Millisecond

I looked up and saw a shooting star,
immediately gone.

In its dying wake was left
a trail of ash and dust,
falling

through

the winter sky
towards the sleeping crust

of earth.
An alien birth,

a billion years of travelling,
extraterrestrial proof,
sprinkled somewhat randomly
on a suburban roof.

When "African Literature" means "Don't Bother"

So, yes, Wasted has at long last reached the shops. 
    It’s not a very long book, or very thick, but I’d like to think that intensity trumps size every time. Besides, it took me a whole long time to write, even longer for my publisher to read, and months to edit, proofread and print. Make it about two years for this process.
    The first time I held the finished article in my hands was half an hour before the launch event. This skinny, ink-smelling, papery thing made me come over all mushy, and I had to find a quick glass of wine to quell the emotions before I could sensibly discuss it with John Maytham.
    The following weekend, I did what I suspect many authors do.
    I turned into a stalker. A voyeur. A benign Peeping Tom. Creeping in happy anonymity around bookstores to see whether they’d ordered my book, and more importantly, to see how they were “merchandising” it, as we advertising people call it.
    And just like last time, I found it in the “African Literature” section, where it had cleverly been denied any chance of visibility by being placed under “W”, which is approximately where my right shin would have found it, if my right shin had eyes.
    I went to the front of the store to inspect the “New Arrivals” shelves. Among the dozens of “international” authors, Suzanne Collins had a double-billing, there was something soggy by E.L. James, and I spotted a new fantasy thing by someone called Sarah J. Maas.
    No Wasted. 
    Or any other work by a South African author.
    I went back to the “African Literature” stand and put on spectacles that were a little less self-centred.
    Under “B” was Lauren Beukes. Okay, so she hasn’t yet won the Booker or a Nobel prize. But she’s won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction. She’s had Stephen King sing her praises. I believe she’s had a book optioned by some Hollywood bigshot, and that she has a worldwide TV series on the cards. 

It was cute to see J.M. Coetzee’s works lined up next to Ms Beukes’. A Nobel winner, a double Booker winner, he’s been, if I remember correctly.
    And there my book was, rubbing shoulders on the bottom shelf with Ivan Vladislavić, who has just been awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize by Yale University.
    It’s great company if you can get it. Yet, not one of these enormously commended authors had a single work on the actual “Fiction” shelves. And nor did any of my other compatriots, stuffed together as we were, spine out, on our own little lopsided island in the corner.

I asked a passing employee where I might find the Scandinavian and Australian Literature sections. She looked at me as if I might bite her on the ankle, so I explained that I was looking for a), a twee story about an old man who jumped out of a window and b), a maundering lecture on Australian politics masquerading as fiction. She gave me a nervous grin and scampered off to help build a gigantic paper idol to Jeffrey Archer or David Baldacci or someone in the front window.

    Because that’s the point, isn’t it?
    How logical is it to categorize books by the nationality of the people who wrote them?
    It’s like holding an athletics event only for athletes with red hair, establishing a soccer club purely for players who like liquorice, or broadcasting a talent show solely for people who are allergic to bees.
    I draw these parallels because writing, too, is a competition. Even the most minor of South African writers (ahem) competes with the biggest international authors for what advertising people call “share of mind”. And as the old cliché goes, “Out of sight....”

I don’t really buy the commercial argument either – that popular authors sell better, and therefore will make more money for the retailer if they’re displayed front and centre. I’m sure a customer would ask after the latest Dan Brown if she can’t find it on the shelf – but she’s hardly going to ask for the latest Mark Winkler. She’d have to know about Winkler’s book to ask, wouldn’t she? And how could she, if it’s been banished to the African Literature stand – a stand that may as well be covered in biohazard symbols, festooned with quarantine flags, or on fire.
    I don’t see an “African Literature” section doing very much to promote African (or South African) authors.
    It’s only announcing, loud and clear, that African literature is somehow second rate, a curiosity to turn to on the rarest of occasions (like pig’s trotters or escargot), and that African writers simply aren’t good enough to rub shoulders with the rest.
    Sarah J. Maas se…

Happy Whatever

So during the Sydney hostage crisis, we had the agency TV set to Sky. As I took two minutes to catch up, a Muslim colleague came to stand beside me. “It’s Muslims like that who give Muslims a bad name,” he said, shaking his head. But it wasn’t really a Muslim who took the hostages. It was by all accounts a crazy person. I’d guess that 99.9% of Muslims aren’t crazy. Therefore, not all crazy people are Muslim.

                  By the time I got back to my desk, #Illridewithyou was trending. I don’t get teary much, but this outpouring of support for those regular people who happened to be Muslims really touched me. Jeez, we should have gone to live in Oz ten years ago, I thought. As a friend of mine commented on Facebook, the Australians might be completely delusional about rugby and cricket, but this was something truly special. Apparently it’s called “mateship”, my Brisbanite editor Lynda tells me.

