First Lines Meme

I can’t resist a good meme and when I saw this over at Dorothy’s, I knew it was an excellent chance to reflect on what has been quite a tumultuous year.

The rules are simple: post the first line (of yours, not a quote) from the first post of each month of the year.

January: What I like about these opening lines from the English version of Griet skryf ‘n sprokie by Marita van der Vyfer is the way they manage to be literary, funny and to hint at depressing possibilities for Griet at the same time.

February: Thanks to Litlove for this tag, which gives me a chance to write a quick post before I get down to studying for the day.

March: In times of uncertainty – or just on a Sunday afternoon when I want to escape – there’s nothing better than a South Africa versus Australia cricket test match.

April: This excellently-illustrated book on Depression arrived in my post-box yesterday.

May: I like that quote by Morrison, not because I’m feeling shame today, but because of the way it evokes the link between fog and the emotion.

June: Bit of craziness here as I wait to see if the Military have booked my plane ticket to fly to Kimberley on Sunday for a week.

July: Feeling a bit out of sorts today.

August: Greetings from Kathu in the remote Northern Cape.

September: Only 13 Mondays before the end of the year.

October: Self-help guru, absent father, cheating husband, excellent writer, self-centred prophet, genuine seeker after truth, a ‘decent person trying sometimes to be better’, a very wounded healer, a “bit of a shit”, a paradox.

November: I went up to Saldanha on Monday to give a presentation on the Psychology of Survival.

December: What do the above three have in common?

These lines make me think that my life this year has been a bit chaotic. I stayed in the military but moved from one base to another. I bought a house and moved in. My relationship went through ups and downs and finally ended. And then my dog died. I also ended therapy with one therapist, took a break and then started therapy with someone who is a much better fit for me. I also edited a book, read a fair bit and made new friends.

Here’s hoping for a much more settled (and happy and productive) 2010!

Summer holidays

Taken yesterday at the local botanical garden. I was amazed that this bird let me creep up to within a metre of it while it was enjoying dining on its own King Protea.

So far I’ve had a pretty quiet time on my holiday. We had a really good family Christmas and I’ve been taking it easy since it’s only a week today since my dog died. I’m feeling a bit numb about it now and I’m trying not to dwell on her death itself.

On the book front, I’ve got a lot to keep me busy. In no particular order we have:

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
We are all made of glue (Marina Lewycka)
Cape Town Stories (Marianne Barnard)
The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
Daddy’s Girl (Margie Orford)
Touch: Stories of contact (edited by Karina Szczurek)
Engleby (Sebastian Faulks)
Cape Town Calling (edited by Justin Fox)
Shark’s Egg (Henrietta Rose-Innes)

I’ve started the Lewycka and am enjoying it. It’s light summer reading and her characters are quirky and amusing. I’ve also been dipping into “Touch” which is a collection of 22 stories by South African authors around the theme of human contact. Contributors include: Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Damon Galgut, Ivan Vladislavic, Jonny Steinberg, Alex Smith, Zoe Wicomb. It’s perfect for when you have 30 minutes to spare but it’s not the kind of book I can read for a couple of hours at a time.

So far I’ve read one story from Outliers on the cultural aspect of plane crashes and it was thorough, entertaining and thought-provoking. I’m tempted to sneak a look at what some of the other book bloggers have said about it before I make up my own mind.

The White Tiger (TWT) won the 2008 Booker Prize with its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries says that one criticism of Adiga’s novel is that he writes about the experiences of India’s poor without himself being poor. Adiga says it is a challenge to “write about people who aren’t anything like me”. But can he actually pull it off?

Stuart Jeffries: “But isn’t there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventrioloquising others’ suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfil his literary ambitions?”

Jeffries says TWT has many failings but its “engaging, gobby, megalomaniac boss-killer” narrator (Balram Halwai) seems to be a strength. From village teashop waiter to Bangalore entrepreneur, Halwai is the white tiger who breaks out of his own cage of servitude.

