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On a literary national myth
A post from Ireland.
Ireland’s academic ranking has taken a dive in the most recent OECD study on international student performance. Since 2000, the country’s students have dropped from 15th to 25th place in the OECD world ranking for maths, and from 9th to 13th in science. Ireland has never seen itself as particularly strong in maths, and the government has invested significant money in science knowing that it’s an area that needs improving. But it’s the drop in English that has been the most shocking: Irish students have fallen from 5th to 17th place. ... read more
Written by Louise Pine on 23-12-2010, 4 user comments
Politics, economics, cartooning
In ‘Bruce Petty drawing money’, the last essay from Overland 201 to go online, Robert Phiddian analyses politics and economics in the oeuvre of Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty. (You’ll need to purchase a copy of 201 to see the accompanying images.)
Political cartoonists draw characters and events. They live off the flux of the political moment, and it used to be rare for them to reach deeper, to engage satirically with patterns of power in society, let alone the economy. Bruce Petty’s trajectory has been different and very influential, especially at the Age, on a generation of cartoonists like Spooner, Leunig and Nicholson. He has fostered a more analytical, economically literate, but still staunchly oppositional attitude towards money and its acolytes on the pictorial parts of the nation’s editorial pages. It is a culture of scepticism that the editorial and financial writers might have striven harder to share, before the instant wisdom of the global financial crisis became fashionable.
Ever since he started at Rupert Murdoch’s crusading Mirror (1962) and Australian (1964) newspapers, Bruce Petty sought to draw the big issues and processes more than other cartoonists. His work at the early Australian was dominated by the directly political issues that characterised the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a widely distributed and accepted sense of optimism that politics could involve planning and substantial achievement. The political spectrum supporting this attitude was broad and not even exclusively left-wing, running from Donald Horne’s right-wing contrarianism in The Lucky Country to the socialist and communist enthusiasms of Stephen Murray-Smith’s Overland. This time of hope, as Horne described it in another book, ended with the mayhem of the second Whitlam government and its dismissal in 1975, though the geopolitical driver for the change was the Oil Shock of 1973. Throughout these years, Petty was a prominent proponent of this progressive attitude, a daily cartoonist working in a newsroom, whose attention focused sharply on the daily news cycle.1
The collapse of Planet Whitlam was compounded for Petty by the way the once liberal Australian suddenly veered Right and edged him out. He contributed posters to ‘Maintain the Rage’ rallies, donated images to any number of good causes, and focused a lot of attention on animated movies.2 Instead of attempting to live in a lost Camelot, however, he got on with analysing the new, economically-driven politics. He was quick to spot the ascendant ideas delineated in political slogans like Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life is not meant to be easy’(1971),3 Margaret Thatcher’s ‘And who is society? There is no such thing!’ (1987), and Bill Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ (1992). Before 1975, he had been swimming with the apparent tide of history, against a conservatism whose time was obviously up. Now, without any real ideological movement, he found himself a mordant critic of an ascendant and reductive economic libertarianism. The central theme of his cartooning became market-doubting in the decades of the rise of monetarism, and the main formal preoccupation became drawing the complex processes of money, influence and power. This searching satirical critique is apparent in books (The Money Book, 1983; The Absurd Machine, 1997), films (The Money Game, 1970; Global Haywire, 2008) and hundreds (if not thousands) of editorial cartoons.
Written by Editorial team on 23-12-2010, No comments
Supporting Assange ≠ condoning rape.
Let me begin with my position: I have no opinion on the allegations regarding Julian Assange. I do believe rape is unconditionally wrong. But what we are talking about in the Assange case are allegations, with the associated presumption of innocence. This is further complicated, however, as rape allegations are so rarely taken seriously by the state.
