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Memory is a weird thing. I woke up this morning with a fragment of song on my mind, which, after mulling over it for a bit, I realised was Roger Whittaker's "The Last Farewell". After ten minutes I could, in fact, remember the entire tune. I got up and played it on the piano, more or less without hesitation. I don't think I've actually heard it for nearly thirty years. The mental images I associate with it are of Makoholi, which is the research station in Zimbabwe (near Masvingo) which we lived on until I was in Standard 3, making me nine or ten years old when I left. I mean, who listens to Roger Whittaker any more? He was one of those singers whose popularity is very much about a specific time. I don't even think my parents had any of his records, I must have heard the song on the radio, or (I vaguely think, the memory is very fragmented) at the house of one of my parents' friends.

I couldn't remember much of the lyrics, but enough (mostly the phrase in my subject line, for some reason) that I could identify the song to pull it up on YouTube and play it. It's making me cry. I have no idea what I'm associating it with - that much of memory doesn't survive, so I'm experiencing a sort of isolated gut-punch attached to nothing in particular. Of course, the time it's linked to in my memory is actually in the middle of the Rhodesian war, and has every reason to be a bit fraught. But it's so strange, that the actual event and emotion are lost, but the emblem endures with all its baggage. Music is very powerful.

So, apparently, am I. On an unrelated note, I spoke to a bunch of parents-of-students at parents' orientation yesterday, in a quick reassurance of we-are-looking-after-your-offsprings'-curriculum which seemed to go down very well (lots of laughter and nodding, always a good sign). One of the dads came up to me yesterday and showed me an SMS his daughter had sent him from the middle of orientation last week. "Am in orientation! its cool!!! Jessica is funny!" Given that my unenviable task is to make about four hours total of detailed curriculum overview somehow entertaining, it quite made my day.
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I have to say, along with Hoban "Wash" Washburne, that with 2011 we experienced "a little problem with our entry sequence". The last few years have not been kind to me and mine: 2009 was father's illness, 2010 was father's death, and I'd hoped that by 2011 the cosmic wossnames would have shot their bolt and we'd experience an upward trend. Instead, the pitch of entry has caused the outer casing to overheat and the wings to fall off. 2011 was a complete bugger, marked both by my increasing lack of happiness in this job, and by a new and interesting chapter in Things My Body Inflicts On Me Out Of Perverse Sadistic Glee. I am not leaping joyously into 2012 so much as crawling over the finish line while 2011 sits panting behind me, the bloodied scraps of fabric in its jaws all that remains of the seat of my pants. (Bizarrely mixed metaphors in this paragraph brought to you at no additional cost).

Thus, the usual scorecard is somewhat unbalanced in its 2011 iteration. It also completely ignores global trends and disasters to focus, as usual, on the purely personal. Thusly:
  • Things achieved by me this year: international travel on my Cherished Institution's dime. Survival of life-threatening illness. Survival of concomitant post-illness chronic fatigue. Invitation to give a keynote paper at a conference next year, albeit a small conference. Invitation to submit paper to special edition of journal, on Miyazaki, so score. Relative success at doing my job despite being absent from it for about three months, and validation from superiors in proof of same. With assistance of therapist and my, as usual, incredibly wonderful friends both real and virtual, something vaguely approaching mental health in endurance of all of the above.
  • Things discovered this year: Dragon Age, Eureka, Lillian Jackson Braun, She Wants Revenge, retro Golden Age superhero comics, the Avengers, Skyrim, buying a new computer specifically for gaming, Dark Angel, Melbourne, the reality of deep vein thrombosis on long haul flights, compression socks, anti-depressants, Questionable Content, bras that fit, Lego, Dollhouse, growing out my fringe.
  • Things not achieved by me: as usual, fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing, enough exercise. Any of the end-2010 resolutions about having a better year. Most importantly, the actual writing any of the above papers owing to aforementioned fatigue. Possibly as a result of all the therapy, I am bizarrely inclined to actually cut myself some slack for this.
  • Resolutions for the new year: attempt to continue the process of cutting myself slack on the fatigue, while simultaneously resolving both to cautiously exercise towards actual health, and not to use fatigue and Skyrim as excuses for protcrastination. Writing of kick-butt papers variously for the journal special issue, for the May Harry Potter conference, and for two additional fairy-tale conferences in August/September. Fiendish political strategising to bend the structure and expectations of this job to my inflexible will. More socialising with all the lovely friends I've hardly seen owing to fatigue and inexorable hedgehogginess.
I spurn 2011 as the dust beneath my chariot wheels, and look sternly at 2012. Shape up, dammit. In the global sense, but particularly in the particular.
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It's Christmas! This has to be the most enthusiastic I've been about it in years, suggesting that, in fact, my usual state of "Bah! Humbug" is actually a response to overload, which causes me to pull in my horns and retreat into my shell like a bad-tempered festive snail. With fangs. Good lord, now I have a mental image of myself as a giant, grumpy, six-foot-tall fanged snail in light-up reindeer horns. My subconcious has apparently been at the surrealists again.

Last night I had a very odd dream about hosting a very ill and exhausted Neil Gaiman* in a completely chaotic flat in the middle of town somewhere, with a house full of demanding children and domestic crises, including running out of food, money and a working car, and a pervading sense of worry that the wretched man was refusing to rest when he clearly needed it. I woke up a bit bemused and unable to account for the images, but on mature reflection it was, I think, at least partially a Christmas dream. Under the grad student lifestyle, with absolutely no disposable income, Christmas present buying was an annual terror; giant Christmases full of extended family and cast-in-stone ritual requiring enormous effort for incongruent emotional payback, has always been a bit of a terror. In an extended family without religious belief, Christmas nonetheless imposes an inexorable set of social and cultural expectations which roll, juggernaut-like, over the actual desires of anyone concerned. I actually quite like my family, but there's a slightly porcupine part of myself which bristles bad-temperedly when forced to interact with them according to a ritual script. (As it does with a lot of social ritual scripts, incidentally, viz. marriage).

My Christmas this year is a quiet backwater, located in a city whose usual buying frenzy and overstuffed tourist quotient has been severely clobbered by recession, and with vastly reduced family requirements owing to the absence of my mother, and my non-present-buying pact with my sister this year. Festivities have consisted of a very pleasant dinner with my sister on Monday night before her family took off for their usual Arniston jaunt; a random present for my Evil Landlord; and a series of quiet days at home playing Skyrim, baking, and pottering around in the garden. I cannot overstate how perfect this is for me, to the point where, as stated above, I'm bumbling around feeling quietly festive.

I am also looking forward to the incoming hordes at Boxing Day tomorrow with unrestrained glee; apparently all I need to do to content the anti-social-expectation inner porcupine is to displace the interaction onto a non-traditional day with non-rigid format involving non-traditional people. Score!

Happy festive wossname, everyone, and may the holidays (of which South Africans have a rather indecent amount this year) bring you seasonal cheer of a kind precisely tailored to your needs and desires.


