Dusty Answers

I. Dusty Words

How fun! Orange Crate Art got LOTS of responses to this question, which he blogged yesterday:
''Can you think of a work of literature in English in which dust plays a significant part?" 

If you have more titles to add, I'm sure they'd be welcome (or answers are welcome here too: don't be put off by "literature"--anything printed counts––or "in English" either--I thought of Jesus writing in the dust...)
--or just go check out the interesting comments:
mleddy.blogspot.com/2018/10/literary-dust.html

I don't know why that question was so popular, but it sure caught my attention--if you go to the post, you'll see six of the twenty-one comments are mine!

 Starting with Dusty Answer, (1927) by Rosamond Lehmann---here, below, with her brother John, and Lytton Strachey:

I haven't read Dusty Answer in probably ... forty years? But it popped right into my mind, re: dust.

The title is from a poem I dislike by George Meredith:
“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul,
When hot for certainties in this our life!”

Now I want to read it again, though I worry I will find it mopey and drippy. I loved it at seventeen, but since then, for me Bloomsbury has lost its bloom.

II. Dusty Records

Today at the thrift store, a coworker put a few 78 rpm records on my desk, for me to check their worth.

I rolled my eyes. I'd recently sold three milk crates of 78s for $10 per crate––JUST GET THEM OUT OF HERE!––but when I bothered to look at them--wow,  there were a couple very cool things!

The T.S. Eliot isn't worth much, but it's FUN--I put it out for $2.99:

But this Woody Guthrie 3-record set, Ballads from the Dust Bowl, (1946) is worth more, especially since the records are in great shape--I priced it high at $75, and put it in the Special Cases case.

It ties into one of the three books Michael (OCA) had in his mind as dusty literature--John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

(I didn't even think of that, though it'd made a big impression on me in high school.)