Blues, reds

[j4]

Oh, I'm all quote marks and scratchy heat today, and I'm fed up with it. I want to pick a fight with somebody, just to get it all out of my system. It's all hormones and airlessness and apprehensiveness; jars of weeping to store under the stairs, all siphoned off. Buckets of waste, stagnant in the sun, and the sheer stifling futility of it all.

I've got this thing I'm writing in my head, and it's been kicking around in there so long that I'm afraid to write it down now in case it makes no sense. A bit of it slipped out onto a post-it note and somebody stood on it by accident; stood on it with words, I mean, but I can still see the footprint in my head. Take nothing. Leave nothing. Stop still for long enough and there won't even be one line of prints in the sand, the wind will blow them all away and leave nothing but the place where you stand, the place you have to start from. Everybody right now seems to be running away from everything, though, just as I'm trying to settle down; I feel like I'm drowning in the wave machine.

It's too hot for book reviews, but recently I've been reading In the Heart of the Country by J M Coetzee, which is a big fly-blown tangle of bitterness and futility, and you'd think it would be just exactly my mood; but the experience of reading it is like being badly constipated on the hottest weekend of the year. There's no particular bit I can point to and say that's why I'm not enjoying it, but after reading a page of it I just feel bloated with it; it doesn't go anywhere, it just sits there swelling in the heat. Accomplished, doubtless; but unpleasant. I haven't finished it yet; still straining.

Ah well, the summer's nearly over, isn't it, anyway.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I love the way you describe it there. I'd much rather read you writing about it than him.

He definitely gets the feeling across, the claustrophobia of too much sky in every direction, the heat and the heaviness, the desperate need to make a mark somewhere in all that nothing. It's just so indigestible. And the character he's writing through is so self-conscious and affected that she makes me look like I'm living the unexamined life.

I'm not saying it was uninteresting (though I didn't find it as impressive as it seems to be reputed to be) but it was a really teeth-gritting read.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

It's a shame that he doesn't manage to get across the way that the biggness of the sky makes you think there is a top to the world; and that you're standing on it. The heat and the heaviness; well, that's there, but there's more to Africa than that.

I think the irritation I have with a lot of this type of South African literature is that the authors seem to think that feeling guilty is enough. Oh, I could go on and on. I don't know what any of them could have done, otherwise? But self examination is endemic over there; the first, and best, talk radio I've ever heard (Radio 702) was started in the Joberg area (I once tried to pass myself off as Jenny Cwrys-Williams, but, unfortunately, she was attending the same book launch, and pointed out to everyone that she was, in fact, her, not me) and that, I think, is a sign of the national, or at least, of the chattering, high veldt English speaking classes need for affirmation through examination.

I agree. It's turgid. I'll find you some more digestible stuff.