Overland literary journal

in these times

Apologies for the descent into Youtubism but the Chantells seems somehow appropriate right at the moment.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-05-2009, 2 user comments

risking blood on his hands

A piece from the Age today:

NAZI hunter Simon Wiesenthal was often asked why he pursued old men about events from so long ago. He replied: "I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge. My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow that they will never rest."

Those words highlight everything wrong about US President Barack Obama's response to the so-called "torture memos". The documents, written by lawyers in George Bush's Justice Department, authorise CIA interrogation techniques. They permit agents to push prisoners into walls, slap them on the face and abdomen, douse them in very cold water, strip them naked, house them in dark, cramped spaces, force them into painful positions (one memo reads, "in wall standing, all of the individual's body weight is placed on his fingertips") and deprive them of sleep for up to 180 hours (while shackled and in nappies). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-05-2009, 1 user comment

a mouthpiece of depravity duly rewarded

You'll be pleased to learn that John Yoo, the notorious author of the Bush administration's 'torture memos', has just been made a regular columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His appointment comes as we learn more about what his interrogation recommendations actually meant. For instance, sleep deprivation -- big joke, yes? Why, a lot of people miss out on sleep all the time! That nice Philip Ruddock said keeping prisoners awake wasn't torture -- and he was a member of Amnesty International! Well, here, via Firedoglake, is a description of what CIA-style sleep deprivation actually entailed: ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-05-2009, 4 user comments

and now expect more of it

Further to this bizzo about an Australian Phoenix Program in Afghanistan, here's Slate on the new NATO command in Afghanistan, one Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who seems to have a background in Pheonix-style  counterinsurgency :

[I]n his press conference, Gates referred to McChrystal's "unique skill set in counterinsurgency."[...] For the past year, McChrystal has been director of the Pentagon's Joint Staff. More pertinently, for five years before that, he was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, a highly secretive operation that hunted down and killed key jihadist fighters, including, most sensationally, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Using techniques of what McChrystal called "collaborative warfare," JSOC combined intelligence intercepts with quick, precision strikes to "eliminate" large numbers of key insurgent leaders. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 12-05-2009, No comments

the Phoenix Program in Afghanistan

You know, a decade ago, if someone had told me that senior politicians would soon be openly boasting about carrying out torture (cf Dick Cheney's latest interview), I'd have thought them a little overheated -- even more so, if they'd suggested that Australia would be running an assassination program based on the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program. Well, welcome to 2009. My thing on Phoenix is now up at New Matilda.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 12-05-2009, No comments

a beauty pageant in the Garden of Gethsemane

If you follow the American media, you'll know of the latest skirmish in the increasingly insane culture wars. At this year's Miss USA pageant, California sent as its representative one Carrie Prejean, a woman whose disconcertingly Aryan features received surgical augmentation funded by the pageant organisers themselves (apparently, that's how these things are run). Anyway, at the climax of the ceremony, Ms Prejean found herself confronted by, of all people, the blogger Perez Hilton (a fellow who spends his days drawing penises on pictures of celebrities) who asked for her take on gay marriage. She responded thus: 'Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. You know what, in my country, in my family, I do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.' Discerning readers might note that the response makes no sense whatsoever (the reason there's a campaign for gay marriage is precisely because Americans can't choose one way or another). Despite that -- or because of it -- Ms Prejean was hailed by Christians across the nation, especially when Hilton revealed that the answer cost her the title. A martyr! A veritable Perpetua, persecuted by teh vengeful gays! ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 12-05-2009, 2 user comments

Wordplay spoken word event

By popular request, a plug for a forthcoming spoken word event:

THURSDAY 14th MAY, 8pm
The Dan O’Connell Hotel (back bar)
Corner Canning and Princes Streets, Carlton (between Nicholson and Lygon)

Featuring:

SOLO
The most recent signing by The Herd's prestigious record label Elefant Traks, Horrorshow are the most exciting new outfit in Australian hip-hop today. Elefant Traks weren't planning on signing anyone, but couldn't resist this duo. Now you can find out why. Horrorshow's sole MC, Solo, is making the trip all the way to Melbourne to deliver a very special acappella set just for Wordplay.

