At an hour and twenty minutes, Collapse is feature length interview with Michael Ruppert, ex-police officer, news reporter, and creator of the Left Wing environmentalist newsletter, Into the Wilderness.

At the centre of the film is the concept of Peak Oil, which Ruppert explains as being the point “when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached,” and when “the rate of production enters terminal decline.” It is from this centre that Ruppert’s view of the world extends–with oil reserves drying up, and the importance that oil takes in our society, especially in the creation of goods, he believes that the economy is coming to a crash, that our way of life will be ending. It’s a frightening portrayal of a future, and Ruppert delivers it well, confident in his research, confident in what the world is becoming. Unfortunately, this is both the pro and the con of the film, which has been made by Chris Smith, the director of Yes Men. For, while Ruppert is confident in his opinion, there is no attempt by Smith to bring in outsides voices, to not so much validate or discredit the man, but to create an argument that within the film. A small attempt is made by a faceless interviewer in the film (it could be Smith, I’m not sure) to raise questions to Ruppert, and the film then touches on ideas such as using the media to support your own opinion, and if human invention will save us all from the horrors that are coming–but Ruppert is unwilling to be drawn into debate, and refuses to answer the questions, making him as bad as the politicians that he is portrays as villains.

Yet, for the lack of outside influence on the film, it is still mostly quite interesting. I hadn’t heard of the term Peak Oil before, and I must admit, I hadn’t stopped to think about how much oil was used in our the construction of things from tires to toothbrushes. Possibly, if you’re a little more knowledgeable than I in the area, you might find the film to be a touch on the shallow side, or lacking any real debate, but if you’re like me, there’s a lot of information floating around in it, and taken with grains of salt, and added with your own research, it’s an interesting hour and a half (well, just under). Yes, it does tend to drag a little, especially in the middle when Ruppert begins repeating himself, but the man himself is a good speaker, and Smith has put his film together well–allowing, even, for a mirror to be held up between Ruppert and his opinion of the world, for Ruppert, like the world he is trying to convince, is in meltdown too. Without steady employment and income, and with his books not selling well, Michael Ruppert, at the end of the film, is living by himself, with a dog, counting the smiles of people when he walks the dog, and fighting eviction, since he is unable to pay his rent.

Worth you time, I reckon.

JD Salinger, the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye has died, 91.

You know, I liked Catcher in the Rye. Not enough that it is my favourite book, or that it would make that list, but I liked it enough that I was always curious as to what Salinger wrote after. Legend has it that though the author stopped publishing after the book became hugely famous, he kept writing, and the work was filed away in a large metal cabinet, where it would be released after his death. Morbidly, and since I have no particular relationship with Salinger the person, I rather hope this is true.

I tell myself that, even though this might not be the best response to an author’s death, at least I’m not Brett Easton Ellis, who used twitter to announce his Salinger-is-Dead Party.

Alisa Krasnostein (girliejones) has purchased my story ‘White Crocodile Jazz’ for her upcoming anthology, Sprawl. Others in the book include Stephanie Campisi, Deb Biancotti, Simon Brown, Anna Tambour, Cat Sparks, and Kaaron Warren.

Not such a bad way to start 2010.

Today I came across the story of the French Government banning hijabs (the scarves some Muslim women wear) under the notion that they are stopping equality. I think it’s the first time I’ve actually heard of anyone banning something in the name of equality, but I’m sure it has happened before. Like this, I’m sure the proposed ban is a way of ignoring the underlying issues that face Muslim women in France, and is a political move motivated by a form of racism.