                  And then, the next day, all this good stuff was undermined by a bunch of total arseholes snapping selfies of themselves on Martin Place. Grinning as if they had just burned through the corporate lunch account, or were on their way to the circus. Sometimes the human race really sucks.

                  It might sound a little glib, but the ideal workplace should be a microcosm of society. In my real job at our ad agency, we have Muslims and Christians and Jews and Hindus and atheists and probably one or two Pastafarian members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster all spending their daylight hours there. Respecting each other and working together and getting things done as professionally as possible, and then laughing and hugging each other at beer o’clock on Fridays and at our various agency get-togethers. Those 10 or so working hours a day, those celebratory occasions, are when religion is forgotten, or at least when belief systems and their entrenched animosities are set aside.

                  The oldest extant version of the Christian Bible resides in the British Museum. It’s dated at approximately 500 years AD. It’s in Greek. It was written by a phalanx of authors, mostly unknown, and most of whom never spoke or wrote Greek. If you work in the ad industry, you will know, by hard experience, that the difference between the one-page client brief and what is relayed to the creative team a day later can be two completely different things. So, how much can be changed within a thousand or so pages, over 500 years? How much has actually been expunged, added, or altered over that time? From the exclusions of the many parts of the Apocrypha, to the mistranslations, to the ecclesiastical editing brought about to bolster the agenda of whomever was boss of the Church at the time?

                  Has religion brought about more wars than anything else? Probably not, if you did the numbers. But it has caused so much hurt, so much pain. Two dead in Sydney. The next day, over a hundred Pakistani pupils slaughtered by the Taliban. And God – ha! – only knows what Boko Haram has been up to in the last twenty-four hours.

                  For what? The roots of all modern religions (Pastafarians aside) lie in Bronze Age superstitions that have barely evolved over 5,000 years, and are today neatly packaged in explosive little parcels for different tastes. And all of that in the face of simple logic, basic empiricism, rudimentary science, and the proven laws of nature.

                  We were in Mauritius a few years ago, and on an outing from our wonderfully fake resort, we passed a Catholic church. Outside, twice life-sized, a sculpture showed Christ on the cross, hang-headed with bright crimson blood running from his hands, feet and chest. My youngest, who is Jewish as my wife is, was horrified. I dug into my Catholic past and tried to explain. The more I tried to clarify the mythology, the less sense it made to her.

We were on our way to a Hindu temple, which was populated by blue elephants and beings with banana-bunches of extraneous arms. My daughter was no less puzzled about the crucifixion sculpture than she was about the Hindu gods. Such is the innocence, and the impartiality, we've all lost.

                  If only we were more concerned with our fellow beings, on a practical, tangible, day-to-day basis, than we are with trying furiously to bat for the particular fairy-tale that makes us each feel warmest and fuzziest, we’d be on to a damned fine thing. As they say, having a religion is like having a penis. It’s okay to have one, but don’t whip it out in public, don't thrust it on anyone, least of all small children or your dinner guests. Don't think with it. Don’t compare sizes. And don’t ever try to write laws with it.

                  Merry Whatever, everyone.

                 

Almost lost for words (but not quite)

I can’t do religious rants – I’m not religious. So this isn’t one, even though I’m a recovering Catholic, my wife is Jewish, and yes, some of my friends and colleagues are Hindu and Muslim.

Consider this a rant against those intellectual amputees who have plumbed the depths of hypocrisy by clutching their Woolworths shares in one hand and a placard demanding that I boycott the company in the other.

Excuse me?

That’s like expecting me to flagellate myself with a bicycle chain because my neighbour’s dog keeps you up all night.

My issue isn’t particularly about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Or that I hear no outrage at the chopping off of heads and the kidnapping of young woman that’s going on in some quarters of our wonderful world.

It’s just that you don’t make any sense. 

Not the slightest, tiniest bit.

God, how stupid do you have to be to try to destroy your own investment? Perhaps the answer to an otherwise rhetorical question lies in the fact that the pig’s head which appeared Woolies’ Sea Point branch was actually placed in the Halaal section of the store. There is no kosher section.

(Much to the surprise of many a Sea Point kugel: “Oy, so since when is Woolies selling kosher food?”)

Here’s what I suggest you do. It may help lend a little logic to your otherwise fraught campaign.

If you don't like the way Woolies conducts is business, sell your shares and shop somewhere else. It's a free world (for the time being).

Find a retailer that has no connections with Israel and buy your food and clothing there. 

But be careful. 

Your favourite new store had better not use Microsoft Windows on their computers. Much of it was developed in Israel. 

Check out their hardware. Chances are that their PCs and other devices contain a Sandybridge, 8088 or Centrino chip, developed and manufactured for Intel in Israel. Or that their CCTV system in fact originated there.

