Jhayne listed the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” Like her, I’ve no interest in tagging people, but I liked what she did with her piece, so I’m going to try my own hand at it.

So:

1. People send me cards, and afterwards I never know what to do with them. Throwaway comments, throwaway well wishes, throwaway apologies. But I can’t toss them. I keep them in this pile, a collection of throwaway moments that people have sent me from around the world. Malaysia, Japan, the States, Iceland, Egypt, and Melbourne. Some have a little more thought put into them, a little more quirk, and these are the ones I like the most; but I wonder how long I’ll keep these things, my pieces of paper and cardboard that took but a moment for someone to write, and which, when I think of throwing them out, I am uncomfortable with.

2. It’s a lot easier to deal with people who don’t like you than those who do. One requires less consideration, after all.

3. In 2008, I turned off the radio in my car. I finally broke against the sharp rocks of dull witted radio personalities. I turned it on again a few nights ago to find two girls talking about weird images while on a road trip. One of them said to the other, “Have you ever been on a road trip,” and the other replied, “Yeah, we did the drive to Melbourne,” while the first talked about being in a camping ground. I sighed, and plugged back in my Ipod. Driving down to Melbourne and a nice freeway is not a road trip. Going to a camping ground is not exciting. Maybe it’s exciting if you pull over and a UFO lands in front of you with bright lights and Elizabeth Taylor steps out, looking like she’s from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Maybe that’s a little different. Maybe, I think, it’s too easy to get on the fucking radio.

4. I have a ratings box for the television. I said to the company that asked if I wanted to take part that I didn’t watch much television, and they said that I was kind of the demographic they wanted, so I agreed. Consequently, if I happen to turn the TV on and Friends is on, I turned the TV off.

5. I have never really spent much time around writers. A bit here and there. I don’t really know many musicians, either. Or painters. But I know a lot of people who work as social workers, therapists, and in other mental and physical health industries.

6. She sent me a message on facebook, wishing me a good Xmas and New Year. Really, I wonder as I read it, why do I keep this facebook account? At any rate, I never replied. The last time I saw her was the morning after my previous New Years, in which we ended up on the Super Lame evening of Vanilla Ice. It was a chaste kind of evening, though it could have gone otherwise, but even a little drunk–it was Vanilla Ice, and you can’t go there sober–there were just things said that left me with the impression that I was better off alone. Well, alone as a kind of chaste evening can be. Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe not. Either way, there was coldness the next day, and later, when I sent her a message, she told me she had deleted my number. I didn’t reply to her facebook message, a year later.

7. I have a jar I drop coins into. Never bothered with such things as a child.

8. She said to me, “I don’t like sheets. They just tangle around your feet, keep you trapped in your bed. I don’t use them. They’re wrong.” I’m 32 and it’s the first time I’ve met anyone with the same opinion about sheets as me. Seems like a long wait on something so trivial.

9. Since the end of 2000, I’ve been on anti-depressants. Something to set you straight when you can’t do it yourself. I never gave it much thought, but around the middle of last year, I figured it was time to give them up, and see how I was without them. So here I am, in 2009, without them, and I haven’t had anything for a month and a bit, and I’m doing okay. Everything has its time and place, it seems, and we can only hope that I end up on some tower shooting at people now, because the world has given me the shits and I’ve nothing to blur it out with.

10. I’m standing in line at the supermarket, listing to my Ipod, and gazing idly at the covers of magazines. There’s one with Nicole Richie on it, showing her in a bikini and big, goggle sunglasses. She’s got these stick arms that look like they would snap, but next to her is a picture of Victoria Beckham, looking anorexic. The picture beneath Richie says that she’s curved and happy now and, sure if you compare her to the latter, she is; that doesn’t mean that in the world of sanity and awareness that she is, however. Maybe I should write a letter. Put a bikini on. Send a picture with it. But then I’d probably have to buy a pair of those glasses, and I’ve always thought that they looked stupid.

11. I learnt to write short stories by reading comics and TV shows. The structure is the same, or at least that’s my theory.

