Oprah Interview With Cormac McCarthy (VIDEO)

I read 'The Road' and was inspired pretty early on to write two books of my own, one, HOLIDAY (published on this blog) and another that I'm still working on, called FIRE, ICE AND THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Click on the tags below this post to link to those posts on this blog.

Amazon Kindle: The Future Minus Paper (review)

E-books are the future. Apparently there is some miscommunication going on and some are under the impression that I think e-books are not the future. I, like many others, enjoy the real thing. There’s just something comforting about having a paper book to carry around, to bunny ear, scratch notes on, highlight words/phrases and whatever else you may like to do. The refresh rates suck and you just want to pull your hair out while waiting for the next page to load. You don’t know how far along you are in the book. Those are just a couple reasons among a slew of arguments to hate e-books. Although, part of me thinks it’s a waste of resources even if it’s made from recycled paper.

Traditional books have their pros and cons, but e-books are just janky and stupid, right? Well, yes, they are, but the Kindle from Amazon is a different beast.

My initial impressions were pretty off. I just wasn’t all that impressed and sort of left it on my desk for half a day, but I always want to floss the latest in technology when traveling so I brought it along for my trip to the Bay Area for turkey day.

More.

NVDL: These gizmos will also made it easier for undiscovered Nobel prize winning candidates - er, like me - getting their fiction work published online, beyond this blog.

The Winter of our Discontent (PHOTOGRAPHY)

The past 10 days or so have been interesting, to say the very least. I've basically looked at narcism* at family level, and have come to realise this is a central barometer to use when gauging balance, mental stability and all the rest. Because to what degree do we love ourselves more or less than we ought to? It is from our parents that we learn what level of narcism is reasonable. If they have given us the gift of teaching us to value ourselves and others in an appropriate fashion (and who can say what is appropriate?) then our narcism ought to be appropriate.

I believe narcism is behind all the great good and evil that exists in the world. Isn't Oprah's appreciation for her own existence and survival evidence of a healthy narcism, and one that spills over into a love of the world. Doesn't she still aspire to be loved and accepted as she reaches out to love and accept the world (but never completely endorses either the world or herself).

So understanding narcism is a great place to start, I feel, a New Year. In essence, the world is sick from its obsessive narcism. We're crying out for love, and getting satisfaction in all the wrong places. In the end, we need the quiet luxury of someone close to us, that listens and understands, but also the discipline from mutual boundary setting. But it is intimacy, community and fellowship that we thirst for the most. Do we get these at work, at home, in the fragments of time we have for our friends? No.



It is in the misty and amorphous world, incomplete and imperfect that we have to search for meaning, and fragments of perfection. There is still tremendous beauty in the world. It is tragic at the same time. I have seen young children and teenagers during this festive season, and I am appalled to what extent they are neglected, but also assailed by an enormous range of forces we knew nothing about at their age. Cellphones are an important device for deception, the internet, especially Facebook, a useful way to forge invisible networks. But do these young human beings ever learn to make emotional connections, to have meaningful and constructive conversations. So much of the time young people are elsewhere: escaping reality by having virtual conversations that are almost always anywhere but here.




During the festive season I had an incredible cycle on Christmas Day. I rose at around 5am and went with Alex through absolutely deserted and flat streets in and around Bloem. The weather was steamy hot, and wet. My throat itched and after 1 90km ride too many, the itchiness got worse and became an infection. Despite this Christmas was touching, with our family providing a cornerstone for others to warm themselves. Dinner was delicious and bountiful, and tinged with wine and lots of laughter.

Despite the headlines and the weather, I believe we can thrive this year. We can thrive by the way we live, by exercising and eating properly. We can also thrive by being good neighbors, by investing in our relationships, but being connected. And we can thrive by being imaginative. Laughing is a way to cope, so is crying - which do you prefer?

Laughing doesn't mean not thinking critically about important issues. One of them is happening right here in our country. It is no small scam either. Zuma has made his intentions clear when he said in an opening address that he supported Mbeki's spineless approach to Mugabe/Zimbabwe. In other words, he supports the parasitism, nepotism and egotistical leadership that leads to very few benefiting at the expense of the very many. As I said in the epilogue to the last David Bullard interview, are we really so naive, and so lazy, to lie down and let what is ours be taken away from us? I hope we in Africa - especially South Africa - are all smarter than that by now.

