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Meanland extract – There are some people not on Twitter (a post for the modern-day luddite)

Facebook is all the people you go to school with. Twitter is all the people you wish you went to school with.

So said some incisive, possibly adolescent, tweeter last week.

I joined Twitter last July and, as of this morning, have 1165 tweets. Is that a lot? Almost certainly, yes, but I think the addiction is wearing off. I originally joined Twitter with one clear objective: to talk politics (aka online activism, which is an oxymoron but that’s another story).

I’ve kept this objective, though wandering thoughts and other interests have started to encroach on what was once a clearly demarcated space. But I’m mostly happy in my Twitter relationship.

I assumed everyone who ever would, had already found Twitter. But I’ve encountered a number of Twitter-curious people – particularly writers – of late, afraid to take the plunge. In conjunction with all the Deveny/Devine heat

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 13-05-2010, No comments

Jobs under the NT Intervention

Much has been written about the Intervention since it first came into place in 2007. Reports have been filed, reviews undertaken. The Government PR machine has gone overboard ensuring media is good. In among all of this something has been missing: the creation of real jobs out in communities across the NT.

As part of the Intervention, the Howard Government suspended the Community Development Employment Program. A program in which people in communities were paid to be rangers, to clean up garbage and the likes: jobs where people would work for top up wages on their land.

In 2008 the Rudd Government reinstated CDEP, although not as it was before the Intervention. As Paddy Gibson, in his 'Working for the Basic Cards in the Northern Territory' discussion paper for Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning put it: ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 12-05-2010, 4 user comments

Review – Stepping Over Seasons

'Stepping over seasons'Simply, Stepping Over Seasons is a fantastic collection of short poems that will appeal to both poetry lovers and readers who may have been burned by poetry in the past. Ashley Capes has captured themes such as love, loss, longing, suburban streetscapes, the plight of Outback Australia and the anguish of the writer’s life in poems that can be studied for their form or enjoyed for their content.

When you read Capes’ work, a distinctive style becomes quickly apparent; he has an ability to form a poem around a seemingly ordinary object. As Justin Lowe writes on the back cover, ‘You sense you could point to any object in a room and Capes would conjure the ghosts of a hundred pairs of hands’. Capes creates a vivid image of an object and the reader is treated to a reconsideration. This object could be small, like the wedding ring in 'other objects', or an entire house, as in 'shell', once filled with life and memories, the house is left empty: ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 12-05-2010, 10 user comments

DeLillo’s Point Omega

Don DeLilloDon DeLillo's novella Point Omega begins with an art installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on 3 September, presumably in 1996. The narrator, about whom we learn very little as the story unfolds, is absorbed in the experience of watching 24 Hour Psycho, a work by Douglas Gordon in which the Alfred Hitchcock film is slowed down to run over a twenty-four hour period.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 11-05-2010, 14 user comments

The WikiLeaks war


In early April, when WikiLeaks released the video of two US Apache gunships machine-gunning civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad in July 2007, anybody who watched it would have perhaps been moved by two things. Firstly, the appalling, terrifying, gut-wrenching tension in watching the endless circling of the two Apache’s as they agitate for the order to open fire (‘C’mon! Let us shoot!’). Secondly, the US soldier on the ground whose voice you strain desperately to listen for amid the radio chatter. Who pulls an unconscious and seriously wounded child out of the shot-up van, and attempts to get her and her brother to medical aid, requesting assistance to get the children to an American military hospital, a request that was refused. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 11-05-2010, 28 user comments

Authors on audio – Ian McEwan

Whatever the virus was that left me sprawled lifeless across the bed, I can thank it for putting me out of action for a week. It gave me the excuse to lie there listening to the four CDs of Ian McEwan reading his novella On Cheshil Beach.

I love audio books. They take the tension out of driving, creating an alternative universe while you are stuck in traffic on Punt Road. They feed the mind and heart while the body is busy fighting microbes and viruses. And what better than hearing the author himself read his work? Ian McEwan has a soft lilting Surrey accent that reveals the tender feelings of the author towards his characters, the young honeymooners Edward and Florence. It is set in 1962, a few years before my first marriage, but the coupling of two virgins is all too familiar. It’s marvellous to hear someone putting words to that fraught event. Writing about wordless events like sex is the hardest thing. Conveying a joyous union would be even harder. ... read more

Written by Carol Middleton on 10-05-2010, 6 user comments

First thoughts on the political

This year, with two elections in Victoria, Australia, it’s time to think about the political. Not that I ever stop thinking about it, given my past: the uncivil sixties, two communist parties, decades of feminism and a talismanic text, Bloch’s three volume The Principle of Hope, purchased from the International Bookshop as late as 1986.

Ah, the past. Or should that be ex-past? You know, the Python joke about ex-parrots. Sometimes that past seems just as stuffed, just as feather-dustery.

Still I’ve been mulling over ideas (new to me) on the political, ideas that shimmer the way mirages do on country roads in summer, elusively out there. But let’s forget for the moment about theory – Schmitt’s and Mouffe’s, and their interpreters. Let’s get down in the dirt where what happens happens, in a small coastal town on the Great Ocean Road at a community meeting. ... read more

Written by Sophia Always on 10-05-2010, 5 user comments

Me and my salwar kameez

My daughter, Ksenya, has given up on midday sleeps, forcing myself and my partner, Liza, to relinquish any activity after 5 pm. The other day she had a rare late afternoon sleep. With the bedtime curfew extended, we decided to go the Deckchair Cinema to catch the latest Coen Brothers’ film, gaze into the clear Darwin sky and bathe in the golden glow of the almost full moon’s rays.

