The Chiz

Acid Alex is one hell of a read for anyone who grew up in South Africa during70's and 80's - hell even the 90's. It's like brushing up against the
unshaven past when you least expect it. So much of the story is real and
visceral, like unexpected memories sparked by a song you haven't heard for a while, or a street you haven't turned down in ages: Loaded…
Here I ask the author, Al Lovejoy some question about writing, drugs and
society, just to try and get more of a handle on the book, and the man behind it.

You can buy Acid Alex by clicking here. Which you really should do if you haven't already! 

1) Al, you've mentioned in previous interviews that you started writing
down your experiences as part of therapy, not with the intention of
writing a novel. At what point did this change into being a book, and did your experience of the act of writing change once you changed your ideas about what you wanted to do with the material?

It was a very deliberate and calculated two-stage process. I primarily had to decide if I was going to at least try and embark on what I could only foresee as a long, lonely, painful and terrifying excursion into my past, and coupled with this was knowing that semi-completed therapy is always detrimental to a positive prognosis…so IF I started – I would HAVE to finish it. Once that extreme decision had been reached, and let me tell you, it wasn’t no easy decision baby – I then had to creep up on the idea that if I really and truly applied myself to this task with the cold determination to make the process work (and it did!) - then surely I should attempt to make it accessible to the rest of the world or at very least those of my contemporaries in the same predicament. That meant writing it as a truly compelling book that would convince me as an extremely well read and utter cynical bastard. It would have been pointless for me to even start otherwise. That is the sole reason why the very first sentence I typed was: “I was born to tell a story…”

2) I some times feel that writing is treated like the medical profession.
It is shrouded in this veil of mystery and mystique, and the idea that only a gifted few are ALLOWED to write, are good enough, strong enough. Your book is one of the most honest, up front and simple that I have read in a long time. You certainly don't come across as an Ivory tower kind of guy. How would you debunk the idea that not everyone can write?

Good writers are master story tellers. But not all master story tellers can write. Welcome to Africa. And I am very much of the verbal school of story telling and as that kind of African I had to bring my stories to my writing - not the other way round. That’s why my prose has a conversational flavour. But I know exactly what you mean when you speak about almost having to ask permission. Look I journalised dialogue and expressions, which I knew any sane South African would recognise immediately but simultaneously kakked myself thinking: “Jirre, Al, you can’t write about Poena pomping spiritsuipermeide – even if it is all true” See, now where the hell did that come from…?

3) Compared to much of the post apartheid, political angst ridden texts that have been published, your book is a breath of multi coloured fresh air. Did you struggle to find a publisher on the basis that your book was just too out there, too extreme?

Weirdly enough no. Struik signed roughly on the basis of the first four pages. Publishing wasn’t the problem. Getting booksellers to stock Acid Alex is the problem. Apparently it is okay to sell Irving Welsh’s books, which raised the use of the word “cunt” to an art form and of course any other foul, filthy thing Americans or other English speakers can produce artistically or otherwise but because I had to take my writing into the gutter of the real South Africa – it is apparently too obscene to stock on their shelves. Struik has actually offered copies of Acid Alex to these booksellers free on consignment (basically if they can’t sell the books just return them) - They refuse flatly. I might be wrong but isn’t that something called censorship? And isn’t it one of the major reasons why this country was considered the siff, racially obsessed, Poes of the Whole World …for so long?

4) Since the book has been out, you have become very active with your website, its forums, posting new writing and keeping a community going around your book and other projects. How do you view the internet as a whole? Do you think it really is an open area where anyone can and should be allowed to post their ideas, creativity and thoughts?

As an IT specialist I come from the Copyleft school of thinking which is rooted in a philosophy that embraces the free association and sharing of thoughts and ideas in an open transparent community. From this perspective - the Internet is merely a common, electronically sustained, artificial consensual hallucination - of both the soaring genius and rude idiocy, the carefree generosity and appalling greed, the astonishing strength of spirit and the utter animal depravity found within the human race. And we as contemporary human beings have skilfully conspired to make the Internet into as much a unique part of our existential experience as the DNA in our living tissue. So skilfully in fact that we can no longer sustain human life as we know without it. And as such, having become a real part of our common humanity – in a crude sense, it is like having a metaphorical extra hand, which may serve to proffer an unexpected gift or become a cocked fist ready to strike and injure. A calculated, mathematic reflection of our universal, recidivistic, human nature.

Remember the Internet was born out of the post-WWII Arpanet, which was conceived by the USA for the sole purpose of processing NATO’s military intelligence and thereby maintaining its trans-Atlantic control of Western Europe - and simultaneously facilitating: the financing, R&D, construction and eventual deployment of bigger, better, more efficient armies and weapons of mass destruction - which singularly serve to underwrite America’s political will. Underneath the beauty and bestiality sculpted from the raw material of abstract algorithms - that is still the underlying backbone and primary application of the Internet – as was carefully defined by the American National Standards Institute in American Standard Code of Information Interchange. In my opinion - it has to be kept an open forum of ideas and exchange by all responsible free thinkers and computer scientists because some corporate spiritual responsibility has to be taken for the Internet before it achieves its ultimate purpose of complete control or the alternate destruction of everything which refuses to submit to American economic, political and military dominance.

