Resuming the position

Don't be ridiculous. This is Ayn Rand.

So it is of course flattering when people say they miss your blog, and inquire why you have not been writing it. “Is jy besig meisie?” Giulietta asked me before the Lions game the other day – the one even before they were so thrashed by the Cheetahs – to which I could barely reply before she continued with, “Jy moet ophou naai, dissie goed vir jou nie.” Well there you have it. The reason I have been lax in my duties to my body of writing work is my one-year-old relationship. Instead of practicing the penpersonship that is going to have to keep poverty from the door once I am too old and too nasty to employ in the company of (or with) other people, I while away my non-income-earning hours in love-soaked delirium. Not.

It is because I go excessively to gym, just in case my love’s interest may really start to wander in the direction of two lithe and uncomplicated twenty-one-year olds I often suggest he might want to replace me with at some point. Not.

No. If the real reason had to stand up, it would be the one on the left called guilt. I did not finish my masters last year like I should have, and have re-registered this year so that I can complete my research report and collect a degree. However, since I have registered I have not done much toward it. Initially I was quite confident that I would make the six-month August deadline that would get me half my money back. Now I am almost sure that I am only going to hand it in at the end of the year. But things have started moving along for various reasons.

Leslie wrote on Basecamp that the university could no longer carry unfinished post graduate degrees, and when we had breakfast to talk about it, I understood why. It’s not the more than 20 unfinished masters’ research reports that are the problem, but the lack of potential supervisors to to supervise the writing of said reports. I guess I get that. In response to her suggestion that I then “book my place” asap, I assured her that I am good to go, and can deliver something as early as next week. Now I have to sit down and actually write something, and I thought the blog would be a good place to start. Although it is not the research report itself, it is ABOUT the report, and it is more constructive than cleaning the house again.

And after all, it was Giulietta who suggested that I blog about the report. I think she might have wanted to say, “for fuck’s sakes, WRITE SOMETHING,” and this suggestion popped out of her mouth instead, but look what it has achieved. Something on paper. I feel pretty good.

Metrobus 101: Waiting for Godot

I don’t know why they changed the name of the Civic Theatre. A big sign board claimed that “Johannesburg Civic Theatre” was too much of a mouthful, and that “Johburg Theatre Complex” was infinitely snappier, which in the long version it clearly is not. Shortened, as always happens, “Joburg Theatre” is beaten by “the Civic” hands-down-no-contest. The latter, I think, is at least as sexy as NYC’s “the Met” with comparable suggestions of the gravity of excellence in performance art. “Johburg Theatre”, on the other hand, positively rings with the pedestrian dum-de-dum of amateur dramatic societies and ballet classes brimming with gauche and resentful preteens.

It is a damning comparison that one could easily apply to other areas of local municipal service, not least of all the Metrobus, and I should know as I was standing in the shade of the Joburg Theatre Complex waiting for it. Across the road the recently-renamed Metropolitan Centre (oh! the parody!) reached formidably into the sky, a mysterious and ugly monument to incompetence, fiscal imprudence, corruption and general idiocy. From last year’s Miss World fiasco to the ongoing, Kafkaesque reports about the water and electricity billing problems that Dumisani Soap and others suffer on a regular basis, our Met does not much inspire confidence in its ratepayers.

So standing at the bus stop was a slightly surreal experience. I was with Mark and Kay, my friends and neighbours who habitually relied on the #3 to get home in the afternoon, but I completely expected the bus not to come. Every now and then we would glance, in unison, down Loveday Street to where it curved in the direction of the city, but in the steadily thickening throng of home-time traffic, no bus would arrive.

Sunday, Potch and the bad sex fiction awards

I am back in Potch. My father is in bed with pleurisy and quite sick. As I only had the CI manual to finish start I thought I would come over and babysit him. We have abandoned the million-inch big screen in the lounge for the 70cm antique in the bedroom. I have the laptop in my lap, and am supposed to have my nose to the grindstone.

