2006 ‘Skip I am Far Above You’

‘Skip I am far above you’ (dedicated to the Pataphysical Society, London)

Introduction

‘For several years from 2006, choosing to have no filter on my computer to exclude spam, I would trawl through emails, curious at the randomly generated paragraphs that formed the body of the message. Most were incomprehensible but for a certain period there was a slew of cogent (if not entirely sensible) short paragraphs. From who? To whom? Messages created by a computer in order to gain access to my computer, a Trojan horse, the meaning unimportant, the approximate syntax just a means to penetrate my firewall…’

2003 ‘Take a Piece of Africa Home with You’

FIFTY-FIVE DAYS IN JOHANNESBURG

or

‘TAKE A PIECE OF AFRICA HOME WITH YOU’

‘walking across the Nelson Mandela bridge (which on some maps exists only as a dotted future project awaiting completion) the city divides before you, hundreds of goods trains or stationary and empty passenger trains in a stagnant river between the two heights of Braamfontein and the CBD. Each one is crowned with skyscrapers, rust and mirrored glass, buildings imitating quartz, basaltic outcrops either side of a fault that shouldn’t (geo)logically have produced these forms, if the mineral in question hadn’t been gold…’