A little box was delivered to my house today: a box of (spoken in hushed whisper) sex toys.

I’ve been writing a piece about subscription services for Good Taste Magazine’s blog (read it here). As many of you know, I’m no stranger to subscription services. I co-founded one with my brilliant business partner-in-crime, Jane Holdcroft, called Lucky Dog Gift Services. I’ve always been fascinated with this online shopping model, and writing about it was the logical next step.

Thanks to Lucky Dog, Zach and Kea, my two dogs, believe that all gift boxes belong to them. When Health Box arrived, the two errant hounds assisted with the opening of the box and Zach carried off a packet of health crunchies. Kea inspected the rubber theraband for toy potential. The two were appalled that this box was not intended for dogs. On the other hand, the humans in the house were thrilled by the size of the box and its quality content.

Of course, the dogs believe that Health Box was a glitch in the muttrix. So when Foxy Box arrived, they couldn’t wait to get stuck in. I have been mugged by wet noses and doggy drool from the front door to my spot at the kitchen table.

And here I sit, with the small black and white box in front of me. Kea stands expectantly at my side, while Zach lifts a paw, hoping for a treat.

Foxy Box is South Africa’s first gift box subscription geared for the adult market. Members receive a discreet box of intimate products on a monthly basis. The aim, according Foxy Box, is to “empower couples and individuals in their sexuality”. No need to repeat myself though – head over to The Good Taste blog to read more about it.

Here follows though the “tale of the opening”:

Pink tissue paper sealed with a circular Foxy Box sticker conceals the items inside. I carefully peel this off and peek inside. I find a Pina Colada flavoured lubricant from Durex, Pjur Personal Cleaning Fleece and a range of silicone shapes closely resembling the fauna and flora of a Mexican desert. The cactus, the desert cottontail rabbit, a single-stemmed euphorbia-type plant (later to be identified as The Anal Plug).

Kea, the golden retriever, is now resting her head on my knee, gazing at me with those plaintive brown eyes. She senses toys. She assumes they are for her.

“Kea, out!”

What? This is absurd! Zach offers me his most disdainful expression and lopes out of the kitchen. Kea retreats under the table (her version of out).

I search the box for instructions. Inside a small black bag are: batteries, a chrome and black capsule and a pamphlet. Instructions!? Alas, no.

The pamphlet details in 8 languages Vibrator Care Instructions, Battery Care Instructions and Warnings. There’s one in particular that I find odd: “Do not use on unexplained calf pain”.

Firstly, the calf is quite far down south from the intended area of use (aka The Vagina). Secondly, and possibly more bizarre, at some point in R&D, someone must have actually used it on an unexplained calf pain causing a severe enough reaction to warrant placing this useful piece of advice on the warning label. Now that’s just odd.

Following the instructions, I insert batteries into the silver capsule. At least now I know that these toys are a set of mini vibrators, and not Arizona desert finger puppets given a Vegas facelift (think purple silicone minus the bright lights and you’re on the right track). But what do they do and where do they go?

Mr Sanchez, my husband, arrives home.

“Google will know,” he says wisely, pointing out that the euphorbia looks a lot like an anal plug. I eye him suspiciously wondering how he knows this.

I consult The Oracle. Within seconds I’m wading through a plethora of adult toys sold online and the silicone euphorbia is forgotten. My god, I think, this is bigger business than dog toys! Goodbye Lucky Dog and hello Lucky Lady!

An email pings into my inbox. It’s from Foxy Box. Finally, instructions for the Mini Couples 4Play Kit, formerly known as desert finger puppets.

“The cactus is not a cactus after all, “ I say to Mr Sanchez, who is standing behind me with a rabbit on his finger. “And that bunny apparently does things no rabbit should have to see.”

Mr Sanchez removes the rabbit from his finger.

I go on, “…and this nubby sleeve goes around–“

Mr Sanchez clears his throat. “Fancy an early night?”

And that, dear readers, is the point at which we must retire this story to the bedroom with our Fantastic Mr (Foxy) Box and close the door.

If you feel left out, you should sign up at www.foxybox.co.za for your very own box.

