Monday, October 2nd, 2006
The popular culture website PopMatters.com has published a piece I wrote on the Green Man Festival and the Silver Jews, along with two new photos. Have a look:
The piece was edited rather against the grain of my sensibilities, and as soon as it’s a week old or so I’ll publish it here in the original. Meanwhile, I can bring you a part that didn’t make the cut - my overall verdict on the Green Man - along with another new festival picture. Read this once you’ve finished with PopMatters (it was supposed to have ended the piece):
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Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Blomefontein’s Afrikaans daily, Die Volksblad, published a review of my novel on Sept. 11th (while I was writing about satyagraha), under the title “Boek lewer belangrike bydrae tot diversiteit”. This translates roughly as “Book furnishes important contribution to diversity” - here’s the link:
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Saturday, October 7th, 2006
Received in the post this week from one Paula Collins, whose return address is a PO Box in Mount Morris, Illinois (a town west of Chicago on Highway 64 - see map), the following form letter:
Poets and Writers Subscription Letter
Now, there is much that might be said about this letter, starting with its promising salutation (”Dear Writer” - quite heartening to be accepted into the guild upfront), then moving on to its opening gambit, which makes you suspect Ms. Collins spent long years as a guidance counsellor at Mount Morris High before embarking on her current career.
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Monday, October 9th, 2006
by Damon Galgut
notes by Ben Oswest
In May 2002, while housesitting for friends, I came across an unpublished manuscript by Damon Galgut called “Free Fall or Flight”, which I duly read, with no small sense - quite thrilling! - of doing something illicit. The piece has since appeared, in shortened form, in The Paris Review (issue 174, summer 2005), under the title “The Follower”. In it, a character called “Damon”, who is both narrator and object of narration, embarks on two long walks with a German man he hardly knows, with consequences that shake each to their foundations. The story’s final form isn’t so different from the draft as to obviate my original impressions - it is an innovative and highly accomplished work - a few of which I reproduce here:
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Monday, October 9th, 2006
Following a New York Times poll that named Toni Morrison’s Beloved
the greatest American novel of the last 25 years, the UK’s Observer - cavilling about US literary isolationism - has played copycat. The paper’s survey of Commonwealth literature of the past quarter-century, released over the weekend, places JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
in pole position.
I personally disagree with both choices - though each book would likely make respective top tens - but, for some reason, my opinion wasn’t solicited.
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Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
Delivered to the inbox a few days ago - should be great fun:
_______________________________________________
Umuzi and Clarke’s Bookshop
invite you to celebrate the publication of
Birds in Words
The Twitchers’ Guide to South African Poetry
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Saturday, October 14th, 2006
As promised, here is my full, four-act piece on the Green Man Festival, which was originally published in edited form by PopMatters.com.
The 2006 Green Man Festival Reviewed
Wintering in Wales: A Love Story
The weather followed us into the Northern Hemisphere. As we careened around the back roads of Abergavenny and Merthyr Tydfil, the joy of the previous night still running at high temperatures in our brains and the dewy, drossy hills of the Brecon Beacons national park crowding the road, I had to switch, for the umpteenth time on this foray into the heart of the British summer, our little Ford’s wipers from “intervalâ€? to “high,â€? and squint to catch the oncoming signs and markers. Granted, these Welsh showers were nothing like the downpours we had left behind in Cape Town – which had brought destructive flooding to the coast and snowdrifts deep enough to shut the mountain passes – but still, we were wearing scarves, there were two pairs of mud-caked Wellies in the boot, it was August, and the heat was on.
My companion fiddled with the radio. Nothing could compare with the sweet music that had kept us sleepless until the diminutive o’clocks of that Sunday morning, however, so Radio 1 and BBC Cymru were silenced. We rode on, through towns with names like “Bwlchâ€?, and allowed ourselves to feel like conquering heroes.
Bwlch
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Sunday, October 15th, 2006
by Bill Buford
reviewed by Ben Oswest
This review appeared in edited form in the 8 Oct 06 Sunday Independent. Here’s the link (subscribers only):
And here’s the full review:
Of the many accusations that it’s possible to level against The New Yorker magazine, where Bill Buford was the fiction editor until quite recently – that it is nakedly snobbish; that it keeps a bloodshot, rather cynical weather eye on the Arab world in its Middle East reporting; or that it smugly publishes, with maddening regularity, some of the best English writing on the planet – a denunciation that it’s “machoâ€? isn’t one of them. The New Yorker is for nakedly snobbish cynics who enjoy the best English writing on the planet. Macho it’s not. And that, it seems, turned out to be a problem for Bill Buford.
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Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Something I’m sorry I’ll miss:
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Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
a found haiku by Gus Ferguson
The copyright sign
is copyrighted under
the Copyright Act.
– extract from the Government Gazette, no. 69-2010
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Thursday, October 19th, 2006
I’ll be giving a reading at Boabab Books in Long Street, Cape Town, on Wed. Nov 1st. Come along - here are the details:
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Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Holtmann asked, and I’ve sweated bullets to deliver up the goods. In the end, two lists weren’t possible, so the U.S. and the Commonwealth have been united. It’s been horrible, agonizing: one discovers that to list one’s favorite novels of the past quarter century is to condemn oneself twice, as both conventional and poorly-read.
Without further ado, then…
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Monday, October 23rd, 2006
A pretty book, launched at a pretty venue. Birds Cafe on Bree St. is one of Cape Town’s most popular lunch spots, the apogee of rustic chic in the city. The usual milk crate seats and door-and-sawhorses tables were cleared away for poets on Saturday morning, but the birdsong - supplied by a turntable spinning behind a curtain - twittered right along throughout.
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Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Islam’s month of Ramadaan came to a close yesterday in Cape Town - there was some debate about whether it should have been the day before, but the new moon wasn’t sighted, so the fasting continued - and, as always on the eve of Eid for the past two decades, a school parking lot in the Cape Flats suburb of Rylands came curiously to life.
Silent Night
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Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
This just in: Adam Habib (pictured below), a top researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), was denied entry into the United States last week after arriving in New York as part of an official delegation. According to reports, upon disembarking from his airplane he was questioned by customs officials - then deported under armed escort.
Adam Habib at the 2006 Cape Town Book Fair
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Sunday, October 29th, 2006
by Gus Ferguson
Just like New Zealand -
it’s so nice to see the odd
black face now and then
— Editor’s note: This haiku was composed apropos the Neighbour Goods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, run by the what if the world artists’ collective. The market re-creates Shangri-La as a movie set every Saturday. Photo:
Market Reflections
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