Overland literary journal

looking for ken

ken loach movies are not normally laugh-a-minute. of course, they can be funny [usually in a dry way] but they can also be harrowing and maudlin and slightly soul-destroying.* not this one.

looking for eric does feature the man-god philosopher king cantona, and is cut throughout with footage of man u in its glory days with cantona in his rightful place as the secular saint of manchester. but the eric of the title is a more conventional loach hero - an ordinary man whose goodness is neither inscribed by his class nor compromised because of it.

it's not a wholly romantic bit of social realism, as the characters face some of the storied challenges of poverty and its power to limit opportunity. it is magic realism with the deftest of touch, so perhaps too whimsical for those like their loach gut-wrenching and heart-stopping in equal measure. ... read more

Written by Karen Pickering on 29-09-2009, No comments

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Written by admin on 29-09-2009, Comments Off

The Little Disturbances of Grace Paley

Short stories are not rock, punk or pop. Stories are the Blues. Most of its heroes are secret discoveries made from whispers and backyard myths. Occasionally there’s a Muddy Waters or an Eric Clapton to wake the world up again to these short outbursts of prose, but there’s no doubt that for the story specialist — the past was hard, the present is bleak and the future just as filled with the Blues.

Any time one of these Blues singers strike it hot they’ll be asked to make it rock, turn it soda-pop, or get hip and growl. Stop playing that backyard stuff for an Aussie pub circuit. Because it’s only the novel that sells, kid. There’s bigger stages. Arenas and telecasts. Some of them even get made into films. If you listen carefully you can even hear the gold bell ring. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 28-09-2009, 5 user comments

the future of Left publications

[Update:'Who’d want to got to a function with a whole bunch of of dykes, poofters, drunks and commos ... '] As flies herald an arriving dump truck, so a rash of 'youse are all poofters' comments signals an incoming Tim Blair link. Truly, he must be proud. It's a fine movement contemporary conservatism is building!]

I'm participating in an event later this week, organised by the New International Bookshop at Trades Hall. It's about the future of Left publications. There's details below.

How are Left-wing publications responding to the challenges of the internet, the financial crisis and climate change? How do they perceive the Left in 21st century Australia? What does the future hold?

AN UNDERGROUND TALK FORUM
6 for 6:30pm Wed 30 Sept
New International Bookshop
Trades Hall, cnr Victoria & Lygon Sts, Carlton
Entry: $5 /

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-09-2009, 5 user comments

‘uni made me dumb’: guest post by Koraly Dimitriadis

Koraly Dimitriadis is a Melbourne writer. She was one of the people who took part in the Overland master class on political writing, some time back. This is a repost from her blog.

Before I started university, years and years ago, I would read a book a week. I would let my imagination lead me into worlds created by masters and they would feed my soul. My first loves were R.L Stine and Christopher Pike, then Virginia Andrews. When people looked for me they would find me behind the cover of a book. Books taught me fancy words my migrant parents would raise their eyebrows at. Books gave me so much – grammar, escape, an appreciation for the English language. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-09-2009, 2 user comments

‘it’s the other one who’s the lunatic’

I posted this Nabokov-Trilling conversation some months back, marveling at  how TV in the fifties could  screen two stout old buffers talking learnedly about literature, in a way unthinkable today unless they were somehow locked into the Big Brother house. Anyway, the NYT links to the same clip and points out something that's missed: Vlad's actually reading his bon mots from notes. That's right -- in a conversation about his own work, he's relying on prepared to answers to ensure that he's sufficiently witty. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 27-09-2009, 1 user comment

Get Drunk on Blue Dog

How many people went out and bought the latest Blue Dog? How many people even know what it is? Sounds like a good name for a beer, and if it was, they’d be selling them by the dozen. Not many looking to get drunk on poetry these days. The blur of words and easy slur of pubs, smoke-free of metaphor or rhyme, is a lot more comfy. But a poetry anthology never was a beaded glass of beer during a rave about the footy final. It was always more of a contraband. Something you needed to walk narrow alleys for, into rooms wrestling with shapes in the smoke, laughter and weeping through the floorboards above or below. Disordered rituals of ingestion as well, a flame and a sugar cube for the absinthe high of a poetic vision. Easier just to get that cold beer with your mates. Blue Dog is a distillat

Written by Alec Patric on 25-09-2009, 8 user comments

fake fakers

With one of my email addresses slowly sinking under a  tide of scam emails, I've come to appreciate the literary possibilities of the form. So it was nice to read, via Boing Boing, The Hobbit rendered as a 419 letter:

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug.

