The Little Boy Lost

"Father, father, where are you going?
Oh do not walk so fast!
Speak, father, speak to you little boy,
Or else I shall be lost." - William Blake, The Little Boy Lost

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses...
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality! - Percy Bysshe Shelley

You know, having friends is wonderful because they never solve any of your problems. Friends are like physical realisations of the opposite poles of one's mind, they play out the conflict that's taking place in your head and allow you to be an observer of what's going on in your head. Unlike C.S. Lewis I am fortunate not to have been born with a mind that's split perfectly in two, a mind that's an oxymoron (mine's just a plain moron), a mind that is made of two opposing hemispheres: the one shallow and rational and the other filled with magic and stories. My mind is entirely filled with magic and stories. I am not built to be an engineer or a lawyer, but rather a reader and a writer.

I am interested in dusty libraries and old churches. I would love to live in a museum as opposed to a city because there is life... real life in dusty books and old Greek vases. Being the strange being that I am it is logical (what a filthy word) for me to pursue a career in the Classics.

The more reasonable half of my friends, ironically led by a very unreasonable Reuben points out to me that I am a black boy (which is apparently synonymous with a unique sort of poverty that can only be overcome by becoming a lawyer or a doctor) living in a country that does not take kindly to the Classics. The other half of my friends, who believe that I should pursue a career in the Classics, ironically led by a very reasonable Simone, make this simple and undeniably true point: What else can he do with his life? He'd suck at everything else.

This is all very straightforward once you've had your friends enact it. I am not capable of any other career but one that is made up of mythology and literature in some form or the other and so I must become a scholar, forever haunting the halls of academia. I'll take up refuge in some university as an excuse to use their library and use the money they pay me to take cute librarians on dates. This is my idea of an idyllic life. Done. It's over, let's not talk about it anymore, the irrational and mad side (led by the voice of reason herself) wins.

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch

Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. – Stephen King

Dear Reader,

If you are reading this then I am dead.

This is my chilling account of the strange events that have recently befallen me in my room, the one place I always felt safest... my sanctuary from the harsh world. I feel like Frodo at coming home and seeing that evil had managed to make its way to his very doorstep. Going off into some distant land to fight the forces of evil takes courage, but it is not as terrifying as having the darkness invading your home... not as terrifying as that sickening feeling you get knowing that orcs have been rummaging through your underwear drawer.

Of late the dark forces have been trying to kill me! It all started with the unused couch I salvaged from the storeroom – the falling and then later the spiders. As I type this, ironically sitting on the bloodthirsty couch that is the source of all my misery, I keep glancing at a corner in the ceiling where I am sure the spiders have taken up residence. They are led by a huge, old spider, with venom dripping from his fangs, who I have decided is probably named Aragog. He is a monster bred in the depths of the Amazon jungle that have never been touched by sunlight.

Until that fateful day a few weeks back I never paid much attention to the storeroom in the kitchen, all I knew is that it was dusty and seemed to contain tools that no one in my household had much use for. I am the only male in the house and I have no interest in manual labour, which is why I have spent my whole life pretending to be bookish in front of my parents when all I really do is lock myself in my room reading fairy tales or playing video games. I walked by the storeroom on my way to refill my coffee mug on that fateful day, finding the door slightly ajar and because the sun shone through the one grimy window in the room I could make out the couch in a corner. My room, which I refer to as my Potter Closet, is actually the coatroom of the old house in which my family and some other strange people live and everyone saw it fit to put me in the smallest space available and then to make me pay rent for it. As you can imagine my life is a rather harsh one, but that is neither here nor there, what matters is that I will be killed by the evil couch and its arachnid minions soon. Seduced by the idea of more comfortable seating for the people who feel the need to visit me more often that I would prefer I went into the storeroom to investigate. The couch turned out to be an ugly purplish colour and small enough to fit in my Potter Closet. It was perfect! To hell with my guests, I am the only one who will sit in this couch I thought, they can sit on the floor while I pretend to be Morpheus and offer them red jelly beans or blue jelly beans.

With great effort I dragged the couch to my room and immediately used it as my throne and that is where the trouble began. I would be getting out of bed and I would fall and land in an awkward position that the human body is simply not designed to assume. On one occasion I crashed headfirst into my bookcase and almost broke my neck. What really scared me was the fact that every time I fell (which was quite often) I would almost break my neck and it would always be the couch that prevented me from doing so. It was then that I began to see it for what it was... an agent of the Prim – that chaotic soup that conjures all sorts of monsters to create disorder in this world. Oh, Discordia! I was not surprised when the spiders started appearing all over the room. I would wake up in the morning with the evil beasties crawling all over my face or I would be watching movies, sitting on the bloodthirsty couch, and they would shamelessly crawl over me and I bet you they derived sick pleasure from the way I would run around the room screaming like a little girl for a few minutes trying to get them off me. They are just torturing me for the time being, I just know it, and soon a time will come when they decide to strike... I can feel them staring at me from their hole in the ceiling and I hear the menacing creak on the couch every time I shift my weight on it.

The time is coming that one morning (or evening, the time of day really has nothing to do with it) that my parents will find my dead and cold body sprawled on this couch, I just know it. This is why I am telling you my sad tale, dear reader, so that you may remember me when you walk by a dusty storeroom with the door slightly ajar and stay away.

P.S. My mother has told me to stop whining, buy some Doom and to move the couch a bit further back so that I would stop tripping over it.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for my return from the dead and my fight against the zombie spiders armed only with a can of Doom and a lighter.

After awhile she turned to look at him. 'Oh Bobby,' she said.
'We've made such a mess of things, you and me. What are we going to do?'
'The best we can,' he said, still stroking her hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed the palm where her lifeline and heartline tangled briefly before wandering away from each other again. 'The best we can.' – Stephen King, Low Men in Yellow Coats (in Hearts in Atlantis)


Warning: Listening to William Hurt read this in his rich and textured voice is enough to break your heart.

