kagablog

keep reading this interview here: http://www.jhblive.com/kultcha/interviews/meet_germiston_satanists_in_shaggy/101892

http://www.twistedspoon.com/iburnparis.html

translated from the Polish
by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski

artwork by Cristian Opris

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L’Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris’s water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.

With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.

This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.

Jasienski’s novel is, after all, primarily a fantastical one, combining the two most critical elements of social literature in those restless times: Catastrophism and the belief in a miracle — in this case, the miracle of the Revolution. … We are affected by this visionary fantasy with the extreme, sometimes even brutal realism of its texture, its innovative literary form, and the ambitious courage of its concept. Above all, however, the novel grips us with its eternal — forever old and forever new — story of the human heart that dreams of a better tomorrow.

— Anatol Stern

This is a superb text of astonishing modernity, a veritable manifesto of the wretched of the earth …

— Marianne

ek voel magteloos

besluitloos

wag maar net

vir die volgende dag,

vergeet om te lag

(1997)

shipwrecked…lifetime to lifetime…washed ashore…blown away…every time…trying to find each other again…the flotsam of life after life after life…looking for something to hold onto…trying to remember what went before…trying to recall….all the other times we met…again and again…as daughter, mother father lover brother…every time unfinished…try again…try again…maybe this time we can get it right…maybe this time stop making mistakes…stop hurting..stop stumbling….stop falling…stop.

even watching television or a movie,

i find myself adopting an interesting gesture

or facial expression i see…

imagine what happens then

when with someone i love -

i mimic them / become them

& then when i lose them…

i’ve lost part of my face…

writing has become a way of reading…i hardly ever read the paper anymore…the only reason i bought ArtSA last month was because i’d been lead to believe i had an article published in it (i was wrong)…i then glanced through it and read only the pieces about people i knew personally, or people who i knew knew, everything else just looked like promo material to me, i.e. faceless…

your cut and paste prank is funny, but why should it be strange that it wasn’t picked up? most writing on art is cut and paste…and in a way, yes, you’re right than no-one’s reading…but more people are writing…and writing is a way of reading…(or assimilating & editing)…to write you have to be able to read…even if this is as vague as reading the world around you…perhaps barthes’ proclamation means that by becoming born again as readers we become writers…so it’s really the death of the reader, since now we’re all writers…

or is it that the pool is slowly closing? that the circle of readers is getting smaller, ever more localised?

let me try to explain myself better – when i write something: an assignment, an article a review, a letter, i tend to read up a bit on what i’m writing about – i.e. at the moment it happens to be isiXhosa dance…so there are all these texts i’ve never noticed before which suddenly become apparent, visible…and i read them for info and quotes and so on…i would never have read them if i wasn’t going to write on them…they only become visible by the process of my writing…

when i read a journal or magazine or a paper or whatever, and it has an article i’ve written, i generally read it first of all and in that way i read the assimilation of other reading i did to write the piece…perhaps it sounds solipsistic, but it’s also a very intimate access to text…

to read “blindly” i.e. a random article by somebody i’ve never heard of or know nothing about, happens only rarely…in a way then i only read what i know and the knowledge is expanded or grows in terms of the reading i do for my writing, or the reading my friends did to write their pieces…

it’s all about community really…writing is being part of a reading community…and almost everything, is an excuse for communitas…definitely art, certainly language…it seems the most obvious thing to say, really, that – all culture is an excuse for community…

hi aryan,

when i saw the “fuck god” headline you gave to the osho piece i forwarded you,

it made me feel a little unsettled and i immediately wanted to ask you if you

could change it or drop the clip…

instead, i thought i’d think about it for a day or two, to try to investigate why i felt this way…

does it amount to a kind of censorship? is it my ego? because, i mean, i don’t really believe

in “god” as such, or the idea most people associate with the term, so why should it matter?

