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Meanland: Doctorow on Copyright vs Creativity

Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 6-09-2010, No comments

200 launch party

Thanks to everyone who helped send edition 200 off into the world at the Melbourne Writers' Festival. Lovely to see so many people, especially those from the online world. Don't have any crowd shots, unfortunately, but here's the three speakers. Onward and upward!

jacinda-at-launchjeff-at-launchrodney-at-launch ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 5-09-2010, 10 user comments

Father’s Day

Storms around Nimbin often come from the south-west, rolling in from behind Nimbin Rocks with a sound like that of some weird, mysterious train.

From the verandah, where I’m sitting, the thunder in the mountains seems like the echo of events taking place in another country. When I think about some of the things that have happened to me in this bizarre experience called Life, to date, I couldn’t be more surprised than if, say, a giant cicada suddenly ate the suburb of Five Dock. Hunter S. Thompson repeatedly said that life could never get weird enough for him. Well actually it did, Hunter. That’s why you topped yourself, you dickhead. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 3-09-2010, 21 user comments

MWF Writing Women – a review

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the lost tourist in the right direction.

‘May I smoke?’ asks an older man ahead of me. He looks like a writer, to me – dishevelled and blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think you should,’ replies his polite companion. Not what I would’ve said.

At last, the doors are open and the queue begins to move. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but it’s our first day,’ says a MWF volunteer. As this is the twenty-fourth Melbourne Writers Festival, I find this a remarkable explanation but what the heck, here we go, the well-oiled machine rolls on. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 3-09-2010, 2 user comments

The more things change

So far as I know, the only people who have analysed and criticised Justice Martin’s sentencing remarks on the white men who beat Kwementyaye Ryder are Chris Graham, and me. This case should provoke soul-searching. We should ask why it happened. We should ask how it could happen that a judge would respond in the way he did. And we should ask why the media has not considered it particularly significant.

The major exception was a report on Four Corners. In some ways, the report was significant. It devoted some 50 minutes to the killing. It contained some revealing testimony from witnesses: the families of the victim. It also contained testimony from the families of the perpetrators. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 2-09-2010, 1 user comment

Cory Doctorow.
Melbourne, tomorrow night.
Copyright vs Creativity.

This is Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow

Little BrotherYou may remember him from such popular, madcap adventures as Boing Boing. Or one of his many, many books, including his latest, Little Brother. Or the Makers revolution (no, I do not mean his novel by the same name). ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 1-09-2010, 3 user comments

Non-fiction review: Singing the Coast

Singing the CoastSinging the Coast
Margaret Somerville and Tony Perkins
Aboriginal Studies Press

Margaret Somerville is a writer firmly engaged in the land she is standing on and all the past and present that come with it. Her fifth book, Singing the Coast, perfectly illustrates this. Written in conjunction with Tony Perkins, a Garby elder from the Gumbaynggirr nation, Singing the Coast explores the way that this connection changes as stories are told and retold as more of the history gets known. Singing the Coast also explores the difficulty of language translation and of recording an oral culture in a written text. It looks at the gaps that this creates, gaps that are filled with each telling and retelling of stories of place. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 1-09-2010, 1 user comment