At first, I thought it was difficult to criticise as a proposition, but that was only because the first response of a white male is to not criticism a move made in the name of feminism, so called or otherwise. Of course, five seconds later, I realised that was a kind of bullshit. Laws that take away a woman’s right to make a choice on what to wear or otherwise aren’t really being done in the name of promoting equality or feminism. In tripping around the web a little, I came across the BBC who had commentary on the issue. Alice Schwarzer, the German feminist, appears to be connecting the issue to the conflict between State and Government, and said, “This issue is about the constitution, and the division between state and religion - a hard fought for achievement of the enlightenment. The weakening of this division is utterly incomprehensible, particularly as it comes at a time when the worldwide offensive of the theocrats is not just making countries with Muslim majorities subservient to their inhumane “holy laws”, but is also threatening democracies worldwide. Countries like France have long grasped the consequences of this.” Personally, I don’t know that France has long grasped this, as I don’t see anyone in France motioning for the ban of crosses being worn by women, and in fact, you could argue that the law in itself is weakening the division she identifies.

I was a little more in line with Fanny Dethloff’s opinion, however. A pastor responsible for refugee’s, he/she said:

It makes absolutely no sense at all to bar Muslim women from public places because they wear the scarf. This kind of exclusion prevents these women gaining access to jobs, stops them from being integrated. It does nothing for emancipation - indeed, by shutting out those women who are trying to better themselves, it has quite the opposite effect.

Of course we want to condemn fundamentalism, but we don’t do that by punishing the women - it is not the women who are involved with pushing this kind of intolerant, politicised Islam, it’s the men. At a time like this we need more understanding, more tolerance, not less. And indeed, cracking down in this way is only likely to lead to a sense of victimisation, which will fuel extremism, not reduce it.

It is also problematic to assume, as some people do, that women are forced into wearing the scarf by overbearing men. While it is certainly the case that some are pressured into putting it on, many Muslim who wear it do it quite self-consciously. We need to respect their wishes, not ourselves oppress them by trying to make them take it off.

Of course, I’m not sure condemning Muslim men as the only pushers of intolerance is entirely correct, but I figure he is mostly talking about the people in charge, and the hardline priests and so forth who are, by and large, men, and who do push that harsh line of victimisation and oppression of women.

At any rate, it’s not my intent to recite all the pieces, so if you’re curious, follow the link and check it out.

What drew me to it initially was the idea that a government, or anyone, would move to ban what can be a choice by women under the name of equality. It’s a misuse of the word, entirely, because equality, to me at least, speaks of the individual’s ability to make a choice, in how to dress, how to present themselves, and how those choices are tolerated. I won’t say accepted, though some might, because I don’t think that everyone has to accept the thing that another does–and acceptance to me means that you, in part, agree with it. You’re not going to agree with everything. The quest for equality is to recognise for that while you don’t agree with something that someone has done, you tolerate that they do it, and you live beside it without condemning them, or persecuting them for their choices in life.

Today is the day that a people lost their country.

I thought, earlier, that I might not write about that. I’ve had this blog for a long time now, and a lot of people have, no doubt, seen me write about Australia Day before. But whenever I start to write about it, whenever I think about Australia, I cannot escape the fact that awful things were done to create it.

It’s not unique. You would be hard pressed to find a country that is not built upon the suffering of others, the deliberate intent of someone who is not native to the land to claim it their own, to poison, attack, and marginalise the people who had lived her for centuries before. That doesn’t mean that it should be ignored, however. Australia’s a nice place. I like my life in Sydney. In truth, its a pretty quiet one, and I spend a lot of time either trying to make a living, or trying to make art, and neither of them are of too much interest to anyone but myself. There’s electricity, there’s roads, there’s health care, there’s a government, and by and large, life is pretty decent here. No earthquakes, tidal waves, crushing poverty, lack of education, and a life span that is less than those of others in other countries.

Unless, that is, if you’re an indigenous Australian. Then you are, for the most part, just avoiding the natural disasters.

Maybe next year I’ll say something different when the 26th rolls around.

Workshop went well, as these things usually do. One of the things I don’t enjoy about teaching High School students is how much I have to pay attention to the boring books and films that they are forced to endure at school. If it’s hard for me to show any vague interest in the books that are being taught, you can imagine the dull sensation that the kids have. Running the workshop is different, though. I get to talk about the work I like. I get to talk about the writers I like. I get to talk even about the stories I think are failures, and why I reckon they are–teaching from pieces that don’t succeed is a nice change from teaching from pieces that do so. It’s interesting to watch a classroom full of kids start talking about why something didn’t work, why they hated it, and so forth.

