Progressive culture since 1954
The once-obscure bush capital, and its number plates, have been keen to adopt new hipster clothing; to present as something like that ‘cool inland city that your best mate lives in’. Yet like every trend that drapes itself in ironic sentiment, there’s more than a kernel of serious intent here, as there is to the apparently outlandish claim that Canberra – yes, Canberra – is now the cultural capital of Australia.
Overland is seeking poetry submissions for a special online edition – ‘Tribulations of the digital frontier’ – to be guest edited by long-time Overland volunteer, Mitchell Welch.
There were meta-critical and existential post-it notes; numerous Wikipedia entries so studiously facsimiled that I’d find myself searching the website, certain they had been copy and pasted; more meticulously and inventively documented crimes than Dick Wolf could ever hope to produce; intra- and inter-office email threads that were unstitched; love letters; threats; liner notes for non-existent albums; and so much more I could not have imagined when putting the callout for false documents.
On Friday, Canadian alt-right YouTuber and activist Lauren Southern will host the Melbourne leg of her national speaking tour, alongside fellow alt-right YouTuber and compatriot Stefan Molyneux. Southern’s video announcing her tour really tries to bring the drama: ‘You guys are at a crossroads. Do you want to retain your culture … your borders, family, identity? Or will the boats keep coming, the no-go zones keep growing and will you become another victim of multiculturalism?’
Collaborations are difficult beasts to navigate at the best of times. When collaborators are coming from very different worlds, from very different ways of experiencing and understanding and making, the dynamic becomes all that more complicated, and all that more compelling.
In such a short time we have achieved so much, from 2013 to right now 2018. We have established an amazing organisation that represents Us Mob in the literary world. We have put some fantastic strategies in place that have reached out not only nationally but ato the other side of the world.
Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse.
Last week, videogame studio ArenaNet fired two of its employees. After a mild Twitter altercation in which narrative designer Jessica Price called out someone for mansplaining her job back to her, a hateful mob of misogynistic gamers mobilised to complain about her ‘abusive’ behaviour.
We – none of us have understood what dreams meant, none of us have had childhood, none of us have understood what life is, none of us have had wishes, because we have all been struggling to find some place to breathe, to stay alive, to fill our empty stomachs.
Access and sustainability go hand in hand. The harder it gets to sustain a career in the arts, the more we will only see work made by the young and privileged, and a narrow band of established artists who slot easily into funded or commercial success.
I feel more at home reading about the quintessential British experience than in books by writers of colour. Perhaps this is, in part, because of the continuing influence of the British Empire. I am Sri Lankan and, in Sri Lanka, the roots of colonialism run deep, so much so that those roots are still very visible in the education system.
A few years ago, I had a male student, no older than twenty, who frequently took photos of me on his iPad while I was lecturing. I found out about the photos because he showed them to me. I reported the student to my head of school, and she called him into her office for an informal meeting. However, when she reprimanded him, he didn’t understand what the problem was. He told her we were in love.
Peterson is urbane and respectable, emblematic of what British writer Olivia Laing has called ‘the endless malice of the polite right’. ‘Just crazy enough’, in Jon Ronson’s phrase, to ensure media interest, but sufficiently intellectual-sounding to attract an audience for whom a brazen bigot like Yiannopoulos would be on the nose.