Overland literary journal

audio of Tsiolkas and Loewenstein

You can now listen, courtesy ABC radio, to streaming audio of the Overland discussion between Christos Tsiolkas and Antony Loewenstein. Check it out here. The ABC glosses it thus:

Public intellectuals and the unpopular stance

The literary magazine, Overland recently invited two public intellectuals − Christos Tsiolkas and Antony Loewenstein − to discuss the consequences of saying unpopular things, something they are both quite familiar with. Christos is a well known Melbourne based author, whose latest novel, The Slap, is about the aftermath of a man hitting another person's child at a barbeque. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-02-2009, No comments

Overland 194 is ready

Overland 194 goes to the printer today. The back cover blurb reads:

Are we to imagine we can sustain forever an economy based on serving each other in ethnic restaurants and taking Japanese tourists on harbour cruises past the Opera House and robbing high-rollers blind in gambling casinos in an era when nobody much will be able to travel any more, and spare cash will be scarce? Do we let the brute greed of our corporate classes guide what we do as a nation, or is there a better way?

Bob Ellis explains what the ‘muscular timidity' of Kevin Rudd means for the future.

Plus Raewyn Connell on the financial meltdown and the Left, Carmen Lawrence and Mungo MacCallum on Gough Whitlam, Mark Furlong on the collapse of the neoliberal self, Tom O'Lincoln on myths and reality in the Pacific War, Louise Swinn on the year ahead in Australian publishing, Dave Hoskin on the perpetual crises of local film and Ouyang Yu on Chinese poetry below the waist.

New fiction from Cate Kennedy, Jennifer Mills and David Wolstencroft, plus poetry, reviews and more.

If you're not already a subscriber, you know what to do.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-02-2009, 3 user comments

Houllebecq on Realism and Lovecraft

I’m currently reading novelist Michel Houllebecq’s (author of Atomised amongst other things) book on great American horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, subtitled ‘Against the World, Against Life’. It is by far the best piece I’ve read on Lovecraft, who has claim to being the 20th century’s most original horror writer. The great thing about Houllebecq’s book is that it analyses Lovecraft’s style and technique with a hitherto unparalleled sophistication. What are often seen as Lovecraft's flaws - the paper-thin nature of his characters; his lack of interest in their backstories - are presented as fundamentally linked to Lovecraft’s world view. In other words, they are not flaws, but a necessary consequence of Lovecraft’s content. Lovecraft knows what he is doing, argues Houllebecq. In any case, it’s a great read for writers or readers interested in the surreal, horrific, macabre, non-realist, and genre fiction in general. Houllebecq also opens the book with the interesting claims: ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 17-02-2009, 3 user comments

lost and found on the underground

10 items from London Transport's lost and found.

Written by Andrew on 17-02-2009, 1 user comment

more from the great derangement of the American Right

As a supplement to the previous post on Michael Ledeen's discovery of fascism in Obama's stimulus package, here's the increasingly porcine Glen Beck talking with Bill O'Reilly about the persecution of US conservatives and how it will lead to revolution. These guys might be whacked out nutcases but they've both got top-rating mainstream. Sure, in this segment, they're clowing a bit but, again, there's going to be an awful lot of people taking such talk seriously.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-02-2009, 1 user comment

no more pussyfooting

'End the pussyfooting' -- over at the Oz, they're beating the drums for extra troops to Afghanistan, with the classic slogan from colonial wars. Enough fighting with our hands tied behind our back! No more constraints -- let's give those dusky savages some cold steel! As Obama begins his Afghan surge, expect more of this from the Australian Right -- until, eventually, Rudd signs on.

Meanwhile, the Australian commitment to Afghanistan produces results familiar enough from the American commitment to Iraq:

FIVE children have been killed in a gunbattle between Australian special forces and Taliban militants in Afghanistan. [...] ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-02-2009, No comments

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino

I saw Clint Eastwood's new film, Gran Torino a couple of days ago. Despite his sometimes deep conservatism, some of Eastwood's earlier films are exceptional, especially Unforgiven, which has a claim to the best western of all time, and Mystic River. It seems to me that in his later years (once he was past his terrible Dirty Harry movies and the appalling precursor to Fatal Attraction, Play Misty for Me) his films have been quite intelligent meditations of the law and violence. Gran Torino follows the same path (a grumpy old republican widower starts to defend his asian neighbours from a "gangsta" gang - just what is permissible when the law breaks down or is non-existent?). Again, the politics are pretty conservative (there isn't much ana

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 13-02-2009, 12 user comments

Milton Friedman as rhetorical strategy

It's bizarre watching intellectual fashions shift. A few years back, most public discussions of economics simply took it for granted that Keynesianism had been discredited and that Friedman was some kind of intellectual powerhouse. Now, you can see the consensus changing all around us. For instance:

After World War II, laissez-faire economists had a big intellectual problem: the Great Depression. How could you argue for dismantling the post-WW II social insurance states and returning to the small-government laissez-faire of the past when that past contained the Great Depression? Some argued that the real problem was that the laissez of the past had not been faire enough: that everyone since Lord Salisbury and William McKinley had been too pinko and too interventionist, and thus the Great Depression was in no way the fault of believers in the free-market economy. This was not terribly convincing. So advocates of a smaller government sector needed another, more convincing argument.

It was provided by Milton Friedman. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-02-2009, No comments

Wilfred Burchett and the Cold War

Something weird's been happening at Crikey over the last few months -- a prolonged discussion about the life and politics of Wilfred Burchett. There has been something of a revival of Burchettalia in recent years (a biography, a collection of journalism and so on) but even so you'd think this was more a question to preoccupy specialists than a debate likely to rage in the letters page of a popular publication.

When Crikey recently moved all the Burchett stuff to a special section, Leigh Josey's post noted that the whole thing actually began in response to a piece I wrote about Manning Clark, another historical figure who keeps popping up in the midst of culture war flare-ups. Which prompted me to try to work out what was behind it all, as per below: ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-02-2009, 4 user comments