The post Fantastic Mr Box appeared first on writerepublic.

I was asked to give a talk to the African Impact team about The Underdog Project and our Charity Ride held in 2012. I spoke about the impact the individuals can have on our communities, touching on clicktivism, slacktivism and riding for the Underdog.

So without further ado…

Two years ago in April, I asked a question that would change the course of my life quite significantly.

I was chatting with a friend and animal behaviourist, Gill. She’d just finished assessing my sister’s new rescue puppy to advise on his resource guarding and separation anxiety. An idea has been swirling in my head for a couple of days, and I needed to let it out for some air.

Can we help troubled teens by teaching them to train shelter dogs? I asked.

In the informal and by no means momentous conversation that followed, The Underdog Project was born. It took me 4 months to assemble a small team and plan and implement a project that had up until then never been run in South Africa: an animal assisted therapy course that uses dog training to bring together and help troubled teens and shelter dogs.

The Underdog Project works with at-risk high school learners who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and have been identified by teachers or counselors as struggling socially, emotionally or academically.

We use a combination of dog training activities and life skills workshops, to engage with and motivate teens – and to help find shelter dogs homes. So the formula benefits two sets of underdogs.

Underdog harnesses the therapeutic power of animals and tackles social and emotional problems in an experiential and indirect way. This is called non-invasive therapy.

Up to this point, where I’m standing here speaking to you, has not been without challenges. Sometimes the best intentions can be lost in a quagmire of administrative duties related to running an above-board Non-profit Organisation, the politics of social welfare, an absence of funding and the extreme disadvantage of our poorer communities and schools.

Yet here I am today, to tell you a story that will hopefully inspire you to take risks, and empower you to become agents of change. I’m going to tell you a story about an individual who was compelled to step into the limelight and help our small organization. I’m going to tell you the story of a real-life champion of underdogs.

The Preface

Over the last few years there’s been a lot of talk about the power of crowds. From crowdfunding and crowd sourcing to flash mobs, the crowd has muscled its way into the spotlight.

Pair mobile technology with social networks like facebook and twitter, and the crowd is transformed into a magnificent engine of change.

Whether funding innovative new inventions and small private enterprises, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo are doing, or crowdfunding alternative technologies such as what Sunfunder is doing in Africa, crowds are being pooled together to help inspired ideas or ideals take shape.

Organisations like Avaaz and Change.org are driving social change online, using the collective power of mass votes to fuel social action.

The term clicktivism has mainstreamed.

Clicktivism is the harnessing of digital media, including social media and other online media, to facilitate social change and activism.

But this is where I find it gets really interesting. For the most part, clicktivism is a singularly individual activity. You and I are the owners of this hand that clicks our support, financial or emotional, of various campaigns.

We sit behind a desk, isolated from the very crowd that we are clicking to join.

Tech writer and theorist Evgeny Morozom calls it “Slacktivism”  he says it is: “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture” he writes “if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space?”

So in this tech-dominated world of ours we have two kinds of change makers:

On the one hand we have the crowd and its potential to pool collective ideals and globalize change.

The crowd is made up of clicktivists who each have the power to be a change maker, yet are quite disconnected from the actual mechanics of change and social interventions.  To the point that a term like slacktivism has attached itself to the body of online activism like a suckerfish to a shark.

And on the other hand you have the individual. It’s this other hand that really interests me. This is where you and I operate – the individuals, the mavericks, the underdogs. With all the attention shifted to the crowd, one runs the risk of forgetting the individuals actively involved on ground level.

Carl Jung writes that “The essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.”

From my experience individuals can be the unassuming, unexpected incubators of change. And this is where my story starts.

Charity Ride story

On the 13th of August last year, I received an email from a man called Leon Crous.

“Dear Jenna and the Underdog Team,” he wrote, “I’m in the planning stages of a motorcycle trip to raise awareness for a charity organisation.”

The trip Leon explained, would be “a gesture of uniting the Western Cape Province for a cause.” Leon invited the Underdog Project to be the charity beneficiary of the campaign.

Leon’s email came at a difficult time. With no funding to employ any staff, and very few volunteers, by August last year, Underdog Project was stretched to capacity.

