Dust is of course constantly falling onto the desk – and I am quite fond of dust. When I can’t think of anything to write, or it’s made everything I can see obtrusively opaque, I wipe it away with spit and tissues (as I used to clean everything, when I was a boy – spit and hanky). The dust particularly likes the shiny silver base of the Anglepoise – that’s where I notice it most. Some particles are just dots but others are shaped as half-moons, fingernails, ferns or spores. I suppose in summer a decent part of it is spores. On the nut beneath the bigger central spring, flanked by two sidekick springs, there is Quay dust. I love the films of the Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, twins – their Mitteleuropean-besotted stop-motion puppet animation that is often at its best when deepest in dust. They must (like Quentin Crisp) curate their dust. It’s not set-dressing dust, sprinkled from a shaker by a runner. Where it is, it has grown, matured, darkened, become oily and characterful. The QQuays – Pittsburgh-born, Borough-based – sometimes animate (full etymology) their dust. Turning-turning screws twizzling out of their lodgings and waltzing away through a grey carpeting. Their dust is the dust of Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser. The Street of Crocodiles. Institute Benjamenta. (Franz Kafka was hardly dusty at all – maybe a bit, in The Trial.) It is grey-brown, like a mouse, like parts of Mouse, and it is soft-sift, it is silky when it isn’t tacky-sticky. If you blow on it, it doesn’t flee, it wrinkles. Dust gathers, like the tribes of Israel, beneath the black printer. It is Jewish dust, the QQuay’s – when it was disturbed in the ’30s, the cause was the worst kind of hygiene. There it is, along the tops of my guiltiest unread books. I am old enough now that the pages of my teenage paperbacks are yellow or golden, and brittle and flaked. Brush the dust off The Dictionary of Latin Tags and Phrases. Off Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Off The Reader’s Encyclopedia. On your finger, it forms an eyebrow. Doldrums – Leigh feeling super-heavy, she says.
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