We’d never taken Ksenya to see a film and were unsure how’d she go sitting still for two or more hours. The Deckchair Cinema is a good place to trial taking a child to the cinema. It has a large grass area in front of the screen, ripe for some running and rolling around, possums sometimes lope across the grass, bats glide shadow like through the trees and the lights of boats can be seen bobbing on the water behind the screen. Plenty to amuse a two-and-a-half-year-old who’s likely to find the Coen Brothers a bit slow. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 7-05-2010, 8 user comments

On Deveny’s dismissal: you’ve tapped into the wrong outrage

Let’s be honest now: is there anyone who truly believes Catherine Deveny was advocating for or supporting paedophilia? The only crimes we can charge her with are bad taste and an inability to judge public reaction, hardly hanging offences.

What other commentators have failed to grasp about the whole debacle are the sinister implications of Deveny’s firing, and the problems this poses for the position of ‘the writer’ today. Alongside the increasing commodification of the author is the idea that authors are a brand, and as such, are expected to build their brand name. They’re thrust into the world of social media, websites, endless self-promotion, celebrity and accessibility. They have to be ‘themselves’ (the reason they were hired in the first place) while promoting their talents, idiosyncrasies and opinions, and within reaching distance of their thousands of followers. They are effectively private contractors who no longer have the support of their institutions or the conditions that go with this. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-05-2010, 17 user comments

It was already political

It was November 2006 and I knew I was going to be on stage that night. Already it was political: I took the tiny newspaper cut-out Tarzan had stuck to the fridge and left screaming baby Boy in his arms. I wore stretched maternity pants and a fast beating heart. I knew I’d come home with some kind of trophy, but never realised I was carrying it before the taxi even arrived.

The Writers Centre was in the grounds of a former mental asylum. I was late to register, but somebody took pity on me. It was already political. Before I arrived or spoke a word, before anyone knew I would be taking the mic, before anyone told me to write poetry about everyday life, before I had a chance to use my ninety seconds to say fuck you in a hundred different ways to a hundred different already-thinking-they-were-listening-to me people who needed to hear it a hundred different times and would carry it away in their hearts without maybe even realising. Before I left the house, it was political. That night a young brown woman left her child to stand up in a room full of mostly white, perhaps even mostly hostile, people. It was political. There was a vomit stain on my shoulder. I didn’t notice it till afterward. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 6-05-2010, 6 user comments

Meanland extract – An argument for long form

Long form: long-form journalism, long form online; you may have heard the term bandied about but a definition will prove elusive.

‘Long form’ makes me think of p-books1. In the same way we have e-books and p-books, we now have the short essay, the blog post and lately, the long-form essay. The fact that we can’t reach a consensus on the territory the long-form essay claims suggests that is it not an established term, and scrutiny may result in fraying around the edges.

When researching reading online, one is bound to come across the following ideas: long form onscreen is hard on the mind and the eye; it’s taxing and the reader is easily distracted; it is not suited to the digital medium. It is hard to say what will become of the long form, it is implied, when we cross the great divide into the wholly digital textual world. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 6-05-2010, No comments

Of books and reading and timey-wimey stuff – pt 2


Fiction begs the question of itself, as does reading. The recent debates about the future of reading and so on seem to have thrown us back to some zero-point where we could begin to consider what reading might be, and therefore who the reader is and what she might be doing when she reads. And of course, given their interdependence, the same thing might be wondered about the writer. All of a sudden we have to question where we are when we read and what we are doing when we write. What is obvious in these debates and forums on reading is how little we seem to have thought about what reading is. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 5-05-2010, 17 user comments

Thinking about the workers

In remembranceInternational Day of Mourning on 28 April each year is a good time to be thinking about the workers.

Mid morning at No. 4 Jetty Port Kembla, Wollongong workers gathered to think about the devastation that comes for the families and communities of the more than a million workers who are killed at work each year. In Australia, approximately 8 people are killed on the job each week and around 15 serious injuries occur every hour. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 5-05-2010, 2 user comments

Spoken Word on the airwaves

This Thursday morning between 9 and 9.30, I’ll be interviewed by Peter Goodyear on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (855 AM). 3CR can also be streamed online.

Apart from reciting a selection of my prose and poetry, I’ll also be discussing my influences, the writing of my novel Misplaced and the Melbourne rock band, Trial Kennedy – helping me bring my story to life. This interview is my introduction to 3CR soundwaves, and I’ve been invited to be a monthly presenter on the Spoken Word program along with Peter Goodyear, Rhonda Jankovic and Santo Cazzati. My first show as interviewer, to air on Thursday 3 June, will feature Overland blogger, Tara Mokhtari who will be reciting her poetry and talking about her experiences as a teacher of creative writing. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 4-05-2010, 6 user comments

Read, read, read

If you have never said ‘Excuse me’ to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.
– Sherri Chasin Calvo

Are you regularly bashing your shins and talking to fire hydrants? I wish I was. Jacinda Woodhead’s recent Meanland post about not having enough time to read everything she aspires to struck a chord. For me, though, it relates most potently to novels. When I first got hooked on Estelle Tang’s blog, 3000 books, I experienced a moment of panic. She has estimated that with 60 reading years left (based on the average age of death) if she reads a book a week she’ll fit in 3000 books. Does 3000 sound like a lot to you? It doesn’t to me. And I don’t always find the time to read a novel a week on top of everything else I’m reading. Plus I’m more than a decade older, so my ‘quota’ is much lower. It made me think about how I need to choose judiciously, and somehow cram more in. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 4-05-2010, 19 user comments