Walter Benjamin

I have a dilemma today as I really wanted to post but what I wanted to write about is not ready.  The reason for this is partly because I had the most marvellous weekend reading bits and pieces for my next thesis chapter about Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys.

This is therefore not so much a blog post as an introduction to a quite extraordinary writer I read in the process.  His name is Walter Benjamin.  He dabbled in many different kinds of writing (much about cities, which is why I am reading him) and his life was cut tragicaly short because he committed suicide rather than be captured by the Germans during World War II.  Go look him up and read his stuff: I find reading over his sentences is like running one's fingers over particularly beautiful jewels.  I introduce you to him via this quote about the imagination (which I hope will lead smoothly to the troublesome blog post about my writing):

*"the faculty of imagination is the gift of interpolating into the infinitely small, of inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fullness, in short, of receiving each image as if it were that of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes, in its new expanse, the beloved features within it". (75)

*Benjamin, Walter.  One Way Street.  Intro. Susan Sontag. Transl. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter.  Noldon: NLB, 1979.

the internet

So I haven't had an Internet connection at home for a while (cause I moved in with my boyfriend and away from the wonderful almost endless campus Internet connection) and my blog posts have therefore been non-existent.  I invested in a blackberry to be able to at least read my e-mails and get onto facebook (but only theoretically-jeez blackberry facebook is Horrible) but the blogger app, wait, there isn't one.  So I have been out of contact.

To be completely honest, I am getting more and more twitchy about being online.  I don't like seeing carefully chosen advertisements from words in my e-mails and in what I have "liked" on facebook.  A case in point is The Little Prince.  I love this book: it moves me almost to tears every time I read it.  So I said I liked it on Facebook and now I have a feed full of items with "Little Prince" on them that I will presumably want to buy.  There is a music box, a duvet cover with matching pillow slip, a watch and endless other things that clearly (?) have equal importance to me as my friends' news as it all streams over the same page.

Facebook even looks different: now I have a timeline with a cute little cube with pictures of my friends and a list of places I have studied or lived in the past.  I can practically feel the marketers and other creepy people who follow your every move closing in...(I have just caught up on my friend Zoe's blog: she (rightly) complains that white people love to panic.  This is me, panicking.  But I suppose if I (kind of) know I'm panicking? Then...)

But I have missed seeing everyone's faces: Amy wandering around London in all her fabulousness; Indra and Thomas smiling out at me from Belgium; all the music department people in their graduation gowns and smiles; and Beatrice with her husband-to-be (nine more days today!) celebrating Easter in typically wacky fashion (picture the chocolate rabbits peering over the rocks towards a waterfall).

I could go off facebook, but then I would expect everyone to...send me letters?  Call me from overseas?  E-mailing is difficult enough.  I do savour an old-fashioned e-mail myself, but not everyone has the gift (or curse) of the endless words that flow from my fingers once I get writing.  I would miss you all too much.

So despite my paranoia about people being able to follow my every move (catch me "tagging in" somewhere I go!) I will stay here, in this online space.

Hello everyone!  It's great to see you all again.

NaNoWriMo: Day One

A short two years ago, I too was asking, "What the heck is that?".  Well, "NaNoWriMo" stands for National Novel-Writing Month.  It started in the United States, but unlike so many of their compatriots, they wanted to share this great idea with the world, so perhaps it should be renamed InNoWriMo (you can guess why).

On the first of November all over the world, writers begin writing a novel (of minimum 50 000 words) that they have to finish on or before the 30th November.  I have never been really interested before, mainly because I thought that that was no way to write a novel.  Maturity has brought reason, however, or perhaps just the bitter realisation that I can never carry my novels further than their opening descriptions because I am a complete perfectionist (read: "egotistical coward").

I am terrified to write something, my brain goes into a freeze and won't come up with more than a striking opening image or situation.  I write a page or so, feel dreadfully proud at the quality of my own writing, and begin to dream dreams of writing a truly brilliant novel.  Then I read it the next day and realise it is trite and the images are cliched.  I fiddle with what I have, I wrack my brains for some more plot, squirm at my inadequate direct speech and then, ooh, what's that?  A movie that I haven't seen for at least a week.  I had better watch that, get some inspiration.

Needless to say, my novels never develop to anything more complex than a sapling.

