pen to paper

Experiencing the awfulness of writing block and am on a hideously over-extended deadline. As usual it's because this article means something to me and could be good, even great. So I tried a writing exercise to help loosen that damnable stuttering and hesitant mental tongue. Came out better than I expected- I could almost feel the father's tears. Heck I nearly cried myself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Google directed me to the following exercise: The T.S. Eliot/John Gardner Killer Exercise.

Here is how it was written up on this site.

"This exercise is quite possibly the most difficult, demanding and important exercise a writer can ever do. The poet and critic, T. S. Eliot, coined the phrase "objective correlative" to designate what he believed was the most important element in writing: Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed WITHOUT ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

The late John Gardner, recognised in his lifetime as the leading creative writing teacher in the United States, developed the following exercise for students:

A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man's point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description."

Here is my fifteen minute attempt:

Mohamed slumped down on the hard pole that served as a bench at the Sea Point bus stop. Never a soft place to rest, never a break in this God-forsaken country. There was a woman with a crying baby next to him and the sound of it grated against his nerves till he felt raw and numb at the same time. In Somalia this wouldn't have happened. This woman in her brazen skirt. The child, crying.

"Will Smith is Switch!" a scratched poster next to him declared. Switch. From Zero to hero. From nothing to everything and back again. Heroes and wars and rescued heroines. Happily ever after and the bloody collateral that gets left in their bloody wake. He couldn't see the poster any more and he realised it was because of the tears and suddenly the lump in his throat was real, too fucking real. And he never swore, he was a mild man, a mild man, he tried to say to the woman next to him who had turned away and he was glad because the child, the child's voice was hoarse now and it was crying as if it's heart would break. As if everything it knew was a filthy lie and the only life that was worth living was not this one. Anything but this one.

The overalled men hang nonchalantly from the back of the flashing truck, expert eyes effortlessly combing the receding road as they speak and laugh.

A shape suddenly detaches himself from the truck's fender, like a gargoyle taking on life. He darts over to a filled black bag, invisible to anyone else until he holds it in his hands. He hoists it over his shoulder and bounds back on to the barely paused truck, using the momentum of his leap to toss the bag into its dark depths.

Hazards flashing the truck continues on its way, its cowboys alert in service in the cold night, while the town eats and sleeps and rests behind high walls assured of clean streets on the morrow. A silent dealing in trash; a heroic service to man.

Tammy-Ann was buzzing. She had A Story to tell about the Latest Development with Her And Rob. "Flip, Jess, I'm SOOOO confused!" she twanged to her friend over a diet coke at the Wimpy in Canal Walk. She tapped her bronze fauz-ballet pump against the steel legs of their table, impatient to get into the meat of her tale.

Jess straightened up, serious in her role as 16-year-old relationship advisor. "What's going on?"

"Like, I'm not sure. I mean, okay- so I didn't want to like, ADD him as a facebook friend, you know?"

"Mmm-hmm," nodded Jess, noisily draining the last of her Schweppes Granadilla.

"Coz that would just look… desperate?" she said, to further nods in the affirmative from Jess.

"So he didn't add me either, which could be coz he's busy coz I checked his wall and he hasn't, like, done anything to anyone else either for the past few days. And his last status update was on, like Monday afternoon.

Jess frowned. "There's been no wall activity since then? You sure he's alive?"

"No no, this was like last week Tuesday, lots has happened since then, let me finish."

Chastised, Jess moved on to her chips to prevent herself from further interruptions.

"So anyway I couldn't poke him obviously,"

Jess shook her head furiously unable to agree strongly enough through her mouthful of chips.

"So then, I had this brilliant idea and decided to group message a bunch of people, like casually about something arb, and just happen to include him in on it."

"Oh! Was that that message about lifts to the Mary J Blige concert?"

"Yes! SO it TOTALLY worked. He added me as a friend the next day."

"Hectic!"

"I know, I'm a genius what can I say," Tammy-Ann tossed her blonde hair, smiling in a fake model pose. Her expression quickly darkened as she moved on to the next part of The Story.

"So it was going well, I left like a few comments, and he replied to most of them,"

"Yeah?! He definitely likes you."

"You think so? Yeah, I mean, there were only like 2 days between my reply and his on some of them..."

"Cool! So what's the problem?"

"Well there's this other chick and she keeps leaving these stupid graffiti wall posts, with like, flowers and crap, like: 'Ooh, I'm so arty'. Whatever," she complained, her charm bracelet jingling as she drummed her fingers on the plastic table.

In the late afternoon sun, through a haze of seaside spray and tall crisscross shadows, a little girl plays an impromptu game of hopskotch on the concrete stretch of the Seapoint promenade. Except the lines of the game exist only in her head. She jumps from sqaure to imaginery square, precariously balancing the wait of her seven-year old self on one foot, as a chubby first clenches the round pebble that is the only real thing about this game.

