Greg Lazarus's Blog

Lovely summary of the launch of our book, Paradise, on BooksLive.

There is something that eludes facile description when a psychologist and philosopher sit down to discuss a novel. It gets weirder and funnier when the psychologist is married to the philosopher, and the topic of their dialogue is the book they have just written together, a book called Paradise. There were few dry eyes in The Book Lounge last week as many present wept with mirth at the hilarious commentary from Lisa Lazarus and Greg Fried, the duo known for publication purposes as Greg Lazarus. This remarkable husband and wife team have just penned and published their third book together to great effect.

Guiding the scintillating conversation was the multi-award-winning author Henrietta Rose-Innes who expressed her delight at being invited to join their discussion. She commented on the different tone of Paradise to their previous book,When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes.

She said their first novel was a stunningly suspenseful psychological thriller that explored the dark edge to the human soul. “Things in Paradise have lightened up. It’s partly a knock-about comedy, partly a heist with a twisty plot, and partly about international criminals descending on Cape Town intent on stealing precious artefacts. At the heart of the book are these flawed, warm, immensely sympathetic characters. Why so sunny?” asked Rose-Innes.

“Well the kids are a bit older now… we feel better! After the first book, (The Book of Jacob), people would say to us, ‘What a warped sensibility! You’re so cynical! Just living in the world must be such a nightmare…’ We wanted something warmer, that spoke to the heart. A lot of books nowadays seem quite dark and disturbing. Life is so hard that it’s nice to have something to cheer you and give some hope.”

Read more here.

“Hey, big boy.” Black gave him a slap on the shoulder as he sat down. The physical contact was strangely helpful, energising. He kind of wanted to ask Black to do it again.

“Late night, Hershie?” Black leered at him.

Hershel almost claimed that he’d had a threesome, two women fighting each other for possession of his bod; but he felt too low for that kind of banter.

The People’s Republic, a socialist coffee shop, was Maurice’s unlikely favourite meeting spot. The music consisted of low, Tibetan-sounding horns and the service was not service. You might order a coffee on arrival, as an opening gambit, and the waitress might write it down – again, just a first move; and then there was nothing. Only when you’d complained once or twice, bringing some real anger to your tone – revolutionary fervour was valued – might your beverage arrive. The cappuccinos were surprisingly good, though (made, presumably, by a bourgeois machine hidden in the back), and anyway it was worth it for the waitresses. They were always seething, oppressed not only by living in a country that subscribed to neo-liberal capitalist policy but perhaps also by being obliged to labour in an anti-capitalist coffee shop that could not pay much, given that there were so few patrons. Hershel found their rage appealing. If he’d been a more energetic person, he would’ve liked to be as emotionally expressive as the servers.

This afternoon, the coffees came fairly quickly – some mistake, maybe; they might have been intended for patrons who’d already left. Hershel smiled at the waitress and was rewarded with her choicest scowl. She had curly black hair, putting him in mind of Camille and making him feel sad and horny. He looked at the foam pattern on the surface of his coffee. “Is this a heart? I think she likes me.”

Black checked out Hershel’s mug. “Maybe, man. But check,” – he gestured at his own blurred foam – “a vagina.”

Hershel laughed, despite the trepidation he felt whenever he had to spend time with Black. The guy was sometimes amusing, you had to hand him that. Also, his affection for The People’s Republic was in his favour. No one who enjoyed an angry socialist coffee shop with Tibetan horn music had completely bought into a corporate ethos. Maybe Black still regarded himself as a boy from the Cape Flats, an outsider, and this place was his way of showing that he wasn’t completely at ease with the lifestyle he’d carved for himself.

“Thanks for meeting me on a Sunday – appreciate it,” Black said. “We can get this out the way before the week starts.”

Out the way?

“Hersh, we’ve always levelled with each other,” said Black. “Let’s forget the bullshit for one second...

View more on Greg Lazarus' website.