on the other hand, i do respect people who do, and i do think that a puss like richard dawkins

is just creating another dogmatism where he’s substituted a new evil as god and i don’t

go for his style at all…i also thought about the furor caused when the guy from fokoffpolisiekar

wrote “fok god” as an autograph…and suddenly they wanted to boot the whole band from

the kknk programme and they couldn’t get accommodation anywhere…i guess it’s lucky

not being popular, coz then nobody notices these infractions and they don’t want to

make a fuss about it if they do…i guess you’re so way out beyond the pale you can

do whatever you want to…

so anyhow, well, perhaps there is unavoidably a tinge of ego and fear of approbation and

not wanting other people to dislike me, and so on; but i do think that another reason i don’t

want to be associated with the headline you wrote is because of love…i mean, love for my

family and friends who would be deeply hurt by seeing that title, you know? they might

want to read what i wrote or check out my page on the blog and they’d think it was me

saying it or having written it, as if i was throwing it in their faces…it would only cause

anger and negative emotions and what’s ever the point of that? it’s not my intention

ever to hurt anyone…

anyhow, i was wondering whether, as a favour, you could please de-link my name from

the headline/ osho clip…

thanks

anton

kaganof: looking back on my life i have been consistently inconsistent, thus fulfilling and contradicting osho’s precepts. which is at it should be.
fuck osho.

krueger: for myself, i’ve only managed to be inconsistent very inconsistently; so have been a better and worse disciple of the dude in the star trek space suit w/ the outlandish shoulder puffs…

Have you heard anything like that – “Don’t be consistent”? When you hear it for the first time or read it for the first time, you will think that there has been some mistake, maybe a proof mistake or something. Because your so-called saints have been telling you just the opposite: “Don’t be inconsistent”, they say. “Be consistent.”

It is here that Atisha is superb. He says:

DON’T BE CONSISTENT

Why? What is consistency? Consistency means living according to the past. With what will you be consistent? If you want to be consistent you can have only one reference, and that is the past. To be consistent means to live according to the past, and to live according to the past is not to live at all. To live according to the past is to be dead. Then your life will be just a repetition.

To be consistent means that you have already decided that now there is no more to life, that you have already come to a full stop; you don’t allow life to have anything new to give you, you have closed your doors. The sun will rise, but you will not allow its rays to enter your room. And the flowers will bloom, but you will remain unaware of their fragrance. Moons will come and go, but you will remain stagnant. You have stopped being a river.

A river cannot be a consistent phenomenon. Only a pond can be consistent, because it is non-flowing.

…

The consistent man is a logical man, his life is one-dimensional… And the logical man is the poorest man in the world, because life consists not only of logic, but of love, too. And love is illogical. Only a very small part of life is logical, the superficial part. The deeper you go, the more and more you move into the illogical, or to be more accurate, the supralogical.

…

Atisha is giving you something tremendously valuable. Live all the moods of life, they are your own and they all have something to contribute to your growth. Howsoever comfortable and cozy it looks, don’t become confined to a small space. Be an adventurer. Search and seek all the facets of life, all the aspects of life.

…

Live, and allow all that is possible. Sing, dance, cry, weep, laugh, love, meditate, relate, be alone. Be in the marketplace, and sometimes be in the mountains.

…

The consistent man is a very poor man. Of course the society respects the consistent man, because the consistent man is predictable. You know what buttons to push and how he will act. He is a machine; he is not truly a man. The society respects the consistent man; the society calls consistency “character”… A real man cannot afford character, because character can be afforded only at the cost of life.

The saint has character, hence he is respected. The sage has no character, hence it is very difficult to recognize him. Socrates is a sage, Lao Tzu is a sage – but they are very difficult to recognize, almost impossible, because they don’t leave any trace behind them. They don’t fit into any mold, they are pure freedom. They are like birds flying in the sky, they don’t leave any footprints.

It is only for a very few sensitive souls to find a sage as a Master, because the mediocre follow the saint. Only very very intelligent people attune themselves to a sage, because the sage has no character and he cannot fulfill any of your expectations. He is bound to offend you, he is bound to disappoint you, he is bound to shake you and shatter you in many many ways.

Slowly, slowly, he will make you as free as he himself is.

From The Book of Wisdom : Discourses on Atisha`s Seven Points of Mind Training, by Osho
Used by kind permission of Osho Foundation International

by Anton Krueger

Aryan Kaganof, was born Ian Kerkhof in 1964. He grew up in Durban and left for Amsterdam in 1984, because, in his own words he didn’t feel like “running around in a uniform shooting at blacks”. He moved back to South Africa in ‘99 to meet his biological father for the first time, who was terminally ill. Aryan lived with him during the last months of his life, an experience recounted in Uselessly (Jacana, 2006). His father was a Jewish man called Harry Caganoff. Kagan is a Russian equivalent of Cohen, and the “off” means “descended from”, so Kaganof is the son of Cohen. And then Ian renamed himself Aryan, (from the Sanskrit arya, meaning “a seeker of truth and light”), so that’s where Aryan Kaganof’s name comes from.