Before you enter, throw away your cell phone. Without Israeli engineering, it must be the size of a small shoebox, which will surely get in the way while you’re stocking up on Iraqi or Chinese or Russian produce.

On your way home, please hand the following to the first beggar who comes to your window: your iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and any Samsung products that use Anobit flash technology. Its Israeli origins surely mean you can’t keep any of them. 

Once you’re home, fling your Kindle out of the window – the Java system that drives it was definitely not developed by COSAS. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to learn that it was developed in Israel.

Take that little flash drive off your key ring and smite it with a rock. Sift through your medicine cabinet and toss half of the medicines in it down the loo. Stop eating the Zionist poison of cherry tomatoes at once.

Then, on a clay tablet, begin a petition demanding that AngloGold Ashanti close its Western Deep mines as punishment for being so naughty as to use Israeli-made cooling systems.

There.

Feeling better now?

Perhaps you should do what I did and spend fifteen minutes on Google to find out exactly where, when and how you (and I, and much of the world's populace that has learnt to balance on its hind legs) benefit from Israeli inventions and products before going off on a hysterical and misguided zombie attack of a single random retailer.

And for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop trying to make up my mind for me.

The only reason that I’d consider boycotting Woolworths is that I don’t really like frogs, least of all in my salad. 

But I’d bet my MacBook that the ratio of frog-infested salad to frog-free salad in Woolies is pretty much on a par with the ratio of Israeli to non-Israeli products on their shelves. 

Durban Decay

A few weeks ago I went to Durban for a shoot. We were looking for Kinshasa without having to go there, and I think we found it. Have a look at more pics here.

Video feed. Food. Fodder.

I follow a few interesting content and design websites that serve information that’s generally a little left of centre, and for the most part they’re surprisingly elucidating and stimulating.

In return for my loyalty, they throw up tantalising pics and copy onto my Facebook page, and sometimes I even click on the links to see what’s on offer.

Which is usually a video. And which is the moment I usually close the page.

Yes, I’m old (school), but for the love of simple sanity, please give me a text article that I can scan in a minute, decide what’s important for myself, and go back and focus on certain bits if I feel like it. Instead, I’m faced with endless video nasties where the point of the thing is made at eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Don’t get me wrong. I love sites like upworthy.com.  “A Kid Got Revenge On His Bully And Immediately Regretted It” (sic) sounds amazing. But I really don’t want to watch a 13-minute video about said bullying and said revenge. I want to read (because I can), and filter out the proverbial bullshit from the cherry pie for myself. Instead, I’ve now missed out on  a story about bullies being re-bullied, and perhaps even bullying back. All I’ve concluded is that in the interchange, everyone lost. Which maybe they didn’t. Perhaps everyone won. I’ll never know. What I do know is that nobody bothered to write anything down at the time.

The little I remember of my journalism studies (other than how to touch-type – thank you, four-year Journ degree) is how to structure a news story. Think inverted triangle – the fat bit at the top is all the important stuff, and as it tails off the copy and the content gets thinner and less significant. It meant that the sub-editor could trim articles from the bottom up to suit the layout, and to the reader it meant that he or she needn’t read the whole thing to get the gist of the story. Of course it's different now – now you need to tease people into clicking through to your content. Hence lines on your newsfeed like, "She swallowed 50 kilograms of earthworms and you won't believe what happened next," or, "He took on a grizzly bear with a spatula and a pair of socks - who came out tops?"

Back in the day, the bullying story might have opened with the following: “A bully found the tables turned when his victim impaled him on a wooden spike” (I don’t know if that’s what happened because I didn’t watch the video, but you understand my point). You get it in fifteen words, and then it’s up to you whether or not to read the rest.

These days, it seems we’re caught between semi-literacy and common-or-garden imbecility. We’re training ourselves to think, and talk, in bites – bytes? – of information. We’re Whatsapping and BBMing and twittering and squittering with no bigger-picture thought of what we’re putting out there. Little bits of schmick-schmack that demonstrate nothing more than the proliferation of pointless information, while emphasising the screaming dearth of wisdom. Dickens, the man who wrote books the size of tombstones with nothing more than a quill pen and some spit, would wet himself.

Of course language morphs and develops. If it didn’t, we’d all be speaking like Chaucer, or discussing Beowulf over the braai, sounding like we were choking on chop bones. But really, people – it’s speech that made us human in the first place, and writing that made us even more so. So when a baby copywriter stuck her head into my office the other day to argue against a grammatically-correct apostrophe because it looked ugly in print, I didn’t feel bad that she left in tears with her apostrophe screwed firmly to the sticking place.

Apostrophes – every time you use them to make a plural, a puppy dies. Every time you omit them from a possessive, the Pope’s underpants catch fire. Either way, you’re going to hell.

Hasthtag just saying.

Review of "Theory"

Here's a review of Theory I never thought I'd hear, by the rather particular John Maytham of 567 Cape Talk (it's the second review on the Soundcloud clip).