This is a story I heard this morning in the car:

A MAN who allegedly raped his daughter almost daily for 30 years, kept her as a virtual prisoner and fathered her four children has been charged by Victorian police.

In a case as horrific as Josef Fritzl’s decades of abuse of his daughter in Austria, child welfare advocates have called for a full inquiry amid claims authorities failed to investigate despite being warned 30 years ago.

A source close to the case claimed it could be “every bit as bad . . . (as) the Josef Fritzl case; especially the fact that she had so many children to her father.”

Neighbours of the family said they had suspicions of abuse but did not go to the authorities because they did not want to cause trouble.

The victim’s mother claims to have been unaware of any abuse, despite sharing a house with her daughter, husband and grandchildren until 2005.

My first thought was, fuck me, how could this happen twice anywhere in the world?

Of course, it probably happens more than these two examples, but just hearing about them makes me think of the world being such a cold and horrible place, and it only gets worse when I read about more abductions and rape (the girl, for example, in the States who was recently found after being abducted twenty odd years ago).

I’ve been kind of looking at this article, too, and trying to think of something insightful to say. In the local news there’s a lot of coverage given to a old paedophile who was relocated to Ryde after abducting, raping three kids in the eighties. It’s hard to get a proper feel for the case since I often waver between thinking, well, fuck you for what did, and you deserve what you get, and the opinion that I usually have for people who have done their time, which is that they’re entitled to their freedom and to be left alone. And, as I have thought about the previous story, this one keeps coming up in my head, and there’s just nothing to really say, there really isn’t.

Link.

Patrick Swayze may be dead, but there are still songs about his b-grade films:

It’s not as good as the Die Hard song, but I’m starting to think I could make a miked tape of bad eighties flicks turned into songs.

This morning, my old seek.com.au account sent me a potential job advertisement, this one as an intelligence officer for ASIO.

I actually did give it thought, if only because fiction has made it sound so very glamorous. I thought of the women I’d meet, the people I’d have to assassinate in dark alleys, and the lies I would have to tell. I don’t actually know if that’s actually what happens in the job, though the description of being able to “go beyond talking, listening, and thinking,” and “cross cultural boundaries and draw upon specialist training to solve complex and absorbing problems,” does sound as if quiet political assassinations and dangerous affairs would be on order. However, there’s a twelve month relocation to Canberra, and I don’t know about you, but no matter how many people you have the promise of extorting and blackmailing, moving there for a year seems a touch excessive.

It’s always the way, isn’t it? Being an astronaut was tarnished somewhat when I discovered that the majority of trained astronauts never get to go into space, which, while poetically tragic, doesn’t exactly make me want to go through the hard work of becoming one. And being an adventurer slash explorer got tossed out when it became apparently that you really had to be born into a substantial amount of wealth to support such a lifestyle. And now, being an intelligence officer means you’ll probably be stuck in Canberra for a year, where neither back alley assassinations of wild affairs with attractive Russian turncoats are likely to happen.

It’s a good thing the glamour of being a writer is everything people say it is.

I last read Ben Peek’s yet unpublished “Beneath the Red Sun,” in which he does a masterful job of splicing alternating narratives and, in a way, reversing the chronology of the story while surging forward. It’s also uniquely Australian in flavour, which is a rare and wonderful thing to encounter, and something I’d like to see more of in the genre.

That bit of niceness is from Tessa Kum, who made reference to it in an interview with emerging writers, organised by Jeff Vandermeer. The whole thing is worth checking out, as things are.

At any rate, Beneath the Red Sun still remains unpublished, but I work at finding a new agent and or publisher. Obviously, I’ve had better times, and when it turns around, I’ll maybe write about it, but who wants to hear about the subject right now? It’s obviously not the position I want to be in, some days I do better with it than others, and while being told repeatedly that you’re not commercial sounds romantic, it’s really not (but maybe I ought to embrace it, buy a beret, and move to a Paris slum).

Ah well.

Either way the solution is to write it out, keep door knocking, and it’ll turn around, or it won’t, and the planet keeps moving like both choices have the same impact.

There’s this story being reported today about South African runner Caster Semenya being a hermaphrodite:

WORLD athletics is in crisis with revelations that world champion South African Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite.

The International Association of Athletics Federations is poised to disqualify Semenya from future events after gender verification tests revealed evidence that she has no womb or ovaries and carries both male and female sexual organs, according to a report in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

Sources involved in the IAAF testing, which involved various scans, said Semenya was found to have internal testes and three times the amount of testosterone that a “normal” female would have, the paper said.

The sport’s governing body, which has not decided whether or not it will strip Semenya of her 800m world championships gold medal in Berlin, will also advise the runner to seek immediate surgery, believing her condition poses significant health risks.

Semenya, 18, was believed to have gone into hiding last night and it is understood she is unlikely to appear in her first race since winning the gold last month.