I can’t help thinking about the dark side of India which finds a favourable audience in the West. Makes me think of other writers from the developing world who show up the corruption of their own countries and are applauded for it in the developed world. Locally the name of RW Johnson springs to mind.

Daddy’s Girl is a local (and celebrated) crime novel by the multi-talented Margie Orford. Just not sure I’m in the mood for crime so soon after suffering a trauma of my own. And so I’ve been sampling this and that and allowing my thoughts to settle and flit off again and then settle and so on. Perhaps this is normal. But it would be great to lose myself for a day or so in a really gripping novel.

I’ll take a break and return in early January. Here’s wishing you a fabulous New Year and all the best for 2010.

A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Today is Group and we have to bring a Christmas-themed reading. For me there is only one choice: A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.

Now I know that Dylan Thomas was a drunk and a bully and that he never quite got over his success or was able to maximise his talent (as they might say in business-speak). But this is such an evocative piece because it reminds me of childhood Christmases spent listening to LPs and laughing as a family at Mrs Prothero and the firemen. “Would you like anything to read?”

I suppose I could also call on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol but that’s been done to death for me. A lesser-known Dickens could work. Any ideas?

And as for poems, there’s TS Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi of course. I should be glad of another death. But what else? And why am I drawing such a blank on this topic? What story or poem stands out for you at Christmas?

Julie Powell, the World Cup Draw and Freud

What do the above three have in common? I’m tempted to say that the best answer wins some delectable prize but I think I should save the giveaway for a more deserving question. (And no, I won’t accept that they’re all a fraud. You’ll find an answer at the end.) The more mundane truth is that I felt like blogging about all three and so have lumped them together.

First up, Julie Powell. Are you feeling cheated that the feel-good image you had of Julie Powell is now having to be revised with the news that her latest book (Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession) carves up, you guessed it, her marriage (as well as meat)?

I’m not a regular Village Voice reader but I enjoyed Rebecca Marx’s excellent carve-up of Cleaving here.

I liked this paragraph:

How much you’ll enjoy Cleaving depends on how sympathetic you are to Powell’s dilemma, which, when it comes down to it, is a bit much to swallow: the act of trying to choose between one’s bottomlessly loving husband and one’s snakey-sounding lover, all while having the financial freedom to hang out with butchers just for the hell of it, is accompanied by the sound of the world’s most miniscule violin.

**
Friday’s Fifa 2010 World Cup Draw in Cape Town was a big deal. Huge street party with 50,000 people and the TV event was pretty good to my relatively untrained eye. I did wince a little when Sepp Blatter told the presenter Carol Manana that it was easy to fall in love with Africa when he looked at her. No, really – he said something as inane as that.

And then there were the countless repetitions of how wonderful the World Cup is going to be next year in South Africa and how historic it is that Africa is hosting the event. Granted. But given that hot air is one of Africa’s biggest exports, I could have done with less hype and more analysis. Some practical discussion of which game will be played where and which ones are likely to be the most popular.

For witty commentary you can’t beat Barney Ronay of the Guardian who was live-blogging the event. After commenting on Charlize Theron’s ditzy blonde routine and observing that her accent went quite mad he notes:

“Yes, Charlize, four teams in eight groups. Where has she been? Doesn’t she read the papers? Oh. It’s a kind of act. I see. Jerome is now explaining what a ball is and how you kick it and what “a goal” means. Or something. Who do they think is watching this? Martians?”

Nice. The best headline I’ve seen on the draw so far was from the Sun newspaper in the UK: Best English group since the Beatles.

England are apparently brimming with confidence after drawing Algeria, Slovenia and the USA. By contrast, South Africa “have a mountain to climb” after drawing Mexico, Uruguay and France. I wonder if the South African public will let Thierry Henry forget about his “Hand of Frog”?