It has been disconcerting of late, since the allegations against Julian Assange surfaced, to read the internet, listen to the radio, watch Democracy Now!. ... read more
Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 22-12-2010, 69 user comments
The world according to Meanland: the top ten things we covered this year (in no particular order)
Do you recall when Meanjin quarterly and Overland magazine announced (see A joint communique from somewhere in Meanland) their 2010 collaboration, Meanland or ‘Reading in a time of change’? Back then they promised:
This joint project aims to create a constructive dialogue on how we, and future generations, will read. It will explore the challenges and opportunities facing literary culture in the twenty-first century—from digital publishing to copyright, from globalisation to the changing nature of reading. We will explore the new literary realities facing readers, writers and publishers, and reflect on and intervene into the changing nature of reading, writing and publishing—circumstances that, naturally, also implicate both Meanjin and Overland.
Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-12-2010, 2 user comments
The violence of everyday
In a world in which we’ve been desensitised to the shock of war and conflict, in which those two very things are normalised, you sometimes need to slow things down, step outside and put things into perspective. This year at TiNA, I saw an event that did just that. It was the publication of Westside Jnr’s 2010 book: Violence.
Launched fittingly on the International Day of Non-Violence, the book is a collection of writing that arose out of workshops at seven schools in Western Sydney. The workshops were run, in conjunction with the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, as part of the Refugee Action Support Project. Alongside the writing workshops there were forum theatre workshops on bullying, where students learned ways of defusing situations before they escalate. ... read more
Written by Scott Foyster on 20-12-2010, 2 user comments
The crowd is our domain
In his fascinating Meanland essay ‘The crowd is our domain’, featured in Overland 201, Marty Hiatt responds to another Meanland essay, Cate Kennedy’s popular yet divisive ‘Driven to Distraction’.
In her article ‘Driven to distraction’ (Overland 199), Cate Kennedy critiques contemporary internet culture from the perspective of the creative writer. While not opposed to the internet as such, Kennedy seeks to demonstrate that Web 2.0 technologies and the activities they facilitate (such as social networking, blogging and video-sharing) are rendering us permanently impatient, disinhibited yet isolated and unable to concentrate. Kennedy finds these effects, which centre on the pursuit of immediacy at the cost of profundity, and the conquest of time and space at the expense of substance, to be the inverse of the disposition required for creative activity.
I want to generalise the discussion because I take Kennedy to be (explicitly or not) following the form of a broader argument about the individual’s interactions with her environment, and also because she makes general comments about the function of the writer. ‘The pattern of the thing precedes the thing,’ Kennedy quotes; I want to illuminate the pattern behind her argument, then criticise it, before suggesting how we might begin from different presuppositions that nevertheless remain true to the subversive essence of the creative act that Kennedy and I both hold dear.
The pedigree of the argument is important because it predates the specific technologies and their affects that Kennedy discusses. Its basic, abstract structure is this:
There are many things;
of which I am only one, with limited energies and capacities to attend to the others.
They press upon me and threaten my unity; they want to make me like them, that is, scattered and formless.
Thus I shall do well to seek distance and shelter from them, and I will uphold whatever extends, and oppose whatever reduces, that distance and shelter.
In Kennedy’s case, the ‘things’ are the utterances of private individuals published via Web 2.0 technologies. The unity they threaten is primarily mental; the distance and shelter she seeks are equally mental; and the techniques she wants to employ include physically isolating the space of creativity from the space of internet browsing, as well as refusing the peer pressure that imposes an obligation to open up to the many.
In the past the ‘things’ have been the utterances of individuals published in books, journals, magazines and pamphlets, whose volume and superficiality the writer bemoans. Nietzsche viciously regretted the invention of the printing press, Swift lamented the decline of the English tongue, and Robert Burton called his time a ‘scribbling age’. Juvenal, in his first satire (first century AD), justifies his scrivening by claiming that if he doesn’t use the paper one of the other innumerable poets will waste it anyway.
But the ‘things’ may equally be taken as the bodies of people themselves, amassed in rapidly developing urban settlements, threatening the mental stability of the ideologist, bureaucrat or social critic (who, like Poe, Engels and many others besides, both marvels at and cowers before their agglomeration) just as they threatened the political stability of the head of state, who sought both a built distance and a cultural one.
