strange things

'But really Mattis', she said with a toss of her head, 'you think up so many strange things these days that I hardly recognise you.'

This testimony made him light up with joy. Hege knew how to make you happy when she wanted to. He went and sat down by himself to be alone with his joy.

I have been rereading The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas these nights, for the clean otherness of Norway. Mattis lives with his sister Hege by a lake. She knits jumpers to earn a living. He thinks up a job as ferryman, he has only one passenger ever, but he goes ferrying every day. He has a job to go to. He takes sandwiches. His simplicity sets him apart. He ferries no one in his leaky boat that couldn't take a passenger anyway. 

The canadian woman at the radical book fair on Saturday nearly knew strangeness by heart.

Reality could be avoided.

It's possible.

No one who looks at me

believes I am dancing.

She said it across our table of books. Like Mattis having his strange things acknowledged. She looked along the display of Coloured Books, and sometimes at me, disbelieving. She'd been in Cork for three months, au pairing. This was the end of her stay. The privacy of that internal dancing was suddenly there between us.

Erasmus in Inniscarra

I noticed this fragment on the front terrace for a day or two before bringing it indoors. Placed on a square of paper it became a drop-down map, somewhere between Italy and Ceylon.

There's an anecdote about Erasmus noticing a scrap of paper on a muddy street and pausing to read it. The printed word was rare in the 15th/16th century; rare also those who could read. Which is still true in the twenty-first century.

It looks like a partly rotted seed packet from Seed Savers. As a child I read labels on jars, info on cereal packets, all kinds of small print, and a constant flow of books. As an adult also. As well as t-shirts and tattoos, cardboard boxes in several languages.

My Erasmus scrap of paper could have continued, out on the terrace, to deteriorate, to transmute, with its inks, into the front garden and beyond. 

WASTE OF LANGUAGE

In Arthur's book emporium P spotted It walks by night and was immediately drawn. Arthur gave it to him, for the title, one of the dark green Penguin crime series. One damp afternoon I read it, if reading includes whizzing and forgetting and getting impatient, annoyed at this waste of language. 

How schematic the duke, the tennis pro, the lunatic, the gombeen man, the shady woman, the fresh uncomplicating Americans, decoys all, in the sealed room puzzle. How did someone get in and out of the card room, slice the duke's head off with a heavy sword kept sharp for just such an occasion. 

I don't see life in terms of puzzles. I'm annoyed that I've been drawn in to this universe where everything is for a purpose. Which is why the god-fearing good citizen can read detective novels with a clear conscience.

It walks by night. It, not He, not She, not They, walks by night. And in Paris. A gambling den. A chinese purveyor of hashish and opium. A chief of police. It is a woman, the duke's wife, with eyes of ambergris, who kills the duke who is not really the duke but her first husband, out of prison and in disguise. 

In a detective novel written by a man, J. Dickson Carr, in 1930, it, is likely to be a woman. A man is a man in all his guises, a woman is denatured if she acts. Is that it?