Overland literary journal

Universities in ruins

Peter Cook once said that nobody had actually read Don Quixote, and though Cervantes might have written it, even he couldn’t be bothered reading it as well. When I heard Cook say this, it relieved me of a great responsibility, that of reading Don Quixote. These days I try never to read any book that weighs more than a brick, but it’s very easy to fill one’s own bookshelves with books that should be read, rather than books that one wants to read and might enjoy.

I still haven’t read Don Quixote, and don’t own a copy so I’m never tempted to try. Gathering a library of books together can be a bit like creating a new family. Biological families, as most of us have hopefully found out, just aren’t enough. Putting together a family of choice that doesn’t in some way replicate the family of origin can be tricky. You can end up accidentally marrying one of your parents (‘You’re just like my mother!’) or squabbling with friends over a variety of objects you’re highly attached to in the same way you used to argue with your brother over who got the GI Joe and who got the Action Man. In the same way we can end up with libraries of books that we hump around for all kinds of reasons other than we enjoy them. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 16-11-2011, 36 user comments

Saint Steve Jobs

I can’t be the only person who on seeing the mindboggling hysteria over the death of Steve Jobs found himself insistently murmuring ‘Foxconn, Foxconn’, over and over as if they were uttering a protective mantra. If I hear one more person gratefully sigh that Jobs was a genius, while lovingly fondling their iPhone, I’ll probably heave into my breakfast.

It might be true that Jobs redefined the way we think about telephones, personal computers and music players, and it’s probably quite an achievement to put most of the planet’s population on the same playing field technology-wise. Whether you’re the Queen or a hooded kid from Tottenham, the iPod is now your music player of choice. But still your iPod/

Written by Stephen Wright on 7-10-2011, 47 user comments

Now we have Bono

When the dust and ash settle, it seems that only then can we gain some kind of perspective on an event. Things can be parcelled out, measured and assessed. Of course narratives start competing as well, and histories are written. But history is always written after the fact, that’s its nature I guess. Only lunatics or politicians would look to their actions with an eye on history, as if they were writing a story they already knew the end to.

In this regard I was thinking not about the September 11 attacks but about what have become known as the London Riots, and about a few things that happened to me as well, both in the far and recent pasts. Sometimes in the immediate heat of an extraordinary event something can be understood that cannot be understood in the future in the same way. Something can be said that can’t be said at other times, and can never be said again. I’m not trying to promote a romantic privileging of the traumatic. As someone whose day job involves working with people who have often routinely used violence to make things happen, or with others who have experienced great violence I don’t subscribe to any kind of ‘It’s all good’ theory, or think that people magically benefit from something called ‘closure’. Sometimes it’s just all bad. And when it’s all bad, there can be a kind of bottomless loneliness revealed to life. Suddenly you don’t share a world view with anyone else. Suddenly you have experienced something that another cannot understand or comprehend. Something has gone that you can never get back in any form and something else has been simultaneously revealed that you can never forget. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 12-09-2011, 3 user comments

Utoya and the fascist mind

Until Boris Kelly popped up on the weekend with his usual lucid description of things, I was starting to wonder if Utoya would pass uncommented by the Overland blog. The Overland blog is often punctuated by some odd silences (nothing to date on SlutWalks or the implosion of the Murdoch empire), and any conversation in any circumstance is always notable for what is not said as much as what is. Of course the silences are no doubt partly a result of Ol bloggers being a disparate and unpaid group with only occasional time and random motivation. But still there’s never a lack of room for ad nauseam discussion about the end of the book and so on and so forth. It’s always seemed to me that Overland can be the place where things can be said that can’t be said anywhere else, and that’s the whole point of both journal and blog. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 1-08-2011, 33 user comments

Being Kylie Minogue

One night in early Autumn I woke from a dream of wolves, and through a chain of association that the dream provoked in my half-awake state (wolves, a page of A Thousand Plateaus, plurality, identities, time, loss, grief) found myself thinking about Kylie Minogue who I had seen crying on TV the previous night while she was being interviewed by Molly Meldrum.

I share a house with three Kylie devotees so June is shaping up as the Month of Kylie, as she hits the country on her Aphrodite tour. It’s surprising to remember how long Kylie has been around. Impossible Princess, the album that contains the Kylie-standards ‘Breathe’ and ‘Cowboy Style’ was released in 1997, colliding with the death of Diana, and she was already a star then. In fact it’s just over twenty years since Kylie’s first live gig, in Brisbane in 1990. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 10-06-2011, 7 user comments

The madness of Bradley Manning

On the weekend the Guardian headlined an investigative report on the personal history of Bradley Manning. The question the Guardian raises as the imperative behind its ‘investigation’ is: ‘Why did the US army ignore warnings from officers that Manning was unstable?’ ‘Unstable’ apparently refers to Manning’s mental state before he was sent to Iraq and plugged himself into SIPRNet. The implication of the Guardian’s question seems to be that if the US military had weeded out this nutjob early enough, they would have saved themselves a whole lot of trouble. The Guardian’s reporting is frankly shoddy, poorly written, sensationalised and generally very strange, and for all its claims to be investigative, seems to contain a lot of information already publicly available. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 30-05-2011, 25 user comments

Ding-dong, the witch is dead

It started with television images that resembled a macabre outtake from a Hollywood blockbuster and it seems to have ended like one too. Ten years ago it was the planes hitting the towers, like a trailer from an upcoming Die Hard film, and last week it was the crowds celebrating outside the White House mirroring the arrival of Dorothy in Oz.

