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JH Lynch in Kalk Bay

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

 I’m no expert on art and I’m no expert on JH Lynch. I discovered the mystery artist quite by mistake in Kalk Bay. You really shouldn’t walk into Big Blue if you set out that morning planning not to buy anything except a cup of coffee or an ice-cream. I ended up buying a set of 6 coasters for R120.00 that reminded me of the Roman Noir covers I’d been perusing while doing research for a new thriller. My latest character is a bit of a femme fatale herself and there was something reminiscent about these women; as if they were all part of dream encounters I’d been sorry to leave behind.

Without really thinking about it I commented how amazing (I meant mesmerizing) the women’s faces on the coasters were. The shop assistant at the cash till said the artist was somebody Lynch. Did you say David Lynch? I asked, mishearing. No, she said, giving me a quick look, realising I didn’t actually have any idea. That’s how I discovered JH Lynch, right there in Kalk Bay, the atmospheric seaside town where Anthony Loxton hijacked my imagination one dark night long after midnight, resulting in The Good Cemetery Guide. There’s something about the place; I always seem to find something I don’t even know I’m looking for. No, for the record, I don’t live there. I just pass through occasionally. That’s the nature of our relationship and it suits us both. Neither of us gets bored with the other that way.

So now I have three of JH Lynch’s fabulous femme fatales gracing my header after months of sitting on my desk lending me inspiration.  When the right energy was lacking I’d shuffle them between my hands like tarot cards, marvelling at the full-lipped seductive power of those expressive faces – women with a certain bring-it-on laissez-faire attitude to love.

~~~

QI: JH Lynch’s pictures appeared in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Did they epitomise kitsch? Or did Kubrick employ their temptress power on a subliminal level to draw us into his game? Rumours persist that JH Lynch was a woman.

CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD: Oh for the love of fudge

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

So. Catherine Ryan Howard is my guru. My guru says ‘Oh for the love of fudge.’ Isn’t that retro and cool? Never had a guru before. I have become slavishly devoted to everything she says because she is going to teach me how to be more than ‘just a writer’. The problem is I don’t have good ideas like hers. I’m going crazy trying to find a good blog name never mind do all the rest.

The best I can come up with is Consuelo, Chocolated. It is clear plagiarism of Catherine, Caffeinated and not as smart or as humorous. Chocolated also reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is not good. This means I’m the most unoriginal person on the planet. Why can I dream up  story after story but I can’t come up with a name for a Writer’s blog that is glittering with the smarts, never mind a bright tagline that is part of the whole cohesive trip… How do you compete with ‘Writer, Astronaut, Skinny’? I ask myself. ‘Writer, Ballerina, Straight hair’, is the best I can do. But it sounds lame because I’m copying Catherine.

I’ve been on first name terms with my guru for a while. Copying is not good. The problem is this whole marketing yourself thing is a bit like writing an unbelievable story about myself and that’s where it comes undone; the non-fiction of my existence doesn’t excite me. I like to make it all up; none of it must ever have existed before.

Catherine says all one has to is have a cohesive concept and stick to it – brand yourself in other words. So she does pink the whole hog, and normally this could be girlish and a bit mundane – but she has this very cool picture of a retro pink tea-cup (much prettier than a coffee mug) and super-retro pink typewriter and it’s practically irresistable. Right now a cohesive concept is eluding me. What is my unique angle? What do I have to share that anybody else might want to know about? Oh for the love of fudge…!

The Lighthouse Cat

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

Did you hear the true story about the lighthouse keeper’s pet cat that managed to wipe out a whole species of songbirds endemic to New Zealand single-handedly? Apparently this is the only known case of a single individual achieving that dubious distinction. It seems strangely ironic and so typical of our natural history; a tragedy almost kafkaesque in its inevitability and yet it shocks us.

The extinction of a species is a huge thing to contemplate: the murder of an entire community; decimation on a scale of absolutes. It’s hard to accept forever as a reality. Surely somewhere on some other remote protrusion of land this foolish bird still sings? Perhaps all our natural scientists and field students have simply not found it?