 
It is only in the hands of a slave that a tool is granted more consideration than the hand that manipulates it. I am a free child of God and the slave of no man. For me the Internet is merely a tool to facilitate the communication of this declaration of self-expression and formed opinion plus a means to gain access and benefit personally from any other schools of shared and applied thinking.

5) You tell so many stories in Acid Alex that any 30+ South African will relate directly to, and a good few more that just about anyone who has ever partied hard, or taken drugs of any kind can relate to. So many in fact, that it seems there could be any number of more books on each of these topics. How did you decide on what to keep and what to focus on?

It is my opinion that most screwed up adults were screwed up kids, so I did spend a lot of time in sketching what I perceive to be the developmental psychology markers of my childhood and adolescence. It was also a personal search for what I call milestones. In between the mud, potholes and rocks strewn along the pathway of a journey are intermittent milestones indicating two things. One, exactly how far one has travelled and two, the means to calculate exactly how much less there is to go before a certain destination will be reached. And remember, while we are bouncing along merrily in the ruts of this metaphor – real time doesn’t ever figure into this equation, measuring spiritual distance is all that counts. Sandy was a milestone. A very big one. That is why he has a whole chapter to himself. That is why, as possibly the only real father figure of my childhood - I chose to dedicate the book to him. See, I figured that if my past was the reason why I was currently pissing all over my future prospects - then I had to re-root myself in my past from a different perspective. It was a process of deciding what people and events had kept enough of that spark of humanity alive in me that they had managed to hold me back from slipping completely over the edge into intractable sociopathology - then taking those things, focussing on them and building the rest of my life from there. Being born again logically necessitates a different Father and thus a different Family.

In this sense, trying to apply Wally as a nurturing father figure behind the man I have chosen to become - would be psychologically destructive once again, because as role model of memories for my malnurtured inner child - I had to realise and accept that the only person who engendered the real beginnings of self-esteem and spiritual responsibility in me was Sandy. And it was okay for me to recognise this and allow myself to feel that way about him too. Wally and Denise formally and emotionally rejected me from their family and actively ground that rejection into my psyche in the most vile way possible - but Sandy never, ever wanted to say goodbye. Writing Acid Alex was a search for that personal truth and a process of making it the first internal building block of a spiritual gateway to entering a place of understanding my true identity as a child of God. And using it to take my place as that unique, precious child and irreplaceable member of another adopted Family which will always remain intact. Bubu was another element. Beating alcoholism and hard narcotic addiction with this understanding - more of the same. And I didn’t feel it overly presumptuous to think that almost everybody relates to this model more or less the same way and most people would find themselves on the same quest somewhere in my story and might possibly benefit from engaging in the same process - so I tried to stick those things that in my opinion we commonly share and experienced as the young South Africans of our era.

6) The world you describe in Acid Alex is one that most deny ever existed, and that most certainly does not exist now. But it is one that I have walked through myself. How entrenched do you think the sub culture, underground life is in South Africa?

Ja, poor, old South Africa and its perpetual culture of denial. We are who we are and that is that. But don’t let it get to you china, if you don’t know where to score zol – just ask. Someone will sort you out. There is only one rule though. Avoid asking the white men who carry Bibles on Sundays. And all their chommies too. Seriously. See, zol was okay with God from when He created it millions of years ago and told bra Adam that zol, cucumbers, mielies, magic mushrooms, garlic, naartjies, suurvye and basically everything else growing there was all irie-I for chowing - but china don’t durb on any of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden because that was guaranteed upset tummy shots. You know this of course - but just under a hundred years ago the ous that carry bibles around on Sundays, all got together with their chommies and voted that they weren’t entirely happy with a lot of the plants and Arrangements God had made - including rumours that heaven actually had a blêrrie back door for the odd unlikely kaffir or hotnot to sneak in! Anyway they set God very straight on all sorts of old score’s including the hemelse-swartgevaar, white people buying alcohol on Sundays and everything to do with zol. Now we don’t talk about it. So, what’s changed Cousin?
 

7) In South Africa, writing and indeed book reading is comparatively Ivory Tower-ish. by which I mean, books are very expensive, and top book shops mostly hidden away in leafy suburbs and shopping Malls. Do you think more can and should be done to give greater access to writing and reading for more people in this country?

Yeah, first remove import tax from books. Especially non-fiction and educational books. Give writers the same tax incentives as the movie industry. Bring reading to grass roots level by means of multi-genre graphic novels. Set up more creative writing scholarships for promising youngsters and illustrators. Support promising aspirant writers and illustrators through subsistence contracts. Translate Asterix, Tintin and Lucky Luke into all the official South African languages (I apologise if somebody has done this already…) and maybe bring J.K. Rowling to South Africa on a speaking tour in schools…

11) Now that you have a novel out, a film on the way, what do you feel about the act of writing itself? How do you now approach this idea of setting out the ideas that might become a book?