* My subconscious uses Neil Gaiman as a dream image a lot. In the New Year I shall enlist my therapist to find out why the hell.
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The auto-repair business of Ray, magical mechanic, has a bunch of youngish and very beautiful plane trees in its parking lot. They probably have about a quarter of the girth of the one in our garden, but they're lovely trees - well-shaped, healthy, full of green and those fascinating hedgehog bobbles which plane trees produce. Absolutely all of them, though, have weird protrusions from their trunks - bits of plastic string, barbed wire, that sort of thing, embedded in the bark and with bits sticking out rather incongruously. Obviously the young trees were staked when they were planted, and over time have gradually grown to absorb the material which tied them up.

It's a very strange image, encapuslating human obliviousness to nature at the same time as a sort of half-arsed, unthinking care - back when they were planted, someone clearly cared enough about the young trees to prop them up, but didn't care enough, or stick around long enough, to remove the supports when they were no longer necessary. And, in that slow, imponderable, organic way nature has, she simply engulfed the problem, incorporated it, and allowed growth and strength to happen regardless.

There was a moment, while I was waiting for my lift and pondering the odd bit of blue plastic string sticking out of the bark, when I found myself wishing that the world on a more macro level was capable of absorbing our damage in that way. Coal-based power stations, for example, folded gently into the earth. Giant forests slowly reducing to rubble our uglier cities. Four-by-fours engulfed by elephant herds which patiently, inexorably flatten them into a thin, quickly-rusting metallic film. The problem is that in the destructive stakes the human race as a whole is really a lot more far-reaching than a few bits of blue plastic string.
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The tottering piles of unread tomes which festoon my study are reaching critical mass. On my to-do list for this six weeks of leave: read them into submission, by processes of stern self-discipline and rejection of distracting fluff. The problem is that in my current chronically fatigued state I'm really drifting inexorably into the fluffy, on the grounds that it's all my tired brain is really fit for. Any inroads into the Bookshelf of Unread Reproach are thus hard-won, spasmodic and somewhat few and far between. In addition, while most of the BoUR is composed of fairly worthwhile literature, some of it is downright intimidating (I still, for example, haven't dared crack open Anathem on account of the fear), so if I do finish something, it's because it bloody well gripped me enough to make me do the work.

This is thus already a point in favour of the two novels I've just finished, which are in the Iskryne series, a collaboration between Elizabeth Bear (whose lj, as [livejournal.com profile] matociquala, I very greatly enjoy) and Sarah Monette. I don't know Monette's writing at all; I know Bear's novels from the cyberpunky Jenny Casey series, Hammered et al, which are fun, and from her rather entertaining take on urban fantasy and mage/fay wars in Blood and Iron. (On my to-acquire list: the slashy Shakespeare/Marlowe ones). She's a deceptively solid writer - the prose feels plain and sturdy, until you look at it more closely and realise how carefully crafted it is and how hard every word is working. She's also deceptive on the level of plot, as these apparently straightforward character-driven adventure narratives tend to be packing serious political teeth.

The books I've just finished are A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men. I thoroughly enjoyed them, but they've stayed with me in a not entirely comfortable sense: in the final analysis, I'm still not sure if they completely worked. The Iskryne world is a sort of alternate-fantasy Viking-based civilisation, in which the early-medieval Nordic homesteads are regularly threatened by trolls and wyverns. The task of fighting off these supernatural depredations is taken by the wolfcarls, warriors telepathically bonded to wolves, who form their own sub-society revolving around the pack. The harshness of the setting - ice and snow and advancing glaciers, and marginal existence scratched out in the face of it - contributes to the overall feel of the books, which is gritty, bloody and occasionally brutal.

Telepathic bonds with animals are so much of a fantasy cliché, you're probably groaning as you read this. Fortunately the authors of this series are absolutely and intrinsically aware of the cliché, and are deliberately setting out to turn it on its head. What above all I adored about these books is the absolute poke in the eye they are to the fluffy teen romanticism of things like McCaffrey's Pern series. The books set out to logically work through the implications of two basic premises, viz:
  1. Telepathic bonding with animals renders the human bondmate open to the unconstrained sexual impulses of the animal in heat, with whatever that realistically implies in terms of loss of agency; and,
  2. Bonding with wolves is about being better equipped to fight maurauding trolls. While a wolfcarl may bond with a male or female wolf, in a civilisation based on Norse mythology and Viking civilisation, the people doing the fighting are going to be exclusively male.
You can see where this is going. Inescapably, this premise followed with any degree of consistency is going to lead to really an awful lot of gay sex. Which it proceeds to do, not always comfortably, but always with complete conviction.

I was impressed with the world-building here. The cultural consequences of a separate, wolf-pack-based, homosexual society for a subset of the culture's warriors seem to me to be well and convincingly delineated. The writers are not shy when it comes to depicting both the consolation of such a setting for its participants, the strength and support of its relationships, and the less comfortable tensions - not just in interaction with a heterosexual meta-culture, but the implications for a heterosexual man who is nonetheless drawn to the wolf-bond enough to accept the sexual imperatives that come with it. The whole set-up has a beautiful logic, and its working out is consistent and satisfying even when it touches on brutality and limitation of choice.

But I'm still not sure it completely works, and I rather suspect that some of the point of my disquiet is in the genesis of this whole thing in two female writers writing about male experiences of homoerotic encounter. When I flippantly refer to "slashy" takes on Shakespeare and Marlowe, above, I am quite deliberately invoking the whole subculture and creed of slash fan fiction, in terms of its production of male homoerotic encounters by, largely, female writers and for the benefit, largely, of female readers. I'm doing it deliberately because at times this is what Companion and Reckoning feel like. There is an awful lot of homosexual sex, inevitably given the set-up, but more importantly, there's a huge amount of focus on male feelings - love, angst, conflict. At base, quite apart from the smut elements, this is what slash is about, the exploration of male emotion expressed outside normal cultural contexts and expectations, and this series does that in spades. The problem - and this may simply be the result of my over-exposure to slash, and thus somewhat dubious - is that it somehow feels as if its address is the same as that of slash, towards a female readership.

So, however much I enjoyed and respected Iskryne's world and achievements - and I did - there's still an ambivalence in my response. Part of me is responding with an awareness that this is serious world-building and cultural exploration, and is doing mental pompom routines on the sidelines in recognition of the simple elegance of the setting's inversions. Hell, if you want a truly poignant window onto the probable experience of gay men forced to hide inside heterosexual marriage, try looking at it through the eyes of a heterosexual man forced into homoerotic relationships solely because of his love for his wolf.

But there's another aspect to my response which is quite simply to feel as though some of the things the series is doing are about objectification, pure and simple - men put through their sexual and emotional paces by and for the benefit of women. And pure titillation aside, some of those paces are nasty - if you let the animal lust thing run its course with men standing in for the wolf bitch in season surrounded by males, what you have is a gang-bang. However rational the steps which have led to that outcome, and however much the focus is on cultural necessities and the emotional consequences of the choices they force, the upshot is deeply unpleasant, and the slashy conditioning makes it feel slightly as though the characters are being put through trauma because it gives rise to interesting angst.

