Alex Smith

Continuing the Long Kiss A-Z here are two more C’s for the collection.
I haven’t yet found kisses written by writers from Chad or Central African Republic, but I will keep looking.
.
.
.

Cape Verde
From The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araujo
By Germano Almeida

Now, a lamentable thing occurred. He’d forgotten to pack pajamas and so he found himself standing in his drawers in frot of a woman whom he considered to be of the best society. He wanted to hide behind the door and he was about to open his mouth to beg her pardon when (more…)

‘La La la laaa, I built a railroad…’ Over the weekend the dog of debt came to me like Marley’s ghost. The Dog of Debt’s face. It loomed from impenetrable darkness, but had a brilliant light about it, and stood out like a boiled lobster in a soup kitchen pot. From a distance it appeared angry and ferocious, barking, but as I came closer the dog of debt was singing with the voice of Al Jolson, even though it was chained up to post. ‘La la la laa, they told me I was building a dream…’ The hair was curiously stirred, by the effort of barking or singing or perhaps the South Easter; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. Those teeth, and its red colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
`Mercy!’ I said. ‘Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?’
Again the spectre raised a song, and gnashed its teeth, and bristled its red fur. ‘Don’t you remember they called me Al;it was Al all the time. Why don’t you remember, I’m your pal?’
`You’re chained,’ I said. ‘Tell me why?’
‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the dog of debt. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’ Then singing again, the dog said: ‘You will be haunted by a multitude of old spirits and a few living ones.’
Sure enough, I looked into space and there was Studs Terkel, only one week in the grave and back talking to Stephen Sackur : He shrugs and points to a table in the corner of the room. ‘You see that urn’ he says. ‘That’s the ashes of my wife Ida. All I want is for my ashes to be mixed with hers. They should spread us both in Bughouse Square’. And how does Studs want to be remembered? His answer is delivered with a glint in the eyes. ‘Someone who made trouble where trouble was needed’. (more…)

Let us leave bitter philosophies and cafés with their roasting pimientos rellenos de arros, and move on. My chin stings, the blood from the cut won’t stop coming, and Algeria’s neck hurts. Somewhere she has read that a backpack should weigh no more than ten percent of a hiker’s body weight, yet her bulging Karrimor is overloaded with bags of Chinese tea, a small teapot, playing cards and two pebbles, heavy with regret. (more…)

Please vote for your favourite of the Love Africa Carnival September Love Notes:

Karina Magdalena Szczurek’s Inverted Season
Michelle McGrane’s The Spaza Shop
Susan Kiguli’s Animal Portraits
Louis Greenberg’s Spring Oak & Melville
Sherissa Roopnarain’s Nani’s Sari
Adrian Niel Chellew’s The Tree
James Clarke’s Skyscapes

The author of the most loved love note will receive a signed book from one of these fine Book SA authors (author will not get his/her own book back:):

A friend and I went walking at Groot Constantia this afternoon. It was a gently warm day in Cape town. Mountain pigeons nesting in the historic homestead’s rafters were chortling. I don’t know where the geese were; I didn’t see the usual flock at the old pools. Our habit is to take a route up and up beyond the houses along a gravel path flanked with vines, now beginning to show spring leaves. The vineyards go right into the mountains, but we don’t go that far. Today, nearing the highest point of our walk we had to step out of the road to make way for a CAT tractor rumbling down in the opposite direction. Then we reached our summit and turned down too. As we descended along a path lined on one side with a river and trees and on the other side with vines, I was telling my friend about my Iran novel –how I am waiting to hear from my publisher, but that on account of at three particular problems, they being the oddness of the story, the eccentricity of its structure and the fact that the novel is entirely based in Iran with no South African content, I feel almost certain it will be rejected. While I was saying all this, I glanced over my shoulder to the right and in the vineyard, quite surprisingly was a peacock with feathers up and out for courting. (more…)

Bless my lips, it’s Monday. Women own Friday, but men kiss best on Monday. And wordy justifications aren’t always desirable, maybe it’s better to say little and kiss more.

The Immoralist
Andre Gide

The railway station is next to the sea. I had to take the coach that brought us to the hotel down to the station to collect our trunks. I stood up in the coach to talk to the driver. He was a little Sicilian from Catania, as beautiful as a line of Theocritus, resplendent, fragrant and delicious as a piece of fruit.
‘Com’ è bella la Signora!’ he said in a charming way as he watched Marceline walk away.
‘Anche tu sei bello, ragazzo,’ I replied. And as I was standing so close to him, and couldn’t resist, I drew him towards me and kissed him. He merely gave a little laugh.
‘I Francesi sono tutti amanti,’ he said.
‘Ma non tutti gli Italiani amati,’ I replied, laughing in turn … I looked for him the days that followed, but couldn’t find him again. We left Taormina for Syracuse. We were retracing our footsteps from our previous journey, working back to the origin of our love.

(more…)

Come my beauty, my handful of dirt … my book with a dingy brown cover. While assembling 95, a composite number of kisses from classic comedy and satires, I find, infected with all this talk of the Second-Hand Goods Bill and second-hand bookshops, I am reminded again, as if I need it, of a book I own that could change my life significantly, if temporarily, by paying off all my debts twice, probably more times over. The problem is I cannot find the book. Dammit! Where is that book? Everywhere, everywhere, I’ve looked in all the boxes I still own, but that book won’t show itself. Coy! The book is playing hard-to-get, but at least kisses are plentiful! (more…)

Other light may not glow near the Fire of Victory made of sixteen kinds of flame. This I learned, when fortunately unaware that it was taboo for a woman to travel around alone there, I went to Iran on a whim, looking for the ruins of Xerxes’ summer place as described in the Old Testament story of Esther. As it turned out Xerxes palace was less than a foundation, but during a road trip through the country, I saw many things to make up for that fizzled quest, including the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Yazd, where a holy flame had been burning for a thousand years (so I was told…) For a small amount of money, the last of my savings in fact, I was able to employ an excellent guide, Najmeh Parvisi, who was at the time a student of ancient languages at Shiraz University. Our journey across Persia was punctuated with countless glasses of black tea, dates, pomegranates and many divinations in the form of passages selected randomly from a fat book of ghazals by Hafiz (the celebrated 14th century mystic poet who has been adoringly over-quoted on the Internet for writing: One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.) Zoroastrianism was one of the first religions of Persia and is still a recognized religion in Iran. The flames enthroned in Yazd were a rare sort called Atash Behram, a union of fires from sixteen sources: funeral pyre, lightening, king, potter, ironsmith, goldsmith, brick maker, brewer, soldier, baker, dyer, shepherd, ascetic, a mint and the house of a good Zoroastrian.
(more…)

With spring comes the grand opening day of the Love Africa Carnival. I’m delighted to unveil Love Africa Carnival Note of Affection#1: Skyscapes by James Clarke.
James was born in London, but now lives in South Africa. He is a columnist for The Star newspaper and has been called South Africa’s funniest columnist by the Financial Mail! James is author of several books on natural history, cultural history and humour.
(more…)

Credo quia impossibile: I heard over spicy dhal of an English professor who habitually gave lectures with his fly down in the 1980’s at a local university … and he wore no under-garments to speak of … this was before there were rules about sexual harassment, but not before there were rules about owning a mug in colours green, yellow and black. You could teach with your fly down and get away with it, but if you owned a mug in those colours the punishment was up to ten years imprisonment for treason. (more…)