Of all of my obsessions, chocolate, photography, reading and writing are the only ones that I can safely live with. However, I now have a slightly different approach to the latter. During the writing of Acid Alex the thing that freaked me out most was reading very, very good books and being entirely intimidated by the staggering talent of the various authors. I remember laying my hands on an Isabel Allende I had wanted to read for a while – and then being unable to write a single word for two weeks I felt so deeply cowed. Now that Acid Alex is finished, I have managed to gain some distance from myself as a writer and when I read bits of it, I’m quite impressed. Really. It means that I can feel comfortable within my own style now without that paralysed so-out-in-the-chilly-bites feeling. So there is a tiny bit more confidence creeping in for me. And that is good and normal. John le Carre was being interviewed after the publishing of Russia House and made the astonishing statement that after publishing about six bestsellers he was at long last comfortable and felt he had now finally learned to write. I know exactly what he is talking about. And while I have given myself another ten to fifteen years to learn how to write all properly like a big person - I can feel that smattering of confindence bolstering my approach. And my editing time is coming down.

Unfortunately I am a slow, nitpicking, hack. I can’t move on from one thing till I am satisfied that it works. And I keep fighting this nightmare thingy where I wake up one morning unable to scribble even a blurb onto a corn-flake box. I am also still a tiny bit shlocked sometimes when I read stuff I’ve written because as a momentary objective reader I think: Fuck Al, that’s actually written quite well. Okay, not all – just some. So it is a process of coming to grips with the extremes of waking up every day and being this totally blue-baboon-bum schizo - yet maintaining the air that all is irie-I. But I suppose that any truly honest writer will admit they are nuttier than Scrat and writing is merely a thinly veiled excuse to excavate a tunnel - in any general direction away from the sabre-toothed squirrel farm. However, even though I would not wish being a writer on my worst enemy (It would make me pity the poor fucker too much and you can’t pity your friggin enemies dammit!). Truth…? I’m happy and I will probably always be a writer.

The Muse did bite the Oracle’s arse and the Oracle in turn has spoken…
Damn!! #&@*!!! What’s yo’ muv’fucking proll’em nigga? I ortta bust a muv’fucking cap in your crazy cannibal ass…you muv’fucking, Guido lovin’, snake haird, shit stirred, mel’n munchin’, spoon-licker… Look at my ass!! …Godamned crazy nigga. Yeah, God damned crazy nigga muv’fuckka is what you is. Biting my ass... Muv’fuckka… What the fuck is wrong wit’choo nigga?

12) I always like to ask if my interviewees have any advice for aspirants. Particularly because your background is not one of formal schooling, I must ask you what advice you have for wannabe writers, and how to get
themselves over their personal hurdles?

Wrong oke to ask that question china. I was so frightened and self-conscious the day I sat down to begin writing Acid Alex that I physically locked my room. First of all, my personal desire to try and become a writer was born out of my very deep love of reading. Everything I write is first tempered by me as an admittedly limited, objective and thoroughly hard bitten reader. If it doesn’t work for me personally as that detached casual reader then I abandon or edit whatever I am writing until it does.

Secondly, a book is written, word by word – sentence by sentence – paragraph by paragraph. Writer’s block usually begins its ravaging attack when this simple focus is lost. It’s like attempting to win the (or someone else’s) game but failing to score the next point. Plots and outline’s are only bright ideas and rough guidelines. The next sentence decides where the actual story is going and that special place is where the real fun begins for a writer. Write about what you know. Be yourself but allow yourself to be moulded by your research (do it nigga) and influences (exclude HBO). Be natural, especially when writing fiction. That’s when the suspension of disbelief occurs and the story starts penetrating the fabric of subjective reality within the reader’s mind. Remember above all else - You are all that limits your writing (That and the word nigga). Do not editorialise or judge your characters, it stifles the reader’s freedom to form a personal opinion. I am only beginning to experiment with all this personally in my first novel. Be lucid, clear and fluid. Also, be truly prepared for the fact that reading for pure pleasure will forever be lost to you. From the moment you take up a pen seriously – every other writer, good or bad - becomes a literary tutor foremost rather than an fellow journeyman. And until you have been edited properly by a good editor, you haven’t begun to learn how to write. Most of all – even seriously, writing should contain elements of fun (read lots and lots of Terry Pratchett when you headbutt-the-wall) and ultimately needs to be deeply and personally satisfying!

13) You hint strongly on your website that we can expect more written work from you... Is there a time frame yet, how far are you? Or is the idea still in the incubation process?

I though it might be a good idea to let you answer that question yourself and therefore permit you: An Exclusive! - For Your Eyes Only! - Sneak Preview! - of the first couple of chapter of a novel I am working on… …word by word, sentence by sentence… Read it, destroy it and then write a few words and you tell us what you think…

OK, so Al sent in the prologue and fist chapter of his latest book… a novel this time. And let me tell you, this is as searing and gut-wrenching as Acid Alex is… and this time you can be glad that its just fiction. Al has a talent for creating real and believable characters. In Acid Alex these were real people, but in his new work, he achieves the same with fictional characters. So far it seems an apocalyptic and dark work, but it’s too early to tell. One thing is for sure, this one will shock a few more readers and book distributors!