My 10, in random order:
Arundhati Roy
Michele Roberts
Carl Sagan
Salman Rushdie
Kazuo Ishiguro
Etienne van Heerden
Milan Kundera
Ovid
Pierre Bourdieu
JRR Tolkien
Vicki Trowler |
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The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Ten authors who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first ten you can recall in no more than ten minutes. Tag at least ten friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose...
My 10, in random order: Arundhati Roy Michele Roberts Carl Sagan Salman Rushdie Kazuo Ishiguro Etienne van Heerden Milan Kundera Ovid Pierre Bourdieu JRR Tolkien
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The Cow had noted that several former UCT staff members had retired to Greyton, but she was surprised to see just how much they missed their former place of employ. Why else would they seek to recreate one of the most enduring (if not endearing) UCT landmarks in this otherwise peaceful village?
The Cow was briefly stunned into silence. She fixed her Anonymous Colleague with a bovine stare. "But how do you know," she demanded, "that Safari Suit is a bad lover? Do you have personal experience?"
It just seemed like such an unlikely coupling. The Anonymous Colleague shrugged. "We had an ex-lover in common," he admitted. "Not at the same time, though!" he added quickly. The Cow paused. Momentarily distracted by imagining what kind of person would move on from Safari Suit to the Anonymous Colleague- albeit over what space of time, she wasn't sure - she took a while to return to the key issue. "She or he told you that??" The Cow was gobsmacked. Somewhere out there, someone that Safari Suit had trusted enough to drop his crimplene trousers for... was rating his performance to his colleague. Who had in turn trusted this person enough to drop another set of trousers for. She wondered what rating this loose-lipped lover had given to the Anonymous Colleague and which colleage had been the beneficiary of that rating. But she kept such thoughts to herself. At that moment, a deeper panic set in. She remembered the faint sense of amusement at discovering, in quick succession, that a number of her erstwhile dalliances were now the legal spouses of assorted colleagues. Dalliances which had, at the time, happened outside of the context of The Knowledge Factory On The Hill, and and so weren't to be expected to recycle themselves in quite the same incestuous way as intramural musings might be. She wondered whether erstwhile dalliances had similarly loose lips. Whether these colleagues giggled into their morning coffee at the thought of the Cow doing the bovine tango with their lawful weddeds back in days of yore. She wondered... and felt her stomachs cramping into knots. She'd always felt a little awkward knowing stuff she oughtn't to know about a senior colleague here or there who'd had the misfortune of engaging a little too intimately with someone who discussed their intimate life in pixellated detail with mutual friends over coffee. She'd considered, at times, whether such error of judgment in the selection of shagees could be extrapolated to flakey judgment in other areas, and whether she should quake with concern for the future of the Knowledge Factory as a result... or whether, like Bill Clinton, a penchant for intern juice was not necessarily indicative of judgment in other areas. Gramsci chuckled. "Well," he mused, "In Safari Suit's case, he has only his poor performance to blame for what's being said. If he'd been fireworks in the bedroom, I imagine he'd be quite happy to have his prowess trumpeted to his colleagues." The Cow paused. If the rating was good, she wondered, the news even have travelled? The Cow was consulting with Dr Google in her quest for some of the wisdom of Steve Wright, when she came across something altogether else. The stand-up master, it appeared, shared his name with the recently-sentenced Ipswich murderer.
"This is just bizarre!" she muttered to Gramsci. "Do you think he took to killing sex workers because they expected him to be funny? And then when they didn't laugh at his jokes, he felt embarrassed and had to delete all memory of the incident?" Gramsci shrugged. "Perhaps he was just recycling," he suggested. "Once he'd paid, he wanted to use the same payment for the next woman?" "Well," the Cow added, "That's not the only recycling going down in the story. It seems his partner's surname - her own, independent of any connection with him - was also Wright. As was the prosecutor in the case, according to the reports." "Yet another 'coincidence', no doubt," suggested Gramsci. "As well as the similarities in surnames of two of his victims, Nicol and Nicholls." "Well I'll bet that despite what the prosecutor called him in court, his partner no longer considers him 'Mr Right'," the Cow sighed. Gramsci agreed. "It is a Wright mess," he conceded. The Cow was suffering Facebook fatigue. After yet another flood of invitations to install applications, she was getting RSI from hitting the "reject all" link.
