Trying to be Nietzsche

For those lucky enough to be my friends on Facebook (which is a whole new level of friendship discovered only in the last ten years), you may know I am in a slump. A book slump. That right there is shame. I am not slumped beneath the pile of books I am reading or will read. Not slumped in a fort made of books or with the weight (well, technically mass) of weighty words or against my newest fictional friend or in awe of a conclusion. I am slumped against the altar of books that is my only sense of meaning.

I mean, technically, do I even exist?

That is only half facetious. Those of you who know me via my blog (a new type of acquaintance-ship) and those of you who know me in the real world and some of you who know me via Facebook, know how caught up in my literature my identity is. Oh, I know the difference between characters and real people, although the line between fantasy and reality is (thankfully) more like the boundaries between countries: a line on a piece of paper, a steady stream of stolen cars, firearms, poachers dodging the law and refugees dodging lions, and officers who take the blame from every politician who has never stood in the sun (although they'd be familiar with accepting bribes) but really have no power so they exert what power they convince us they have.

(I speak from limited but very thorough experience. I once presented myself at the South African side of the Lesotho border post. I walked in past what looked like a schooldesk and two women talking. They ignored me, so they could start yelling at me ten seconds later. I have flown to other SADC countries ten times and been interrogated every since time: oh, and my luggage searched. Every time. Another time I was stopped by an officer who had been waiting for me. While I was on the plane, they phoned my place of work to verify I worked there.)

What I am talking about is boundaries, however, not border posts. Although sometimes the line between those two is thin, too. 

I have lived at least hundreds of lives - yes, you non-believer, this saying is true. Holden of Catcher in the Rye: I ran away with him when I was fifteen. Sula of Sula: not my favourite of Toni Morrison's books, but a brutality that doesn't need fists or words. Adam of We are Now Beginning our Descent: I heard the alarms and explosions and quiet senselessness when he broke those glasses against the wall. Nancy Drew, of course (you didn't see that coming): she taught me never to accept answers.

In hundreds of places. In Midnight's Children: India's break from British rule and - instead of the joy of freedom - the conflict that is blithely described as between Muslims and Hindus. In The Road, the bleakness of pure existence that made the fantastically possible world of Oryx and Crake feel like a romantic comedy. The stream of conscious of The Waves that was a sea of voices telling a story of loss. A New York that Audrey Hepburne (however epic) could never embody in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." That quote is painted across the top of the altar made of all these lives that are to me tangible. Sometimes it reminds me of the stupidity of people, I have to be honest, for the exact same reason that it is startling. We cannot survive alone (although I plan to prove Faulkner wrong when I find some hidey-hole and then pay people to deliver my manuscripts without explanation). Although  the first meaning seems to me to be the blandness of life - a kind of existential determinism (hah! I coined that).

If you threw one of these books at my head and did the border officer thing, first I would demonstrate the correct way to handle books (with reverence) and then I would read a few pages and remember about a quarter of what I had read, place it on my nightstand (opposite the stack of bookmarked books on my dresser (which is the same thing as my nightstand, just not next to my bed)), baby bunny would chew the cover and eventually I would  move it to the stack of books I am not slumped under.

Yes, I am being melodramatic (not about the bunny - she chowed two covers and a sticky note with a reminder on). It would not be a first - shush you. But what if I made you watch The Matrix and then led you into a room where Laurence Fishburne is waiting with two colored pills? Your mind would shut down, right? Now reverse that. I have been coughed up into the world made of binary code and I can see it but I'm too tired to read it. Yip, my life without books is exactly like that. Without, you know, all of those characters and settings.

FYI the plot of The Matrix is loosely based on a thought experiment devised by some philosopher as part of the metaphysical and existential debates. There is an amusingly vehement argument between the two camps, mostly because after a thousand years we're still just yelling at each other without concrete evidence either way. He said, what if you are dreaming, right now? One day you wake up and find that every experience, belief, emotion (you get it, and so on) is a fiction. Not one of those people you loved exists. What then? Which life is meaningful? What does that mean? And so on.

Also FYI, the movie was partly based on Neuromancer, which was based on the thought experiment. And also also FYI, there is no way to prove one way or the other. Don't bother. People much smarter than us have tried.

Neo and Morpheus (and that annoying Trinity) just assume one is better than the other and most people would react the same way. But apart from being a traitorous creep, Cypher may have been right about ignorance being bliss. I was very happy living two lives and I am not thrilled about now living my own without any distraction. 

Granted, perhaps it is the material that is the problem. My last read was A Canticle for Leibowitz, which if you have read this blog before, I did not love. It was like going for a blood test. I get anxious, not because of the sting, but because I do not like the thought of intentionally breaching my skin. I don't try to get papercuts, they just happen. (Like, daily. I can get a papercut just holding a book or opening a cereal box.) In other words, because I lost myself, so I think I lost you, it was bad because I struggled to pay attention, which made the rest of it awful, because I knew I was going to finish a book I didn't like and it was going to take a long time.

For now, I am going to continue to read magazine articles a page at a time, flick through books I know I won't finish, listen to podcasts, and do crossword puzzles and Sudoku (I have a timed app - at the moment I veer between less than one star and more than three stars (I award myself these points) - it's fantastic). I will think about the books I have read with longing, like the longing Neo would have felt for his life if he had lived in a lovely apartment like mine with three bizarre animals and shelves of books that are here when I get my life back.