I navigate myself gingerly around her, unsure of where her world ends and mine begins. The last thing I want to do is infringe on territory that is the sole preserve of her mind. 

The little girl flickers to a shadow behind me as I forge ahead with the million and one chores of my newly adult life. Jogging, shopping, cooking, cleaning. The sole preserve of the monotonous.

I am barely looking up when it happens. Staring at the faded patterns on the promenade as I jog, I watch them disappear under my feet to form a soothing, constant pattern that takes life in the repetitive motion. So when he touched me you'll understand why I recoiled in shock; confused and defensive.

At the behest of fellow writer Luke Reed, I have taken it upon myself to put something (anything!) on this poor excuse for a blog site. Indeed my Mozilla Firefox huffed and wheezed as it navigated away from it's customary position on Facebook.

One can't blame it. The poor creature has grown fat and lazy on the quick fix of multimedia affirmation and over-the-counter bytes of hellos and goodbyes. Blogs were mired in the bygone print tradition of analysis and context and, lets face it, social networking with its multiple modes of communication is just so much easier than slogging away at a blog entry and maybe getting one comment.

Okay, while the sarcasm is real there, it's also an indictment on my sorry self for losing the writing plot and being seduced by the endless opportunities for self-aggrandisation that a simple profile picture change affords one, on the book of faces and the space of my.

According to Luke, it'll be nice to know what I"m doing and where I'm going. It's true, many exciting things have happened in that vast arena of 'my life' of late that are worthy of telling. But I find myself sucked into the journalism trap of: "good news is no news".

Thus you may notice how any accident, break-in or supposed attempts on my life by homicidal flatmates precipitates a flurry of blog activity, whilst being awarded a media fellowship, being sent on an amazing Narrative Journalism course, interviewing great people and having weekend after amazing weekend leaves me quiet as a Health Department spokesperson. Ha.

So I'm not quite up to updating. I'm enjoying this self-created writing confessional booth too much. Which if you think about it, is what blogs really are a lot of the time... the cathartic joys of confession is something the Catholic have kept to themselves for too long. Try it. Shout it out to the world. Your dirty laundry and maybe someone elses, though that might get you into jail as poor Juan Uys found out. (One of my most popular stories that, proving that sex, and not, as one may hope, amazing development projects, sells papers, or in my case, advertising space on 'news' sites).

Ah, I hear you what you're thinking. It's happened, the industry has claimed her and we've lost Verashni to the pervasive cynicism that IS the media. Let me assure you to the contrary. I've always been this cynical.

Okay that WAS a joke. Relax. I still love God and want to be part of his plan to change the world.

And to end off: the eye-candy that no Verashni web-presence is complete without.

Rocking it up at the Rocking the Daisies festival this past weekend, with newly-befriended Alan Rosewall. One of aforementioned epic weekends :) Amazing photo courtesty of amazing friend: Michael Salzwedel.

I have come to a very sad realisation. Pitiful really. There is not a single piece of writing I've done this year that I can say I'm proud of. This came to me when I was looking through my pieces from last year. While not being amazing there was the element of trying.

One can't try new things in news journalism. One must just communicate the facts in as simple a way as possible. Of course, this too is a skill, but in many ways it is far removed from the 'art' of writing.

Nonetheless I do cd reviews on the side to keep sane... and to score free cds. I guess those are the exceptions: I"m quite happy to share those with my friends. I'm particularly proud of my summation of the sick-inducing love compilation: "We belong together." You can read it here.

Otherwise... don't google my name. Instead of the fruits of my student achievements as  was formerly displayed, now it's dominated by dozens of pages of horrid news stories... sigh.

There’s something energising about city streets at night. Not in a trendy neighbourhood like Long Street. I abhor trendiness and Cape Town reeks of it. Sea Point isn’t trendy and that is precisely why I love it. It’s real. Camps Bay and Clifton has the pristine beaches but that same coast stretches South and a few kilometres later it is the rocky, pungent beaches of Sea Point where seagulls peck between littered nets lying on the beach. The smell of the sea along Sea Points famous promenade is something else. It hurts on an empty stomach.

But I love the sweeping promenade that stretches from just after the red and white striped lighthouse at Mouille Point, where the poet Ingrid Jonker walked into the sea and never walked out, through a little bit of Green Point, past the blink-and-miss neighbour hood of Three Anchor Bay and on till the famous Sea Point public swimming pools: a serene body of water, overlooking the ocean with ropes and lengths clearly marked out in the art deco sweep of architecture.