For the last few weeks my life has been like A Series of Unfortunate Events – minus the weird, but undeniably cool, siblings. I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my whole (and quite short) life – what sucks though is the fact that I get no satisfaction from it because most of my work consists of marking first year students’ assignments and tests and I’ve never met people who are as apathetic as the first year students at UJ. Tolkien must have been made of ridiculously tough mental stuff to mark exams for so many years and still be sane at the end of it all... then again students were much brighter back in his day. Perhaps if I continue on this course I’ll get so bored that my mind will be forced to come up with a story so brilliant that it parallels The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to try and stop itself from withering away.

One of my life goals is not to live a mediocre life, so being surrounded by so many students who just don’t give a damn is rather shocking! I struggle (and fail most of the time) to be the best Charlie® I can be every day but these people don’t even seem all that bothered about trying. The whole business makes me think of Jagang’s Imperial Order in Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth novels in which Jagang and his men try to make it seem that people who try to aspire to be better than their fellow men are being full of themselves and selfish. The sad reality is that we live in world where mediocrity is not enough to get you to the top – bearing in mind that my definition of the top is probably drastically different from yours... mine involves a huge library.

Anyhoo, I’m tired and need to be heading to Slumber Land to rest my weary body. In a few hours it’s my birthday and I’m looking forward to being twenty-two – it’s exciting I think, what being a full blown adult person and all.

Good night furry friends :)

rAge

A Life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?

- Dunno

Have I ever told you guys how much I love October? No? Well, it's the coolest month ever because it's the month I was born and it's also the month that my momsicals and jerk of a dad were born. More importantly than my existence being strangely linked to October, it's the month that the really Awesome gaming expo takes place. Imagine this scenario: The Dome in Northgate filled to the brim with the strangest people in the country, people with reflexes faster than any gunslinger ever bred in Gilead. Now imagine these strange creatures walking around gawking at shiny computer bits, scantily clad booth babes (who aren't too sure what you're on about when you ask them about quad core CPUs) and comic books. Some of them might point at random things with wires and fans and start drooling and others will jump up and down at the sight of squiggles on a plasma screen. Now tell me, why on Earth you would be anywhere else (like at a club hitting on hot girls) when you could be hanging with these weird people and having the awesomest time in the history of ever?

Tomorrow it's on! I'm going to rAge to lick a Playstion 3. Happy days.

4 AM in the Morning

Half my life
is in books' written pages
Lived and learned from fools and
from sages - Aerosmith, Dream On

It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep, I’ve been tossing and turning for the last hour... I might as well wake up and do something useful with my life. I’ve considered getting dressed and walking to the nearby pub for a beer or two but people having been getting mugged in the morning on my street of late – and I’m too lazy to actually get dressed. I wonder if that huge bouncer guy at the pub would let me in wearing only boxers and a wrinkled T-shirt...? Probably not. There’s also the fact that I have to be up in a few hours to mark a pile of portfolios and a beer or two (which really means six) wouldn’t go a long way in setting the mood for that sort of thing.

Don’t worry too much about it though, I’ll just sit here for a bit and kick the ol’ bull with you guys. You hear about the clown who assaulted the chicken crossing the road? Well, neither did I, it must have been quite a scene I imagine. What was cool, though, was chatting to one of the crazier (which should be interpreted as meaning über cool in this here instance) tutors at the English Department. We were talking about some of the crazy things she’s done in her life and why she did them. She tells me that at some point she got tired of reading about things and wanted to experience them firsthand. If you want to know what falling in love is like, allow yourself to be swept off of your feet on that euphoric wave of gushy feelings instead of believing what some author (even if they’re really clever) tells you. People like me tend to read about things and then think we’ve done them and thus have the wrong idea about them, which is not good depending on how you’re looking at it. The moral of the story you ask? Books are really awesome but at some point you’ve got to add to the Great Tapestry by actually getting out there and living (whatever that means).

That's my mini-ramble for the morning :) Later.

Bats on the Brian

"'But I don't want to go among mad people' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'Or you wouldn't have come here.'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

"You're in the real world now and the lunatics have taken over the Asylum."
- The Joker, Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth

Okay, I officially have Bats on the brain; the guy is taking over my life and I'm losing the little that remains of my sanity - assuming I was sane to begin with. I've probably played the Arkham Asylum video game demo hundreds of times and I'm rather sad that I won't be able to afford the full version when it comes out on PC later this month. I'll make a plan though, something like stealing my neighbour's cat, Mr Ginger, and selling him. The game is getting rave reviews on consoles and people are even comparing it to BioShock. I just love the Detective Mode and the silent take downs, there's nothing more satisfying than swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle and swooping down and taking out an enemy and then disappearing before his friends see you. You then sit and watch as the villains in the room get nervous wondering who's next and jumping at their own shadows.

I've also just finished reading the graphic novel, Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, which is surprisingly good - I'd go as far as to say that it's even better than The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. I just love how dark it is and how it messes with your mind. If you're into psychology you'll notice some of Carl Jung's archetypes in it and another cool aspect is how The Joker raises the question in the reader's mind: which is the real loony bin, the asylum or the real world? Amadeus Arkham converted his ancestral home into an asylum for the criminally insane because he thought that he could help insane people and thus achieve a triumph of reason over the irrational and other cool stuff like that.

Speaking of The Joker, he's always an interesting character to read about. In Arkham Asylum one of the psychiatrists notes that he cannot be properly defined as insane, she suspects that he is an example of someone with some kind of super-sanity: "A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century." The novel has a very postmodern edge to it and asks whether identity is stable or not. In one scene of the novel one of the asylum's inmates suggests that they take off Bats' mask so they can see who he really is underneath. The Joker intervenes and says that the mask is Bats' real identity. So, you see there's a lot of fun to be had with this novel.

All-in-all, Arkham Asylum is an awesome graphic novel that caters for people interested in exploring the darker corners of the human mind.

Spring Has Sprung

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When [September] is scarcely here

- Emily Dickinson

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

- Emily Dickinson

Ah, 'tis the Spring, it has finally arrived and I feel so gosh-darn good because of it. Winter totally kills my skinny frame and I'm never all that sad to see the bugger go. Spring makes everyone think of the colour green (which is my favourite colour if you're interested in knowing that sort of thing about me) but it makes me think of yellow. For some reason everything that's yellow catches my eye in Spring: take the lemon tree outside my house for instance, it looks so much more beautiful in Spring.