Whirled out of the heart of America, Dorothy dropped out of the sky into Foreigners-ville, crushing an incarnation of evil under solid American timbers in a weird pre-figuration of last week’s raid in Pakistan, where our American heroes were themselves whirled into the sky (though Stealth-ily) and dropped into the land of the freaky towelheads, right onto the head of the biggest baddie of them all. Cue singing, dancing and general merriment. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 9-05-2011, 15 user comments

Grief, stolen children and SIEV 221

The controversy over the burial of the dead of SIEV 221 still seems to have the aura of an event that everyone agrees not to speak of ever again. Some things in life, Scott Morrison’s outrage at the SIEV 221 funerals being one of them, are just too creepy to keep talking about. For a moment it seemed as though Morrison had weirded out most of the country with his astounding statements. Even the media, never shy of a lurid headline, struggled with that one. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 13-04-2011, 9 user comments

The revenger’s comedy

In early January, on a random scrap of paper on my desk, I wrote: ‘I just want it said, if there is any need to say it, that it seems blindingly obvious to me that Kevin Rudd is already wondering if he can do to Julia Gillard what she did to him; shaft her and become Prime Minister.’ Over New Year, Rudd had a kind of mini unofficial campaign launch at the Woodford Folk Festival, where he revisited the ‘I’m here to help’ slogan and played to an audience still hoping that someone will take action on climate change, stop treating refugees so criminally and start to act and think like a person with a soul not owned by flesh-eating aliens from the planet Zok. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 21-03-2011, 8 user comments

Politics and Religion in the New Century

Politics and Religion in the New Century
Philip Quadrio and Carrol Besseling (eds)
Sydney University Press

Any critical engagement with the politics of religious discourse that begins by acknowledging Al Swearangen and Joe Strummer has to be worth more than a second look. At least I’ve made the assumption that is the Joe Strummer and the Al Swearangen. It’s possible I’m reading too much into it and they are referring to Professors Strummer and Swearangen who are comfortably ensconced in chairs at Sydney Uni. I’ll go with my first assumption as it gives me a better springboard into Politics and Religion in the New Century, edited by Philip Quadrio and Carrol Besseling. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 9-03-2011, 4 user comments

A cure for stuttering

It’s true I think, as Adam Phillips remarked in one of his later essays, that we continually speak each other’s unspoken thoughts. We are not as discrete as we appear to be. There are many things in our lives that get spoken over and over, that we can’t stop speaking of, that are, in a sense, barely intelligible markers of things we don’t really know we are turning into utterance. It’s as if there is always something unspeakable inside us.

We all have pockets of unintegrated stuff hidden away within; autistic bits, psychotic bits, dissociated bits, and so on. They try and make themselves known again and again, in all sorts of weird ways. It’s as if we keep stuttering over and over, even stuttering about our stuttering. Those of us who are readers and writers may well be the worst stutterers of all. Writers speak in books, over and over. It’s as if the highly literate are people who just can’t shut up. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-02-2011, 3 user comments

The paddocks of amnesia

On Australia Day night the moon rose very late. On nights like that the sky is revealed as an event that the word ‘spectacular’ doesn’t do justice. The Milky Way with the Magellanic Clouds hanging off it gives the sky a profound depth. In daylight the farthest you can see is three-and-a-half minutes no matter where you are. At night, the farthest object you can see with the naked eye – Galaxy M31 in Andromeda – is about 2.5 million light years away. Light that set out toward us, as Carl Sagan once memorably put it to his presumably astounded American television audience, long before there were hamburgers or television. It’s the strangest thing looking at the revealed night sky. There’s a kind of ‘Oh, that’s the sky’ moment of understanding. That blue stuff we usually think of as sky, isn’t. We’ve just got the light shining in our eyes and can’t see anything. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 8-02-2011, 6 user comments

The politics of paranoia

In his scathing review of George W. Bush’s account of his Presidency, Decision Points, at the LRB, Eliot Weinberger suggests that the most likely Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2012, is Jeb Bush. The fact that we might find ourselves heaving a covert sigh of relief at this news, that at least Jeb Bush isn’t Sarah Palin, shows how much our sense of what is mad and what is dangerous have been elided in the past few years. Of brother George, Weinberger writes: ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-01-2011, 10 user comments

The provenance of things

Happy New Year. Gerard de Nerval – the bloke who used to walk around Paris with a lobster on a lead – once wrote that he believed that ‘the human imagination never invented anything that was not true, in this world or any other’.

Very soon I’ll be starting a new job, my first in two years, partly because I’ve run completely out of money. Of course, I add hastily, there’s a strong desire to again engage in some work that is also my version or interpretation of intentional activism too, and work with people who are cohesive, are neither too idealistic nor too despairing and tell good jokes. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 13-01-2011, 1 user comment