Overland literary journal

copyrights and wrongs

Lynne Spender's essay on Google books and copyright in the latest Meanjin spurred one of the more feisty sessions at the Sydney Writers Festival, with the attendees divided between those who passionately agreed and those who vehemently opposed.. ABC Radio's Book Show staged a return bout, with Lynne debating author Morris Gleitzman. The whole thing is worth reading but here's a couple of snippets.

Lynne Spender: Well, I think the principle of copyright and of creators having some sort of protection of their work is just as valid as it ever was, but copyright was a system that was based on print and on fixed physical products of books. We now have literary creativity in a whole lot of areas that aren't in fixed form anymore, they are digital, and I think that we need to rethink copyright in order to cope with these exciting new digital opportunities for knowledge, information and creativity. [snip] ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-06-2009, 22 user comments

death of a letter writer

The Age today reports the death of Constance E Little, a name that will probably mean nothing to anyone outside Melbourne but has distinct resonances for Victorians over a certain age. She was a constant (if you pardon the pun) fixture of the Age letter pages, and her passing  provides another opportunity to reflect on how quickly the media landscape is changing.

Traditionally, letters to newspaperswere part of a very narrow public sphere available to ordinary people, and because the number of people writing in massively exceeded the space there was an elaborate screening process. It was quite an achievement to get your letter published: in various campaigns, for instance, there would be discussions as to how something might be penned as to have the best chance of appearing. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-06-2009, 9 user comments

Grimshaw, interviews and sexism

I was somewhat mystified and appalled by what ‘Dean of Sydney’ had to say about the Gordon Ramsey/Tracy Grimshaw debacle on the Meanjin blog. Unless it’s deadpan irony, too sophisticated for me, the comment was pretty odd.

While I believe there is little doubt that in the Matthew Johns scenario, the solicitation of ‘consent’ from a young woman, intoxicated, disoriented, in the company of well-known sportsmen and possibly frightened, is questionable at best – the law doesn’t merely interpret the lack of resistance to a sexual advance as ‘consent’, the person needs to be able to proferr their consent freely, unimpeded by unconsciousness, severe drunkenness or forms of duress – whichever position you take on this question, it’s hard to see that Tracy Grimshaw is a ‘hypocrite’ for how she conducted her interview.

Yes she was a determined, maybe even polemical, interview who kept returning to questions if she felt they had not been sufficiently addressed – although there are a vast store of male commentators who have conducted far more bracing and confronting interviews - but so what? Are we now to assume that if women presenters maintain a confident, assertive, persistent approach in interviews they then deserve to be compared with pigs, labelled “lesbians” and publicly derided for being ugly? This is backwards logic at its worst. 

Written by Kalinda Ashton on 15-06-2009, 7 user comments

Climate Change

My friend Damien Lawson, National Climate Justice Coordinator at Friends of the Earth, has an opinion piece in the Age today which is worth checking out. In it he makes the analogy of Climate Change and War - and makes an argument against the Rudd government's proposed legislation.

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 14-06-2009, 4 user comments

by royal request

The new poet laureate Carol Duffy has published her first poem since landing the new gig. One might wonder why she accepted the job, given that it implicates her in the undemocratic and increasingly bizarre institution of royalty, and has widely been seen as the ruination of the previous poets who took it on. Plus it gets paid in sherry, of all things (does anyone actually drink sherry?). Anyway, props to her for incorporating the word 'piss' into an official royal poem, which appears below.

POLITICS

How it makes of your face a stone
that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,
clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue
an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand
a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh
a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs
hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice
that can throw no six. How it takes the breath
away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,
makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,
of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –
politics – to your education education education; shouts this –
Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your
conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-06-2009, 6 user comments

Dorrit goes digital

Interesting experiment: Ann Kirschner compares the experience of reading Little Dorrit as paperback, audiobook, on the Kindle and on the iPhone. How does she fare? The iPhone proves a surprise winner:

I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me. Woody Allen had it right: Seventy percent of success in life is showing up. Yes, the Kindle's reasonable imitation of a book is an advantage, but not enough to outweigh the necessity to carry an extra object and its power plugs.

This validates an argument Jenny Lee made in Overland, one to which I keep returning in these discussion. New media doesn't have to be as good as the form it supplants: it just has to be good enough so that its convenience overrides everything else. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-06-2009, No comments

Balibo

I went to a media screening of the new film Balibo yesterday, which covers the murder of the five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975, prior to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The film also follows Australian journalist Roger East, who is invited to Timor by Jose Ramos Horta and tries to discover what happened to the journalists. I'm not allowed to say much about it, but I will say that the film is in the tradition of Australian political movies such The Year of Living Dangerously, or perhaps foreign films like The Quiet American. I highly recommend it when it comes out. During the film I couldn't help think

