Overland literary journal

J. G. Ballard Dies

J. G. Ballard died on April 19. Best known probably for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, later filmed by Steven Spielberg, and Crash, filmed by David Cronenberg, it was always Ballard's early work that had the most influence on me. Within science fiction circles, Ballard was one of the chief figures in the New Wave science fiction, a movement that sought to raise the form from the naive childishness that many people associate with it to the realms of 'literature'. The New Wave's irreducible nucleus, as Thomas Disch said, 'was the dyad of J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, with Ballard in the role of T.S. Eliot, the genius in residence, and Moorcock as Ezra Pound ... ' Here's a bit from an essay I wrote on Ballard some time ago and published in Vector:

If the New Worlds magazine [edited by Moorcock] began the process that was to revolutionise science fiction, then the work of J.G.Ballard (1930-) was at the centre of this change. Ballard embodied the main reversals and shifts that were to characterise the early British New Wave. He proclaimed a boredom with traditional science fiction, preferring an examination of 'inner space' to outer space; he reversed or inverted the central narrative strategies of Golden Age science fiction, replacing rational cerebral heroes with troubled, isolated antiheroes. His future worlds were not the space-faring futures of Asimov, Heinlein or Clarke, but crumbling worlds which were expressions of some sort of transfigured future of the psyche.

Some years ago I wrote to Ballard, requesting an interview. He declined, but I still have the card that he wrote to me, wishing me well. The front image is of a gaudy constructivist-style image. I'm not one really for author memorabilia, but I do appreciate that.

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 21-04-2009, No comments

discounted joint subscriptions with Meanjin

We're now offering a discounted joint subscription with Meanjin (and hello to 'Spike', the new Meanjin blog). Basically, if you subscribe to both mags, the adult rate's reduced to $110. It's spectacularly cheap and it clears your conscience for an entire year, since with one click of the mouse you can do your bit to keep alternative literary culture flourishing. In celebration of this momentous event, Baz Luhrmann shot the brief clip below.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-04-2009, 1 user comment

Let’s break it down, your fine black Majesty…

 Walt Disney’s first cartoon black princess is ready to jitterbug her way across the ballroom in The Princess and the Frog, set in jazz-era New Orleans. The movie won’t be released until Christmas, but what we do know is that Princess Tiana’s mother will be voiced by Oprah Winfrey and the movie will feature a Spanish prince and a toothless old firefly with a suspect Southern accent which echoes that of the ‘lazy’ Jamaican lobster from The Little Mermaid. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 20-04-2009, 3 user comments

the CIA waterboarded a prisoner 183 times in a month

What can you possibly say? This from Emptywheel (via Huff Post).

According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 19-04-2009, No comments

statesmen and criminals

Andrew Sullivan correctly describes the newly released Bush torture memo as:

[a] chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 19-04-2009, No comments

school age homophobia

This from Salon:

On Thursday, Judith Warner wrote about both Carl Walker-Hoover and Eric Mohat, a 17-year-old who shot himself after a bully flat-out suggested he should, adding "no one will miss you." And once again, the tormenters were focused on the victim's failure to conform to gender norms, so the bullying manifested as vicious homophobia. "Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of 'gay,' 'fag,' 'queer' and 'homo." As Warner puts it, "The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today's poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy's guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive." She quotes one teenage boy who told author C.J. Pascoe, "To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that's like saying that you're nothing." Pascoe herself, who spent 18 months studying the culture in a Northern California high school, says that the boys there "have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important ... To not be a man is to not be fully human and that's terrifying." To not be a man is to not be fully human. To be gay is to be nothing. In case anyone was unclear on the connection between homophobia and misogyny, there you go. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-04-2009, 14 user comments

my favourite things

I like car wreckers and scrap metal dealers and large recycling operations. I like landfill sites. I like waste transfer stations and telephone exchanges. I like water plants and pumping sheds. I like electricity substations and high tension lines and the land beneath them. I like railway yards and freight terminals. I like the weeds that grow there. I like the secret places people dump refrigerators and stained mattresses. I like the undersides of overpasses. I like yellow earthmoving machinery and the pressed steel plates put over their cabins at night. I like the bodies of birds caught on barbed wire. I like the smell of diesel exhaust and engine grease and sump oil. I like shipping containers and nights lit by sodium arc. I like the sides of creeks that run through industrial estates. I

Written by Andrew on 17-04-2009, 2 user comments

deliberately pouring petrol

This seems too obvious to need saying but then again perhaps not. Suppose that, after the Victorian bushfires, a group of survivors took shelter in a nearby town. Suppose that the house in which they stayed somehow caught fire and killled a bunch of people.

Would the media and politicians immediately start speculating, before any investigations, that the bushfire victims were themselves responsible? If they did, what conclusions would they draw? If indeed some of the survivors were involved, what it be suggested that, just perhaps, they were a little traumatised by their ordeal? Or, on the other hand, would the implication be that the tragedy told you everything you needed to know, not just about these bushfire survivors, but bushfire survivors in general; that anyone who fled from a natural disaster was a pyromaniac who needed to be kept in a cage; and that all assistance to bushfire victims should be immediately suspended? ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-04-2009, 2 user comments

advertising blitz

Our latest 3RR ad has now manifested: you can hear it by clicking here.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-04-2009, No comments

bird with attitude

It began with bloodcurdling screams in the night...

Such is not the usual stuff of an Overland blog, although the chief protagonist was born in the former Soviet empire of Russia, and in attitude can best be described as bolshy. They (gender-neutral pronoun) were also under a foot tall, with very long black legs and beak. And, very definitely, lost, in an inner suburban backyard.

No 13, Our street, normally has a floating population of two homo sapiens, and visitors, plus two ageing lady felis domesticus, who also have a younger male visitor of the same species, next door. The cats are at the stage of life where a bird generally provokes the reaction of ‘Can't be arsed, zzzzzzzzzzzz'. Thus several Mohawk pigeons (so named by a Goth teen of our acquaintance) and a blackbird pair are able to scratch around for the compost worms. In seasonal fruit times bats and lorikeets sack and loot the apricot and plum trees. Rats and increasingly possums also make an appearance. ... read more

Written by Lucy on 15-04-2009, 2 user comments

pirates, terrorists, whatever

As liberal America convulses in ecstacy over the willingness of their guy to pull the trigger on pirates, it's worth thinking a little more about Somalia, since it's not out of the question that we'll be seeing another wonderful humanitarian intervention there before too long.  Consider, then, Johann Hari's analysis:

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-04-2009, No comments

Amazon sex police

Amazon.com has apparently decided to protect its readers from themselves by removing any titles it considered 'adult' from its sales rankings, thus making them impossible to uncover through normal searchings. Funnily enough, this outbreak of Grundyism wipes out most of the titles aimed at a gay and lesbian readership. More than that, Amazon now hides GLBT titles but allows homophobic ones -- you can't search for Brokeback Mountain but you can find A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. There's more info here.

The reaction throughought blogosphere seems to be sufficiently intense that Amazon might have to reconsider. But this shabby little episode raises broader questions about the role of monopolies in the industry. Amazon hopes that its Kindle will become the standard platform for electrionic books. Think about the kind of power it will have over publishers. Would you trust them with it? Um... maybe not so much. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-04-2009, 3 user comments