Happy Hour

Day Two

Today's segment comes from a story written about this photo of a cup of Starbucks coffee. It is, as you will discover, pure fiction.

She enters the room and make a B-line straight for him, walking with purpose. The place is full, and everyone turns in their seats to watch the scene that is about to unfold. She places her bag on the table, removes her red jacket, revealing a figure-hugging black dress underneath that would melt any man, and orders her usual – Caramel Latte with extra froth. She looks into his eyes as she says it, and he can feel her eyes boring into his soul, reading his mind, knowing everything that he feels. She reaches out a single hand towards him and lets it gently cup his face. “Jackson,” she whispers, reading the nametag on his chest. “Jackson.” He’s always hated the name, but she makes it sound so heavenly. She leans in towards him over the counter, her hand still resting on his cheek, still murmuring his name over and over again. “Jackson. Jackson.”

“Jackson?”
He feels a hard prod in the ribs, and opens his eyes to find himself staring straight at Nicole’s breasts. Not a bad view, but he doubts she’ll appreciate it, her being his boss and all.

Day One

Since starting 365, it would seem that my blogging has come to a dead halt. While this may be the case, it doesn't mean that my writing has stopped. I have resorted to writing stories for each of the photos that have been taken, some fiction, some litjourn, some life and some poems. And so, I have decided that I will post pieces of the stories on my blog. And so I will start today with the beginning of a litjourn piece that I wrote about this picture, taken at the Cat Cafe in Myeongdong, Seoul.

"She shakes her head at me, her eyes wide with realization and embarrassment simultaneously. She quickly calls her supervisor, but there is no real need – one shake of the head and a look around the room tells me all I need to know.
“I,” she points at herself, “sorry,” she says, reading the look of disappointment that I am sure is all over my face. “Full.”"

The bitter taste of disappointment

Seven months. That is how long it took me to complete Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. Seven months of my life that could have been spent making a dent in my bookshelf reading list. But no. Instead they were spent on the stories of India, Boonyi, Max, Shalimar and Kashmira (who is in fact India, but with her name changed.)

I have heard good things about Rushdie, have read bits and pieces of Midnight's Children and thoroughly enjoyed them. So why was it that I struggled so much through Shalimar the Clown? I started reading the book on my first weekend in Korea after flying through A Thousand Splendid Suns and Recipes for a Perfect Marriage. I had saved Rushdie as a treat for myself, expecting to delve into it and devour it in much the same way as I had with the other books. But reading Rushdie would be more of an accomplishment than the others. It would be a culmination in my desire to read more intellectually, to achieve the standard of reading that I felt my degree in English afforded me.

I opened the book and fell asleep about eight pages in. Tiredness. I shrugged off the fact as though it meant nothing. So what if I was tired and couldn't concentrate. That said nothing about the book and everything about myself, my personality, my habits. I tried again when I awoke, and pushed on through my tiredness to the end of India's story. By this point, I had napped. I wasn't tired when I started, but after reading twenty four pages, I was exhausted. His words had drained the energy out of me. I wanted to know more, but I couldn't be bothered to read and find out. I threw the book onto the bookshelf and didn't look at it again until, three books later, I was desperate for something to read.

My resilience was back. I wouldn't open another book until I finished this one. My reading list steadily grew, my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread masterpieces, but I ignored the sound and struggled on. There were moments when I was entranced, when I didn't want to put the book down for fear of losing my enthusiasm once again, but those moments were few and far between, and as I pushed past the story of Boonyi and her betrayal, as I sympathised with Max and his naivety, as I battled with Shalimar and his pride and sense of revenge and finally came to Kashmira and her grief, I found myself not relating to them as I normally would, but separating myself from them, viewing them as entities that I couldn't understand, had no relation to. For the first time in a long time, I saw them as purely fictional characters with no relevance in the real world. I am sure that their stories stem from truth, but I couldn't attach myself to their stories. Though the tale that Rushdie told was an intriguing one, of that there can be no doubt, the way in which he told it led me to being absolutely bored to the verge of tears.