District 9

I was watching some show on TV a few nights ago and they were all hyped up about this movie when I remembered NAG saying something about it... and the fact that Peter Jackson was the Producer didn't hurt in persuading me to go and see it either.

All I can say is Wowzers! This movie is the "fokken" shiz hey! Seriously, who would have thought that aliens landing in Johannesburg could make such a cool story? Blomkamp and his team chucked everything into this movie: that Cloverfield-esque shaky cam/security surveillance cam thing that usually irritates the crap out of me in other movies, documentary style commentary and speculation, lots of violence and gore (always a good thing in movies), playing with the whole apartheid/xenophobia thing in South Africa, shady Nigerians (rather stereotypical but good fun all the same and an Afrikaans guy who says "fokken" a lot. I spent this first half of the movie laughing at how South African the movie was, which is really cool. The second half I spent ogling the cool special effects an just enjoying how the MNU soldiers and Nigerian gangsters explode when they're hit by the alien weapons.

I was asking Lady Leigh of the Meadows how it feels to live in a city that you see getting destroyed in movies when I saw the Millennium Bridge being taken out by Death Eaters in the new Potter movie and now I have some idea: it's kind of worrying. I'm being a chop but the Nigerian gangsters scared the crap out of me - they're so freakin' ruthless hey. People who live in New York must be brave because that place always gets trashed in movies.

All-in-all District 9 is hands-down the best South African movie in the history of the universe! Go see it, whether you like sci-fi or not you will love it. I pinky promise.

P.S. Check out Christopher's blog while you're here.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor, The End

People want some sort of consistency in their lives; they want to live their lives according to a rhythm. Wait a minute! Don’t people want adventure and the excitement that comes with it? I hear you say. They do, but within the bounds of a certain ‘routine’.

The other day I was listening to a talk by Peter Kreeft (I really should find other people to spend hours listening to) in which he says we must live our lives like poetry. This immediately made me think of great people like Ghandi, Mother Teresa and Mandela. Whenever one reads of their lives it always seems very poetic – the pain they felt is described in such beautiful terms that make it seem like theirs was a higher kind of pain and their joy was a nobler sort of joy. Dr Kreeft’s statement has been bothering me for a few weeks now because I can’t seem to fine tune my life to the point that it is poetic. When I feel sad, though, it’s a boring sort of sadness and when I’m happy it seems to be an everyday kind of happiness... nothing to write poetry about because poetry – in my head at least – is vibrant, toxic, dangerous and all kinds of exciting.

What I want is for my inner being to be consistent with my outer being, I want to feel like there is a storm raging inside of me when I argue with someone and I want to feel like my heart is melting when I see my beloved... you know, that Romantic kind of thing the old poets always seem to be on about. I want adventure within a confined sort of space – a taste of the unexpected wrapped in familiar packaging.

I might be generalising but I suspect that most of the human race is like me and Walter Savage (this name is fitting somehow) Landor, we want to look back and be able to say that we lived our lives according to some ideal that made us feel nice and warm or crazy and heated in a poetic kind of way. Daily life in a city doesn’t seem to cater for people want to feel poetic about their lives though, which is why I plan to be a surfer or a tree hugger (which is not a nice thing to call someone I’m told).

A Life Lived

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.” – Sir Philip Sidney


Past,
Future;
They all merge into this present moment
I’m a dude on the road –
I dare to disturb the universe
Within these pages
There are snippets and snatches
Of a life lived


“There is delight in singing, tho’ none hear
Beside the singer: and there is delight
In praising, tho’ the praiser sit alone”

– Walter Savage Landor, To Robert Browning


Through the Eyes of the Observer

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency- Emily Dickinson

Young, silent observer
In social circles he stands reserved
He is part of all, but not
Jotting down notes with his elegant flowing mind script
Always adding to his intelligence supreme
Like a journalist in a war zone he can do nothing
Nothing but record the terrors
Taking note of human errors
Always adding to his heavily guarded vault of infinite intelligence
Observe is all he can do
It is no fault of his
He seems without feeling
Emotionally void
Grey-eyed ghost
Hands stuffed in pockets of faded blue jeans
He scours rodent-inhabited streets
To add to his already extensive library of thought
His presence paradox, phantom but not
His lips dry like the arid Kalahari from the lack of use
In the shroud of city death the grey-eyed phantom stands
Unseen, listening, jotting down and storing in a box
That might one-day spill all the secrets of life under a cranium saw

“Why do you just stand there?” I dare to ask
No reply
Just a penetrating silver glare

Blood begins to fall from a wounded sky
Drops fall like crimson jewels
He stares at the bleeding sky, emotions from the dawn of time finally stirred
Platinum tears hit the blacktop with unheard plops
He falls to the ground on his knees, arms skinny and limp at his sides
“Father, why?”
He asks in a parched tone

"The Lord said, ‘I was ready to answer my people’s prayers, but they did not pray. I was ready for them to find me, but they did not even try. The nation did not pray to me, even though I was always ready to answer ‘Here I am, I will help you’."

Young Man Going West

Within my heart there dwells a perfect kind of sadness
Within my heart, raging, there is also an organised sort of madness
Stealthily (or so they think) they go about their dire business
I can just barely detect their presence
But I’m quite certain they eventually mean to kill me
Together they make up a beast that is without remorse or relent

Whenever I think of my sadness and madness
I’m struck by the notion that a war’s afoot
I suspect that my soul’s the target of titanic opposing forces
The one side means for me to shed my humanity in exchange for flawless godliness
The other side simply means to consume my soul by preying on my ‘weaker’ will

I stand facing two paths
One of them I have to religiously follow
The choice is simply black and white,
Heaven or hell

But wait!

