Eartha Kitt has died:

Eartha Kitt, the versatile US singer and actress whose sultry voice and sensuality made her an international star with a career spanning six decades, died Thursday at age 81, her friend and publicist said.

Kitt, who won two Emmy television awards and was nominated for two Tony awards and two Grammy awards, died at 2:15 pm (1915 GMT) of colon cancer, Andrew Freedman told AFP. She was being treated at New York Presbyterian Hospital and resided in the state of Connecticut.

“She was certainly a legendary performer and while I think there may have been many imitations, she was an original,” Freedman said. She was one of the few artists who have been nominated for Tony, Grammy and Emmy awards.

“I Want to Be Evil” and “Santa Baby,” still a Christmas favorite today, were among her best-selling songs.

A self-described “sex kitten,” Kitt famously played the role of Catwoman in the US hit TV series “Batman” in the 1960s. Her catlike purr and uncanny persona won her many fans, among them Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world.”

She acted in movies as well, starring with Nat King Cole in “St. Louis Blues” (1958).

Kitt rose to fame from humble origins as a mixed-race child who grew up in South Carolina’s cotton fields.

She was blacklisted in the US during the late 1960s after she spoke out against the Vietnam war during a luncheon at the White House. She worked abroad for years until her triumphant return to Broadway in 1974. She received her second Tony nomination in 1978 for her role in the musical “Timbuktu.”

In December 2006, she returned to the White House to light the National Christmas Tree, standing beside President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.

Singing in 10 different languages, Kitt performed in over 100 countries.

She launched her career as a dancer in Paris with the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. Before she had hit the age of 20, she had already toured the world with the company as a dancer and vocalist.

“Paris was one of her great loves,” Freedman said. “One of her first big hits was ‘La Vie en Rose,’” the Edith Piaf original.

“Since that period in the early 40s and 50s, Europe has always held a special place in her heart, particularly Paris.”

Link.

Merry Christmas, everyone–

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

He explained that defending God’s creation is not limited to saving the environment, but also protecting man from self-destruction.

The pope was delivering his end-of-year address to senior Vatican staff.

His words, later released to the media, emphasised his total rejection of gender theory.

Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurs the distinction between male and female and could thus lead to the “self-destruction” of the human race.

–God hates you.

Link.

So.

My neighbour just raked my lawn.

I have this big tree out the front, and come summer, it sheds bark. Leave it for a day and there’s bark on the lawn. After about a week you mow the lawn and the bark. Maybe it’s not the best solution, but it’s the one I have, and it’s clean enough, and overall, I don’t really give a shit. Some people go crazy over this kind of stuff, but me, I recognise the tree needs to shed its bark, and the tree and me and the yard, we all recognise that I don’t honestly care about if some random driving in my street sees bark. Maybe they’ll think, hey, that big gum tree is shedding bark; who knows. But tomorrow, my neighbour must be having a Persian Prince and Princess for lunch, because she, and her mother - an elderly woman who has never spoken to me - and her daughter - a teenage girl who, also, has never spoken to me - are out there raking it. Have, in fact, raked it. They are pushing a pile of leaves out of the gutter and into the drain pipe as I write this.

Until recently, my neighbours never spoke to me. Now, however, they know I teach, write, and have a doctorate. When I told them the last, they shook my hand, like it was some thing to be proud of. I only mentioned it because they have a teenage daughter, and I figured I might pick up some easy work one day.

Apparently, though, it also means my lawn gets raked.

Who knew?

Octavia Butler’s first novel, Wild Seed, is a mixed creation.

Viewed as the start of her body of work, it makes an interesting novel to read, because you can see the threads that would dominate her body of work. Questions about slavery, about gender, and the roles of women, in particular, can all be found in the book, and the interest that I took in it came from this area. The rest of the novel, unfortunately, is mixed; it’s not a bad novel, really, but the second half of it has no structural resonance with the first half, and Butler’s characterisation of Doro and Anyanwu, the two god like figures who are centre to the book, never comes together at the end. Still, it’s interesting: Butler begins with Doro, a being who jumps from body to body, killing men and women both to continue his own life, and who, in the 18th Century, stumbles upon Anyanwu in Africa, a kind of Goddess in the area, and able to change her form as is needed. Being centuries old, however, hasn’t stopped the latter from marriage and children, and she ends up married to Doro, and brought back to the States, where Doro then marries her off to his son, Isaac, so they can produce children with special powers. I guess you could say it was a superhero breeding program.

