Overland literary journal

writing and real work

The NYT extract from Matthew B. Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft resonated with me and I wondered what others thought. After taking his PhD in philosophy, Crawford became a motorbike mechanic, and the essay deals with why he finds so much more satisfaction working with his hands repairing bikes than from much more prestigious white collar jobs:

In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 31-05-2009, 3 user comments

signals, noise and other things

The novelist and blogger James Bradley is currently hosting an interesting discussion about the problems and perils of literary journals venturing onlineee. Here's a taste:

Meanjin has decided to create a separate entity which complements and extends the print version of the magazine by providing content specifically created for an online environment.

All of which makes the redesign of the physical magazine, and its preparedness to rethink how the medium might affect the message seem less about simply taking design cues from elsewhere and more about a really serious strategy to find a model which might contain good writing across a variety of media (a project that’s also visible in Sophie and the magazine’s enthusiastic and highly successful embrace of the possibilities of Twitter). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 30-05-2009, No comments

more on the unreleased torture photos

The Daily Beast is now confirming the Telegraph's description about the Abu Ghraib photos that Obama won't release.

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. The well-informed source confirmed, just as reported in the Telegraph, that many of the photographs are sexually explicit, including those mentioned above. The photographs differ from those already officially released. Some show U.S. personnel engaged in sexual acts with prisoners and each other. In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 30-05-2009, 2 user comments

more on copyright, e-books and the rest of it

One of the more controversial sessions at the SWF was Lynn Spender's CAL-Meanjin lecture on copyright, a presentation of an essay that appears in the latest Meanjin. I didn't hear the lecture but in the essay Lynn discusses the Google book digitalisation project and makes what seems to me the fairly sensible point that current copyright laws simply cannot cope with the new online reality. In that context, it's worth reading Seth Freedman's piece in the Guardian, a fairly strident defence of the status quo. He writes:

It is no secret that the moment the music business sold its soul to the compact disc devil, the industry was in serious trouble. CDs, followed by MP3s, meant that the listening public now had access to high quality files of their favourite music, and could pirate copies at will, should their desire to save money prove more compelling than their sense of ethics. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 29-05-2009, 7 user comments

the unbearable whiteness of SF

Junot Díaz's Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao made (or at least implied) two interesting arguments about SF and minorities. Firstly, the preoccupation of the central character with SF (or more strictly fantasy) is portrayed as part of his general weirdness and isolation. It's middle-class white kids who obsess about Tolkein, not teenagers from the Third World. Secondly, however, Diaz demonstrates how well SF -- a genre inherently concerned with alienation and identity -- works to reflect Wao's circumstances. Indeed, reading the book left me wondering about the relationship between the first point and the second. Why aren't there more voices of colour in SF?

OK, I know there are some. Offline, Maxine and Rjurik and I were recently talking about Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-American SF writer (about whom I know very little). There's Octavia Butler, too, and I'm sure there's others. Nonetheless, SF is still overwhelmingly whitebread. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-05-2009, 21 user comments

more content

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 27-05-2009, No comments

sound and fury

This ran in Crikey a few days ago (would link to it but can't figure out where their new site puts content):

Clare Werbeloff is Australian for Sarah Palin.

Well, not quite. Palin’s still talked about as a Republican candidate for the next presidential poll whereas the Werbeloff express will probably come to a screeching stop at a station called Celebrity Big Brother or Ralph magazine.

But there are definite parallels. Contemporary conservatism demands only two things from its heroes: they must be photogenic and they must enrage liberals.

Think back to how right-wing pundits reacted to Sarah Palin’s initial speech at the Republican National Convention, and compare to the conservative blogs that launched the Werbeloff clip. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 27-05-2009, 1 user comment

this may be a little bumpy

We're just experimenting with a new comments plugin so there might be a little turbulence for the next day or so.

[Added: OK, that seems to have been easier than I thought. If you've commented here before, you will have to set up a new account with Intense Debate. But it's really easy and it does seem to work much more smoothly.]

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-05-2009, 4 user comments

Master Class for Progressive Writers – An Explanation

The deadline for applications for the Overland Master Class is coming up, and I wanted to explain further our thinking behind it:

1) Fiction (and all art) is about taking the world and turning it on a certain angle, so that your reader can see it afresh, and by implication see their own place within the world. It allows a rethinking of the world and where we stand within it.

2) What kind of world, then, is the fiction writer showing? This is an implicitly political question because it asks the writer to examine their own assumptions about the world as well as how they'd like to represent it. So what can we say about the world today? There are obviously a great many things, but if we look at it in its broad sweep, it has some pretty serious issues: the coming disintegration of the ecosphere and the changing climate, the new effects of the GFC (loss of jobs etc), the extraordinary exploitation of the underdeveloped world, the obsession with image (especially body image) that seems to swamp us, (add your own to the list...). ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 26-05-2009, 6 user comments

fiction from 195 now online

We've started getting the contents of Overland 195 up onto the site. You can now read the stories by Miranda Siemienowicz, Kristel Thornell, Laurie Clancy and Andrew Fuhrmann, as well as poems by Sarah-Jane Norman and Astrid Lorange from the Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets. As always, if you like what you read, we'd encourage you to take out a sub. Aside from earning you good karma (Overland is a non-profit organisation), a subcription gives you the superior reading experience offered by paper and our snazzy new design. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-05-2009, No comments

saving Salt publishing

This is kind of a chain letter but still worth reading:

Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book

A note from Chris Emery, publishser of Salt in Britain:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've ￡4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over ￡55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business. Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds
of authors around the world.  JUST ONE BOOK: ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 24-05-2009, 15 user comments

Sydney Writers’ Festival

Back from the SWF now. Didn't actually get to go to anything much, other than events in which I was directly involved -- the problem is that you are either preparing for sessions or recovering from them. Rjurik's already posted something about the Greer event but there's varying assessments of it floating around the web. Here's an assessment by Tara Moss ('Greer's speech was pointed, funny and full of zeal'); Guy Rundle was more critical in Crikey. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 24-05-2009, 1 user comment

argh! the stupid! it burns!

Yesterday's Overland session on climate change at the Sydney Writers Festival seems to have fanned the low-level cretinism normally gusting out from the Quadrant blog (cf the notorious Sally-Warhaft-is-a-dumb-blonde post) into a veritable tornado of idiocy. Take, for instance, this little item:

When the Sydney [Left] Writers’ Festival hold a phoney “forum” on climate change they ensure dissent is silenced by excluding Ian Plimer - writer of the best selling Australian book on climate change.

Though the entire sentence stands as a minor masterpiece of witlessness, particular credit should be given to the scare quotes around forum, intended, one presumes, to emphasise the phoney phoniness of this counterfeit deception.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 24-05-2009, 3 user comments