Also also also FYI, while I was trying to be Descartes, Sartre and Nietszche, just without the famous part, I forgot to tell you my next attempt (you should know I never give up). Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read Purple Hibiscus about six years ago and was thrown around in her character's emotions like dead leaves - the pretty yellow kind that kids make terrible and very unimaginative art with. My theory is that if I throw enough emotion at the part of my brain that is slumped over, I may push it right over. Either I'll then leap to my feet, view literature from a different angle, or close my eyes and pretend Morpheus isn't there.

I should know better

I should know better. Haven't I been down this road? And haven't I dragged you with me, just to hear you scream? (Solidarity is what I mean. Scream in solidarity.) Suffer for your art. Lesson learnt. Do what you love. Learnt and burnt. (It rhymes. Stop thinking so much.) Language is a fickle thing, swayed by plays on words. Live what you love and vice versa. Maybe I enjoy testing platitudes, maybe I am just otherwise and maybe there is a teeny tiny origami-ed singularity of... hope... living in a swamp of nihilism. Unlikely, right? Maybe it's just a stagnant pond.

I have struck out on my own, hypothetically earning money by writing. Yes, for a living. Yes, hypothetically for a living. Yes, I know. I should know better.

For those you who are new to said screaming, a publisher in Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller explains, unasked, that a reader should never be a publisher. He leaves his claim hanging, for you to fill in the gaps. For me, it was a) realising that most of the manuscripts you thumb through are just that: a dirty thumbprint as well as an exercise in egoism - you are not discovering Yeats or Morrison; you are packaging products that are shelved and bought and shelved, and to be followed by the sequel, and b) the previous point (I got ahead of myself) about packaging.

See, words and books are the altar at which I scrutinise and decode and generally worship with the nit-pickiness of the editor I am. I am an editor and writer. In the most fundamental existential and religious sense (although I am told this is not possible, I live to be otherwise). A career is something you do to fund your existential crises - and that discord is exactly how you come to be good at your job (and, to be crass, to make piles of money you can use to line your published novels with).

Hang on. Something is out of sync in this tirade. What is it? Is it my bleeding wounds? My rampaging cynicism? My unfed facetiousness?

Bear with me, now. Perhaps this is an old song, taught to me by a long-dead bird (it may be under my bed cuddled by a self-satisfied cat named Selina the Psychopath). Perhaps I am older, bolder and uglier, better poised to defend my altar without necessarily dying in the process. This cannot be. If it is, my days and nights will run together (ok, that began yonks ago); I will hum while I do chores; I may actually finish my novel and at some point I will be... content? Sorry, I dropped my laptop as the shivers paralysed my motor skills. 

A writer is nothing without discontent. Every story has a complication or infinite; every award-worthy literary novel has complication, anti-climax and a resolution that is both unknowable and for you to find out. All writers are cynical, vaguely hostile, isolated and definitely not in any way wealthy. Or even just head-above-water not-broke. Or so volumes of novels and biographies, and degrees of terrabytes of movies tell us.

Virginia Woolf or Marianne Keyes? That is my choice? Oh deity of my absolutely fictional altar, I am just going to hide out under it for a while with you, if that's ok? I don't take up much space. Especially when I have dehydrated myself with hours of bawling.

I still protest the word plays that skip like Little Bo Peeps through this post. Partly because that is just tempting Murphy (remember last week when I left my house keys in my car, which was being serviced, or when I forgot my wallet at home and was already in a queue and had to beg the parking office to let me out, or when I left my lights on at work and had to call for a jump start at 23:00 on a Sunday evening? I have seen him in pyjamas, folks. Pyjamas) and partly because life is more complicated than seven words (which in itself nullifies that clause).

Ok, ok, since you are that insistent I will crawl out from underneath this altar and write everything and only enjoy it a medium amount of much. I will also desist from the crazy meandering of this post.  I will stop crying if you stop screaming. I will not overanalyse how much I do enjoy writing (insurance is more interesting that you think, you). I will do all of this, but I will take my imaginary deity with me. We have a novel to finish. And it needs to be complicated and unresolved.

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

My impossible life as Jane Eyre

Hello, old friend. Why don't you ever age? We look alike but I have two wrinkles now (I swear the one appeared the morning of my 30th birthday), frown wrinkles, only on one side, the left, like my smile. No, my smile isn't one-sided, jokester; you know what I mean, it's crooked. Unbalanced, lopsided, displaced? Huh, another two differences where we thought there was none. (The second being your obliviousness to nuance. Not yours, hers.) From congruence, to similarity, to a single acquaintance in common.

What am I talking about? Who are you talking to?

Oh, her... I forget she's there sometimes. It's a bit creepy the way she stands behind me, staring over my shoulder at what I haven't done, so I prefer to let her entertain herself. While she's at it, she really could lend a hand, but if she moved, maybe the illusion of symmetry will backflip to, well, what's like symmetry (har!) but with less in common? A straight line. Perhaps. I'm not convinced.

We'd be less alike. I've covered this. Moving on.

Dissatisfaction. We're Generation D. 'The sky's the limit,' say rolly-polly creatures of cute, dopey babies and fogged landscapes caged in black frames or in handwriting poised improbably in mid-air. 'Shoot the moon and bruise yourself against stars' (FYI stars are waaaaay further away than the moon, so I'd advise you go for one or the other). 'There's no such thing as impossible.' (Uh, yeah there is. Walking to the moon unaided, for one. At the very least, there's improbable. The moon elevator, for two.)