There seems to be something more…
Something more lies within this fragile heart of mine
Simple gladness

With great consideration I’ll choose the path to follow
I’ll pick up my sadness, madness and new-found gladness
And together we’ll walk down that winding path
Singing our tuneless song into the sunset

Young Man Coming Home

With my madness and sadness in tow
I left home
I travelled far and wide
With these two companions by my side
I swam across seas
Seeking a cure for my disease
And I was told:

"there is a cure in the house
And not outside it, no,"

I found myself coming back home,
Madness, sadness and newly acquired gladness in tow

A THOUGHT ABOUT EVE ON SAINT VALANTINE’S DAY

“True love’s the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy’s hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.”- Sir Walter Scott, True Love

“… a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” – Genesis 2:24

One day I might be walking down the street…
And all of a sudden there you will be,
As if waiting for me
On that day the sun may or may not shine on our account
Dear God knows, the birds may not even sing
Our meeting may take place in the dead of winter or in the blossom of spring
I would guess the month to be October – things always seem to happen at that time of year
Who is to say it won’t be a dark day of terrible loss and violence
A call to persevere: pure, untainted love founded in a pool of grief and sorrow

The world seemingly passing us by, but from the corner of eyes doubting our little ‘fling’, secretly wishing us ill
You and me, kind of like Fisher’s Lock and Key Hypothesis
No words that I may ever mutter or commit to scraps of paper can do your beauty justice
Your open mind inspiring faith, courage and belief

My love for you, child-like; pure and simple
Because I will give you my all – no more and no less – you may prove to be my fall
I don’t care because I love you
We may be ripped apart by tragedy
And the world may say our ‘doom’ was inevitable, “It was too good to be true”
Stuff the pompous lot with turkey stuffing because I don’t care
I simply and utterly love you

“They sin who tell us Love can die.
Love is undestructible.
Its holy flame for ever burneth,
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth” – Robert Southey, The Immortality of Love

To the Masters of Old

Great masters of old,
You'd be amazed by twenty-first century machinery
'though you invented time travel
That modern science has yet to match
I find myself spirited away by words
That are ages old

Your thoughts are entwined
With mine
I dwell in an ancient past
That never was
I walked down to the store
With Hamlet on my mind
And I could swear that for a moment
Achilles was by my side,
His animated shield
Telling an enthralling tale

To my God

I thank Thee for the life Thou hast given me
As topsy turvy as it may be

I thank Thee for the ups and downs,
The heavenly moments and even what sometimes seems to be mediocrity

I thank Thee for the charming
View of life in retrospect
And the hope of tomorrow

I thank Thee for it all,
Lessons learned and wisdom that flew right over my head

Stay by my side and show me the way
With Your patience, kindness and Love
Show me the way that leads to the Dark Tower

The Lamb

“That is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not understand.’” – The Lamb

You are both the Lion and the Lamb
Your love encompasses things seemingly opposite
And thus our magicians are baffled
By Your mysterious ways

I come to You as I am,
A beggar at Your doorstep
Even if I offer You my all
It amounts to naught

I stand trembling at Your doorstep
Because I know that You are a killer of men
Though I am scared of letting go
I beg that You cut me deep
And remove all traces of I in me

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing of wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost though know who made thee?

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is calléd by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & though a lamb,
We are calléd by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee. - William Blake, The Lamb

Curious Me

Life!
So complex,
So intricate
Everything's entwined like a vast chain link fence
One thing cannot exist perfectly without another
It's such a fine balance
Even the seemingly simple things are mind-bending
Destinies supposedly linked to ancient prophecies written on tattered Greek tapestries
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?
These are my journalistic questions
Who do I ask?
Scientists?
Mathematicians?
Or philosophers?
No
They ‘re all just like me
Always searching, digging and trying to unravel the universe's secrets
Unfortunately with answers come only more questions
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?
Curiosity killed the cat
Why didn't the murdering dirt-bag kill the dog curiously sniffing his own butt?
Shall I ask God to reveal to me His grand design?
I wonder what He would say?
"Certainly not! Patience My child is the key."
Probably not
I wonder, I wonder...
If a fish were a cat
And a cat a tin
What would I have been?
A slit-eyed fiend maybe...?
If I was born a minute later...?
Dear Lord! Would I still be me?
Only goodness knows
Then again it may be that wickedness does too
Do you?

The Pursuit of Joy

What wretched, unhappy creatures we allow ourselves to be!
Created for Joy were we
Who now do not heed our Shepherd’s call;
We’re too busy spreading misery

Happiness is like the sea,
He cannot be caught and contained
For He is not a tame lion
Aslan is on the move
And we must follow,
Leaving everything behind
To the ends of the earth and across the great sea
We must follow

To enter that great country
For whose halls every soul yearns
We must forsake this world

Leave behind all your burdens
And forget your cares
Keep your eyes always on that terrible and fierce Lion
Who gave His life for you and me

Take Me Away

My love, whisk me away
To a place where it’s just you and me
You can sing to me of great beauty
And I’ll recite to thee verses of delight



The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there . . . and still on your feet. – Randall Flagg (in Stephen King’s The Stand)

The Sea, the Sea . . . it calls out to me

And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

It has finally dawned on me that I am not very good at this ‘real life’ business that everyone else seems so intent on. The new plan is to go live somewhere near the Sea and to take up surfing as my new life-style. Being homeless in Jozi is probably not something anyone should strive for but being homeless near the Sea is a different kettle of fish: all I’ll need is a surf board, some wax, board shorts, a fishing rod and a bonfire every night.

Okay, let me backtrack and be a little more realistic. As Romantic as being homeless on the beach sounds I’m not Zen enough to survive under those conditions yet. What I’ll really need to be a successful semi-beach bum is to save up enough money to buy a super kewl VW hippie van and enough to open a little second hand bookstore somewhere near the beach – those deeply philosophical surfers always need something to stimulate their minds after all. Then I’ll be set for a glorious life of having my brain totally fried by the bliss that is surfing.

I think that we should all quit our jobs or studies and all head out to the world’s beaches and surf forever. If you’re not very fond of the Sea, i.e. she scares the living daylights out of you, I’d recommend trees, quit your job and go live in a giant oak tree… you know, like the Elves in Tolkien. Just build a flet in the biggest tree you can find and fill it with good books and you’re good to go.