The problem with the book, of course, is Doro and Anyanwu. The former is a primarily immoral being, going through lives, doing as he pleases, while the latter is his opposite, a healer, as Butler eventually states in the book, interested in helping rather than destroying, or building empires like Doro. To a degree, Butler has fashioned her two protagonists as representations of male and female gender roles in society, but she never explores this with any real depth in the book, and the last quarter of it, when Doro finds Anyanwu after she flees him, is borderline anti-climatic, silly, and somewhat insulting to any gender portrayal of women. Battered housewife syndrome, I guess, where the morals of the time that Butler was writing in give the book a different ending to what it would get now. Yet, if you can overcome that, the writing is actually quite good for a first novel, and lacks the clunk and roughness that a lot of authors have when they begin; in fact, I would dare say that Butler’s later writing became slightly more grittier, which is actually an improvement, but you’ll find nothing about her prose that would be a turn off.

There’s a curious flirt with exploring sexuality in the book, too. It begins when Doro suggests that he take over a woman’s body, and Anyanwu become a man, so they can have sex that way. Her response is one of horror, but later, you learn that in the 19th century, Anyanwu, in her female form, took a woman as her lover. Largely, it is done to show a change in her character, to show how being in American for over a hundred years has altered her, but at the same time there’s a definite timidness to it, and I couldn’t help how much of a stronger book it would have been if Butler had just amped that up a little, and gone in all directions. Of course, that said, it could easily have made it a much worse novel, but is this not what vague blog posts are all about?

I think so.

Yesterday I got a call from the new director of Gerric, telling me my workshop was cancelled for January. It was the second time, and it no longer looks like a reliable injection of cash in January, which is a shame. That cash makes a nice bridging amount for the bills that hit round February and March, when I’m just getting tutoring back up to full.

There were some reasons given, which in hindsight leave me questions, but it’s neither here nor there; the program as a whole has been bleeding students, and I had some hassle last time I ran it, which probably means that it is time to move on and find something new. Unfortunately, I have to find that now, which is a hassle, given that I have the Summer holidays coming up, and I’m now officially running on fumes for the next month and a half. To be honest, it’s not been the best year for cash, but it was my first year of running my own show completely, and I was too lax where I shouldn’t have been, and I didn’t push the openings when I had them. Probably this applies to writing as much as it does the teaching that I do, but I was kind of sick of the business of writing this year and I feel as if I took a lot of time out from it. I wrote Beneath the Red Sun and then kind of wandered off for a while. With any luck the book will sell shortly, though it seems the moment that I finished it, America’s economy went to the shit, and everything is taking longer than I had hoped. Realistically speaking, for an author of my position, the economy woes translates into cautious buying, less cash on the offer, and a whole host of knock on effects that I just don’t want to think too much about, because, lets face it, there’s really nothing I can do about it. It impacts on the teaching as well, though in different ways, and probably less than the first. Education, fortunately, is one of the things that people don’t like to skimp cash on. Well, at least the people that I see don’t.

I’m not making this post to bitch, or complain. I make my choices. I just feel that blogging about it makes it a little more interesting, and people tell me they enjoy hearing opinions that aren’t all sunshine and sparkles.

You might be wondering what this all means for me, and it’s a change, whatever that might be. Big or little, the year will figure it out, and so will I. I’m hoping that the writing will start pulling some of its weight financially, but if it doesn’t, then the teaching will likely switch into something different or new.

You know, life would be a lot simpler if I lived in the Smurf Village.

This got sent to me in an email:

It is impossible to lick your elbow.

Photographic evidence if you can do it, please.

Here’s an interesting piece on the US military using music for torture:

The last time that the US administration’s use of music as torture hit the headlines was in June, when Stafford Smith raised the issue in the Guardian, and when, in an accompanying article, the Guardian noted that David Gray’s song “Babylon” had become associated with the torture debate after Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of the song, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst, Gray spoke up to condemn the practice. “The moral niceties of whether they’re using my song or not are totally irrelevant,” he said. “We are thinking below the level of the people we’re supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to represent. It’s disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to the scale of the horror and how low we’ve sunk is a good thing.”

In a subsequent interview with the BBC, Gray complained that the only part of the torture music story that got noticed was its “novelty aspect” — which he compared to Guantánamo[‘s] Greatest Hits — and then delivered another powerful indictment of the misappropriation of his and other artists’ music. “What we’re talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them for 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “That is torture. That is nothing but torture. It doesn’t matter what the music is — it could be Tchaikovsky’s finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn’t matter, it’s going to drive you completely nuts.” He added, “No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we’ve gone above and beyond all legal process and we’re torturing people.”

