MO: Molo Jasper. How is it going now that autumn is a creeping in, and loud sing those Sedgefield water birds? Can this be said to be an age of reading for meaning? In truth a book costs almost as much as a single zol or a dram of deep south, these days, I am told. In an age which measures coffees in MacDonald or KFC cups or at one of those entrepreneurial coffee kiosks all over, coffee for sure is a luxury and so is a book, but hey the price is not too different, and one is for ever? Successive coffees very soon add up to a single book – and that is an investment surely, more lasting than the coffee spills on my T-shirt? Nothing sounds so bland as coffee for meaning, to my ears. And yours?

JC: Molo Maeder. As I gaze at the dunes between plumes of coffee-steam (I am never far from steam), I mind-munch on this: books vs e-readers. Old geek that I am, it sums up to me, two modern ages: the Post Office Age, and the Email Age. Is ‘The Post’ dead and buried forever? And should it be?

Fact: Books last longer than bits and bytes, at similar price levels. That does it for me. And, geek though I am, I do not and will not trust electronic voting. But - I have found I am a snob. It depresses me that I have to constantly finger away ugly advertisements blocking the good stuff. Ads for me have always been low-life. They somehow remind me of teenage American bandes-dessinées. when the fingers were for pimple-popping. Vervlaks!

MO: Anyway, in the midst of all sort of stuff to read on social media - which I still can’t quite get to at my age - and new and 2nd hand book shops, and borrowable books, here is an old special friend, Olivia Schaffer, reminding me that websites including ours could perhaps be spending more of their digital time on books as both material things and etherial things? After all, even the likes of Tonald Dump, can perhaps not count on lasting longer than a single good book to invest in and read for meaning? You should know?

JC: Hooo aaah, (as Al Pacino would say), Dump didn’t do a grand job of reading the DRC President’s name: quote tshisekiseki unquote. Like Koornhof’s phonetic schadenfreude with kwon debila (kwaNdebele). Forget about reading for meaning, that literative desert couldn’t even read what the boarding-school pisshole poet would have mastered by 11 years of age. And don’t worry about social media. It is a mere steaming cowpat in the æons of time, except that steaming cowpats were enzyme-rich and even medicinal. And you could at least jump into them to warm your feet on a freezing Karoo morning.

MO: Anyway, for sure have your say, but here is Ollie Schaffer’s latest rave to me for opengates.africa, as well as two books she is meaning to read. Who knows – such could be more liberating for more meanings ahead?