Overland literary journal

summer read

For the next few days, I'm blogging with my sister Jill at the State Library site, as part of its Summer Read program.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 22-01-2009, No comments

michael row the boat ashore: a poem for the inauguration of president obama

well this river is deep & wide / hallelujah
milk & honey on the other side / hallelujah

when michael rowed the boat ashore
crouched down over that mighty jordan roar
when michael rowed the boat ashore
struggling with those flimsy splintered oars
when michael rowed the boat ashore / he
never steered the craft into jesus’ kingdom
that brown boy’s promised land
we call it freedom

hallelujah
michael row the boat shore
hallelujah

when david searched to find that stone / her
ankle flesh rubbed back to bone with chain
when david looked to find that stone
crouched among the cotton fields / down low
when david chose that stone to slay / she
armed the slingshot at the master’s head / & prayed

sister help to trim that sail
hallelujah
sister help to trim that sail
hallelujah

so obama has entered the lion’s den / that
large white house built by chained black men
so obama’s entered the lion’s den
but lord / can the young man tame the thing
obama’s entered the lion’s den
can I get a witness / lord / amen
the man has entered the lion’s den
& this silence has descended

hallelujah
michael row the boat shore
hallelujah

lot/s wife was asked
to leave all she knew behind

hallelujah

& the woman thought she could
but just one last glance behind

hallelujah

this god has a vengeance

hallelujah

she had to die
to keep her faith alive
(what an ending)

well this river is chilly & cold / hallelujah
chills the body but not the soul / hallelujah

well this river is deep & wide / hallelujah
milk & honey on the other side / hallelujah

(more...)

Written by Maxine Clarke on 21-01-2009, No comments

Gaza: Beating to the rhythms of the US electoral cycle

From Crikey, Monday: To be honest, this came out a bit half-cooked. But, hey, it's January.

So the killing in Gaza ends as it began, to a timetable determined less by events in the region than the rhythms of the US electoral cycle.

The latest round of carnage began, of course, back in November when Israelbreached the ceasefire with Hamas on the day that Americans went to the polls, judging (correctly, as it happened) that, with the world’s media focused on the US, a few Palestinian deaths would slide neatly down the memory hole.

Operation Cast Lead duly took place during the final weeks of George Bush’s term, a period in which both the outgoing and incoming presidents could deftly avoid any responsibility. No-one was listening to W any more; Obama was yet to take the reigns.

Thus the ceasefire. The SMH explains: "By halting the offensive, Israel has spared Barack Obama the spectre of a Middle East bloodbath to mark his inauguration and avoided friction with the new US administration."

Warmongers, take note. You can kill 1206 Palestinians, a third of them children. You bomb mosques and shell schools and cover UNRWA refugee shelters with white phosphorus. But what you can’t do is lower the tone of an official function. Why, this inauguration’s about hope, don’t you know!

Well, there’s precious little of that in Gaza now. In a territory already so impoverished that, even before the offensive, Palestinians suffered from malnutrition, eighty per cent of Gaza’s national product has been destroyed. The total damage bill is said to come to $1.5 billion. Some 20,000 buildings have been hit, fifteen per cent of the total structures on the strip. About 26,000 Palestinians have become internal refugees; the unemployment rate now exceeds 60 per cent.

Insofar as the international community pays attention to Gaza over the next few days, it will be to nod wisely over the need to close the border tunnels to Egypt. The smuggling routes might have supplied Hamas with rockets but they also gave Gazans access to food and medicine and the other supplies of which the Israeli blockade deprived them. Israeli intelligence says that the Palestinians will have the tunnels open within a few months. Of course they will. With the blockade continuing, what else can they do?

That’s why the most likely prognosis is for a brief lull -- and then more of the same.

Though the Israeli politicians most closely associated with the war have received a boost in the polls, the residents of Sderot feel cheated by the cease fire and the Israeli far-right will agitate to avoid the "mistakes" of Lebanon and to finish the job.

On the Palestinian side, Hamas, simply by surviving, can claim some sort ofvictory, especially since it retains the ability to fire rockets.

Nonetheless, the Gaza crisis has also widened the schisms within Palestinian politics, and with Fatah now actively collaborating with the IDF, a Palestinian civil war seems more likely than ever.

In that light, it’s worth revisiting David Rose’s remarkable article from Vanity Fair last year, a piece that revealed the US’s covert operation to arm and train Fatah militants to overthrow Hamas after the Palestinian Authority’s first democratic elections.

Rose’s research illustrates, once again, that the USA is not an onlooker in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians so much as a central player. After all, almost all the weapons by which Gaza has been reduced to rubble came, one way or another, from the USA, the source of some $53 billion in military aid to Israel over recent decades.

That’s why, amidst the glitter of Obama’s inauguration, the Palestinians remain, as always, the skeletons at the feast. The crisis in Gaza is not over. In many ways, it’s just beginning.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-01-2009, No comments

sing it, kids: Bush was right!