It's the Care Bears' fault. My first piece of evidence is the style of the memes above. My second piece of evidence is that I cannot identify another such set of liars in my life. Preschool teachers are the last to whisper such things while they wipe bottoms. The ones I have met, anyway. Ask one. Tell her her kids are 'cute', that they can scrawl honeyed sayings, that they are set to walk to the moon and/or shoot it. I heard her snort on word two.

The Care Bears could slide down rainbows (another impossible feat) and shoot glittered things from their chests. Apart from the fact they were talking bears, they talked in much higher voices than even a Spectacled Bear's growl. Third piece of evidence and slam that gavel, You.

I don't want to be purple or furry or live on a cloud (impossible). I would however like what I was promised: everything. On second thought (not really, because we've talked about this before, you and I. Just nod) literature has to shoulder some of the blame for those ridiculous memes. Alice in Wonderland, The Enchanted Wood, Nancy Drew and the Secret Seven... Possession, The People's Act of Love, As I Lay Dying...

Life is the sum total of the possible. The possible is, in my experience, either horrible or boring. I'm not looking for much: just some Aristotelian tragedy, Gothic martyrdom and a Shakespearean script. How am I supposed to be Jane Eyre without a mad woman in the attic and the burnt ruins of my love? (I could do without Mr Rochester, the ridiculous man. I'll take Jason Bourne.) Yeah, thanks, Care Bears. Since you predate reading, you can slide this all back up that rainbow.

Ok, so possible. I'm gonna go with boring - it's the yellow card. Other side. Yes. My novel and I are pretending we don't notice the other, like two acquaintances who can't remember each other's names. My career... perhaps we all feel like we have more to give than anyone wants? The ideas are flying from our ears and hovering near the ceiling, but hey, at least they have wings. The absence of a personal life here is the absence of a personal life.

Generation D. Ah, and here's some tragedy to chew on: we don't give up. (That 'd' is a bit of a stretch, I grant you.) Even now, my spirit is rallying, tripping the tragic martyr who never ages from the stage. Care Bears swoop in, bearing their burdens, and shoot glitter at the darkness. They swap the yellow card for a purple one, but they confiscate the script. I'm allowed the impossible, provided it isn't literary.

You've got nothing to lose

"You've got nothing to lose." I used this one on myself a couple of months ago (a pep talk is not counted as talking to myself). Although not entirely true (do self-esteem, hope and happiness count as nothing?) it is very comforting. (After all, lots of things that are comforting aren't true. Fat-free yoghurt that is still yoghurt, pure English, democracy...) And if I didn't lose nothing, if I had lost everything - gained everything - gained nothing... Read between the lines, please. What would I have done?

Cliffhanger.

No, that's not what I would have done - how do you cliffhang? There is a lack of suspense-building, you. And here I had thought we had bonded. Is that how you cliffhang? By bonding yourself to a rock?

You always get what you want anyway: I would probably have run from Cape Town to Cairo, in order to cross the Suez and get to Siberia. That's as far as I could go. I have bad circulation. Also, wolves.

The same applies to my novel. In the amount of overtime I work, I could probably have written a novel, perhaps two, and my premature memoirs (you should really have done something interesting first). And when I come home, I have been researching and compiling a proposal for... a research grant? the greatest piece of literature ever? a novella? short story? preface? Nope. To line someone else's pockets.

I'm sure it's not lost on you that I'm blogging instead of writing. (Although I count this as a half hour of writing a week.)

I have a hypothesis.

HYPOTHESIS
Success is more frightening than failure.1
1 Erratum: sometimes2 more frightening
2 Smart, right?

METHOD
A. Review the above two anecdotes.3
3 Anecdotes are admissible because I say so and because else this blog post has already ended. Which would be disappointing. And definitely not a full half hour.
B. Consider a goal of your own and whether you have intentionally but sub-consciously scuppered it.

OBSERVATIONS

• Failure is sometimes4 the easier option. You know what to expect (worldwide anarchy) and you don't have to try so hard. To fail, simply stop doing.5

4 Smart, right?

5 It's in the dictionary. 'S true 's Bob.

• Success is difficult because then what? What do you do, how and for how long? Do you deserve it? Do other people think you deserve it? If you fudge it now, you have everything to lose. And so on goes your racing mind. Which would be so poignant if you were a racing driver. Be a racing driver. Who reads blogs. About books. Nevermind. Just befriend one.
• Sometimes that everything is your life. Like the racing driver. If he did nothing, he would die in a fiery wreck.

CONCLUSION
Success is sometimes more frightening than failure.

We seem to have drifted from Siberia to someplace over some ocean (I'm not very good at Geography). Or Astronomy apparently.

See, this blog post was meant to circle in on itself: fear of success is in our (completely independent and feral) minds. So is fear of failure. But in the case of Mr Racing Driver, fear of failure is necessary for success. Or at least, the absence of the concept of failure (replaced by the fear of Murphy's Law). Now instead of maneuvering this ship (it's a flying ship, a dirigible) (no, not the Hindenberg!) around the world to land gently where it first took off (seriously, there is no hydrogen on this thing! And no you can't have any helium - I don't care if you need it to survive this flight!), I have flown this thing into the Bermuda Triangle.

Oh look, there's Amelia Earhart!

Either Mr Racing Driver is an exception, or I should stick to specifics. In this specific instance, writing the rest of my novel is, well, frightening. If I don't write it, I simply carry on as I do now, towing regret and the question of what if? behind me. (This Hindenberg carries hydrogen.) I may not lose anything, but I gain a burden. And if I do write it, what's the worst that happen? (I knew it as I typed it. Look out for that blog post.) I knew my choice was to try before I typed it. Sometimes you need to look it in the eye first and then jump off that cliff.