Instead I am responding to e-mail from an old lover while sharing my father’s grumpy happiness with the Lions’ Currie Cup victory over the Cheetahs earlier on. We are watching the Bulls whip Province, and are feeling equally pleased. We are Lions fans, but will support our neighbours in a game against any team hailing from a province that did not have the suffix “transvaal” tagged onto its name in the bad old days. For me this is simply a geographical marker, for my father… well, I am not sure. Anyway. His first loyalty lies with the Leopards (Wes Transvaal), actually, but after that, in order, with the other teams that live withing driving distance somewhere along the N12 to the North.

(This feels like an appropriate moment to offer my father’s rugby joke for the weekend.

“Ek loop nou die dag in ‘n ou pêl vas, en vra vir hom hoe gaan dit. ‘Ag,’ sê hy vir my, ‘ek sukkel so met my selfbeeld.’ Nou hoe dan so? Vra ek vir hom. ‘Nee,’ sê die ou, ‘dis nou al so erg, gedurende die rugby wanneer die ouens so sak in die skrum, dan dink ek hulle skinder van my…’” (I thought it was very funny.))

I want to write many things that, unlike the corporate identity guidelines, will make no difference to my bank balance.  Having finished my illicit correspondence for the morning, I now want to work on a 3^rd Potchefstroom story. It will be called “Potchefstroom Mon Amour” and will be about being cold, footprints in the frost on the lawn, childhood memories of a smallholding called “Ommidraai” and the smell of the dry grass of the Highveld winter. But this will have to wait. First, to work. I have to work today because Thursday was, well, Sunday.

Anyway. While ruminating on the practice of spanking and the joys of literary pornography earlier on, I remembered the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Fiction Awards, and I wondered if they had been dished out yet this year. They have been, but were not as entertaining as last year I thought, so I am posting a few of the previous winners. (Just in case the papers are boring today.) The sex may have been bad, but the writing is, on occasion, wonderful.

Now, my parents should please note:

 

2003 Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal (Faber & Faber)

She’s taking off her blouse. It’s on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She’s taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There’s a design as well. You gasp.
‘What’s that?’ you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator…
As your hands roam her back, her breasts, and trace the swastika on her mound you start feeling like an ancient Aryan warlord yourself…
She sandwiches your nozzle between her tits, massaging it with a slow rhythm. A trailer to bookmark the events ahead. For now she has taken you in her lovely mouth. Your palms are holding her neck and thumbs are at her ears regulating the speed of her head as she swallows and then sucks up your machinery.
She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time…
She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.

2005 Winkler by Giles Coren (Jonathan Cape)

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

2004 I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape)

Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, ‘Stop!’? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, ‘No, Hoyt,’ in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.
***
Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog…
***
…the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair – what’s that! – Her panties were so wet down…there the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right…therethere

2002 Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam (Peter Owen)

She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and on to his shoulders – Mr Hughes’s shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes’s penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin. Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he’d used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: ‘… dislocation of the second MTPJ … titanium hemi-implant …’
‘Yes!’ she whispered back. ‘Dorsal subluxation … flexion deformity of the first metatarsal …’
They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm – long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed with gasping cries.
‘Wait,’ Ralph panted. ‘let’s do it the other way.’ Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and knees and knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way – tighter, more exciting. She cupped his pin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.
‘Oh yes!’ she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. ‘Yes, oh Malcolm, yes!”

2001 Rescue Me by Christopher Hart (Faber & Faber)

Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole. And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged. I try twitching, and then shaking my leg, but to no avail. At last, disastrously, I try squeezing her hand painfully between my bony thighs, but this only serves to inflame her ardour the more. Ever northward moves her hand, while she smiles languorously at my right ear. And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror…she will surely want to pitch her tent.

