Jimmy Pieterse

First Bowling Alone, now Drinking Alone?

Big Pumpkin's coming for your jam. Ek sê jou.

Dis die woord op die straat waar ons bly...

And very possibly dishonest too - having been made from flavoured and coloured pumpkin, not raspberry at all.

Reviewer 2 taking their frustrations out on people like they even know their life.

Laat my regtig dink aan sekere Dutch landscape paintings. Beautiful.

While Afrikaner nationalists of that period were neither Maoist nor scared of Big Poultry, they sure liked the idea of the people on whom they thrust their largesse to be self reliant (concerning eggs, at least).

Some advertisements for stands in the relatively newly proclaimed suburbs in the north of Pretoria that I came across reading copies of the ISCOR News of the 1940s/50s proudly mentioned that these stands were large enough for multiple chicken coops...

Featuring lots of Rage Against the Machine?

Judith Butler · This Is Wrong We need a better understanding of the fears exploited by authoritarians: who is this ‘migrant’, so dangerous they...

‘When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future.’

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

OF THE EMPIRE We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

From a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, where after a hundred poems showcasing gentle observations on nature and animals, she hits you with this

Well done, you! Legibility is the key. Last year during an undergraduate lecture I made a reference to Good Will Hunting that drew only blank stares. After an uncomfortable silence, my TA mouthed "they weren't born when that film was released." I almost went shopping for a pipe and a tweede jacket.

Friends, Esté Pieterse and I will be relocating to Hogsback (a tiny wee town in the Amatole mountains) in May. I will be taking up an AP position in Anthropology at the historic UFH. We are, it is safe to say, very excited.

Seems like cadre deployment is fast becoming our biggest export product. I wonder if it is liable to be taxed like Canadian oil?

Fingers crossed for a big reunion in the not too distant future!

Hi, Carolyn! Right back at you! We're probably as flabbergasted as everyone else by global politics. But life goes on, I guess. So while our presidents shout at each other on Twitter, the academic year is about to start and we'll very soon be dealing with an intake of almost 9000 freshmen...

The mine dumps of Silicon Valley While it might be cathartic to compare Elon Musk’s tech firms to apartheid-era mines, the connection between ex-South Africans and American capitalism is complicated.

He is also, in an important sense, quite American:

africasacountry.com/2024/10/the-...

The man in the high castle or the high man in the castle?