Is that what cliffhanger means?

Purely anecdotes and musings - you've been warned

"I am looking for a book," she would say. "You're in a bookshop, so there's no need to announce it," I would not say. "The cover is white and it was over there last week," one hand circling the shop. Or, "It's about a boy and his mother, and she dies, and so he must go on a journey that will prove the strength of his will." "Bambi!" I would almost say.

Something about working in a bookshop convinces you that you are smarter than those you serve. (You know the kind - the Philosophy major, who reads Nietzsche behind the counter (wherein is tucked a copy of the latest tacky thriller), with one eyebrow permanently raised above the rim of his glasses and his lips pursed.) But something about shopping in a bookshop convinces you that are smarter than those who serve you. (Hence the stereotyped description above - in two years I never worked with one of those.)

A bookshop is a battle of psyches and some inappropriate, redirected rage, with author's names for ammunition and books lining the walls for atmosphere. A little too much? Ok, I grant you that. The books don't just line the walls; they are arranged inside the room on bookshelves and piles on the floor. One more? They are the pretence for opening the battle field to the public.

Ok, I think this bantering is out of my system (remember that I was a bookseller and am a bookbuyer and that books are my religion. And hence awarded certain liberties).

The premise is, however, sadly true. Imagine this at 15.00 on a Saturday afternoon in one of the busiest malls in the country when you have been standing since 08.00 and the aircon is broken and one of the other staff is off sick: One moron customer instructing you not very nicely about how to press 'tab' to get to the next field, because he is in a hurry. (Now remember that as a feminist, I am very prickly about men treating me as though I am stupid.) Rage. Pure rage.

Or the woman who asked if I liked to read and then recommended I read Dan Brown. (I'm sorry if that offends any Brown fan (but not really). I'm sure his books are great 'sorbet' reads - reads that have no function except to cleanse your emotional scars before the next book - and paperweights, but they are not going to dance with the orbit on which I wobble.) So take your paperweight and leave said orbit.

These sound trivial, but they are the incidents I remember. Like the two women I served as a waitress one day, who were really nice even though I fudged their really simple order and told me I looked like Julianne Moore, and didn't leave a great tip (the last few rands were counted out in bronze coins), but who I remember 9 years later for being really genuinely nice when I was tired and my calves ached and I felt like I looked like Golem and I was really really lost.

What prompted this ramble was a bookbuying expedition. I stood in the amorphous queue (the one with no people in but the spot at which one of the sellers was looking at the time) clutching my tome to my chest. I do not just buy. I plan, forage, identify, continue to forage, identify more, compare, contemplate and usually decide I don't need said item after all, because homeless children wander my street without such things.

Buying tomes is clearly a big event for me. (Pun...)

This seller continued to look at the spot in which I was standing and perspiring with some vague idea that a security guard would stop me and tell me to stop being frivolous. One second, two seconds, three... The snotty-nosed boy then looked at me, arched his eyebrow above his glasses and put the book he had been reading on the counter. He turned and walked away.

Another girl rushed up to the next counter and beckoned me on. She kept looking at his back, not reprovingly, but adoringly, probably because he is a Philosophy major and speaks Latin or ancient Greek or something. So I got my tome and she served a customer without once looking at her (an achievement) and he is still a prat.

There's no great revelation here, if that's what you're looking for. Just a woman musing out loud (musing out binary silence... screen buzzing... key tapping...?) and concluding: that most social interactions - brief and anonymous, or enduring and intimate - are battlefields; that at different times we fill different roles - prat, admirer, tome-buyer; and that maybe the roles you fill or have filled, shift in hindsight.

And maybe I just lost my touch with the grand-sounding ending - The Point you love so much. Bear with me. I'm sure I'll be able to dredge it up again.

Synecdoche Ulysses

"A book lover should never go into publishing." I have written on this theme before. Many times before. This blog is aweary of this theme, I imagine, cracking like the spine of a paperback. (I stole that quote from Italo Calvino and paraphrased the grandeur out of it.) Well, glue that spine straight, set it in a cast, cover up the cracks with a nail file and a marker... Because that book needs to carry some extra weight.

Ulysses. The James Joyce version. Epic in a different way. (And no, I'm not comparing this blog to that tome - you always get antsy right about here. I should leave the second paragraph blank, just for you .The Point? Granted, sometimes this is where The Point bares itself. But said Point defies convention! Even if its existence depends upon it.)

Back to spines and books with heavy burdens. I am not a shameless name-dropper. I own said epic. I have pried open the covers and run my forefinger beneath a page, ready to turn it over. My ownership is proclaimed with a green bookmark. I even have an opinion about the book and author. But I have started it twice and never made it past page 96.

That is not an invitation to stop reading, you. Pay attention.

My bookshelf contains some equal and some lesser tomes. Roberto Bolano's 2666, Murakami's trilogy, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, another James Meek. Most of them unread. I also have a Kindle. Ditto. A library card, with a slightly higher rate of success. But ditto. And a magazine app to which my subscriptions get delivered. And ditto.

Time. I imagine Time as my scapegoat, on a leash, trotting at my heels towards a bridge underneath which a troll lives. As I get nearer, I realise the goat is the troll, and I wake up sweating. Like most bibliophiles, I need many lifetimes to read the books I own as well as many more for those I want to read. Having nine lives, though, is as realistic as a troll on a leash. Or even just a troll, I guess.

Turn on your heel and back to my career and here we reach my standard gripe (no, this is not The Point). Who wants to dissect an object they love? Intellectually, perhaps. But physically? I spend at least seven out of my allotted nine lives grappling with that.

