Overland literary journal > Articles by: Rjurik Davidson

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Rjurik Davidson

Rjurik Davidson is a writer, editor and speaker. Rjurik’s novel, The Stars Askew was released in 2016. Rjurik is a former associate editor of Overland magazine. He can be found at rjurik.com and tweets as @rjurikdavidson.

Articles by Rjurik Davidson:

6 March 201819 March 2018 · radicalism

War/Peace: the Weather Underground and the present crisis

Rjurik Davidson

On 6 March 1970, an immense explosion tore through the basement of 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village. Two young activists were killed by the dynamite bomb they were constructing. Twenty-two-year-old Terry Robbins, one of the most vocal advocates of revolutionary violence in the Weather Underground, was practically vapourised.

25 January 20187 March 2018 · Writing

Our lodestar: on Ursula K Le Guin (1929–2018)

Rjurik Davidson

For those of us seeking to write politically conscious fiction it should be clear just how important Le Guin is. This was what drew me to make the pilgrimage to Portland a little over fifteen years ago as I was researching my PhD. Le Guin suggested a hotel for me to stay at and I took a bus out from the city to find her house with ‘the red door’ as she described it to me.

20 July 201629 August 2016 · History

Where is the Australian Corbyn?

Rjurik Davidson

As the dust settles on another Australian election campaign, in which the population resoundingly supported no party, no program, no leader, British Politics is undergoing a sea change. Thrust into the centre – almost like a feat of the imagination, some flight of fancy recalling A Very British Coup – came Jeremy Corbyn, a social-democrat in the old style. For the first time in decades, there is a national leader in the anglophone world arguing against neoliberalism in Old Left terms.

19 November 20159 February 2016 · Main Posts

Statues of Lovecraft

Rjurik Davidson

And so the culture wars rage on. In the latest instalment, the World Fantasy Award has decided to retire the bust of HP Lovecraft, traditionally used for the award. The new image for the award is yet to be decided. This has happened hot on the heels of the Hugo Awards controversy and Gamergate, and the world of speculative fiction has once again erupted into acrimony.

6 July 201522 July 2015 · Syriza

The referendum and the momentum

Rjurik Davidson

For the last year or more, history has raced ahead in Greece. The impressive victory of the ‘No’ campaign in yesterday’s referendum is the latest significant moment. Forged in the shadow of a banking crisis, with Europe’s political establishment against them, around 60% of Greek voters reaffirmed once more their anti-austerity stance.

21 April 201511 May 2015 · Writing

The Mad Puppies revenge

Rjurik Davidson

In recent weeks a culture war has raged in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Hot on the heels of the Gamergate controversy - and to a significant extent running parallel alongside it - in this latest case, a right-wing group known as the 'Sad Puppies' have campaigned to correct science fiction of its 'Leftist' bias. The fight again highlights the deep schisms running through contemporary popular culture.

23 March 20158 April 2015 · Reflection

A measure of our defeats

Rjurik Davidson

For those with progressive instincts, Malcolm Fraser's recent advocacy for human rights and refugees is likely to colour our attitude towards him. Indeed, in recent days, many on the left have lauded the former prime minister, but we’d do well to have a more circumspect attitude. His career was divided into several chapters – the latest one was by no means the most historically important.

13 November 201418 November 2014 · Reviews

Building the future

Rjurik Davidson

In his latest book, Revolution in the Making: 3D Printers, Robots and the Future, Guy Rundle – whom I should disclose is a friend – makes a case that contemporary society is at the beginning of a social transformation, a technological revolution that will change the very social structures which dominates our lives. As is usually the case, Rundle’s book showcases his cutting edge sensibilities and his restless intellect. It’s a fascinating and zesty little book.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

On writer's block

Rjurik Davidson

There was a time in my early twenties when I found it excruciating to sit in front of the computer. As a teenager, I’d been excited to write, and stories had flowed from me freely. Then this, from nowhere.

25 March 20144 April 2014 · Reviews

Go forward to meet the new: Daniel Bensaïd’s An Impatient Life

Rjurik Davidson

There are several problems with the use of the term, ‘the sixties generation’. To begin with, it tends to play into the dubious narrative of youthful rebellion followed by gradual conservatisation in the face of of career, family life and disappointed hopes. It’s a narrative that sees the sixties as both defining – ah, the glories of youth! – and long left behind.

27 February 20146 March 2014 · Reviews

Back to the future?

Rjurik Davidson

What is the appropriate literary form for us to represent the modern world, with all its clashes and confusions, its currents and eddies, its triumphs and tragedies? For much of the twentieth century, the two opposing answers have been either realism or modernism.

Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Writing

On being injured

Rjurik Davidson

In early September last year, I began to feel an ache running between my spine and right shoulderblade.

2 December 201312 December 2013 · Reading

Really, what’s so great about the New Yorker?

Rjurik Davidson

Recently I resubscribed to the New Yorker, that bastion of journalism and commentary so often lauded by us literary types. I had a subscription about five years ago that I let lapse after a year. Finding myself with a lot more time to read, it made sense to reacquaint myself with the magazine.