Contrary to what the name Horrorshow suggests, Solo's writing is gentle, lyrical, and bursting with intelligence. He's the most laid-back of rappers in an era of over-hyped macho. He has wit, craftsmanship, and insight. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 12-05-2009, 1 user comment

now here’s a surprise

You'll remember how, at the G20 demonstrations, a passing newspaper vendor died about being struck by a policeman. Now a British MP says he saw an undercover cop acting as a provocateur at the demonstration:

An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 10-05-2009, No comments

writers and insomnia

John Elder wrote in the Age this morning about how often sleep disorders are wrongly diagnosed. One of the interesting points in the piece related to questions of causality in insomnia and mental illness: insomnia tends to get treated as a symptom of depression rather than the other way around.

Anyway, it made me wonder about the number of writers you run into who suffer from crippling insomnia. When you think about it, writing seems to be designed to prevent you from ever sleeping. It's a job that's never finished, so you always go to bed thinking about what you're supposed to be working on. It encourages all the habits you are supposed to avoid: a sedentary lifestyle, caffeine, alcohol, etc. And most people do it on top of another job, and so the perpetual struggle to find time means lots of early mornings and late nights. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 10-05-2009, 3 user comments

the Starbucks logo and Greg Sheridan

Critiquing Greg Sheridan loses its charm once you discover that, in the computer program that writes his columns, stupidity is a feature and not a bug. Today, however, we should make the effort, given that he pops up on Arts and Letters Daily.

Did you know the woman in the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther of the Jews? Just part of a vast Israeli plot against Arab people. Greg Sheridan can tell you more ... ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 8-05-2009, No comments

some deaths are bigger than others

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (h/t Lenin's Tomb) draws attention to the remarkable discrepancy in media coverage of the Darfur crisis compared to the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The situation in the Congo is, as it happens, much, much worse. FAIR notes:

The wars that have wrac

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 7-05-2009, No comments

we’re going to burn

Maybe I'm too pessimistic but I just can't see now how there's now going to be any serious action on climate change in the short to medium term. As Bernard Keane argues, the Rudd government's latest amendments to its emissions trading scheme represents 'almost complete surrender to the largest polluters, who will now face virtually no increased cost associated with their carbon emissions'.

The whole tenor of Rudd's approach has been to insist that there's no crisis, no emergency, and that targets for carbon reduction can be dickered about as if they were donations to a charity, where you just give amount depending on how generous you feel. Framed that way, they'll always be trumped by some more immediate issue. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 5-05-2009, 1 user comment

top ten titles

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a compilation of the top ten titles submitted to Virginia Quarterly Review over the last two years. Would be interesting to see an Australian equivalent. My guess is it would include 'Sex' somewhere.

The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past two years:

1. Untitled
2. Aubade
3. Gravity
4. Prayer
5. Homecoming
6. Night
7. Drowning
8. Home
9. Sonnet
10. Sleep

The laws of probability dictate that repeat single-world titles are far more common than multi-word titles, which is why these are all single words. Since we receive more poems than any other genre, and since poems are more likely to have single-word titles than other genres, almost all of these are poems. These don’t represent a huge percentage of our submissions (we received seventeen works entitled “Untitled,” for instance), but they do stand out for their frequency. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 3-05-2009, 2 user comments

who let that coloured girl in the green room?

This is me in the Cadbury Schweppes (very) green room at the Arts Centre, Melbourne on April 8 before a collaborative gig with blues guitarist John Norton as pre-show for a group of subsaharan guitar-poets called Tinariwen.

As a child, actors dressing rooms always fascinated me. Visiting sets with my actress mother, these cramped prop and make-up cluttered spaces seemed like magical places full of laughter, drama and possibility: a chaotic mixture of pre-stage-entrance tension and an almost bubble-burst kind of relief as actors flitted to and from the wings during performances. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-05-2009, 2 user comments