THE RE:MIX

Since his rebranding and re-adoption of South Africa, Kaganof has forced himself rather insistently onto the local cultural landscape with works in the widest range of media imaginable – film, text, fine art, music. Within these categories, he’s been viciously prolific; producing poetry, novels, memoir, philosophy, blues, noise music, painting, etching, performance, documentary, music videos, narrative stories and more. He most often refers to what he does as “editing” and “remixing” and some of his principles are spelled out in a 24 part manifesto on the “RE:MIX” on the back cover of Nostalgia for the Future (2009). Here are two of his points:

“20. The atomic unit of the RE:MIX is not the shot, but the fragment – which is a clump, a volatile, conglomerate. Granular, dense and stuck together.”

“6. The RE:MIXER poeticizes the image by emphasizing its musical values (chromatic oppositions, dissonances and compositional rhyme)…”

Nostalgia For The Future consists of varying frames of found footage, mixed with very personal tapes, and spliced together in a multiplicity of frames to create a curious new rhythm. Working on RE:MIXING is, according to Kaganof “like working on oneself, on one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things.” He cuts up and reshapes cultural products which one have seen before, and yet something seeps through; some fungi, something unnameable. Something dirty. And this is exactly his appeal. Henk Ooosterling says:

“[Kaganof’s] films don’t follow a story line. They follow an image. He employs that image like a tone in a musical piece, setting it in motion, driving it along, draining it of its colour, letting it flow apart or run over into other images, staccato and dazzling or slowly diminishing, vaguely trilled or clear and taut.” (1)

This lack of focus, in narrative plot, theme, or image resolution contributes to the sullying of the image. When I first met him in 2004, Kaganof was fond of wearing this standard issue old brown apartheid military outfit which he’d personalized with stencils, like “Hou my vas corporal”. There was another one I remember that read: “I’m for the emancipation of the out of focus.”

To be analytical is to be clear. To be synthetic is to be fuzzy. If you’re going to bring things together, especially disparate entities, there are going to be a lot of overlapping borders, a lot of blurry boundaries. Here’s another little gem from the manifesto:

“3. The re:mixer is fascinated with working at the very limits of coherence.”

So a lot of Kaganof’s films tend to be kind of blurry. He’s not one for hi-res. When he made the world’s first feature film shot entirely on Cellphones (SMS Sugar man, 2007) somebody asked him why he didn’t just use bad cameras with low resolution; but his aim is to play with alternative ways of producing images and finding out what the side effects are of experimenting with new media. (2)

THE ROUGH THEATRE

The framing concept of the “Synthetic Dirt” colloquium comes from the chapter in Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (1968) about the “Rough Theatre”; and whether singing guttural blues with the band Freedom Fighter or in performance pieces such as Catherine Henegan’s The Shooting Gallery (2006) there is certainly something rough about Kaganof’s approach, not only in terms of content but also stylistically. Robyn Sassen complained that The Shooting Gallery was “poorly strung together” while she acknowledged that there were a number of powerful images in the piece (3). There’s no getting around it, a lot of Kaganof’s work can come across as unrefined and unpolished, as if he could have spent more time crafting his concept and planning his production.

Kaganof prefers to act rather than to think. He’s said outrageous things like “Thinking is vulgar; the pastime of intellectual peasants; thinking is always too slow.”(4). What matters to Kaganof is not preferences for good or bad; but action and non-action – whether one Wills or not. Most of Aryan’s products are entirely self-produced in short bursts of energy. In his narrative films there is little subtlety of emotions or characterization and his plotlines (such as they exist), veer towards stereotype, using thickly applied repetitions. The music is often glaring and repetitive and unpleasant; the content takes a strong stomach and can bring about a nausea. I’ve walked out of his film on Ron Athey because I felt ill, I wanted to throw up; and yet, the film affected me on a visceral level. It made me aware of my own body and its limitations, of the blood in my veins, my mortality. It broke through the illusion of existing in a safe cocoon removed from inevitable old age, sickness and death.

