scenes from a campus story
A very sexy law faculty.
A friend recently asked whether my next novel is going to be set at the University of Cape Town (given that I am now enrolled in a master's programme there). I assured him that would not be the case – not least because the world has ample campus novels, and I do not seek to add to them.
(Incidentally, I think Finuala Dowling did a wonderful job at capturing the tragicomic absurdities and fraught convulsions that are hallmarks of the post-apartheid university in her exquisite UCT-inspired novel Okay, Okay, Okay.)
My creative writing and publishing practice is something I see as something quite discrete from my stumbles into the realm of environmental law (the subject of my MPhil). The former might be a personal life-raft (I shudder to think where I'd be without them – drunk or dead, probably), the latter a set of steps (I hope!) towards making a greater contribution in fights against social and ecological injustice and planetary harm.
And yet, and yet! Perhaps it's inevitable that one realm might bleed into the other. Already, I've been struck by how one prescribed text was strikingly pertinent to the novel I'm currently revising, while another seemed to offer helpful context for a different novel project (one that's been brewing for many, many years but is currently very much on the back burner). I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this given the likelihood that many of the themes, dynamics, predicaments and tensions which animate my fiction probably overlap with many of the issues, anger and anxieties that have motivated me to study law.
Anyway. This law student / novelist / amateur photographer is amused by how enchanted I am by the Kramer Building, a 1984 face brick and concrete edifice housing UCT's law faculty on the university's Middle Campus. Amused because I suspect my younger (that is, teenaged) self would've found it drab, dour, cringy, "dated". The 2026 me finds it sexy without trying to be. (Hence the compulsive picture-taking.) A faded, unassuming, self-possessed modern. At the very, very outer edge of the mid-century, before it teeters off into post-modern insanity. I looked up when it was built: 1984, apparently. (So, not really mid-century at all.) Helvetica everywhere (now, that is modern). A smattering of art. And delightful plants, inside and outside, too.