I don’t often get involved in sport, and in truth, I care even less about runners than I usually do about sports people (being able to move quickly has never struck me as a skill worth lauding above, say, being able to cure something–but it’s a long time before we have doctor and scientist Olympics, I admit); but there’s just something truly tragic about the whole as it is being reported now. To be eighteen, and to have the world thinking that, to use the euphemism, ‘you’re a chick with a dick,’ well, that must be awful on s many personal levels.

I am actually moved to a sense of sadness.

I’m sure it’ll pass.

Link.

“This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly, but it’s far from serene: what resemble the dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes.”

Link.

I have to admit, one of my cinematic guilty pleasures are the films that Quentin Tarantino makes. Not the films that he stars in, I assure you, but the ones he directs. For all the style, excess, and occasional self employment of his limited acting ability, I do dig them.

With that said, then, I have to confess that I found <i>Inglourious Basterds</i> a conflicted Tarantino film, one that played to his previously established strengths of excessive violence, quirky characters, and stylised dialogue, but one which also showed a different Tarantino, one that is restrained, realistic, and at times tragic. The latter occurred whenever he focused on any of the French characters, who are lead by Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna, a Jewish girl who after the death of her family, finds herself in France, running a cinema and the object of affection for German war hero, Fredrick Zoller, played by Daniel Bruhl. There, she comes face to face with Colonel Hans Landa, the German commander who is in charge of hunting down and killing Jews in France. Christoph Waltz, who plays the character, is actually the best of some very good performances in the film, and is totally compelling in his portrayal of the highly intelligent, dangerous and charming commander, from the first moment that he steps into the film. Placed against this, however, is the storylines of Aldo Raine’s guerilla group of German killing soldiers. Raine is Pitt’s character, and he comes complete with a thick accent, the scar from a noose around his neck, and everything else that is excessive that you can think of in a Tarantino film. Raine and his group in the film are involved in a plot to blow up the cinema that Shosanna runs while a German film festival is taking place, killing such German high command figures as Joseph Goebbels and Hitler himself. Of course, things start to go wrong when the group is told to meet Bridget von Hammersmark in a basement bar. It’s a terrible place for a meeting, they all say, and indeed it is, but it allows for Tarantino to build a nice, claustrophobic scene.

About half way through the film, I realised that the one figure I could lose from it and not feel as if anything had been lost was Pitt’s Raine. He, like the Samuel L. Jackson voice over, and the occasional flaskback for a select few Basterds, felt as if they were unnecessary in the larger film, and a strong editorial hand should have pruned them out in the early script factor. With that removed, I reckon that the film would have been Tarantino’s best, and shown an entirely new voice and sensibility for him–and to be fair, as it is, it does show a new voice–one that is building, even, on the inter-contextualised references to other films and film movements established in <i>Kill Bill</i> and to a lesser extent, <i>Death Proof</i>–but rather than one that is successful, I think it shows a voice struggling to emerge.

Anyhow, I did enjoy the film, despite the fact that it has one of my pet hates in American cinema, which is films that deal with Nazi Germany. So strong is my hate for American Nazi films that I almost considered not going to see this film, but since I recognise that this hate of mine stems entirely from the racist and awful films that Steven Spielberg has thrown out and had lauded, I figured I ought to put it aside. It isn’t that I think the Holocaust is a fabrication, or that I think these films make it seem worse than it was, but rather because the treatment of them are so often in the same vein as the Nazis portrayed in the Indiana Jones, in which they wear black coats and have maps to various treasures burned into the flesh of their hands. For the most part, Tarantino actually manages to avoid this, however, and that is mostly due to the excellence of Waltz and Bruhl, but whenever Pitt is on screen, you can’t help but think of this tendency, and occasionally wait for Harrison Ford to stroll into scene with his whip and hat and a Bible and say, “I don’t suppose you know the way to the Holy Grail, do you?”

I realised today, while trying to change a washer on a tap in the backyard, that as a man, I’ve learnt nothing about finesse, tools, or craft. All I know is that if I have a hammer and bash something, eventually, it will move, and one way or the other, the problem will be solved.

Well, maybe not.

At any rate, long story short, the tap is no longer leaking.

I had this weird dream the other night. Mostly, I don’t remember my dreams unless I’m sick, and I’m cool with that. Part of it is because the dreams I do remember are really kind of useless to me.

For example, the other night’s dream, I began sick after purchasing and eating bad heroin. Yes, eating. The heroin was rather like decaying grain and I would scoop it up and eat it because it was what I wanted. I woke up in the early hours, feeling like absolute shit, and then proceeded to drift in and out of sleep, dreaming a parade of people who got on my case for buying bad heroin. You should only buy good heroin, Fred Astaire told me. Don’t you know the difference between good and bad heroin, Jose Saramago asked me. This is the funniest shit I’ve ever seen, said one of my friends (who I could never quite recall, and who I thought for a while looked like all my friends, shuffled into one face, and continually shifting in their aspect).

I suspect I’d be alright with remembering dreams like this if they were useful to me, but on the most part, they’re just a collection of images that spin round idly and go nowhere. Perhaps one day I’ll begin a story or a book with the words, Fred Astaire warned me about bad heroin.

Perhaps.