Not every musician shared David Gray’s revulsion. Bob Singleton, who wrote the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur, which has been used extensively in the “War on Terror,” acknowledged in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in July that “if you blare the music loud enough for long enough, I guess it can become unbearable,” but refused to accept either that songwriters can legitimately have any say about how their music is used, or that there were any circumstances under which playing music relentlessly at prisoners could be considered torture. “It’s absolutely ludicrous,” he wrote. “A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point?” He added, “The idea that repeating a song will drive someone over the brink of emotional stability, or cause them to act counter to their own nature, makes music into something like voodoo, which it is not.”

Singleton was not the only artist to misunderstand how music could indeed constitute torture — especially when used as part of a package of techniques specifically designed to “break” prisoners. Steve Asheim, Deicide’s drummer, said, “These guys are not a bunch of high school kids. They are warriors, and they’re trained to resist torture. They’re expecting to be burned with torches and beaten and have their bones broken. If I was a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and they blasted a load of music at me, I’d be like, ‘Is this all you got? Come on.’ I certainly don’t believe in torturing people, but I don’t believe that playing loud music is torture either.”

Furthermore, other musicians have been positively enthusiastic about the use of their music. Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool, who have played to US troops in Iraq, told Spin magazine, “People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”

Fortunately, for those who understand that using music as part of a system of torture techniques is no laughing matter, the Zero dB initiative provides the most noticeable attempt to date to call a halt to its continued use. Christopher Cerf, who wrote the music for Sesame Street, was horrified to learn that the show’s theme tune had been used in interrogations. “I wouldn’t want my music to be a party to that,” he said

What I find interesting is Gray’s quoted comments, because I’ve seen this story linked round a bit, and it’s always been with a smirk about how Britney Spear’s tunes were being used to torture. Finally, a good use, it seems to suggest, with a chuckle at the end.

But, like Gray–whose music I don’t really like–says, it’s torture, plain and simple.

Link.

Well, it seems that Dan Bloom is a real person, and this–maybe–is a photo of him:

Ben…

Tis me. Danny Dan Daniel Bloom. Just don’t call me Ishmael.

Thanks for posting this above, and sorry for the mis-spelled and typo-ridden emails. Some of them were Atomic Typos, ever heard of that term for proofreading? Look it up: atomic typo. I even have a blog devoted to it.

NOW to get serious. I was really really serious, and was talking about this book: “Angel the Fence” by Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat. Due to be published in USA in early February 2009, and also in Oz by HarperCollins Australia and in the UK by HarperCollins Thorsons Element.

The book is most likely a fraud, not a hoax per se, but a fraud. I really don’t know the exact details, but I do believe someone is behind this old man, 80 now, manipulating him for reasons unknown. OPRAH has invited him on her show twice. There are emails all over the world about this man’s love for his wife and how it all came to be. Google: “Herman Rosenblat” and you will see.

In a recent blog post, a noted Holocaust historian who believes the book is a fraud noted, just TODAY: “It is fairly certain that this is a
hoax. Historians are working on it. The facts will emerge shortly, and
for those who care about truth, it will not be a nice situation.”

Here is the book cover, and here is his website.

Book website:
http://angelatthefence.com/

BOOK COVER
http://www.amazon.com/Angel-Fence-True-Story-Survived/dp/042522581X

The book is not yet published. But the hype has been building for 10 years! Pub date is Feb. 3, 2009. But the publishers MIGHT have to recalll the book before it even gets released. See my news article below.

The only thing, Ben, is that I am afraid this another BEAH book waiting to implode, once the media see what the historians looking into this faux memoir present their findings to the New York Times. Or to me! I am freelance journo, too, not a 4:30 am phone freak!

I found your blog because I was researching how the BEAH book was covered in the Australian press, and I thought Shelley Gare did a fantastic job reporting the story. So I was looking to you to give me some feedback, that’s all, and you did, in your own sort of writerly way.

I am not a bad chap. Bit of a goofball, yes.