"What's with this 'Human Pets' thing anyway?" she grumbled to Gramsci. "Who'd want to be a human pet?" Gramsci looked up, startled. "Well, at least one person," he proffered. "According to reports, there was a recent incident where one was thrown off a London bus." The Cow loomed over his shoulders and took a look. "Hmmm..." she mused. "She doesn't cook or clean, and claims to have an easy life. I suppose there's something to be said for that!" "She lives on state benefits, too," Gramsci added. "Imagine filling out forms - Occupation: Pet! Wonder what the statisticians make of that when they interpret census data?" The Cow chuckled. She could imagine the delight UK taxpayers felt in subsidising their compatriots' animal lifestyles. "Well, some claim that the English treat their dogs better than their children," Gramsci reminded her. "And dogs are allowed to stay in UK hotels!" The Cow shuffled awkwardly. She'd seen far too many dogs travelling in the cab of local bakkies, while the farm labourer sat on the back. "Perhaps," she suggested, "if we valued humans more, aspiring to be a pet would be less alluring?" "Women are a costly business!" the Cow muttered to Gramsci. "One moment the press is full of Shaik paying for uMalume's various wives and their spawn, and the next it's some other dubious character funding some other shady official's women and offspring!"
Gramsci skipped closer. "You mean," he whispered hoarsely, "Jackie Selebi?" Gramsci glanced nervously over his eight shoulders. In the Spy vs Spy saga between the cops and the good guys, anything you said was likely to be taken down and used in evidence against whomever was in the rifle sights at the moment. The Cow nodded. "It seems so," she sighed. "His wife and girlfriend, as well as their kids, were the recipients of the latest dirty money aired in the press." Gramsci shook his head sadly. "Perhaps the State should be more like the Catholic Church," he suggested, "and only appoint the celibate?" The Cow snorted. "Just think of the costs of defending all the paedophilia claims!" she retorted. "That's unlikely to work out cheaper!" "I suppose we should be thankful it's druglords and not taxpayers funding it," Gramsci sighed. "Though i suppose we do end up paying for it, through the legal costs of the trials and the subsequent accommodation costs of the guilty." The Cow shuddered. Shaik's accommodation and medical costs were probably enough to run a small Third World country - or at least, one whose leadership was getting its women and children funded elsewise. "Still," she mused, "it would be interesting to know who funded uMalume's latest: the lobola, the wedding, and presumably the First-Lady-in-Waiting outfits." Gramsci chuckled. "I'm sure there are no end of applicants for that vacancy!" he mused. "After all, the next government will have lots of business on offer..." The Cow was a little bemused. "Do you think that was intentional?" she asked Gramsci, pointing to the lamppost bearing weekend newspaper hoardings. Directly beneath a Weekend Argus headline about Jacob Zuma was the Sunday Times's "Dumbest Crooks of 2007" headline.
Gramsci chuckled. "Perhaps he's realised Dave Bullard and Zapiro aren't going to hand over the R6 Million-odd he's demanding, so he's going for the man in the street - literally!" The Cow sighed. The uMalume soap opera was even longer running than Sewende Laan, and far less interesting, albeit with a cast of 218 planned for the new season. And the storyboard, well... "R25 for a mini-valet for his car!" Gramsci announced. "You'd think they'd provide the contact details. Unless it was another 'special deal'?" "Like Yengeni's discounted luxury vehicle?" the Cow mused. "Certainly possible. But how about all those kids' school and technikon fees? Do you think that is the estranged wives getting back at the absence of formal education uMalume boasts?" Gramsci shrugged, rippling a Mexican wave through his multiple shoulders. "The wife payouts are interesting, too. Nkosazana gets R22K over four years as a divorce settlement, whereas poor old Kate, for '24 years of hell', gets pretty much the same amount!" "She was only 44 when she killed herself," the Cow noted. "She must have been 20 when they married. Her entire adult life, worth R23K!" Gramsci looked up. "Do you think Shaik paid the lobola, too?" The Cow chuckled. "If many of the payments to uMalume were allegedly 'loans', what was Shaik going to do if he defaulted? Repossess his wives?" Gramsci blanched. "Perhaps that's why the man is in such a state of stress," he observed wryly. "He was afraid Sarafina and Co. were coming to stay..." Among the dead forests awaiting the Cow on her return from the floods was a mail-merged glossy letter asking the Cow, as an alumna, to join the continuing struggle by donating generously to the University.
