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Subscriberthon Day 3 – One for the poets

As many of you may know, on Wednesdays, we let Overland editor Jeff Sparrow out of the office and onto the airwaves of 102.7 FM 3RRR, where he talks all things poetic and literary with the distinguished alicia sometimes.

In celebration of this fact, Day 3 of Subscriberthon is dedicated to the poets, and the RRR devotees.

But first, let’s hear from Josh Healy, with ‘Queer Intifada’:

The daily prizes for Wednesday 24 November are:

The GDS pack
The last 6 issues of experimental journal Going Down Swinging, No. 25–30.

The small poetry press prize
An outstanding range of poetry collections from Picaro Press.

The other writings of poets prize
A collection of books from poets working in other forms: Roberta Lowing’s Notorious, Ouyang Yu’s The English Class, John Kinsella & Robert Drewe’s Sand and an anthology of the work of Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered.

Plus a $50 Readings gift voucher!

And a special RRR prize crammed with RRR merchandise for someone who subscribes when Aural Text is on (between 12 and 2pm today).

I know you're keen to head over to the subscribe page (a mere $40 conc and $54 full), but first, check out Emily Zoe Baker – ‘Fannyism’:

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 24-11-2010, 4 user comments

Telling you what you don’t want to hear

Overland coverWhen Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul, a number of academics held a forum, ‘In Defence of Academic Freedom’. By far, the most brilliant speech was by philosophy Professor Akeel Bilgrami. He explained his view, which I’d long held intuitively: that it is the responsibility of the intellectual to be unpopular.

I can find it quite understandable, indeed I find it honourable, if someone speaking and writing in America finds it important to stress much more the wrongs of the American government and its allies and clients, like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia under Suharto, Chile under Pinochet... But if the same person was speaking or writing, say, in the Palestinian territories or in Arab newspapers, it would be far more effective and honourable if he were to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Arab regimes like Sadaam’s or Islamic regimes like Iran’s.... Edward Said showed exactly this honourable imbalance, criticizing Israel and the U.S. while speaking here and criticizing Arafat and the Palestinian Authority in the Arab press.

It is said that whenever Sakharov criticized the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents in the ’50s, he was chastised by his government for showing an imbalance and not saying anything against the treatment of blacks in the American South. That is precisely the kind of imbalance that courageous people are going to be accused of by McCarthyite elements in this country, and I hope that all of us will have the courage to continue being imbalanced in just this way. It is in some ways the duty of the intellectual to be imbalanced in this way. That is another way of saying that it is the duty of the intellectual to be unpopular. They should not be discouraged by such unpopularity. They should see it as an indirect acknowledgement of their courage.

... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 23-11-2010, 2 user comments

Here’s the thing about political poetry

It was after convening my first twenty poetry readings and open microphone competitions that I figured out that political poetry has a really bad reputation in Australia.

As I hadn’t been on the Sydney poetry scene for long, it took another chunk of time to work out my definition of what political poetry is (and isn’t) and why it was where it was, which is not many places at all.

What I came up with shaped the way that I wrote my first book of poetry. Ruin is a sequence of 55 poems about the Iraq War told from four different points of view. Some of the poems have been previously published in this journal and others.

I’ll touch on my process later but first, I’ll lay out my definition of political poetry, as it relates to printed poetry and public readings in this country. (Unfortunately, I don’t have the space here to tackle issues facing poets in other countries but feel free to give your opinions.) ... read more

Written by Roberta Lowing on 23-11-2010, 9 user comments

Overland Subscriberthon Day 2 – Things are warming up

The first day of Subscriberthon 2010 went off with a gigantic bang, and we thank you. But we’re only a fraction of the way to meeting our Subscriberthon 2010 target, a target that ensures we continue to provide our print content online for free, operate our feisty and dynamic blog and, importantly, keep publishing a print issue four times a year. We’re committed to the Overland community and hope you feel similarly.