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

That's John Hinderaker from the big American conservative blog Powerline in July 2005 (not surprisingly, that particular archive seems to have vanished). The blogosphere encourages hyperbole but even so Hinderaker's breathless insistence on W's underappreciated genius wasn't a million miles from the mainstream Right's view, even in 2005.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion (the statue falling and all that) it even became, for a time, the common wisdom of the media: here was a decisive, determined president who had faced down his elitist critics and prevailed. The ‘Mission Accomplished' moment, when Bush rescheduled an aircraft carrier so he could land a fighter pilot on it, whipped some of the more excitable commentators into an almost sexual frenzy. Consider this astonishing transcript from the Chris Mathews show: ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-01-2009, No comments

resorting to violence

Missed this when it first appeared (ht Lenin's Tomb). Here's a statistical study of ceasefires between Israel and the Palestinians. How do they end? Is it because the Islamofascist-we-worship-death-while-you-worship-life Palestinians just can't help themselves in their insane desire for the blood of Israelis? No, not so much.

[T]his analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-01-2009, 1 user comment

Gaza ceasefire and the US elections

I've got a piece on the relationship between Gaza and the US elections up at Crikey today, though I think it's behind the subscriber firewall. One thing I meant to note in that article but didn't (cos I'm brain dead today) was the article unearthed by Politico: a piece written by Barack Obama when he was a student activist. In it, Obama quotes approvingly from, of all people, Peter Tosh, in a song that could not be more relevant for Gaza. Let's hope he still remembers it.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 19-01-2009, No comments

The Course of the Heart

I'm currently reading M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart. It opens like this:

When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it.

The sentence sets the tone for whole novel: a constant sense of something wondrous or dreadful existing parallel - or perhaps at a slight angle - to everyday life. The plot (and I'm only half-way through) centres of a trio of friends who took part (or may have taken part - it's not altogether clear) in an occult ritual years earlier, the consequences of which still haunt them. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-01-2009, No comments

why you should be at the rally for Gaza on Sunday

A few days ago, the NYT's Tom Friedman approvingly described Israel's strategy against Hezbollah as follows:

Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future. Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?” ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-01-2009, 1 user comment

Saturday morning chicken blogging

As the chickens had their breakfast this morning, they were stalked by the ferocious kitteh from next door, who spent half an hour or so sitting on the fence deciding whether or not to pounce on them from a great height. Naturally, watching it conclude that four hungry chickens were more than a match for one baby cat  proved far more entertaining than the work I was supposed to be doing ...

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-01-2009, No comments

launch of Sleepers Almanac No Five

If you're in Melbourne, you might want to attend the launch of Sleepers Almanac No Five. Sleepers has become a Melbourne institution and its events are always rambunctious affairs.  Overland's Kalinda Ashton has a story in this year's almanac (and I'm sure the rest of it's good, too). Details below:

Launch of the latest Sleepers Almanac
To kick-start the year, the Sleepers Almanac No. 5 is hot off the press and ready to be celebrated. Melburnians, please come along to:
Date: Thursday the 12th of February
Time: From 6pm till 8pm
Place: At the Trades Hall Bar on the corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton – now enter via Lygon Street. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-01-2009, No comments

best internet thing ever

Maybe the whole world already knows about this but I've just discovered Livestation. You download a little viewer thing and suddenly you have free live access to just about every cable news service. As well as the BBC and CSPAN and the rest, you can watch the Aljazeera English channel. It's the only network with a journalist reporting live from Gaza (as opposed to watching from the Israeli side of the border). As you might expect, the perspective there is a little different -- especially now that the IDF has, apparently, fired white phosphorous shells at a UN refugee agency containing hundreds of civilians. As someone on Aljazeera just said, imagine the outcry if Hamas had fired phosphorous (it works like napalm) at American civilians in a clearly marked UN refugee facility. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-01-2009, No comments

The Humpty Dumpty gang

My piece from today's Crikey has been reprinted at Webdiary, which means, I guess, that it's probably OK to republish here.

Yesterday, the Washington Post gave Bob Woodward the front page for a story in which Susan J Crawford, the convening authority for Bush’s military commissions acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," she said. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-01-2009, 3 user comments

Little Hoodlum: Keri Glastonbury on Dorothy Porter

 Jean-Luc Nancy, in his book The Inoperative Community, argues that ‘community is revealed in the death of others'. This is community in a more ineffable sense, the way I like to think of myself in terms of feeling part of a poetic community: perhaps the kind of poetic community that, as Dorothy Porter wrote, ‘is actually marvellously good at honouring its dead'. There's no doubt that contemporary community is also intrinsically linked to communication, often literally these days using communications technologies. I heard that Dorothy Porter had died in an email from Overland's editor Jeff Sparrow, and then put ‘Vale Dorothy Porter' as my Facebook status. This triggered a rash of comments: of shock (‘Dorothy Porter is DEAD?!'), of disbelief (‘she seemed so strong, unassailable'), garnering responses both globally and locally (‘there I was in the middle of Kalgoorlie and I realised that there was nowhere where her words didn't work - I wanted to be the night parrot and wreak havoc with that news'). ... read more

Written by admin on 15-01-2009, No comments