I was responsible for every aspect of the organization, from running its bookkeeping, marketing and PR, project management, volunteer coordination, fundraising and facilitation of each course. Our trainers and therapists came when they could, and the rest relied on volunteers who were also juggling their precious time to help us out.

So I had reservations. If I accepted Leon’s invitation to be a part of this bike ride, what would it entail? What did he want from us? How much more time and how much more money would I have to give? These are questions one learns to ask as an NPO.

I invited Leon to meet with me at DARG, the shelter out of which we were operating. He happened to arrive on our most difficult day – to meet the  youngest Underdogs we’d ever accepted onto the course. Abused and neglected children in the care of SA Children’s Home ranging from 6 to 10 years old. Not being familiar with this age group, we gave each of them a dog to handle. For the record, I am proud to say that it was remarkably less chaotic than it should have been. But no training was happening and no troubled teens were present.

I wondered what Leon would make of our motley crew rounding up dogs and children with attention spans of 30 seconds and less.

I pictured a leather-clad motorcyclist with a big beard and a big personality, overbearing and extroverted. Leon was the complete opposite. Apart from lacking in beard, he was quiet and stoic.  We hovered in the passageway of the kennels, our conversation drowned out by barking dogs around us.

But there was something about Leon that struck me: he’d made a decision. He’d stepped out from his everyday life and planted himself midstream. He was going to change the current and nothing was going to stop him. I was sold.

Perhaps this is the measure of a change-maker. The inner workings: courage, determination and the confidence to follow through.

Which is exactly what he did.

In November last year, motorcycle enthusiast and passionate animal lover, Leon, hit the roads of the Western Cape, riding for The Underdog Project.

Both Leon and I believed that by encouraging animal shelters to work together and learn from each other our organisations could be powerful vehicles of change and transformation in our communities.

The Underdog Charity Ride was a way of sharing this message. Over 6 days and some 3000 kilometers, Leon visited 20 animal shelters highlighting their needs, and raising funds and awareness for them and The Underdog Project.

Together we marketed the campaign and promoted it on our social networks. The idea was to “sell” kilometres, to get businesses on board to sponsor different parts of the bike and then to get other sponsors to donate goods to shelters along the way. It was an ambitious goal, but Leon never gave up, and I never once doubted he could do it.

Leon raised close to R40,000 from just one ride. But more importantly he forged connections with other shelters and fosters, and inspired them to look at their dogs not only as victims, but as four-legged therapists with the power to really change lives for the better.

Underdog seeds have been sown. And already we are seeing some shoots emerge. Oudtshoorn SPCA is actively setting up an Underdog Project. We’ve had requests from Kayamandi in Stellenbosch to help set up a programme there.

And all it took was one man, with a sense of adventure and a social conscience.

Just one person.

George Eliot (or Mary Anne Evans as she was in real life) wrote that “The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.”

I asked Leon what his message would be to people wanting to make a difference and this is what he said:

“If you have that hunger to do something to make a difference somewhere in the world, you don’t have to have all the facts at first, nor does it matter how small your contribution will be, you have to act on it and find a cause that speaks to your heart. Trust your instincts and go for it!”

My challenge to you today is to carry on with your amazing work – go out there and inspire individuals to use their ingenuity and make change happen.

Show them that with
♣    Trust
♣    Determination and
♣    Optimism

Anything can be achieved.

Your power to change the world around you rests in your self-belief, your ability to set goals and work towards them, and your belief in other people

Your belief in the Underdogs.

The post Crowd vs. Individual – where does change happen? appeared first on writerepublic.

From Woman Unfolding

Navigation

Your body is my country.
In the familiar borders of your provinces
navigating roads across your contours
I know I am home.

Your shoulders are the Karoo.
Fine fynbos hairs break the surface
against my cheek, I inhale
dust and dry riverbeds.
Your ground is covered in spoor.
A lonely korhaan stokstil,
clicks and shrills,
splitting your stillness.

Your back is the Breede River.
I finger each vertebra
searching for your source.

I survey your horizon.
Two roads stretch out
spun with veins to guide me,
scars to signpost the way.

