Becoming Visible by Gary Cummiskey

Toast Coetzer On Die Plesier Parade

"Right now my favourite South African album is Die Plesier Parade's Vonkvioole & Wasem. It's not afraid. It's about religion, depression and darkness -- a kind of forced expression of life's hardest puzzles. It breaks your head in two. It makes you think. Not everything works, but when it does, the soundscapes created take you on a tour of troubled-mind country. The closer, 15-minute-long Daar Is Net Een is spectacular -- a creepy, whispered nightmare in equal parts melancholic and frightening. When the CD player stops, you will be silent. Maritz van den Berg is the man behind it -- all the lyrics are his and sometimes the vocals too. But he rustles up a small army of other voices and musicians to help craft Die Plesier Parade's albums (the self-titled debut is possibly even better than Vonkvioole & Wasem)."

First published in the Mail&Guardian.

Max Moodley: 0054

Congratulations!

Congratulations to V. Williams on 100 posts!

Victoria Williams: 0100

I said, ‘Our love is one in a hundred.’ He said, ‘A hundred! This does not speak well of your character.’ Then he lit his pipe and stroked his beard just like in the movies. He was 22 years old. Later, in the summer, when I was also 22, I’d gotten used to sitting up by the lamplight waiting for him, sometimes until the moths had settled in my hair. The first sign of him would be the silhouette of his pitchfork passing by the window. Of course by this time our love was one in a hundred and three.

Thighs

She wraps her thighs around compromise.

Snowstorm Under A Midnight Moon Burning Through The Sky by Gary Cummiskey

“And my blood became hot!”

Crimes of Passion, Crimes of Reason: An analysis of the crimes of murder and physical assault against Masters and Mistresses by their Indian Domestic Servants, Natal, 1880-1920 by Prinisha Badassy

Max Moodley: 0053

Victoria Williams: 0099

What do you have great poet?
I have a pain in my head.

Annihilation Of The Cross by Gary Cummiskey

Filmi Very Filmi

“Filmi very Filmi:” The influence of popular Indian film in shaping the cultural and social identity of Diasporic community of South African Indians by Vashna Jagarnath.

Max Moodley: 0052

Victoria Williams: 0098

Love Letters: My Darling, let us not allow the Rimbaud/Rambo argument to overshadow our entire honeymoon.

One-Eyed

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is the designated driver.

~ Danielle Naidoo

This Vehicle Is Under 24-hour Satellite Surveillance by Gary Cummiskey

Sky Dreaming Review

Review of Gary Cummiskey's Sky Dreaming by Aleathia Drehmer.

Max Moodley: 0051

Victoria Williams: 0097

I don’t want your pity. Unless it’s in the form of financial compensation.

Scruffy

For his tenth birthday, John Coetzee's grandfather, a senile CERN physicist, FedExed him a black hole. John's parents, who were both employed as logicians at the University of Durban's Philosophy Department, were, naturally, concerned that this shirt-button-sized hole - which their son had christened Scruffy - would grow
larger and, eventually, suck up the city of Durban. They pleaded with John to send it back to his grandfather or, at very least, donate it to the Durban Museum of Modern Art, whose most recent exhibition the Coetzees had declared to be "the beginning of the end." The ten-year old, accustomed to robust and extremely rational dinner conversation, put his foot down: "It's utterly irrational to ask me to return nothingness.” Suitably chastised, John's parents allowed him to keep Scruffy. Two days later, Detective Xolani Hlongwe, standing above the void where Durban had once stood, coughed, tossed his cigarette into the abyss, then turned to his colleague, Detective Craig Naidoo, and opined: "This is why logicians shouldn't have children."

As She Came To The Vale In Spring by Gary Cummiskey