See pics and life here:
http://danbloom888.blogspot.com

I’m going to be honest, Dan, the immediate problem with your story is that you don’t know the exact details, and you simply believe that an eighty year old man has been manipulated. Old folk getting manipulated happens all the time, sadly, and they get ripped out of savings, medications, and sometimes crockery. Quite often they don’t end up on Oprah, but I must admit, I haven’t watched that show for a long time. I’m really a fan of fat Oprah, not thin, hang with movie stars and give away cars to upper middle class white people Oprah. A Holocaust survivor story about love sounds like the kind of thing her crowd would get off on, so you’re probably right. Still, I think if you’re going to go running round with this stuff, you might need some concrete details.

Slightly more pressing is, why give a shit? If some historian says it’ll turn out to be a fake, and they’ll do that soon enough, then let them do it. It’s already appearing on Snopes. I’m sure there’s more. It’s hardly like you’re leading the way in blowing the lid off something hidden and amazing with the media attention that seems given to them. I mean, five secs in google gave me their faces:

So, what’s your personal stake in this?

I’m half tempted to call you out as a viral marketing tool, a way to seed interest in a book that’s likely to bore the shit out of me, but maybe that’s just me making this interesting.

You also wrote this:

“Dan, you’re slightly cracked, mate. There is perhaps a reason why mainstream media outlets don’t want to touch you, and why you’re here, talking to a nobody like me.”

LOL. I am a nobody, too!

“But I do like giving cracked dudes a bit of a voice, so if you leave details on what this literary fake is in the comments, then I’ll post it here for everyone to see.”

ABOVE DONE DEAL.

“Don’t email me and ask to chat privately, cause it isn’t going to happen, and at any rate, there’s really nothing I can do for you outside using this blog post if it’s true or not.”

CAN WE CHAT OFFLINE NOW? JUST ONE WRITER WANTING TO CHAT WITH ANOTHER WRITER. BY THE WAY…I am 60, maybe that explains it! SMILE. 60 going on 19. Slightly cracked? No, deeply, madly, utterly cracked. Story of me life. Now why would ANYONE ever think I am SPAM? This happens to me all the time, Ben. I send polite emails to complete strangers and they think I am SPAM. What’s up with that?

SMILE.

Your post gave me a good laff, and cheers, mate…

Danny on island Taiwan, same time zone as you Down Under…

if you really want to see how CRACKED I am, Ben, see my polar cities for Australia and NZ work here:

http://pcillu101.blogspot

and my lawsuit for US$1 billion against all world leaders for global warming here, from Reuters:

http://northwardho.blogspot.com

PS — I know what you are going to say now: “Dan, get a life!”

I did get a life. And look where it got me!

See my take on BLOOMSDAY and James Joyce here:

http://bloomsinthenews.blogspot.com

Over and out. Oh, I said that already, didn’t I?

You then sent me a picture of a typewriter, the blurb and publisher weekly review of Black Sheep, a google alert about the book you’re talking about, an article about author fakes, and also introduced yourself to my mate, John, over on his blog.

Which is why we won’t be talking offline.

What I’m saying is there’s a way to do things, and a way not to do things. You’ve crossed that line into the way you don’t do things. When I log into my email and there’s eight emails from you, that’s too much. Probably communicating on my blog with you like this is a little too much validation for your bit of crazy, but I like to give people a bit of rope. Yours kind’ve ran out, though, so I’d appreciate if you didn’t continue emailing me, left my friends alone, and have a good time while you’re in Thailand.

I’m sure you mean well, but this just isn’t my thing.

There was a series of messages left on my blogs, and emailed to me, on Saturday, and I thought I would share them today:

Ben
fascinating posts on the Beah story and the Chaon replies and the reporter’s misquots.the book i want to talk to you offline email about is going to be a huge bestseller in USa and OZ in 2009, huge huge huge, but it is very likely faked…..i have tried to tell some reproters in the USA about this, but they all say NOT interested. Not interested until the story breaks , that is. HAHA….lazy bums….they don’t want to break it…and when I write polite letters to the publisher, editor and agent of the book, NO REPLIES at all, not even eff off, they just ignore my polite emails trying to warn them they might be over their heads on this one…..What to dO? that is my quandry? Be quiet and let it pass? Or, like a true truth seeker, seek out the truth? (he says with a smile)

He also being a writer too and loving the publishing industry for what it is and isn;t

email me do

The above is, perhaps, the only email where detail is given. I’m half torn on if it’s an amazing bit of spam, or not, since it came off this post, where I talked about the supposed Beah fake. But of course, this was not the only one. There was this:

ben

i am reeserach a new hoax book, not pubbed yet in NYC, but soon, and i need your help in chatting with you. can you email me at danbloom At gmail DOT com

thanks

Danny
Tufts 1971

this story is even MORE amazing than the BEAH story…and when the hoax is revealed it will make world headlines. trust me…do email me sir