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 13-06-2009, 1 user comment

Going Down Swinging Launch

Going Down Swinging was launched at the Northcote Social Club last night. M and I attended, to watch a lot of spoken word (Going Down Swinging has an accompanying cd of spoken word) and the triphop band, MISO, who are very cool and remind me a little of Bjork. I did wonder, during the spoken word, about the form: it seems to be closest to prose poetry, and in the flesh obviously has the advantage of being a performance. Some of the performances were closer to the poetry end of things, and I especially enjoyed those with accompanying music, while others seemed rambling and in need of stronger 'through lines' as a scriptwriter might say. As a whole then, I felt ambivalent about it, though maybe it's simply the case with all forms: it can be hit and miss. Anyway, here's a video of MISO. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 11-06-2009, 4 user comments

Wright, Macrae, Martinkus

Online now is Clare Wright's piece on Lola Montez, Andrew Macrae's review of local SF and John Martinkus' memoir of journalism in Afghanistan, which begins as follows:

In September 2005, it seemed from afar that things were going well for Afghanistan: so well that my first proposed story on that country had already been cut from twenty-five to fifteen minutes by an uninterested management before I even left Sydney. There was the perception that the country was on the right track, that Iraq was still the main game. Sure, there were still some isolated acts of violence, mostly in the border areas, but in the capital, Kabul, I was surprised at the lack of roadblocks, the presence of foreign troops and the ease with which foreigners travelled around the city in local taxis and sometimes on foot. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 11-06-2009, 2 user comments

Marley and me

If you listen to reggae a lot, it's easy to underrate Bob Marley. Partly, the songs of his that get radio play are the more cheesy moments of his later career: the rather sacharine recut of 'One Love', comes to mind. But it's also the strange paradox that, while Marley remains the international face of reggae, in many ways he's not actually that representative of it. Think of the three most distinctive elements of Jamaican music in the seventies: versioning (in which different artists would build their own songs over the same rhythm track), DJing (famously, American hip-hop evolved from Jamaican emigrants doing to funk what they'd been doing to reggae ever since the sixties) and dub (where producers stripped a track down to its basic elements and then rebuilt it, essentially using the mixing desk as an instrument). Marley never did versions; never worked with DJs; never seemed interested in dub. He was a songwriter working with his own band in an industry based around particular studios and particular producers, a quite different musical model. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 11-06-2009, 2 user comments

postcard over land

Written by Maxine Clarke on 10-06-2009, 1 user comment

why not here?

I wrote something for Crikey this morning on the stunning successes of the far-Right in the European election. I can't link to it since the new Crikey website continues to baffle me (like, I'm sure the article is there somewhere but I have no idea where) but here's the start:

Yorkshire has just returned as its representative in the European Parliament Andrew Brons, a man who cut his political teeth in the National Socialist Movement. Yes, that’s right. National Socialist, as in sieg-heiling, formed-on-Hitler’s-birthday, send- them-all-the-gas-chambers, National Socialist.

In those days, Andrew Brons once overheard another NSM member discussing (as one does) bombing some synagogues. Brons himself equivocated over the plan. "I realise that he is well intentioned," he explained to a third colleague, "[but] I feel that our public image may suffer considerable damage as a result of these activities. I am however open to correction on this point."

Today, Brons seems to be more decided. In the recent elections, he campaigned for the British National Party, promising to seek Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. No mention of bombing synagogues -- and no mention, either, of the slogans of the National Front, the organisation he led after his NSM days. In that capacity Brons distinguished with an arrest for breaching the peace for shouting "Death to the Jews" and "White Power" in a suburban shopping mall.

Brons’ election, along with that of the BNP leader Nick Griffin, came amidst a swag of successes for fascist and racist groups across the continent.

In Hungary, Jobbik -- or Movement for a Better Hungary -- won 14.8 per cent of the vote, nearly trebling the result of the ruling socialists. Jobbik openly parades its members in the colours of the Arrow Cross, the party responsible for murdering Hungary’s Jews during the Second World War.

Slovakia saw the triumph of the Slovak National party, which honours the wartime leader Jozef Tiso, executed in 1946 after deporting between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews to concentration camps. In Austria, the combined vote of 17.7 per cent for the anti-immigrant Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria came in the context of a resurgent neo-Nazi movement with which both groups have links, while in Denmark, the far-right Danish People's Party won two seats with 14.4 per cent of the vote.

Geert Wilders -- a man recently banned from Britain -- was one of the biggest winners, with his Freedom Party moving into second place behind the Christian Democrats. Wilders group, unlike so many of the European rightists, has no historical association with Second World War-era fascist groups, and has built its profile almost exclusively out of bigotry against Muslims. Increasingly, that’s the model that others are following: toning down the anti-Semitism, ramping up the Islamophobia (and, in the east, racism against those forgotten victims of genocide, the gypsies). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 9-06-2009, 8 user comments

Hugo Race and Mario Merola

Many people might know Hugo Race from his work with Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, the Wreckery and, more recently, his own band True Spirit. But he's also a writer. In Overland 195, he discusses the culture and music of Sicily, and his growing obsession with the singer and actor Mario Merola. Here's Merola in full flight.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 8-06-2009, No comments