Show your gangster signs.

Tessa read 26lies a year ago and wrote about it because the world was too fucking cold and she wanted to burn it for warmth, most likely:

Regardless of where this book is pigeon-holed, it remains fucking OARSUM, a little book of brilliance. Ben is a master at playing with structure, and has done so to great effect here, striding through the alphabet and giving the reader a neat catalog of his life and thoughts and opinions. The mosaic is superbly balanced, and the pieces bounce of each other with an ever-growing resonance.

People often talk about the next Great Australian Novel. When I’d finished it, I sat on the train, full of all the meat contained in this slim volume, and thinking of everything it had to say about Australia here, now. I think this is that long awaited Great Australian Novel.

It is only fitting it be written by a white heterosexual middle class male, one who recognises how he fits in the world around him. It is only fitting that this book not be published or available within Australia, and as with the majority of Australia’s culture, must be imported.

Link.

I am listening to Taken by Trees do a cover of Guns N Roses ‘Sweet Child O Mine’ which is actually quite good. You know, once upon a time, I wanted to be a musician. I just didn’t have any rhythm to me and I gave up on it. It’s still true, you know.

I am thinking of using Scrabble as a teaching device.

Over the last couple of days I’ve seen a couple of films, the first being Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 City of God, and the second David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express, released last year. One film was good and the other had funny moments, but was otherwise very forgettable.

Unsurprisingly, Pineapple Express was the latter. It’s a film in which Seth Rogen reprises his stoner, never amount to anything role as a stoner who witnesses a murder and then runs straight to the apartment of his dealer, played by James Franco. Having recently purchased some a-grade pot from the dealer–the ‘pineapple express’–Rogen’s character leaves a roach on the road that drug lord and recent killer Gary Cole tracks him down with and a series of errors and paranoia ensue. There are some funny moments, such as when Franco drives a squad car down the road with his foot stuck in the front window, or when Rogen visits his High School girlfriend and later, her parents, but mostly it’s a lot of scenes in which the two main characters smoke, do something stupid, and then end up with guns and fighting Chinese and American drug gangs.

Perhaps if Neil Patrick Harris had been in it.

Anyhow.

City of God was pretty decent, however, and I enjoyed it. It’s firmly directed and nicely shot and focuses on the rise of gangs from the slums of Rio through the eyes of the narrator, Rocket. For the most part, Rocket is a figure on the edges of the gang war that erupts between Lil Ze and Knockout Ed, and the use of him as a point of view character allows the film to examine both sides, as well as to show the contrast between the rich and poor (or white and non-white, one could argue). Meirelles uses the socio-economic culture of the slums (the City of God that the title refers too) to provide the reason for the crime life in the slums: it’s the way to make a living, and one of the few ways to make something of yourself in the crippling poverty that the slums exist in. I seem to remember that when the film came out it was fairly popular, and caught a lot of attention, and I remember thinking that I should watch it after catching Merielles’ next film, The Constant Gardner . His latest film is Blindness, a flick I haven’t bothered to track down because I thought I’d read the novel first, but maybe I will, after this, especially since I’ve enjoyed both his films.

In fact, here’s the trailer for Blindness, which looks pretty decent:

Anyone see it?

Hey.

I know there’s a few people reading this who teach, and if you wouldn’t mind, I could do with picking a few ideas off you to steal and pass as my own.

Essentially, I have a student whose struggling with spelling and grammar. He was doing alright, but recently there’s been a bit of a relapse, and I’d like to get him back to paying attention to it and picking it up (without getting into too much detail, it’s a pretty bad side of things, and is making the difference between pass and fail in High School English). Anyhow, what I’m looking for is basically some different ways to do this–something that’s a bit off the beating path and which will be (hopefully) more engaging than the usual stuff you do with this kind of issue. So if you got any experience of teaching it (or having it taught to you) feel free to drop some notes down in the comments for me.

Thanks.

For some reason, I have become fascinated by the Carradine death. Obviously, it means some kind of story is kicking round, and whether or not it is in bad taste, or too early, or whatever, I’ll just ignore. I’ll write it and see how it goes after I’ve finished it, which is the way these things usually are.

Here are some of the conflicting yet fascinating notes I’m collecting:

* “Carradine’s manager Chick Binder points to the fact the actor was found with his hands tied behind his back, and a mysterious footprint on his hotel bed, as evidence of foul play.