I had the lighthouse cat at the back of my mind as I read the captivating The Story of Beautiful Girl . The lighthouse motif is used extensively and effectively to structure an Image result for the story of beautiful girlepic story of indomitable love in the face of near-impossible circumstances. A much-used familiar theme but in this case skilfully crafted and alive with sincerity.  Rachel Simon takes the idea of a lighthouse symbolising safety, moves from the existence of a unique postbox on a farm (a lighthouse with a man’s face that pops up when there are letters), extends the visual symbol to it’s fictional ‘real-life’ equivalent (a coastal lighthouse with a man’s face in front) and succeeds in keeping us glued to the page while she unwraps an intricate human drama around this major lighthouse metaphor with great sensitivity and empathy.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Read no further if you intend to read this novel…

I foresaw the happy ending but not the lighthouse’s major role; such a neat circling back to those first amazing 20 pages. How I admired the fact that Simon took her structural vision for her novel and ran with it! Simon goes where many authors are told not to go; she is unashamedly sentimental in handling a difficult subject; love between a deaf black man and a mentally challenged white woman who have been institutionalised and ignored by society. I wasn’t too sure about the race difference being necessary but that’s what’s admirable; Simon takes her story all the way; no holds barred; as far as she can, to make it absolutely clear that their bond is immutable; to squeeze every last bit of emotion out of the reader that she can. But in the background I had the disturbing image of a vicious predator, the lighthouse cat, chomping away one little bird at a time…

Is that what fiction should do? Take us away from the cold Darwinian hearth of real-life?  Give us hope? Make us believe there’s always one songbird left, somewhere? T.S.Eliot said that the human race can’t bear too much reality. I suspect he was absolutely right; especially if you want a NY Times bestseller. Imagine the novel had ended with the lighthouse man metaphorically imprisoned in his tower (aka. lighthouse), consumed with sorrow and loneliness as he waits for the beloved who will never come… Nothing comforting about that. Real life, like lighthouse cats, can’t be controlled, but we can choose which books we choose to read and pass on by word-of-mouth to others. There’s probably a lesson there for writers wanting to join Simon on her New York Times Bestseller pedestal.

On the other hand happy endings don’t make us distraught or induce weeping and they don’t make us tremble; the thunder of unspeakable tragedy does. My physical responses to We Need to Talk About Kevin included dizziness nausea and weepiness, but I could no more have stopped reading than I could have stopped breathing. A marvelous book attacks you in the solar plexus and never lets you go. Perhaps, after all,  humans are more robust than we might expect. Perhaps we need both kinds of endings, to remind us that lighthouse stories come in many guises. When does craft move into the arena of art? Is it not when the work itself can move the human heart in a new direction? And is the author who presents the possibility of joy any less an artist than the one who speaks of pain?

I can’t help thinking what a great short story The Lighthouse Cat would make. It should be full of carnage and destruction and unbearable pathos.  It should be intensely disturbing; we should see the lighthouse lamp as a speck in the eternal void, hear the diabolical pet cat purr in the light-keeper’s arms.

The adventures of a book peddler

/ Consuelo Roland / 1 Comment

Somewhere along the way I’ve become a book peddler. It seemed an infinitely preferable course of action to watching my novel THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE languish in a publisher’s warehouse.

Being one of those people who suffer from excess optimism, otherwise termed ridiculous enthusiasm, I ignored the advice of all the sensible caring people in my life who told me marketing my own book was a bad idea and not to even think about doinga website around the novel, not even in my wildest dreams; that it would distract me, delay me, detour me; that I was a writer not a salesperson, a novelist not a web-designer, and in case I really didn’t get it, no writer ever made money out of a website and I should be concentrating on my second book.

Not strictly true of course, some writers have done very nicely through their websites, but for the sake of argument they (those of good intent) were absolutely right. My 2008 New Year’s resolution to earn a living as a writer has been postponed once again to the following year. They did however forget to mention what seems most pertinent; that it would require endless painstaking hours of hard work. Doing a website is worse than writing a book; it’s a consumptive black hole.

Any serious enterprise requires time.  Writers never have enough time because we’re leading double lives; we live and work in parallel so just making the space to be aware of taking a breath (listen to/read Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH!) is hard.

The good news is it’s been a gas. Rollicking fun-on-the-road growing-up-to-be-a-real-writer stuff. The truth is the adventures are as much a real life affair
as being in cyberspace.

I’ve vanquished shyness and expanded horizons by getting out to small independent bookshops in the city environs and in outlying country towns, and talked about the book and website to some of the countless readers circles, writers groups and book clubs that keep the book industry in South Africa humming. Along the way I’ve sold books.

