real life drunken flower-picking

An old world exists hidden in the recesses of some of Johannesburg's quaint suburban patchwork. Some remnants lie behind palisades crawling with flowering plants; other signs exist just in the archives at Baileys and various scattered media. My fingertips pry these places with a mixture of glee and apprehension and what I might discover. I am a good month into the new project and I have written scant little about it, save for a few transcripts. Just one dive in and I am being swept away by the current that prevails. I am on a spate of interviews as part of the data collection phase; and I have yet to speak to a person under the age of 60. Life is revealing itself to me at a whole other level. Writing does no justice.

The stories pile up on my virtual desk. Some merge in tapestries of biography that will themselves reveal to be whole new stories to look into. Other's add colour to the mainframe of a story that works its way into my new work. And it's all just the raw material for now... a range of logs that wait for the craftsmen to get to work creating canoes that will carry contemporary readers across the river to the other side... to a view of a world that our generation can only ever read about and never really know.

I am to write a biography in the next few months; and the realness of a non-fiction work is filling me with an amazing sense of being once again a part of something wholesome. I love narrative biography; the basis for 'Daughters are Diamonds' was just that. This is different though; I am walking into a world that even my imagination at a stretch would be unable to tease out. It will present itself as the life story of a man who, arguably, may not have commissioned the work if he was alive. That in itself lends to a responsibility in the way that I present this. The comments resonate, both in the archives, and from the transcripts of his contemporaries, his children, his recorded notes and memories. There once walked a man distinguished more by his sense of presence than by the guarded allegiances he made with the freedom struggle of his time. My thoughts are scattered more by the brilliance in simplicity than by the ostentatious delving into this almost forgotten world.

At some point, I must emerge from this trance and get back to the drawing board for some real work. For now, the flower-picking continues...

words and things

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

-Lewis Carroll

Olivia

"Then one day Olivia's newspapers and magazines lay on her doorstep, untouched. The Corvette sat sullen under a tan canvas cover dotted with fallen jacaranda flowers like mementos of loss. Just the sight of the landlocked Corvette made me wish I had some Percodan left. I settled for some leftover codeine cough syrup Marvel had in her medicine chest. The sticky cloying taste lingered as I sat on my ripcord bedspread and combed my hair with Olivia's comb. I was in awe of her perfection. A woman who would throw out a handmade tortoiseshell comb just because it was missing a tooth. I wondered if she really made love to men for money, what that was like. Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. My mother would hate that, but it was true. Words trailing their streamers of judgment. A wife got money from her husband and nobody said anything. And if Olivia's boyfriends gave her money? So what?

I combed my hair and made a French twist, imagining myself as Olivia. I stalked the small room, walking the way she walked, hips first, like a runway model. What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots - prostitute, housewife, saint - like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I ran her stocking up my leg, smelled the Ma Griffe.

I imagined she'd gone to Paris, that she was sitting at a cafe, having a cloudy Pernod and water, scarf tied to her purse like the women in her French Vogue. I imagined she was with the BMW man, the quiet one with gold cuff links who liked jazz. I'd imagined them often, dancing in the old-fashioned way in her living room, hardly moving their feet, his cheek resting on the top of her close-waved hair. That's how I saw her in Paris. Staying up till late in a jazz club only black Parisians knew, in a cellar on the Rive Gauche, dancing. I could see the champagne and the way their eyes closed, and they weren't thinking of anything but more of the same."

Extract from 'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch. (pp 122-3; Virago Publ. 1999.)

And in other news...

In other news....

I am writing some fabulous fiction :P

check it out...

okay, rather...

i should pass around the address when I have more to share...

okay whatever...

Sigh.

Shafs...

some moments last forever- character caricatures

They say that time flies when you're having fun. She wasn't.
"Gosh. What on earth am I doing here?" she thought.
But 'nice' was a thing she did. It's what got her here in the first place.

Sam & Julie. She loved them to bits. But not this much!

"Nice guy," they'd said. "Just do lunch and see what happens."
She could see what happens. Total disaster.

"Kola tonic with lemonade for the lady." She heard his voice to the waiter.
She'd ordered a lime cordial. Nevermind.

"Yes, so as I was saying. I've acquired ten acres of land alongside the
Kayalami racetrack. And all for a song, 'cos the old man says I remind him of his son!" he chuckled.
"And then just this week, my dealer says he can get me prime less 6% for new car."

He was beside himself. She just smiled.