Forty pages from the end of the book, I made a deal with myself. If I could finish the book in one sitting, I would give myself some form of reward, be it in a new book or some sweet treat. I sat down on my bed and read. And read. And read. I read for at least an hour, trying to push past my boredom and the desire to throw the book across the room. I read until the last page, the last sentence and then I stared at it. Was this it? There was no sense of accomplishment, no sense of resolve, no sense of anything but bitterness at having the last seven months of my life taken from me. They stood and faced each other, each about to kill the other, and then it was over. You never find out what happens to Shalimar, whose story you have been following from the beginning, because even as you are reading the stories of the other characters, Shalimar is moving in the back of your mind and you find yourself wondering how this person is important to Shalimar, how his or her actions will affect the murder that he commits within the first few pages of the novel. And then it is over. With no warning, no finality, no grand ending. It just finishes. Rushdie writes a final sentence and feels that the novel is over, but I am left with a sense of wondering what the hell happened!

I don't want a sequel. God no. For the first time in this whole miserable book I want to know what happens next, and it is denied to me. I gave into my desire and threw the book across the room. It was finished. I would put it behind me and bury it in amongst a myriad of better books, hopefully one or two by Rushdie himself. But the feeling of disappointment cannot be taken from me. I pushed through it, but I came out at the end bitter and broken and filled with hatred. That was a first.

On My Bookshelf Update

In July, I wrote a post about all the books on my bookshelf. Since then I have made a couple of trips back to What the Book in their new and improved, far bigger, store. Bigger store means more books of course, and over the last few months I have reveled in this fact and indulged.

My first indulgence was on the weekend that Grant arrived. I may have been a terrible tourguide in terms of showing him around Seoul, but I did take him to What the Book. This was the first time that I had visited the new shop, and I think that my excitement showed through. While Grant was quite happy to be in a second hand bookshop where he ended up walking away with three books in his hands, I was running between the aisles exclaiming at the treasures hidden within. Having read only read Stardust, which I have heard from a number of sources isn't Neil Gaiman's best, I was excited to find a large range of Gaiman's work going at 10,000 each. Close by were the works of Terry Pratchett, another author who, I am ashamed to admit, I have never really read. I did read Diggers in my middle school years, and I did enjoy it, but I never explored Pratchett's intricate world more than that. All of Pratchett's work were also 10,000 a pop, making it very difficult for me not to just buy out the whole lot. I picked up three Gaimans and the first Discworld book, and was just about ready to go when I stumbled across Alice Sebold. Having watched and loved the movie of The Lovely Bones, and having heard that the book is a hundred times better, I couldn't resist picking it up and adding it to my steadily growing pile. And so, while Grant walked away with three books (two by Isaac Asimov and one called Cosmos), I left the shop with five.

Smoke and Mirrors - Neil Gaiman
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

After buying so many books and having not made any progress through the ones that I already own, I stayed away from What the Book for almost two months. I did make a stop at one bookshop in Cheongju, walking away with two books for learning Korean, but beyond that I was good and didn't buy any more, and I even made some good headway through Shalimar the Clown, which I am now more than halfway through and finally starting to get into. But then yesterday, I was in Itaewon once again, and Jess had asked me to make a stop into What the Book to find something for her. I didn't object, of course. Why would I? I have self-restraint after all!
But apparently I don't and added three more books to my collection.

The Last Song - Nicholas Sparks
The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson (which I loved when I started reading it, but didn't have the time to finish)
Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett (the best of both worlds, I figure.)

My bookshelf is starting to wobble and I am starting to stack books in odd ways to try and make space for more. There are still two "unused" shelves in terms of books, but I am weary to remove my makeup and the stash of gifts for people back home that I have steadily been stacking up. We'll see how many more books I end up buying by the end of the year!

Tongue-tied

My tongue twists and contorts and words stumble from my lips without the approval of my ever-working mind - a jumble of the foreign languages that I have learned over the years. A dash of Korean; another of Afrikaans, a splodge of dusty French and a sprinkling of almost forgotten Hebrew. The taxi driver looks at me quizically and I clear my throat before repeating it, only in Korean this time around. He shakes his head in amusement and starts to drive.

I sink into the backseat, contemplating the outburst. I go over the words in my head first in Korean, then Afrikaans, then French, then Hebrew. I start trying to assemble my lingual knowledge, practicing numbers and phrases in my head, seeing how much of the Hebrew alphabet I can remember.
Thank You.
Gamsahamnida.
Dankie.
Merci.
Slicha? No, that's sorry.