Which is, of course, deeply illogical: to return full circle, what I really like about the series is its ability to insist that animal life is not clean or pleasant or romantic, that Pern's dragonriders largely got away with soft-focus hawt dragon sex rather than having to face the reality of sexual coercion via involuntary participation in an animal's responses. The angst is entirely necessary and justified. Likewise, if slash interests me, it's mostly because of the extent to which it seems to function as a genuinely female pornography, written by and for women and about men. If I don't have a problem with Harry/Draco, why should I have a problem with conflicted homosexual wolf-carls? Because it's "serious literature" rather than "fluffy parodic self-indulgence"? Way to be consistent, there.

Nonetheless, there is disquiet, and I'm not entirely sure it's the disquiet the authors intended to create with their deliberately provocative premise. It's not enough to prevent my enjoyment of the writing, and it won't stop me from acquiring the third in the Iskryne series when it turns up - this is a compelling world and I really like these characters. (Quite apart from all of the angst and trauma and bloody fighting, these books still manage to be occasionally funny). But I have, let us say, small political reservations. I shall watch the direction taken by the third book, and my own responses to it, with baffled fascination.

belonging to be

Wednesday, 24 August 2011 05:56 pm
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So, a strange thing. Several people commented on my post about Zimbabwe and identity to say that they felt national identity didn't really apply to them: either because it's an irrelevant concept, or because South Africa itself has changed so much in the last ten years that it'll never be the home they left. I can obviously understand that, and the extent to which the increasing globalisation of our particular strata of the socio-economic wossname has made nationality in some ways irrelevant. William Gibson would be proud. But it's weird: in a sense, the gradual erosion of the old South Africa into irrelevance for those people has had the opposite effect to that which the sudden, catastrophic erosion of Zimbabwe has had on me.

There's the old saw that "home is where, if you have to go back, they have to take you in". If a new Brit or US or Aussie regime suddenly expelled all you SA expats, you could come back here. It wouldn't be the place you left, but it would hold out at least a vague hope of employment, enough continuity for a pension, an education for your kids. At least as it currently stands you could build a life here, and have a reasonable expectation that it would endure. ([livejournal.com profile] xavierxalfonso hit it when he talked about somewhere to grow old). It may be hopeless idealism or ostrichism on my part to see it in those terms, of course, but I live here: to me, it feels viable.

You can't say that about Zim. Its changes have been sudden and shocking and arbitrary and cruel enough that it no longer offers any sense of continuity, and to be effective, "home" and "nation" have to have that - they can change, and everywhere does, but they need to endure. Somewhere in my head, on some odd level, "nation" is not actually about a community of shared life experience, but equates to "shelter", to "belonging" in a sense which is ultimately protective and continuing. Zimbabwe no longer offers that. South Africa might, but it doesn't belong to me.

Nonetheless, the effect of the dissolution of my "nation" has made me value nationality rather than reject it; I can't have it, but it's still important and desirable. Probably because I can't have it, and I know how aching a loss its absence - on a completely different level from "I left it and it's changed" - has created. On a weird sort of level, I have no right to take for granted the shelter offered by any country, including my own. And now that I think it through, obviously for me "nationality" has a resonance of legitimate expectation, of "take for granted". It's about security above anything else.

Fortunately security can come in all sorts of flavours, and if I can't identify with nation, I certainly identify with people. You lot, for example :> - both in Cape Town and in cyberspace. I'm not sure I agree that nation is no longer relevant, but I certainly agree that community has come to mean a far more diffuse and abstract thing than it ever did in the age of the village. And that, too, has its poignancies and pains, because on some level of community it's really just about someone to give you a hug when you're down. I've just delivered my mother to the airport, and I won't see her again until April next year. I've spent the last couple of hours in tears, because already - and probably particularly because I'm exhausted and post-serious-illness and not quite myself - I miss her like an ache. I'm too bloody old to miss my mum, but dammit, I do. And part of that weepiness is because I watch her struggle off into the distances of the airport with her huge suitcase, and I know that she goes gallantly back to a home, and a life, which is characterised by the same visceral loss and undefined rootlessness as mine. Except worse, because she's older, and Zim took far more away from her than it ever did from me. And it's not fair. Dammit. It's not. Nations should endure.
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Today I unearthed unexpectedly, from the clutter in my drawer, my Zimbabwean post office book. At the time I last used it, which was in 1996, its charmingly analogue columns attested to my ownership of Z$529.23.



This would have been the residue of all the saving I did from vac jobs when I was at school or in my first few years at university, less whatever I drew out for self-indulgence (usually books or fabric). If it's still there, and hasn't been closed down or whatever, it might have picked up a bit of interest in the intervening fifteen years. But let's take it from the actual depicted amount. It's currently worth a fraction over 10 South African rand, or approximatly 0.89 British pounds.

My mother has an older sister who is still in Zim - she's mentally disabled and lives in a retirement home. My grandparents left a trust fund for her when they died, which was designed to provide for her for the rest of her life. After Zim's economic collapse, my mother drew the entirety of the trust fund out of the bank, and used it to buy a milkshake and a toasted cheese sandwich at a local fast food joint.

I spent the first 20 years of my life in Zimbabwe. I don't know if it's possible to get across to someone who hasn't had their national identity whisked out from under them like a rug, exactly how odd it feels: your whole childhood, the validity of a whole nation's operation, taken away from you. The first twenty years of my life is unreal to the point where it may as well have been a fantasy, one which has been replaced with a reality which is horribly Kafkaesque. My stupid post office book is a ridiculous microcosm of the feeling my parents must have had, watching their entire working lives, plans, investments, gurgle down the drain in a matter of months. There are still people in Zim, and a government of sorts, and if you work in US$ apparently you can make a living there, but there is no coherent sense of stability or continuity such as would make a sense of identity feel legitimate.

They say you can't go home again, and in this particular case they're horribly right. I have enormous emotional attachment to Zimbabwe's landscapes, which at times I still miss with an almost physical ache, but the place is no longer the locus of any sense of a working country. I can't think of myself as a Zimbabwean any more, because Zimbabwe doesn't viably exist. But I still can't think of myself as a South African. At best, I'm a Capetonian. At worst, I know I'm not anything. There's not anything to be from. It does some very odd things to one's psyche.
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I really am a fundamentally law-abiding creature, which is useful when in hospital for ten days, because it means I have a tendency to trust structure. Hospitals can be confining and intrusive, what with the rules and the bed-baths and the searching personal questions about your bowel movements, but mostly I found it reassuring. If my knee has to Go Evil and mount a flank attack on my lungs, at least I'm in the right place and all the right highly-trained people are around to repel it appropriately. Likewise, even in ICU my feeling was not "aargh could have life-threatening embolism at any moment", but a sort of calmly fatalistic sense that I was being Looked After in an agreeably high-tech and beeping-machine way, and that if a Great White Whale blood clot did actually surface, either they'd deal with it or it couldn't be dealt with. Either way, there didn't seem much point in worrying about it, so I didn't.

I'm not sure if this makes me ridiculously unimaginative, ridiculously well-adjusted, or inherently fatalist, but there it is. I darkly suspect that me being in hospital was actually harder, emotionally speaking, on my family and friends than it was on me.