Written by Editorial team on 20-12-2010, No comments
On being struck by lightning
The other night I was struck by lightning. The summer storms sweep up toward my house from the valley behind the menhir shadows of Nimbin Rocks, like a Groke on a rampage, all grey flying sheets and vast threats.
I was standing in the kitchen idly wondering what I would do if I were hanging from a cliff-face threatened by ravenous tigers above and ravenous tigers below, when the lightning hit.
Lightning at very close range really does go CRACK, a massive machete-edged CRACK, like the sound effects in a Marvel comic. The difference is that to replicate the actual aural impact of a lightning strike, especially one in your kitchen, you’d have to magnify the sound effect by about 800 000, and then compress it into a slice of ruptured air about a nanosecond thick. Then when it’s packed good and tight, ignite it. ... read more
Written by Stephen Wright on 17-12-2010, 9 user comments
I wanna tell you a story
I wanna tell you a story. A story of a house and its history. A story of its building. Its problems. Issues.
I wanna tell you a story of its rebuilding. Of the promises made. Of the restructuring and the re-checking. Of the new paint job that cost $10 000. Of the new kitchen and bathroom that now means cupboard doors and new shower. Of the over-costing. Of the big, big promises made, only to be revoked when proper costing is done and it’s realised there’s not enough money to do all that. ... read more
Written by Scott Foyster on 17-12-2010, 1 user comment
The Friday poets
What do Fiona Wright, Eileen Chong, David Musgrave, Michael Farrell, Adrian Wiggins and Philip Hammial have in common? They’re half the poets featured in Overland 201, which is not only crammed with fiction, but also poetry.
Take some time this afternoon to read:
Fiona Wright – Terminus
Eileen Chong − Tank Man
David Musgrave − Machine Code | Homecoming
Michael Farrell − dinner with aspro
Adrian Wiggins − in the simple perfect
Philip Hammial − By the Sea
Written by Editorial team on 17-12-2010, 1 user comment
Post from Uganda: The Rhino Sanctuary
It’s good to be reminded that you’re not the centre of the universe. Scott and I recently made a visit to the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, west of Kampala on the way to Murchison Falls. There, the dry grass catching at our legs and the sun bearing down on our heads, I felt small and unimportant, but in a good way. Standing just metres from their hulking, heavy bodies, I was surprised at how easily I understood that these enormous, sleeping creatures were more important than I was to the staff at the sanctuary. Certainly, they are more important to the world at large.
We signed a waiver upon entering the park indemnifying the staff at the sanctuary should anything go wrong. Yes, we were at a rhino sanctuary, but it was a sanctuary rather than a zoo. The rhinos were wild, they weren’t in captivity. Humans operated on their periphery only, studying them but leaving them to live in peace. I started to understand the waiver we had signed: ... read more
Written by Louise Pine on 16-12-2010, 1 user comment
The industrialised breast
In Overland 201, writer and academic Julie Stephens writes a controversial examination on the neoliberalisation of female labour:
There used to be a billboard in Melbourne that advertised milk by depicting young, large-breasted women cavorting on a trampoline. The radical graffiti activist group Buga-Up painted the words ‘Women are not cows’ in large letters across it. The association between women and the mechanised dairy industry was not a comfortable one – Buga-Up chose its words well – and it wasn’t long before the billboard came down.
These days, however, the association may seem less shocking. We have moved into a new phase of commodification where mothers’ breasts have become harnessed to industrial processes.
Farewell to the tender bond between the breastfeeding mother and baby; enter the motorised breast pump. Once considered an unsightly, even dreaded, medical contraption, the breast pump has become a personal accessory item, designed like a Fendi briefcase or a Gucci backpack. In the United States, new mothers with professional careers are offered work-based ‘lactation rooms’ as incentives to return to work as soon as possible after giving birth. They can make on-line bookings for the purpose-designed pumping chairs in these rooms, where they can ‘comfortably’ plug in and express milk during a work-break. According to journalist Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, lactation rooms are coveted as a sign of a caring workplace, with the newly developed ‘Corporate Lactation Policies’ of companies like Goldman Sachs becoming an accepted substitute for maternity leave.