And this:

ben

i am reeserach a new hoax book, not pubbed yet in NYC, but soon, and i need your help in chatting with you. can you email me at danbloom At gmail DOT com

thanks

Danny
Tufts 1971

this story is even MORE amazing than the BEAH story…and when the hoax is revealed it will make world headlines. trust me…do email me sir

Yes, I did get it twice. I got it a third time, actually, but I’ll spare you the repeat, because there was this, which had a slight alteration:

not sure if you wnt to do this Ben, are you in Australia, not sure, but this book i told yuou about it will come to Oz too….it is about a Holocaust memoir that is very likely embellished beyond belief…..email me yes

ben

i am reeserach a new hoax book, not pubbed yet in NYC, but soon, and i need your help in chatting with you. can you email me at danbloom At gmail DOT com

thanks

Danny
Tufts 1971

this story is even MORE amazing than the BEAH story…and when the hoax is revealed it will make world headlines. trust me…do email me sir

After those I also got emails, a pair of them, one that said:

> ben
>
> i am reeserach a new hoax book, not pubbed yet in NYC, but soon, and i
> need your help in chatting with you. can you email me at danbloom At
> gmail DOT com
>
> thanks
>
> Danny
> Tufts 1971
>
> this story is even MORE amazing than the BEAH story…and when the
> hoax is revealed it will make world headlines. trust me…do email me
> sir
>

And another that sent me the link to the New York Times piece on the fraud around the Margaret B. Jones book, Love and Consequences.

At any rate, I’m torn over if I think this is new, smarter bot spam, though the Times piece seems to suggest not; if it’s not then, Dan, you’re slightly cracked, mate. There is perhaps a reason why mainstream media outlets don’t want to touch you, and why you’re here, talking to a nobody like me. But I do like giving cracked dudes a bit of a voice, so if you leave details on what this literary fake is in the comments, then I’ll post it here for everyone to see. Don’t email me and ask to chat privately, cause it isn’t going to happen, and at any rate, there’s really nothing I can do for you outside using this blog post if it’s true or not.

But anyhow, lets here it now.

I’m slowly making my way through Octavia Butler’s novels, still. I had originally planned to write a story which contained a critical review of all her work, but as the story grew in my head, I realised that mash of forms didn’t make a very interesting piece, and so now I’ve shuffled into something else.*

I don’t know how much Butler anyone reading this has read, but feel free to chime in if you got an opinion. I’d be surprised if a lot of Australians do, since she’s not really published here, and a lot of her themes and concerns feel very American, thus giving her a very culturally specific readership. Kindred, perhaps her most well known of books in the States (at least, from what I understand, I might be wrong) is concerned with racial elements that link to American history, and that does tend to limit her audience, I think; in comparison, the racial concerns she explores in Parable of the Sower are more universal, and reach a larger audience, even though it is the less complex of the two books. In Kindred, Butler takes her narrator, and dumps her back in time to rescue a white slave owner who may, or may not, be her great great great grandfather. She is pulled whenever Rufus–the white guy–reaches a point of life threatening danger, and from this device, uses the situation to explore slave conditions.

It’s an early book, but Butler’s deceptively simple language is there, as are the emotions she wishes to convey, which would resonate stronger as she wrote more. What’s good to see, however, is how murky she’s willing to be, even early on in her work. There’s no hero, no villain. It might seem strange to say this, but if you compare to, say Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which explores different aspects of racial portrayals, you might find it a bit more interesting. In Rushdie’s book, he picks a side to sit on, and he doesn’t have a lot of understanding for the other. Butler, while she does pick a side–slave ownership is never supported–she doesn’t make villains out of her characters, and it is that concept, which sits at the centre of the book, that gives it something that another book with a similar concept might not have. It’s a very admirable thing, that greyness, that ability to write everyone sympathetically, that I think was one of the most interesting about Butler, but others could go differently on it.

Anyhow, I’m currently reading the Wild Seed series, which I had not read before. I’m not exactly sure I’d recommend the first book to anyone, mind you, and I miss that simple honest voice, but it is starting to pick up, which is nice.

* In case you’re curious, the story is still related to Butler’s work. It just doesn’t have the critical piece, and the story has become more complex, and layered, and difficult, which is awesome.