It's been a busy week for me.
On Monday I was proceeding - on my feet and legs - at a steady pace in an easterly direction. I can tell because it's sort of in the general direction of Brakpan, my lodestar, though my gorgeous wife, who does not fart like a horse (actually, as far I can tell, my wife doesn't fart at all), my wife says the direction to which I am referring is actually northwards because Pretoria is just there. We have, you can tell, a great deal of scintillating debate in our family.
Anyway, that's what I was doing, on the banks of that odd body of water, Zoo Lake, dodging the mess that the ducks and geese make, cogitating on the dearth of the grass on the lake's south side and on whether Little Julie Malema is in truth quite smart.
My interests were not entirely horticultural and political. I was also, may Colleen Lowe Morna et al forgive me, ruminating on the wondrousness of the construction of the female body (two joggers who were clearly of Amazonian descent had just run by - I think it was Penthesilea, who participated in the Trojan War, and her sister Hippolyta), when I received a call from Martin Williams, the editor of The Citizen, regarding something he had just read in the morning newspaper.
Why Williams should spend the early hours of a glorious Monday morning, when he could be at a coffee shop or jogging (which, heaven help us, he actually enjoys), reading a specimen of what my brother Bullfinch calls the dead tree media, I cannot tell. But Williams - who performed years of yeoman service under the hardest and maddest taskmaster of all, one Johnny Johnson - knows, one must presume, what he's doing.
"I need to check something with you," said Williams in the slightly puzzled tone he sometimes affects (or, maybe, after years of working for his particular proprietor and for Johnson, may he rest in peace, Williams is indeed puzzled), "but do you or don't you write the Karen Bliksem column?"
To cut a long story short, Peter "feel the thick end of my wedgie, baby" Bruce, the editor of Business Day, had taken umbrage at something written in last Sunday's Bliksem column and had blamed me and caused Williams momentary confusion. [You know what a wedgie is, yes? "Lady Gaga was snapped arriving at her hotel in Toronto yesterday (June 20) with her strong security detail around her and an apparent wedgie in her derriere."]
However, the point is that I have not assisted Karen with her column, or had anything to do with it, since 15 December 2008 when she booted me in the derriere, told me not to darken her door any more, and I retreated to the Hemel en Aarde near Hermanus to lick my wounds (which, being a bit of a dfog, heh heh, I could easily manage to do).
Should Bruce have known about the break-up of Karen and me? Well, yeah, he should have known, if only by reading her column since December. But it is remarkable how little thought people - assuming you consider editors people - give to what they read these days, especially I suppose on a Sunday morning. More to the point, Bruce was smarting - he was hurt - because Blik-kop had apparently attacked him about the demise of The Weekender which, jokes aside, must have been very difficult for Bruce.
Especially annoying is that Bruce must have remembered - if he remembers anything these days (he really should take his folic acid every morning) - that I once approached him about working at The Weekender. (I mean about me working there, not him, though he could have put in more time.)
Besides my penchant for low-circulation newspapers on whose figurative necks management is about to drop the sword (not for nothing were some of my ancestors at Masada and not for nothing have I worked on the Rand Daily Mail, Sunday Express, Frontline, and The Sunday Independent), I have always thought that The Weekender was one of the best. Its hard news pages could have done with a bit of a fillip and Xolela Mangcu could have done with an occasional patsch on the tuchis, but, other than those, I thought it was a great newspaper.
Even more puzzling, Bliksem last Sunday was pretty gentle about Bruce. It was actually Brendan Venter ... sorry, I mean Brendan Seery (Venter is the vershtunkende coach of the Saracens, may wedgies plague him for the rest of his life), it was Seery who was apparently nasty about The Weekender on the Saturday Star media pages. Unfortunately the Mondi paper pickup truck has already been by this week, so I am not able to read Seery's piece. But I do know that Seery believes it important, in this day of effete poetasters, that someone in the media, aka Seery, should be calling a spade a shovel at every opportunity. So he probably, as they say, gave it to The Weekender good.
Anyway, no harm done. I mean, given the level of defamation usually levelled at me, this was, so to speak, a stroll at Zoo Lake. But then some whippersnapper, or so she would appear to be from the ensuing comments, went after me on "Book SA-News" for "hounding" poor, defenceless Paul Trewhela - on this very site! Remember? I said he reminded me of a dog that barked every night at 3am. Geddit? Dog, "hound"? (Whereas, as you will have noticed, about five paragraphs back, I am the dog - or so a former fiancé of mine always used to say).
Anyway, I responded in the robust manner learned here on Politicsweb, and it seems I upset some of the delicate souls at Book SA. Sorry, guys, it's simply that I come from a tough neighbourhood. Justice Malala and Denis Beckett live here; you don't mess with us.
Trewhela clearly comes from a tougher neighbourhood - or one with even more dogs anyway - and he wasn't fazed at all. He wrote: "Gordin complains that my book is ‘annoying' because I sound ‘like a neighbourhood dog that barks at 3am every day and won't stop.' But isn't that what a dog is for, when danger is inside the gate?"
And he continues: "It is time for South Africans to read again those classic investigations of totalitarianism: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945), Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940), Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Czselaw Milosz's The Captive Mind (1953) - all written while Comrade Stalin was alive, the idolatrous subject of the adulation of the CPSA/SACP."
Thanks, Paul, for the reading list. The suggestion and explanation are, as we used to say in the old Seffrica, very white of you. But what makes you think that we Seffricans haven't read those books? Are you not talking down to us just a trifle? Just a little? Why, just the other day Little Julie was saying to me, following a Yoof League press conference, that he thought that Koestler had captured the soul of totalitarianism to a much larger extent than Arendt.
No, no, Paul. You have it all wrong. Those aren't the books and articles that you and we should be reading. We should be reading the funny guys - those whose works befit the Seffrica of today: Catch-22 by Joe Heller, any Kingsley Amis novel, any Mordechai Richler novel, Karen Bliksem, Ben Trovato, statements by the government, SACP and Yoof League, and so on.
But those are doubtless too jolly for the serious folk. They need to take a walk and read a good book, I say.
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