The readers of the kind of books I read and write finally have a face. I’ve written pages of content for the website in a different style to anything I’ve published before. I’ve experienced enormous crafting satisfaction from turning an idea that wouldn’t let go of me into a cyber space called www.goodcemeteryguide.com that dwells lightly on the interplay of life, love and death. Always with the hope that someday we’ll have those important conversations at the dinner table!

And here I am baring my soul on book.co.za! I’ve stormed the bastions of technology with a website; now with Ben’s help I’m inside the fortress. I wish I could say I just threw a few words onto the ‘page’ and it was a breeze. Truth is I dithered over it because spontaneous unedited expression is scary.

Measured words are a writer’s weapons in the war against mortality. I look forward to further real life marketing forays and cyber adventures but the time has come to put self-marketing on a slow burner and return in spirit to the really tough stuff that terrifies the living daylights out of me as much as it drives me nearly insane with pleasure.

The gods of the universe and I had a serious chat the other day. I’d been out in the car and material for future books was being thrown at me thick and fast (as tends to happen when I drive around); I felt pummeled and exhausted by the end of the trip.

“I haven’t even finished my second book!” I said grumpily to no-one in particular. A voice in my head said quite clearly, ‘Well, get on with it!’ And so I shall.

Source: First published in its original format as ‘Adventures in Cyberspace’ on Sunday Times Books Live

 

 

What do I really think?

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

Oops! Deleted my spam file without thinking and lost bald-head’s comment on the graves gardener blog. Basically telling me off for being spineless: come on (!) why don’t you tell everyone what you really think? I guess that’s blog protocol. Tell it like it is, get it out there, spill your guts, take sides, be up-front, controversy and confrontation is good, get naked, decide if you’re a lover or a hater. Life is essentially humdrum and boring so use your opportunity to liven it up.

This is where I point out that I’m a fiction writer experimenting with a new medium, not an amateur journalist or social commentator. Fiction writers  are often fence-sitters; even famous ones admit to it happily in interviews. They’re born to dwell on moral conundrums, painstakingly seeing every perspective, lovingly walking in a character’s shoes until it’s almost clear to everybody concerned what drives this imitation of a human being to behave the way they do.

I’m a life-long eclectic by choice. But in the midst of all of that truth is another truth; my personal truth that I’m still trying to figure out.

So here goes, for what it’s worth I find cemeteries claustrophobic, I’d want my minimised earthly remains (ashes) to be spilled from a mountain top over some endless wild expanse. Low-impact and clean. But… what if some dearly beloved family member or good friend died tragically in the line of duty on a foreign battle-field? Neither option seems optimal to me; not the pretty english flowers or the stark german simplicity.

So the provocation pushes me to realise two things: firstly, like Anthony Loxton in my novel THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE I prefer some wildness in the mix, a fenceless park-like area where visitors might wander in peace and privacy, a place of natural beauty with running streams and huge harbouring trees (Ah, but trees bring leaves and work…!) and secondly, that perhaps my gut response has something to do with the fact that I’m neither english nor german but afro-european.

Do I think nations should honour and respect their war dead? Absolutely. Do I think it would be great if we were all more involved in how our country’s cemeteries are set up and run? Absolutely. Do I think governments, politicians and public servants should lighten up (and open up) on the question of public cemeteries and burial sites? Absolutely.

The financial burden of running the war graveyards should not only be part of a  national dialogue between government, the military, survivors and the rest of the population, it should be part of dinner conversations conducted with much gusto and opinionated banter.

Of course I have an opinion but it’s dull to me; using the imagination to explore other people’s motives is a far more satisfying activity.  So how to keep faith with the characters who arrive out of the dark wanting me to tell their tale impartially, warts and all? I’ll just don my wizard’s hat and wander away from real-life blogs and I’ll soon be back in their zone.

Madeleine McCann loves pink

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment
Madeleine, still missing

Madeleine loves pink

Ironic that soon after my post “Pink is the new Blue” I started reading the book Madeleine, Kate McCann’s heart-rending account of the abduction of her 4-year old daughter in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May 2007. It turns out that the little girl loves pink. Suddenly it seems unbelieavably irrelevant whether little girls wear pink or not. I even have the feeling I should be ashamed of having wasted time on that blog.