I procrastinated (a little) before starting this evening, but I wrote the required 1666 words without the wave of crushing inadequacy I usually feel hovering above my head.  It's really late now, which will come back to bite me tomorrow, but for now, I feel just the teeniest stirrings of something like euphoria.  I have begun.

blogger's block (and my soution)

The more I blog, the less I feel able to. In part, this may be a writer's problem. The words overwhelm one. How can one find the right words when there are no right ones? My experiences and feelings can never be teased out in language, the subtleties cannot be expressed. They can be hinted at, or expressed in a particular way but actually come to mean something completely different. Sometimes the life I want to describe seethes with vibrancy and infinite riches before my eyes and I feel clumsy and rough, having to shatter what I see in order to smear the oozing remains onto the page. And yet language does communicate. Having caught up on friends' blogs, I am enlightened and lifted and made to see differently. I am sure that sometimes my writings (if I work on them conscientiously enough) do the same.

It may also be because I flinch from the continuous sound (metaphorically speaking) of my own voice. Too often, debate or public speaking can become nothing more than a tirade of repetitive shock-slogans, and those who speak the loudest are the best heard. I maintain that one of the best ways to deal with Julius Malema is not to give him so much free publicity (although the recent publicity about his trust fund makes me thrilled). South Africa has so any wise people who are doing good work, why cannot we have their revelations on the front pages or discussed and picked over in the media? Perhaps, in part, because wisdom cannot always be arrived at in a headline or a twitter feed. I am uninitiated to the world of twitter, but it does make me shudder like the ancient, pedantic English teacher I'm sure I am on the inside. Even the name makes all my toes curl. "Twit" (as in Roald Dahl's "The Twits"), or to "twit" someone has never been a good thing. Perhaps the joke is on us: millions of people signing up for the right to be called a "twit-ter".

As I just illustrated (most effectively to myself), I can easily be betrayed into a tirade. But what is the difference between an educated, interesting opinion and a tirade? At what point do my opinions stop trying to effect good in the world and turn into statements designed to wound and simultaneously make myself look self-righteous and superior? I am sure many people can come up with pithy statements on twitter, just as many people write, um, not-so-pithy things.

Perhaps I do sometimes betray myself into wounding rather than challenging constructively, but what I do love doing (without regrets, although I always wish I could describe them better) in these blogs is telling people's stories. There are such interesting people walking by me every day that when life slows down a little (or when I slow down enough to stop and really see) I have really nourishing encounters.

I've just been on holiday to three different provinces (KwaZulu Natal, the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga) and what really struck me was the wonderful men I met. Feminists are not completely round the twist when they say that we still live in an unequal society. Female lecturers at Wits (for example) are more often that not paid less than their male counterparts. I also meet women (more often than I would like to) who still do all the housework and cooking despite the fact that both partners have full time jobs. Then there are also men who are brought up with very specific ideas about what masculinity is, and when they are unable to fulfil these expectations, are left feeling emasculated and angry. Sometimes this can make women (myself included) and men bitter about the state of gender relations.

Yet on this holiday, I found so much evidence of men who were negotiating this world with such verve and sensitivity that I have returned feeling inspired. There are two of the men I went to school with, Richard and Malcolm. I saw them on the last leg of my trip as Malcolm was getting married (what a beautiful wedding and a meaningful and thought-provoking marriage service). Richard cooked a few delicious meals for all of us, and always treated his girlfriend, Tarryn with the utmost respect. He is endlessly curious and energetic, always wanting to learn more about all of us and what we are interested in, never arrogantly dreaming that he knows everything or intimating, however subtly or unconsciously, that he would be smarter because he is a man(despite being a really talented computer scientist). He reminded me of how important it is to be curious about everything, and how much more you can learn and grow because of it.

Malcolm, who was getting married to his wonderful wife, Jess, made clear throughout the ceremony and reception that he was so fortunate to be getting married to such a special person. The absolute love and respect he has for his wife, and the fact that he was unashamed to show the enormity of his emotion was an incredibly beautiful thing to see.

Then there is Markus, a bird and mammal guide extraordinaire. He made me think almost all the time: openly challenging me to be sharper, more aware and even more moral. "Moral" is a bit of a self-righteous word, but hang in there. It's because he listened closely to whatever I said, and pulled it apart. I had fallen into the habit of speaking unthinkingly, and of saying (among other things), "I promise" when I wanted to emphasise a point, implying (as he rightly said) that what I usually said was untrustworthy or not worth listening to. As a language person, thinking about how I use language before I say anything is immensely important. Language is powerful. Travelling with a wildlife guide also made me more aware of how much I miss all around me every day. I walked to work through Wits campus (the centre of South Africa's biggest city) the other day actually looking for birds and I found the kind of strikingly beautiful birdlife I only dreamed was possible in game parks. I have been walking around half-blind.