I’ve never liked my name. It reminds me of a little girl twirling her curls while sucking a lollipop. Lisa Lazarus: that is not a name with serious intent. When I gabble it down the phone, I sound all tangled up. Backwards, it’s Asil Surazal and if I say it right, it rhymes, making my name lilting and light. But I can’t use my name backwards, so basically I have a life sentence with the forward version.

I could have lost my name when I married but that didn’t seem right. I’d been stuck with this odd-sounding abbreviation of me for close on 30 years by then and had kind of made peace with it (in the same way I’d got used to never tanning.) Like untanned skin, I thought of my name as a ‘feature’ rather than a ‘failure’, or at least that’s what I told myself. And anyway...

View more on Greg Lazarus' website.

Remember Hal and Roger? Intrepid teenage adventurers from the 1970s. There was “steady nineteen-year-old” Hal, “six feet tall, with the strength and brains of a man”. Nice! Roger was a bit of a ninny, but then he was only thirteen years old and not “a heavy thinker”. The books followed the brothers’ adventures capturing animals for zoos. Not very PC. Willard Price, the author, came from a family of devout Methodists and might even have spied for America. So at least there’s that.

All very retro. Like Gummi Bears and the Rubik Cube. But more interesting, perhaps, is the price of the book.

View more on Greg Lazarus' website.

I've just finished Edmund White’s latest memoir, Inside a Pearl, about his fifteen or so years in Paris. Although I don’t think it’s his best work, it is still titillating, absorbing, gossipy, even scandalous. My favourite of his books is probably The Farewell Symphony, because it’s so frank and funny, sexy and shocking.

Inside a Pearl claims that paintings can afford to be much more experimental than books. I’d never thought about it like that before, but he has a point – if you want wide appeal as an author, then, to some extent, you need to track the cultural norm.

In Eddie’s own words: “It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of Time, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle.”

Can rocks be wronged? One reason to say no is that rocks don’t have feelings. If you break a rock, you cause no suffering to it. You might be doing wrong to others – like anyone who might use or enjoy it – but not to the rock.

The situation seems different for conscious beings. Whatever has feelings – in particular, whatever can suffer – can surely be wronged. And we are doing wrong when we cause suffering that is extensive, avoidable, and undeserved.

If you agree, then please consider the fact that every year, tens of billions of chickens, pigs and other animals are killed on factory farms. During their lives, they may be separated from their mothers after birth, be crammed into living spaces so small they cannot turn around, experience only aggression from their frantic fellow animals, and endure other circumstances that many people find distressing even to read about. And here I have a dilemma: my subject requires that I mention some of these conditions, but I dearly do not want to put you off from reading this. So I have put more details in a separate paragraph that I have placed after the conclusion of this piece. I hope you decide to page down and read it, but if you choose not to, I hope you go on reading anyway.

The animals in factory farms can suffer. Their behaviour, anatomy and physiology are all evidence of that. It appears they can experience a range of negative feelings, such as anxiety and fear, and they can clearly feel pain. So they can be wronged. Are they in fact being wronged? The suffering inflicted on them is certainly undeserved. It is avoidable: there is nothing necessary about factory farming practices. And it is unimaginably extensive, in its nature and quantity; no respite, from birth to death, for many thousands of millions of animals every year. So we are not merely doing some wrong to animals. This is a vast wrong, and it goes on and on.

I find this hard to face, because it is so horrible. I suspect that factory farming maintains itself partly by committing wrongs so great that we turn away. We care for our dogs, and ignore their fellow mammals in factory farms. We read books about happy farm animals to our children, and we drive past the long, windowless buildings off the highway. We take the kids to a petting zoo, making sure that the children handle the lambs and chicks gently, but the billions of their fellow creatures in factory farms get none of our attention. We are touched to learn that mother pigs sing to their young while nursing, or that hens cluck softly to their chicks before they are born, and that they chirp back to her and to each other from inside their shells. And when we enjoy the cooked body parts of animals on our plates, we prefer not to think of the cost, in pain, of our meat.