**
And then, since this is supposed to be partly a psychology blog, I will add in a quote I read yesterday on Freud by Joan Raphael-Leff, a psychoanalyst at Unversity College in London.

My thesis is that for Freud Egypt plays an ambiguous and complex role as (unconscious) representation of the ‘dark continent’ – repudiated realm of the uncanny archaic mother / primordial ‘eternal feminine’. I suggest that his periodic preoccupation with ancient Egypt constitutes a particular form of unconscious repetition, which he called ‘return of the repressed’, and today we would link with revival of a filigree of implicit configurations, or dissociated memories. Association with traumatic events relating to his own earliest years induced avoidance of the Isis / Osiris / Horus myth with its evocative reminders of generational confusions, incestuous passions, fragmentation and fratricidal violence. This terrifying narrative rooted not in the phallic supremacy Freud chose to privilege but in maternal magic and integration of feminine powers of intuition as aspects of the masculine self. (from the journal parallax, 2007)

I know this is probably difficult to read without the surrounding context and discussion but I found it fascinating to read how Raphael-Leff uses Freud’s prehistory to explain his subsequent neglect of the feminine and the development of his (in)famous Oedipal theory.

Incidentally, one theme which brings all three together is that of Africa. Julie Powell visits Africa towards the end of Cleaving, the World Cup is being staged in Africa next year and this article was about Freud’s obsession with Egypt (which is still in Africa).

Fear and joy of flying

I went up to Saldanha on Monday to give a presentation on the Psychology of Survival. Then back for a night-flight in a helicopter that evening. Wow, what a thrill.

Leaving aside the long wait, some anxiety about flying with a trainee pilot, sitting around while he practises landing from different heights (800m, 600m, 400m, 200m) and so on, the flight itself was exhilirating. We had breathtaking views of the city at sunset and then there was the sheer thrill of being up in the air and looking down on everything.

It was scary and exciting at the same time and I’m sure the anxiety adds to the enjoyment since all that fear of crashing in a ball of flame on the ground gets transformed into the joy of apparent weightlessness as you drift over the city in the magic light of sunset.

We got to see the new Cape Town Stadium which is hosting the World Cup Draw next Saturday and it’s beautiful. Unfortunately I had my camera on the wrong setting and so my stadium shots were blurry. But at least the mountain was looking good.

***

Thinking about my fear of flying led me to realise that I’ve never actually read Erica Jong’s 1973 novel, which is “a comic, picaresque novel of sex and psychiatry that challenged conventional views of women”.

Before rushing off to get the book I thought I’d read a couple of reviews to see how this feminist classic has weathered the intervening 36 years. Joanne Barkan does a very good re-reading in the Fall 2009 issue of Dissent.

Here she summarises the plot:

Twenty-nine-year-old Isadora Wing (who’s recently been on the reading circuit with her first book, a volume of erotic poetry) is travelling with her Chinese American psychiatrist husband to a convention of psychoanalysts in Vienna. Emotionally frustrated and sexually bored in her marriage, Isadora is tormented, on the one hand, by her yearning for adventure, sexual rapture, freedom, and creativity, and on the other hand, by her need for the security and protection of a husband. She opts, at least temporarily, for adventure by taking off on a frenzied, buzzed-on-beer road trip through Western Europe in a sporty convertible with a “swinging” Jungian analyst whom she’s met at the convention. Two and a half weeks later, he dumps her in Paris in order to join his children and his current girlfriend for a long-planned vacation in Brittany. Completely unprepared for this, Isadora falls apart for a day but emerges from her panic with some of the confidence and strength she’s craved. She heads to London and the hotel where she and her husband had planned to meet before flying back to New York. He’s out, but she gets the key to his room. The book closes with her soaking in the bathtub, feeling contented, when her husband walks in. Will she stay with him or leave? She doesn’t know, but in either case, she’s convinced that she’ll be fine. (Joanne Barkan, Dissent, Fall 2009)

The novel seems to have been equally shocking and liberating at the time and while not very well written, Fear of Flying helped to break the mould of women’s identities. As Barkan says, it “encouraged so many of us to get our stories straight”.