So you love Overland but are already a steadfast subscriber? Firstly, thank you. Secondly, there are a couple of options. You can resubscribe now, go into the running for the prizes and we’ll simply add four issues to your existing subscription. Alternatively, how about a gift subscription? At a mere $40 concession and $54 full, who wouldn’t be impressed? ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 23-11-2010, 2 user comments

The L word

This blog will be in two parts. Part One: a rant about how bloody important literature (and thus Overland) is to life, the universe and everything. Part Two (at the request of Rjurik Davidson): a short Choose Your Own Adventure tale in which you, the protagonist, take the future of Australian literature in your own hands.


Part One

I don’t come from a literary family. I wasn’t reading Proust at fourteen and my parents did not indulge in long conversations about Kafka at the dinner table. This isn’t to say that I came from a bookless house, though. My brother and I were read to everyday since we were babies and by the age of twelve I owned just about everything Ann The Babysitters Club M Martin ever wrote. (My childhood dream was to change my name to Claudia and move to Connecticut.) My dad read books about the history of pure mathematics and biographies of sixteenth-century astronomers. My mum read crime fiction. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 22-11-2010, 14 user comments

Uncanny X-book: ebooks, design and digital possibility

When people ask about the design of a book, they're usually talking about the cover. But as any writer knows, choosing a cover is only one of a whole series of invisible questions involved in transforming a manuscript into a book. Some of these questions – paper stock for instance – probably seem trivial to outsiders, but along with more obviously significant questions about design and typography they all play their part in shaping the way a reader experiences a text.

Ebooks - by kozumel

Over the past few decades, as public interest in design has grown, many publishers, especially American publishers, have chosen to foreground some of these decisions, usually by running notes at the back of books about the font employed and its history. I'm not a font person, but I have to confess to at least a passing interest in knowing that the font a book I'm reading uses is a variant of a font developed in the 17th century, or that its designer was an atheist famous for his Bibles, or a student of Greek Humanist letter-forms. ... read more

Written by James Bradley on 22-11-2010, 4 user comments

Overland Subscriberthon Day 1 – Still fighting the powers that be

Morning, welcome to the Overland Subscriberthon 2010. Over the next week you’ll see guest blog posts by Australian luminaries such as Alison Croggon, James Bradley, Roberta Lowing and Antony Loewenstein, and much-admired Overland regulars like Koraly Dimitriadis, Boris Kelly, Michael Brull, and many more. There’ll be spot prizes and competitions and you’ll go into the draw to collect prizes from some of the best publishers and journals in Australia.

In fact, if you subscribe today, you’ll go into the running for the following prizes:

The Monday Meanjin prize
A complete set of the 2010 Meanjin quarterly, which is just about to celebrate its 70th birthday. Their latest anniversary issue revisits Vance Palmer on going to war (1942), Jim Davidson interviewing Dorothy Hewett (1979), MJ Hyland (2004), Helen Garner (2002) and Elizabeth Jolley talking knickers (1987).

The Monday Taste of Melb Pub prizeThe Monday taste of Melbourne publishing prize
The Little Books on Big Themes collection (MUP), Melbourne Remade (Arcade Publications), My Grandmother (Spinifex Press), Out of Bounds (re.press), Stamping Ground (Clouds of Magellan), Sleepers Almanac No.6 (Sleepers), Writing Art and Architecture (re.press), A Dandelion on the Roof & other stories (Clouds of Magellan), Four Quarters (ASP), The Pacific Solution (ASP), Keeping Faith (transit lounge) and a signed copy of the Miles Franklin winning Truth (Text).

The Monday 50+ issues of Overland in sequential order prize
That’s right, a complete run of issues from 1990–2002. See what was happening in Australian culture and politics post the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the outbreak of the first Gulf War and during the first half of Howard’s reign; [re]discover our Black writing edition, the emergence of grunge fiction, and a profusion of Australian and American poetry.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 22-11-2010, 9 user comments

In conversation with Toni Jordan

'Fall girl'In the second of Westgarth Book’s Emerging Writers’ Events, Toni Jordan, author of international bestseller Addition, will be discussing her new novel Fall Girl.