During the reign of Thror our kingdom was a prosperous one. Kings used to send for our smiths, and reward even the least skillful most richly. Fathers would beg us to take their sons as apprentices, and pay us handsomely, especially in food-supplies, which we never bothered to grow or find for ourselves. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvellous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-09-2009, 1 user comment

Some Israel Questions

Apologies for light blogging. We're a little overwhelmed by work at the moment, and so most of our time is spent rushing from one breach in the dam wall to the other, frantically plugging the leaks with our fingers. But I thought I should mention that I'm hosting a conversation with Antony Loewenstein about the new edition of his book My Israel Question tonight at Readings. You can see the details here.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 24-09-2009, 1 user comment

Alec Patric reviews The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret

Sometimes you pick up a book and after a few pages think what the fuck. You keep reading and have this persistent thought — how the fuck have I not heard about this motherfucking genius before today? (Even I don’t know why my internal enthusiasm expresses itself with so much inner profanity. Are others also as subliminally uncouth?) I’m not fucking kidding. This guy is the shit and I’m only now coming across him… and only then by a kind of silly happenstance. What the fuck?

Maybe that’s what I love best about books. The personal discovery of gold in old, mined-out hills. It reminds me of a woman who came into my bookstore a few weeks ago and asked, ‘Have you got this book? It’s called… The Da Vinci… Code, or something like that.’ She consulted a little piece of paper while I waited for her to read it, ‘It’s by an author called Dan… Brown.’ And she looked up at me expectantly. I suppose some people don’t read more than a few books in their whole lifetime and for them Mr Brown will be a discovery on a par with mine of Etgar Keret. The similarity ends there. I mean, there probably won’t be as much internal profanity, for one thing. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 22-09-2009, 5 user comments

archaeological traces of another world

I stumbled upon this on the back of a door at Victoria University the other day, one of the original stickers from the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum back in 2000.

With all that's happened in the last nine years, the S11 protest seems, in retrospect, entirely fantastical. Not just the huge numbers that attended (though that too is a source of wonder) but the optimism that permeated the whole event, a sentiment encapsulated in the slogan 'Another world is possible'. Compare with the zeitgeist of today, manifested most depressingly at the shenanigans at Copenhagen where, with the fate of the planet very possibly hanging in the balance, the statesman's art consists of manufacturing bogus enthusiasm for various permutations of the status quo. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 22-09-2009, 5 user comments

winning at scrabble against people who are much better than you

It's good to know that there are people out there as desperately, pathetically competitive as I am. Who knew that you could get a huge crowd of people hooting with enthusiasm over ways to cheat at parlour games?

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-09-2009, 3 user comments

Joint Vogel winners

This year, the Vogel Prize -- the big award for novelists under thirty-five -- was shared between two writers.

Melbourne writer Lisa Lang and Sydney writer Kristel Thornell will share the $20,000 prize for their novels Utopian Man and Night Street.

Ms Lang says she is looking forward to meeting her co-winner, who is currently in New York.

If anyone else wants to know about Kristel Thornell, a good place to start is with her wonderful story from Overland 195, 'Cabin Fever' . Congratulations to both Kristel and Lisa. [Update: there's also a Kristel story online over at the Mean Ginners. Not that it's a competition or anything.] ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-09-2009, 1 user comment

‘the new fascism hates Muslims’

I've got a piece up at New Matilda at the moment. It begins like this:

If these aren't fascists, they're close enough as to make no difference.

Last week, a shaven-headed gang calling itself the "English Defence League" staged an anti-Muslim rally in Birmingham. On Youtube, EDL supporters had boasted of belonging to "the most organised and ruthless street army in the country"; the scene outside the Birmingham mosque, with football hooligans and skinheads battling local Muslims and anti-racists, seemed to confirm it.

The EDL originated with far-Right bloggers, hallucinogenic types who see evidence of a caliphate in every advertisement for halal kebabs. Its real muscle, however, comes from the soccer hooligan "firms", yobs who combine beery chauvinism with casual ultraviolence and thus have provided recruits for far-Right thugs for the last 30 years or so.

Significantly, the EDL's provocations follow the political breakthroughs of the British National Party. The recent European elections saw major gains for far-Right and neo-Nazi groups across the continent. In Britain, the BNP polled more than a million votes under the leadership of Nick Griffin, a Holocaust-denying, alumnus of the old National Front. An advocate of the "suits-not-boots" school of fascism, Griffin struggles, not always successfully, to keep his more unreconstructed seig-heilers under control, and so the hardcore brawlers from the BNP seem to have gravitated to the EDL (and similar groups like Stop the Islamisation of Europe), where they're at least guaranteed a good ruck.

You can read the rest here.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-09-2009, No comments