I think this will solve some of the world’s problems (some minor squabbles like Hey! Your tree’s bigger than mine will still exist though I’m sad to say) and we’ll all be happier people.

There’ll be some technicalities to consider but I think we (by which I mainly mean a bunch of smart people somewhere) can work around these difficulties and create a system that works. Never mind that, scrap the technicalities, they’re what’s making us humans so unhappy in the first place – we’ll just wing it and hope for the best.

Meeting the Master

Dreams are a serious business – one rarely knows whether they are real or not, or (more precisely) which of their aspects are real and which are not. Sorting through the tangled webs of our dreams tends to be very sticky and I would rather not do it unless the need is dire, by which I mean something like my Mr Spotty Dog being held hostage by an evil organization of green-eyed cats. Our dreams possess many magical properties, prophecy being the most common and strangest of them I’ve found in my approximately 8030 hours on this planet. I’d be walking down the street when I suddenly have a sense of déjà vu, I’ve seen this before and someone in a bright red hat is about to appear from around that corner I’d think. Such occurrences always fry my noodle until it’s nice and crispy. Enough with all this rambling though, what I really want to tell you is about a very strange dream I had some time ago.

Every single time I read Tolkien I am astounded by the scale, beauty and richness of his imagination, so much so that the ‘real’ world seems rather dull in comparison to his Middle-Earth. He was a cantankerous and endlessly niggling man to know from what I’ve read of him, but I would like to meet him nonetheless. The members of my family are all mad in one way or the other so I’ve some experience with lunatics. Back to this dream of mine: I’ve always had this idea in my head that if could write a story half as good as The Lord of the Rings that I would be the happiest man in the world and then I stumbled across Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and it smacked of Tolkien somehow. The first book in the series opens with the best opening line I’ve ever read. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Maybe it’s just me but those words are like the coming of a great storm, and what a whirlwind of an adventure the journey to the Dark Tower has been. The Dark Tower scared me because it seemed to do for contemporary readers what Tolkien did for his readers, what I hoped I could do one day. In an introduction in the new editions of the Dark Tower books King reveals that he was indeed inspired by Tolkien to write a long tale that would captivate readers in the same way that The Lord of the Rings does, but without the Elves. I think that he’s achieved his goal in terms of writing a story that excites readers, a story that even makes them weep at times. His story is so overwhelming that it seeps into all his other stories. All things serve the Beam in the end I guess – it’s ka.

I think there’s still something missing though… King doesn’t quite hit the spot. I’m the only person that I know of who notices this gap, so perhaps it is my job to fill it. Tolkien and Lewis wrote the type of stories that they did because they felt that there were no authors who wrote the type of stories that they wanted to read. I rarely come across books that do to me what Tolkien does. Perhaps if there more stories like Tolkien’s it would be like living in an Angel haunted world, which (as Peter Kreeft points out) might drive us so mad that we would not eat, sleep or procreate. Back to my dream (in earnest this time): I had a dream that as I was walking down Main Street, Tolkien appeared before me in that unsurprising manner in which things happen in dreams – as if meeting dead authors in person was as common as bread. He looked at me and spoke, more to himself than to me it seemed, quoting Sir Philip Sidney (whose work I’ve never seen him quote anywhere before): “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

I said before that I believe in the prophetic power of dreams and I think that the message of this one is fairly straightforward; in order to write something that might do to readers what Tolkien’s work does I have to start writing and to stop dreaming. Whether I’m good or not is yet to be seen. Wish me luck on my journey to the Dark Tower… or is it to Mount Doom? Who knows? I certainly don’t.

Living or Not Living

In his very strange novel, A Void, which is a lipogram of the letter “E”, Georges Perec writes:
Living, or not living: that is what I ask:
If 'tis a stamp of honour to submit
To slings and arrows waft'd us by ill winds,
Or brandish arms against a flood of afflictions,
Which by our opposition is subdu'd? Dying, drowsing;
Waking not? – William Shakspar

Yesterday morning I was totally peed off! ... Which is better than being peed on I guess. There were no buses again (not that there are buses today mind you), which meant I had to hustle lifts from everyone like a mad person because paying for taxis is burning a serious hole in my pocket – and I can’t afford a pair of those really cool fireproof pants they sell at Cape Union Mart. I spent my money buying a monthly bus ticket, only to have it sit uselessly in my bag because Metrobus is full of crap.

This is one of those times when it’s very irritating to be living in a society where it feels like the letter “E” has been letternabbed by some villainous organisation of hooded figures with girly fingernails and everything is topsy-turvy. I'm an indefatigable optimist though and slings and arrows waft'd at me by ill winds simply bounce of my imaginary Achilles' armour, which just goes to show how dangerous my imagination is.

My answer to Shakspar's question is that I choose to brandish arms against a flood of afflictions and to continue the imaginary revolution. For Frodo! (And my grandmother!)

The Horror

I've been downloading old-time radio horror shows for the past few months and listening to them on my mp3 player on my way to varsity, and recently someone pointed out to me that this is strange. Apparently I'm the only person who listened to tales of terror on the radio as a kid - I have no clue where everyone else grew up. To all the masses out there, who are clearly out of the loop, I must tell you that listening to a radio horror story is a very frightening experience, especially if the actors lending their voices to the drama are good. I don't recommend it to people with heart conditions! I've had many sleepless nights after listening to stories like Dr Grimshaw's Sanitarium. The horror stories that aired in the '50s are the scariest in my opinion - they have a weird vibe about them that just freaks you out as a listener.

Get a dose of some old school horror here.

Reading the Archetype

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth
his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

I actually own an ancient copy of Bacon’s Essays that looks as if it would be perfectly at home in a literary museum; and thus I feel it necessary to point out that I’m feeling particularly lazy at the moment and instead of quoting from my copy of Bacon I’m quoting from the PDF version of Louis-Jorge Borges’s epigraph to his short story, The Immortal. I am quoting Bacon being quoted by Borges – it’s mind boggling if you think about it, which I don’t suggest you do because I don’t want it on my conscience that you lost the last scrap of sanity that you owned reading this blog.

