Overland literary journal

Page Seventeen Launch

Written by Maxine Clarke on 30-10-2009, No comments

The Heart of the Nation?

When did ‘The Australian’ turn into an outright, unabashed, reactionary tabloid? It wasn’t that long ago it prided itself on a balanced view but on Tuesday it ran the standalone headline, “Black Saturday is Allah’s revenge.” I haven’t seen anything as recklessly destructive of social cohesion and cultural respect since the worst years of Howard and his xenophobic election victory over Beazley, where ads were broadcast across the country to dob in anyone that even looked suspicious. We all knew the kind of person we were meant to be calling in. Anyone not white and possibly Muslim. If you thought that particular fire had begun to simmer down, here comes ‘The Australian’ with a barrel of oil. They’ve even brought the human sacrifices to be lynched and set aflame.

Before we talk about the Australians in our communities who are not white and possibly Islamic, the less obvious insult is to the 173 dead of the recent fires, used here as nothing more than fuel to incite rage. All those properties and families destroyed, just kindling for anti-Muslim polemics of the most crude and brutal kind. Those Victorian mothers, fathers and their children just incendiary devices for the journos at ‘The Australian’ to lob into communities and workplaces around the nation. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 29-10-2009, 3 user comments

creativity and commodification

This appeared as a blog comment but seemed important enough to have its own thread. It's from Malcolm King:

I'm interested in comments from Overland readers about my article in the Australian on creativity and the commodification of academic programs.

I was really targetting those unis who use the creative industries model.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 29-10-2009, 19 user comments

critical gratitude

i have just posted my piece from the EWF reader over at walking and falling for your edification and amusement.

received said reader in the mail yesterday and have already laughed out loud, nodded serious assent, shaken my fist, copied a quote into my notebook, and read a paragraph aloud to the other person in the room. it's that sort of book.

Written by Jennifer Mills on 28-10-2009, No comments

Talking Politics

I travelled Europe a long time ago. Landed in London but my time in England was brief. I went to France, Spain and Germany. Only really felt like spending a lot of time in Italy. I met a man in Naples who took me to a pizzeria. He asked me how long Australia had been around, and I told him a little over two hundred years. Well, he said, this pizzeria has been around longer than that.

On the wall the pictures of a family holding pizza paddles moved from full colour, to uncertain colour, to black and white, to sepia, to murky experiments in photography. Outside there were buildings that seemed occupied by Communists and others by Anarchists, but were simply community centres. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 27-10-2009, 2 user comments

Submissions Open – Australian Blog Writing 2009

Editor Karen Andrews writes: Submissions are now open for Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing 2009. One of the more common questions I’ve been asked about the project is: “Why publish an anthology full of content that’s already available on the Internet for free?”

I have a number of responses. There are bloggers – good ones, talented folk – who languish in obscurity. Their pieces are posted and remain on their main page for a week, perhaps more, when they are then archived and from that point on may only be seen by traffic arriving on random Google searches. This often strikes me as a waste. Second, despite its growing cultural significance, there are still people (and potential readers) who have not quite yet grasped what blogs are ‘all about’. They are still learning to negotiate the wide web and may not have the time, or inclination, to do the digging that is often required when trying to find a specific post. As readers, traditionally we like our words, our treasures, to be packaged and delivered via the book form. And some of us mightn’t like reading off our iPhones. If we own one, that is. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 26-10-2009, 4 user comments

what Nick Griffin meant to say

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 24-10-2009, 2 user comments

Beautiful Losers

Watch this film ---> Beautiful Losers (DVD)

Reasons: interviews & art. Some good; occasionally brilliant. One epiphany.

What else do you want? If you like art, you’ll pick it up at your next opportunity.

Written by Alec Patric on 24-10-2009, 2 user comments

Rundle responds

This is less a point-by-point reply to Jeff's posting below, than it is a companion piece - the debate moved to this venue principally to argue it out at more length, and not test Crikey readers' patience.

