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Finally – Gil Scott Heron is on Parole

'Gil Scott Heron is on Parole'Less than a fortnight ago in a small bookshop in Carlton, a small tidal wave crashed into the face of the current Australian literary landscape when Maxine Beneba Clarke’s first major poetry collection, Gil Scott Heron is on Parole, was launched. I don’t usually drag myself out of hiding for a book launch these days – they all seem repetitive, monotonous, same old, just like Australian literature.

What a refreshing change it was to attend this launch. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 28-02-2010, 5 user comments

How about radical success?

Interesting piece by US academic and poet Joshua Corey (spotted via Currajah) on poetry, institutional support, gatekeepers, and the relationship between what we make and how we make it. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the ongoing strategies of radical writer-reader relationships.

If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don't sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I've found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one's own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one's work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees.

... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 26-02-2010, 3 user comments

Of whales and men

The story of Tilikum the killer whale illustrates, in a rather horrible fashion, the weird contradictions in the way we relate to nature these days.

For those who haven't followed the case, Tilikum is a prize exhibit in Sea World, Florida. The day before yesterday, it was being patted by its trainer, one Dawn Brancheau, when it reached up, grabbed her ponytail and then drowned her. It subsequently emerged that this is the third death in which the whale has been implicated. On a previous occasion, it, and two other whales, drowned another trainer; later, a man who broke into the enclosure was found dead in the tank.

The death – as well as another recent incident in which an orca killed its trainer – has sparked much discussion about the ethics of keeping huge animals in tiny tanks. 'Tilikum is a casualty of captivity; it has destroyed his mind and turned him demented,' explained Russ Rector, a former dolphin trainer involved in the Dolphin Freedom Foundation. 'If he was a horse, dog, bear, cat or elephant he would already have been put down after the first kill, and this is his third.' ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-02-2010, 43 user comments

Taking the fifth?

We all remember the end of last year for the dismal outcome, at Copenhagen, for concerted international action to deal with the world’s problems. Just a few weeks before, however, another meeting took place. In November last year, the International Encounter of Left Parties met in Caracas. At that meeting, Hugo Chávez, in typically theatrical style, declared that it was time ‘to convene the Fifth International, and I dare to make the call, which I think is a necessity’.

What would a Fifth International look like? More of the same Trotskyist rhetoric, or something new and radical that, while rejecting the neoliberal consensus, does not tie itself up in dogma, recognising that all theory is contingent – that nineteenth-century critiques of capital, however brilliant for their time, are not the be-all and end-all? ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 24-02-2010, 2 user comments

Distraction

'Distraction'Melbourne writer and philosopher Damon Young's wonderful, little book Distraction (MUP, 2008) landed on my desk recently, courtesy of a very old friend.

She had been struck by a reference in the book to the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. A lens grinder by trade, Spinoza spent his leisure hours in pursuit of philosophical discourse and ultimately became one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 23-02-2010, 14 user comments

The Monday review – the simple art of murder

Some Monday afternoon links, skirting around the edges of murder, which may have earlier escaped your attention.

1. On Mossad and murder – ‘Meir Dagan: the mastermind behind Mossad's secret war’.

2. On Australian soldiers and their use of drones in Afghanistan – ‘The law of instant death’.

[There exist] big flaws in the training given to military lawyers who advise commanders on the legality of the targeted killing of suspected insurgents. Lawyers in uniform have to learn on the job, in a conflict where the consequences of a wrong decision are enormous …

An official directive points out the possibility of individual criminal responsibility for failing to comply with legal obligations and directs ADF legal advisers to be involved in all stages of the targeting process. ''At the same time, there is no formal training provided to these same legal advisers on targeting in the complex Afghanistan coalition context,'' the report says.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 22-02-2010, 3 user comments

Today I thought I was Ella

Today I thought I was Ella. I thought I was a young, naive girl in love. But I’m not. I’m not Ella, I’m her author. I created her.

Yet she is me.

Ella is me but so is Anna and Harry and Robert and Jed and George – all of them are me. They are facets of me. They are also facets of others. How can I write them without embodying them? Without seeing the world through their eyes? My head is a muddle of me and the past, present and future of characters that are not me. Not only their lives, but also their emotions, desires, needs, wants.

Yet how to find me among it all? How to find Koraly. Where is she? Who is she? Oh, the novel will be grand, and powerful, and explore themes unexplored in Australian literature, but where does that leave me? Not Ella – Koraly. Someone told me it’s the experiences that pain us most, the ones that drain our souls and refill us changed; it is those experiences that create the best stories, the stories that affect people, the stories that resonate. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 19-02-2010, 2 user comments

Why does the ABC continue to insult us with Bolt?

It seems the ABC can’t get enough of Andrew even though his extreme views on everything, from white settlement to climate change, are as dangerous as they are unpalatable. He has co-hosted Jon Faine’s conversation hour, appeared on Lateline, been a panellist on Q&A, and is a regular commentator on the current affairs show the Insiders on Sunday mornings.

It’s not as if Andrew doesn’t have ample opportunity to opine misleadingly all over the media. He has his own twice-weekly column in the Herald Sun for a start, is a regular on 3AW and has gigs happening all around Australia.