Toni will also share with us her tips on how to write memorable characters, who, like Grace Vandenburg and Ella Canfield, stay with us long after we’ve read the last line. Don’t miss this chance to meet one of Australia’s most successful authors and enjoy an evening of conversation and networking in the character-filled Westgarth Books. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 21-11-2010, No comments

Overland Subscriberthon: The Inevitable Movie

Written by Editorial team on 18-11-2010, 5 user comments

Malalai Joya, Tanya Plibersek, Labor, etc

Tuesday evening, Malalai Joya gave a talk at UTS. She’s a small woman, and her English is a bit unsteady. Her manner was generally not as fiery as her language. What she said, however, radiated the defiance that makes her such an inspiring person. Whether denouncing the ‘mafia puppet government’ of Karzai, or the fundamentalist warlords, Joya was uncompromising in her rejection of Islamist fundamentalists, and of Western imperialism.

During question time, a passionate Iranian woman took the chance to give a long speech-question, before speaking even longer in Persian. When Joya responded to her question, Joya took the opportunity to denounce in her characteristically passionate way the ‘fascist’ government of Iran, which she said was ‘worse than Hitler’. This was surprising to me, as by my judgment the Taliban and warlords in Afghanistan are significantly worse than the reign of Ayatollahs in Iran. Interestingly, what I liked was Joya specifically warning against illusions about the reformists in Iran, insisting the whole system needed to be overthrown. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 18-11-2010, 5 user comments

Post from Rwanda: Preserving the dead

I read of an exchange that took place between a British journalist who arrived in Rwanda in 1995 and an aid worker who had seen atrocities taking place in one of the refugee camps at around the same time. They were discussing the merits of leaving corpses as they had fallen at sites of massacre as a memorial or an educational tool against the horrors of genocide. The journalist was resistant to the idea of leaving bodies. To paraphrase, he described them as being left forever in their state of violation as a monument to the crimes against them and to the armies that had ended the crimes. The journalist doubted the necessity of seeing the victims in order to fully confront the crime; in fact, he worried that because people are resistant to assimilating too much horror, even as we look at horrific things, we are trying to find ways to regard them as unreal. The result is that such memorials result in us becoming inured to horror rather than being informed by it. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 17-11-2010, 3 user comments

Anecdotal tales from the ‘Indigenous Industry’

At this year’s Garma Festival a friend told me of a conversation she had with someone who used to work for the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). When she told this guy that she was from Alice Springs, he commented that some people in FaHCSIA are talking of moving to central Australia to take out a second mortgage.

The story was recounted again this weekend while sitting in a cafe in town. Over coffee a couple of friends described the constant strain and struggle of working in Indigenous communities: the repetitiveness of the stories, continually wrestling with the same issues, the failure of any major successful project. The constant pushing and pushing and pushing – and the way working in the field can just wear you out, make you apathetic or burnt out. They spoke about how this status quo of major health, education, short-term funding, etc creates a sort of false economy around Indigenous Affairs in Alice. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 17-11-2010, 2 user comments

Poetry review: The Bee Hut

'The Bee Hut'The Bee Hut
Dorothy Porter
Black Inc.

Whatever you think of her poetic style, Dorothy Porter was the contemporary godmother of narrative poetry in Australia. Having read and watched the Joanne Davis performance of The Monkey’s Mask, and having also thoroughly enjoyed What A Piece Of Work, I learned some important lessons about how to manipulate time and space using poetics in the writing of a verse novel. I was curious to read Porter’s collection The Bee Hut to find distinctions between the micro-narrative style that drives the plots of her novels and the standalone free verse of her other poetry. ... read more

Written by Tara Mokhtari on 16-11-2010, 3 user comments

Overland magazine wants you!

Overland 199As a subscriber, that is. Our annual fundraising drive – Subscriberthon – is running 9am Monday 22 to 5pm Monday 29 November. During that week, our website will be transformed into a Subscriberthon carnival of guest posts from celebrated writers and bloggers, competitions and a general air of festivity and collectivity.

Subscribe during that week for a year’s worth of Australia’s finest literary journal, prizes galore

Written by Editorial team on 15-11-2010, 3 user comments

Meanland: Abandoning print

Meanjin coversPeter Craven made a grave prognosis in his recent defence of the cultural worth of Meanjin: ‘If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist.’

On Thursday on Drum Tim Dunlop countered with: ‘The sooner magazines like Meanjin engage with the realities of online reading – and pray their financiers give them enough money to do it properly – the better.’ ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 15-11-2010, 14 user comments