Overland literary journal

Progressive culture since 1954

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La fille mal gardée

On hunger

2000 prisoners on hunger strike. Two thousand. 77 days for some of them, starving. In a way, such numbers are tricky – simultaneously easy and cruel. They encourage abstraction and personal disconnection. They suggest formulas and mechanics.

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Meanland

Digital – you keep using that word!

If technology was going to thwart anything, I’d expect it to be a literary journal. Fittingly enough the current issue of Island is ‘Digitalism’, dedicated to the ‘digital’. It has a collection of essays tackling self-publishing, literary participation and the Australian book publishing industry. Southerly has, as always, two tables of contents: one for print articles and one for their online articles, ‘The long paddock’.

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Garibaldi's Statue

A message from Joseph Goebbels

Against the backdrop of Anders Breivik’s personal theatre, and on the eve of the staggering electoral result in Greece of the party that for reasons of politeness so many media organisations would rather not call neofascist or neo-Nazi (besides, their symbol is not at all a Swastika, it’s a meander, that’s like a totally different thing, don’t you see?), outside the train station in Bologna, I picked up an old film magazine.

Continue reading 'A message from Joseph Goebbels' 23

New Words

Living in The Avengers’ universe

What happens when the disengagement of the populace from political life gets thoroughly normalised? In such circumstances, the political class and its agents seem, almost by definition, able to perform feats that ordinary people simply cannot. That seems to me the context for the new hegemony of superheroes. The genre no longer presents as wish-fulfillment so much as a kind of realism – an accurate depiction of the way society works. We are, in other words, already living in a comic book.

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Cruel Miracles

Why I write

My writing had reached an impasse. I realised that if I wished to write about the people I loved in any kind of truthful way, they would have to be dead. I no longer wanted to be continually thrown back into my interior life where all my desires are heaped up like bones in an elephants’ graveyard.

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