This blog is for those men who do make a better way forward in this "monstrous and wonderful, banal and bizarre, ordered and chaotic"* world. It's also for my boyfriend, the intensely private man who I haven't described in detail here, but who is living proof for me every day that men and women do not always have to tear at each other, but can nourish and better each other in every infinitesimal way.

what I'm reading

I've thought up the perfect description for how my eyes feel after staring at the computer screen for too long. They begin to feel like teeth feel when you wake up in the morning and (for whatever reason) you never brushed them the night before. There is that thin, unpleasant furry yet slimy sensation when your tongue runs along them. That is how my eyes feel now because I have speant the past few hours looking for intriguing blogs written by complete strangers to follow. I found surprisingly few. Maybe I am not looking well enough, but I found so many blogs that were little more than "watch this video of ...[include link to YouTube] hahaha. Or pseudo-poetry accompanied by stylistic/artistic photos of really thin models looking "pensive" (to quote the fabulously facile joke at Joey's expense in 10 Things I Hate About You. Dont you dare judge me for referring to this movie. It's wickedly cool: partly because the geek gets the girl without undergoing a geek-to-cool transformation. I mean geeks are cool already). Even the many SA politics blogs begin to annoy me. They all sound like Mail and Guardian articles. I love the Mail and Guardian articles...in the Mail and Guardian. Surely blogs should experiment with different styles?

Anyway, enough whining. The point is that I eventually did find a cool blog by Mridu Khullar Relph: an independent journalist from India. As I am a technological retard, I can't actually figure out how to follow her page, but I'm going to add it to my favourites and see how that works. I digress, the point is that she has a regular blog called "What I'm reading" that lists a whole host of things she is reading without the pressure of having to produce a formal book review on the particular book.

So, in the spirit of Mridu Khullar Relph,
What I'm Reading (or rather, what I've read this month so far):

The Devil's Chimney - Anne Landsman

I wanted to like this book. It is written by a South African woman, set in South Africa and is about South African women. It is a "magic-realist" text and is set in the Karroo, one of the most mysterious and eerie South African landscapes.

But I didn't like it. Anne Landsman lives in New York (since 1981). I only read this after I had put down the novel and had felt profoundly dissatisfied. Some of my dissatisfaction suddenly made sense because I felt like it was written like a white trauma-experienced-by-women-by-numbers text, not an intricate engagement with the subtlties of South African interactions, something which has to be experienced on the ground.

There were great moments and the effort to focus the text through a poor white, alcoholic woman with a rich imagination unschooled by academies was startlingly orginal. I started losing faith when it became more and more depressing (I don't mind difficult and depressing: I love J.M. Coetzee and Sello K. Duiker) but then ended with a unconvincingly happily: alcoholic woman embraces alcoholic abusive husband after forty (?) years of non-conversation after the (deeply movingly rendered) loss of their child. Because all the years of masculinity-issues abuse and dangerous drug abuse will suddenly cease because of a hug. Then there are some mystical black folk thrown in who have (equally mystical) relations to the San. Fail.

Thirteen Cents - K. Sello Duiker

This book - by contrast - was unremittingly disturbingly brilliant. It is the tale of a street kid in Cape Town who discovers just how soulless the city can be. The so-called liberal "gay capital" of South Africa is shown to be a misnomer: how gay-friendly is it when this kid makes a lot of his money having sex with in-the-closet, married businessmen who have no problem having sex with a thirteen-year-old? All his efforts at improving himself are betrayed by adults he should be able to trust and friends who constantly betray themselves because of crippling addictions.

One of the gang bosses enforced on him tells him his mother never loved him and that he (the gang leader) is the only one who ever did. Azure - the name of the protagonist - loves Cape Town: the "mother city" of South Africa. The novel shows that Mother Cape Town sure doesn't love Azure and other black people like him.

The Power Book - Jeanette Winterson

I love love this author. Really, words escape me and I am reduced to the gibbering idotish "I love love". I will just quote her and you can see for yourself how revolutionary (I mean that word in its best possible sense) she is. Hopefully, reading these quotes will direct you to her website full of insightful articles and prose.

"The heart. Carbon based primitive in a silicone world" (40).
"That's the size of [love], the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable" (51).
"Did I write this story, or was it you, writing through me the way the sun sparks the fire through a piece of glass?" (209).

And finally, the favourite that I have placed at the top of this blog:
"The world is a mirror of the mind's abundance" (223).

Reading is a large part of what makes my mind abundant enough to see riches in the world. I can only hope that with time and reflection, it will only increase.