THE BODY

Moving on then to another kind of dirt, Kaganof’s images are not only thematically and digitally dirtied, but they also deal with what is considered filthy by polite society. Many of Kaganof’s films are vulgar, they’ve shown people vomiting (into each other’s mouths no less), urinating, having anal sex, injecting drugs and so on. They’re offensive, as are any of these acts committed in a public place, as is releasing any of the body’s mortal fragments into the social sphere. What could be dirtier than what we expel? Anna Tilroe writes: “for Kaganof the body must endure everything it fears: torture, sexual excess, sensual chaos”. She goes on to say that: “inherent in that transcendent is violation: a transgression of borders that is neither socially nor politically acceptable.” (5)

For Julia Kristeva, the body only becomes socially acceptable when it is able to enter the realm of signification, when it is able to keep abjection at bay. She says: “The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic”. (6) We have to bolster the illusion of civilization, keeping it well away from the body’s functions, and perhaps this might be one way of proposing a dividing line between “dirty” and “clean” – society is clean; culture is clean; while the naked, trembling, aging, dying, sick body is dirty. The body away from language, outside of the synthesizing (and anesthetizing) effects of culture is dirty. (7)

It seems a strange dichotomy that a person who revels in the digital medium, so often favours the earthy. What is not fake in culture, the Dionysian that bursts through, is the body, when it tries to burst out of its symbolic confines.

So perhaps Kaganof is not a good example of “Synthetic Dirt”, because the dirt he supplies is not synthetic. What is synthetic is everything else which is not the dirt. His plotlines, his characters, his settings, his scenes – more often than not these can be extremely synthetic, in the sense of being parodic. The characters are clichéd, the scenes often a pastiche of other films. (At their funniest moments we recognise the films they come from.) (8)

On the other hand, he’s managed to capture the painfully masochistic celebrations of Ron Athey and filmed Mathew Barney shitting pearls onto a velvet cushion held by supermodel Helena Christensen (9), and he has Thom Hoffmann having anal sex while reciting the Lord’s prayer (10); moments which constitute just about the most original footage I’ve ever seen.

In defining postdramatic theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann says: “The ‘principles of narration and figuration’ and the order of a ‘fable’ (story) are disappearing in the contemporary ‘no longer dramatic theatre text’ (Poschmann). An ‘autonomization of language’ develops…texts in which language appears not as the speech of characters – if there still are definable characters at all – but as an autonomous theatricality.” (11)

If I could fashion a link here between “postdramatic theatre” and Kaganof’s “postnarrative film”, it seems that in Kaganof’s oeuvre there is an autonomization of the image. Images no longer refer to scenes of conflict, to contexts available to narrative explanation. When I asked him where some of the images in Nostalgia for the Future and Nique ta Mere came from, and if some of it were found images, he said, “lost images”. (12)

Where postdramatic theatre uses “language surfaces” here there is a surface of flickering images which draw attention to their flickering nature. The movies have always been flickering, the great illusion has been trying to present a stable image, so this is a process of emphasising and laying bare the way film works on the eye.

These flickering images present a very different view of human subjectivity. I don’t think they lack an interest in the human subject, but this creature is far from autonomous. Lehmann again: “What finds articulation here is less intentionality – a characteristic of the subject – than its failure, less conscious will than desire, less the “I” than the ‘subject of the unconscious”.” (13)

Also, in his RE:MIX manifesto Kaganof writes “21. The RE:MIX is a practice of diluting or hemorrhaging the subject in a fragmented, particled sound/vision language…” But it feels as though there’s a contradiction here. the prologue to SMS Sanctuary states “Kaganof is…in a word, a monster, obsessed by the idea of an impossible liberty…The staging of the author as the work itself”. And here Kaganof’s greatest strength comes to the fore, despite his repeated injunctions towards the dissolution of the subject, it is the strong subject of himself as an artist with a powerful personality, which leads to his prodigious output. He is continually performing himself, no matter how much he seems to have dissolved within these dirty technologies. The performance work, The Shooting Gallery, starts out with Kaganof hanging naked upside down from the ceiling for about 15 minutes, while media images are flashed onto his body, clothing him in news, in media, in digital representation. This image is central to Kaganof’s work – the synthesis of the dirty image and the dirty body. And the placing of himself at the centre of his work.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I’d like to return to Peter Brook’s idea of the Rough Theatre and extend it to the metaphor of roughage in one’s diet. Very sophisticated food is inevitably very well processed. Cake flour, for example, is highly refined. It goes through the mill again and again, through committee after committee, to get rid of the lumps, so that it arrives on our plate beautifully creamy and light and delicious. We also know, however, that highly processed foods like white bread and cake tend to stick in our guts. We don’t digest them very well. So ironically, the most processed foods are the most difficult for our stomachs to process because they’ve become so complicated, they’re so very many steps removed from the original food groups they came from.

