Progressive culture since 1954
Grease-black, the Californian sea lion moves through the pool like a slick of oil pushed by a strong current. Propelled by rear flippers in a momentous leap, a halo of water spins from its glossy head, and, as the awkward mound flops down, a large splash rises to an elated chorus of laughter. A cool bead hits my arm. The smell in the air is cold fish mixed with the scent left in a room after a dog has been bathed.
Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 June, State Library Victoria, Conference Centre
Join Overland at the National Writers’ Conference weekend, as part of the 2018 Emerging Writers’ Festival. There’s a panel on mentoring, featuring Laniyuk Garcon and Ellen van Neerven, a couple of industry sessions, such as ‘What editors want’ and ‘Pitch it!’, and Overland will have a trade table all Saturday, where you can stop by and talk with mag eds, peruse issues and maybe even try on some Overland tees.
For many writers, especially liberals, thinking and writing about politics isn’t a precursor to changing the world, it is an alternative to doing so. That’s particularly the case since writing and reading are individualistic, middle-class pursuits deeply marked by the cultural logic of capitalism.
To continue to eat meat depends not on our biology but on our commitment to an idea that, if pushed, most of us would reject: that the spoliation of the natural world and the suffering of animals are less important than the gustatory pleasure we take in eating meat and dairy.
What does unionism mean to people today? What should be its objectives? How can we come together to make real change, now and into the future?
This prize encourages artists and writers of fiction, poetry and essays to be part of setting a new agenda for our future – to imagine a just, common future, and how we might get there together.
But Wairoa has been hit the hardest. And it is here, in this small Hawke’s Bay town, that the debate about the future of New Zealand’s workplace relations policy really matters. Wairoa is a town deeply affected by the impacts of job insecurity and the legacy of an industrial dispute. Will the new government’s workplace legislation change that?
The debate over Hobart’s proposed cable car – mooted to run from Cascade Gardens and across the Organ Pipes to the pinnacle of kunanyi/Mt Wellington – transcends the stereotypical Tassie-greenie vs. ‘economic progress’ conflict. Local tensions are being ignited by concerns over due process and political transparency, the erasure of Indigenous rights and cultural agency, and short-sighted planning that is viewing the future of Tasmania purely through a tourism lens.
Hedva’s book is a pulsing work. It makes you want to delete all your social media, even as it recognises the internet as a potential space of freedom for those who understand its workings. In On Hell, Hedva identifies the effects of control on the brown body, bodies that are routinely subject to the violence of systematic oppression and incarceration.
This week forty years ago, Italy became the first country in the world to legislate the closure of its asylums. The law was drafted by a psychiatrist and member of the governing Christian Democratic party, Bruno Orsini, but was known from the outset as ‘Basaglia Law’, after the leader of the movement that pushed for that radical and in some ways paradoxical reform.
Films about black teenagers, crime and drug dealers can claim a good portion of American cinematic history. Hollywood has always been good at exploiting its audience’s desires and, more relevantly, fears. It’s an industry inherently geared towards capitalist consumption. This is why you should fear the black man, these early films seemingly said, to white viewers. Why did it take mainstream American cinema so long to show us complex black characters?
‘Multiculturalism should not just mean majority group assistance for minority cultural groups,’ the Council wrote, ‘but rather should be a way of perceiving Australian society as a whole.’ And for a brief moment, ‘multiculturalism’ meant something in Australia. It meant structural pluralism, wherein institutions in all parts of society are expanded and changed to accommodate a society made up of people from many different backgrounds.
Maybe I can’t blame Stalin for my disordered eating, but I think we must allow for unexpected ways that trauma persists – the cycles and resonances following the wandering migrant; the lost community, incoherent and unpredictable.
Here’s how my old FanFiction.net profile describes me:
Author has written 24 stories for Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, Once and Again, Troy, Dirty Dancing, Love Actually, Misc. Movies, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, West Wing, One Tree Hill, Grey’s Anatomy, Robin Hood BBC, Twilight, Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries, and Mercy Thompson series.
When Pound structured poetry into three forms in the 1930s (melapoeia, phanopoiea and logopoeia), it’s unlikely he could have anticipated the confessional, tag-and-shareable, anti-intellectual iteration of online poetry in the 21st century. #instapoetry, Pinterest poetry and Tumblr poetry, often created by the same individuals and shared across platforms, push a direct, targeted meaning which is arguably without poetic or intellectual interference.
Described as an ‘immersive, intimate exploration of Islam, skateboarding and sexual politics’, the film follows the ‘surprising’ phenomenon of Muslim women skateboarders. Its aim: to tackle the stereotype of ‘passive, subservient Muslim women’.