South, below your stomach,
so many paths
thick and forested.
I track your caves, your mountains
lose myself in the peaks,
Marble Baths of your skin.

Your skin is a night sky
I follow the stars to your face.

The post A Love Poem appeared first on writerepublic.

I don’t take part in chain mail (and nor should you), but with this Next Big Thing doing the rounds on the blogosphere, I have decided to break my own rules. I hold Tiah Marie Beautement entirely responsible for my deviation from the norm and resurrection of my blog. Witty and talented, she’s the author of the novel Moons Don’t Go to Venus. Shorter works have appeared in various publications, including two anthologies: The Edge of Things and Wisdom Has a Voice. Read Tiah’s Next Small Thing here. She calls it a small thing. Personally I think her small thing is a rather big thing indeed and I’d love to read it one day. Fingers crossed!

—

Now, onto mine…

What is the working title of your book?

Perfect Worlds

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Probably from watching way too much science fiction.

What genre does your book fall under?

Science fiction, maybe cyberpunk or slipstream? I’ll let you know when it’s finished.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Antonia Laura Thomas (from Misfits) would be a great fit for my protagonist, minus the British accent. Actually this question has inspired me to write in a part for a bare-chested Vin Diesel. That solves my chapter 9 dilemma…

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When bounty hunter, Zah, uploads into Perfect Worlds to investigate a series of violent hate crimes, she finds herself trapped in a virtual underworld where the boundary between real and unreal has blurred and she must fight to stay alive.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

My dog has promised to publish it.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m a slow baker. This story started as a short story and I’m currently turning it into a novel. Estimated baking time?

She shrugs and moves on to the next question.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A young woman visited me early one morning to tell me her story. She pulled up her sleeve to reveal a tattoo covering her arm in purple tendrils. It looked like it was moving under her skin. She told me she didn’t have much time. She told me that South Africa in the future was dark and dirty. She told me about this virtual world that people had invented in the future – a way to escape their lives, the overcrowding and the filth. You could upload as anyone, you could change everything, from the colour of your skin to the house you lived in. A Perfect World. She swore a lot. But the concept had backfired because everyone had their own version of perfect. And people had started to disappear from the real world. Murdered in vicious hate crimes, appearing later in Perfect Worlds as slave apps. She told me that she was hunting the guy behind it all. She said she’d found him. She was going in to catch him.That was the last time I heard from her.

Later when I woke up and put on my pyjamas, I decided to head into Perfect Worlds to find her.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I might decorate it with marshmallow icing and chocolate sprinkles… just saying.

—

I now pass on the baton to the thrilling Joanne Hichens. Based in Cape Town, she is currently the curator of the hot new SHORT SHARP STORIES AWARD, an annual award for South African short fiction, teaches creative writing in the Master’s degree programme at Rhodes University, and blogs on Voices @ news24. Her crime novel Divine Justice, published by Mercury, is acclaimed as a SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN KILLER THRILLER as well as a LITNET TOP TEN READ. The sequel, Sweet Paradise, will be published 2013. Read Joanne’s Next Big Thing here.

The post Next Big Thing appeared first on writerepublic.

An open letter to President Jacob Zuma.

Dear President Zuma

I am concerned about your speechwriter. I’m concerned because he or she is not coming across as particularly well-versed in English. Before I’m branded a racist, please let me explain.

Mr President, I’m referring to basic word meaning and the appropriate choice of words to convey the intended meaning of a phrase or sentence. English people call it vocabulary. I’m Jewish, but I’m not sure what the word is in Hebrew, or Yiddish for that matter, because I’ve lost my culture. I’m pretty sure I’ll find it under all the bills in my office one of these days. I know it’s there, with my glasses.

Oh, and my mezuzah fell off my door and my husband hasn’t helped to fix it. Between you and me, Mr President, I do believe he’s trying to undermine my cultural expression with his reluctance to pick up a screwdriver.

