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Saturday, January 7, 2012

In The Blood

I never knew my paternal grandfather. I have a photo, somewhere, of him holding me when I was a few months hold, but sadly, I remember the onesie I was wearing at the time better than I do him.

The one thing I do know about him is that he was a writer. Poetry, mostly. A collection of his poems were compiled by someone in my dad's family and bound, a handful of copies that were given to members of the Jamneck family. Some years ago, I think when my dad finally started believing that I actually wanted to be a writer and it wasn't just a phase, he gave me his bound copy of my grandfather's poems. I've been carrying it around with me ever since, but it always remains hidden away, in a box somewhere because I am paranoid about something happening to it in between the frequent moving that comes with not owning your own house. The promise is that, once I sign a deed, the copy will come out and onto the bookshelf.

In the last couple of years, however, my uncle has been working on getting my grandfather's poetry out to a wider audience. He has finally collected most of the poetry together on a site, called Leopold Jamneck - Verses

The poems were written in Afrikaans and English. My grandfather had tried to get his poetry published, but he had been turned down by at least two publishers in the Apartheid era because of the anti-Apartheid stance of his work.

My grandfather's work has allowed me, in a way that is very personal to me, to be able to connect to him, even if we never knew one another. I am somehow always a little surprised by the spiritual nature of some of his poems. I have no idea why. Maybe because I see something of myself, of my own thoughts in his work. Maybe the surprise is actually a buffer for the disappointment I feel at never having known this other writer in my family. I'm sorry I never got to know him better, because I think we would have had some interesting conversations. I think I might have been able to talk to him about things I struggled with when I was young, things that I felt I couldn't talk to other people about simply because they were part of the status quo.

Here's to meeting you in another life, oupa.


"Many people want white supremacy;
I ask for the supremacy of Love.
Many preachers say we have three foes to renounce –
the Devil, the World and the Flesh.
But let me remind them that the Devil is within Man
and I have been told to love my fellow-man."
                                                                                             -- Leopold Jamneck

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Happy New Year!

...and that's the last time I m going to say it, because really, once is enough.

I'm not quite sure what to expect of 2012. Last year was a bit of a banger, literally, particularly with the planet going wild on the natural front. It's been raining in Auckland for the past few days and muggy as hell, so I can't really get away from the fact that La NiƱa is going to continue being a bitch as we proceed into the future.
(CHINA and AMERICA take note)

In two months my thesis has to be finished. I'm feeling unnervingly calm about it at this stage. I've just passed the 30K mark of what needs to be a 40K document, and that's excluding the intro and conclusion. I need to tighten and firmly establish my argument however, because though I know what I'm writing about, I need to make sure others will find it illuminating rather than confusing. Ladida. Such is the nature of writing on the ambiguity of language, which inherently falls short of communicating emotional experience. Humanities - there's nothing humane about it.

[Lordie, thank you, the fireworks have stopped. Cats are both asleep, though the eldest was back chatting me earlier because I wouldn't let her out.]

So, with the thesis ending, I can finally direct all my energies at THE BOOK. It's practically all there, it just needs to be written. I have applied for a tutoring position in the first trimester at AU again, so fingers crossed. I have one or other two things up my sleeve, but don't want to let the cat(s) out the bag just yet.

Idea for a story brewing after watching a BBC doco about the 16th Century British pagans and their beliefs about fairies. You thought the old "make a witch float" theory was brutal? Meh. Fairies were where it was at, bro.

And so, let's not forget that it is finally 2012. I am apprehensively looking forward to sitting back and watching all the banana-batshit-crazy that people are going to come up with in their preparations for the end of the world. Word up, peeps, if it was going to be a black hole, we would be gone-burgers by now.

I wonder if people would have learned anything from the failed appearance of the Rapture last year. All I know is that somewhere there are Mayans sitting around a fire, LMAO.