As an enjoyable offshoot of this "takes pleasure from structure" thing, I spent most of the morning happily constructing the Lego version of Hagrid's hut, which was the EL's birthday present to me, and seems to be ideally suited to my current state of convalescent brain-deadness. This process causes my mother to laugh at me a lot and make comments about her "sweet little daughter" playing with her toys, but once again, this fails to penetrate my calm. I like Lego, and the jig-saw-like process of construction has perfectly obvious and abstract satisfactions about which I decline to be embarassed in any way whatsoever. Besides, I can fire back with a beautifully accurate guilt trip about never having had Lego as a child owing to sanctions and the family state of brokeness, so we're about even.

Being at home again is, for some reason, giving me really odd dreams - or possibly it's the result of the more than usually insane amount of reading I've been doing (seven Patricia McKillips in a row has to be good for something). Saturday night: wandering around a medieval village festival in the snow, being a young blonde thing having an affair with JRR Tolkien, and listening to his sadness about his distant Elven wife. Last night: being, for some reason, a beauty contestant, attending complicated gala dinners in giant shopping malls. Mostly, I think, this one was about being able to move.



Obligatory Reverse Inside-Out Australia Blog photograph: I found Sydney, while rather lovely in its waterfront nature and beautiful skies, incredibly glitzy and touristy and ultimately somewhat heartless. I was in quite a lot of pain by the end of the trip and didn't do a lot of sightseeing, but there was a Wildlife World park thingy quite close to the hotel, so I managed to pack koalas and kangaroos and wallabies and duck-billed platypi, oh my, into a fairly quick limp around. Not in any way an authentic experience, I really wish I could have gone out into the country, but still rather fun. This shot, with the koalas sleeping improbably and uncomfortably up bits of stick right against the cityscape, exemplifies the experience for me.

retrospective

Friday, 31 December 2010 12:45 pm
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That was 2010, that was. Now it's old and grey and tottering towards the finish line while 2011 sits in the wings and plots. At the end of last year I said that 2009 had made me sad, and politely requested 2010 to pull its socks up. In a weird sort of way it's sort of complied. Given that my major resolution for 2010 was "survive", I can pretty much say "mission accomplished", but it wasn't much of a mission.

I lost my father this year and, however merciful his release was from his horrible illness, losing a parent is something of a major life event. His death has freed me to start getting my life and finances back on track, but I think I'm still trying to absorb the implications of his absence; it all feels strangely distant and unreal, as though he's actually live and well and pottering around France somewhere. I suppose that's almost inevitable, when the relationship I've had with him for the last ten years has been across distance and with infrequent contact. Loss takes a while to sink in.

The usual scorecard:
  • Things achieved by me this year: a conference, a published paper, a serious amount of academic validation from complete strangers. Paid-off debts to bank and sister. A house in France, and an actual tenant in it. Survival of giant renovations. A far more vicious stranglehold on this job, it's starting to become routine, and to give me something approaching headspace, making it vaguely possible that I will be able, in the near future, to think of it as a day job and do more interesting things around its edges. A reasonably effective management plan for life with chronic sinusitis/glandular fever, although I'm still working on the "while not whinging about it" part.
  • Things discovered this year: Star Trek, Smallville, Plants vs. Zombies, Catherynne M. Valente, tempura batter, Death Cab for Cutie, Echo Bazaar, Scott Pilgrim, Transmetropolitan, Fiasco!, netbooks, how to cook fillet, Microfiction.
  • Things not achieved by me: as usual, fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing, enough exercise. In addition, I have not seen enough of all my friends; I've retreated into a sort of exhausted hermitage thing where I socialise only if someone actively pulls me out with hook and line. I've missed everyone.
  • Resolutions for the new year: trample job under my booted heel and find more energy for more interesting things, including headspace in which to write. Do some bloody exercise. See my friends far more actively and often. Travel more.

2010 had extremely horrible moments, but I think its overall arc has been slightly upwards. I am cautiously hopeful about 2011. Tonight a small gang of us see in the New Year in our traditional fashion, which is to cook giant, elaborate meals on the distributed plan while imbibing alcohol freely and allowing the conversation to wander hither and thither at will. I hope that you all have equally pleasant prospects for the evening, and that 2011 will bring you wonderful things.

fearful symmetry

Saturday, 27 November 2010 02:27 pm
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This is one of those beautifully neat, elegant and symmetrical compositions by means of which cats attempt to persuade us that they are neat and elegant creatures, and that the catsick on the front step/dismembered bird in the bathroom/live mole released under the Evil Landlord's bed/piles of hair on the furniture are nothing to do with them.

The interaction of dog- and cat-owners with their much-loved pets is one of the things which actually gives me hope for the human race. An animal is not only a member of a totally different species with absolutely different needs, wants and pleasures to ours, it's a member of a totally different species which has only the most minimal ability to communicate with us. Despite this, we cheerfully accept sick on the carpets, dismembered creatures all over the house, clawed furniture, plaintive meeping at mealtimes, and the Hobbit's fixed determination to break my neck by walking in front of me unexpectedly, without diminishing our affection for these creatures one jot. Animals are a huge intrusion into the well-ordered life of the average human; by and large they don't obey the rules worth a damn. And yet we keep them. And love them. And, however much we complain about their foibles, we're fiercely protective of them and devastated when they die. It's about the only thing, apart from intelligent science fiction, which gives me any reason to hope we might actually be capable of the sublimation of ego necessary to get along with extraterrestrial life, should we ever find any.

Golux is on the left, the black blob on the right is Todal. I should add that this is a bi-coloured sofa because it has a throw blanket on it as a vague stop-gap to prevent the grungy piles of cat-hair from irrevocably staining the light fabric. If you visit, the secret is to remove the throw before you sit down.
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Lovely, gossipy lunch with [livejournal.com profile] wolverine_nun yesterday, in the course of which she revealed that she's just been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Hooray! *random pom-pom routine, with mortarboards*. This is excellent news: the ad-hominem promotion process is legendarily nasty, and it's very, very cool that her faculty has recognised her Excellent Work. However, she also gently suggested that it would be far preferable to impart this sort of news over lunch if I was in any sort of position to be contemplating such a promotion myself, and oh, by the way, when am I resigning from this job? Which is an excellent question.

While I'm actually not completely hating my current job just at the moment, nor is it anywhere I actually want to be in the long term. I want to be a Real Academic, and be able to share my academic ladder-climbing triumphs with [livejournal.com profile] wolverine_nun over the calamari. However my daily little theme song, wandering the corridors of my Cherished Institution, goes something along the lines of "I'm a lonely little fantasist in an African Potato patch". As long as I resolutely stick to my non-Africanist guns in terms of research interests, it's extremely unlikely that I'll acquire a permanent academic post of any sort here. It may be wantonly bloody-minded, but those are my guns, and by gum I'm sticking to them. This recent Glasgow trip has suggested that I'm also not quite as uncompetitive in the international arena as I've always kinda thought I'd be. All of this being the case, why the hell am I still in Cape Town, instead of kicking my heels up in a much more accommodating unicorn-infested field overseas?