In an intriguing article on the history and contemporary uses of the breast pump in the United States, Lepore paints a disturbing picture of professional women increasingly describing themselves as ‘lactating mothers’, not breastfeeding mothers. Expressing breast milk and feeding it to a baby via a bottle has become more widespread, even for mothers staying at home. The motorised breast pump industry is booming, with the nation beginning to look, in Lepore’s words, like ‘a giant human dairy farm’. Pumping at work has become de rigueur:
Duck into the ladies’ room at a conference, of, say, professors and chances are you’ll find a flock of women with matching ‘briefcases’, waiting none too patiently and, trust me, more than a little sheepishly, for a turn with the electric outlet. Pumps come with plastic sleeves, like the sleeves in a man’s wallet, into which the mother is supposed to slip a photograph of her baby, because, Pavlov-like, looking at the picture aids ‘let-down’, the release of milk normally triggered by the presence of the baby, its touch, its cry.
In this scenario, breast milk becomes a commodity to be pumped, bottled and fed to the baby to improve its immune system or to ensure that later it achieves higher marks at school. Breastfeeding has been detached from its association with warmth, intimacy, comfort, nurture, emotional wellbeing or flesh against flesh.
In some respects, breast milk has always had a market value. Just as privileged white mothers used to rely on wet nurses, so those working at Goldman Sachs probably depend on other women, from different classes and cultures, to feed the precious (and hard won) ‘expressed milk’ to their infants. While such racialised and class-based patterns of exploitation may be much the same as in the past, the mechanised processes of production are relatively new. Breast pumps may appear personal but their purpose is profoundly industrial: increasing productivity in the workplace.
Written by Editorial team on 16-12-2010, 4 user comments
Plastic water bottles, how I loathe thee
I loathe plastic water bottles. I detest them, I really do. I think they’re ridiculous, wasteful, overpriced and faintly offensive. They’re faintly unhealthy, and insulting. I prefer them to the endless consumption of bottled soft drinks, but I still consider them more pointless. And, in the words of my eighty-five-year-old great aunt, they’re a little bit ‘old lady’.
Let’s face facts. Australia is a first-world country, which means we have among the cleanest water in the world. We have occasional health scares – Giardia, in the 90s, being the last I can think of – but the class of our water systems is such that we know about them. Our water is treated to such high standards that it’s honestly faintly ridiculous, given we use only two per cent of it for actually drinking. In fact, our quality of water is so high that study after study shows people can’t tell the difference between bottle and tap water. When all of that is true, it’s frankly absurd to purchase water at $3 for 600 ml, not to mention wasteful, decadent and sodding selfish. We do not need purified, mountain waters, bottled and transferred to us over hundreds of kilometres. Think of the carbon miles. ... read more
Written by Georgia Claire on 15-12-2010, 10 user comments
Haunted tales
‘If it is possible to assess the current state of Australian literature through a reading of four novels published in late September and October 2010,’ says Overland’s new fiction editor and friend of literature everywhere, Jane Gleeson-White, ‘then I’d say Australian fiction is haunted, preoccupied with the past.’