It’s fair to say that Andrew and his ilk pretty much dominate commercial media but it’s his appearances on the ABC that bestow on him a credibility he doesn’t deserve and that he can never achieve in the tabloids. Perhaps this is why he so proudly declares his ABC credentials on his CV. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 19-02-2010, 15 user comments

Convicted on fanaticism

A citizen's response

Fifty-seven years ago a young Milo Radulovich was dismissed from the US Air Force, deemed a ‘security risk’. His crime? A ‘close and continuing’ relationship with a father from Yugoslavia, and a sister who picketed a hotel that wouldn’t have Paul Robeson as a guest. Radulovich didn’t take McCarthy’s word for his crime and sought legal counsel. When in court, his dismissal was upheld by the ‘evidence’ contained in a sealed envelope. An envelope sealed, presumably, because the contents were too shocking, too corrupting, too contagious to lay eyes upon.

This trial was the beginning of the end for McCarthy. Edward Murrow took up the story and people began to understand the illogicality of the ‘reds under the bed’ scare – specifically, they didn’t know what they were afraid of or how to measure this indefinable ‘quality’ that was infecting the US en masse. Ultimately, communists were hard to distinguish, and people concluded that what they were witnessing was not justice. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 18-02-2010, No comments

Neil James’ proposal to imprison me for treason; my response to the same

Yesterday, the following item appeared in the Crikey correspondence section:

Neil James, Executive Director, Australia Defence Association, writes: Re. “War criminal to hero … a dangerous precedent” (Monday, item 19). Jeff Sparrow used a popular-front agitprop technique, redolent of the Communist Party of Australia in its 1930-1970 heyday period, in tacking on some incorrect claims about current ADF operations in Afghanistan to his supposed conclusion of an historical piece on the execution of Harry “Breaker” Morant in the 1899-1902 Boer War.

Sparrow wrongly (in both moral and factual terms) claimed “… in Afghanistan at the moment Australia has authorised elite counterinsurgent forces to carry out targeted killings, in a strategy modelled upon the notorious Phoenix Program of the Vietnam War. A campaign of assassination of local leaders thought to be loyal to the Taliban contains an obvious potential for human rights abuses, especially since it’s almost impossible for the media to monitor what undercover troops actually do.” ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-02-2010, 5 user comments

Experiences from the frontline

I spend 22 hours a week in one of the busiest needle exchanges in the world. Apart from the obvious statistical data informing me of this, there are two reasons why I know it to be true. Firstly, the existence of a loophole in the laws in Australia allowing us to distribute needles to the ‘general public’ and secondly, the fact that there’s a relatively large injecting culture amongst Australian drug users.

Needle and Syringe Program (NSP) stats are testimony to this. They’re also a cost saving bonanza to any health department’s budget because they stem the infection of blood borne viruses, particularly Hep C and HIV, among injecting drug users. Add to that the fact they keep people not injecting safer, and you can undoubtedly say, we have a very successful public health initiative up and running. But while we shouldn’t underestimate the benefits to all, including the clients who use the exchanges, we should equally keep in mind that this is neither an altruistic program, nor does it sit on solid ground. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 18-02-2010, 3 user comments

Launch of Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole

That clip from the new Gil Scott Heron album is by way of reminder that Maxine Clarke’s launching her new book of poetry Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole at Readings, Carlton at 6.30 pm on 18 February.

You can buy the book on the night or via Picaro Press. You might also want to check out Maxine’s recent essay ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Beauty’ from Overland 196. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-02-2010, 1 user comment

$200 hamburgers and The Value of Nothing

Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing is my favourite book of the summer. It’s vividly told and riveting. Which I wasn’t expecting from a book subtitled ‘How to reshape market society and redefine democracy’.

'The value of nothing' I’ve been interested in the anomalies of capitalism since studying economics in the late 1980s when shoulder pads, Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman’s free market ruled. Except the ‘free’ market is so patently un-free. It’s run by a few companies and financial institutions, characterised by vast concentrations of monopolistic capital, and depends on reserves of unemployed and unpaid domestic labour. Inequalities and hidden costs are fundamental to its ‘success’. But when we questioned the free market we were dismissed with the same raised eyebrow and ‘it’s very complicated’ that Bill Nighy uses in his ‘Robin Hood bank tax’ video. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 16-02-2010, 22 user comments

So what’s really happening in Greece?

Guest post by Guy Rundle

Down Stadiou Street the march turned, from Syntagma (Constitution) Square, in the centre of Athens. There were about five to ten thousand, young and old, workers and students, and a thousand banners and flags, most bearing the phrase Γ Γ .ΓŒΓ… (militant worker army). Headed to Omonia, near Exarchia and the old Athens Polytechnic, emotional heart of the Greek Left. It was militant, it was unified, it was uncompromising. 'They are at war with us, so we are at with them', said one Communist leader of George Papandreou's PASOK government. For anyone from the tepid politics of the anglo world, it was pretty damn impressive.

And it was widely judged to be a fizzer.

'They didn't fill Syntagma' one political-watcher remarked afterwards, in an Exarchia cafe. 'They should have filled it several times over!' He was a PASOK supporter, so not unbiased, but the sentiment was widely aired. So what's really happening in Greece? ... read more

Written by admin on 15-02-2010, No comments

Aboriginal Control of Aboriginal Affairs

Saturday 13 February
National Day of Action: Stop the NT intervention
2 pm MAYSAR Gertrude St Fitzroy

National Day of Action: Stop the NT intervention


‘The victory over apartheid was, in other words, the result of mass action, not only in South Africa but here in Australia, too.’

So what's the NT intervention, if not a little apartheid?


... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 12-02-2010, No comments