2000 Kissing England by Sean Thomas (Flamingo)

It is time, time to fuck her. Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her smallwhite tidy body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features… Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more
She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa.
Aiwa – She says, as he enters her slimy red-peppers-in-olive-oil cunt – Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

1999 Starcrossed by AA Gill (Doubleday)

‘…His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don’t say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It’s difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It’s hot and damp, and then, Christ; it’s amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as…’
‘As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?’
‘A fucking salami. Shut up, John.’
***
‘…he takes his clothes off until he’s just wearing his boots. I hook my nails into his really taut bottom and he pumps and nearly chokes me.’
‘How did he get his trousers off over his boots? I mean, does he take his boots off and put them back on again?’
‘Shut up. I pull my dress off and I’m naked. He reaches down and roughly grabs me between the legs. I can feel his long, bony finger slip inside me. His thumb slides into the crack of my bottom and lifts me like…’
‘A bowling ball? A six-pack?’
‘Like I was light as a feather.’
***
She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar…

(And so on.)

On writing # 8: Writing that makes you want to kill yourself. Or drink a lot.

“To coin a cliché” is also a cliché.

Just a thought. I am writing the copy for the Corporate Identity Guidelines of a large minerals-and-mining company, and if I have to conjure up yet another way of saying, “speaks to the values of the brand” I am going out for a bottle of whisky. Fortunately the end is in sight. Most of the weekend has been spent in the service of Satan. I guess he pays. At forty one, I have no qualms in selling my soul for money, as selling it for various versions of love or meaning, so far, has proved a very bad long-term investment, every time.

The results of this transaction are also much cheerier than the alternative. (Unless of course one is making drama for the SABC, when one frequently finds oneself screaming at imaginary people, first thing in the morning, in the bath. But back to me, in the present.)

Considering that I am relentless in my current pursuit of happiness (I am taking happiness vitamins. They say Vitamin D3 is a cure for SAD) I have taken a little break to write something that I have not already written in other words. This was it.

And now I have to get back there. I feel much better now.

And foie gras

You know, I really hate to go on and on about Hayibo, but today’s illuminating (and relieving, I promise) piece on Mrs Zille’s “wild whore libido” really made me think twice about applying for that SAPPI job in Nelspruit.

I spent some time this morning with the guys, trying to instil in them valuable production tools such as the twin principles of Independent Thought  and Common Sense as entry-level operational devices. Then I came home.  Mary was here so I put a lovely pot of lentil soup on the stove. While it was cooking,  I proof-read a chapter of a book chronicling the history and likely future of the Great South African Education Debacle. So far so good.

Then we ate. And in that moment I had a real longing for a time when I could drive to Corné Delicatessen just outside Alexandra to pick up a lobe of foie gras and marinate it in black pepper and cognac and poach it in a bain marie and have it with a some baguette and wooded Chardonnay. Look, of course the lentil soup was good, but sometimes practical food really bores me. Oh! The thought of something so spectacular…

So, honestly, by 15h00 the day had already been a crap one.

The thought of the foie gras did inspire me to make a concerted job-search effort, which is when I came upon the SAPPI vacancy, where the “focus will be on providing an efficient Public Affais (sic) service to Ngodwana Mill, Nelspruit – Mpumalanga”. It was instantly attractive. I had not seen the papers today, being so caught up in the joys of underpaid economic activity and so on. But I glanced at the IOL headlines and would-you-believe-it, Mrs Zille and the ANCYL were right up there. That, and the lentils, and the production principles, really just made me wish I could run away to place not even remotely connected with what we reasonably experience as reality.

SAPPI’s suggestion to “conduc[t] communications training, managing and improving exiting (sic) communications conduits (sic) as well as the management and publication of in-house newsletters and communique’s, (sic) the production of publicity material, local press relations (sic) and representing the Mill (sic, I think you get it now) at external events…” was incredibly appealing.

I ran this thought past Boris (we had a quick catch-up on IM) and did not, even when he reminded me that Ngodwana usually smells like a decomposing pack animal, stop twiddling the idea in my head.

What IS this indulgent and determined connection to the sordid every-day morass of Johannesburg and its culture, and its people, and its childish fixation with impeccable grammar? (Okay, maybe that is not a Jozi thing, maybe it’s just a my-life-in-Jozi-thing. But perhaps you understand what I mean.)

And then I read Hayibo, and laughed out loud. They sometimes struggle to finish properly, a little like your average guy-over-45-on-viagra, but today’s issue was faultless. Really. Go there. Things turn rose-coloured at the click of a mouse.

