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Greedy for Air

I've been enjoying my round of fiction reads this month.

Just last week, I got through "The White Tiger". Much can be said about a book that openly reveals that greed and survival are really not the same thing. The human mind forever fascinates me. The limits we place upon ourselves, as well as the new frontiers that are challenged in those finite boxes of sanity and insanity are largely unexplored. There are, I believe, yet to be seen examples of how much the potential of the human mind will surprise and enthrall, and yes, even horrify the 'clanging masses' rest of us.

Taking from the White Tiger, although situated in India, the story has echoes of relevance for South Africa; not just from an 'Indian' point of view, but also if we were to take both a human and then even an inhumane outlook. Okay, let's not pretend that we're one swathing mass of loving humanity; there are amongst us those who will sell their mother's left hand given the right blend of conditions.

Writer's like Adiga are adept at bringing that 'potential' of the inhumane human to the fore; of highlighting the irreverent contradictions of what it is to be a human being. And while I would like to imagine, still, that it takes much of a stretch of the imagination, I know at some rational level, that I would be kidding myself: I had barely put the pages of The White Tiger to rest, when the ET debacle exploded right in our midst. Not even for 7lakh rupees. Just. Dead.
Was it because of years of pent up Hatred?
Was it an act of Love?

I don't really want to know. A human life was slaughtered at the hands of people maimed by his own acts of terrorizing them over years. Do we really reap what we sow? This might be an apt example. Still, a human life is so easily rendered to a bag of bones and flesh and blood that oozes back into the womb of the earth. We're so easily turned back into the clay from which we came.
All material, mortal. There it is again. Mortality looks back from the mirror everyday.

Which brings me to the new book that I am reading, and reviewing, this time, for an Afrikaans paper: 'Say You're One of Them,' by Uwem Akpan. I am just learning, that childhood is a commodity in Africa. Akpan brings this idea to life in his book.

And. midway through the book, I am blown away. Now to scrape and claw for some moments of objectivity. Watch this space.

S

fail to see

you say that you cannot find me

and here i am
where i've always been

i am the poet

i am the ink

i am the bark of the tree

and that blade of grass

i am the wispy cloud
the gravel on the road
the hay stack

and the humming bird

i am the poem
and the pebble

and inevitably,
i am the rock.

i am also the
person looking
out the window
every now
and then

just
in case
you come home
again.

Literary Award Winners 2009

A16: Food + Wine by Nate Appleman, Shelley Lindgren and Kate Leahy
Winner of the IACP Cookbook Awards

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Winner of the Man Booker Award

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Winner of the Newbery Medal and Hugo Award for Best Novel

American Lion by Jon Meacham
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

Blue Heaven by C. J. Box
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel


The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature


Tribute by Nora Roberts
Winner of the RITA Award for Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements

i aint no poker face

An inspired thread runs between the blogs, sometimes... it's enough to be celebrated.
I said at Azra's place just now, that we each have our prided space in enough dysfunction to keep us functioning... at an almost ordered, but often chaotic optimum.

In my case, it shows out in my writing's. Optimum is a day when the words flow unhaltingly, rivers into oceans and reaching their zenith just as I am about to crash for the evening to indulge in a read or a movie or a late night phone call to catch up with a friend... or something different. Seeking inspiration. Craving it. Replenishing it. Call me predator. My mind thirsts that way, insatiable for the most part.

It shows. When those days of being far below anything remotely optimum threaten my imaginary hold on sanity. It screams on those days. Raging, burning, and surging through every cell in my body. It shows in my writing; and more in my lack of being able to create at all. My facial expressiveness does little to save me the billboard status. I aint no poker face. That's for sure. Writing this book has proven that in oh so many ways. Zarreen's joys and fears have somewhat mirrored my own. In some cases she overcomes imagined hurdles that I have yet to surpass. In other's our lives are so far apart that it takes a little more than the stretch of my worn out muse. We need a vacation :) But not until the job is done.

I love some parts of this writing. Love, love, love it. I cringe at some of it. I cannot bear to read it! But nothing that the slicing and dicing phase can't fix. Or the delete function on my pc. But there's also some bits that surprise me. Lurking in the psyche somewhere, are these molecules and seeds of information that grow to tree's of like(ly) and unlike(ly). And they are made manifest in these creative efforts.

I want to paint again.

Now is a very good time to get started, methinks...

S

lets begin at the end...

Zarreen is experiencing a shift in consciousness. I can see it happening for her. But there’s two ways this can go. And I have written two ways in which the book can end. Both choices are part of her reflections; or rather they flow from it. Both will turn out okay. They won’t be dead end. Just that they will be. And that they will signal a kind of finality with future prospects.

And still, I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head, that there’s another way of doing this. A way that I must discover for myself. A midway almost, but not.

Zarreen must have these choices and so must the reader. I want to leave these choices to both parties, and not be the one to make it for them. Zarreen must be willing to make that decision; it’s what regaining her sense of self and her essential autonomy is all about. And for the reader who has journeyed with her, I want to honour the same respect for that kind of choice. That level of engagement. And not to take it as my own, my right as the artist of these scenes; I am just the one documenting and giving form to these reflections, these choices, these bits of life that no doubt, every one of us do and will encounter along the path that we tread.

