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.