In literature, it seems to me that we sometimes insist that the only way to talk about work is to walk about it as a success, and not a failure.

Anyhow, like I said, it went well. The only real hassle were the long hours spent in traffic. I’d do strange things in that traffic. Random acts of kindness followed by random acts of cruelty. Maybe it’s how people in that peak hour crawl usually act. Of course, I got taught a lesson right towards the end, when I left a guy pull in front of me. He was in a beat up old station wagon, but I didn’t think much of that. Just slow down. Just let him drift into the lane. Just watch as he, in the middle of peak hour traffic, with lanes on either side of me packed tightly, put on his hazard lights and stumbled to a stop.

I sat there for a while, in the heat, waiting for a random moment of kindness that would allow me to escape.

John Travolta and Scientology are going to Haiti.

Scientologists have mobilized to seize on the promotional and recruitment opportunities presented by the horror going on in Haiti, and John Travolta has personally arranged to fly “volunteer ministers” to Haiti to inflict his junk science on victims there.

Anywhere people are suffering, Scientology’s yellow-shirted “volunteer ministers” can be found lurking near news cameras and claiming to help people with their bullshit technology. They performed “purification rundowns” on recovery workers sifting through the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11, administered “touch assists” to victims of the tsunami, distributed literature after the Virginia Tech shooting, and are on the ground in Haiti right now warning the starving, dehydrated populace about the dangers of psychiatry.

John Travolta is using his air miles to help the Haiti relief effort by planning a mercy mission to the earthquake ravaged nation.

The movie star and celebrity member of the Church of Scientology has become the latest big name to dig deep to help the victims of Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude tremor.

He says, “I have arranged for a plane to take down some volunteer ministers and some supplies and some medics.

“I hope that inspires others as well. It’s needed.”

So precisely what does this desperately needed help consist of? To be fair, Scientology claims to have airlifted some actual medical professionals to Porte-au-Prince, a move that is hard to argue with even if the doctors are cultists and are accompanied by a retinue of recruiters and glorified masseuses who are there not to help but to carry on their “crusade to build a better world,” as the web site for the cult’s volunteer ministers program puts it, through the application of L. Ron Hubbard’s paranoid and power-mad fantasies.

Isn’t that just inspiring you to start your own religion to prey on those in disaster zones?

I’m sure every other religion is doing the same, albiet without the massage.

Link.

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is engaged in a variation of the old argument of why science fiction is not respected:

We’ve all probably had the experience of reading a great SF novel and lending it to a friend—a literate friend who adores A.S. Byatt and E.M. Forster. Sometimes our friend will turn their nose up at the cover, and we’ll say no, really, this is good, you’ll like it. Sometimes our friend does like it, but often we’ll find our friend returning the book with a puzzled grimace, having tried to read it but “just not been able to get into it.” That friend has approached science fiction without the necessary toolkit and has bounced off. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s not that they can’t read sentences. It’s just that part of the fun of science fiction happens in your head, and their head isn’t having fun, it’s finding it hard work to keep up.

Unfortunately, the post boils down to arguing that a door is really a door (especially if it opens to another dimension where dragons exist) and that the world is just not educated enough to appreciate science fiction properly.

Perhaps the most telling part of the post, however, is when Walton discusses the translation of one of her own books. “Science fiction,” she writes, “may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there. I had this problem with one of the translators of my novel Tooth and Claw—he kept emailing me asking what things represented. I had to keep saying no, the characters really were dragons, and if they represented anything that was secondary to the reality of their dragon nature. He kept on and on, and I kept being polite but in the end I bit his head off—metaphorically, of course.”