A rougher, less pure, unrefined product may at times contribute to what we need (14); since too much sophistication, too much refinement can sit in the throat; can make one sick, like too many syrupy Hollywood meringues. In this sense, Kaganof’s works are raw, uncooked; savage displays of sometimes brutal ideas; actions without concept; and yet, perhaps they contribute towards a cleansing of the colon of the unconscious.

(1). Oosterling, Henk. 2003. “Writings on the Wall”. In SMS Sanctuary. Translated by Elizabeth Savage. Westdene: Pine Slopes Publications. (no page numbers.)

(2). For example, there was an interesting side effect of using cellphones, in that one had to shoot very close to the actor’s bodies, from as little as a metre away, which gave a very different texture to the acting style. Also, curiously, the golds and reds that predominate in the film almost give it the feel of a Super 8 film. So these are interesting side effects which the experiment revealed which would not necessarily have been known in advance.

A difference is that Peter Brook also defines the “Rough Theatre” as popular theatre, and real popularity is something Kaganof has only achieved once in his career, with the multi-award winning Naar de Klote / Wasted (1996), which was the first film ever to boost up a digital medium to 35 mm for screening, preceding Lars von Trier and the Dogma movement by a year.

(3). Sassen, Robyn. 2006. “Shooting Blanks on the Main”. Cue. Tuesday 4 July: 5.

(4). http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2007/12/15/aphorisibles-for-cigar-smokers-2/

(5). Tilroe, Anna. 2003 “The Substitute”. In SMS Sanctuary. Westdene: Pine Slopes Publishing. (no page numbers).

(6). Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University press. page 102.

(7). Hans-Thies Lehman, speaking about postdramatic theatre, has this to say about the deviant body: “[It] causes an ‘amoral’ fascination, unease or fear. Possibilities of existence that are generally repressed and excluded come to prominence…and repudiate all perception that has established itself”. Within this fascination may lie the necessity to sacrifice characterization and plot.

(8). For example, when he rips off Pulp Fiction in Naar de Klote!

(9). Matthew Barney in The Emperor’s New Clothes (2005)

(10). Shabondama Elegy (1999)

(11). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge. Page 18.

(12). E-mail communication. 11 April, 2011.

(13). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge. Page18

(14). Here one thinks of the cinema of Stan Brakhage and the pornological experiments of Dietmer Brehm.

http://rhythmmusicstore.com/music/7349/Anton-Krueger/Killed-and-Sunnyside-Sal

Ce court métrage de 27 minutes est exemple significatif de cinéma «　naïf　» au sens sophistiqué du terme. Deux cambrioleurs arrivent en plein jour chez Anzan, un beau garçon qui est en train de faire l’amour avec sa copine. Les cris de satisfaction de cette dernière sont entendus partout dans cette grande maison de campagne. Très vite on comprend que les deux malfaiteurs sont un peu imbéciles. Ils ont tous les deux une difficulté avec le langage. Anzan pourtant est très poli avec eux. Il est tout nu et il est incarné par l’acteur Brandon Craig, un acteur très beau et lumineux de grâce. En plus, c’est sa belle bite qu’on aperçoit en premier quand il s’approche des cambrioleurs.

La porte d’entrée n’était pas verrouillée et les deux hommes entrent facilement. Pendant que les cris de la femme accueillent les intrus, un portrait de femme dans le salon les surveille. Nous allons retrouver le même portrait dans la cuisine aussi ! Le titre est un peu symbolique puisque «　Azania　» est un sobriquet pour l’Afrique du Sud, inventé par les habitants de ce beau pays. Donc Anzan pourrait être une variation ironique de cette belle origine. L’acteur Craig en est sûrement un exemple parfait, en contraste avec les deux malfaiteurs qui sont imbéciles et laids. L’un des deux est tout le temps frappé par l’autre. La question «　Vous avez une Playstation　?» est drôle et caractéristique de leur esprit enfantin.

Un policier, voisin du quartier, vient par hasard visiter son ami Anzan. Ce dernier ne denonce pas les deux hommes naifs qui n’ont pas eu le temps d’agir finalement. Ils discutent un peu les quatre ensemble et puis les malfaiteurs partent avec les mains vides. On comprend aussi très facilement par son langage que le policier voisin est aussi un peu imbécile. Donc à part le bel Anzan, les trois autres vedettes du film sont bêtes. Est-ce symbolique dans le film ? Le cinéaste a voulu faire un rapprochement général avec ses compatriotes et avec son évolution récente ?

