“Whence did the wond’rous
mystic art arise,
Of painting speech,
and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines
are taught
How to embody,
and to colour thought?”
William Massey
Photography by Rubee Hood
Magic lines
Month: October 2022
Doggies in the window
I put three new books in the window: I thought they might give the passers by something nice to look at. The books face everyone coming from the bakery, and who are usually walking fast, wanting to be back to the car.
It worked. People swerved, stopped, stared at the covers, tapped the glass, made comments, nodded their heads. Nobody came in, but that’s ok. This’ll do for now!
A man in a green uniform stood with hands on hips and stared down at the books for ages. Finally a lady in a similar uniform came up behind him with coffees and said, ‘come on.’ They left.
A young man walking rapidly with two coffees swerved mid step, and then approached and bent over the window. He turned his head from side to side frowning slightly, as trying to get at a memory that was lodged on the other side of the window.
A lady tapped the glass, on and on, trying to make her husband look at the books.
‘Look at these, Rex.’ But he wouldn’t. He stood at the car and said, ‘You didn’t close this door properly again.’
A child bobbing along sang out trillingly, ‘look at the doggies on the boat.’
A man studied one of the books and said to his companion, ‘See that fella? Looks like Kenny.’
A tight knot of school students swung past without looking at all.
A young couple stood silently at the window looking down at the display. They’d piled shopping bags in an angular clump at their feet. She consulted her phone and then said, ‘No, he’s already got it.’ They disappeared, and then suddenly Robert bloomed at the door but didn’t notice the dog books. He said, ‘Things are getting ridiculous in this country.’
He asked me about The Dance of Shiva which still hasn’t arrived, and said, ‘Well never mind, it’ll get here when it wants to, I suppose.’ Then he asked me if I was getting any reading done, and I said, ‘God, yes’, and he lit the door with his high pitched laugh and then took off for the bank.
A young woman talking on her phone crossed the road with her eyes fixed on the dog books the whole time. As she came closer, she turned her head slightly to one side and then finally knelt in front of the window and took a picture.
The rain to the wind said
“The rain to the wind said,
You push and I’ll pelt.’
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged–though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.”
Robert Frost
Sculpture by Anne-Sophie Gilloen
On being without internet
It was strange being at the shop without internet because there didn’t seem to be much to do. And there was very little going on. But this turned out to be wrong.
There were customers all day. Everyone chatted companionably about the outage. Everyone had a theory.
An old lady said she didn’t care that the tower was down because she could still work in the garden, and she bought an Elizabeth George, saying, ‘I’ll pay for this with good old cash!’
Robert, who has never been connected to any internet, didn’t comment on it because he didn’t know about it. He said he’s planning to read every Carlos Castaneda book so he could work through the ongoing problem: are they fact or fiction?
I managed to reorganize my entire counter and clean some windows. Once, outside the shop, a group of young men realized they couldn’t use their phones, holding them up in the air toward the sun. One man said, ‘What are you gunna do?’ and his friend said, ‘Fuck knows.’
A man told me he was with Optus and so his phone was fine: he had internet! And his data had already been stolen, so nothing further to worry about.
Alan noticed that a couple he sees every day each go to different bakeries and reckons it’s because one bakery has better lamingtons than the other. ‘But couples should go to the same place, otherwise you cause problems. That’s how I see it anyway.’ Then he went home: meat to cook and a sleep to find.
I read two chapters of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. Brilliant and will continue. I showed the book to George who said he’d been looking for it, but I refused to sell it. He bought a book about elephants for his grandson instead.
Someone told me the Facebook chat page about the local Telstra outage is entertaining and informative. ‘If you have Optus. Lol.’
A teenage reader showed me that her phone was working. An older reader who examined the signal on this girl’s phone (while waiting behind her to purchase a copy of Quietly Flows the Don), advised me that technology always works for young people.