“We definitely don’t believe it was a suicide,” he said. “David was a great guy and a great client and a great friend.”

Link.

* “And so there is a suspicion that if there was some foul play, that may be the first area they should look.”

The claim echoed conspiracy theories that martial arts expert Bruce Lee was killed by Chinese Triads in 1973.

Secret societies in kung fu date back centuries and were originally formed to protect humble people from corrupt Chinese overlords. But many have since turned to crime.

Link.

* Carradine’s third ex-wife, Gail Jensen, dropped more personal bombshells in an interview with Patricia Towle this weekend, saying “David was pretty strange. He would like to get tied up. He would tie himself up and I would walk in and see him and say ‘Oh my God, David, you got to be kidding me — and I would (turn around and) walk out. I would leave him to his own devices.”

Jensen added, “He liked to be tied up. And he could tie himself up … He spent days planning a different feature. He would go to a hardware store and buy the stuff.”

We spoke with Jensen, who told us although David liked tying himself up “it was never sexual.” She says he liked bondage but never choked himself. Then again, they divorced in 1997.

Last week, TheSmokingGun.com published legal documents from Carradine’s 4th wife, detailing David’s “potentially deadly” sex habits.

***

David Carradine’s hands were tied above his head when he died — turns out, in the world of auto-erotic suspension, it’s an easy task to master.

Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler who has studied auto-erotic asphyxiation, has examined the photo of Carradine’s body published in a Thai newspaper. The photo shows the body with a rope around his neck hanging in a closet … Carradine’s hands were tied above his head.

Turvey says it’s simple for someone to tie rope around his/her hands, by loosely tying the hands in front — then raising them up to tighten.

Turvey says undoing the knot is easy as well, allowing for a quick escape.

Turvey says, “By tying his hands above his head, and bending his knees in a sitting position, he can easily stand up and untie his hands with his teeth. Choking in this position is an accident that usually results from the rope being left on the neck a few seconds too long.”

Since we first reported Friday that Carradine’s hands may have been tied, there has been a lot of speculation it’s evidence of foul play. But apparently it’s actually consistent with accidental death.

***

We’ve just seen a higher resolution image of the photo that appears to be David Carradine’s body hanging in his hotel room — and it shows what seems consistent with an auto-erotica scenario … at least from outward appearances.

The photo — published by a Thai tabloid — shows a body suspended from a bar in a closet, with his hands bound together above his head. Carradine’s genitals were also tied.

But the new sharper image also reveals what appears to be fishnet stockings covering the body. You can also see red women’s lingerie on the bed. And, it appears, Carradine may have been wearing a dark wig.

Although there are signs this could have been a sexual act that turned accidentally deadly, family sources say they are still suspicious of the circumstances and have not ruled out homicide.

Link.

* Finally, the picture in question is here.

The last one isn’t as morbid as people would have you believe, though the strangeness of him being in a fish net body stocking and wearing a wig kind’ve leaves you with the feeling that you’re actually looking at something else entirely, and I can only take it for certain that this is an image of it because of the other report.

Fascinating shit, though.

Really, this is just pure awesome:

A secret sect of kung fu assassins could have silenced actor David Carradine as he delved into their shadowy activities, according to his family’s lawyer.

In a twist that could be straight out of one the “Kill Bill” star’s movies, attorney Mark Geragos suggested that Carradine may have been killed as he tried to uncover groups working in the martial-arts underworld.

The lawyer said the actor’s family refuses to believe he died in a sadomasochistic sex stunt gone wrong — despite his being found naked with a rope tied around his neck, wrists and genitals.

The lawyer said the actor’s family refuses to believe he died in a sadomasochistic sex stunt gone wrong — despite his being found naked with a rope tied around his neck, wrists and genitals.

Loved ones have urged the FBI to travel to Thailand and pick up the pieces of the police investigation there.

“They’ve done it because of the conflicting reports and the nature of those reports that have given the family great pause,” Geragos said.

The secret societies of martial artists should be the first place they start looking for answers, said the prominent Hollywood lawyer, who has represented Michael Jackson, actress Winona Ryder, wife killer Scott Peterson and singer Chris Brown.

The bizarre claim was made on “Larry King Live” on CNN Friday after a panel member said, “David was very interested in investigating and disclosing secret societies.”

“Absolutely,” said Geragos.

“What that means is connected to martial arts and his interest in martial arts,” he continued. “And so there is a suspicion that if there was some foul play, that that may be the first area where they should look.”

