Overland literary journal

Dispatch from our intern

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the time is ripe for reflection. As is commonly said, the events of September 11, 2001 ‘changed everything’, and a decade on we are still trying to make sense of what happened that day, and where we’ve come since then.

This week TomDispatch.com will be attempting to make sense of the legacy of 9/11, and they begin with a post by Noam Chomsky called ‘Was There An Alternative? Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later’. The founding editor of TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt, weighs in, too, in the latest TomCast podcast, and he calls for the cancellation of 9/11 ceremonies since they, among other reasons, ‘provide a blank check for the military to conduct its wars’. Keep an eye on the website for more posts in the coming days.

Islamophobia is a disturbing sentiment that has intensified in the West over the past ten years, and recently the Centre for American Progress released a report titled ‘Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America’, which chronicles how a small group of anti-Muslim organisations, think tanks, financiers, politicians and media commentators are able to proliferate the fear and hatred of Muslims in America. Antiwar radio conducted a great interview with co-author of the report Eli Clifton.

Also worth a listen on Antiwar radio is the interview with journalist and author of Obama Does Globalistan, Pepe Escobar. Escobar has been reporting on the Arab uprisings for the Asia Times, and in an interview with Antiwar radio host Scott Horton, Escobar discusses a recent article of his on the Libyan intervention, ‘R2P is now Right 2 Plunder’. Yep, you guessed it, according to Escobar NATO allies will amass wealth out of reconstructing Libya (like, rebuilding what they bombed) and by extracting its natural resources. Listen to the podcast, and follow Escobar’s reporting for the Asia Times.

Exploring similar issues to Andy Worthington’s article ‘When America Changed Forever’ (in the latest Overland), Lisa Hajjar, a professor of sociology at the University of California and co-editor of Jadaliyya, is writing a five-part series for Al Jazeera on America’s detention policy post-9/11. Part one is already up.

And if you missed it, see Malalai Joya’s opinion piece in the Age. Joya, an Afghan writer and activist Overland brought out for the Melbourne Writers Festival, is also interviewed in Overland 204, which can now be read online.

And some extra links:

• Independent Israeli journalist Joseph Dana reviews a new book that explores Israel’s military legal system, titled Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel

• For a bit of literature: Perry Anderson on the historical novel, over at The London Review of Books

• New Matilda is calling for 1500 readers to sign up as financial supporters to keep the publication afloat in 2012

• And, lastly, if you’re like me and didn’t get to see as many Melbourne Writers’ Festival events as you hoped, catch up on all the fun of the Festival at its official blog. Overland’s Clare Strahan was also a MWF UNblogger this year, and you can read her coverage of the Festival at her blog, 9fragmented

Written by Roselina Press on 9-09-2011, 2 user comments

The short of it

With the release of my debut collection of fiction I’ve been talking about the short story a lot and it’s got me thinking.

To my mind the short story is undervalued. There are a plethora of short fiction competitions and a handful of literary magazines that will publish them, but a collection in book form? Unless you’re Tim Winton forget it. Nam Le’s debut collection The Boat (2008) is one notable exception. It won every award imaginable and became an international bestseller. Then A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Writers were no doubt hoping all this was a sign of changing times, a sign that the short form was gaining greater recognition. But even Marion Halligan, one of our most celebrated authors with 20 books to her name, recounts how when her latest short fiction collection, Shooting the Fox , landed on her agent’s desk she phoned her up and groaned, ‘Oh, Marion. Short stories?’ ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 8-09-2011, 8 user comments

A voice that demands to be heard

Love and Fuck Poems
Koraly Dimitriadis

First, to discuss the controversy. ‘Poetry or pornography?’ was posted on this blog by Koraly in June, and, at last count, has generated 96 comments. To dispel the argument: shock is subjective. Some people might be shocked by the content of this collection, it might warrant a ‘sexually explicit’ label on its cover, but this is the nature of poetry, open to interpretation and judgment. Consider how Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo & Juliet received an M15⁺ rating in Australia, whereas Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 interpretation of exactly the same words only received a PG. It’s all just a matter of perspective. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 7-09-2011, 11 user comments