For myself I anticipate tough decisions, including whether or not to get married, to buy a house, to do the Ironman. But I am also excited. I see more mainstream contributions in 2008 (written and photographic), and some new projects besides. I've become incredibly motivated to perform at a high level physically and intellectually, and I'm recognising a strong need to reconnect to Nature. I anticipate doing the 1000km ride to Plettenberg Bay in March/April, the Argus obviously. I want to quietly go into the pristine places (Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia) and generally explore new environments. This is a spiritual journey.

I see Fire and Ice being finished by Winter this year, a second Photographic Exhibition (featuring People and Water), and a strong surge in creative experimentation.

Above all I appreciate the value of good relationships. Whatever the weather we can make our lives a lot easier for ourselves and each other if we learn to live with one another better. I'd like to encourage everyone who reads this blog to make 2008 the year we begin to really be good neighbors, because we're going to need each other more and more.


*1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4. The attribute of the human psyche charactized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.

Fire, Ice and the Whole Wide World

The story of the end of our world

"You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow" - Cormac McCarthy

Dawn

The fire of the sun rose fresh, its flames cutting sharp shards of white glass through the rain drenched air, filling the sweeping, flooding, turning river with blinding light. Luc van Lierde sat inside the cave, clinging to blankets, the soft gray feathers of coals a cool cushion in the dark corner behind his head. Light bounced off the waters, playing against the mountainside, sending splinters into the cave. He lay there, eyes closed, but wide awake. Cold. Thinking.
An hour later he was pulling on his trousers: camouflaged cargo pants. A brown sweat and dirt stained long sleeve shirt. He was cold, so he draped a dirty gray blanket around him. The light blinded him. His face and eyes pained in the cold and powerful light.
The habit was set. He emerged slowly, carefully. For long entire minutes, his gray green eyes trained over the glistening wet mountainside. He emerged very slowly and sat beside a withered bush that bounced and scratched beside him against the light and the dry cold wind.

Luc remained there a long time, unfocussing his eyes so as to pick up movement, a flash of metal or glass above the shimmering spectacle of water.
Below him the Moordenaarskuil River had become a monster that had devastated, like so many other once natural, once benign features, the surrounding landscape. Though it flowed swiftly like a super river, something as large and powerful as the Amazon, or Ganges, it was a deadly torrent filled with debris, and while he watched, distant trees fell silently into the maelstrom, and small cakes of hillside slipped into the water.

After an hour crouching, he moved carefully along a contour, a few short movements, then a few more, sticking low to the ground. He moved to the shoulder of Botlierskop, a pyramidal shaped hill protruding oddly out of the centre of an otherwise broad and now completely submerged valley, its strange steep slopes contrasting with the even and gradual sinking of other folded mountains. He glanced over the shoulder towards Mossel Bay. It was not easy to tell where the sea ended and the new enormous lagoon began. He tried to make out a single intact colored rectangle – which might be a distant house – but he knew it was silliness.
Emerging from the aircraft, he remembered, driving along the highway, they had seen the water. And the next day, finally, houses had started to rip, one by one,more and more, from their foundations like corn from a cob. The wind and the water raged from on and on, as Nature’s Infinite Fury was unleashed here also.
Roads were awash, the sky was a waterfall, people locked hands and the long human snake made towards higher ground. They had been tens, hundreds, and the rain just kept coming down. More and more were swept away. Then they had tried to save each other.

He noticed a small movement. He blinked. His eyes swiveled left and right.
His eyelids narrowed.
A young man, a teenager, seeing him now, turned tail and sprinted down the hillside, leaping to a boulder, and then disappearing. A branch wagged erratically, like a skeletal hand, as if to remind Luc where the young man had gone.

Luc’s left hand balled slowly into a fist. He allowed himself to breathe. The other, a scarred right hand gripped the cool wet edge of limestone outcrop. Pebbles crunched a small biscuit noise as he turned, still crouching, and skulked back to the cave. He made straight for a particular nook, and drove his fingers into a small crevice he’d excavated. He withdrew a spear, a dagger and a small leather satchel. Weaponised, he returned stealthily to his previous position.

He did not need to wait long before a head popped up quickly behind a distant rock two hundreds metres below his position. He allowed himself four small nods, the resolve hardening in him. Yes, it was as he had feared. But this was not the first time, and it would not be the last. Someone else knew about his shelter. He did not have to fear monkeys or rabbits or rats. He had to face, today, this morning, the most dangerous predator of all: a human being.

Next: The Hunt