In a world that receives much of its produce from such tremendous suffering, there are many occasions for grotesquely inappropriate displays of sentiment. Take National Braai Day. Desmond Tutu is the patron of the organisation Braai4Heritage, which urges us all to have a braai on Heritage Day. At a press function in 2008, Tutu said, ‘It’s a fantastic thing, a very simple idea. Irrespective of your politics, of your culture, of your race, of your whatever, hierdie ding doen ons saam…Here is one thing that can unite us irrespective of all of the things that are trying to tear us apart.’ Asked what vegetarians should do on National Braai Day, Tutu said, ‘They can stand and watch’.

Much of the meat that will be consumed on National Braai Day will come from factory farms, but any talk of the suffering en route to the braai seems to be off the table. We are to listen to Jan Braai’s views on lamb – ‘The lamb loin chop is a member of the braai royal family’, as he remarks in his latest book – but to point out that lambs identify their mother by her bleat, while sheep can perform sophisticated cognitive tasks, is to be a spoilsport. Are we not true South Africans, then, if we won’t have the lamb chop and pork wors? On the contrary: anyone who believes that consuming factory farmed meat together is a source of pride has very low standards. And since I am as South African as you are, let me sum up my point in a sincerely South African way: Braai Day se ma se p**s!

Here’s a different suggestion. If we want to be proud of our country and ourselves, one way to do it is to show some care for our fellow creatures, and reject factory farming. Many of us already display concern for some animals – if they’re our pets, for instance, or fellow primates, or very large, or scarce, or beautiful. But animals can be wronged even if they are none of these things. Two months after his speech in favour of Braai Day, Desmond Tutu spoke in support of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s campaign to stop the killing of whales. He said: ‘Are we surprised that we have lost a sense of the worth of human life, when we kill so carelessly?…This [campaign against the killing of whales] warns us that we are slowly ourselves committing a kind of suicide. If it is not a physical suicide, it is a moral and ethical suicide. For our own sakes we need to recover our humaneness, and our humanity. It is time to say no, no, no! to the killing of whales.’ Whales differ in many ways from chickens, cattle, pigs and other factory farmed animals. But these creatures all have in common the capacity to suffer. To regard our killing of some animals as moral suicide while treating the pain we inflict on others as being of no moral concern is a mistake.

Attention to human interests adds to the wrongs of factory farming. For example, factory farming is hugely wasteful of environmental resources, can pass on disease and undesirable chemicals to meat-eaters, and pollutes the atmosphere. There is much more to say, but this piece has focused only on the wrongs done to the animals themselves.

Note that I have argued against factory farming without taking a position on many questions in animal ethics. Do animals have rights? How much consideration should be given to their interests, in comparison to human interests? May humans ever raise animals in order to eat them or experiment on them? Is it acceptable to kill animals if one does not cause them to suffer during their lives? I have also said little about the many abilities of animals, emotional and cognitive, beyond their capacity to suffer. There is plenty of writing on all these topics. Much of it reveals that our everyday attention to the treatment of animals is completely inadequate. But in this piece, for the sake of focus, I have not dwelt on these questions. Here I want only to argue that if any creature that can suffer can also be wronged, then we ought to reject factory farming.

I hope that future generations will be appalled by our treatment of animals in factory farms. I hope that they regard those of us who turn a blind eye exactly as we deserve. But even now – to return to Desmond Tutu’s jocular suggestion for vegetarians – people who decide to pay moral attention to the way we treat animals will indeed stand, as we braai, and watch. They will watch us, and they will judge.

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Below is the part that may be difficult to read. Seeing pictures or watching footage is worse.

Many factory farm animals experience conditions including mutilation of body parts (beaks, tails, teeth) without anaesthetic, breaking of bones due to inactivity and overcrowding and aggression from other distressed animals, imbibing of anaesthetics to keep them alive for enough time, protracted periods without food or water on the way to the abattoir, beatings from abattoir workers to keep them moving, and finally a slit throat, or – if they have been missed out on the killing line, or are still alive after being wounded – being dropped into vats of scalding water while conscious.