My husband picked up a couple of books by William Alexander from our local library last week. He had never heard of the author, but there was something (the title? the cover? the blurb on the back?) that gave him a feeling these were my kind of books. He was right. The books are targeted to ages 8~12, so of course they were perfect for me. (This is where you either laugh out loud because you think I'm joking, or you just smile wisely.)
The titles of these two books are Ghoulish Song and Goblin Secrets, and, as the titles suggest, they are fantasy books set in and among a time/place/people where magic seems to happen, and even to belong, but mostly when people aren't paying attention. I read them both in no time at all, but there were two lines in Goblin Secrets that stuck in my mind and begged to be expressed in etegami form.
The first comes from this paragraph: Rownie walked in daylight with a fox face over his own, and some people couldn't see him at all. He was hiding and proclaiming himself, both at once. He didn't know how this could possibly work, and he didn't want to think about it too much in case it stopped working, so he just kept moving. He let the fox mask show him how to move.
The whole section about the fox mask intrigued me because foxes, and even fox masks, have a solid place in Japanese mythology and culture, in a way that gave this story a nostalgic feel. I felt it could lead to an etegami that fit in well with my " life between cultures" -themed art journal, so I gave it a try.
The other line that engaged my imagination was this one describing the marketplace along the riverbank: Another barge-stall showed off small and cunning devices that did useless things beautifully. Don't you just love the combination of those words? And I've always loved cunning works of art that look like they ought to have some practical use, but really exist just to delight people like me.
Well, that was fun. Now to find some more cool stuff to read.
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