What I’m really trying to say is that I think those mysterious people who told Liz Browning that the epics are dead might have been right, but not in the cynical way in which they supposed. The moment the first truly great and epic story was told was the moment nothing better could be told. Every story that follows is simply another version of the archetype – its storyness is a shadow of the real story in the world of forms. This is all in Plato according to Professor Kirke; “Dear me, what do they teach them in the schools nowadays?” He asks. It’s certainly not Plato I can assure him.

Why do we continue to tell stories then? I think it’s because we are a forgetful bunch that constantly needs to be reminded of our place in the world in the world. We never seem to learn from our mistakes as a species. Look at our history: The Americans fought for independence from the British, who were being very mean to them, and then they started fighting with the native Americans (this probably happened before their independence). They drafted a beautiful declaration of independence that goes on about the rights of all humankind and then they go and enslave African people and act like they’re not human beings. The same thing happened all over the world: in South Africa the Boers fought for independence against the British (hmm... they seem to be the root of all evil in this tale) and then merrily instituted apartheid. I was telling a friend of mine that we’ve all more-or-less come to the conclusion that colonisation was wrong but if we ever discovered a planet in some far away galaxy that is populated by beings with less strength of arms than us we would colonize them in a heartbeat. We would argue that this is somehow different from what we’ve been doing on our planet in the past.

This is why we still write stories, to remind us that we are silly and that we need to stop it and eat all our veggies.

A Lazy Weekend Taking Over Middle-Earth

Hang a gold cord down from heaven, and all you gods and goddesses take hold of it: but you could not pull Zeus, the counsellor most high, down from heaven to the ground, however long and hard you laboured. But whenever I had a mind to pull in earnest, I could haul you up, earth and sea and all – then I could hitch the cord round a peak of Olympus, so that everything was then left hanging in midair. That is how superior I am to gods and men.
– Zeus, The Iliad

The earth is shaking
Because of His wrath
The mountains tremble
At the sound of His voice
He pulls down the sky
To crush His enemies
He descends upon them with fire
He is clothed in greatness
His voice resounds throughout the earth
His vengeance no longer is contained
His light destroys the darkness
If He speaks the earth will crumble
If He moves the universe will fall
He is clothed in greatness
- Becoming the Archetype, The End of the Age

At some point in our lives we all dream of taking over the world and ruling it with an iron fist; but unlike Hitler or Mugabe most of us are actually sane and know not get ahead of ourselves. I spent most of my weekend listening to the lead singer of Becoming the Archetype boom out lyrics of God’s greatness in his thundering voice as I sent my vast armies of Nύmenόrean descent across the plains of Mordor in The Battle for Middle-Earth 2 – crushing all who would dare oppose me. I was not trying to be blasphemous and compare myself to God; no, not by any means. I was just feeling very powerful as I ordered virtual soldiers to do my bidding and the music served as a muse of sorts. I felt like Zeus surely must feel in Greek mythology as he sits on his throne atop Mount Olympus, using his power to meddle in the affairs of humankind.

When you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows you were told that Lord Voldemort died. If you believed this I’m sorry to tell you that you are a gullible fool because Voldemort did not perish in that battle with snot-nosed Potter, I spirited him away to Middle-Earth using my godlike powers. He now commands my armies for me alongside Gandalf and Galadriel. Sauron sits trembling on his black throne as my army marches through Mordor to annihilate him. I have also slain that foul creature who calls himself Gollum before he could get the chance to lose the Ring to Bilbo in a silly game of riddles. I’ve taken the ring and given it to Galadriel as she is the only one powerful enough to wield it against Sauron – she will become corrupted by the Ring in the process but I do not care about such trivialities.

Mwahahaha, mwahahaha... cough, cough.

No Rest for the Wicked

Dear traveller,

Surely you are lost. The interwebs, wonderfully wibbly and wobbly though they may be, are like the world-renowned labyrinth that Dædalus constructed for king Minos and it is easy to click on the wrong link and end up lost in cyberspace. Since you are here now and I can’t help you find your way home, you might as well stay for some cake and listen to me talk about things that will not change your life in any meaningful way.

It is said, by people I don’t know, that there’s no rest for the wicked. I’m quite certain that this means I can spend the next two weeks resting because I can’t be classified as a wicked person; selfish, petty, mean and proud perhaps, but not wicked. I am officially on holiday and as a result I’m ridiculously happy. Very practical people (whose role on this planet I’ve yet to figure out) have tried to rain on my parade by pointing out the stack of work that I have to get done by the end of my holiday. These puddleglums don’t have to worry, though, because I’ve already come up with a plan to get my work done in time; it’s a plan so brilliant that you can put a pointy wizard’s hat on it and call it Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

When I am not doing my work or fending off irritating family members (who cannot bear to see me happy in any shape or form) with my imaginary kung-fu skills I will be reading. My reading list just keeps growing and growing, I spend more time haunting book stores than I spend reading it seems. At the moment I have three books that I’m focused on: The Song of Susannah by Stephen King, Odd Hours by Dean Koontz, my favourite fry cook who sees dead people’s fourth outing, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. I eventually have to get around to reading books I picked up at second hand bookstores some months ago, books like Peter Straub’s Koko (which Lady Leigh assures me is disturbing) and The Book of the Dead, a collection of horror stories that pay tribute to George Romero’s zombie movies. To add to my long reading list I went to this super cool bookstore called Boekehuis, which serves coffee in a beautiful garden when you feel thirsty after browsing their impressive selection of books, and bought a copy of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. I read City of Glass (one of the three stories in the book) last year for literary theory, which totally blew my mind. Lady Leigh was kind enough to lend me her copy of book but I never got around to reading the other two stories so I just had to buy my own copy. Speaking of Mr Auster, I went and bought his friend, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (which I read in English last year). To round up my reading list I bought Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss because the stickler inside of me decided that it’s time improve my punctuation and grammar – which is atrocious at best. The fact that the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS) wrote me a scathing letter concerning my misuse of the apostrophe didn’t dissuade me from buying the book either.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they
have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again”- Arundhati Roi, The God of Small Things.

