Overland literary journal

Fragments from Sydney

1. Periodically the rain bursts down torrentially. The city is rambling and crumbling and green. Coming from Melbourne - which sits down in the south like a bunch of huts in a dust bowl - the weather seems exotic, like some Ballardian vision from The Drowned World. When not at the Writers Festival I'm typing away in the vast empty spaces of a grand old terrace house in Glebe.

2. Germaine Greer takes the stage after Jeff's carefully and finely worded introduction. The applause in the packed hall is powerful enough that she raises two hands, smiles and says, "What am I going to do with you?" There is little doubt that she is wildly charismatic, and her talk is a grab-bag of issues about Australia. The crowd - a mixed group, generally older - applaud periodically throughout, though I wonder quite where they all stand, politically. A woman asks "Do you have hope for our female politicians? Can you foresee a female prime-minister?". Greer answers "Do we really care?" Incensed, a woman sitting next to G and I calls out angrily "Yes we do!" Greer continues on, arguing that it's a systemic problem, and mentioning Thatcher. "The plumbing doesn't matter" she says. Afterwards I see an older woman wearing a t-shirt that says something like "My Marxist Feminist Days are Not Over." She may not have been representative of the audience. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 22-05-2009, 3 user comments

What is Overland?

And welcome to Overland, Age readers. If you're not familiar with the journal, Overland is an Australian literary institution, published continuously since 1954. You can read more about its history here. This front page functions as a group blog; recent back issues of the print journal are available free online here. You can see the contents of the current issue here. It's not yet available online but you can buy it at most good bookshops or online here. If you're a writer and would like to contribute to Overland, please read our submission guidelines, available here. You might also want to sign up to receive our irregular e-bulletin. If you're in Sydney, Overland is participating in a variety of events at the Sydney Writers' Festival. They're listed here. Overland is a non-profit organisation and depends on the support of people like you. If you like what you see, consider taking out a subscription. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-05-2009, No comments

Poetry Slamming with the President

The Obamas held a poetry jam at their big White House last week. James Earl Jones was there, and Poetry Slam Champion Mayda de Valle. And yet, despite Obama's frequent emails to me, I didn't receive an invite. How could he have left me off the list? I mean, he even wrote me the evening he was elected, saying: Dear Maxine, I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. And I don't want you to forget how we did it

Written by Maxine Clarke on 20-05-2009, No comments

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: remembering the banane femme on Josephine Baker Day

Many years have passed since the death of Josephine Baker, and the charismatic Broadway chorus-girl turned Parisian music-hall legend, actress, comedian and French fashion icon is still widely remembered for her many achievements. Josephine was, amongst other things: a theatrical genius, a talented musician and extraordinary dancer, a humanitarian and civil rights campaigner, a message courier for the French Resistance during World War II, and the first African American entertainer to break through the ‘colour barrier’ in both Europe and America. She was courted by Hemmingway, painted by Picasso, Henri Laurens and Rouault, sculpted by Alexander Calder, and was the most photographed woman of her time. Josephine was also, perhaps most incredibly, a single mother to the twelve adopted children who comprised her multi-racial and multi-religious Rainbow Tribe family.Gyrating across the stage energetically to the mad unearthly rhythms of the jazz band accompanying her, naked but for a short skirt made of pink ostrich figures, her dark skin glistens under the stage lights, glowing terracotta-mahogany. The eyes of the audience follow her every hip-sway, sashay, gyrate and slide. She pauses briefly every so often to peer cheekily over her shoulder, her short pixie hair-cut emphasising her impish grin… ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 20-05-2009, No comments

as devastating as ever

Noam Chomsky's got a piece in Salon, the first time (I think) they've published him. Indeed, Chomsky seems to have been relatively quiet recently, perhaps because he's now over eighty. But the Salon piece both reminds you of all his strengths: in particular, his willingness to push beyond the polite consensus to reach discomforting conclusions. Most of the liberal commentators on the torture debate (it still astonishes me that these two words aren't oxymoronic) portray the Bush administration as departure from traditional American foreign policy. Chomsky discusses the continuities, arguing that the Bush gang simply used slightly different techniques from their forebears:

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's "torture paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book "A Question of Torture." He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: "Truth, Torture, and the American Way." So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers lament that "in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way." ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-05-2009, No comments

Meanjin and Overland: in print and at the SWF

The June edition of both Meanjin and Overland are in their respective houses and Meanjin and Overland’s superfriends two for one deal is still on the table. The true awesomeness of the deal is explained over the jump or you can go here for more details.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 19-05-2009, 4 user comments

you’ve seen one History War, you’ve seen them all

There's a fascinating article at The National about the debates in Russia over the reputation of Leonid Khrushchev, the eldest son of Nikita Khrushchev. Because the clique around Putin wants to rehabilitate Stalin (or, at least, discredit those who attack hm), they seek to trash Nikita Khrushchev, since he delivered the so-called 'Secret Speech', at which some of the crimes of Stalinism were vented. One way to do that is to portray his son, who was formerly considered a war hero, as a pro-Nazi traitor, thus tarring his father by association. Bizarre, yes, but you can see how it works. Anyway, this passage caught my eye.

