The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson . good books on the give away shelf this sunday morning . denmark to me it . niedecker flood small works . Winesburg OH little sentence shaped bits of paper . because human understanding, whenever and wherever it is active, always and everywhere keeps on the lookout for: the reason why whatever it encounters is and is the way it is.

The True Deceiver - by Tove Jansson
NYRB Classics (December 1, 2009)
A New York Review Books Original.

Tove Jansson (1914—2001) wrote about the adventures of the Moomin family cute Moomins in a long-running comic strip and bestselling series of books for children. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, including The Summer Book (NYRB Classics). yes I saw that, a girl & her grandmother. judged it happier than I. summer.

All winter long the snow has been falling on the village.
Katri, yellow-eyed, lives in a room with her simple brother Mats and dog with no name. She hasn't any patience for politeness. Anna Aemelin lives alone in her family mansion, venturing out come springtime to paint exquisitely detailed paintings of the forest floor, to which her young fans insist she add the flower-covered rabbits she is known for.
When Katri moves with her brother into Anna's mansion with the intention of helping around the house, it's not long before she has taken charge of just about every aspect of Anna’s life and livelihood. As the season becomes increasingly oppressive, the two women find themselves engaged in a confrontation that will gradually strip away their cherished illusions. 'product description' online different from & I like it less than on my galley. I did like the book. simple. this happened, then this. Katri organizes all the papers into folders. Anna no longer feels she can trust anyone.
"I loved this book...understated yet exciting, with a tension that keeps you reading. I felt transported to that remote region of Sweden. The characters still haunt me."-Ruth Rendell


also read thr and did not care for, also a NYRB galley: No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon. NYRB Classics (October 13, 2009) Denon’s ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. Summoned by Madame de T–– to her country house, the young hero of the novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights. Lydia Davis’s definitive translation of Denon’s slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text.
"A tale of adulterous love told with impeccable discretion." --The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. manners. discretion. do not care for.

also recently: A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January 6, 2010)
Sixteen-year-old Katya is spending the summer working as a nanny in a wealthy Jersey Shore community when she meets Marcus Kidder, an elderly yet dashing artist to whom libraries and pavilions are dedicated all over town. ..Despite each rebuff, she keeps returning to Kidder and soon is posing for his paintings. What sounds like a story of older-man-seduces-young-girl becomes a treatise on female aspiration. There is a subtle mystery at the center of this unsettling short novel: Kidder insists that he has a “mission” for Katya that will be revealed in time. The mission, when it comes, is a dark one, involving not just transactions of subservience and control but of life and death, and readers’ takes on character motivations will govern their reactions. I am curious to see reactions. ends in the mode of ~ a fairy tale, immersed in what Kidder wanted, how he saw it. ~ugly to me, ~accurate, ugly.

put books on give away shelf this Sunday morning. galleys: A Fair Maiden. Remainder. A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes. what else. The Search. The Singularity is Near. book re McCain. Wittgenstein ~ basic works, damaged copy. Lipstick Jihad. book re Sassy, tall & thin like magazine, bright colors. craft magazine bought w bonnie. yale press ~ World Apart Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
and the rest I do not readily remember. so there.
today the feeling is I do not care, and I am calm. I'm glad to be in a position to be nice to people, to help them find a book, be supportive. ('Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie.') I think most if not all of it ~ pentecostalism, Edith Wharton re the French & their ways, Power by Lukes, the stupid girl with a dragon tattoo or flaming hair or whatever ~ is not worth caring about, but if you do, you do. I don't. (Denmark's a prison. - A goodly one; in which there are many confines.. - We think not so, my lord. - Why, then, 'tis none to you.)
I do not think there is anyone to tell, and so what is there worth telling.
I mean, if I *really* don't see anyone to tell.
so, tell myself.
no sense of any possible accomplishment, progress. only: you like it or you do not.
type it on dlww. though there is no idea to make anything out of it, no idea of a making that is distinct in completion from in progress, or anything better made than not made. no sense of form, study, learning, realizing, none of that. none of that describes any real experience I've had. only: you like it or you do not.
write it down, throw the paper away.
words written on bits of paper ~ Winesburg, OH. little sentence shaped bits of paper.


Niedecker:

Do not save love

for things

Throw things

to the flood

Paean to Place by Lorine Niedecker. encountered that bit recently as epigraph to Small Works by Pam Rehm


also in my mind ~ 'going out in the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.'

I was thinking maybe this was Didion On self-respect but it's not, it's Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted:
Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.
What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?
I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

so what I've got, what I recognize is: despair, end, beginning, alone, tabula rasa, why this, what does it matter. I opened Heidegger 'Principle of Reason' ~ everything for a reason; understanding looks for the reason in any thing it encounters.
'nothing is without a reason.'
It is because human understanding, whenever and wherever it is active, always and everywhere keeps on the lookout for: the reason why whatever it encounters is and is the way it is.