Sarah said that the flooding is getting worse. I told her I couldn’t look up the news without the internet and she said that flooding doesn’t need an internet. She also said the British PM is in a bad way.
A lady told me about Roald Dahl: from her head, not from her phone. I thought maybe I could do a bit more of that.
And so life want wonderingly on.
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home
“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”
Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse
Illustration by Antoni Fabres
The little boy who took a long time waving goodbye
I didn’t see him when he came in: must have come in a slim shadow next to the walking thighs of parents and holding tightly to an adult hand. I know they were in the front room: I could hear the murmuring and the calling out that families do.
‘Where are you, Jack?’
‘Where did Jack go?’
‘Here.’
Later, they all came to the counter with a handful of children’s books and a DK Star Wars Reader, book 4, level 5. They paid. They all turned in a soft cotton group for the door.
That was when the child looked back at me and waved. I said, ‘Goodbye. Enjoy your books.’
And he continued to wave in that way children do, the hand going rapidly from side to side at face level, both eyes intensely on me, not looking where they’re going, bumping against mum, banging against the door, still looking back and making the same hand movement and the eyes on me, eyes like polished citrine expanding into dark gold.
‘Come on Jack, watch the door.’ A final soft little bump, the little fluttering hand, and then they were gone.
Sculpture by Clay Enoch
If we were not
‘If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves…’
Pablo Neruda
Sculpture by Elizabeth Price
Well, no, not really!
Rain, rain, and more rain, but it’s not that cold. Passers by are not rugged up, and nobody is hurrying along. An older couple, holding hands, stopped to look through the window. He asked, ‘Want to go in?’
She said, ‘Well, no. Not really.’
They continued walking. When I came out my door a little later, they were further down the road going very slowly hand in hand and not minding the steady rain. They were looking around at everything. They both wore thongs and they stopped to look down at a puddle and talk about it.
I watched them cross the road and get sprayed by a passing car and laugh about it.
Pangur Bán
This old Irish poem was written by a monk about his cat in the 9th century and found in a monastery in Austria.
Pangur Bán (translated by Seamus Heaney)
Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.
More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove.
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse’s den.
Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.
Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.
All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.
With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.
So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.
Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.
On this day
A customer asked for a copy of The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy and published by The Woman’s Press. I don’t have it, but I’m interested in it because everything published by The Woman’s Press is excellent. So now there’s two of us need a copy.
I read another chapter of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara; a Hawaiian author new to me. It was recommended, and it’s brilliant.
People are sitting outside the bakery, enjoying the warm day and talking very loudly. Here are the topics I’ve overheard so far: the dam in Echunga, the price of fuel, the rain coming next week, where to buy tickets to the Strathalbyn show, why Coles have put their Christmas decorations out already, and if the trains are running this weekend. Two men also discussed heart surgery and how their mate, who isn’t there, ‘isn’t seeing the whole picture’.
It’s warm today. Short sleeves and older people in caravans put on sun hats to go to the bakery. It’s the October Labour Day long weekend, a celebration of the eight-hour working day won for us in the 1850s.
Motorcycles are passing in long noisy chains.
Robert came in for Mysteries of the Dreaming, but it hasn’t arrived. He said about Labour Day that people will celebrate anything as long as there’s a drink in it.
A man came in and asked if I sold tickets to the Strathalbyn show, but I don’t.
A family came in and bought all my Eragon books and one DK Book Of Flight.
Two ladies came in, turned around and left immediately. One said, ‘See you when I’ve got my glasses.’
Someone wanted Anne Cleves mystery books. A family came in needing tickets to the Strathalbyn show. A man outside told someone on his phone that there was no way he was returning to that construction site.
I gave directions to the art gallery (across the road), the public toilets (across the road) and a good pub (up the road and around the corner).
A dog urinated under my window. It saw me through the window but just kept doing it anyway.
I sold a copy of Seven Little Australians. Then I went outside to stand in the sun and feel good.
The Book Keeper Book Shop 