{archive: September, 2006}
At the recent Green Man Festival in Wales, Silver Jews sound man Steve West stepped into the breach when the band’s regular drummer was felled by a stomach ailment. Happily, Mr. West used to tickle the skins for Pavement.
The New Suffolk Hymnbook
by Ben Oswest
Your perceptions of meaning and self will be challenged by this read
A lot of books wrestle with the idea of meaning, the eternal quest to understand. Ben Oswest’s book may well be one of them. But I’m not entirely sure.
This is the challenge and the delight of the book, the paradox that it plays with inside its covers (I think), delivered amidst a most blindingly dazzling display of wordsmithery. Who cares what he is saying, when he says it so brilliantly?
Snail Press’ latest title, the Afrikaans poetry collection edited by Charl-Pierre Naudé, My Ousie is ‘n Blom, was launched at the Irma Stern Museum last night. A slightly bemused Valiant Swart - a rock artist who rarely, one suspects, plays sedate poetry gigs - and a deadly serious David Ferguson provided musical entertainment (on the acoustic guitar and harmonica/electro-modulator, respectively).
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It bears remembering, on this day devoted to remembrance, that exactly 100 years ago, on September 11th, 1906, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi introduced satyagraha to the world, at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, where he had gathered with 3,000 others to fight injustice aganist Indians in the then four South African colonies - the Transvaal, Natal, the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State.
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Of interest to many in Africa will be the events surrounding the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, to take place at the Sorbonne in Paris later this month.
I missed Owen Sheers’ reading at the Green Man Festival - he was in the “literature tent” on the festival’s Saturday afternoon, while I was out driving through towns with names like Bwlch - but was afforded the opportunity to catch up yesterday evening, when he appeared somewhat miraculously at the Cape Town V&A Waterfront’s Wordsworth Books, to talk about his book, The Dust Diaries.
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South Africa is an arms-buying nation, a fact that rarely intrudes into the everyday quest for consumer goods here. But if you happened to be leaving the second-largest mall in the southern hemisphere with your daily shop at about 3h30 pm yesterday, you’d have been shaken by a few representative doomsday roars. See if you can spot why:
Quite against the grain of normal life Down Under, officialdom in Australia lifted a curtain on scenes from the country’s colonial past today, with appropriately chaotic results.
A Federal Court judge there ruled that an Aboriginal group known as the Noongars was entitled to ownership of some 200,000 square kilometers of Western Australia (that’s the big province in the left half, making up about a third of the entire continent), including all the land around the capital city of Perth, as well as Perth itself.
Perth, ironically, is known to South Africans as a top emigrants’ destination, untroubled as it is (like the rest of Australia) with the pesky issues around transformation and development - including land reform in favor of indigenous people - that seem to weigh in with such regularity here.
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On the eve of South Africa’s Heritage Day, the American folk opera Porgy & Bess was the top billing at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre, and complimentary tickets had been waved under my nose - so off we went.
The opera was a moderate success: a cast of rather unwieldy proportions (thirty players onstage during the big scenes? forty?) drove home the central point that life is fickle with gusto, and carried off a few of the numbers in gripping style. Although Sportin’ Life (Marcus Desando) didn’t quite have the pipes for “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, he certainly had the wickedness of heart, and was great fun to watch; Clara (Philisa Sibeko) was pure pathos during her reprise of “Summertime”, sung against the winds of the hurricane that had claimed her husband; and Porgy (Leonard Rowe, a last-minute replacement for Otto Maidi) was a Siberian husky of a cripple, belting out his numbers and panting so happily afterwards that you almost looked for a tail.
One of the more interesting aspects of opera in Cape Town, of course, is that it is largely performed by members of the city’s Xhosa-speaking community, which is reknowned for its vocal prowess.
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Book launch gadflies were offered a tough choice between two luminaries for their evening fluttering tonight: at the Centre for the Book, reknowned Afrikaans poet Petra Müller, who read at the release of her first collection of verse in English, Night Crossing (Tafelberg); and at the V&A Waterfront, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, subject of John Allen’s new biography, the clunkily-titled A Rabble Rouser for Peace (Random House). (Allen was also, incidentally, in attendance.)
If your gadfly timing was good, however, you could have flitted from one event to the other for the best parts of each.
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