Avant de partir le policier embrasse le bel Anzan tendrement sur la joue.

Écrit par Dionysos Andronis

Title: Shaggy: 14 Rather Amusing Rambles
Author: Anton Krueger and Pravasan Pillay
Publisher: BK Publishing, Pretoria
ISBN: 9780620504584

In a country beset by crime, political sideshows, service delivery protests and escalating electricity prices there doesn’t always seem to be too much to laugh about, let alone the kind of laughter that makes your abdominal muscles (that you didn’t know existed) contract and contort and your cheeks start to tickle with tears of joy. Into this seeming void step Anton Krueger and Pravasan Pillay, who have just released their first collection of 14 short stories, entitled Shaggy: 14 Rather Amusing Rambles. The title in itself did not prepare me one bit for the riotous, rollicking “rambles” I was about to encounter, nor did it give any real hint of its completely overblown yet often scintillating mix of razor-sharp wit, a dry-as-dust tone and a willingness to engage the reader on an intellectual level.

What Krueger and Pillay set out to do with Shaggy is completely explode the conventions and form of the traditional shaggy-dog tale, with its usual long-winded narration and anti-climactic punchline mutated here into 14 short, sharp, seriously funny monologues set forth from the mouths of a motley crew of “scheming misanthropes whose speeches are full of sound and fury, signifying very little”.

Among this “rogues gallery” we find “manipulative, ingratiating, deluded, egotistical, inauthentic, spiteful narcissists” that all operate in Margate of all places, letting loose outlandish, eccentric and mercifully short spurts of highly imaginative verbal defecation. Some of the most memorable and ridiculous characters (often megalomaniacal and mischievous) are an SABC executive that spins a hilarious web of codswallop around the financial woes of the enterprise; a Picasso-wannabe conceptual artist that extols the virtues of the culinary as well as the corporeal; a brilliantly sketched film director of fatuous fluff who sees himself as an avant-garde auteur completely misunderstood by the censors; a Cambodian woman both compulsive and obsessive about washing dishes, despite her ownership of cosmetics empire Khmer Rouge with its arch rivals Ku Klux Glam (LOL!); and a completely ludicrous Satanist hell-bent on selling timeshare.

To say that these short stories present a shaggy and scraggly collection of characters that do little but “talk shit” would be to sell Krueger and Pillay’s work short. Through the “rambles” of these characters the authors devilishly deconstruct the quotidian and mundane, leaving the reader with little desire to breathe before the next over-the-top tale. Not a single story is without tremendously fine humour, a feather-light touch and a rib-tickling turn of phrase. If variety is the spice of life then humour is surely not far behind, and with this cracking collection Krueger and Pillay have established themselves as a brave new voice deserving of an appreciative audience.

this review was first published on litnet.co.za

In literary theory the interlinking terms parody, satire, persiflage and pastiche all, in one way or another, denote the sending up or inversion of existing texts and textual norms. All the sketches in Shaggy are satirical in nature; they are also parodies. Satire is derived from satura – a dish filled with various types of fruit, also connotating saturation and satiety. These texts are characterised by the humorous way in which a weakness of a person or a flawed aspect of society is sent up. Parodies render a well-known text, person or situation absurd, by imitating characteristics of these persons, texts or situations in a comical fashion.

In each Shaggy sketch a different persona becomes the narrator: a retired comic/comedian offering words of advice to a novice; a director of the SABC faced with the conundrum of dealing with a reduction of spending on programming from R4500 per minute to R1-50; a useless lecturer addressing his class and trying to salvage, in an extremely ingratiating way, both his job and his students’ future; a very stupid jailbird planning an escape, a wannabee Marxist activist desperately trying to justify his ultra-capitalist tendencies to his comrades; a restaurateur with an extremely weird addiction; a chairperson of a writing circle confessing about his sojourns into South African satanism; a Bollywood actress being interviewed and displaying every cliché about her trade; a young inventor trying to sell his South Africanised version of the Rubik’s cube; a literally obsessive whistle blower addressing his local police station, and a certain Prof Alex Fitzpatrick, who goes on a lengthy discourse about the number four, in the last sketch, aptly called “The Foreword”.

