Blog

Reading like your sanity depends upon it

We at Overland don’t only take pleasure in deleting commas and rearranging words; we are also ardent readers. Things we have been reading lately include:

Rjurik Davidson

TrotskyLast week I finished Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, which brilliantly documents the French Revolution from the point of view (mainly) of Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton.

Currently I'm reading Deborah Biancotti's Book of Endings, a collection of stories by the under-recognised Australian speculative fiction author. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 30-07-2010, 35 user comments

Thinking about democracy

It is odd, how we think of democracy these days – as something ordinary, inherent to the West, something to strive for yet something taken for granted, also. It is a concept that has plagued the politically vexed mind since time immemorial, well, at least since our ancient forebears. Aristotle envisioned it, Plato feared it (‘Democracy passes into despotism’), as did Mill, and Machiavelli idealised it, believing that the majority would preclude oppression, which was preferable to the tyranny of the few, who would always look to subjugation to maintain control and order. It used to be a radical concept: tyrannical or feudal systems didn’t benefit the majority and were subject to the whims and natures of the privileged minority.

If we were to ask a passerby in the street, ‘How do you define democracy?’ it’s impossible to predict, based on recent observations of democracy in action in Australia, in the Unites States, in Israel, in the outbreak of democracy across the free world, what their definition would look like. George Orwell alluded to this when he wrote, ‘It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.’ ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 29-07-2010, 17 user comments

Where poetry and the Greens meet

Extending Our Community with the Australian Greens
1 August 2:00-4:40
284 Brunswick st Fitzroy

Aboriginal elder Uncle Reg Blow will conduct a cleansing ceremony to precede a heat of the invitational Melbourne Believer Slam. Slam MC: Michael Reynolds Competitors: Ben Pobjie, Laura Smith, Luka Haralampou, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Graham Colin, Dandelion Jackson, Rhys Rodgers, Koraly Dimitriadis, Joel MacKerrow and Eddy Berger.

Introductory words by Greens candidate Kathleen Maltzahn. Closing remarks by Greens candidate Brian Walters.

Admission $10 $5 concession.
A fundraiser for the Australian Greens.

... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 29-07-2010, 3 user comments

The democratisation of publishing (and a bit of Clay Shirky for good measure)

A brandspanking new Meanland post:

The idea that the printing press democratised reading, writing and ideas is widely embraced. This is not to suggest it was – or remains in its internet incarnation – politically progressive or, indeed, revolutionary. Matthew Battles reminds us:

The printing press never only produced the kind of deep reading we admire and privilege today. It also produced propaganda and misinformation, penny dreadfuls and comic books offensive to public morality, pornography, self-help books, and much that was generally despised and rejected by polite culture. Any account of the history of “The Gutenberg Era” that lacks these is incomplete — just as any picture of the Internet that privileges LOLcats and 4chan is insufficient. We must consider both — for pornography, misinformation, and sheer foolishness have thrived from the age of incunables to the advent of the Internet.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 29-07-2010, No comments

The passing of Generation Kill

Julian Assange said dryly, on the release of what he called the Afghan War Diaries, that war is just one damn thing after another, which is a somewhat polite way of putting it, and makes him sound a bit like Biggles. Perhaps ‘one fucking atrocity after another’ would have been more to the point.

The day before the WikiLeaks documents were released, I finished reading Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, a book I’d been meaning to get around to reading but life, etc. Generation Kill has become something of a celebrity book now. It’s Wright’s account of being embedded for two months with a company of marines of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion spearheading the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wright, who cut his reporting teeth – if that’s the word – writing porn reviews for Hustler, where he seems to have learned something about misogyny, has gained something of a reputation as a sort of latter day Hunter S. Thompson. A Thompson he isn’t, but he is a fine observer and takes full advantage of his role as an embedded journo. We won’t get an Australian equivalent as the ADF controls its info on its operations with an obsessive po-faced secrecy that borders on the ludicrous, and a compliant media ensures that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are events we are not going to be asked to think about too much. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 28-07-2010, 50 user comments

In defence of the pledge of allegiance

Last month I attended an Australian citizenship ceremony in the town hall in the suburb I grew up in. After 50 years of living in Australia, my mum decided that she wanted to become an Australian citizen.

There was no financial incentive – she would be eligible for the pension should she need it one day. There are no restrictions on her voice as an Australian – she was on the electoral roll before 1984 when the laws changed to exclude non-citizens from voting. She’s been here since she was seven – and she’ll be the first to tell you that she feels Australian.

