Overland literary journal

blessed is the colt peacemaker

Yesterday, in an article for Crikey, I commented on (what seemed to me) an astonishing suggestion in Time magazine that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to nuclear weapons. Let me repeat. A. Peace. Prize. For. Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons. Today, I discover in the New York Times that Thomas Friedman thinks that the prize should have been accepted on behalf of the US military, including those occupying Iraq (where more than a million people have been killed) and Afghanistan (where 1500 civilians died last year). What remains to be said anymore? Roll out the next column: freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength, etc, etc.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 13-10-2009, 3 user comments

Keynesian Schadenfreude

I found this article a] illuminating, b] devastating and c] a little bit inspiring. Illuminating because it gave me a good snapshot of the body politic in the UK and the government response to the GFC. Devastating because it makes plain that, of course, the Tories will win, and of course, the Labour party will be punished beyond belief.* And, finally, ever so slightly inspiring because it reminds me that just because 'the Left' hasn't adequately or intelligently responded to the GFC yet [has there been a better time since the 1930s to convince people of the central tenets of Marxism for Dummies?], doesn't mean they can't or won't soon.

I've excerpted the best bits in case you don't want to click through. This is where the author dissects the absurdity of the Tory position, the utter stupidity of which won't stop them smashing Labour at the election:
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Written by Karen Pickering on 12-10-2009, 2 user comments

Thoughts on Fragmentalism

We all know that we might not see the forest for the trees, but there’s also the possibility of not seeing a leaf for the tree.

In visual arts, a far more pretentious field of artistic endeavour than the workman-like crafters of sentences using the every day commerce of communication, words like Pointillism and Cubism offer the Cognoscenti just one more way of proving how in-the-know they really are. There is the appeal of the Haiku, and its idea of the seashell containing the ocean, that they sometimes enjoy offering their fellows. Naming what you’re reading now Literary Fragmentalism is a sad concession to the Inteligencia, and their power to bequeath legitimacy with generations yet to come, but in every other respect the author wishes to say to these arbiters of the artistic and philosophical, a heart felt, fuck you very much. Which is meant sincerely, though the lightness of tone might persuade otherwise. The babbling ears of these interlopers will hear what they will. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 12-10-2009, 2 user comments

the deputy prime minister is a racist pig

the deputy prime minister is a racist pig
oh / i know her media people will be
all over this / talkin about defamation
& maybe even sedition / if they
cn make it stick / will call in some
corporate communications team
it might just have been a small thing
julia said / simply a matter of calling
in votes / & hell it wz probably
exactly what she wz advised to do
& by far the easiest outcome

bt the deputy prime minister is a racist pig
& believe me i have thought a lot
about this particular thing / this woman
watched while somebody sold us
down the river then came out & said
the water looked so inviting
& anyway nobody even got wet
the deputy prime minister
saw burning crosses
in our front yards / & said
appreciate the lights
her people are wearing white
hoods / & the deputy prime minister
is saying it is almost halloween
what the fuck is wrong with
you hysterical people

the deputy prime minister is a racist pig
next time she meets obama believe me
that man will be thinking get the fuck
away from me oh rest assured he'll smile
for the cameras & everything / bt
when he goes back home / michelle
will make him scrub before he
thinks about hugging their children

it might just have been a small thing
julia said / simply a matter of calling
in votes / & hell it wz probably
exactly what she wz advised to do
& by far the easiest thing
bt somebody spat on our history
& the deputy told us
to drink it

Written by Maxine Clarke on 11-10-2009, 39 user comments

The Emerging Writers’ Festival Reader

 

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Written by Maxine Clarke on 10-10-2009, 2 user comments

we will decide who’s lynched in this country, & the rope with which it’s done.

Written by Maxine Clarke on 9-10-2009, 4 user comments

postcard party

I have plugged this over at my blog already, but here's a reminder to Melbourne people to get down to Sticky tomorrow between 12-4pm for the launch of from sometimes love beth: an adventure in postcards, published by Affirm Press. There will be a mass postcard-sending, so take your address book! more info here.