But it also gives an opportunity to talk more explicitly about left strategy in an issue that has clearly restarted and moved to the centre of public debate.

In the past forty-eight hours, everything suggests to me that my argument about a double-strategy of the Rudd government - one oriented both ethically and practically - has been strengthened, and the argument that the government will snap back into a more punitive mode weakened.

Tonight, both the PM - on the 7.30 Report - and Craig Emerson on Q and A, repeated what has become the  central image they are spruiking: that the Howard government put children behind barbed wire. Wilson Tuckey's comment that terrorists might be aboard the boats and some further mad stuff about race, was met not with a mere assertion of Labor's stronger procedures, but of a denunciation of the very nature of Tuckey's intervention, and a re-assertion of the common humanity of refugees. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 23-10-2009, 1 user comment

Ruddism and refugees: a debate

Over the last few days, Guy Rundle and I have had something of a debate in Crikey over how Kevin Rudd's attitude to refugees might develop (Guy's first piece is here, my reply is here and Guy's response here). Yesterday, Guy politely suggested that we take it outside, as they say, with  some back and forth on the Overland blog.

In that spirit, here's two cents from me, to be followed shortly by Guy's rejoinder. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 22-10-2009, No comments

Learning to Walk

The usual line is that you can’t teach writing. That there’s no use in writing courses. Salman Rushdie was recently the editor of The Best American Short Stories series. In his intro to the anthology he wrote: “Old-fashioned naturalism was the dominant manner this year, and creative writingese, I have to say, was often in evidence. There were so many stories that were well observed, well crafted, full of well-honed phrases; so many rhythmic, allusive, technically sophisticated stories that knew when to leave matters unresolved and when it was right to bring events to dramatic climax; so many stories that had everything one could wish for in a story… except for the sense that it had to be written, that it was necessary. This was what I had expected and perhaps feared: a widespread, humourless, bloodless competence.” And all those poor fools that have studied and sweated over their flawless manuscripts, nothing but mechanical drones. Unable to find the ‘necessary’ words. The vital connection to higher cosmic lights. But I think most of us who haven’t won the Booker of Bookers don’t so easily go for the it’s just a kind of magic route. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 19-10-2009, 15 user comments

Glen Beck and ‘Hey Hey’

Glen Beck presents such a freak show that it's easy to underestimate him. But he's important not simply because of his huge influence (the cable show and radio appearances attract millions and the book's an instant bestseller) but because he successfully distills right-wing populism into its basic components, as this clip illustrates.

Most obviously, the whole Beck persona reflects and amplifies the classic ideology of a lower middle class in decline: the world is frightening and hostile and bewildering, and we don't understand why our lives steadily worsen. The more the situation seems beyond our control, the more there must be someone else pulling the strings. Hence the Beckian obsession with conspiracies, evil plots against stolid, well-meaning citizens directed either from above (corporations, bankers, etc) or, more often, from below (Muslims, communists, ACORN, more or less anyone else that comes to hand). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-10-2009, 2 user comments

Rundle on Ruddock

In Crikey:

There was the old demeanour — the skin like wet paper mache, waiting to be molded, the hair like a wreath of cigarette smoke. Ruddock, a man of liberal instincts some years, decades, ago, took on the refugee thing for complicated reasons. It chewed him up, and spat him out, and the result, pulsating with resentment and vindictive and premature triumph, is what we now see on our screens. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-10-2009, 1 user comment

all honorable men

Sometimes, you almost find yourself wishing for the utter collapse of Western civilisation, if only because it might mean that Philip Ruddock and others of his ilk might have themselves to seek asylum.

Here's the old vampire in the Oz this morning.

The government then argues that the worldwide security situation has deteriorated. This is also not true. Indeed, in some places it has improved. The situation has always been difficult in source countries such as Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and it is arguable that Afghanistan was significantly less safe under the Taliban than it is now. Likewise, Sri Lanka was long beset with a Tamil insurgency that now appears to have been defeated militarily. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-10-2009, 4 user comments