Another excellent question, and there has been Brooding about it. Mature reflection has suggested that the following factors may be a consideration:

  • Trepidation. I'm a cowardy-custard, you may commence the junior playground mockery now. I doubt I'll waltz straight into an academic post of any sort overseas unless I'm actually living there, which will entail some sort of temp work. I lived hand-to-mouth for a long time as a grad student, and I do not contemplate a return to a more precarious existence with anything other than fear and trembling. Also, I am very happy with my home, friends and life here, other than the actual career satisfaction, and the thought of having to start again from scratch fills me with a profound desire to chain myself to my bed and hide under it.

  • Location. It's a well-known fact that the groovy cosmic rays put off by the Mountain have a measurable effect on brain chemistry, as well as causing long-term inhabitants of the city to put down Psychic Roots. In the immortal words of [livejournal.com profile] wolverine_nun, leaving Cape Town is all cool and exciting and great career opportunities etc, except for the part where you shrivel up and die. She was born here, she Gets It. I am too young and cussed to shrivel up and die just yet.

  • Dislocation. I am Capetonian, body and soul, but I'm also an exiled Zimbabwean. Being Zimbabwean does very odd things to one's sense of identity and belonging. Cape Town has become my home, because the utter disaster that is Zimbabwe precludes thinking of it as home any more: there's no longer anything there for me, and never will be. My family is now dispersed all over the world, which means that the main thing which makes Cape Town "home" to me is my presence in it - I build that rootedness for myself, not because of a family safety net or family home or anything else which grounds it. (Friends do, and my friends are amazing, but you can't take them for granted; they're also dependent on ongoing construction by one's actual presence). If I go elsewhere, out of Cape Town, I have no anchor. I'm adrift. I can't "go back", because "home" has uprooted and moved with me. It's a horribly precarious feeling to contemplate, and I think contributes materially to my reluctance to leave.

  • Consolation. As I said above, I actually haven't hated this job lately. Bits of it annoy me intensely, particularly boring admin nitty-gritty and not being able to work at home. But at the same time, I'm achieving useful stuff here, both for me and for the organisation. I am advancing, if nothing else, in leaps and bounds in the acquisition of interesting political skills in the areas of self-promotion, committee-wrangling and what have you. If I ever do get back into academia proper, watch out academia. Also, this year I've managed to up the amount of teaching I'm doing quite considerably, with the reassuringly full blessing of my superiors, and have moreover realised the possibility of exciting conference trips courtesy of the Cherished Institution. I thus have just enough access to the things that make me happy to be able to contemplate the continuation of what's effectively a Day Job for at least a little while longer.
All of the above, of course, is sheer rationalisation, and subject to change without warning: if someone against all odds offered me an overseas academic post, I'd probably up sticks tomorrow without a thought. But it's quite a good feeling to think it through and realise that there are Reasons, and it ain't all bad.

mourning borders

Wednesday, 22 September 2010 12:56 pm
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I left my gosh-darned car lights on yesterday morning, and the kindly passer-by who noticed and told the traffic services only did so around mid-day: when they phoned me and I dashed up the hill to rectify matters, it was too late. I got into the car to go home, turned the key, and was rewarded only with a sort of tragic, gasping whirr. (So much for lack of karma. I've made a "they left their lights on" report twice in the last year, you'd think the Cosmic Wossnames would have a stronger sense of justice). Fortunately our campus security runs a jump-start service; once we'd sorted out the communication issues (I said "Library Road", they heard "Rugby Road" and I consequently twiddled my thumbs for an hour before phoning them back in plaintive complaint at their non-appearance) they started me up and I tootled merrily home. The Evil Landlord is a useful sort of person who has things like a battery charger in his Giant Workshop of Doom, so we hauled the battery out and charged it up overnight, and I slung it back in this morning before I went to work.

I haven't uninstalled and reinstalled a battery for years, and kept on thinking vaguely that having to do so now is just what I might have expected after incautiously writing microfics about spanners. (Didn't drop it once, for the record). I'd forgotten how incredibly pervasive engine grease is. There are still black borders under my nails, after four separate bouts of scrubbing. And the smell lingers for days: I lay in bed last night being both weirded out and obscurely comforted by the smell of grease on my hands. One of those childhood nostalgia, back-brain memory-triggers, all about farm upbringing, and various fathers, grandfathers, cousins and uncles, mostly now late and lamented, under various motors. Also, now I really miss my Biscuit Tin. I used to fiddle with her engine a lot more than I fiddle with the Mermaid's: the Biscuit Tin had a ridiculously simple engine which even a liberal arts major could understand. I was in the habit of adjusting her idling speed myself, she had a simple screw-turn mechanism which the mechanic always set too high.

The basically straightforward principles of installing a battery notwithstanding, there's always an insecure corner of my psyche which subliminally expects the car to burst into flames when I switch it on after such an exercise conducted solely by me. It didn't, of course, the engine leaped into life first go. I feel empowered. And, still, faintly, covered in grease. In a good way.
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This conference trip was really enjoyable, and at the same time deeply surprising. I've mostly come to terms with how isolated I am in my academic interests here: there aren't really any other serious fairy-tale theorists in the country, and my other interests - genre, science fiction, the internet, children's lit, fanfic - are likewise not highly regarded. This has conspired to somehow give me the mental sense of being a negligible quality, academically speaking. A dabbler. Not serious. Certainly not theoretically accomplished.

My experience of the conference has revealed this as so much bosh. Distanced as I am from the European and American hubs of fairy-tale theory, I expected my book to vanish into the academic ocean with scarcely a splash or ripple. Instead, it was fairly high-profile in the conference consciousness: included in the conference recommended reading list, directly referenced by several papers, and quite a few people approached me to say they'd read it/liked it/had it and planned to read it/oh gosh let's talk about metafiction no-one else does! I didn't feel that my actual conference paper was particularly well delivered, and I always feel like a bit of a fraud trotting out the jargon, but again it received only positive feedback, engagement, validation. If nothing else my isolation means I do things slightly differently to the mainstream of this discipline, and my peers in the field seem to find that interesting.

Most importantly, though, I found that I actually fitted into this milieu without too much trouble. I deliberately don't socialise much with my academic contemporaries, I think that way madness lies, or at the very least princesses in ivory towers, but the result of this is that I'm very conscious of "not being a pretentious academic" in social settings. Not only do I self-consciously flag long words like marmalade when I'm holding forth, I self-censor like mad, and have apparently conditioned legions of my long-suffering friends into applying the firm hand of righteous mockery when the polysyllables become too polysyllabic. (And mad props to stv, for the suggestion that my next online identity of any sort is as "Polly Syllable".)

So it was a bit odd to find myself, for example, in animated discussion with one of the grad student presenters about Buffy and Supernatural and genre tropes, reflexively holding back on the jargon levels, only to think, "Wait! Hang on!" and crank it up instead. Which is, I have to say, fun. And tends to be met, capped and encouraged. And, somewhat to my own surprise, I pull it off. I actually know what I'm talking about. I know the critics being referenced, I have opinions on theoretical positions, I am swimming at ease in this verbal ocean and doing occasional back-flips in sheer joie de vivre.