Secret societies in kung fu date back centuries and were originally formed as humanitarian groups, fighting on the side of the people against corrupt Chinese dynasties. But in the last 200 years, many started to turn to criminal activities.

The suggestion they killed Carradine echoes conspiracy theories that Bruce Lee — who, ironically, competed with Carradine for the lead role in the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” — was killed in 1973 by the Triads, a Chinese secret society.

Authorities said Lee, 32, died of brain swelling triggered by a reaction to medication.

Carradine, who was found dead in a Bangkok hotel last week, had been fascinated with martial arts since he first began studying the discipline upon landing the “Kung Fu” role.

“It’s a way of life,” the actor once said in an interview.

He had dusted off his martial arts moves 30 years later for the title role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies.

His ex-wife, Marina Anderson, told The Post yesterday, “If he was involved in secret societies, it was a secret that even I didn’t know about.

“But he did have some big secrets.”

Carradine was found dead in the closet of a Bangkok hotel last week.

Thai authorities think he might have died while pleasuring himself in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation — a practice which involves temporarily cutting off the brain’s supply of oxygen to create a sexual turn-on.

He had been accused of being a fan of “potentially deadly” kinky sex acts in divorce papers Anderson filed against him in 2003.

Carradine’s family has lined up famed forensic expert Dr. Michael Baden — head pathologist for the New York State Police — to carry out his own examination of the actor’s body.

I’m linking this mostly because I now want to write a story called ‘David Carradine’, and it would involve kinky sex, secret kung fu societies, and conspiracy theories surrounding Bruce Lee’s death. Because I ask you, who wouldn’t read a novel about that?

Link.

You know, since becoming self employed, I really have missed the free money and day off that is a public holiday. Students tell me there’s one today. I tell them, ‘So?’

Perhaps more disturbingly, it’s half way through the year, and I could do without that. Here’s hoping that I can turn the final half of the year around and it can have a little bit of success in it. Or, at the very least, more amusing and vaguely pedo music videos.

I never thought too much of David Carradine. He was alright in Kill Bill, but Kung Fu bored the shit out of me, and I’ve never been a huge fan of b-grade films, but after his recent suicide, I have a low grade fascination. I don’t know what it is, but the whole idea of someone having found him hanging in a Thai hotel room is just something I can’t shake. There’s an odd, morbid kind of poetry to it, which I know that a lot of people are not going to see, simply because a lot of people have a thing about suicide. Which is all good and fine, but I’m looking at this from an outsider’s perspective, with the gaze of someone who has spent an entire life being trained to watch the way that celebrities conduct themselves, both good and bad.

Recently, C said to me, “You only like famous people when they’re dead.”

She said it after Ballard had died, and I was reading The Drowned World.

David Eddings, co-author of the Belgariad and other series, has died. The obits talk about how he made a lot of money and was motivated by cash.

There’s something a bit dismissive by those comments, but then I don’t suppose Eddings was considered great literature by anyone, not even myself. When I was a teenager I read his series, introduced to them by Dj, and I have to admit, I did dig them at the time. They were an easier and palpable introduction to fantasy than Tolkien was (and is, to my mind, still). Strangely, I’d not given the books much thought until recently when one of the students I have began reading them. In a week, the kid has churned through four of the first five books in the series, and is planning to read the next five, which may or may not seem impressive to you, but in my world, finding books that teenage boys want to read is something of a hassle. A lot of them don’t want to read–I work a lot with movies and TV shows and music videos, since the techniques you need to teach for basic English translate a lot through that, and you can slip in books and poems and short stories as needed. Still, though, this kid has torn through the books, and will likely go through all of Eddings work before he’s finished. Oddly, he was asking me for what to read next, for both he and his friend. The power will obviously send me insane and he’ll find himself reading boring shit within a month, but that’s the joy of job number one.

Anyhow, here’s a little something to add to the obits floating round:

“I know I’m doing it [writing] as well as I possibly can,” he [Eddings] says. “Some people say oh well, what the heck, it’s just genre fiction so that’s good enough. This is a good way to become enrolled in the large fraternity known as unpublished writers. You have to do it well, because if you don’t think this is as good as you can do, then it’s going to show.” Eddings is characteristically humble about his work. He says that many people tell him that they never liked to read before coming upon his work, but now they read all the time. “I look upon this as perhaps my purpose in life,” he says. “I am here to teach a generation or two how to read. After they’ve finished with me and I don’t challenge them any more, they can move on to somebody important like Homer or Milton.”