I wrack my brain for the correct words, try to count up to ten. I might not be able to remember thank you in Hebrew, but I can only count to eight in French. My memory after huit becomes blurry, clouded by nege, gu and teisha. My head becomes a cloud of unspoken foreign phrases, running together, combining themselves until I don't trust myself to speak, worried that the words that will out of my mouth will be non-sensical jumblings, indistinguishable in any language, nevermind Korean. I close my eyes and close my mind to the mutterings, trying to focus on just one.

A conversation with the taxi driver is not in the cards. I don't trust myself to speak to him, am worried that I will come out of it looking stupid when in truth, I am overburdened with knowledge that wants to spill over at every opportunity.

Thirty Books Everyone Should Read Before They're Thirty

I am a bookshop addict. I cannot walk past a bookshop without taking a peek inside, especially if it is a second hand shop. Second hand book shops have characters, I find. You will not always find the kinds of books that you are interested in reading, but you will inevitably find the kinds of books that the owner is interested in reading and there is something about walking into a secondhand bookshop and browsing the shelves that makes you feel connected to the owner of the shop as well as to the previous owners and future owners of the books. New bookshops do not have the same kind of warmth and character attached to them, but you can still sense something about the shop by perusing through the shelves and noting what they have and, more specifically, what they don't.

When I walk into a bookshop, I do so with a sense of purpose. There are books that I want to read that I have yet to find, and when I walk into a bookshop and start perusing the shelves, I am looking for specific authors, names that I will recognise. When I don't recognise any names, I immediately write that bookshop off my list of possibilites. When I recognise even a name or two, I start to make myself comfortable and peruse the shelves with more ease - I might only know a few of the authors, but there is a sense of visiting some old friends and being introduced to some of their contemporaries.

You might ask where I got the list of books that I look for from, and this is simple enough - it has been built up from years of English books that I neglected to read when I should have and books that have been recommended by friends, but was added to last year during my creative writing course when we were given a list of books longer than anyone would be able to manage in the mere three months that we had to complete the course. Then there are those that I gouge from the internet pages that I read. Internet pages like the one that I stumbled across this morning: "Thirty Books Everyone Should Read Before They're Thirty" (http://www.divinecaroline.com/22189/98450-thirty-books-everyone-read-they-re).

Looking over this list, I realised that I hadn't heard of most of the books and had only read a grand total of four of them. But most of them, upon reading the short descriptions, were ones that I had no interest in in any case! People's tastes are completely subjective, and I know that mine is no different, but I have decided to put together a list of the books that I want to read before I am thirty, compiled from a combination of that list and the creative writing one (excluding the ones sitting on my bookshelf here waiting to be read). And here it is, in alphabetical order, rather than that of preference:

Lara's List of Book She Wants to Read Before She is Thirty

Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
Arundhati Roy - God of Small Things
Bernard Schlink - The Reader
David Cohen - People Who Have Stolen From Me
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom The Bell Tolls
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain
George Orwell - 1984
Jack Kerouac - On the Road
James Ellmore - The Black Dahlia
JM Coetzee - Boyhood
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Jonathon Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jose Saramago - The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Ma Jian - Red Dust
Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje - Running in the Family
Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari
Peter Matthiessen - Snow Leopard
Plato - The Republic
Primo Levi - If This Be A Man
Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Xiaolu Guo - 20 Fragments of a Revenous Youth
Xinran - The Good Women of China

Some of these, like The Lord of the Rings, are ones that I have started reading. Some are ones that are sitting on my shelf back home in South Africa, awaiting my return and itching to be opened. Some I am weary about and some I am confident in. There are many more to be added to this list, but this is just the beginning. You can expect to find it edited over and over again, but never cut down unless one of the books is read. But for now, this is all that I can do. I would like to hear opinions, so feel free to comment!

The Vessel

Lying between my folded arms
Held awkwardly against my body
As I strain to see over your curves.
I gently caress your strings
And let your music ring out into the silence.

My fingers are the instruments
As they pluck out the melody
Fret after fret,
Chord after chord.
You are just the vessel for my creative mind.
My tool.
My means to an end.
Without me you would be empty and silent,
Gathering dust,
Your strings rusting to uselessness.

Without me you are nothing.
Without you I am silenced.

On my bookshelf

Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones
Ben Sherwood - The Man Who Ate the 747
David Mitchell - Number 9 Dream
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-TIme
Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors
Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown
Salman Rushdie - The Enchantress of Florence
Sophie Kinsella - Shopaholic and Baby
Terry Pratchett - The Colour of Magic

On my bookshelf

Visitors