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Brull’s bookshelf

I’m not a Christian, so I didn’t think of doing this earlier and saying ‘go and get these for Christmas for your pinko friends’. But the end of the year is as good a time as any. So, I thought I’d recommend some books.

I just read it, so this one’s first: Bleeding Afghanistan, by James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar. I think leftists should understand the wars we should be opposing now. This book is five years old, but is very, very good. It looks at the history of Afghanistan; it rightly situates Hamid Karzai as the Western puppet he is, talks about the Islamist warlords we’ve supported, the Islamist theocracy we’ve created and the role of Zalmay Khalilzad. There have been developments since then and greater documentation. But in a pretty brief book, it’s very well reported, hits all the right notes and sets out the contours for understanding our occupation of Afghanistan. I do not necessarily agree with all of its recommendations – it is rather equivocal about ending the occupation. Specifically, the authors say public opinion in Afghanistan at the time was supportive of the occupation continuing. They therefore recommend ending the occupation when the country is safer and warlords are disarmed (or something like that). I think the former condition is the kind of condition Cheney would support – so that they could justify occupation for the next 20 years. The other recommendations are more reasonable. Considering recommendations only take up a few pages, I would not want my reservations on this score to detract from what I consider an excellent and important book, which is the one book above all I would think should be read by activists against this war. People should not just talk about bombing of civilians in Afghanistan – they need to understand more, and this book sets it out clearly and carefully. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 30-12-2011, 2 user comments

The state is not the remedy but the poison

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue against George Monbiot’s contention that the state is required to curb the excesses of capital, by imposing ‘legal restraints upon freedoms which interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.’ Decades of financial deregulation led to a financial crisis to which we are yet to know the full cost; the gap between rich and poor continues to grow; and governments frequently excuse regressive policies against the will of the public on the grounds of ensuring market confidence. In such times, it is understandable that Monbiot defends the role of the state as bulwark against big business, following Henri Lacondaire’s axiom that ‘between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the master and the servant, it’s liberty that oppresses, and the law that liberates’. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 28-12-2011, 3 user comments

All about happiness, tra-la-la

Happiness, like sanity, is something we have very few definitions of. We’ve got any number of ways of describing what it looks like to be crazy, and probably as many to describe all the variations of misery. Stephanie Convery’s review at Overland a while back of David Malouf’s Quarterly Essay on happiness showed very clearly how even the writers we have been told are literate flounder when trying to philosophise about happiness, either falling back on hackneyed definitions derived from the classics, or fumbling around on the edges of the trite language of self-help manuals. Life is unfortunately not a metaphysical exercise, just as Christmas is not a time of unalloyed bliss. Christmas is in fact a crap time for a lot of people, and family violence tends to spike at Christmas. Whether they are writers or salesmen no-one looks so foolish as the person who says they will now tell us all about happiness, as though they know what it is, as though happiness is a quality that can be acquired by buying particular objects, or reading certain books. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 23-12-2011, 28 user comments

The US forces in our country

On 17 of November Barack Obama touched down in Darwin for a visit that sent Darwin into a tailspin. The visit had been announced weeks earlier, giving Darwin time to spruce up for the visit. This included painting all the public benches on The Esplanade, where Obama was going to pay tribute to the US sailors who were killed when the Japanese bombed the USS Peary in 1942. It also included moving all the ‘Longgrassers’ (itinerant people, mainly Aboriginal, who congregate on the green grass, under shady trees during the day) out of town. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 22-12-2011, 3 user comments

Small presses and free markets

Caroline Hamilton is a research fellow in the Department of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and has also worked as a freelance writer and editor. Her latest book One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity is published by Continuum. We spoke to Caroline about her article ‘Sympathy for the devil?’ which is featured the latest edition of Overland. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 22-12-2011, No comments

This year in film

1. The Kid With a Bike (Le Gamin au vélo)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy

2011 may be the year that 3D came into its own with auteurs from Spielberg and Scorsese to Wenders and Herzog making admirable contributions to the medium. However, this year belongs to a modestly analogue film about an eleven-year-old boy abandoned by his father and taken in by a young woman. The filmmaking of The Kid With a Bike is unshowy yet wildly kinetic, driven by the camera’s need to follow a boy whose desperation sends him running with the velocity of a wild animal. With this astonishing film, the Dardennes remind us that cinema’s true greatness lies not in technological advancements but in ideas and stories. ... read more

Written by Brad Nguyen on 21-12-2011, No comments

How dumb luck got me published

Morris Gleitzman once said that every successful writer he knew could look back to one incident of good fortune that lifted them above the crowd. I think I’ve just had mine.

I’ve always loved those stories about the serendipity of some unlikely twist of fate that has led to a publisher discovering a manuscript. Let’s face it, luck and publishing go hand in hand. Having recently acquired a good luck story of my very own (more on that in a moment) it seemed like a good excuse to interview a bunch of talented local authors about how luck has played a part in their own fortunes. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 21-12-2011, No comments

All linked up (but not always with enough love or grace)

There was one (probably among many) critical and seemingly obvious point when viewing Adam Curtis’s documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Namely, that there are many important relationships, connections and consequences from all the actions and developments that shape our lives.