For all he does to distance his work from literature, Eddings has a strong background in the discipline and bases his work in secretly profound ways on archetypes and old written traditions. Eddings, who majored in English at Reed, drew on the Odyssey and Arthurian and Carolingian legends for the mythic underpinnings of the Belgariad and Malloreon. After a term of service in the Army from 1954 to 1956, Eddings used G. I. Bill funds to attend graduate school in English at the University of Washington. Although his field was contemporary American fiction (he wrote a novel for his master’s degree), he became fluent in Middle English and fell in love with Chaucer and from there with Sir Thomas Malory. “Since what is called ‘epic fantasy’ in the contemporary world descends in an almost direct line from medieval romance, my studies of Chaucer and Malory gave me a running head start in the field,” Eddings wrote in the introduction to his preliminary studies of the Belgariad series. Just for fun, Eddings wrote a speech in Middle English, from memory, in the middle of his book The Shining Ones: he checked it later and it turned out to be perfect Middle English.

“To be honest about it, I write because I have to write,” Eddings says. He began trying his hand at writing at 17, and his Reed senior thesis gave him his first chance to write a sustained piece of fiction. During his junior year a noted writer named Walter van Tilberg Clark visited Reed for a week, read one of Eddings’s short stories–about a soldier returned from the military who tries to find out why his girlfriend committed suicide–and suggested that Eddings expand it into a novel. Eddings had been taking a creative writing course from English and art history professor Lloyd Reynolds, who became his thesis adviser for the novel, How Lonely Are the Dead. Eddings recalls Reynolds’s inspiring teaching method: “He would bring things in and read them to us. He’d take that pipe out of his mouth and say, ‘Now that’s writing!’ He got his point across and generated a great deal of enthusiasm among the students.”

I just came across this post by Jennifer Fallon about the ten things author’s should never blog about. It seems that, at one time or another over the last eight years of blogging, I’ve done at least half of them–and for a moment, I was going to write a counter ten list. It was going to be funny, and insightful.

But then I took off to the couch for a while and gave it some thought. What bothers me about Fallon’s post, to be honest, is the implication that silence is better than speaking out, and it’s something that I’ve found to be true in the writing circles since I first got involved. There is a sense, when you begin, that being published is a privilege, no doubt aided by the struggle that the majority of writers go through at the start of their career (rejection, rejection, rejection). No one takes you aside and says that the people publishing you need you, possibly because they don’t. For every small bit of success you can scrounge out of writing, there’s dozens of men and women who are willing to walk over your corpse and take terrible working conditions to have what you have. They’ll kick you when you’re down. They’ll nick off your corpse. They’ll eat off the broken plates and drink from cracked glasses because being a writer is important and glamorous. So you will actually find that when you start writing, you’ll be told simple ‘truths’: never argue with an editor, never tell a publisher they suck, never argue with a reviewer, never take your issues public. Never ever ever.

Perhaps it is just today, but I can’t even really tell you that such an opinion is wrong. Originally, I thought, the response to Fallon’s post was to say that you should talk about editors and agents and publishers and writers and work. After all, you’ll talk about movies and movie stars and people who you buy bread and tea off, so why split hairs? Talk about the people in your world when they’re good and bad–for every person doing you a disservice that you discuss, talk about the person doing you good, too. That is, honestly, how I try to roll. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that hey, maybe it is easier just to stay polite, quiet, and never give any shit. I’ve seen it done, often by people I like, and I’ve seen myself not do it, because I’ve always believed that you should say what you think, you should be passionate, you should let whatever you have out, rather than to pen it up and let it die, or fester in you. Which of course is why I’ve been called a cancer, met people who have never spoken to me and gotten nothing but attitude, and been conveniently–or honestly–left out of things. Fuck, not so long ago I saw someone discussing how I’m already washed up, and there was pleasure in that statement for them.

It’s just thoughts, of course, and could amount to nothing, but the more I look at Fallon’s list, which I’m sure was throwaway (it does mention bowel movements and litter boxes as something not to discuss, and I won’t disagree there), the more I look at it, the more I find it sad, and limiting, and really, just a little, frightened–like someone could take away the toys she has suddenly discovered.

Perhaps it’s just the drugs talking, though.