I wonder if they write from Cape Town.  I wonder if that is far enough removed.

On writing #5: hara-kiri, etc. – part 2

I did Afrikaans-Nederlands I & II and Modern Fiction in Translation at university. I had an illustrious assemblage of professors: Etienne van Heerden, Andre P. Brink, Godfrey Meintjies and Tim Huysamen. Tim told me that I read like a housewife, and I suspect it was because I did not really take to Oomblik in die Wind. Or something. Or maybe it was Madame Bovary or Flaubert’s Parrot. Seeing that I have embraced writing as both a serious pastime and a career-in-construction,  I guess I am going to have to go back to that stuff. Whatever. Thing is, at the time, I loved the reading (whether I read like a housewife or not). I read not only the prescribed Kundera, I read everything I could lay my hands on. I read everything I could find by Garcia Marquez, I embraced magic realism.

I discovered Saul Bellow, to this day perhaps my favourite author. I have read More Die of Heartbreak three times, and Hertzog twice. (Although DM Thomas’ White Hotel is still my favourite novel, with a record four reads. I also keep on having to buy it because I keep on giving it away, I love it so much.)

I am not sure what happened next. In my reading history, there is a big black hole. I know I read almost everything by Elmore Leonard and James Elroy. Elmore Leonard you can read over and over again because it is impossible to remember what happens from one story to the next. Every time you read one of his books again, it’s like reading it for the first time. Unless you see the movie. When you have seen the movie, you may as well toss the book, you are NEVER going to go back there. Get Shorty, (didn’t they just make a terrible mess of the sequel? Unbelievably unfunny) Jackie Brown (Rum Punch), Out of Sight… lost. Forever. Nothing quite like a 2^nd or 3^rd reading of an Elmore Leonard to put a girl to sleep, with the exception, perhaps, of anything penned by Hanna Arendt.

I remember books with titles like Why the Tree Loves the Axe, and The Émigré. I found and fell in love with Hanif Kureishi, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut. I bought quite a few books by Neil Jordan.  I accepted that he could not write for shit even though he was quite deft with the audiovisual medium. Somewhere in the darkness there were Angela Carter, Dorothy Parker, Robertson Davies and Julian Barnes. (The ABCDs, so to speak.) I read some poetry. Some guy from NY City gave me a book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. To this day I am suspicious of men bearing books of poetry (any) and (specifically) an English translation of Hedda Gabler. They are going to break your heart for sure. And guys who actually WRITE poetry… if it’s any good, tell them to stop forthwith, or you will be nursing misery and rage for… eh… easily a year or more. Fortunately BAD poetry works just as well in the other direction. You are so going to dump that guy and never think of him again. But I digress.

On writing #4: hara-kiri of the mind – part 1

One begins to understand how impossible it is for people of different cultures to cross that divide when one finds a Google ad for a “Belly Fat Cure” on a webpage offering the details of suicide by ritual disembowelment, or the Japanese tradition of hara-kiri, or seppuku.

Yukio Mishima, the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake, born in 1925, was a frighteningly patriotic Japanese novelist, playwright and actor who committed seppuku after a failed coup attempt in Tokyo on 25 November, 1970.

Mishima and four other men barricaded the office of the commandant of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, and tied the commandant to his chair. Mishima then stepped onto the balcony with their manifesto and list of demands to address the soldiers gathered below. He meant to inspire a coup d’état restoring the powers of the emperor. Instead, he was mocked and jeered. He returned to the commandant’s office and committed seppuku. The man who was assigned the customary duty of lobbing off the head at the end of this ritual, the story goes, failed after several attempts. Eventually one of the other guys had to complete the ceremony. It reads like a scene from a Nagisa Oshima film (In the Realm of the Senses, perhaps more than Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, I think) rather than one from recent history.

The grisly act was symbolic, apparently, of Mishima’s strong opposition to “Japan’s close ties to the West in the post-war era (notably the new constitution that forbade rearmament)”, as well as his yearning to “preserve Japan’s martial spirit and reverence for the emperor”, who,  according to Mishima’s ideology, was more than the reigning Emperor, and embodied the abstract essence of Japan.