The little girl is still missing, still missed after 4 long years.  There is now no law-enforcement agency in  the world actively looking for Madeleine. Her parents are conducting a private search with the help of hired investigators. To date no-one has come forward to identify a man seen by witnesses walking away from their apartment with an (apparently) sleeping child in pyjamas in his arms. Who was he? What of the other sightings? Who were the other strange individuals hanging around the apartment preceding the abduction? Somebody must know…

Kate McCann mentions her daughter loving pink several times and proudly describes her as ‘girly’. Her grandmother mentions it staunchly at Christmas time (See quote below). Are we wasting too much time on irrelevant stuff? Who are these evil people that are taking children all over the world? Why are we not holding vigils outside our police and justice departments? Why does the media not focus on these horrific crimes with the same assiduity and persistence as they do political fraud and corruption?

The slut walk has engendered huge amounts of commentary in the print and online media, but missing children as a major reflection of our damaged society are completely off the radar unless one of them happens to be yours, in which case you live, dream and think about nothing else. Why are our governments not working towards creating an effective integrated trans-border child abduction unit with real powers to work with other similiar bodies across the world? Could it be that nobody’s interested? That it’s easier to ignore the real under-our-nose horror than to face it?

Could it be that there’s no commercial aspect to grip the politicians’ and media’s interest? If every one of the long-missing children was treated as a stolen oil-field we might actually get somewhere. I don’t actually care anymore if girls wear pink or not: I just want them to grow up warm and safe, wearing whatever colours they like and free to choose their own futures (with a little bit of help from the loving people that surround them).

Visit http://www.findmadeleine.com to see how you can help.

Madeleine and her cousin

“Mrs McCann [Madeleine’s grandmother], 67, said she planned to put a large pink teddy bear with a big white heart on the four-year-old’s bed, ready to welcome her home.

She said: ‘I always pick out clothes and put money in a little envelope for each of [Madeleine, Sean and Amelie]. This year I did the same for Madeleine. I’d never leave her out.

‘She loves the colour pink. I have a huge pink teddy bear with a white heart on it -‘  “

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-503303/Kate-Gerry-McCann-spared-police-questioning-Christmas.html#ixzz1XRrE8ZIW

A touch of sex

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

‘Add a touch of sex and we’ll have them…!’

He emphasized his brilliance with a casual click of fingers to attract a waiter’s attention. The man’s capitalist orientation was all there in the casual certainty of his educated voice.  You couldn’t have missed it.

We’ll satisfy the insatiable appetite, attract them with plastic breasts, draw them in with what they can’t get enough of and feed them our subliminal message. They won’t even know that we’re selling them something else… was the implicit message.

Sex. The cherry on the top. The sweetener. The appetiser. The addiction.

He reminded me of a thirty-something self-starter I once worked with who owned his own Company and developed client training material.  A successful businessman who wore an earring and long shining black hair in a ponytail; nothing wrong with being smart and arty his whole attitude seemed to say. Contrary to what you might have expected the big corporate executives gave him plenty of work. We put it down to the confidence he projected.

That’s what this guy in the coffee shop was like too; super-confident, no doubts in his mind about sex being the ultimate additive. The woman opposite him was listening closely, her head to one side; she wasn’t going to challenge him. He could have been an advertising executive or a literary agent. I keep thinking back to what Saul Bellow said about every serious writer having to write a book about death and another about sex.

Sex is as weighty a topic as death is, I want to say to the stranger I overhear on my way out the coffee shop. It’s not just a throwaway line. I want to tell him I find gratuitous sex to be nasty and horrible. He wants to sell me cheap perfume and I want to buy a timeless erotic fragrance. I want to tell him: Sex isn’t just about pelvic thrusts and bared boobs in our faces; it’s physical contact between living breathing thinking human beings. A mysterious alchemy of mind and skin. That’s the secret, intimate space that could fascinate one.

It’s a great comfort that what goes around comes around; everything’s going retro these days. My coffee shop man may even impress a future acolyte with the immortal line: ‘add a touch of class and we’ll have them…!’ One can live in hope.

PS. Blogging is turning out to be more fun than I thought. There’s something therapeutic about being able to respond to a stranger’s words without ever speaking to him.