This blog has been as lonely as a Skeleton Coast ghost town for about two weeks. So have most of my social media accounts. (This is not how I define my life. I swear. By my scapegoat.)  I have been publishing. At silly hours. Doing silly, mindboggingly boring things. Convinced that these things, these assembled bits and pieces will change lives.

This is not just a job. This is passion - not a passion. Just, passion.

"A book lover should never go into publishing." Perhaps not. Unless there are (lucrative) career opportunities for people to read. I can think of lots of reasons to reskill, find another industry or find a wardrobe to hide in (with a book obviously). Most of those reasons are scattered in posts around this blog - many of which, I'm afraid, weren't labelled because they like the darkness of that wardrobe.

Ulysses, that big lug, is the part that best defines this whole: Do you really want to read something created by someone who doesn't think that book will change your life? Do you want to read something that you don't think will change your life?

Bibliolatry: an exploration

You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.

If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.

It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.

Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.

Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.

This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.

Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.

Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?

The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)

Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).

To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!

Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.

Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.

Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.

Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.

So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.

What next?

When I was a wee intern, I dreamed a dream. To set this dream against a dreamy background: I have always loved been possessed by worshipped books, so I skipped from school to an English literature and media degree into Publishing postgrad. I studied with the earnestness of my namesake marching into battle. (Which was how I thought one captured dreams.) Halfway through postgrad, I raised my head, threw my hand in the air and begged to be an intern. They said yes, and later would make me do jumping jacks. Lookee! We've wrapped this up in the first paragraph. Not.

Interning was a dream and now the intern had another dream. (Even if this were It, we're now in the second paragraph. Crisis avoided.)

Editor. Intern Me knew I was an Editor. Now, every person who studies a BA with any seriousness graduates in existential crisis (I have the relevant data). Who are we? Where are we? What are we? Why are we? Are we? So 'knowledge' is a misleading statement. Let's quantify it. I had done well in my editing course and often felt as though the skills were being extracted from me rather than embedded. I could spend hours gleefully editing or proofreading. I edited menus. Signs. Emails. (Still do.) I intended to be an Editor. I was Good at it.

Aside. An Editor is not someone who checks for spelling errors and punctuation. Only. We edit for sense: Is there enough groundwork leading to this concept? Do the paragraphs flow in sequence? Are there factual inaccuracies or discrepancies? Does the artwork link with the text? Is every editorial and design convention consistently applied? Does anything smell of Wikipedia? And on. The Editor's job is to take an author's work and bang it into the best it can be without changing the essence of the work. And sometimes, if the work is really bad, we just change it.

Phone calls to magazine editors, emails to reviewers, persuasive marketing copy, book launches. This publishing intern was suddenly a marketing publicity intern. Recap: Editors are by stereotype reclusive, detail-orientated, routine-bound. Publicists? I see a disco ball and it is definitely not actually in my kitchen. My first job in the industry. Trying to convince different media to review a book I hadn't read and didn't intend to. A disco ball. Then they hired a real publishing intern. (I.e. Not me.) She proofread. I called the same people I had called yesterday about a different book.

I needed a sign.

To cheer myself up (for example, after doing jumping jacks) I would: Choose a book, caress the covers (especially if there is embossing or foiling - look it up and be amazed at the things publishers could do but can't afford), open the pages to look at the typeface and smell the paper. (Yes. Smell. Like you don't have a quirk?!) I'm not decoding and cataloguing the scent like a wine drinker here, simply experiencing, but my favourites are those that remind me of reading as a young 'un. This did the trick for a while.

But it wasn't a sign.

One week, there was a company sales conference. The publisher's in-house editor (we usually outsource this work) and marketing manager were flying up from Cape Town. The editor had a 'history', the industry was all a-scandalled (as it often is); no one apart from the directors had ever seen him - only ever heard his name or received one-line emails from him; and the office thrummed in anticipation. We were ordered to make a full report to a colleague who couldn't be there. We were prepared.

We almost missed his single appearance entirely. I was publicising and my colleague next to me was selling, when my manager came out of a meeting and into her office. Straggling behind her was a man, clearly a visitor by the way he was looking up and around him. He wore a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and brown slacks, probably brown shoes. He stood, put his hands in his pocket and walked to the bookcase behind and to the side of me. My manager called his name, and he turned and spoke to her.

Ever so surreptitiously (as if there is such thing), I scanned him for intel. He looked like a bird, a wren maybe. Not that he was small - it was the way he carried himself - daintily, I suppose. He was balding, with fine brown hair that he probably just combed once a day, without any concern about his balding. His face was average: eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose. No prominent feature. Except, he looked at things.

Here was an Editor, of the Tweed variety.

I turned back to my spreadsheet but watched him from the corner of my eye as he picked up a large hardcover book from the shelf. He caressed the cover, front and back, as he eyed the title and the blurb. He unfolded it and flipped through a few pages. He didn't bother with the rest of the ritual. He leant down and smelt the pages, the book almost closed, in a V, to capture the smell. Yes! I haven't thought to tell you the importance of these details, to preserve the essence of the scent and your own nostalgia.

That was The Day I knew I was an Editor.

Everything is in flux: editing conventions change over time as someone decides that the use of 'whom' is matter of choice rather than a grammar rule; writing styles change as we react to stark melodrama of the Post-modern landscape; pop philosophy changes as someone wanders even further down the garden path. Dreams do, too. As an intern, and a young sub-editor and then project manager, I revelled in the detail as if I could control some part of the world with my red pen on a black and white page. Now a publisher, I long to manhandle concepts and leave the detail to someone else. This one though, I'm figuring out on my own.