In Eirei no Koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead), Mishima apparently denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his claim of divinity at the end of World War II. I am not surprised that Hirohito did such a thing: the feverish adoration that came with the job (see above) must have been incredibly creepy. It would have kept me awake at night for sure.

Considering the gravitas of the event, I found Mishima’s choice of the date quite perplexing. November 25 is no more or less significant than any other day, really. It is the 329th day of the year (330th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, leaving 36 days in which to decide whether or not a new set of New Year’s resolutions will be helpful or defeating.

It has seen its share of famous natural disasters, with the Great Storm of 1703 killing 9000 people (more than swine flu ever will) in gusts up to 120 mph in the southern part of the UK. Apparently it blew like that for two days.

It was the birth date of Joe DiMaggio (1914), and the day on which JFK was buried at Arlington National Cemetery (1963).  On this day in 1867 Alfred Nobel patented dynamite and Panama became a signatory to the Buenos Aires copyright treaty in1913. The first “systematic Hollywood blacklist” was created on 25 November 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for “contempt of Congress” after refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and were promptly fired in an announcement that became known as the Waldorf Statement. The men were called the Hollywood Ten.

Considering Mishima’s disgust with the West, none of these events, auspicious as some of them might have been, should have (I would imagine) struck him as the appropriate moment for a spectacular and physical declaration of his daunting traditionalist beliefs.

In fact, I cannot imagine that ANY day of the year would be suitable for such a declaration. Think of  the events that lead to his death: it seems that they were doomed from the start. The Free Dictionary suggests that Mishima “seized” the military headquarters. But conning your way into a military base, locking the door and tying up the commandant hardly seem to qualify as “seizure”.  Surely he had some idea of what the response would be to his manifesto and demands? Or was he simply both a writer AND a dreamer? (I think they are not always coincident.)

Mishima’s former friend and biographer,  John Nathan, suggested that the coup attempt “was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed.” He composed the traditional jisei (death poems) and had planned the suicide for more than a year before the event. The men that followed him into that base on the 25^th, however, really should have known what he had in mind, if he had hopes of being canonised for his imaginary patriotic zeal. (Or whatever they do in Japan.)

At this point, I would like to say that “I digress”. However, considering that I have not even achieved an entry-level paragraph on the subject that I wanted to write about immediately after the heading, I can’t. At the same time, to end here with Yukio Mishima, and to offer nothing else, might well cause a bit of “WTF?” in the minds of the netball team. Why do we care about this guy? (See how I have avoided calling him a nutcase.)

We don’t, I guess, seeing that most of us are not evolved Yogi’s with an intimate physical connection to all sacred living things (and people, probably) and inevitably, as a result, the history of misery and madness.

So. WTF is the story with the story of Yukio Mishima?

I wanted to write a blog about modern fiction being, (as I finally managed to formulate all by myself after multiple, determined attempts to read Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss), the equivalent of examining one’s own entrails after committing hara-kiri.

And I can NEVER remember how to spell that. So I looked it up…. and then I found the story of Mishima… and then… well here we are. And now my blog time for today, in spite of it being Saturday, is over. But there will be more about Obsession, Lunar Park, Hanif Kureshi, Andre P. Brink, Tim Huysamen and Elmore Leonard tomorrow. Really. Now I have to gel down my hair and go and watch Wolverine.

On writing #3: Nothing to say

I am going through an alarming phase in which I have nothing to say. This did not worry me over the weekend, as I was in the company of friends and, apparently, 27 bottles of wine. And then, when I got back on Monday, I could string a sentence or two together about recycling these very friends that had such a terrible influence on me.  

But yesterday, nothing, and today… nothing. (I think there was a column written by a columnist once about writing about not knowing what to write about. I feel like that person right now.)

I received a blog award, The Honest Scrapper, from Extranjera. (Thanks a lot.)

