Overland literary journal

Sacha Cohen’s War

Matt Cornell — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:19:01 +0000

The defining moment in The Dictatorcomes when Sacha Baron Cohen sings ‘Ebony and Ivory’ with the decapitated head of a black man.

Us and Them

Stephen Wright — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:51:12 +0000

I live on the edge of a temperate rainforest. In the city the daylight hours are filled with noise, and at night things fade into silence. In the rainforest everything is reversed. During the day the forest is as silent as the grave. At night it erupts with noise.

Unfree labour and slavery’s second cousins

Elizabeth Humphrys — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:54:08 +0000

Slavery. It was a bad thing that happened somewhere else, in the United States or elsewhere. Or so we are told.

Fiction: The Spider King’s Daughter

Jennifer Mills — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:45:37 +0000

The Spider King’s Daughter opens with a powerful scene of domestic sadism in which the protagonist’s father runs over her dog. Her one-upmanship in this cruelty is the beginning of a game that she calls Frustration, an unhealthy battle for power with her father, which gets her into all kinds of strife later on.

On hunger

Stephanie Convery — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:44:12 +0000

2000 prisoners on hunger strike. Two thousand. 77 days for some of them, starving. In a way, such numbers are tricky – simultaneously easy and cruel. They encourage abstraction and personal disconnection. They suggest formulas and mechanics.

Digital – you keep using that word!

Benjamin Laird — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:01:29 +0000

If technology was going to thwart anything, I’d expect it to be a literary journal. Fittingly enough the current issue of Island is ‘Digitalism’, dedicated to the ‘digital’. It has a collection of essays tackling self-publishing, literary participation and the Australian book publishing industry. Southerly has, as always, two tables of contents: one for print articles and one for their online articles, ‘The long paddock’.

A message from Joseph Goebbels

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:05:49 +0000

Against the backdrop of Anders Breivik’s personal theatre, and on the eve of the staggering electoral result in Greece of the party that for reasons of politeness so many media organisations would rather not call neofascist or neo-Nazi (besides, their symbol is not at all a Swastika, it’s a meander, that’s like a totally different thing, don’t you see?), outside the train station in Bologna, I picked up an old film magazine.

On work and Girls

Ellena Savage — Mon, 14 May 2012 03:23:31 +0000

It has been four months since I had a job. It’s the longest time in ten years that I’ve not had a job – at least, a job that tallies up my hours, deducts the things I broke that week, and puts money into my account.

Call for spoken word submissions

Editorial team — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:04:03 +0000

Audio submissions of spoken word poetry are sought for a special online presentation of Overland to be published in July 2012. Submissions must be under ten minutes in length, and sent as an audio file via the online submission system at overland.org.au before 12 July 2012. Audio Overland will be guest edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Living in The Avengers’ universe

Jeff Sparrow — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:43:12 +0000

What happens when the disengagement of the populace from political life gets thoroughly normalised? In such circumstances, the political class and its agents seem, almost by definition, able to perform feats that ordinary people simply cannot. That seems to me the context for the new hegemony of superheroes. The genre no longer presents as wish-fulfillment so much as a kind of realism – an accurate depiction of the way society works. We are, in other words, already living in a comic book.

The fastest growing bloodsport in the world

Rjurik Davidson — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:48:00 +0000

The first time I saw UFC on the television, the experience was akin to watching a car crash. One fighter had knocked the other out. Before the referee could intervene, the fighter had launched himself onto his prone opponent and began to pummel the man’s unconscious face with ‘hammer fists’.

Changing the world, one grandmother at a time

Jane Gleeson-White — Wed, 09 May 2012 03:14:38 +0000

And then I read a comment below his blog: ‘I think there has to be a direct discourse of kindness unearthed somewhere. Kindness has become a kind of granny-virtue, if I can say that and be understood without offending grannies.

Poetry: Australian Poetry Since 1788

Ali Alizadeh — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:49:49 +0000

Why set out to be so unforgiving about what is, ultimately, just an anthology, i.e. a subjective selection made by two mere, imperfect mortals?

A Dangerous Method: violating the boundary between theory and practice

Tad Tietze — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:12:37 +0000

Cronenberg has in the past fended off accusations that his films are cautionary tales about when scientists ‘go too far’ and ‘play God’. If anything, his work is a direct rejection of such ideas, which have been a staple of North American science-fiction cinema.

Where are the shows about neurotic Black women?

Jacinda Woodhead — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:27:03 +0000

If you’ve spent time flitting across the internet over the past few weeks, chances are you’ve encountered the Lena Dunham/Girls backlash, or ‘backlash to the backlash’, even if you’ve never watched the show (which is likely in Australia, because it hasn’t even screened here yet.)