If you’re interested, also check out this article by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker.

Halloween meme

In the spirit of Halloween, and even though we don’t do Halloween here in SA, I thought I’d ask my resident horrorphile (the lovely P) to answer Emily’s 13 meme questions which I first saw over at Courtney’s. Here goes (and this is unedited by the way, which is really saying something about my ability not to be too controlling!)

1). Which urban legend ghost scared the bejeezus out of you when you were a kid?

I used to find any kind of poltergeist scary.

2). Which horror movie has the best premise?

I think the original Saw (yes, the rest were pretty lame) was brilliant. I LOVE it when there’s a twist I’m not expecting, and when the ‘dead’ guy gets up right at the end of the movie after lying there, er, ‘dead’ the whole time, well, I was impressed that I’d been misled! Plus – and I guess these don’t count as horror movies but rather as thrillers – The Others and The Sixth Sense. I loved the twists in these too.

3). What is the most disappointing “treat” to receive in your bag on Halloween night?

Well, we don’t really do the whole trick or treat thing in SA but I’d say any kind of fruit wouldn’t score highly on the excitement scale for me. Give me chocolate, please – Lindt or Cadbury if possible!

4). What’s the best non-candy item to receive?

Er, I’ll pass on this one…. Trick or treating is all about the sweets, isn’t it?

5). Did a monster live in your closet when you were a child?

No. But I had a thing about the possibility of something lurking under my bed, and would often peak under there before I turned out the light at night.

6). Which supernatural creature sent chills up your spine when you were ten and still does?

I used to find vampires pretty intriguing – I remember seeing a movie where a vampire scales the wall outside someone’s bedroom and it freaked me out. But I don’t find them that scary any more.

7). Which supernatural creature makes you yawn?

I’m afraid zombies don’t really do it for me. I think the way they move just makes me want to laugh – plus I think I’ve seen too many zombie spoof movies! (Sorry, Courtney!)

8). What’s your favorite Halloween decoration?

I agree with Courtney – the carved pumpkins with candles inside do look pretty sinister. And they remind me of the movie Halloween….

9). If you could be anywhere on Halloween night, where would you be?

On the couch watching some of the scariest DVDs imaginable, with a stash of chocolate and chips. (And with you to snuggle up next to, babe! Sorry to drag you into this scenario – I know you’re not crazy about scary movies!)

10). What’s the scariest book you’ve read so far this year?

Sadly I haven’t read any scary books this year, but Misery and The Shining by Stephen King are two of my all-time favourites….

11). Haunted houses or haunted hayrides?

I haven’t heard of haunted hayrides but they sound like loads of fun! I’ve been on haunted walking tours in London and York, though, and they were mostly funny but there were a couple of scary moments too!

12). Which Stephen King novel/movie would you least like to find yourself trapped in?

I think either Misery (at the mercy of Kathy Bates and her sledgehammer – eek!) or Cujo.

13). Which are creepiest: evil dolls, evil pets, or evil children?

I’d have to say evil children. The child in The Omen (the book and the movie) terrifies me!

Regrets? I’ve had a few

• I don’t regret the rosé with a light lunch at the hospital (a few slices of cheese on French bread and some baby tomatoes, which left a definite hole in my tummy only partially filled with chocolate cake). But I do have other regrets – social ones, work ones.

• What got me onto this subject was watching the latest episode of the wonderful ZA News here (along the lines of Spitting Image). Former president Thabo Mbeki is funny on the subject of regrets. I love Zapiro’s puppets and all of them are good – Tim Modise as the presenter, Tutu and Mandela, Manto, former prez Mbeki and the others. This was initially intended for the SABC but they chickened out so their loss is the web’s gain.