Riddikulus.

I have a confession to make. I have - for a good part of the last five years - been an aerobics-class taker. I have done step classes and arm movements that make me feel like I am stuck in the eighties when aerobics first became popular, like I should be wearing a g-string unitard thing with tights and leg-warmers and way too much make-up. That feeling (along with the rush of endorphins) was a lot of fun: it's why I enjoyed aerobics. I spent those classes with a huge grin on my face and frequently giggled. Most people associate exercise with pain or discomfort, or perhaps even with becoming as toned as Gwen Stefani or Rihanna (or if not them, at least that girl who you see at the gym every day with the body you wished you had). I would argue that being a spectacle can be even more fun (encourage you to hit the gym more often) and make you feel more attractive than being "beautiful".

Some of my favourite moments over the years have been when I have thrown dignity out of the window and been just plain ridiculous. I am never so at home as when I let myself go beyond my skin. The EastCape Opera Company's show "Misbehavin'" was probably the start. I had to strut around the stage in a long flowery dress with a lumpy pregnancy belly jutting out in front. The belly was tan in colour, egg-shaped and had my name written on it in black marker. I had to lug it around to the different theatres we performed in and I can definitely say it was one of the oddest props I have ever had to remember. It was also - initially - embarrassing. I liked to look pretty on stage or at least unusual-bordering-on-odd (but still pretty), not ridiculous.

Eventually I found it liberating. I realised I could move freely and come up with creative (and fun) ideas when I wasn't worried about how I looked.

I moved these theatrics into real life when I used to dress up for Rhodes's many parties. I hammed it up as a transvestite (a woman playing a man who's playing a woman, Victor/Victoria style) in white hot pants, a red velvet cloak-like top and a crown with a feather at the OutRhodes party. It was one of my favourite parties because I felt absolutely no awkward self-consciousness. I also dressed up as "two-dollah" (if you've seen "Full Metal Jacket" you'll know what I mean) for a friend's Girls of the Playboy Mansion twenty-first. I was dressed really provocatively, but I was also wearing the most hideous, platinum blonde wig. Once I put that wig on, there was no chance anyone could think I was trying to be a sexy, pert bunny. It was so hideous that there is video footage of it coming to life and "attacking" my friend Kendra.

My final Rhodes prank was the pink wig I wore when I graduated last year. I thought that perhaps Rhodes staff wouldn't let me get away with it (it was so pink it practically glowed), but actually most people were thrilled to see something different at the usually long ceremony. The photograph of me being capped is pretty much the same as the previous year's apart from the pink wig: I'm even wearing the same dress. Except for the anonymous academic sitting behind me. He has a huge smile on his face.

That's why it is not just about dressing ridiculously (though as I've said many times before, anything that stops girls and women, including myself, from feeling self-consciously unworthy about their bodies is wonderful): it's about having a healthy sense of humour about all sorts of different parts of life because it can bring a real sense of joy to everyone.

It's about bravery and freedom. If I were to take myself too seriously, I would never achieve anything. I don't mean that I don't take life seriously. Life is a serious business because I am always interacting with other human beings as fragile -or more so - than myself. My actions will always impact others in ways I can never even dream of. It is more about not being serious about expecting myself or others to be perfect. If I am brave enough to be ridiculous, I am brave enough to admit I am not perfect: not always beautiful or intelligent or witty or kind. It is only then I am free to write what I want, love people without fear that I will lose them because I am not perfect enough and have a great time without worrying that I look funny. I probably do, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I would say there is a lot right about it.

The same goes for my writing. Writing my first blog was like stepping off a precipice. It is terrifying to nurture some words and throw them out there, realising people are actually going to read them. There are times when I feel unsatisfied with what I have written (OK, most times) and if I didn't publish it, those mistakes and blind reasoning wouldn't be here. It also means none of my writing would be here, and I would have lost out on the beauty and exhilaration (and strong sense of fun) I feel when I write and when (sometimes) these blogs make a difference or people enjoy them.

In The Prisoner of Azkaban (non-Harry Potter fans bear with me), there is a certain creature - a boggart - that assumes the form of whatever we fear the most. The only way to defeat it is to imagine it looking silly and nonthreatening (like the school bully in your grandmother's gown and cap) and shout "Riddikulus". It is a clever concept because most things we're afraid of are of our own making. That's not to say (continuing the metaphor) that there aren't other really scary creatures out there that we do need to be afraid of, but many of the ones we spend our time worrying about (or at least, the ones I do) are just spectres of our minds that can be defeated with a little healthy riddikulus.