The other side of the fence

Confess. At least every so often - I'm guessing more often that less - you wonder how you got here. 'Here' being shorthand for your life (isn't it interesting that we use a vague spatial indicator to refer to this 'thing' (again) that feels like an undiscovered dimension). I wonder why I have been so lucky (I haven't been: I have worked myself into diagnosed exhaustion and fought my way through every obstacle, with dirt and flesh under my fingernails) and why it feels like reading an autobiography and identifying with the author. Hey, but then, my brand of nihilism allows for this.

This is not actually my point now, although it makes for a meandering tangent (oxymoron intended).

My career was always meant to be enough - to be the thing that defined me and filled me and distracted me from all the pain in the world. I predicted that I would have nothing else for fear of turning around one day (unforewarned) and realising that I had nothing. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed. Now, destructively curious, I am turning around (more like turning my head cautiously so as not to alarm anything, anyone, myself) and there is... almost everything. Almost everything I had written in a list a year and a half ago in a crisis similar to this one now.

Damn right I'm watching someone else balance on this precipice! I say. You respond: but what's the problem?

Did you ever have a mantra that you leant against when life overwhelmed you because you were young and needed something? And did that mantra ever have sprout from some perceived deficiency? In other words, did you ever think you weren't 'good enough'? Urgh, you've read this story before, probably some Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque coming-of-age tale, about the misfit made hero, the duckling made swan, hopefully the damsel made the narrator of her own tale. Well, I am reading the story of my own life, so just think about it.

If you lean there long enough, you grow around the mantra, like a tree around a chainlink fence. You hold onto it just as closely as you do your fantasy of your future. Maybe the two even bond and so break each other down and so create something else, corroding, like rust on said fence. My mantra was work hard and achieve (implicitly convincing me that working is the same as being). Obvious, but not so obvious to me until I turned 16. Logic driven by emotional distress (this is why you should never send an email when angry) concluded that the only way to be whole would be to work hard. Ta-da, the secret of life!

A decade and a bit later, blah blah exhaustion. Believe it or not, this is not the problem.

Heaven help me, I have a will and a sense of determination to fuel it that need an outlet. At the risk of dissociating, my will always reminds me of those horror movies where the living dead are crushed by something and then stand back up, clicking bones back into joints. No, my will is really a Nancy Drew who wants to learn (oh, knowledge!) and keeps sneaking back into the library, perhaps because it drafted every line of the building plan.

I have seen so much and learnt so much, and can appreciate that no 'problem' is unsolvable, and that people are damaged, and who to trust and who not to, and now my life is filled with people and passions and hard-won security. I can appreciate how 'lucky' I am, even if from afar.

The problem is that I hadn't really thought further than this point. For that decade and a bit, my world has been the curling of bark around the chainlink fence. You can't chop a gap between them without damaging the tree and even if you were to separate them cleanly, there would be a gap in the tree trunk in the shape of the wire with a plaster of rust. To compound my dilemma, scrutinising and defining this isolated point of a larger system has brought me closer to myself, just not close enough.

What now? I can think of at least 50 things, but choosing one of them would mean accepting that the wire should be there, rather than accepting that it already is. Surprisingly (to me), my will wants the latter - perhaps because I want to have my own story and perhaps because I have tried a few of the 50 things and the latter seems like a greater challenge. (Discarding the metaphor now - can you see in the previous paragraph how it started to blur - and that that is the point - that it cannot move and it cannot change and it is but a tool of dissociation.)

I have already chosen: to 'pull myself toward myself' and with arms accordingly folded around myself slowly stand and scrutinise the world around me rather than scrutinising my huddled self with the world's eyes. Confession made, liturgy recited from behind a veiled screen (what that makes you, you'll have to figure out), and as I leave I wonder why I am confessing that which is not a sin. Why I asked you to confess, whether you heard my instruction and sat yourself on the other side in the confessional, or heard it, held my hand and let me talk it out, or heard it and had heard enough and walked away.

Who are we saving? And from what?

My friend has a gently expanding house cat. She hates to be held, but has no choice when you hug her close. Said cat is on a diet. A diet is worthless without exercise (even the diet pill companies are forced to admit this), but she has never been outside. Imagine that. Never knowing there was an outside. Now, he has a leash that straps around her back and tummy so that he can walk her around the complex. She submits to the servitude, but then believes she is unable to walk. She has to be dragged around like a sled. Take the leash off and away she goes.

She believes she cannot walk, perhaps because when you hold her she is helpless. Maybe. This is common, apparently - there are pictures all over the internet. I have not tried this with my two, because I am convinced I will not be able to walk afterwards.

I have just returned from Namibia, travelling around primary schools from Windhoek to Ondangwa, about 14 hours by car. I went in with certain assumptions that guided the questions I was going to ask: What resources do you need? How do we manage large classes? What level of visual literacy do the learners have?

I came out with fewer assumptions. Now, you know, regular reader, that I am conscious of the politics of representation, even in the way one views another person, on a daily basis. I despise the way tourism turns culture into curiosities that ultimately convince us of the superiority of our societies and amenities. 'Can you believe they live without toilets? Poor things,' says a woman to her husband. 'They believe in an omnipotent praying mantis,' sniggers her child. I know what I feel is not that.