• I’ve almost reached 150 posts here at the Couch Trip and I’ve realised that I’ve fallen into the habit of blogging about once a week (mostly on a Monday). I don’t think I’ve lost my blogging Mojo just yet but I have been wondering about how long I’ll keep going and whether I should focus it a bit more on psychology rather than the general whatever-I-feel-like format that it currently has. When I’m busy and/or stressed I don’t do the rounds of usual blog-reading that I would like to. But I do think my life is a lot richer for the blogging friends that I’ve made and I always come away from my regular blog-reads with some good ideas and grateful for the sense of shared experiences.

• I also know that I need to shake up my real-life social interaction. I’ve fallen into a bit of a rut where friendships are concerned and reading Sandy’s blog-post (over at Blogging Behavioural) about making friends made me realise that I can do something about it.

• Today is the day that I got an offer of more permanent employment with the military. Part of me is relieved that the offer finally came through but I’ve also got used to being temporary here so it’s with mixed feelings that I will sign the acceptance letter and fax it back to them. I’m almost ready to leave again and so it feels quite weird to be signing a letter saying that I’m going to stay.

• I’m working on a short talk for my group on Tuesday about literary representations of Cape Town. I intended to draw on ten novels about Cape Town but I think that I will find more than enough material in the excellent A City Imagined by various authors and edited by Stephen Watson from the UCT English department. It’s interesting that while Cape Town is such an incredibly beautiful city many people (and writers in particular) react to it with such mixed feelings and with a sense of tangible disappointment. I’ll post on this next week when my head is a bit clearer.

• Friday is generally not a good day for me. I’m not exactly sure why but I think the friendship drought has something to do with it. I enjoy the solitude and the chance to read and recover from the week but I’m also wishing for more stimulating company. I nearly went to a book launch this week at the excellent (and independent) Book Lounge but P was busy with her taxman and I just wasn’t up for it. I felt like a bit of a coward and the trip to the gym only put me in a worse mood.

• I have a low cringe threshold for John Cleese in Fawlty Towers. I bought the complete edition for P for her birthday and we watched the first episode the other night. Basil Fawlty is sooooo awful. It’s that similar feeling I get when I watch The Office. I can appreciate the humour but the awkwardness of it makes me want to curl up into a ball and start rocking! One DVD series that I AM loving is Planet Earth. The visuals alone are breath-taking.

This and that

• Only 13 Mondays before the end of the year. That’s a scary thought. Apparently the Christmas rush (or the build-up to the Christmas rush) starts on Thursday. I was interested to read about Super Thursday in the book trade, which happens this Thursday the 1st of October. That’s the day the UK publishers release about 800 titles in time for Christmas. No prizes for guessing which book is likely to be one of the major sellers this year. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (good review here).

• I’m busy with my Cape Town reading project. The aim is to read or re-read 10 Cape Town novels before the end of October. I’ll post on this in due course. Most of the novels I’m reading seem to be written by women. I wonder if that dynamic is more pronounced here in SA than in Europe – that it’s women who do the bulk of the novel writing and reading?

• I’ve also started re-reading The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. This was first published in 1978 but is still relevant and topical. Peck talks a lot about suffering as being necessary for personal growth and draws a lot on Buddhism. The opening line if I can remember it correctly is “Life is Suffering”.

• I’m also having to work, which can be annoying. It’s not the patients that I mind so much as the talks that I’m called on to give. This week I need to brief a group of people on “How to tell when someone has a psychological problem”. Ok that wasn’t the exact title but that’s what it boils down to. I’m not sure this is the kind of audience who will appreciate being told that everyone should go for (or could benefit from) therapy. And I also don’t want to do therapy with everyone here. I’m not allowed to give the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV so I’ll have to make this a more general “signs and symptoms” talk. Ho hum.

• I’m feeling guilty about the dog. We’ve been staying in the new house for a month now and I still haven’t managed to get an internal fence so that the dog can come and live with us. The parents are being quite patient and long-suffering about looking after her but I can also see by Joschka’s expression when I come to visit that she’s wondering when I’m coming to claim her.