As one of the nice professors pointed out after listening sympathetically to my minor rant about my employability in this country, this conference is a space in which no-one once felt the need to mention Africa. You have no idea how refreshing that is. And I am starting to realise, with slight horror, the actual and hideous extent to which this department, this institution, this intellectual climate, has sapped my belief in myself and the validity of what I do. It sucks. It must stop. I must go on more of these jaunts. They're good for the soul.

dark side of the moon

Saturday, 7 August 2010 10:27 am
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This is so weird. One of my music-acquisition projects lately has been to gradually acquire copies of all the stuff I used to listen to in undergrad, mostly on evil bootleg tapes which have subsequently lost all relevance, technologically speaking. Today, Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn arrived. Listening to it is a very strange experience, because, while I don't think I've heard this album in, gosh, probably fifteen years, it's still utterly familiar to me - more so than music I listen to regularly at the moment. It's as if I heard it yesterday. Something in the sound is hardwired into immediacy rather than nostalgia.

I'm wondering if this is about simply being in your early twenties: the experiences you have then are particularly vivid, they impress themselves on you extra hard because so many of them are new, taking those first steps into adulthood. It's not as if Piper is particularly significant to me, it's a background sound track to a fairly generalised sense of time and place (Honours year, the Twickenham Rd house). Dark Side of the Moon was much more a personal-totem album, it'll be interesting to see if it feels as immediate, once I've actually persuaded Loot to find me a copy.

Talking about moons and dark sides and things, I had truly bizarre werewolf dreams last night. We gatecrashed, literally, a huge, swanky, eighteenth-century mansion by the simple expedient of driving a limousine straight up the driveway and crashing it in through the front door. The place was full of werewolves, all hairy monster-men in eighteenth-century costume (rather Cocteau feel, in fact, although colour rather than black-and-white - lots of orangey browns). I was with some unspecified quest-partner, male; we were really rather evil, or possibly surrounded by evil and rather desperate. At some point I killed a woman by strangling her, rather inefficiently: I had to do it a couple of times because she kept coming back to life, and eventually we dumped her unconscious form into a giant excavation which was conveniently in the garden, and piled earth on top of her. Later we locked another woman into a sort of giant cage with all the werewolves and waited for them to kill her; it was somehow important that she died in pain. In retrospect, all of the above is probably stuff I shouldn't tell my therapist. Or should tell my therapist. If I had a therapist. Memo to self: don't acquire therapist.
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I started playing D&D in my first year of university, which was not a good year: I was very shy, very introverted, horribly homesick, and pathologically incapable of striking up new friendships owing to all of the above. I was dragged off to a regular D&D game by the first-year med student who lived across the road from my aunt, and acquiesced, I suspect, mostly because I couldn't think up a plausible reason to refuse. The group was the usual crew of cheerful eccentrics who took happily for granted my inclusion in the game, and assisted me to roll up the usual designated starter cliché, a half-elven ranger who was almost killed by ghouls in a graveyard in her first combat. (I think I date my ongoing roleplaying fondness for staying at the back of the group with arrows and/or magic from this rather vividly-remembered moment). The game was DMed by an Honours student in theoretical physics, on whom I developed a minor crush, and who is probably responsible for infecting me with my predilection for Earl Grey, which I still associate with those sessions. The group played absolutely standard AD&D, hacking our way through several levels of the Temple of Elemental Evil during that first year I played: it was rote, standard, unexamined adherence to the tropes, and I loved it unconditionally.

From there, of course, the rest is history: contact with the motley hordes of CLAW and their far more wide-ranging and exploratory take on roleplaying in my second year, and very quick eradication of the shyness in the face of the completely mind-bending experience of being one of approximately two and a half girls in an otherwise all-male role-playing group. I'm not really sure if it was the confidence boost of this, or the powerful shields afforded by a role-playing persona, which kick-started the transformation from pastel schoolgirl mouse into something more in possession of a personality. But it wouldn't have been possible without that year of exposure to AD&D in its most standard form; that first game was lame and grotty and, in an odd sort of way, profoundly unimaginative, and it met a need I didn't even know I had.

So it's not really surprising that every now and then I still randomly develop a sudden, deep, alarming desire for something D&Dish. This is difficult to fulfil in this day and age, even with the high concentration of roleplayers in my immediate social circle, as everyone's moved on to other systems, or their own systems, or families and work. ([livejournal.com profile] bumpycat's late lamented D&D game was enormously retro fun and I still miss it passionately. Barbarian clerics ftw!). But for the moments when the jones is paramount, there's Munchkin. Munchkin is perfect because it speaks to our juvenile experiences of D&D: it's firmly embedded in the paradigm, the in-jokes1 and tactical nastinesses and sneaky min-maxing and lame system features. It knows the gazebo joke. But it's also ironic, distanced, self-consciously condemnatory as much as it's affectionate: we are invited, playing Munchkin, to celebrate both our unsophisticated enjoyment of a dungeon hack, and our graduation to something better.

By the end of last night's game I had a surprisingly coherent character: a dwarven cleric with a Talking Horse, Leather Armour (picture: busty brunette in skimpy corset and thigh-high boots), Pantyhose of Giant Strength, and Broad Sword (usable only by female players). Munchkin is a profoundly nostalgic pleasure if only because there aren't many women who enjoy playing it in our crowd (me and [livejournal.com profile] smoczek, and she's still in Madagascar), and you can trade shamelessly to end up with all the items useable only by females and thus useless to the rest of the group without a quick sex change. It's quite like old times. The session took over four hours and ended with all five players on 9 hit points, needing just one combat to win, and staving off the inevitable victory for a random one of us for three rounds by serially preventing, in a desperate, marginal and happenstance way depending on the fall of cards, our opponents' success in combat. I didn't win, alas, as the bastard elves ganged up to use their sneaky helping-someone-else-to-win-a-combat bonus, causing game end in a tie, but it was bloody good fun and completely worth staggering off to bed somewhere around midnight. I'm just sad I didn't get a chance to use my Kneepads of Allure.



1 They have a Level One Potted Plant as a monster! I recall affectionately the early days of CLAWs, when one of the in-jokes was the Party Potplant ("DM! DM! I rustle my leaves!"). And a Large Angry Chicken! Do you remember the ongoing gag about the Rolemaster sheep?

fragile things

Monday, 5 July 2010 09:38 pm
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It's not madly compatible with ownership of four1 cats, but I really enjoy birds. To this end I have a hanging bird table in the back courtyard, which I fill erratically with assorted seeds, and watch with great pleasure while a motley assortment of pigeons, doves, sparrers, white-eyes and the occasional thrush squabble for it messily, taking off in a miniature thunderclap of wings whenever I wander outside. The cats lurk under the feeder, pretending nonchalance, but the birds either cheerfully ignore them or, in the case of sparrers and white-eyes, swear at them with Cockney urchin insolence.

Yesterday one of the doves, the dainty little Cape turtle-doves with the distinctive black collar, flew madly into the kitchen and thence into the living room, where I was curled up on the sofa imbibing my daily dose of hawt mind-bending demon-sex courtesy of Justina Robson. The stupid bird of course did the classic stupid bird thing, which was to make a mad dash for the outside via the closed window; fortunately it wasn't flying fast enough to stun or kill itself, but it ended up fluttering frantically in the space between the window and the burglar bars. This meant that I could actually rescue it by the simple expedient of moving slowly up to the window and catching it in my hands.