So there’s one thing that I am sure of… It’s not only my choice to make.

belief, trust and process

I am in need of one of those magic potions that will keep me astride the latest developments, and all pepped up with the vitamins of good and glorious. Okay, what I mean to say is that what with all the hype of my new writing project, I am in constant need to replenish the energies of enthusiasm and to find myself the inspiration I need to dive into it.

*Deep Breath*

The new project is about to begin. I got a call to set the ball rolling late last week. And so, I am about to take that nose-dive into the refreshing waters of an exciting research project that has already got me meeting some fascinating types. My world is about to merge with an underworld of veterans and newbies; spies of old, turned fruitsellers and ex-pats nostalgic for the dust of days gone by.

Of course, colliding with that novel that I have been pretending to write, means that the overlaps will prove to be an interesting challenge for me. And there's no rush to get anywhere, anytime as per diary and stop-watch. No guilt about words that won't happen. No anxiety about the project being compromised. I am just being one with the words and being pulled along by the current from which they flow.

I believe in process; I trust the ability for things set in motion to make their way along a vine of growth and contention and more growth.

So they will happen together; my rainbow of things, side by side. And together, they will merge on this canvas of newness.

PS: This post represents the inauguration of the new baby. I will do a separate post on it in a few days when I can get back to the blogs. Cheerio till then. S.

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.)

White Oleander

I am reading the novel at the moment; and am totally engrossed by the author's wield of metaphors, depth of characters and fine play of believable/unbelievable scenario's. Will review it soon. In the meantime... Here's a trailer of the major motion picture version...

My Tug of War

"The faster I write the better my output.

If I'm going slowly I'm in trouble.

It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."


-Raymond Chandler

a bite out of chapter six/The Rain

THIS POST HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR PUBLICATION.

I have been playing with short pieces of fiction in trying to get the creative juices flowing;
this piece was more or less meant to be Chapter 6 of a new book that I am working on, but it has been slightly
adapted for a short story.

http://www.allaboutlove.net/index.php/love-stories/entry/the_rain/

uSe or Abuse?

I wonder. I wonder at what point people might realise that they’re in an abusive relationship. I wonder at what point they can know that it is abuse. I also wonder how much people are willing to put up with. And why?

Life is Tangible Fiction

Sometimes, life's greatest fictions occur in front of our eyes. Other times, they're stories told to us over camp fires, revealing the hopes and fears of their orators. Some are carved into the pages of ornate classics; others are splashed across the headlines of the media or spray-painted onto the digitized walls of the big screen.
Whether they're oral or in some or other form of the visual or sensual, words and images evoke emotion and memory. They link us to a time when we also felt those things implied by them: fear, sadness, helplessness, elation, ecstasy, hate. And so runs this multi-coloured thread of humanity and insanity. Life is a tangible fiction, really. We make it up as we go along, all the while relying on the raw material box of odds and ends we're given at the beginning, adding the stuff that we pick up along the way, and stealing and borrowing bits and bobs too. Its what makes us plain human. We rely on instinct to survive. We beg, borrow and steal. We use intellect to plan, plot and maraud. Then we dig deep down into that spiritual core to look for redemption, contentment, and a ticket to the paradise of enlightenment and a hoped for full realisation of all that we are.

I listen to stories every day. Ask someone what their name means, and a story unfolds. Its happy. Its sad. Its somewhat bittersweet. Or its just nothing. I met a beautiful French woman. She was well-dressed, poised and confident. She spoke much of her travels around the world, and her choice to settle in South Africa. She had an old world charm about her that reminded me of my grandmother. Only, her name unsettled her. Her name was Ettie. She said it made her feel ugly and insignificant. Not beautiful and meant for fame like Alexandria, for example.

Then, there's stories that are overtly exaggerated in their intent. Stories that carry with them an energy that makes you feel like you're listening to the diatribe of someone whose life lacks lustre. An addict of victim hood. A virtuous complaints agent. Someone wanting to irately dump their hot potato on your lap. That energy overrides your own, blocks your flow of inspiration and makes you want to say: 'Stop!'

Until you retreat to the cave in your mind. Silence. Then the realisation dawns. The simple human drama's that manifest in every persons mind and life, are resemblant of some of your own. We mirror each other on this journey. Either by way of learning a lesson we may not have been able to in the past, or in preparation for a forthcoming event. Or maybe its just part of our collection of data to do as we please with. Or not.

But then, there's some stories that, no matter how much you'd rather not hear them, they keep coming back to you. Grating, like sandpaper to your skin, they retell themselves...They emerge in your dreams and add salt to your food. And just when you think you've read the end credits, they start all over in someone else's words...

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.

odd bits of dialogue

“People don’t always follow their hearts” he said.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I guess I did what most do” he said, rather nonchalant.
“I survived. I did what was expected of me. And everyone was happy”
“Everyone except for you?” she said.

drip dry is best

she put her heart through one of those
state-of-the-art shredders yesterday..

and it came out in perfectly measured strips;
all the same size..

but dripping, somewhat.

good thing today's
a sunny day;
so the strips and bits
can be hung out to dry
on the washing line.

the label said
drip dry is best.