I am honoured because I think she writes a kick-ass blog, and she is prolific as hell. I wonder where all the great sentences that land up on her page come from, there are so many of them, and she is Finnish to boot. Not that this means anything beyond that she seems to be writing in a second language and that she likes to drink a lot. (She says she does.) I once had dinner with a client who came to shoot an Ericsson commercial in Cape Town. The crew represented the whole Scandinavian peninsula. The producer and director were Swedes, the DOP Norwegian and the steadicam operator was Finnish. They were unanimous on the fact that the Fins drank the most. And that they liked to drink a lot.

But back to the Honest Scrapper, and the problem of having nothing to say.

It is one of those awards where you have to do the work after the honour has been bestowed on you and then pass it along. Like a chain letter in the old days, but better, as it is designed to attract attention to your blog and spread the love at the same time. I suspect it also gives folk something to write about on days when they have absolutely nothing to say. Lots of  people out there really like to write about themselves. Sometimes I do too.

But today, this week, this month, I feel that I may not deserve the award. I tried to write “ten honest things” about myself, but failed. It is not that I cannot put ten things down on a page, it is just that once they are down, they seem of little consequence, and lacking in both wit and gravitas. And if so… who the hell cares?

There were only two items that amused me about myself:

1. I am a BIG Neil Diamond fan. Indra can scoff all he likes, but when the news of a new album hit the stands, I was not even a little surprised. I knew it would be coming.

2. I am a TERRIBLE food snob. It starts with making your own stock. If you do not make your own stock, please do not tick the “Cooking – I LOVE it!” box in the “more about yourself” page of your Dating Buzz profile. Do NOT describe yourself as a good cook. No, really. That, for me, it’s as damning as posting a picture from ten years ago when you were twenty kilo’s lighter. I know it’s pathetic. But a girl has to have at least one standard she is not prepared to lower during a hormonal surge of some kind or the other.

I just thought of another one:

3. My mother thinks that a return to faith in God and prayer will make my life better. I think giving up coffee, alcohol, flour, dairy and sugar will make my life better. If you had to choose, which one would YOU say is the narrow path?

But moving along.  I am also not sure who I would send this to. The initial instruction was “7 cool people” but has been whittled down to “seven five”. It does not help much. Considering the trauma I experienced in trying to be honest about myself, I hesitate to pass on the award, I must admit.

If it is about connecting, and sharing, I must recommend the Hispanic Fanatic very highly . He writes beautifully, and is funny, and engages critically and intelligently with the world he lives in. And he gets on really well with his mother. And Hardspear. I love his blog. (Where the hell have you been?) And then PW and Sons. There something about that one…

This funk I am in may be the result of trying to give up coffee for a whole day this week. I forwent its pleasures on Tuesday, and did pretty well. But on Wednesday I passed via the Chef on my way to work and today I cannot wait to get to Seattle. RIGHT NOW, I am thinking of taking my blog there.

I also started doing a round of Surya Namaskar in the mornings, and cultivating a routine. I thought that falling out of bed and heading for the computer in my pyjamas with an espresso, and staying there, was not an adult way of working at home. Now I get up, stretch, shower, have vegetable juice and THEN sit down, fully dressed and washed, like at a real job. The jury is out on that one.

I have moved my office around and thrown out the months-old newspapers. It is clean, sparkling, and conducive to work.

Still – nothing.

I print and read my preparation for class, I think about working on the tabloid essay. I have figured out that, if I proposed an argument at the beginning of the essay and failed to make it (which I did) I should not rewrite the entire thing, I should change the proposal to fit the argument that I DID make. That is a much easier task, but has not inspired me to action.

In fact, I get a headache just thinking about it. I feel trapped in procrastination, and I am not sure how I am going to get out of it. I think the salute to the sun is a good start, and I think I am going to stick with it for a while. That and the vegetable juice.

And keep on writing. Even when I have absolutely nothing to say.

On writing #2: S is for Solent

An adjective, (I know, it’s turning into a bit of a thing), “solent” is descriptive of the state of serene self-knowledge reached through drink. We are back with Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, and only because the Deeper Meaning of Liff has to go back to its owner this week. (Now there’s a blog – “OH? You wanted that BACK?”) And because there has been a second entry for the competition. Yay.