Holding a wild bird in your hands is a surprisingly intense experience. Their frames are astonishingly light and brittle; the tiny bundle of feathers sits in your fingers with incredible quivering vitality given how fragile it is. The discrepancy between its size and your own is almost unthinkable, and you feel like a clumsy giant, strangely torn between impulses of nurture and predation. Nurture wins out over the "small crunchy morsel" instinct because the fluttering stops the instant you have your hand around the frail body, which is suddenly motionless except for the hammering of its little heart. The stillness is heart-rending: it suggests that the small creature is overloaded, has given up, is stoically waiting for death. This is the point where birds can simply die from the shock, so it's always a victory when you step outside and open your hands, and the negligible weight reasserts its energy and motion to flutter off, disbelievingly and slightly drunkenly, into the sunlight.

I like birds. They’re a completely unlikely conglomeration of delicate physicality, all that self-determined, vibrating life hung onto those slight, airy bones and feathers. I can’t imagine how we must appear to them – huge, threatening, noisy, incomprehensible creatures confusingly unlike a definable predator, and prone to these unexpected and unfathomable rescues. I want to reassure the flitting, feathery bundles that I mean them only good, but there’s absolutely no way I can. Frustrated, I put out birdseed.



1 Stealth!Cat, thank heavens, seems to have departed, suggesting Ounce and Hobbit actually managed to find enough of the missing masculine equipment to run him out of Dodge.

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One of the things I inherited from my dad was the family clock, an old wooden one like a small, sturdy wooden house with a minimalist outbreak of carving and gold leaf. It dates from about 1910 and belonged, I think, to my grandparents: it has a Westminster chime which was forever getting out of sync, and with which I remember my father endlessly tinkering, like the Duke of Coffin Castle, to try and persuade its dings to mesh with its dongs. So to speak. When I inherited it it had travelled all over Zimbabwe, up to France and then down again to Cape Town, and was very firmly Not Working. However, by one of those wonderful fortuities [livejournal.com profile] friendly_shrink's father is a clockmaker specialising in old clocks, and he very kindly restored the workings for me at a fraction of the usual price for such things. This was particularly kind as it was apparently a total bugger, causing him to have to rootle endlessly around its innards, presumably with strange Germanic clockmaker's oaths, and to actually machine new parts for the gaps in its rather shoddy workings. (Don't, apparently, go for German clock parts, they're not as good as the French or Swiss.)

Now it's on the piano, gently chiming the quarter hours, and every time I wander through the living room and catch it in mid-chime, I have to swallow this enormous lump in my throat. That sound is part of my childhood: the clock stood on the mantelpiece in our house in Harare when I was in high school, between the two foot porcelain dandy peering coyly around the muchly rose-bedewed fencepost, and the gap where his frothy-petticoated shepherdess sweetheart stood before the cat knocked her down and shattered her into fifty million porcelain bits. (And good riddance. I hated those things, they were perfect examples of Rococo Twee). The clock, though: the clock is memory and evocation, and a familiar household god, and it somehow makes the house slightly more fundamentally home to have it anchored by that gentle soundtrack. Even if I am now forced to add it to the ever-increasing list of the Approximately Three Million Random Things That Make Me Cry.

Things That Make Me Giggle, however: Castle. Castle is jolly detective romance TV: it's the froth on your cappuccino, the flourish to your hat, the cheerful solid child-friendly blocks from which your narrative is built. It's gosh-darned perky, composed mainly of one-liners, good humour and perfectly obvious twists. It works mostly because Nathan Fillion could put across the debonair bastard with the heart of gold with the mere power of his eyebrows while reading from the telephone directory. It's worth watching for Castle's relationship with his daughter alone, but I am developing a fondness not unakin to horrified fascination for the opening corpse montages with the pretentious photography and the nice indie soundtrack. I am unable to acquit them of taking the mickey out of themselves. I finished the first season in a giant, glorious gobble as a distraction from my current state of sinus headache, and am possessing my soul in patience until the second season finishes on Monday and I can extract it from long-suffering friends. It's no bloody good at all, but it makes me happy.
freckles_and_doubt: (South Park Self)
(In which I finally achieve enough distance to attempt to memorialise my father. You don't need to read this, although I'd like you to: I needed to write it.)



John de Wilton Tiffin, 1943-2010

My father died in exile. In thinking of him I can’t separate him from place, from the farms and bush and birds and animals of Zimbabwe. He was with us, his daughters, when he died, but family is only a part of who he was. The changes in Africa over the last thirty years denied him, in the end, both a legitimate space to inhabit and a sizeable portion of his selfhood: he was rootless and lost.

The land defined not only my dad, but his family. His father was a bureaucrat who succumbed to the yen to farm and his siblings grew up to be farmers, landscape gardeners, horse enthusiasts. My dad’s large family (five children plus three adopted) spent his childhood variously on Malawi’s Mount Zomba, and near Harare, but the place which defines them is Lodestar, the family ranch in the Lowveld. The ranch is the stuff of Christmas memories, presided over by my grandfather’s slightly inept cattle management and my grandmother’s strong-minded matriarchy, and inhabited for the holidays by a seething rabble of cousins, horses and dogs. In going into agricultural research, becoming with his PhD far more educated than any other members of his family, my father both confirmed and denied his upbringing.

He was in research for thirteen years, studying beef cattle, and moving us in the process between research stations in Harare, Bulawayo (I was born while we lived in the Matopos hills), Masvingo and Marondera. I am grateful to his career for my childhood outside cities, not quite on a farm, but just as much about the bush and dirt roads and milk from the dairy down the road. Memories of my dad are inevitably memories of cattle and open grasslands, and of driving slowly past field trials while he, focused, energised and slightly removed from us, surveyed the animals. I always forget that in all of that he also went through the Rhodesian war, serving in the Grey's Scouts, the mounted unit which used his childhood horse-riding skills: I remember him driving armoured vehicles, carrying a sub-machine gun, using army shorthand on the radio, arriving back from call-ups bearded and filthy to give us jam from his rat-packs.

In later years he left research and became a consultant to farmers all over the country, entering the business world without losing the essential outdoor aspects of his daily life. He was a respected authority, a leader in his field: huge values in cattle herds moved through his hands, strengthened and refined by his knowledge. He maintained his own herd as a sideline, leasing grazing and selling slaughter animals which were higher quality with each generation: the proceeds put both me and my sister through Honours degrees. If the country hadn’t collapsed into farm invasions and land-grabs, the herd would have both whiled away and financed his retirement.

I also cannot think of my father without thinking of falcons. He was an obsessive and dedicated falconer and bird-watcher, and had a bird in training through my childhood and beyond. Home to me was a peregrine on a perch on the lawn, pointers in the car, shotguns in the gun cabinet, dead doves in the freezer, and a continual succession of rescued birds raised in the house – orphaned owls and guinea fowl, a stork injured by a storm. I will never be able to hear a peregrine’s scream without remembering my dad. I don’t think he was ever as much himself as he was when careering through a vlei in his ancient and many-pocketed hunting jacket, bird overhead, dogs at his heels, intent and fulfilled in the multiple co-operation of creatures, man and environment. I know that the daily demands of training a falcon took time away from us, his family, but I find his absences difficult to resent: I can’t imagine him without that essential thread to his life. Even in his last days, unable to speak, he would still monitor the doves nesting in the shrubs in the garden. My sister and I never really took to what was in that place and time an extremely male-flavoured hobby; he would have loved to have a son to share it with. He was, though, as much involved in the conservation aspects of falconry as in actually flying a bird, and it’s that awareness which probably helped to shape my own preoccupations with environmental destruction – I’m glad to think I could share at least that much with him.