The types of people I met on my travels (on- and off-road) were as varied as our own neighbours. Some were wary, some were disdainful, others judged me believing I was judging them, and others were unbelievably kind. The children were mostly amused by my skin colour and by my inability to understand their language - I'm pretty sure the learners of one class were tricking me by saying rude words when I asked questions.

Sometimes in publishing we think we are 'saving' the children (or 'empowering' them, we say, nodding at our own altruism). Those children do not need saving. I'd argue that they don't need empowering except in the eradication of the belief that they need to be empowered. That they are somehow lacking something that we have. The people I saw were self-sufficient. They have honed their skills, making them marketable and profitable. So we judge them because they don't bow before the altar of commercialism? Because they don't have toilets?

Without ever once venturing beyond our television sets, we proclaim our liberalism, our belief in the value of diverse cultures. What we are really doing is cataloguing the ethnological differences between other cultures and ourselves, creating an 'us' and 'them' where we invariably come out on top. Or we talk about the 'noble savage', about the simple life living in communion with the earth. Please, let's not impose our complexity on these poor souls!

I respect the people that I saw and their lives, knowing that I was creating my own story about them. Driving out of the last school, along a dirt track, past village upon village and young children shepherding animals, all I could think was that those children have skills and knowledge. By seating them in those classrooms, we convince them they know nothing. Teachers complain about the lack of resources when all I saw were the rich resources they were already using: language, the feedback of the learners' peers, learners' own pictures of different concepts. The rich resources they could use: number lines of string, clips and numbered paper; numbering the desks; numbering the learners; the structures of the learners' first languages.

If a learner can identify a tree in the yard under which they play and its structures, they can understand photosynthesis. If they notice the sand beneath their feet and how they pile the grains into heaps, they can understand atoms and elements. Together with their community, they can build structures of mud and thatch. They can even build multi-roomed houses with bricks. Then surely they can understand almost any structure, wherever it appears.

Who exactly do we believe we are saving? Who exactly are we empowering and to do what? As I see it, the more we do this, the more we tighten the leash around these people's backs.

So let me tell you my vision for education: To strengthen the sense of value in at least one learner's own skills, in their environments, in their communities. To allow them to tell their own stories. To identify the genuine needs in a community and to plug those holes themselves. In a community such as my urban one, to see one person see the value in the ramshackle structure they build of found materials. A person doesn't perceive their own value when 'we' save 'them'; it happens when I respect you and vice versa.

Drag races in my mind

Thoughts are screaming through my mind, like racing cars on a bridge, weaving and jostling and breaking the rules without appearing to break the rules, and every so often one spins from the edge (because there are no barriers made of tyres - this is not mere sport) and disappears. Except, no wait, it doesn't disappear because my mind appears to be infinite, so it just spins around, bumping into other bridges and scraping pieces of cement and steel from the supports.

There you have it, folks, another crisis. Long overdue, really, like the shifting of the poles. What the doomsayers don't tell you is that we will survive the changes in magnetic fields, because we are resourceful (and annoying) creatures, although this is based on the evidence of blockbuster movies, where we annihilate the aliens - and I suspect that half the time we don't even know how we did it.

(Afraid of water? Really? Build a suit of armour. A wetsuit. Coat yourselves in Vaseline. I suspect that really these aliens figured out how dumb and superstitious we are and figured it was something in the air. And since they hadn't thought to build a suit of armour etc, and probably had no way to test the air to come to a definitive conclusion, they therefore could not afford to lose what brain cells they have left.)

My point is this won't destroy me - but don't tell me it will make me stronger.

To interrupt, and really to prove my point - Interception. Brilliant movie that set my little dinkie cars off on my Lego bridge (circular pun). But the scene where the merry band of blackmailers run from a pursuing band of snowsuit-clad symbols of the subconscious - don't make me laugh. I have had a few encounters with my subconscious and, trust me, its minions certainly don't run around in furry white suits on a snowy holiday.

There are no metaphors for the pain and suffering this force that we live with every day can and routinely does enforce. In fact, chances are you would be the tool of your own torture, so that it wouldn't have to waste time on more dumb creatures - guarding the one it has is probably punishment enough.

My furry pursuers and I have reached a truce, an equitable one. The alternative is pain and suffering in the form of an eternal crisis. This way I only have intermittent ones. Hurrah. But no, these crises are now a bonding experience. Hurrah.

I know where this crisis has come from. I don't like to stand still. My past might catch up. I am in charge of a humongous project, in a job I enjoy, in a company I like, with colleagues I respect. That sounds like a stimulating challenge, right, that doesn't leave much time for boredom. My past is 1 400 km away and for the time being staying put. But I am bored. Which does not imply I want to leave my job. On the contrary.

I am difficult to manage. I am high maintenance. (Don't patronise me by pretending to be surprised.) But I have an insatiable appetite for learning. (This is the basis on which my subconscious and I have bonded so that we are no longer separate entities.) I need to be pushed, incessantly. I need someone to stand there with a stick and an ice pack, and I can't do it on my own because then the stick turns into a cat o' nine tails and the ice pack into the bloodied rags of a damp face cloth.

The usual solutions have made an appearance on the bridge and have one by one been mown down except the last: travelling, Master's, novel. But even this one doesn't quite soothe the bruising. For the time being, I am battling the urge to run by doing the things I had forgotten I liked: making things, drawing, gardening, mothering every living thing in sight (including geckos).

And writing. Hello regular blog postings and appearances on various social media.

Maybe it's ok for there to be drag races on the bridges that connect one roiling island of my mind to another. Something like the progressive levels of the Nordic spiritual plane. I like that metaphor. I might pin it up somewhere. So maybe the furry snow riders aren't pursuing. Maybe they are shepherding.