I digress. This is part of the reason I haven’t written a novel yet. The Afrikaans word is woordeskat – I know this because my Afrikaans teacher was terribly scary and skrikked the word right into my young mind. By the way, I think your idea to make learning an African language compulsory in every school is a great idea. I wish I’d carried on with Zulu instead of Latin. I thought I could help those poor Romans to resurrect their dead language. Talk about a vanished culture. But I’m happy to say that I do remember all the Zulu farm words I was taught as a youngster, like ingulube, and ugandaganda, which I have to say are a lot more useful in daily life, than Hannibal’s defeat in the battle of Zuma Zama, which we had to translate in high school.

Oh dear, there I go digressing again. Vocabulary. What dictionary does your speechwriter use? I can really recommend The Oxford Dictionary of English Second Edition (Revised) 2005. It really is very good. I am not sure what your budget is looking like after the big spend on your home, but perhaps you could make provision for a dictionary in the New Year?

In the meantime I’d just like to share with you some of the words and phrases from your Impendle speech that I have picked up as problematic. The press has been so kind as to share with us some of your speech – I only hope that they’ve quoted you verbatim. You never know with these journalists though do you? Well, if you find any glaring errors below, please don’t blame me, blame the free press.

Here goes – I do hope that you’ll find these useful for your next speech.

Spending money to buy a dog and taking it to the vet and for walks, belongs to “white” culture (paraphrased)

Racism. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

For example, saying that keeping dogs as pets, walking them and taking them to vets belongs to white culture is racism. It is a sweeping generalisation with no factual evidence to support it. Dogs have been a part of African life for a very long time indeed. The domestic dog was brought into South Africa with the migration of Early Iron Age Bantu speaking people and since this time, Africans have been living with dogs as both pets and as working companions.

I can also confidently say that your statement is misleading, because I happen to run an organization that works with disadvantaged children and dogs of all different colours. From my experience with The Underdog Project, as many black households have pet dogs as white households. The only real difference is a lack of access to education and disposable income that marks how their pets are cared for. Middle and upper income dogs (that’s your LSM, Mr President), get to ride in cars to the vet and hang their heads out of the window. They get to sleep inside. Lower income and impoverished dogs are walked or carried to a local shelter for treatment or they wait for a visit from mobile animal clinics. They mostly sleep outside. Caring for an animal, Mr President, is more of an economic identifier than a cultural identifier.

Your speechwriter could have written that keeping and caring for a pet dog is a part of economic freedom and is something that black South Africans should not emulate. If it was up to me though I would have simply left this bit out of your speech, because even this version makes no sense at all.

Next time you are in Cape Town you must come and visit The Underdog Project. I know the Mother City is not your favourite place to visit, but I don’t normally have tea with Helen or Patricia on a Wednesday so that’s a really good day to visit if you don’t want to bump into them. We’re in Hout Bay. Bring your next speech along with you and I’ll help you edit it. I have a Masters in Creative Writing, a beginners course in isiXhosa, Grade 4 in isiZulu, the Kiddush in Hebrew and a guilty conscience in Yiddish.

“previously oppressed”

Previously: at a previous or earlier time; before.

Oppress: keep (someone) in subjection and hardship, especially (but not only, Mr President) by the unjust exercise of authority

Now I want to really commend you speechwriter on this most excellent and applicable use of this phrase. He or she was absolutely correct in the usage but I would like to suggest a small edit that would more appropriately fit in with your speech about Ubuntu and decolonising the African mind.

Currently oppressed. Mr President, the fact of the matter is that a large majority of our black South Africans are currently oppressed rather than previously oppressed. This means that they are still being kept in subjection and hardship. As leader of this country you are now in control of how its people live. They don’t really have much say because one vote does not equal freedom.

I had to do some research for a speech I was writing about the state of education here in South Africa. Did you know that although more historically disadvantaged youth are entering the school system, fewer are actually finishing? Studies show that children are taking longer to finish school with many simply dropping out before they matriculate.

A 2010 report indicated that 1 in 4 youths have considered committing suicide and almost a third (32.7%) have actually attempted it.

By not investing money in teachers, mental health workers and nurses, you are contributing to a current generation of youth who are illiterate, stressed, clinically depressed and academically ill equipped to enter the job market?

If, Mr President, we continue to look back, continue to use words such as previously and historically, we might forget to look where we are going. We might trip up, or worse, like Lot’s wife, turn to pillars of salt, and go nowhere, fast.