The great thing about my dad was the fact that he was both a practical man and an intellectual. He was intensely the product of his time – Zimbabwe, the farming community, and all that is insular, parochial, conservative and frequently racist about that environment – but he was also highly intelligent, articulate, fundamentally interested in the world and in ideas for their own sake. I don’t think he ever quite understood my career or my hobbies or (particularly) my choice of boyfriends, but he never resented them. I disagreed with him on a number of fronts – feminism, childbearing, affirmative action – and we used to have wing-ding arguments about the issues, but at the same time I think he relished the discussions and enjoyed having raised a daughter who occasionally bested him logically. (I never could at chess). He had a favourite catch-phrase: “The purpose of parenthood is self-generated redundancy”, and I never doubted that, while occasionally uncomprehending, he was proud of me, as much because of my difference from him as in spite of it.

His intellectual abilities made his last few years particularly hard. He moved to France because his second wife wanted to, and because Zimbabwe was no longer tenable. Europe was always wrong for him, too cultivated, too safe and far too manicured after Africa’s open wildernesses. He was in the middle of a farming community in the Gers, but its beautiful spaces would always have been slightly awry – the air the wrong colour, the horizon the wrong shape. He was also driven to making a living however he could, which turned out to be renovating houses. It was practical, and he was good at it after an upbringing in the practical can-do Zimbo farming environment, but he felt very keenly that it was a come-down after his successes as a researcher and a consultant. The disease that killed him, the muscular degeneration which prevented him at first from working and then from moving easily or, finally, speaking, simply completed a process of erosion that the dissolution of Zimbabwe had begun. At the end I think the only thing he had left that was important to him was his daughters - his world had disappeared, his friends and family were elsewhere, his body had failed him.

I wish I could say that my dad was a happy person. He was in many ways, of course – he was a brilliant storyteller, he attracted devoted friends, and I owe to his good sense of humour my love of the Goon Show, Peanuts cartoons, Archie the cockroach. The indignities of his disease he dealt with surprisingly well, partially because his background involved so much of the earthiness of animals and their bodily functions, partially because his own puckish sense of the ridiculous was never quite suppressed. But he was never, I think, a fulfilled or contented person – he was above all an idealist, and I don’t think anything in his life ever quite matched up to his sense of what it should have been. He had many practical skills, but he wasn’t a realist, and in the end I don’t think he could see beyond what seemed to be the failures of his life – two divorces, the loss of his capital and his lifestyle in Zimbabwe, his menial job as a renovator and the failure to rent of his renovated properties – to appreciate how much he actually achieved over his lifetime. I respected my father infinitely for his ability to pick himself up out of an exploding country and find a way to keep on going in the teeth of loss, but I think he saw only that nothing had fulfilled his expectations. He didn't accept his death easily: he was resentful it was so early, he still had so much he wanted to do, and it ultimately outraged his sense of fitness, of the life he'd wanted and worked for and which I think he thought he'd earned.

I’ve come to realise only in the last few months the impulses behind one of the major and ongoing arguments I had with him about the fact that I’ve never tried to publish fiction. One of the reasons I’ve perhaps never tried, and never been able to even discuss it with him, is because I know that even if I succeeded, it would never quite be what he expected or wanted. His sense of “my daughter the writer” was some ideal of financial and artistic success which bore no resemblance to the long, hard demands of the process, and I couldn’t stand either to disappoint him, or to subject my efforts to that impossible ideal. I’m sorry I couldn’t overcome my own issues to give him that before he died.

I don’t think my dad was an easy man to live with. While he had real affection for his daughters he was also in some ways distant, perhaps as a result of the pressure to be undemonstrative in his own upbringing - I know my school friends were rather afraid of him. I think too often in his relationships he expected conformity to some unexamined pattern without noticing the disconnect between the pattern and the person. He had high expectations of his daughters, and I remember being afraid of his anger as a child, but my memories of him are overwhelmingly positive: he was a good man, intelligent, caring, interesting, accomplished; commanding respect and affection from those who knew him. I was proud to be his daughter, and still am. I wish he'd come to some other end.
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A random thought has occurred to me. I have burbled before, in this forum, about my complete love for disaster movies, and for watching large tracts of human civilisation explode, erupt, disintegrate, drown, get swallowed by earthquakes, get blown up by aliens or otherwise interestingly fall apart. However, watching the Na'vi Hometree char and collapse, despite its lavish provision of explosions and giant things going crunch, gave me no enjoyment at all, engendering instead a sort of sickened disgust.

This has been somewhat revelatory. I think I enjoy disaster movies, in the average expression of the genre, because they offer an apocalyptic response to something I feel very strongly about, which is that human civilisation simply doesn't work. On average it's an unreflecting, unintegrated, fundamentally self-destructive society we belong to, one that is probably stuck in a downward spiral to some kind of collapse. Being gleefully destroyed by some imponderably and irresistably enormous external force, whether alien or environmental, operates on some level of my subconscious not just as a lovely externalisation of inherent qualities, but as something we probably deserve. The Na'vi, on the other hand, are a functional society in perfect and harmonious balance with their habitat. They didn't deserve to be destroyed. Hence, no enjoyment.

This basically suggests that somewhere in my subconsious is a sort of stern Victorian governess with a very large ruler, saying over her pince-nez, with steely determination, "If you break one more thing there will be trouble." I'm OK with that. I'm also going to stop talking about Avatar now, I seem to have mostly expelled the fury by blogging.
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Shopping this morning, I put four bags of pecan nuts1 onto the till counter, and noticed that the woman had only rung up three of them. When I gently pointed out that in fact I owed her another R18.50 (and, ye gods, when did pecan nuts shoot up in price? memo to self, plant tree) she looked at me as though I was a particularly insane three-headed alien waving my twelve arms and spouting gibberish in Esperanto. She then rang up the extra item after triple- and quadruple-checking that this was actually what I meant, as though she couldn't quite believe it. When I'd paid she handed over my receipt with a sort of grudgingly suspicious thank-you for pointing out the error.

This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.

I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yourself-now has apparently identified altruism as a foolish weakness which needs to be eradicated from the herd by sheer Darwinian principles. I don't know how the hell the inventors of the system expected it to self-regulate so that rampant greed doesn't grind up everything in its path, but grind it has. And I don't see how you re-introduce the old-fashioned virtues back to this post-capitalist world once you've opened Pandora's box, short of sending the world to moral boot camp with floggings and stern teachers. The system doesn't work any more. Maybe it never did. Maybe humanity isn't actually capable of rising above its own base nature. Maybe I've been reading altogether too much China Mieville and am turning into a socialist. Maybe it's just Christmas getting to me.

I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.



1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake.

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