At around 5pm the promenade calls us out of our apartment blocks, and the segregation of our atomised lives. All sorts of people converge on the promenade, taking in the air, walking with their dogs, their boyfriends, their children and watching the softening sun melt into the darkening sea.

The promenade combination of earnest joggers and older couples, children and dogs bounding everywhere may not be a very accurate representation of Sea Point residents though. That amorphous grouping of people is a curious mixture. An immigrant community made up of increasing numbers of Congolese and other African immigrants occupy noisy apartments close to the main road.

I once went to look at a room to rent for R1500, the cheapest I could find in Sea Point. I met an Eritrean man who showed me a 2-bedroomed flat already housing 3 couples with the lounge converted into bedroom and sharing 1 bathroom. I didn’t take in much of the apartment as I was fascinated by the man’s proportions. Long, slender fingers and arms. I thought I was tall and thin but people from the Horn of Africa have the elegance of bone structure I’m tempted to attribute to a whole other race of beings. They seem like a more evolved version of man that has travelled backwards in time. If they are they shouldn’t have returned. Xenophobic South Africans afford them the same grace a pack of locusts could hope to expect.

Then of course there is the traditional Jewish community that Sea Point is also notorious for. A drive down Main Road will take you past the Kosher Butchery, and on to the Marais Road Synagogue. I was browsing a book store with a friend on Main Road once when a Jewish man casually started a conversation with us. Before I knew it was being given a full-blown history lecture of Judaism, and being invited to the temple, though I’d have to "dress a bit more modestly". I had never quite been at the receiving end of evangelism before. On the outside of my apartment’s door is a previous resident’s mezuzah, the scrolls that house the famous shema of Isreal: “ Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One...”

There are also the less savoury aspects of Sea Point. Sitting on my bed, in the almost non-existent neighbourhood of Three Anchor Bay, I can see the prostitutes stand on the corner on Main Road, watching motorists whiz by from Green Point to Sea Point. I always seem to get the halfway neighbourhoods. In Johannesburg I lived in Midrand, half way between Pretoria and Johannesburg. I called it Purgatory, because God knows the place has all the charm and fascination of a waiting room. Then I remembered I wasn’t Catholic and resorted to merely calling it Midbland.

But Sea Point is different. It has lots of character. Too much I sometimes think. I’m contemplating going downstairs one day with a flask of coffee and striking up a conversation with the girls, dressed far too skimpily for the cold. But I’ve only lived here for less than a month. There is still time enough to explore this city the way I love to explore any city. Through its people, the ones we put on postcards as well as the ones that get discussed in our social welfare departments.

Much like prayer, when one hasn't blogged in what one knows is too long, there is a reluctance to return: to make good on one's absence. But this prodigal has had enough of the pig sty and is coming back, cringing, ashamed yet wearily excited at her return to the Chronicles of Vash. It's been too long.

And now that I have finally purchased a flash stick (and lost it a week later at a packed lounger bar, who then called me and returned it- a whole other story) I no longer have to furtively type out my blog entries at work, glancing over my shoulder at every possible discovery. I'll do it in the comfort of my new flat and bring it in in the mornings.

Here's to a new season of writing!

(ps. here's a pic of me with newly short hair at my epic return to Grahamstown last month for graduation... standing here with Joy)

In the words of Fiona Apple, "I've been been a bad, bad girl." Well, a bad, bad blogger at the very least. So take the Cat o'nine tails to my deserving hide: chide, chastise and castigate me. But when you're done, accept this humble offering.

My final essay... EVER. A tract appropriately entitled "Why I write," in keeping with George Orwell's famous essay of the same name. While I was tempted to entertain you with the whole 2314 word diatribe, I realised just how excessive that would be in the nick of time. (In my mind's eye I beheld hordes of MTV generationers slurring out between lazy mouthfuls of pizza and coke "Byte size, byte size, we want byte size." Instant gratification in a microwave culture, what have we to do with length and depth when we can have surface and fast?)

Ahem. Where was I? Right, the essay. So here are some extracts to that piece de resistance. I'll be back. No really, I will.

A writing class product...

With arguably the most advanced university catering system in the country, Rhodes University Catering division gives the students a fair deal. Eight menu options are made available, varying from vegetarian to Hindu/Halaal and African. Choosing the fast food option of a meal usually means getting chips instead of vegetables and a faster road to high cholesterol.

But the variety available to students is contingent on one thing: pre-booking, 48 hours in advance. And as I stared down at the explosion of different shades of yellow on my regulation white plate, I bemoaned my lack of foresight.

The pumpkin wasn’t too bad. Neither was the chicken lasagne, if you’re partial to herb overkill and a use of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme that would lure Simon and Garfunkel out of retirement. As I peeled off the top of my cheese a la plastic, I glanced over at a friend’s plate, and started in dismay. “What’s wrong with your food?” I enquired.