In ‘Haunted tales’ (Overland 201), Gleeson-White pulls up a chair next to the fireplace of contemporary Australian fiction, reviewing three first novels, Notorious by Roberta Lowing, Night Street by Kristel Thornell and Utopian Man by Lisa Lang, and Chris Womersley’s second novel, Bereft:
Only one of these four novels, Notorious, also embraces the present. And Night Street and Utopian Man, co-winners of the 2009 Australian/Vogel Literary Award, are derived from the lives of two significant Australian cultural figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurial booklover Edward Cole (1832–1918) and Melbourne painter Clarice Beckett (1887–1935). Three of these novels are also, intriguingly, concerned with books and their almost supernatural powers (and Night Street is concerned with the power of art). Here in our relativistic, post-Christian era is fiction as history and the book as an article of faith. ... read more
Written by Editorial team on 15-12-2010, 1 user comment
WikiLeaks and Honduras
While many voices are currently being raised in Australia in defence of WikiLeaks, it has its critics. Luke Walladge, for example, describes Mr Assange as a ‘dangerous anarcho-Marxist with paranoid tendencies’. WikiLeaks is an ‘agenda-driven group of deceptive megalomaniacs’, and ‘the latest disclosure of information has the potential to disrupt the diplomatic processes that help humanity to avoid conflicts. How is this a good thing?’
Assange, writing in his defence, notes similarly the allegation that ‘there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes’. ... read more
Written by Michael Brull on 15-12-2010, 3 user comments
Kath Wilson on craft and flow
In ‘The rhythm of engagement’ in Overland 201 (which can be yours to own), former Overland editor Katherine Wilson probes the world of craft labour:
Forty-three-year-old Gilda Civitico and I are sipping tea and talking about craft in the open-plan rear extension of the modest brick home she shares with her partner, electrical engineer Andrew Peel, and their two young daughters. In the light-filled space are shelves of games, fossils and magazines: New Scientist, IEEE Spectrum, New Economist, Make and Craft, amid a collection of specialist books she calls her ‘craft porn’ (including The Art of Manipulating Fabric and Metal Clay: The Complete Guide).
In her previous professional life, Civitico often worked with fluffy ducklings, easing them tenderly into a sink. ‘I gave them a little pat and let them have a swim,’ she tells me. ‘With their mates.’ Then she cupped a duckling in her hand, anaesthetised it, and while its tiny heart still quivered, she sliced open its belly, snapped through its rib cage, disentangled the organs, and harvested its slippery liver, snipping off portal veins and connective vessels. ‘You have to do it while it’s still alive,’ she explains, ‘or the blood clots.’
It was fiddly work, in which speed and precision were essential. You can’t culture live cells if cell function starts shutting down.
After taking a liver, Civitico swiftly flushed out its red blood cells. She doused it with collagenase, an enzyme that breaks down the binding proteins and transforms the organ into the consistency of soft tofu. She pressed this still-warm mound into a sieve so fine as to only allow single cells through. The resulting slurry she spun in a warm centrifuge, which separated the cells into three distinct bands: fat cells at the top; remnant red blood cells in the middle; and at the bottom, the denser material she coveted – hepatocytes (the main liver tissue cells).
As we tuck into hot scones and homemade jam, she explains the labyrinthine process that followed. Once she isolated the cells, she suspended them in pre-warmed culture media and started a gentle layering and centrifuging in a process she likens to cooking. ‘Think liquid red jelly being gently layered onto not-quite-set green jelly,’ she says. ‘You don’t want them to be mixed.’ When she got the cell density just right, she syringed the substance into a pipette, washed the cells, counted them and checked their viability by a staining process. ‘And then you dilute them out with media to the right number of cells per millilitre of media and this is what you use to seed your cell culture plates.’
Left overnight, exiled in their Petri dishes and sustained with the right temperatures and gas mixtures, the duckling liver cells bonded together and also to their new homes. And, each day for the next few weeks, Civitico tended to their needs, changing growth medium and nutrients. This microbial life-support regime, she explains, is but the first of many procedures before the finicky business of DNA profiling and Hepatitis B dose-response analysis.
Civitico earned her PhD in virology at Melbourne University and, working at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, soon became a deft hand at complex experiments. Some contingents, like the ideal nutrient profile in growth medium, were knowable by keeping abreast of specialist literature. But others – like the subtle colour- or shape-shifts that might suggest cell fatigue, or the ways some cells seem to prefer certain plastic plates – couldn’t be codified in a procedures manual or even adequately explained to an assistant.
Written by Editorial team on 14-12-2010, No comments
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