I went to go and see Watchmen last weekend. I love the graphic novel and I was waiting for the movie to come out for some months now. I was actually expecting it to come out in July so the March release caught me by surprise.

The accuracy with which most of the graphic novel was captured and translated onto the silver screen is remarkable. I browsed through the graphic novel the day before going to see the movie to refresh the story in my mind and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the movie used the panels in the graphic novel as scenes and they barely changed the dialogue – which just goes to show how good Watchmen is as a graphic novel.

After seeing Watchmen (which I'm going to go and see again on Wednesday) I started thinking about the movies I like. I rarely go to the movies to see a movie whose story I don't know. All the movies I watch are based on books I've read or comic books whose plots I know. I like familiar stories, they have to be comfortable enough for me to jump right into them and know what's happening. I'm the sort of person who reads the same books over and over again because I like the way they are written, I've fallen deeply in love with the characters (and plan to name my children after them) and because the stories make me weep. I'm currently reading Terry Goodkind's Confessor and I had to hold back my tears on the bus this morning because I was so impressed by the strength of Richard Rahl's spirit. When I was reading Stephen King's The Waste Lands I came across one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read (which I don't recall now) and I stopped and reread it for fifteen minutes.

All the lovers of stories, whether they are about wizards and dragons or superheroes, go to the movies to see them in a new light without wanting the essence of them to change.

Who watches the watchmen? The fans of books, comics and video games. We are the watchers of movies based on our favourite stories. We go see a movie based on the Watchmen graphic novel to see if they can capture that epic feeling we experienced when we were reading it at 3 in the morning. Once in a while something like the Watchmen movie comes along and makes us happy to be those shadowy figures behind the scenes that keep a protective eye over the watchmen as they keep the streets safe.

The World Is Too Much with Charlie

The world is too much with us; late and soon

- William Wordsworth

I have always suspected that I am a materialistic person but things have finally spun out of control. I want, want, want and I want some more! My latest 'want', I'm proud to say, is actually a desperate need in disguise.

This post is aimed at anyone in this wide world, and even worlds parallel to this one, who feels the need to grant a poor African pseudo-kid the one sensible object of all his desires (drum roll): an Amazon Kindle 2 .



As a certified bookworm I need to have this space-age piece of technology. I'm always lugging books around and this tends to disturb a lot of people on the bus. I'm a skinny dude with the upper arm strength of a Keibler Elf and I'm a bit of a lummox - thus I'm always dropping heavy books on fellow commuters' toes and falling on them. If a very kind person bought me a Kindle 2 this would not happen and many toes would be spared.

Er...: Laughing Men Co.

Image Source

Phew! This has been one of those weeks where a lot of things seem to happen and when you take the time to think about it you realise that you were just going around wasting a lot of energy doing almost nothing. I ran up stairs and down stairs for reasons that make no sense to me and I walked around with lots of useless books in my bag and hands for most of the week feeling very productive and now I can't even remember where those books came from. The first week of varsity is like drinking too much at some party and having a vague memory of how all that vomit got on your shoes the following day. I have scraps of paper lying everywhere and I have no clue where most of them came from. I'll use my super sleuth skills later to solve this case, I'm just too damn lazy right now.

The highlight of this week is the company I'm starting when I acquire a heap of money in the near future. I met an old high school acquaintance yesterday and just to bore the nonsense out of him I decided to tell him about Laughing Men Co., which is going to be the biggest, wealthiest and least profitable company in the world. We're going to convince (at gunpoint of course) the top ten people on the Forbes list to give us all their money. We will then proceed to build an empire that will be the second home of the world's strongest, fastest, tallest and most intelligent men and women. With the skill of these insanely talented people at our disposal we will find devious ways in which to lose money. Laughing Men Co. will be headed by a board of 13 directors (me being at the head of the table) in a room enveloped by Cuban cigar smoke. The directors will all wear expensive Armani suits that cost more than the house I currently live in and no one will know what their faces look like because they'll all be wearing black hoods. From their ivory tower the directors will laugh, giggle like little girls and snicker as the company loses vast sums of money. We (by which I mean my 12-year old sister and I) made some advanced calculations and with the capital at our disposal Laughing Men Co. will be around for almost a century before our money runs out. I'll be dead by then so I won't care that lives have been ruined by 13 crazy, laughing people in a room.

P.S. If you've just wasted two minutes of your life reading this post I'm sad to say that there is 99.999999% chance that you will never get them back... unless the Chuckling Time Machine that Laughing Men Co. plans to build in the future actually works.

“The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;
I’ll not believe it”- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What our age lacks is the passion older civilizations seem to have had. Kierkegaard said of the modern age (he was speaking in a religious context) that you can hardly call its inhabitants sinners; they (i.e. us) are lukewarm beings whose sins are of the vague and wretched sort. The older civilizations really sinned! They murdered, they stole and they lusted in the proper sense of the words. These terms hardly qualify in describing the modern human being. In a time when love just means being nice to other people passion is almost dead. Look at the stories we tell on TV, they’re getting sillier every year. As a kid I watched lots of TV because they had good cartoons on, shows like Darkwing Duck, Bikermice from Mars and Captain Planet. I see that they’re barely showing cartoons on children’s shows anymore, all they go on about is the presenters and what they get up to. Apparently we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet and yet we waste our lives away talking about the cellulite on some celebrity’s thigh. Did you see how lumpy Jennifer Smith’s thighs are? They have pics of it in Warm Magazine. WTF?! Douglas Adams is right, it’s mice that actually run the show and dolphins are second in command.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Like the lovely Mrs Browning I believe that the spirit of old is not dead yet. It is locked away in some cupboard and it’s still fairly easy to get hold of the Golden Key with which to open that forgotten cupboard. That Golden Key is, believe it or not, literature. Stories have always been the favourite art form of human beings all over the planet because they are an ingenious way of preserving a society’s wisdom and even more importantly, they are entertaining.

