Close Reading with Jayne Tuttle
Edition Eight
You are about to read the eighth edition of Close Reading, a dispatch of literary obsessions, published by Woolgather. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”. This edition is by Jayne Tuttle a writer, performer, and bookseller.
Trained in theatre at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, she has worked as an actor, director, translator, and bilingual copywriter. Her first book, Paris or Die was developed into a solo theatre show with director John Bolton and performed throughout Australia and France between 2021 and 2023. The book is currently optioned for development into a feature film.
In 2023 and 2026 she was a laureate of the City of Paris, to research, write and perform in Paris in conjunction with the Centre Les Récollets. She has received fellowships and awards from La Napoule Arts Foundation, Bundanon Trust, Regional Arts Victoria and the Varuna National Writers House.
Jayne co-owns The Bookshop at Queenscliff in coastal Victoria.
In this edition, Jayne shares words of nature, dreams, travel, friendship, and the search for understanding.
Illustration by Lachlan Conn
One Word:
Duende
I discovered this word back when I was doing theatre; it identified something in art, in people, in life, that I’d never been able to name. Lorca was the first to move the idea of ‘the duende’ - the naughty little sprite in Spanish folklore that came into your house and did mischief - to ‘having duende’, the naughty, spritely quality in theatre, dance, writing, that balances death and light, beauty and humour, making it ‘spine-chilling’. Art with duende is always on the precipice, aware that the world could explode at any second, that ‘ants could eat us, or a great arsenic lobster could fall from the sky’. It reminds us to not to take ourselves, or life, too seriously; be demonic, outrageous.
One Quote:
Knowing isn’t interesting. Seeing is interesting.
There’s this fantastic 80s video of a conversation between a very young Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Luc Godard between scenes on Sauve Qui Peut. Huppert is lost, trying to find who she is within the role, asking the director what she should do, who she should be.
Savoir n’a aucun interêt, he says. Voir a de l’interêt.
She sits uncomfortably with this. It sucks that feeling of not knowing, but that is the dreadful state of when you’re really doing the work. I wrote it on a post-it, for when I’m in the mire, which is pretty much always.
One Poem:
For The Seasons
From Beverley Farmer – For the Seasons
The wattle birds watch
each day for the next blood-red
fig to split open.
Not long after returning from overseas in 2019 to take over the bookshop, Beverley Farmer’s son Taki came in with a printout of a set of haikus his late mother had left behind. He had just discovered they existed, and wondered if I’d like to read them. I was in a state of total disorientation, something Farmer knew well from her life between Greece and this seaside town. Reading the haikus broke me from a depression that had kept my eyes closed to my surroundings, my head still elsewhere. It caused me to stop and look closely at the environment down here, the rock pools and foliage and birds, the small things. So much fragile wisdom and humility in her words.
The book is now published, and everyone reads it but it feels like it is mine. Its refusal to be read fast forced me to slow right down from years of frantic rushing. Each poem only opens to you when you are ready, and prepared to sit quietly, with time.
One Book:
Book of Dreams
Down the back of the Pompidou bookshop was this majestic book: Fellini’s Book of Dreams. I would sit on a stool and look through it with marvel: all the goddesses and lions and giant clitorises and coming dicks, the boobs and cars and alligators and shitting boys and crying men, all the shadows and colour and demons and light. I would regularly go just to open random pages; nobody minded or hassled me to buy it, surely it was way out of my league.
One day I flipped it over and noticed it was on clearance sale – 35 euros. Over the next months I bought the impressive thing for friends getting married, birthdays, imagining one day I’d have a home and buy one for myself too. That day came, but by then they were sold out and out of print. Online they were selling for $3k! A friend found me the world’s last cheap copy in Germany, grazie a dio. I use it to keep the dream life present: you can’t argue with dreams, dreams will not be judged.
One Other Thing:
L’Étranger
François Ozon’s new adaptation of L’Étranger. Hit me like a truck.