On library cards

I think I have posted something similar before... or maybe I just meant to. I have visited The Library, religiously, every second or third Saturday since I was in Grade 2. As friends and readers may know, a 'little birdie' broke into our house one night and flew away with our TV. 'What will these children do without a TV?' my parents wondered.

'Read!' they shouted in unison. (No, not really. I don't how the conversation really went.)

The next morning we were surrounded by books in waist-high (my seven-year-old waist), horizontal bookshelves. This experience meant little to me at the time, mostly because what I knew about reading was Johnny and Mary going to town, spewing rhyming non sequiturs, depicted as children in 'sensible clothes' prancing around.

We were given barcoded cards, but the entry into the system was still done with cards placed inside the books when shelved and removed when they were taken out. (Yes, I am that ancient. I learnt to use a computer on MS Dos.)

The first book we took out on our first library cards was a picture book featuring crocodiles. Each page was filled with jungle scenes and crocodiles and tiny creatures to find - a mouse under a fern, a bird in a nest... We (my sister and I) took this book out every few weeks, until my mother insisted I was too old for it. I continued to take it out as a show of autonomy.

It all steamrolled from there. Soon I was reading my complement of books (three), plus two on my mother's card, in a week. I would finish at least one of these books that same Saturday. I would hide a book under my pillow and either hold it at an angle to catch the light from the passage or sit in the light that fell in through my open doorway with one ear cocked for the sounds of my parents going to sleep. I was never very good at pretending to be asleep when they checked in on me though.

In my defense (and that of my shortsightedness), I was never one of those children who fall asleep quickly. I could lie there for hours and hours and hours staring into the dark and imagining what the witch under my bed was planning to do to my toes and what I would do without toes, so why not make better use of my time - and imagination?

By Grade 8, I had the reading level of a Grade 12 - after which, I confess, my reading habit took a brief nosedive. I had read all the books in the children's and young adults' section, but wasn't quite ready for the adults' section (no below-the-belt humour intended). My world righted itself in Grade 10, though.

Predictably, I took English Literature as one of my undergraduate majors, and fell in love repeatedly. During my holidays from prescribed reading, I consumed everything I could find in the library by the author I was then enamoured with: Toni Morrison, Rebecca West, Henry James, EM Forster, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zakes Mda... In my third year, I got a job as a bookseller, so now I could take five books from the library, three books on apro from the shop and buy books at two-thirds of the retail price.

If I sound as though I've read a ton of books, that's why. Note: trade publishers also give booksellers complimentary/advance copies twice a year.

By turns, I have worked as a book reviewer, publicist, editor and publisher, all of which, my friends, equals (yes) more free and discounted books. As you can imagine I have towers of the things, mostly in boxes at my mom's house, which amounts to a good few years-of-reading's worth. Still, I visit the library every second Saturday and/or Wednesday. I never take less than my full allocation and, no, I don't read them all, but I get to look at them for two weeks.

This week's view

This post was supposed to about the Cape Town Central Library, which has become My Library because of the range of books, the architecture and mass of books. This library is where I go when I need some reassurance. It's my rabbit hole. There are bookshelves around you, above you and in little rooms to the side... I can breathe there.

Sadly, I do not have the guts to delete this entire post and begin again. So perhaps those of you in the city should just take a gander instead.

PS. The library card is free, and you can take out seven books (I squealed out loud when the librarian told me) for two weeks and renew them twice - and then take them out as new books again! And the card works in any of the municipal libraries, so you just check online which library has the book you're looking for and pick it up. Really, why are you still in front of your computer?

Just a glimpse

Normally, I don't like taking or sharing photographs - why replace the moment with a record of it? Isn't that the function of memory? Granted, memories shift every time you recall - or don't - recall them, but isn't that the fun of it - that your memory is actually dependant on the present and the present's plan's for the future? That it captures who you are, now and then? Yes, yes, all representation is subject to interpretation blah blah. But to some degree, a photo is static. If a doorway is blue, it will always be blue - well, until the photo fades - when your memory can repaint it brown or red...

Representations will always be less than experience (says the woman who doubts everything, who lives almost entirely in her head, and who thinks we could be simulations and still be happy - which is actually compatible if you think about it).

Having said this, here is a glimpse into my life, of literature and writing:

My writing and reading spot. A wild garden, a filled-in well, sunlight and a blanket.

The reads sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for the perfect moment to be read. Every book has a perfect moment and I can tell you exactly when and where and why I adopted every one of them.

Nice to meet you

By way of introduction let me tell you that today I am an editor and proofreader moonlighting as a writer and a bookseller. I am also, on other days, a writer moonlighting as an editor, proofreader and bookseller. I am never a bookseller moonlighting as anything, although I also volunteer at the zoo as a tour guide.

Actually, scrap that. Let me instead introduce myself as a book lover, a bibliophile, a lover of language. I am this every day, although today, for the first time, I had my doubts. I wondered whether I truly loved books or whether I was just hiding behind something. And that was how I knew I was a true bibliophile, because we are always poking holes in things, searching for enlightenment, and never content.

It bothers me that people do not know these things about me. That someone can walk up to the counter in the bookshop and tell me emphatically that I should read the Da Vinci Code when I know I am not that reader, one that would enjoy that book. And that, when I tell someone I am writing a novel, they imagine a certain kind of novel, which I would never write. Even my friends often do not know these things about me, but I hope they have an inkling.

So now, in conclusion, let me tell you that I am moonlighting on my life, but that I have no other way to be.