“decolonise the African mind”

Decolonise: [of a state] withdraw from (a colony), leaving it independent.

This is a lovely example of using a word as a metaphor, and your speechwriter is spot on with his/her phrasing. As an aside, you may have noticed that decolonise can also be spelled with a z (as in decolonize) and the simple choice of using an s in place of a z comes down to colonisation of English by Americans. One has the freedom to use either, but the small choice is significant and I must say, I prefer to decolonise my decolonise spelling with an s rather than recolonize it with a z. The devil, Mr President, is in the details.

As I was saying, the metaphor is correct, but again, the context is misinformed. Owning pets and straightening hair with lotion (personally I prefer GHD straightening irons for straightening the Jew right out of me, which is less toxic and not tested on animals) are not going to impede the creation of independent African minds.

The only thing that can create independent, free thinking, decolonised African minds is education. And by education, I refer to that experience where children attend classes with textbooks, stationary and passionate, skilled teachers for 12 years. Whether the classroom is an academically focused school or a skills-focused trade school does not matter. The keys for decolonised minds are 100% access to early learning, libraries, literacy programmes, emotional and social welfare support, education and hard and soft skills training before the age of 18.

Mr President, independent Africa needs to take its place at the forefront of invention and innovation in 2013 and beyond. Africans, black, white, coloured, red (which is what our Gauteng holiday makers are looking like here on Hout Bay beach), need to be educated before they can do this. Africa needs young leaders and young leaders need education. They’re not getting it. You need to stop worrying so much whether their hair is straight or frizzy, or whether they have a Ridgeback or Chihuahua at the end of their lead. All you need to do is give them some textbooks, teachers and after school care. And maybe a dictionary or two.

“lack of humanity”

Humanity: the qualities of being humane; benevolence.

Humane: having or showing compassion or benevolence.

Mr President, have you heard of something called Humane Education? I am sorry that your speechwriter hasn’t. Humane Education “is defined as the teaching of compassion and respect related to animal welfare, environmental, and social justice issues.” I won’t quote the whole thing, but this definition on Wikipedia is really easy to understand and I think you should have a quick read over your next cup of coffee. I’m going to add a few links to the bottom of this letter as well, for your information.

Mr President your speechwriter has failed to grasp that treating an animal with compassion and kindness is an indicator of how a person treats his or her family, and how he or she behaves in the community.

Your speechwriter uses the example of the employer driving with his dogs in the front and the workers at the back, but this is a stereotyped image that belongs rather in a satirical cartoon than in an example proving a point about Ubuntu. The more widely acknowledged truth is that employers that abuse and mistreat their employees, are more than likely abusing their pets and family at home too. This  kind of situation is unacceptable for all races.

Dogs, along with all other animals, are indicator species for the emotional and ethical health of society.

“In addition to a growing sensitivity to the rights of animals, another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide.” [read more]

By pigeonholing pet ownership into “white culture”, Mr President, your speechwriter is not only placing animals into a difficult position as weapons of cultural destruction, but also limiting the opportunities for African children to learn empathy and compassion. Empathy is a net of neural circuitry in the brain – it can be eroded by exposure to violence and abuse that so many of our children are exposed to on a daily basis. But it can also be cultivated.

Whether owning their own animal, visiting animal farms or joining programmes like The Underdog Project, children can learn empathy by caring for animals. Empathy is key to Ubuntu. Ownership and caring for a pet is not a one of those “practices that are detrimental to building a caring African society” as your speechwriter phrases it – it is an integral part of African society.

Mr President I’m going to end this by saying that I really admire the work that you are trying to do in boosting the self-confidence of our African youth. And I do hope that you find a new speechwriter soon to help you continue with your work. I’m sure that one day we can both look back on this Impendle speech of yours and laugh about it together over a cup of tea and a teiglach. Perhaps I’ll even introduce you to my dogs.

