Monday, October 18, 2004



The Scots have confirmed what I have suspected for a long, long, time. I am right. Flamers note that I am always right. Imrigh \Im"righ\, n. [Scot.; Gael. ?un-bhrigh chicken soup.] A peculiar strong soup or broth, made in Scotland. [Written also imrich.]
Why I'm writing a book ... The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.
We live in amazing and interesting times. I intend the book to do a damn good job proving it.

Literature & Sport Across Frontiers: My Master Plan for World Domination & Soul Soup
Since the dawn of the film industry, it has been common practice for writers to send scripts and pitch stories to movie executives and producers. And for almost as long, scores of writers have sued the studios for stealing their ideas, only to have suits, filed on hard-to-prove copyright infringement grounds, which are dismissed or quietly settled. But a recently published opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Jeff Grosso v. Miramax Film Corporation, may soon shift the balance of power in this age-old tug of war.
Every successful movie ever made has had a raft of crazy lawsuits.

What? We Can't Steal Your Ideas? [Is Canada Really Stealing Hollywood Productions? ; Can you win over the same folks who read People magazine without turning off the so-called serious reader? Stand-alone book magazines ride choppy seas to celebrate the promise of the written word: Bookmarks]
• · Exhibitionists who like to feel more than the wind in their hair rejoice - nude cruises are coming to Australia The Bare Necessities of the Maiden Voyage (Boat People); [ It's Maiden Book Blitz Week at Slate ! ; Maiden high-tech security: Vatican: It is home to 1.6 million books, centuries-old manuscripts and the oldest known complete Bible]
• · · A few months ago Hollie Andrew was collecting tickets at a Sydney Dendy Cinema at Circular Quay. Now she is nominated for an AFI award: her movie Somersault premiered at the Sydney Film Festival What a Somersault of Artistic Life; [Snakes hit the beach; and may Gianna’s Novel-in-progress Hit #1]
• · · · Why Authors Should Blog ; [The sexual memoir has been gaining steam (no pun intended) as a literary form in recent years, and far from being near-porn, many of the books read like throwbacks to an age when sex was allowed to be beautiful, and not simply an animal act. Literature Regains Its Sex Life: sexual writing aims... to demystify and de-emotionalize sex — to reduce it to a physical and hormonal process not much different from, say, scratching an itch ]
• · · · · Leisel Jones' and our old coach, Ken Wood, has seemingly re-opened the rift between her and Brooke Hanson by playing down the Victorian's record-breaking feats at the world shortcourse swimming championships; [The allergy is now under control thanks to her switch from an indoor pool to an outdoor one at Sutherland, where she trains under the guidance of Ian Thorpe's coach Tracey Menzies. Kirsten Thomson ]
• · · · · · Elfriede Jelinek has been pilloried in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest by exposing the seamy side of her country of birth to the outside world. She's very adventurous. She's a playwright and poet too and is always doing crazy and wonderful things with the form of the novel. While the form taken by her writing constantly shifts, however, its fundamental purpose appears to be to disturb. And she does so, in the academy's words, by demonstrating how the entertainment industry's cliches seep into people's consciousness and paralyze opposition to class injustices and gender oppression ; [Reports of the Death of the Printed Word Have Been Exaggerated]