by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
Then we’re there, and there’s the turny thing with all the DVDs stacked up, got labels stuck on the side with letters on them, that’s how they put them all in order, but I’m still naive and I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, and there’s so many that I don’t know what to do, they all look so good, open up the box there’s the shiny round disc, click-out click-in, some of them when they get sucked up into the DVD player have extra stuff on the menu, outtakes and stuff like that, and you’d watch them so many times you knew them by heart.
All done, picked one. A French film. Now over to the book bits, that’s even more like I don’t know what to do, they all look so good and there’s thousands of them, got a whole life and it’s still not long enough to eat all these delicious words, but by God I’ll try. Studied books, I did, studied them long and hard, didn’t make me any the wiser to what it’s all about, but it turned me back into a reader, thank God, years it’d been since I sat like the trees all wound up no sound just wires clicking and crackling deep in my head, then how the tears flow, I cry when I read beautiful things, those are the books I like, the ones that make it all so beautiful that I can’t take it.
Shrewsbury Library. Didn’t used to be a library, used to be a school, it’s where Darwin went to school, can’t forget it because he’s sat in stone on a big throne right outside, big beard and all. It’s all quiet in Shrewsbury Library, go in and there’s the rush of must, sugary and yeasty and woody, and because it’s all old there are wooden beams plunging down into the grey carpet. I always loved it in there. I had a library card, would take out stuff then bring it back and push it through the little book bin near the door, upstairs were all the serious things, big science and big fashion and big food, they’ve got everything there. Peaceful, too. Upstairs, by the big windows, there are little ledges and you can just sit there, that’s how time goes by, and it’s profound, it’s profound to sit with a book on a ledge surrounded by books and time going by.
I have been to other libraries too. I liked the library at my university in Brighton, it had a good feeling, smelled like hard work. I’d fall asleep in there sometimes and I didn’t have any friends to wake me up, but that was okay, I’d wake up then cycle home, that was a day well done. All glass was the library, chairs with no names, books stacked up in metal, stairs going up and down and up and downs, blinds across the windows making it all like stripes.
I liked the library at my university in Leeds. Good library, that was. Felt like a big deal in there, all columns and wood done up in a circle, hide in a corner, felt like a god, smelled like big exams tomorrow and a rave last night, great books proper good selection, I’d fall asleep in there too, then I’d go to the gym, then I’d go home and my room was tiny but I liked being in there, had posters on my walls of movies, can’t believe that now I’m in the movies, wonder if someone will have a poster of a movie I’m in one day, that’s like magic.
I’ve been to the British Library, it’s not good like the other ones. Books are all behind glass, can’t breathe on them, you’ve got to book them out, go in a special little room with just a pencil, gentle with the books you’ve got to be, got to be like a surgeon with them, little notes down the side, then they take it from you, package it up, down it goes, back down to the morgue where it lies in the perfect temperature, dead imagine, no light touches her now. Can’t hardly get a seat in there too. There are good bits about it, like the big strange paintings when you go in the door, but then there are bad bits, like how you can’t hardly get a seat in there.
There’s a library down the road from me, but you can’t sit there long, you get the men looking over at you from their computers, there are all these computers in there that you can use, metal and felt dividers standing around dividing up random pieces of the room, not enough love they’ve given this place, and by love I mean money, and by money I mean love. I loved going to the library. Bookshops are good, some of them are very good, and the second-hand ones are the best, but in a library it’s like it all belongs to you, all the hours and patience of writers throughout the centuries piled up beside you, and it’s like they’re all watching, all watching as you read, and that’s a good feeling, it sure is.
But there are no good libraries near me, here in this city. I’ve read about some good ones, but I’ve got to get the train to get to them, and some of them you need to pay something like £575 to be in there, and that’s a lot of money. The community ones are the ones that are all broken. There’s no heart about, just enough money to get metal shelves to stack the books on and a few desktops sitting next to each other on plastic tables.
But why should they put more money into the libraries? They read on their kindles, now. Or they don’t read at all. Some of them read books about business, but that’s not like reading, that’s like trying to make money and be better than other people.
They don’t read anymore, do they? People say they haven’t got the time for it, but mostly the people who say that do have time, it’s just that reading is like effort, and effort is like patience and concentration, and concentration is like everything that is distracting you, day in, day out.
A friend told me that her ex-boyfriend used to pretend to read because he thought it’d make him look cool. I know her ex-boyfriend. He wants to be a screenwriter, he told me that, he wants to write great things that people will love. Funny how people are.
My family likes to read. Don’t know how much time my brother has for it these days, just how it is, reads lots of science and maths papers because he’s a professor, he’s real clever, he’s just one of those guys isn’t he, they all knew it, we all knew it, remember we went to this big park for a walk one time when we were little, think he must’ve been 11 years old or something, maybe, we saw all these deer and we had walking boots on even though it wasn’t very muddy, and we went to the second-hand bookshop at the end of the walk and I picked out this old sweet-making book so I could make sweeties at home, and my brother picked out this complicated maths book and he read it all real quick, little square glasses, unstoppable he was, heart of gold brain all electric, he’s like that, he’s all gooey in the middle like a pudding, self-saucing pudding, he sees it all and he listens when you talk, I love that about him, and then he’s got a circuit board head, it’s like he takes it out and wires it all himself, that’s how clever he is.
My mama eats up books like nobody’s watching, she’s got a pace on her, so many books so little time, that’s what gets to her, there’s so much beauty and how can she get through it all, that’s why she likes being alone, she loves my family and I, I know that, but she loves as well when it’s all silences except for how our old house creaks like old houses do, she likes the seat by the window, bottom made of straw all tied together, footstool, she could be there forever, just eating books, sometimes I find it difficult to read her, like I don’t know what she’s really thinking, because she’s that kind of love and cleverness where she watches it all without saying anything, she’s more Zen than I could ever be.
My sister always liked animal books, read all this series about this vet going about doing vet things in the countryside, James Herriott, I think that was his name, big old vet about town, she loved it, she loves them, the animals, the birds, how the boatmen skate over the water, how the fish glitter, she liked the tiny things, knows butterfly names and what rocks are what, stuff like that, she cares about a lot of stuff, she’s caring is what she is, she plays all jokester like me, prank patrol, class clown, but she’s all gooey inside.
My dad’s favourite book is The Magus by John Fowles, only got round to reading it recently, lots of pages like eight-hundred pages or something, it’s from the 60s and it’s got that 60s taste, nature-loving men talking the landscape and beautiful women, like Hemingway kind of, then it’s got that Kubrick-Burgess-Polanski strange-cold-dark-paranoid-sin kind of thing rearing its head round back. My dad has got lots of opinions, and lots of favourite things, and he’s got a circuit-board head like my brother, there’s so much in there, and so much of the circuit board is love, he has great love for great art, he’s a good-living man.
I have many books looking at me from my bookshelf. They’re staring at me right now. I’ve read some of them, not all of them. The ones I have read and kept are very good, or feel very important. Some books feel important, I think that very much. I read a book by Tarjei Vesaas, a Norwegian writer, a couple of weeks ago, ‘The Ice Palace’ it was called, and that was a very important book. Two young girls become friends, then one of them goes out to explore a waterfall that has frozen into an ice palace, and then she disappears, and it’s all about how friendship is when you’re little and how no-one understands, all these secrets and these feelings that swell and explode like clouds into rain, and the rain falls only on you, and no-one else can know.
That was an important book. I think I’m going to keep it.
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This Carl Krus Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include: Private Road, On Friendships, and the Letters That Made Me.
Also find Carl Kruse at Behance.