12. I had a comic in this blog, and for a year, I changed the way I did things, tried to shift it so that it was at the centre. Since then, I have been wondering what I will do with this blog. I feel a little lost with it. I’m not sure what it should be anymore, or what I should do with it. There’s an entire chance that it could have run its course, too, and that I’ll be better off just shutting it down; but it’s not there yet, I don’t think, and I know what I’m like: I’ll find something I want to do and I’ll be full of direction and such thoughts won’t even exist.

13. I hate wearing shirts while I sleep. They tangle around you, try to strangle you. That’s not my scene.

14. For years, I had a camera, and I still do, if you include the one I have on my phone, but I barely take photos anymore. The camera I had broke while I was in the States, and while I was in a church, taking pictures. I’ve waited patiently for God to replace what he broke, but I think I might have to do that myself.

15. One of my favourite books still remains Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking.

16. I still figure I have time to become an astronaut.

Flip on the news, learn that Israel has rolled into Gaza, having shut down the power, and send in their helicopters, their soldiers, their funded military might.

I tend to be more sympathetic towards the Palestinians, but only because I fall on the side of underdogs when I’m not emotionally invested; otherwise, I tend to think there’s no right or wrong side in the whole mess it is. It has been going a long time. It’ll go on for a long time. My opinion ultimately comes down to a knowledge that people are dying for something that’ll be around a long time after they’re dead, and it’s just sad–but I’m hear, in a house in Sydney, with the air con turned up. I got it pretty easy, just like a lot of people with air conditioning do. What I do find interesting, however, is watching the coverage. Tonight they showed an Israeli training camp that had been built to resemble the warren of the Gaza Strip. Months of preparation said one station; another simply said nothing about that. When it came to the Palestinians, however, there was a lot of ‘we think’ and ‘they will have’ but no actual images of training camps. The person on the television seemed particularly disturbed by the fact that the strip would be trapped. Oh my god! We’re sending in tanks and they’re not going to like that! After these maybes and perhaps, the reporter added, as if it were an after thought, that they Palestinians had light weapons, nothing compared to the largely American made Israeli military.

I go through phases watching the news, because of this exact thing. Everyone is presenting an angle, creating a fiction built upon half truths, or a truth build upon fictions, whatever you like. Occasionally it gets to me, that we all live in a world where we are pretty much manipulated on a daily basis to get us to think, feel, and purchase someone else’s opinion.

Maybe if they gave me fries with it, I’d be good.

It’s a new year.

I’d like to say I’ve been doing fascinating things, but the truth is I’ve painted my office, read a bit, wrote a bit, played video games.

2008 wasn’t exactly the best year I’ve had. In many ways, it felt like a year to curl up and sleep through, or at least to escape. I wrote a novel, I kept Nowhere Near Savannah going for most of the year, I was self employed for the first time, I wrote a few short stories… but I feel like the end of the year was a bit slack, and I didn’t do as much as I could have. I still managed to feel a bit burnt out, though, which probably points out to a shockingly small burn out threshold on my part. My hope is that this year should be a bit different, and hopefully things will start to pick up financially and career wise, but if not, well, there’s always 2010.

I tell you what, though, there was one really surprising thing this year, and that was the fact that people continued to read and post about 26lies. There were the guys and girls who had it as part of a course, but there was, throughout the year, little pops of notes about the book on my google alerts notification. Most of them weren’t worth mentioning, just comments that people made on message boards, and the like (there was one, oddly enough, on a Harry Potter board, which made me laugh). There wasn’t a bad thing said about it, and it’s this cool little buzz that the book is just moving along, being read, being shared. I watched Black Sheep come and go and disappear without any real trace and that, no matter what you (the author) think of the work, is always a harsh deal. It was a little harsher given all the circumstances around it, but for the most part, I’ve let it go, closed those doors, and moved on. What else is there to do? But 26lies… that little book seems to have an odd life of its own, so much so that someone - I have no idea who, but thanks - actually wrote a wikipedia page about it.

It’s a strange, cool world at times, and it’ll surprise you no matter how cynical you are.

So lets hope 2009 has more dead celebs, and more people reading and buying my shit, just as I write and sell more of it.

Peace, y’all.

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.