"Tsk, tsk!" she shook her head at Gramsci. "You'd think someone somewhere would spot that the address was a Campus address, and realise that they're squeezing blood from a turnip here. Surely you address calls for cash to those that have it to give, not those about whom you have hard evidence of their financial situation?" Gramsci chuckled. He'd heard the anecdotes about the conference delegates on Durban beachfront who, when approached by the child sex workers, admitted that they were academics, and were told sympathetically, "never mind, we know you don't have the money". "You could always make a donation in kind," he suggested. "Inform them that you're contracted to work 37.5 hours per week, and tell them to consider the additional hours you work your contribution to their fundraising efforts!" The Cow paused. It would be possible, she supposed, to work out her hourly rate and put a pricetag on that, but she'd have to wait until she was in overtime to do that so as not to be seen to be abusing the University's paid time in doing so. The beancounters who ran things were rather picky that way. "Still," she remarked, "it's nice to see that the slogan has improved. 'Changing minds. Changing Futures' is a lot better than 'Changing minds. Changing Histories' as the 175th anniversary asserted. The underlying assumption behind the 175th was revisionist enough as it was, without compounding it by such a heinous slogan." Gramsci nodded. "Yes," he agreed, "you don't want parents forewarned that this is a Chinese-style re-education camp, however attractive that idea might be to the State." The Cow blanched. "Let's not give them any ideas!" she muttered hastily. "We already have Kwality Assurance seeking to beancount everything. Next we'll have to have our course outlines, our handouts, and our lecture scripts signed off by some bureaucracy after vetting for ideological appropriateness. And videotapes of our classes compared with those to ensure that nothing unapproved snuck in." But Gramsci was still pondering the new slogan. "I wonder who convinced the author to change it?" he asked. "None of the criticism seemed to be heard, first time around." "Who knows?" the Cow shrugged. "Maybe he simply changed his mind?" Gramsci conceded the point. "And no doubt his history, too!" he added. It was only when she looked for the spade that was no longer there that the Cow realised she'd become a statistic.
"Can you believe?" she asked Gramsci, gobsmacked. "Someone stole my spade!" "It happens," Gramsci shrugged, sending a Mexican wave through his eight shoulders. "Even if crime firgures are rather contested." The Cow snorted. "That's not the point!" She roled her eyes. "The spade was standing outside in the garden. Next to an inflatable dinghy and a couple of paddleskis. Why take the spade? The vleicraft would have been much more fun!" "Perhaps a spade was more useful to them?" asked Gramsci. "Perhaps they saw it standing there, unused, while they had a pressing need for a spade?" "Yes, but!" the Cow huffed impatiently. "That suggests that the criminal mind is motivated by noble imperatives, like labour and cultivation, rather than by greed and deviousness. That can't possibly be. It might lead one to think that crime in this country is sometimes the last resort of desperate unemployed people with dependents to feed and clothe, rather than the easy option of williewerkies who want the trappings of affluence without any effort. And then the economy of Perth would collapse!" Gramsci chuckled. "Well," he suggested, "perhaps he just had a body he needed to dispose of in a hurry?" "I don't buy that!" the Cow muttered to Gramsci. "This survey found that the greatest source of workplace annoyance was gossip! That doesn't seem very likely!"
"They clearly didn't include the Knowledge Factory in the sample," agreed Gramsci. "If people really hated office gossip that much, the grapevine would have died off ages ago, instead of growing new shoots and leaves all the time!" "And it's been particularly busy of late," added the Cow, "what with all the recent events down the Hill." "Alleged events," corrected Gramsci. "It was all a dream, remember? But isn't it interesting that gossip beat that heinous crime of 'reply all'? Now that, IMO, ought to be a capital crime, or at least a dismissable offence!" "Even more than playing with cellphones during meetings?" asked the Cow. "Mind you, I suppose it depends on the ringtone. One more William Tell Overture and I haul out my bow and arrow!" "Perhaps we should conduct a poll here at the Knowledge Factory," Gramsci suggested. "I'm sure people who come late to meetings, or don't send out agendas and minutes timeously, or Jammie Shuttles who cause students to rush into lectures late, would all feature!" "Or snotty groupmails instructing rather than advising, or students who park in staff parking bays!" "Hmmm..." mused Gramsci. "It could get quite lengthy." "Almost as lengthy as the alleged climate survey," agreed the Cow. "If that ever sees the light of day!" "Perhaps," suggested Gramsci tentatively, "that was also just a dream?" |
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