What Walton fails to recognise here is that the dragons are doing both in her book, just as they would be doing should they appear in any other genre: they exist as the dragons within the text, but carry also a secondary reading, which is open to a representational reading. It is wrong to say that one reading is more valid than the other and Walton, by ignoring that, sounds very much like a High School student, who, sick of being stuck in an English class, turns around and says, “Why does this stuff have to mean anything? Why can’t it just be about what is happening on the page.” What the student there is saying is, I don’t want to think. I don’t want to have to work for meaning. I want it to be two plus two equals four. I just want to be told something. I want to be given my moment away from my life and not have to think about anything in it. Which is, of course, fair enough, but its up to the reader to decide if they would like to read a book that way–and often the reader makes a subconscious decision on how they will be reading the work by his or her own interests. For example, to use Walton’s example of The Forever War, you can read the novel as a story about being a story in which the characters get out of sync to what’s happening at home, or you can read it as a story that details what it was like for soldiers involved in the Vietnam War. Both readings are valid, and to me, it is the second reading that makes the novel an interesting piece. Now, I couldn’t imagine Haldeman saying, “Yeah, no, piss off. It’s about people lost in time. There’s no extra meaning at all. The people are just people.” But who knows, maybe he would–Walton, however, in actually rejecting that there are multiple ways to write, and in being unable to see how her book should function on two levels, and unable to present it with a realisation that it should function on levels like that, is doing herself a disservice.

It appears that on Thursday and Friday I’m running a workshop. I hadn’t gotten any confirmation about it, so I was glad I checked.

At any rate, has anyone seen Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom? I came across it today and it has me a little curious, but I’m always a bit leery about films that are banned and controversial. Mostly, they’re just boring.

There’s more and more in the news about the Haiti disaster. Today, I saw a news program talking about how they identified the first Australian to die there. I don’t know, but that stuff just always shits me–as if it really makes the awfulness of the tragedy somehow more real to think that someone from your own country was involved. To me, it strikes of being the most selfish and inconsiderate of statements to make. As if the awfulness of seeing countless people homeless, hungry, sick, injured, dying and dead is somehow not enough for anyone of a different race or nationality to feel basic compassion.

In America, a televangelist is claiming that Haiti made a pact with the Devil.

I’m not exactly sure why he, or anyone, would want to say such a thing right about now, but I doubt someone like Pat Robertson needs much in the way of compassion or understanding or common sense. In the New York Times, Commander Diane W. Durham is reported as being the commander of the first American vessel to reach the devastation. “From the port,” she said, “not many burning fires [are] visible in the capital, but collapsed buildings [are] everywhere in sight. It is hard to look out in this harbor and see a building that has not been affected, from the waterfront up the hills to the larger buildings.”

In Port-au-Prince, many piers had collapsed into the harbor and oil had spilled into the water, Commander Durham said, but there did not appear to be obstructions in the channel leading into the port, meaning that other American or foreign relief ships should be able to approach the area. For now, though, there is no easy way to land rescue supplies from ships, she said.

Off the ship, and on the ground, it is much worse.

Huge swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, lay in ruins, and thousands of people were feared dead in the rubble of government buildings, foreign aid offices and shantytowns. Limbs protruded from piles of disintegrated concrete, and muffled cries emanated from deep inside the wrecks of buildings, as this impoverished nation struggled to grasp the grim, still unknown toll from its worst earthquake in more than 200 years.

Scenes of destruction defined the city. Concrete homes collapsed on hillsides. Hospitals overflowed with victims. The Canape Vert hospital was surrounded by collapsed buildings.

With the electricity and phone service out and supplies of fresh water dwindling, The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Haiti was facing a “major humanitarian emergency.” With 14 United Nations peacekeepers confirmed dead and more than 100 workers missing, the organization was in mourning and flying its own flag at half-staff.

The Haitian president, René Préval, told The Miami Herald that the toll was “unimaginable” and estimated that thousands had died. Among those feared dead were the chief of the United Nations mission in Haiti and Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, the archbishop of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The quake struck just before 5 p.m. Tuesday about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, ravaging the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroying some of its most important cultural symbols. The domed white presidential palace and the cathedral collapsed, the Ministry of Justice was destroyed, and the country’s national prison suffered extensive damage, a United Nations spokesman said.

“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval was quoted as saying. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”

“All of the hospitals are packed with people,” he added. “It is a catastrophe.”

Victoria really should fix that fire warning.