For non-legals: a guide to the High Court’s ruling

Introduction

I think generally the law is under-understood. Experts comment on it, because they’re the only people who understand it. Often, they do not explain much. When they do, they are generally very diplomatic and civil when commenting publicly. There is a convention that it is necessary, if not merely important, to be deferential whenever one comments on judgments and legal opinion. In my view, this compounds the problem of bias I think one finds from legal commentators, who tend to fall within a narrow political range (that is, not a very long way leftwards). I think it is desirable to try to explain the law to people, especially when it’s something as significant as this case (which I’ll call M70). However, law is difficult and complicated. I think I have some competence in understanding the area of law of this case (administrative law). However, I freely admit that I am not an expert, and what follows could be wrong. How wrong is yet to be determined. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 7-09-2011, No comments

The Stella, pub feminism and Greek goddesses

Last Friday night in Melbourne a new prize for women’s writing was officially launched. Called the Stella Prize, it’s named after Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin. The name is a nod at the fiction prize Franklin established in her will, the Miles Franklin Award, which in 2009 and 2011 presented male-only shortlists despite the fact that excellent fiction had been published by Australian women in those years.

These and other similar events – detailed by writer and editor Sophie Cunningham in her speech on why we still need feminism at the 2011 Melbourne Writers’ Festival – have led a group of women to take action to support women’s writing.

Cunningham is one of the founders of the Stella Prize and a member of its committee, along with bookish and feminist luminaries Jo Case, Monica Dux, Christine Gordon, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Susan Johnson, Jenny Niven, Rebecca Starford, Louise Swinn, Kirsten Tranter and Aviva Tuffield. The prize is part of their broader intention to, as Cunningham says, ‘work as a lobby group for women in publishing, to set up mentorship schemes, and to undertake rigorous and current research on women in publishing.’ ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 6-09-2011, 7 user comments

‘No nation can liberate another nation’

Malalai Joya's talks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival presented the war in Afghanistan quite differently to how it's normally discussed here.

Whereas Australians are told that, without NATO, Afghanistan would descend into civil war, Joya explained that civil war is already raging; where we're assured that foreign intervention protects Afghans from the Taliban, Joya says that the Taliban are, in essence, already in power, since the warlords and fundamentalists aligned with the Karzai regime share all the Taliban's most reactionary attitudes. She explains more in her interview with Overland, which is now online. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 5-09-2011, 1 user comment

Now that we know what you think

We’d like to say a gigantic thankyou to everyone who participated in the Overland readers survey. We had nearly 500 responses, more than we expected, and we learned some fascinating things about you:

Firstly, you clearly have good taste. Secondly, you could be any age, and are fractionally more likely to be a woman. Many of you are here for the politics and culture, and quite a number of you are writers. More importantly, though, we learned what you think does and doesn’t work in Overland, information that will be used to shape our magazine into the future, in print and online. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 2-09-2011, 2 user comments

Bite your tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Francesca Rendle-Short
Spinifex Press

In Bite Your Tongue, Professor Francesca Rendle-Short managed to pull-off a remarkable feat: a fictionalised memoir that moves pretty-well-effortlessly between the directly auto-biographical and the lyricism of good fiction. Her description here, of her created self, ‘Glory’, represented in a childhood photograph of Francesca, sums up the relationship between the two ‘characters’:

Here, swimming in this backyard pool, a little girl and her rubber ring make music in the water with a leg cocked sidewards, a face angled skywards. Here in these words, she comes alive in story. Together, she and I become more than simply a portrait of what once was. As the story gets going, the two of us swim together with only a slit of indiscernible Brisbane daylight between—depending on the slant, the hold, the poetry. Water drips through our hair.

... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 1-09-2011, 1 user comment