The epics have not died out my friends; they’re on shelves in your local bookstores and libraries. If you’ve never heard of those places just look around for dusty looking people and they’ll gladly show you the way.

Totally Out of the Loop

Image Source

There’s been a disturbing trend amongst many of my friends of late; they all seem to be surprised that I’m out of the loop when it comes to current affairs or social conventions. Let me just say this: I watch very little TV and the little I do watch I rarely remember because after 15 minutes whatever’s on TV just fades into the background and I start thinking about whether or not dwarvish women should enter into some of Faerie’s beauty contests. I live my whole life in a box – it’s a sad, sad existence I know but it suits me just fine.

To all of my friends who get exasperated because I don’t know the name of some celebrity whom even people in Timbuktu know about and because I have no idea what happens in some movie that’s apparently a classic and everyone in the universe watches it twice a year, please bear with me. When you talk to me always assume that I have no clue what you’re on about, go as far as thinking of me as an alien visiting the planet for the first time. I’m surprised that so many people talk to me in the first place! It’s a miracle I thank God for.

This little post is just to remind you guys that Charlie is a freak who has no idea how the world works. All I know is that there seems to be some sort of activity everywhere and that the Dark Tower still stands. I’m not good at real life and that’s why I just don’t participate in it.

Thank you.

Amazingly enough, Lady Leigh and Sleuth know this and they are the only people who seem to be able to roll with it.

The Change We Need

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." - Morpheus, The Matrix

Yesterday was a monumental day in the history of our planet – the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th president of the US of A and the formatting of my hard drive. President Obama promises to be a breath of fresh air in the world's polluted political landscape and my hard drive just needed some spring cleaning. Whether you like it or not, the US is the nation that we all look up to as the standard of wealth and prosperity. As the guiding light of the world the US is always under the scrutiny of critics and when they become a fallen people the world is catapulted into doom and gloom.

Yesterday Obama promised the American population the change (for the better) that they need and my PC seemed to think that it too needed a certain change, a fresh installation of Windows XP. I was trying to install the Windows 7 Beta and I forgot to back up some of my data, only to have W7 crash halfway through the installation. I did what any person who is unhealthily attached to their PC would do, I cried. It would have been better if I'd been dumped by a girl. Luckily, though, I'm of the same stock as the lovely (and somewhat imaginary) Mrs Lorrie Tock, I'm an indefatigable optimist. I'm always cheerful, come crashing PCs or gun toting clowns – the latter being quite disturbing and potentially fatal.

As the world watched and listened in awe as President Obama delivered his inauguration speech promising Americans (and the world to a lesser extent) the change that we need I was installing Windows XP onto my PC and giving it the change it so desperately needed.

I wish President Obama a wonderful and successful term in office and may his bright vision inspire each and every one of us to become better human beings.

P.S. Remember kids, change is an important and necessary part of life – especially when it comes to things like underwear.

P.P.S. Is it just me or does Obama sound a little like Morpheus?

"I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds, for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives. This is a war and we are soldiers. What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?" - Morpheus, The Matrix

From the Elder Days to the Dark Tower

I had a sense of eucatasptrophe (what Tolkien calls the good catastrophe) this morning as I was reading Wolves of the Calla. It happens when Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy go todash (courtesy of Black Thirteen) and land up (in a manner of speaking) in New York. They go visit the rose that might be a doorway to the Dark Tower or the Tower itself. When they see the rose there is a sound of many voices singing:

“Here is yes. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness that you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.”

Every age has its great stories: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, and many other tales besides. In terms of sheer epic scope J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium stands head and shoulders above any other work of the 20th Century and that mantle has been passed down to Stephen King I think. I’ve read many fantasy books where the blurb compares the story to The Lord of the Rings but they all just don’t live up to that high standard. SK does not try to create an epic story of a world gone but rather he writes about a world that’s moving on, a world that’s dying . . . our world. Tolkien starts his story when the world is yet new and already evil has entered into it and stops in a time where the world has forgotten the beauty of old and the power of Elves and Men has declined. SK’s epic story starts with a lone gunslinger, the last of his kind, following the Dark Man across the desert. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Roland is the last true hero of a world on the edge of oblivion. At the centre of SK’s epic story is the Dark Tower which holds all worlds together and what I love about SK’s corpus is that all of his work is somehow connected to the Dark Tower, all his books are interconnected. In SK’s universe everything means, when things are said it’s best to pay attention because ka is at work.

What I love about good stories is the storyness of them; their text-ure, that warm feeling they give you as a reader. Great stories are an echo of life, not the humdrum everyday sort of thing but the sort of life where anything might happen at any time. In a way stories are more real than ‘real’ life. In books people get killed and it causes the reader real grief, in real life people die every day and we don’t give a damn. We turn on the news and we think, Conflict in the Middle-East, I’m so bored by this. Stories give us our humanity back so that we may care about people dying in senseless conflicts and maybe even do something about it. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy says:

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

The stories Tolkien and SK write are like that, you never grow tired of them because they don’t try to trick you into liking them – they simply reveal certain truths about the human condition. The theme of these stories, like Christianity . . . like life, is eucatastrophe – the good turn. No matter how dark things become they remind us that there is light and beauty forever beyond the reach of the dark cloud as Sam realised when he spotted the lone star from the slag heaps of Mordor.

If you want great stories that deal with a magical world of old, read Tolkien. If you’re looking for something more modern but just as epic, read SK.

There's Life After the Party

My sneaky plan for this festive season was to fly under the radar and not be noticed but, alas, that didn't work. I had my hiding corner all kitted out with everything comfy or edible lying around the house so I can read the days away. My corner was discovered and I was immediately dragged, kicking, biting and screaming, to the nearest pub where I now have my own honorary table and beer mug. After a week of drinking beer and eating pub food I'm super tired. I left the pub this morning and waved goodbye to my pub friends and the waitress I had a minor crush on. I got home and went straight to bed and prayed, thanking God that I'm still here on this blue ball called Earth :)

I had a good time at the pub but I have to go back to being a bibliophile.

A prosperous new year to everyone on Earth, Mars, Oogle Google or wherever you are :) God bless.