“Why don’t you write a book!”
Voices I hear as the sweat drips and I feel faint. If I have to look at one more damn book!
It’s Saturday afternoon and I am at work. The aircon is off.
My friend Nick “The Dawnie” Pike is proclaiming the greatness of the flooring — that’s his game when he is not out surfing or fishing — and the excellence of the modern architecture.
Industrial brutalism, a sweat shop by any other name, I mutter as the drops literally plop onto the covers.
The public are amazing.
Many, many boxes of books have arrived from readers supporting our annual Donate a Book drive.
They will be repurposed by our local hero winners back into local society to be enjoyed by others who may not have the bucks to buy these treasure troves of information, stories, education, wisdoms, life.
A few years ago, an old journo connoccio put this way when he was cast out, yet again: “Make yourself clever.”
And he did by engrossing himself with the incoming new order — he basically played with his cellphone. The other day he was made journalist of the year.
So what’s it to be? YouTube, Insta or words in ink on a page?
My greatest worry is I cannot pull my eyes away from my screen — and the tech bros know that, because they made it like that, clever so-and-sos.
But atavism is a strange thing.
I grew up with a little library in my cupboard in King Edward Road, Cambridge.
Which book stayed with me? Not the bloke who wrote James Bond, who was all the rage in the ’60s. All the bullets and babes could never match the grief and gravitas of one book on my little shelf, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley.
I remember it as a cloth-bound tome with big, curly handwriting and dark illustrations.
Tom was a chimney sweep in the mid-1800s. His job was to unclog the soot and grime of many a dreadful hole in fire-warmed Victorian homes.
He was a kid — and he drowns in a river fleeing from a cruel, torrid life.
Was this really suitable for me, also a kid? It was so horrendous that I don’t think I could get myself to finish it. He becomes a water baby but that’s all I can tell you.
Books stay with us.
I cannot tell you what I watched a minute ago on the Tube — oh yes, a pastor’s daughter who grew into a feminist Insta star with her critique of religion.
She was just getting into a fine Westerner’s view on how missionaries came with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other when suddenly, boom, she was gone, and there was this monster bakkie being advertised, in my face!
Apparently, the tech bros ruthlessly amplify or suppress posts or sources they dislike whose analysis is too close for comfort.
But a book cannot be tuned up or down. It is there, darkly inked, immutable. A challenge to your critical brain to work through.
And so there is an outpouring of books, printed objet d’art in the building and I am struck.
I get struck a lot these days but mostly by new ideas not canes, fists or tirades.
However this time, I am struck by how many of the authors I actually know or have met!
Raymond Suttner is here — and there is his budgie or lovebird parakeet.
I remember helping him move house in Johannesburg and that damn bird was all over the car!
He is a splendid guy and I see from the jacket note that he has updated his introduction to Inside Apartheid’s Prison to explain why his lifelong struggle for freedom and justice has seen him ditch his movements and parties, the ANC and SACP. Should be interesting. I should read it. But will I?
I see Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone. Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, and Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. Nature rebounding in the post-human landscape.
Wow, that should be interesting, and Ron Nixon writing in Selling Apartheid wittily titled in a Coca-Cola type and in red.
He notes how for 50 years the regime spent R1.6bn a year on a global propaganda drive. Tyini!
There is the cutest children’s book Nelson Mandela. Long walk to Freedom abridged by Chris van Wyk and illustrated by Paddy Bouma. I am betting this is less traumatic than Water Babies.
There is Emma by Jane Austen. Now if anyone wants to find out how race and class work against women, here is an incredible tale — of struggle too.
There’s a cutie called Joy is forever with the inscription: “Dearest Belin. I love you. Thanks to our Father that helped you getting better.” Bit of grammar checking needed, but who cares, I understand “Mom” (who wrote inscription) perfectly.
And, of course, I have a friend called Joy! I marvel at Richard Wagner saying: “Joy is not in things, it is in us” and chuckle at HW Byles quipping: “Cheerfulness is what greases the axles of the world. Don’t go through life creaking.” Hilarious.
I am taking Hetty for a well-deserved spa treatment this week. All her oils will be changed, she will be lubed, tweaked, and we will make plans for a longer-term renovation. I will try and be cheerful as the costs mount!
There is Garden Birds of Southern Africa by Peter Gin and Geoff McIlleron.
I just got off the phone to sis and she tells me how she fact-checked some male down on the Sunshine Coast who tried to say there was a lesser and greater pied kingfisher.
Apparently in these parts it’s a pied or giant they were talking about.
And then the mother lode: Jurgen Schadeburg’s memoir The Way I see it.
He was in the fray with the Drum school of journalism in the ’50s.
My old prof Gavin Stewart taught it to us in journ II at Rhodes in 1981.
It was an extraordinary, all South African style and I have loved it all my life.
I blame this school of freedom-loving wordsmithing and photography for my lifelong battle against the cadaverous hand of old-school British “objective” reporting which so easily, and coldly undermined African hearts.
There are crimes of journalism and this insidious collaborator with colonialism, bigotry and racism in English journalism has been the enemy within for 45 years.
Thankfully, they have been in the tiny minority and the vast majority of newsrooms were mostly middle-of-the-road characters who actually cared about the horror being waged in our townships pre-1994.
Indeed, it is the horror being waged post-1994 which should attract our attention and concern, in this, our land of elitism, broken dreams and suffering.
I wonder at all these great titles and topics, lying donated and deserted today, awaiting new life yes, but still, at this point, in the bin of history.
And finally I come to one book and, whoa, it’s one I actually edited myself! No ways!
I did a lot of what we call in the trade “panel-beating”, giving the next editors “something to work with” as we also like to say.
I am keeping its title to myself but can’t stop myself from reading the author’s description of me as a “good, and sometimes very grumpy, friend”. I fall about with laughter.
So here are the reasons you ain’t ever getting no book from me: I have already written it, every week for 100 months since late 2017, which comes to about 428 columns or about 640,000 words! Tolstoy’s War and Peace is only 612,000 words.
The truth is, once this column is read that is it. It’s gone. Veggie wrap or lining the cage for Knobbie the Nahoon parrot. No delusion here.
So will it be ink or screen in the future? Feet on the ground, horses or cars?
It will be a little bit of everything, but those screens are already a big winner.
The problem becomes one of manipulation and propaganda — who owns the message machine is always the big issue.
Do they believe in independent journalism — for that is what people who like to make themselves clever are prepared to pay for — or will it be cheap and nasty propaganda, Fox News, Zimbabwe state media, the Gupta’s New Age?
I am staying with legacy media, the New York Times, the Guardian and the 153-year-old Daily Dispatch.
Actually, I am just grateful that you stayed with me, having fun, sort of…
Today, you are my local hero, all one of you!
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