Words of a feather flock together

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

I came away from seeing the movie Conviction inspired and humbled. Not only did I get an inkling of what a truly amazing brother-sister relationship might be like, I also m3_baw_1sht_V2.qxd:MECHANICALacquired the word ‘setback’ for use in my daily life. In the past I have used the word ‘disappointment’ (as in ‘life is full of little disappointments’) far too frequently. I now realise my world-weary attitude is a cop-out because I can then stop trying; contemplating a ‘disappointment’ gives me permission to be miserable.

Thanks to Conviction I realise that all the little disappointments are in fact nothing but setbacks to be overcome (a la Hilary Swank as the lawyer sibling on steroids). The French word ‘contretemps’, now also in english dictionaries, has a wonderful elegance that implies a similiar obduracy, but it’s not as durable or as down-to-earth as a setback.

Today my husband asked if anything exciting had happened in my day. I replied that a whole lot had happened but nothing that he would classify as exciting. ‘So you had a lot of niggle,’ he said. Apparently ‘a lot of niggle in the game’ in rugby parlance means there’s been some rough stuff like the odd punch thrown here and there and an altercation or two or three, but nothing major enough to change the course of the game. Don’t you just love words? Who could get depressed about a whole lot of niggle in their day? And that setback I mentioned? I’m working on a publishing contract for my second novel as we speak…

____________________________

Postnote: The movie is based on real-life events. There are plenty of novels with the title ‘Conviction’ but they have nothing to do with this marvelous movie.

Pink is the new Blue

/ Consuelo Roland / 1 Comment

Well, not so new actually. Apparently, according to a book review read along the way, baby girls’ rooms decorated in blue were all the rage before the first world war, and a baby boy dressed in pink was the norm. It’s an intriguing thought; that a daily reality we treat as fact might be viewed as the wrong way round in an earlier age.

The international SlutWalk phenomenon with all its controversy has finally hit South Africa. While pondering my own point of view on the great divide between the ‘proud to be a slut’ and the ‘keep your slut word to yourself’ brigades, I came upon Joanne Hichens’ thoughtful riposte to the ‘common sisterhood’ line of argument (Cape Times, Aug 29, 2011).

And that got me thinking about the whole pink debate. There’s an organisation in the UK that has its knickers in a knot (some might say) over little girls dressed in pink from top-to-toe, playing with pink toy ponies, riding pink bicycles etc. These strong women have devoted themselves to convincing politicians, business moguls and unaware parents that it’s best to avoid pink for the nation’s daughters, thereby challenging society’s views on little girls who are only supposed to like sugar and spice and everything nice (aside: my first memory of pink for girls was pink candy floss; the boys got blue) and encouraging the girls themselves to avoid being pigeon-holed.

Could it be ‘slut’ is a pigeon-hole just like the colour pink? To paraphrase Hichens we not only have to challenge the attitudes men have towards women, but also have to discuss attitudes women have towards themselves and their sexuality. Odd thing is I disliked pink growing up, but these days I have plenty of pink items in my wardrobe. Does that make me less or more of a feminist? Have I perhaps come out on the other side as a fully liberated human being who wears pink and blue with equal abandon?

PS. Read ‘In the pink’ on MercatorNet for an interesting viewpoint on the link between breast cancer and reproductive risk factors, including oral contraceptives and induced abortion.

Thank you, Harrison

/ Consuelo Roland / Leave a comment

Harrison Ford to interviewer Margaret Gardiner (The Good Weekend, August 20, 2011): “… I thought the trick to this business was that they pay you fairly. Since they respect you based on how much they pay you, I’ve never been shy about asking for money… I also mean it when I say that I’m in it for the money. That is to say, this is my job. I don’t have another job. I don’t do it for free any more than a plumber does it for free.”

Any book publishers out there listening? Any literary agents out there listening? All you gung-ho wannabe authors out there, I dunno if that would be a wise career move… Consider the energy expended to potential income ratio: a friend of mine paints; it took her about a day to finish a painting she later sold for R12 000 to an American; that’s what I would call a decent return for her time.

How long will it take you to complete your first book? Double that. How much of your own money will you spend on learning your craft and editorial advice? Triple that. Before you leave your boring/stressful/dead-end/impossible/unsatisfactory paying full-time job take a long cool sober look at a standard publishing contract. What kind of book sales would you need just to get you through the month? Never mind, there’s always acting… Or plumbing.

PS. Have I broken the cardinal writers’ rule? The comment above is intended to be full of wry wisdom gained with not a note of whine but it’s a fine fine line and easily crossed.