Yours sincerely,

Jenna Mervis

“To date, one of the most promising methods for healing those whose empathic pathways have been stunted by things like repeated exposure to animal cruelty is, poetically enough, having such victims work with animals. Kids who tend to be completely unresponsive to human counselors and who generally shun physical and emotional closeness with people often find themselves talking openly to, often crying in front of, a horse — a creature that can often be just as strong-willed and unpredictable as they are and yet in no way judgmental, except, of course, for a natural aversion to loud, aggressive human behaviors.”

The post An Impendle Lexicon appeared first on writerepublic.

During my research for a feature on micro-farming in the Mother City for Good Taste magazine, I met a French winemaker crafting wine in the city bowl. Now if you think that the French accent is seductive, spend an hour with Jean Vincent Ridon in the sun getting drunk on vineyards and views, then escape into the cool depths of a tasting room and wet your lips on a blushing Mourvèdre or Syrah.

This was one of those interviews that could have been transcribed directly into the pages of a novel. The Frenchman is passionate – he swears, he smoulders, he raises his eyebrows, he tells a full-bodied tale. His interview transcript was just too good to shelve and get corked. Here follows a few parts for your voyeuristic reading pleasure.

A bit of history…

My reason to redevelop the urban planting of vineyards is that historically Cape Town was the centre of the winelands. I found that Church Street had 3 wineries in the late 19th century. Leeuwenhof, the residence of the premiere used to be a 12 hectare wine estate. Welgemeend next to Jan van Riebeeck school where the netball courts are now, was covered with vineyards.

The first wine made in 1659 was from the Company Garden vineyards and pressed in the Castle. Woodstock had vineyards, part of Salt River had vineyards and cattle. The vines got a pest, a small bug called Phylloxera that landed in the country with American plantings in 1895. It started in Observatory and it wiped out all of the vineyards in South Africa within 5 to 10 years. At the same time the steamers arrived in Cape Town, so we needed more land for buildings. The vineyards never recovered from that blow. And the land was built on.

The vines have completely disappeared. I couldn’t even find revival roots. I did find in Observatory an old backyard with very old vines, but they were table grapes – you could see they were more than 100 years old. Only this one here (in Heritage square) has been protected. What is so funny with this vine, is that we didn’t know what it was. I actually sent it to France for DNA analysis because our labs are well-equipped to do that. I sent leaves, the science of deciding what vine it is is called empillography. Every leaf is like a fingerprint. The Heritage vine is actually a Chenin Blanc.

On flames of passion…

Vineyards and olive trees are one of the strongest plants on earth. In Spain, Greece, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, they use vines as firebreaks. I had a long talk with Cape Point National Park because I wanted to replace all the blue gums, which are pumping tons of water and killing the ground, and plant vineyards as firebreaks because they have less impact on nature, and you get a crop out of them with little maintenance. We’re trying also to do this next to Rhodes Memorial. I understand there’s this global patrimony for all of us, so the decision can take a very long time. They want to make sure they don’t fuck up. They don’t want to lose their jobs from bad decisions, so they don’t make decisions.

On touch…

I use hands-on equipment. Which means we fully destem all the bunches by hand. I keep on believing that in SA it is a social responsibility to try and de-mechanise the farming in order to provide job for people that have little training. You don’t need to be a rocket science to destem grapes, but it is better for the quality of the wine. There’s no machine that can do this as well as human fingers.

On foot fetishes…

We don’t stomp grapes with our feet just to be romantic. Not only is it good for the wine fermentation, but as a winemaker, when you put your body into the wine you feel the temperature. You’ll feel: here’s a pocket of warmth, its probably at 40°C so I should cool down my tank, but when I go down under the cap I feel the juice  is only 18°C, so I need to  mix it more otherwise temperature will be too warm on top and too cool underneath.

It gives precious information for winemaking. I know it’s difficult to apply in big, big tanks. I know many of my winemaker friends who have been doing it by the book and they think that when they take wine from the tap, that this is the temperature of the full tank – but that is just pure bullshit.

You have to get your feet dirty for this winemaking. And you get the usual question from the American tourists: Uh, do you wash your feet? But you know I’m not asking the ladybugs not to piss on the vines. Welcome to reality.