These sketches vary from quips to sometimes absurd and side-splitting puns, jokes and send-ups. For example, in a footnote to the discourse about the number four, we learn about Professor Doctor Heinz Mannheim:

“Mannheim was awarded his professorship in Linguistics at Letz University at the remarkable age of seven, but a severe stutter prevented him from taking up lecturing duties. Instead, he was given free reign in his writing and research. The name Mannheim was consequently to become intimately associated with fields as diverse as Infant Biology, Water Mechanics, and the then nascent field of Hide-And-Go-Seek Studies. The latter occupied much of the pre-pubescent professor’s research hours” (p 127-8).

The satirist’s weapons are mainly under- or overstatement, irony, and sometimes sarcasm, and all these elements are found in abundance in these sketches, but never in a condescending way. (Anton, of course, is known for his sarcastic comments in shows of Die Plesier Parade, another one of his many talents.) The cudgel or the rapier may be employed in getting the message across and, wisely, the rapier is mainly used.

If you like Monty Python, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Robert Kirby and especially Woody Allen (Getting Even), you will love Shaggy. It provided me with lots of hoots, and I hope it will do the same for you.

Le premier recueil de poèmes de Anton Krueger

Le titre anglais «　Everyday Anomalies　» (éditions Aerial, Grahamstown) est un peu équivoque à traduire en français. Nous préférons le titre «　Irrégularités Quotidiennes　» plutôt que «　Anomalies Quotidiennes　». Il s’agit du premier recueil de poèmes du professeur de Rhodes University sud-africain Anton Krueger. Nous avions la chance de rencontrer Anton Krueger à Grahamstown lors du National Film Festival en 2005. Il était pré-docteur à cette époque et rédacteur pour le journal «　Cue　» du même festival. Six ans sont passés depuis lors et Krueger est devenu Poète aussi aujourd‘hui.

Son recueil est composé de vers libres et il est librement structuré aussi. La peinture de Cecilia Ferreira sur la couverture nous prépare sur le contenu. Ce sont des formes humaines mobiles et fluides, puisqu’il s’agit d’une peinture à l’huile. Anton Krueger aime voyager et plusieurs poèmes de son recueil nous racontent son périple quotidien sur les rues de Lisbonne, Barcelone, Munich et plein d’autres «　stations　» intermédiaires.

Nous avons été contents de voir que la poésie de Aryan Kaganof a nettement influencé Krueger. Quelques-uns de ses poèmes sont visuels en forme de triangle (voir «　Traffic　» page 10), une technique empruntée aux arts plastiques. Sur le même «　Traffic　» la syntaxe est abolie et on voit le point final après la dernière lignée. C’est intentionnellement écrit comme ça bien sûr ! Les lettres sont minuscules pour tous les mots des poèmes, même quand il s’agit de prénoms. C’est la liberté complète qui appartenait avant au langage poétique et cinématographique de Kaganof. Puisque nous avons désigné comme «　cinématographiques　» les poèmes du recueil, nous allons ajouter qu’en vérité c’est le carnet «　narratif　» de ses voyages et des moments fugitifs de sa vie quotidienne.

Le poète change de styles pendant ses descriptions. Il y a la prose à la fin qui nous prouve du statut narratif du recueil entier, il y a le style minimaliste aussi, surtout pour le poème «　re:　» (page 32) qui est un poème de répétitions de la syllabe ci-dessus (le principe visuel mentionné plus haut), et il y a aussi le style brut pour quelques poèmes comme «　Watching　» (page 24).

Tous les poèmes ont été écrits après 1994 et quelques-uns ont déjà fait partie d’une anthologie de 1998 «　Six of the best　». Mais l’ouvrage entier a vu le jour seulement en 2011.

Il ne nous reste maintenant qu’à souhaiter une bonne suite au Poète et à vous promettre que nous allons prochainement présenter un de ses nouveaux films.

Écrit par Dionysos Andronis

I write
Erase
Rewrite
Erase again
And then a poppy blooms.

Hokusai

Dr Anton Kreuger recently launched their debut collection of poetry titled Everyday Anomalies respectively.

Talking about the title of his book, Kreuger explained that it is meant to be a kind of oxymoron: “anomalies” are odd events, or out of the ordinary occurrences, so by sticking “everyday” in front of the word, it’s kind of a joke about how common things can be seen, if not necessarily always as extraordinary, nevertheless as “anomalous”, or odd.

The collection is a grab bag of everything that he has done up to now, “it’s a collection culled from lots of poems over many years. Some of the poems go back maybe fifteen years, others were written earlier this year; so there isn’t really a strong central theme except that they’re all anomalous” he said.