Khrushchev, who had planted the seedling of the Soviet demise, quietly and almost magically morphed into a force for bad, the antithesis of what the new leadership represented, which meant that he would have to be countered, undermined, repudiated: if one wanted to curry favour with the Kremlin one might train his sights on Nikita Sergeyevich, in a book, a newspaper, maybe on a nationally broadcast television programme. This was never stated, of course. There were no memos or secret speeches. Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev would never deign to get involved in this sort of thing.

The best recent example of this two-step process – in which the leader signals some vague wish or discontent and his minions subsequently bend over backward to fulfil that wish or correct the perceived injustice – was on display in Putin’s remarks at a June 2007 conference of high-school teachers in Moscow. As the historian Orlando Figes recounts in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Putin denounced the “mess and confusion” that had afflicted the teaching of Russian history. Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, giving the Ministry of Education the right to choose which textbooks should be published and used in Russian schools. Government officials at the conference promoted – and soon adopted – a textbook whose main author, Alexander Filippov, was the employee of a pro-Kremlin think-tank. The office of the president, which commissioned the book, had issued instructions to Filippov and his co-authors to portray Stalin as “good” (because he “strengthened vertical power”), Khrushchev as “bad” (“weakened vertical power”), and Brezhnev as “good” (“for the same reasons as Stalin”). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 19-05-2009, No comments

The Eternal Dancer

Occasionally I write stories for people - for their birthdays, or just as presents. This one I wrote about six months ago in a forty-five minute rush one Sunday morning. I wrote it for a dancer whose birthday it was. Thought maybe it would be nice to share, though there's not much to it. The Eternal Dancer The Eternal Dancer began her dance shortly after the Autarch banned all forms of art. In one of the city’s many squares, once the province of trapeze artists and jugglers, musicians and theatre troupes, she ascended one of the now wide and empty stages and began her performance. It would be foolish to try to describe her moves – her momentary arabesques and brises, her cabrioles and chasses – except to say that it was not long before passers-by stopped momentarily, aware of the

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 18-05-2009, No comments

Spanish Film Festival

The Spanish Film Festival is on at the moment around the country, and it has a stream on the Spanish Civil War which includes:

A WAR IN HOLLYWOOD is an in-depth look at the impact that the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship had on the North American film industry.

Hollywood used the Civil War as a subject in more than 50 films. The defeat of democracy in Spain left an “open wound” in the heart of liberal actors, directors and screenwriters in the US, who used affection towards democratic Spain as a symbolic feature to define the romantic spirit of their characters. This sympathy, however, was shaped according to the American political tendencies of each period.

This evolution is narrated through the personal story of Alvah Bessie, a Hollywood screenwriter who fought as a member of the International Brigade.

This meticulous documentary includes excerpts from Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Way We Were among others, and commentary by actress Susan Sarandon, screenwriters Arthur Laurents and Walter Bernstein and cinema historians Román Gubern and Patrick McGilligan.

... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 18-05-2009, No comments

Overland is…

Written by Maxine Clarke on 18-05-2009, 3 user comments

bring to light the hidden things of darkness

Apparently, SBS already had some of the torture photos that Obama now says he won't release. Now, of course, there's hard evidence that these acts weren't the result of the few depraved guards who have been punished but rather the implementation of carefully calibrated techniques designed by senior officials who won't be punished. Looking at the images, you can see how more than a hundred prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq actually died in the course of interrogations. Which is why, of course, the publication of the photos matters so much. It's easy to gibly dismiss 'enhanced interrogations' in the abstract; much less so when you can see with your own eyes what it means. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-05-2009, 2 user comments

Jack Kerouc: role-playing gamer

The NYT has an account of how Jack Kerouac, idealised by undergraduate creative writing students the world over for his hard-drinkin', hard-livin ways, invented his own weird baseball card game, which he apparently played all through his life.

Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow-Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-05-2009, No comments

DIY book promotion

Via Boing Boing, some tips for DIY promotion from Jeff Vandermeer:

The integrity/quality of your brand across products affects your ability to gain leverage across your career. Inconsistency from creative project to creative project breeds indecision among readers. Variety between projects, so long as quality is high, may slow your progress but result in rewards that are just as great. But, again, for the long-term, your work must be high-quality. (Your “brand” across time also refers to your public image and other elements that may not always have much to do with your core creativity. However, these elements have impact because reader perceptions are so of

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-05-2009, 8 user comments