On S&M

Vines are survivors. They are extreme survivors. If you pull out a vine, it will grow from a piece of root left behind. That’s why vines make fruit, and so much fruit. That’s why we prune them. We hurt them so that the message given to them is okay, this is not a good place for you, try to make beautiful berries so that the birds will eat them and remove you to somewhere else. It’s sadism and vines. I could go pruning with my whip and black leather outfit. We could make a special tourism for that.

[My friend Lauren took this gorgeous photograph in the Kalk Bay vineyard. Vines in fishnets, ripening up the road from a bustling street of tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves. And tourists. At night in Kalk Bay I'm sure you'll find at least one pair of legs clad in fishnets and heels, ripe for the plucking.]

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since my last blog post here. Obviously I am a very, very busy woman (she clears her throat) working on other very, very important things (more throat clearing … I’ve never been a good liar).

Well, any excuse would be feeble in this kind of embarrassing situation. I should rewind. Write backwards – tell the whole story of 2012. Pen the bastard down for all to read.

Instead I’ll tell you about my doctor who, I discovered during the first consultation, can write backwards and upside down. No, not standing on his head, that would be silly. Sitting across from me, he turned the sheet of paper to face me, then proceeded to draw a diagram of my endocrine system and spell out my condition in perfectly legible upside down (for him) print. It’s one thing to have a dysfunctional endocrine system, but to have it spelled out for me upside down and backwards, was both disturbing and comical. Should I laugh or cry? The nuclear scan I’d had an hour before was even more unsettling. There’s something really wrong about allowing another person to inject you with radioactive serum (always to be referred to as serum to ensure maximum horror effect). But that’s another story for another night.

So, the specialist was quirky. But the specialist was also clever. He could write backwards and upside down. Perhaps he is married to a woman who can see around corners.

In 2012, we needed special powers like theirs. We needed to see in the dark to protect our rhinos. We needed to vanish certain politicians. We needed Spiderman to knit a sky web to hold back the storms. We needed mind reading, supersonic hearing, we needed superman to save Hayibo.

We needed to write backwards.

[Long Street at night in Cape Town, lights stream through the camera shutter, Marvel glows in the background. Passing cars leech the shadow of a car guard, waiting, drawn backwards into the bright night.]

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Modjaji Books and the Book Lounge are delighted to invite you to the launch of Jenna Mervis’s long awaited debut collection of poems, “Woman Unfolding”.

MORE ABOUT THE POEMS:

There are degrees of loss.
Mostly the loss of oneself in another:
myself in you.
I catch myself
grasping
for the next skin.
From ‘Shedding Skin’

These are poems of unfolding. A brain in limbo; a mother’s warnings, unheeded; the diving and swimming in life; fiancés who evolve into husbands; a child not yet conceived; poems birthed so that the reader follows the evolution of a word into something tangible, erect, alive.

The post Coming Soon to a Bookshop Near You appeared first on writerepublic.

A poem of mine (called “Planting Eyes”) has been included in the latest issue of Carapace (no. 86). It’s about potatoes, lack of basic education and care for children and vegetable gardening, as poems usually are.

I love this issue of Carapace (and not only because I have a poem in it). The little stapled book feels more like a bountiful harvest than a poetry collection. In a way, I suppose it is a harvest. Each month Finuala Dowling scatters seeds into our inboxes, and we germinate poems in response. The harvest – a selection of juicy, fat, crisp, peppery and ripened poems to bite into. Bon Appetit!

[For a year-long crop, subscribe to Carapace. You'll never go hungry. jjf@userfriendly.co.za for subscription info]

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Last week a group of hags and poetry whores spent 2 nights corrupting innocent belivers as they tore at bread and bloodied their tables with red wine.

Some video evidence follows (grainy, dim and muffled in keeping with the spirit of the night). Should you wish to pursue a witch hunt, please contact the Rain Queen.

Wednesday night featured Malika Ndlovu, Kerry Hammerton, Liesl Jobson, Khadija Heeger and Colleen Higgs. Thursday night featured myself and Karin Schimke, Sindiwe Magona, Helen Moffett and Dawn Garisch.
If you’re wondering where my readings are, well, they were horrid – needless to say the cameraman has been lynched.

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