• On Saturday we watched The Life of David Gale (starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet). I thought it was brilliant (if a little far-fetched).

• Don’t mention the cricket. (We lost again – this time to England).

Have a good week.

Settling in

Just a quick blog-post to say I’m settling in and enjoying the new house. It still feels quite strange and I’m feeling guilty about not unpacking all the boxes and not doing this and that. I am pretty pleased with the Chagall though.

I am also feeling a bit overwhelmed by this move. The strain is definitely showing since my anxiety is definitely worse than usual. It’s making me cranky and irritable and worried. I’m frustrated that I can’t just be done with the move already. Why do I need to keep on unpacking and organising and tidying and throwing away and making decisions?

If I wasn’t so tired I could go to gym and feel better but … well, I just need to take it easy.

Some good news on the book front is that my new books arrived. I’m loving The River Midnight (Lilian’s “stunning debut novel” from 1999) and I’m astonished at how well Lilian has realised the Polish shtetl. Great dialogue and I’m loving the vilda bayas, the four friends (wild creatures) who are now grown up. I’m a slow reader so it could take me a couple of weeks to finish this but I’ll post a review when I’m through.

Also very happy to have started Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I read about this on Charlotte’s blog (I think) and have wanted to read it ever since. That’s good advice for writing and life – just take things bird by bird.

In Treatment

In Treatment (HBO, 2008) is a TV series (closely based on an Israeli TV drama called Be Tipul) which centres on Paul Weston, a 53-year old Maryland-based psychotherapist. Each episode depicts a single therapy session and provides an excellent exercise in dialogue and close camera work. Gabriel Byrne plays Paul and his soft blue eyes, wrinkled smile and lilting Irish accent work well to create the impression of a kind, likeable and intense therapist who is also quite preoccupied by his own troubled marriage and mid-life crisis.

I watched the first seven episodes of Season One this weekend and I was initially quite impressed. The sessions are divided up according to weeks. Monday is Laura (a young woman with Borderline tendencies who falls in love with Paul), Tuesday is Alex (a narcissistic Navy pilot who was responsible for the death of 16 Iraqi boys in a religious school), Wednesday is Sophie (suicidal teenager), Thursday is Jake and Amy (a bickering couple) and Friday sees Paul in his own supervision / therapy. The sessions are addictive and a little over-dramatic but I was pulled in and interested, at least for the first five or so episodes.

What I liked about In Treatment was the experimental format, the extended dialogue, the clever use of the therapeutic frame and other therapy devices. The troubled therapist adds an interesting dimension and I was intrigued to see how the Israeli influence would work in an American series. There were many issues which deserve a lot of discussion, such as erotic transference, empathy, narcissism and so on. What I didn’t like was the inevitable over-dramatisation, the sexual voyeurism, the lack of understanding between therapist and patient and what I took as simply bad therapeutic technique.

Many of Paul’s interpretations made me cringe. As a therapist I know when I’m off the mark with what I say and I had this same sensation for much of the episodes. Paul will gaze off into the middle distance and say something profound rather than staying with his patients and connecting with their experience. Of course a lot of this has to do with the demands of TV and it also has to do with the plot. Paul’s shortcomings as a therapist are partly what make this series interesting. It’s a classic case of “Doctor heal thyself”. One example of a bad interpretation: Paul starts telling Laura, the young woman patient who has fallen in love with him, about scuba diving and the bends rather than focusing on what she’s just presented to him, which is her engagement to her boyfriend.

I was interested to see the reaction on the Internet and it seems largely positive. What I would be more interested in is seeing the reaction from therapists themselves. My own initial impressions after seven episodes are very mixed. There’s a big difference between playing the role of a therapist and actually doing therapy. I really don’t think this is something you can read from a script. Empathy is something you can feel and it’s either there or it’s not. My initial impression was that it simply wasn’t there. Anyone else seen it? Does it work for you?