Overland literary journal » Giovanni Tiso

‘The world is corpsed’: Marvel’s dazzling adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Giovanni Tiso — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 01:57:29 +0000

The Russo Brothers have redefined what it means to ‘take liberties’ with the source material. Beckett said the play should be set in a single interior? Then we’re going to use the whole universe. He ordered that there should be only four characters? Then we’re going to use hundreds, possibly thousands of them.

How to talk to your politicians and your media about the terrorist attacks in Christchurch

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 02:41:22 +0000

Even as the country was grieving with its Muslim community, a quiet process of revision began.

The Riace model, climate change and the social imagination

Giovanni Tiso — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 03:31:06 +0000

In 1998, nearly thirty years after the discovery of these ancient shipwrecks, another boat left Greece for Italy and ran aground near Riace. This time its cargo was human beings: nearly two hundred Kurdish asylum seekers whose journey had begun in northern Iraq. They walked into the town along the highway, in single file, and the people of Riace did their best to welcome them.

That time Louise Mensch claimed I’m a Russian spy

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 01:34:25 +0000

It started quite innocently, as these social media collisions always do. A friend and I were discussing on Twitter Ed Whelan’s bizarre conspiracy theory in defence of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, remarking – as many people have – that it was reminiscent of Eric Garland’s infamous 120-tweet long ‘game theory’ thread of late 2016.

Fear but mostly loathing in Washington DC

Giovanni Tiso — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 01:26:42 +0000

Even as a workplace drama, Fear is a disappointment. We are promised in the prologue the story of the ‘nervous breakdown’ of the executive branch of the US government: a story of insubordination and sabotage, of documents removed from the president’s desk and orders to the military flatly disobeyed.

A brief (fascist) history of ‘I don’t care’

Giovanni Tiso — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 05:00:13 +0000

This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’.

Restoring the future: on the closure of Italy’s asylums

Giovanni Tiso — Thu, 17 May 2018 05:17:08 +0000

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.

When you ban a song against Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 05:02:30 +0000

‘Bella Ciao’ is both the most popular and the least political of all partisan anthems. It has a jaunty, upbeat tune and a very simple plot: the first-person singer wakes up one morning to discover that the country has been invaded. He wishes to join the partisans, for he doesn’t fear death. Should he in fact die, he only asks that he be buried by the shadow of a nice flower.

The story of Laika, who was just a dog

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 04:25:24 +0000

Speaking at a Moscow press conference in 1998, Oleg Gazenko – a scientist attached to the mission – expressed his regret in sombre and sympathetic tones: ‘The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.’

On polite Nazis and the violence of speech

Giovanni Tiso — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 01:14:04 +0000

It was, in the words of far-right parliamentarian and former minister of youth policy Giorgia Meloni, ‘intimidation at worst’, and nothing compared to the actual violence of far-left demonstrators ‘who destroy entire cities and burn down our cars’.

Against anti-fascism: Amadeo Bordiga’s last interview

Giovanni Tiso — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 05:37:32 +0000

An important figure in Italian and European communism, Bordiga was every bit as prominent as his friend and rival Antonio Gramsci in the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As leader of the abstentionist faction of the Socialist Party, he was at the centre of the split that led to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, of which he served as secretary while Mussolini seized power.

New Zealand has a new government – where to now?

Giovanni Tiso — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:46:07 +0000

These unusual circumstances reflect the difficulty our political system still has in adjusting to mixed proportional representation – a difficulty echoed by today’s Australian headline ‘NZ shock: losers take power’. We are a full 21 years and eight elections into the current constitutional arrangements, but the thought that the party with the second highest vote might be better placed to form the government still baffles some.

A fresh approach no more: the return of politics in New Zealand

Giovanni Tiso — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 05:18:04 +0000

It’s hard to predict what will happen from here. The Greens and Labour could spend the next seven weeks fighting over that 4% of the left-wing vote which will make a great deal of difference to their respective post-election fortunes, but none over who gets to form the next government

Tale of a haunting: Jeff Sparrow’s search for Paul Robeson

Giovanni Tiso — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 01:52:54 +0000

While Sparrow’s admiration for his subject is palpable (and amply justified), the book is never triumphalist or hagiographic – or, worse still, nostalgic – nor are the central claims concerning the relevance of Robeson’s political thought uncomplicated. The book reads rather like the story of a haunting. What is it that moved a white Australian writer to travel the world in search of the ghost of a black American artist? And what did he learn?

The man without a legacy

Giovanni Tiso — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 04:03:29 +0000

In specular fashion, Key offered instead a paradoxical continuity: putting the Tories in charge of Labour’s house, and making them the custodians of Clark’s achievements. Not a new thing in the country’s political history, but done so well that the public barely noticed. It was not so much an election as a wonderfully executed burglary.