On that evening, my mum stood up and pledged the following: ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 27-07-2010, 7 user comments

Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t

In last night's puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the 'job is done'. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is.

The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing an almost blow-by-blow account of the Afghan conflict. Here's what the Guardian says:

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-07-2010, 14 user comments

Invented histories

Streets of ParisWhen I was about ten years old there was a television ad that featured a woman in a fur coat and beret rushing through the streets of Paris to meet her lover for an instant coffee. She wore fabulous red lipstick and the soundtrack was Piaf. After one viewing Punky Brewster was knocked off her perch as my role model and replaced by an anonymous woman with a taste for Parisian men and scant regard for animal rights. I decided I would learn French and began by writing a list in my diary of all the French words I knew – bonjour, merci, croissant, ballet, Yoplait. It never occurred to me that the ad wasn’t shot in Paris, but more likely on a soundstage in Reno or someplace. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 23-07-2010, 2 user comments

Norman Finklestein and the Holocaust

American RadicalAt the age of 50, Norman Finkelstein is without a job and lives alone with his books and computer in Coney Island, New York. He was hounded out of his job as a professor at De Paul University, New York by the machinations of Professor Alan Dershowitz and his supporters. In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein aroused the ire of this warrior of Zionism by accusing him of plagiarism and being fraudulent in his writings on Israel. He laughingly says in the documentary film, American Radical, he wouldn’t use Dershowitz’s book as a schmatte (Yiddish for cleaning rag). ... read more

Written by Vivienne Porzsolt on 23-07-2010, 6 user comments

Journal review – indigo, vol 5

Indigo vol 5There have been several reviews of literary journals on the Overland blog of late. I reviewed the newest kid on the block, Kill Your Darlings, and others have reviewed the latest issues of harvest and Wet Ink. I now find myself in the rather strange position of reviewing a journal that is about to fold. I have been handed volume 5 of indigo rather late as it was released in February, and it’s next – and at this stage last – issue will be published in December. The decision has kicked up a storm of controversy. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 22-07-2010, 1 user comment

Resistance is futile

Cane toad

At 0900 hours the enemy combatant was identified squatting, camouflaged, in the undergrowth. The target was photographed and captured without incident. He is believed to be a scout from the coming invasion party.

Perhaps that’s not quite how the first cane toad was reported near Noonbah Station, southwest of Longreach in Queensland last week, but it was there nonetheless. The amphibious peril is moving to the strategically important Cooper Creek, buoyed by swollen outback rivers. Cooper Creek may allow the force to reach Lake Eyre in South Australia. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 22-07-2010, 6 user comments

Meanland extract – Amazon and that old fudging figures manoeuvre

Unless you slept through yesterday (or for some incomprehensible reason went offline), you probably heard how Amazon won the book wars, summed up so succinctly in this New York Times headline: E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon:

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 22-07-2010, No comments

Vale Laurie Clancy

Laurie ClancyLaurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the two magazines. In later years he became not only captain of Meanjin, but one of the main organisers of the match. He celebrated this event in one of the stories he published in Overland. This also appeared, slightly modified, in his novel The Wildlife Reserve. The description of the comic progress and violent end of a cricket match between supporters of rival literary magazines demonstrates the deep knowledge and love of sport that was so much a part of Laurie’s life. In the book it also introduces the hero to the divisions he will find in an English Department tormented by cultural, pedagogical and sexual politics. ... read more

Written by John McLaren on 21-07-2010, 2 user comments

On atrocities and equivocal jokes

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to speak of. And there is still a sense in the air that something terrible happened there once, if we could just remember what it was. We were sitting in a hideous cafe in a hideous building at a university – hideous in a way that only universities can accomplish – when my friend said to me, vis-à-vis the blogs, ‘I really like your blog writing. But why don’t you write more about what you think about the solutions to the problems you write about? It’s like you’re complaining – and there’s lots to complain about – but I never know what you really think.’ ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 21-07-2010, 12 user comments

On Manning, Lamo, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, new media and old journalism

I have an article up at Drum about all of the above:

How has the online temperament of news changed journalism? In Katrina Fox’s article on objectivity, transparency and advocacy in journalism, “What’s your bias?”, Marcus O’Donnell, lecturer in journalism, explains:

[O]bjectivity was a trust mechanism we relied on in media that didn’t do links. But now we can make it perfectly clear where we are coming from, what our sources are and what our values are, and it is this transparency that is the new trust mechanism that both readers and writers have to rely on.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-07-2010, 1 user comment