While the rain pelts, words swirl and snowflake (around the sapiosexual)

I'm a few months into my second year of Cape Town living; it's also my second Open Book festival, which started yesterday. Last year's festival also coincided with a vengeful coldfront that bucketed ice water over the city; the retreating winter is as spiteful as all hell because its day's are seriously numbered.

The wet didn't stop me from dashing down to the Fugard Theatre to attend the first event I'd got my hands on tickets for: talking 'writing sexuality' with three writers, one of which is a local favourite, Damon Galgut (3rd right), another - Michiel Heyns (far left) - whom I guess is soon to become another local favourite of mine (because of his wit and self-deprecating humour), and then a writer I'd never heard of before, Karina Szczurek (2nd right). Her stillness and centredness, Polish accent and open-minded approach to sex and sexuality intrigued me. Also that she has been married to Andre Brink, who was in the front row, since 2006. (At first I was, also, astonished at his frailty, but then discovered that he as born in 1935.)

I flourish amongst writers and their words, either written or spoken. Comfortable and safe I am, this is my world, where ideally I slink quietly between the bookish folk and their minds, all of whom could populate Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Hobbit worlds, to take but a sample slice,

Talking about reading sexuality... at an other event much later in the evening of yesterday - Literature Magazines: The Urgency of Literature and New Voices - about and around the publishers of Prufrock (Helen Sullivan), Chimurenga (Ntone Edjabe) and Kwani? (Billy Kahora), hosted by the softspoken journalist Sean O'Toole, I noticed a former lover, and then others in the audiences that I found totally sexually attractive: I am most definitely mentally and physically attracted to, and very comfotable sexually with these bookish, geeky and nerdy 'types'. 

There must be a word that describes the eroticness of this that I so badly attempt, but fail to describe...perhaps what comes closest is the word 'sapiosexual' (n.), i.e. one who is attracted to or aroused by intelligence in others.

You have to be always drunk.

That's all there is to it - it's the only way.

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time

that breaks your back and bends you to the earth,

you have to be continually drunk.

But on what?

Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish.

But be drunk.

                                         - Charles Baudelaire