Written by Jennifer Mills on 9-10-2009, 1 user comment

all just fun

The reaction to the 'Hey Hey' minstrel show is proving more revelatory than the actual skit. The original 'Hey Hey' always depended upon a certain low level bigotry, with jokes about Kamahl's ethnicity interspersed with innuendo about Molly Meldrum's sexuality. In that sense, the Jackson Jive performance was more exemplary than accidental: it was a reunion performance, after all, in which the group had been asked to reprise an act from twenty years earlier, clearly on the basis that the producers thought the gag to be mighty funny. What's more, in the midst of the dance, the 'Hey Hey' cartoonist chimed in, with a sketch inquiring as to the whereabouts of Kamahl (you see, he's got black skin, too, and so should have been up there with the rest of his kind). ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 9-10-2009, 15 user comments

enter the vook

This, from a Salon article about 'video books', sounds about right:

And so the familiar games begin. Someone is called upon to say that the sky is falling and to scold book publishers for being behind the times: "You can't just be linear anymore with your text," said Judith Carr, Atria's publisher. Then someone stuffier is summoned to detect the imminent fall of Western Civilization presaged by people's unwillingness to read great literature anymore. Professor Maryanne Wolf lamented, "Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?" and novelist Walter Mosley asserted that "doing stuff on computers" actually degrades one's "cognitive abilities." The comments thread fills up with semi-hysterical fogies moaning, "Don't take my good old-fashioned books away! I love the way they smell!" And, finally, the geek punditocracy steps in to sniffily announce that although printed books are indeed doomed, this particular alternative is hopelessly lame, created by clueless print-oriented geezers who can't see that the real future lies in some yet-to-be-imagined, fantastically entertaining fusion of emerging media that our poor, reeling, post-adolescent brains can't hope to conceptualize. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 7-10-2009, 3 user comments

No SF Booker Winners

Recently there's been a bit of a discussion about why no SF writer has won the Booker prize. As far as I know, it was begun by Kim Stanley Robinson in a piece for New Scientist. After quoting Virginia Woolf's complimentary letter to SF great Olaf Stapleton, he wrote:

Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California - supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year - but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels.

Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

This is not going to happen. But it is a minor injustice, which can be ameliorated by the readers of New Scientist: simply buy the book and read it. Be the jury yourself. Read like Woolf, widely and without preconceptions. Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction.

Adam Roberts, who Robinson mentioned, responded in the Guardian with this:

I found myself noticing how much of this year's shortlist is built around essentially science fiction conceits, although mostly in slightly stifled ways: Coetzee's Summertime is, among other things, about uncertainty in the face of versions of reality - the topic that Philip K Dick made so brilliantly his own. Byatt's absorbing The Children's Book, though rooted in a detailed Edwardianism, is in part about fantasy, and is structured around entry into and expulsion from Narnia-like paradises, or anti-Narnia hells. Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, set in the 1840s, is about transcending reality and distils moments of intensity that gesture towards SF's sense of wonder. They're all good novels. But how much better they could have been if their authors had allowed themselves to play with the complete paint-box of SF and fantasy.

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 4-10-2009, 1 user comment

sunday night with candy b

I am totally, madly, unbelievably in love with Candy B: a big, bold, beautiful self-declared Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Blasian (Black-Caucasian-Asian) queen. A couple nights ago I spent an hour and a half in Candy’s company as she rocked stage, audience and screen in shiny pink dance-pants, which clung to her curves almost as cheekily as the way she kept running her mouth off.

Before I get any further with this review though, let me drop the line Candy Bowers insisted any reviewers start with when covering her one woman show Who’s That Chik? , running at the Arts Centre until tonight: Candy Bowers is a black woman. On stage. At the Arts Centre. In her own hip-hop theatre show: Who’s That Chik? ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 3-10-2009, No comments