Kreuger said that a lot of the earlier poems were specifically written for performance, when he was part of a “bekgeveg” crew in Pretoria along with Leon de Kock, Henning Pieterse and Charl-Pierre Naude and run by Demos Takoulas. They used to have a poetry slam show that they performed at Afrikaans festivals as well as at bars, theatres and libraries around Gauteng. “I was also the poetry editor on Litnet and wrote some stuff during those years and since I’ve been in Grahamstown I’ve taken part in the ISEA creative writing course run by Robert Berold and I’ve started writing new things in connection with that”.

More recently he has started transcribing notes into poems, and “instead of writing more poetry I’d like to further explore the genre of the note”. This is different from work that he has published before as it is his first collection of poetry.

In 2010, he published Experiments in Freedom: Issues of Identity in New South African Drama, which won the Rhodes Vice-Chancellor’s Book Award for 2011. This book examines the ways in which identities have been represented in recent South African play texts published in English. He has also written fiction in a range of genres, including a novella Sunnyside Sal- set in the early 1990s; it is a story of two young boys whose changing hormones coincide with a country going through its own rebirth.

In 2003, he wrote the play Living in Strange Lands, which was awarded a special trophy by the South African Community Theatre Association in 2001; was nominated for the Olive Schreiner as well as for the FNB Vita Award. In 2010 Anton was a runner up for the Dalro Poetry Prize.

first published here: http://www.ru.ac.za/modules/blog_include/blog_content.php?blog_id=2099

Jeanne Hromnik, AK47, Ari Migdale, Gangster, Beatrice Lamwaka, Janet van Eeden, Anton Krueger, Sarah Frost, Gillian Schutte, Colleen Higgs

Edge of Things

Authors’ brief: Genre-bashing

Each person’s contribution must take its lead from the previous piece while changing his/her paragraph to another genre completely.

Some examples of genres which I’ve nicked from film as well as literature are: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Urban (Dystopia), Thriller, Horror, Romantic comedy, Chick lit, Drama, Crime, Film noir, Slice of life, Science fiction, Satire, Political, Mystery, Kitchen sink drama, Epic saga, Historical, Faction, Fantasy, Erotic, Documentary, Western, Gangster, Cowboy, Coming of age and Hospital drama.

I’ve started the chain off with my own take on a Film noir genre of sorts. The next person has to change the tone completely, but not lose the thread of the story if possible. I can’t wait to see what we come up with in the end!

– Janet van Eeden

The Chain Gang

The furnace of her fury had cooled into a bullet-shaped lump, lodged into her very core. She wondered if she’d ever wake up without feeling the primal urge to kill him, to bludgeon his brittle bones into a pulp. She imagined herself smiling at the limp sack of his bloodied flesh as she’d watch the light leave his eyes. She desired his death as she’d never desired anything before. (Film noir, Janet van Eeden)

Angelique sighed, closed the Word document she had been reading, and ran her fingers through her strawberry blonde hair. It needed washing; she just hadn’t had time this morning, late, frantic, running for the Tube, as bloody usual. These wannabe authors, all so self-important and full of hot air, thinking they were going to make it in the big literary world. Only a handful of the submissions that ever came through into her inbox were good enough to make it, and this example, well, it was good, it fitted perfectly into the noir genre the publishing house she worked for was launching next year, but truth was, she was tired – tired of reading, tired of life, tired of the grey cold damp London weather … (Slice of life, Arja Salafranca)

She made it into the Tube just as the doors were closing. The metal floor dissolved beneath her into a thousand shining circles, like globules of oil on water. She clung to the strap overhead and let herself sway in the monstrous steel cradle in which she found herself. It was terrible and beautiful, like death itself, coffin and cradle, ruby-red droplets of blood hanging like pendants in the air. Words floated out of her laptop case and circled her head slowly before pasting themselves against the glass of the windows and doors. People were reading them, some even adding to them, telling a story that would outshine all stories. (Magic realism, Jeanne Hromnik)

Just then the bomb rocked the Tube station and Angelique was turned into 473 thousand lumps of inanimate clotting that co-existed with similar lumps from the hundreds of thousands of dead Tube-goers that would never need to pretend again that they were enjoying their jobs and having good days. London was over, the West was over, consumerism was over and, however impossible it seemed to those who loved reading them, the short story itself was over. Kaput. (Dystopian, AK47)

keep reading this “bit of silliness” here: http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&cause_id=1270&news_id=105461&cat_id=188