Adam Curtis’s television essay journeyed from Ayn Rand to global financial meltdowns to colonialism and its consequences via machines, sex scandals and wars. There may be links between all or some of these things. However, we will never know if or how connections work without public discussions. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 20-12-2011, No comments

Meanland: Beautiful statistics

With a glut of 4,568 emails, many of which are links emailed from my twitter account for deeper reading, I try to focus on the task at hand. After six months you’d think I’d have lost the fascination. But what I’m learning is too great to ignore. After eight years as a stay-at-home mum, I’m hungering for conversations reminiscent of those had in London when I worked for a woman who played a leading role in shifting attitudes on disability. On Twitter are shares I have not before been privy to in such abundance. The buzz comes from journalists, writers, scientists, visual artists, digital natives and others sharing literature, publishing, innovations, climate change, equality and more. It’s huge. I am gorging. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 20-12-2011, 2 user comments

Mr Rudd: Protect Assange!

This is an open letter to Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Attorney-General Nicola Roxon. It calls on the Australian government to take steps to ensure Julian Assange's human rights are protected. It will be delivered on 19 December 2011, but we encourage members of the public to sign the letter below by adding their full name in the comments section, together with any comment they may wish to make. Please feel free to spread the word about the letter to others who may be interested.

Bernard Keane and Elizabeth O'Shea

The Hon Kevin Rudd
Minister for Foreign Affairs
Parliament House ACT 2600

Dear Minister

We write to express our concern about the plight of Julian Assange.

To date, no charges have been laid against Mr Ass

Written by Editorial team on 18-12-2011, 885 user comments

Best non-fiction reads 2011

My pick of non-fiction books is, as you would expect, mostly a reflection of my own particular obsessions and interests. However, one of the pleasures of being a regular reviewer of non-fiction books is the discovery of gems you would not otherwise have stumbled across or even thought were your thing.

One such discovery was How to Cause a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behaviour by Laura Kipnis (Scribe). This book could have been a supremely trashy exercise in schadenfreude were it not for Kipnis’s witty razor-sharp analysis of the unconscious forces that drive those who scandalise and those who feed on these public fiascos. Taking her cue from Freud, Laura Kipnis tackles four case studies – the spurned female astronaut bent on revenge, the judge who created alter-egos to stalk a former lover, the false friend who snitched on Monica Lewinsky and the fibbing memoirist. As she follows the convolutions of these lurid plots, she lays bare the basic psychic ingredients of scandal: the impulse to self-sabotage, the capacity for self-delusion, the revenge imperative, the flimsiness of rationality and the collective hunger for a scapegoat. Her psychoanalytical approach, fascination with human foibles and feel for narrative make Kipnis akin to Janet Malcolm on overdrive. ... read more

Written by Fiona Capp on 16-12-2011, No comments

City Hall as Trojan Horse: lessons from Occupy LA

While protesters in Oakland, Portland, Boston, New York and cities throughout the US faced riot police with tear gas canisters, their comrades in Los Angeles enjoyed a much cosier relationship with the city and its police. From the very beginning, organisers of Occupy LA made a decision to work closely with the city government and the police, through liaisons, in an effort to avoid the kinds of confrontations seen in other cities. As media team organiser Lisa Clapier put it in characteristically New-Agey prose, ‘[We] chose collectively to remain in our integrity and NOT break the law, unless doing so WAS in integrity.’

Though initially gathering in Pershing Square, a large public space near many financial institutions, organisers quickly opted to set up camp in the grassy park surrounding City Hall, just a stone’s throw from LAPD headquarters. The LAPD set up a command post inside City Hall, allowing for easy surveillance of the park and assigned twelve full-time officers to the protest. The activists, for their part, toed the line, dutifully moving their tents to the surrounding sidewalk each night at 10:30, in keeping with park rules. It was, as one sceptic noted, an ‘occupation by permission’. ... read more

Written by Matt Cornell on 16-12-2011, 1 user comment

Favourite fiction 2011

Shorts

David Malouf’s The Complete Short Stories may have been published in 2008 (Vintage) but I’m including it in my favourite Australian fiction picks for 2011 because it’s one of my best literary investments this year. (That and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but that book is so far from ‘2011’ and ‘Australian fiction’ that I don’t think I can get away with it.) My favourite Malouf short, ‘Every Breath You Take’, is the title piece from one of his earlier collections. I’ve been back to the story a few times to try and sort out the uncomfortable feeling that Malouf is reading me and not the other way around. How does a seventy-something man know anything about my disintegration during that love affair? The Complete Short Stories is a slow feast of pretty-close-to-perfect craft by a master. ... read more

Written by Sarah Drummond on 15-12-2011, 2 user comments

Lessons from the age of riots and revolution

An interview with Brad Nguyen

Brad Nguyen is the co-editor of Screen Machine, an online magazine on film, media and cultural criticism. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne and has done film reviewing for Triple R Breakfasters. He chats with us about his essay ‘Morality Begone!’, which is featured in the latest edition of Overland.

In your essay you write that by framing outbreaks of social violence – one example being the London riots – in moral terms, ‘the true political dimension is obliterated’. Could you please describe what you mean by this? ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 15-12-2011, 1 user comment

Top Ten Poetic Moments of 2011

The following is a list of my ten favourite moments in Australian poetry in the past year or so. I call it a list of moments because not all of these are poems; a few of them are discussions of poetry which I enjoyed for various reasons.

In a recent entry on my own blog entitled ‘Some Thoughts’ I made a few points about my sometimes awkward relationship with contemporary Australian poetry. I will refrain from quoting myself here but I will preface the following list by admitting that if permitted I would spend all my time reading books by my favourite poets and authors, almost all of whom are international and dead.

However, I will also admit that on occasion it proves a blessing to be forced to delve into contemporary Australian poetry and the following is a list of ten things that failed to make me wish I was born in another time and place: ... read more

Written by Tara Mokhtari on 14-12-2011, 3 user comments