Jason’s cover drawing for his new book Athos in America (above).
Nordic Provenance — A lovely essay by Matthew Battles on writer and cartoonist Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomintrolls and author of brilliant novels such as The True Deceiver and The Summer Book:
The trolls, singers, and creeps in the Moomin books have about them all of the absurd rigor of Roald Dahl’s characters — only the hatred goes missing. In place of dread, Jansson’s characters struggle with vague longings, forever discovering that their worst enemies are not tempests or monsters or maiden aunts, but themselves. While they’re quite capable of getting up to mischief and putting themselves into dire circumstances, they see their way through troubles not by means of sentimentality but with a kind of philosophically playful savoir-faire.
The Death of a Plaything — Brian Dillon reviews Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor for The Guardian:
Though we know, even if vaguely, how an AA battery works, that it has a functional interior, it nonetheless seems a thing solid and uniform to the core, stonelike in its simplicity and selfsameness. We appear to learn from things not just about the practicalities of our local material world, but about the expanding world of metaphor: “A teacup asks to be picked up by the handle; a brandy glass invites us to cradle it, tender as a dove, from underneath.” Nor are the desires we bring to things entirely devotional or affectionate; in an echo of Baudelaire’s essay on toys – the poet’s immediate desire as a boy was to smash a toy and find its soul – Connor conjectures: “Perhaps all play has at its horizon the death of the plaything.”
And let’s finish how we started with the back cover for Athos in America by Jason:
I feel like that some days…