Anyway. I love “solent”. It is the moment in which the burrs of what one’s done with one’s life-so-far turns into sought-after dalrymples (dalrymple, n., the things you pay extra for on pieces of hand-made craftwork – the rough edges, the paint smudges and the holes in the glazing), with meaning, and so on. This is very useful when the expected results of the necessary changes one had to make to ensure one’s long-term happiness are very slow in materialising.

In a sentence: “Macy secretly regretted and often denied the many revelations she shared with Pooky in what she would call, many years later in an award-winning memoir, her Solent Period.”

In spite of the ridiculous amounts of fun that they can generate, adjectives have been maligned a lot. Very much like cocaine, come to think of it. LC once said to me that if you need an adjective, you are not using the right noun. Ben Yagoda is even more damning. His book on The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse, is called, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. If I was an adjective I’d be drinking a lot.

Moving on (or back, if you like) to the competition. I am determined to announce a winner at the end of May, so the closing date for entries will be, eh, 30 May. So there is still lots of time to work with:

• swanibost – “completely shagged out after a hard day of having income tax explained to you”
• duntish – “mentally incapacitated as a result of a severe hangover”
• climpy – “allowing yourself to be persuaded to do something and pretending to be reluctant”

I told Susan about the competition (oh must send her an e-mail) and although she co-wrote The (“thee”) Book on how to write a great research report (with the fabulous Barbara English, called Putting it into words) her first reaction was… “oh, that’s difficult.” When true wordsmiths consider it a challenge…

But do not be afraid.

As inspiration, here are the first two entries.

From Hardspear, we have…

Insights that are both profound and important

According to Lesley, to say “…the Sowetan has been recovering from a lengthy crisis of semi-erection; hovering between the la-di-da of respectability and the economic imperatives of crass commercialism…” is not academic, and even though she thought it was amusing, I have the opportunity to better my ways.

I knew of course, that this would be the response to what I thought was a particularly witty observation. Essays on Jane Austin’s entire oeuvre and Shakespeare’s Richard II (I can still not figure out why the hell I got to write two essays on Richard II) and The Tempest elicited a similar reaction. Then I was quite floored. Now… it is great that, as one gets older, one can quite easily accept that although one is unspeakably smart, there is a lot of shit one does not know, and that other smart people may even disagree with inventive opinions one may hold on the basis of shit one does know.  Still, it was my first attempt at academic writing since pa fell off the bus, and I thought I could test the waters.

And so on.

Questions to be answered in future:

1.         I don’t understand why the fucking Woody Allen festival should be AFTER the fucking 8pm movie on a Sunday. Does fucking e-tv not understand that 10pm is too LATE for Woody Allen fans? We are OLD now, and we have to fucking work on Monday. More than this, one cannot fucking tape/PVR the film and watch it at some other time because there are other things, equally important to watch, like 30 Rock on a Monday. I’m not even going to go to that place where people have a dish. I have not had a single afternoon/evening to sit through five episodes of ANY of my five favourite series and I don’t even have a real job. My mother calls me and tells me to watch Oprah in the afternoon, and I just don’t have the time. PLEASE!  When you hit the couch, THAT is the moment in which you have to engage. Putting it off is like getting an extension on an essay. Things pile up like old copies of magazines and newspapers.  Why why why?

2.         Is it possible that the continual, if vague, desire I have to find a guy with whom I could have an extended monogamous love-relationship with, is similar to the one my friend Katrien had when she bought a gun. In her mind, the gun would have been useful. She imagined that a robber would come, she would shoot him in the knees, he would fall in the pond (I don’t remember her having a pond) and then the police would come and take him away. Realising the absurdity of the fantasy, she took the gun back to the shop. Can one recycle a man in the same way? Or would one have to do more penance than a simple, “sorry, I thought I was in love, but it turned out to be an middle-ear infection?”

3.         What is wrong with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt?

4.         Is it OK to point out to etiolated vegans that they should either do something about their diet or stay the hell away from the rest of us?

I think that’s enough for the middle of April. I just realised that, although I thought of her all day, I did not actually call Ruby for her birthday, and she would be asleep for two hours already.

Shit.