18 November 201322 November 2013 · Reviews

Trucksong, a literary debut

Rjurik Davidson

Tonight, Andrew Macrae’s literary debut, Trucksong, is being launched in Fitzroy. This is a novel about trucks that are sentient, with thoughts and plans of their own. Macrae’s trucks often run alone, or they gather in great ‘brumby packs’ like wild horses. They inhabit a post-apocalyptic Australia, together with the orphan protagonist, Jon Ra.

22 October 201330 October 2013 · Reflection

Norman Geras: an obituary

Rjurik Davidson

The only time I briefly met Norman Geras was at the Marxism 2000 conference, held in Amherst, Massachusetts. Geras was one of three keynote speakers. Angela Davis spoke on the prison-industrial complex, with typical charisma; Gayatri Spivak packed the hall and gave a paper that was interminable and incomprehensible (though to be fair, her work really only suits the printed page).

26 September 20132 October 2013 · Reflection

Rediscovering Gramsci

Rjurik Davidson

In recent years among the Anglophone Left, there has been something of a rediscovery of the work of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, whom Eric Hobsbawm once called the twentieth century’s greatest thinker. This seems an odd enough thing to say (I’ll return to this strangeness) for there have been at least two waves of Gramsci studies – one in the 1960s and 1970s, and the second in the 1980s – which have seen his concepts permeate almost all intellectual disciplines.

Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013 · Writing

On writing and the unconscious

Rjurik Davidson

The novel I’m currently finishing has a fiendishly complex plot. Cleverly, I didn’t plan it out in detail beforehand, so I’m now spending lots of time sitting in front of the computer wondering, ‘What happens now?’ and ‘Why didn’t I plot this properly earlier?’ Sometimes I think, ‘Why aren’t I smarter?’ but mostly it’s ‘Is there chocolate in the cupboard?’

18 July 201323 July 2013 · Reflection

My life as a zombie

Rjurik Davidson

Nothing strains ones faith in humanity as much as attempting to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: it’s barely visible behind the mass of people, crowding forward, a veritable phalanx of phones and ipads clicking and flashing, bodies pressing together like an ancient Roman testudo. (Banning phones and cameras would immeasurably improve the museum experience.)

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013 · Reading

Packing up my library

Rjurik Davidson

In preparation for an overseas trip, I’ve been packing up my books. As I take them from the shelves, I discover titles I’d long forgotten. The process is nostalgic. Books are like songs: they transport us instantly back in time. They can evoke images, thoughts, feelings gone but still residing somewhere within us.

22 May 20132 June 2013 · Reviews

The Company You Keep and the Weather Underground

Rjurik Davidson

The Company You Keep cannot quite transcend the boundaries of the question posed by the Weather Underground members themselves: were we right or wrong?

9 April 20132 June 2013 · Politics

More on Thatcher, life and death.

Rjurik Davidson

When it comes to deaths, the balance of the universe has always been askew. Kind, generous and honest people I’ve known have died well before their years. Some years ago, my best friend – a brilliant and gentle socialist – died at age twenty-seven. Meanwhile, the paladins of the right – Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush Senior – seem to go on and on.

Published in Overland Issue 210 Autumn 2013 · Culture

Resistance on film

Rjurik Davidson

When I was a teenager, my parents took my sister and me to the small town of Biella, in Piedmont, north-west Italy. There we met a small old man with wiry grey hair. He led us along the wall of the cemetery. Attached to the wall were small oval black-and-white photographs of young men whose ages ranged from around seventeen to thirty or so.

15 March 20132 June 2013 · Reviews

The Girl with No Hands

Rjurik Davidson

Few writers have burst across the Speculative Fiction scene in Australia with as much fanfare as Angela Slatter. Six or so years ago, Slatter began publishing a series of stories that garnered her immediate attention. She seemed to emerge fully formed, a writer instantly at the peak of her powers, offering lyrical, ingenious stories that seemed like a collection of so many rich chocolates.

7 March 20132 June 2013 · Politics

On the life and death of Hugo Chavez

Rjurik Davidson

But perhaps most importantly, Chavez was a hero to the poorest Venezuelans, a symbol for the significant improvements in their lives wrought by the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’.

23 January 201326 January 2013 · Politics

Filmme Fatales and the rise of a new feminism?

Rjurik Davidson

Launched in a hip bar in Collingwood filled with cool twenty-somethings, Filmme Fatales is full of life and exuberance. In fact, both descriptions – ‘feminist’ and mostly ‘about women’ – are accurate.

5 December 20125 December 2012 · Reviews

The Middle of Middle Earth

Rjurik Davidson

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey premiered on 27 November in Wellington. The association of New Zealand and Middle Earth is itself ironic, for Tolkien’s idyllic Hobbiton is the province of simple-minded folk. In the novels (but mercifully not the films), our heroes return from the war (read: Second World War), like classic conservatives to find – horror of horrors – the Labour Party (ahem, Saruman’s ‘sharers’) are in power.

27 November 201228 November 2012 · Reading

On rereading Isaac Deutscher

Rjurik Davidson

Incapacitated by back pain in recent weeks, I searched around for something to read. The criterion was simple: it had to be something engaging enough to keep me interested, but familiar enough for my codeine-addled brain.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

Political writers in the neoliberal age

Rjurik Davidson

The notion is, of course, a product of modernity. As Terry Eagleton outlines in The Function of Criticism, the idea of the public sphere was forged in the struggle against the absolutist state. Salons, clubs and coffee houses, broadsheets, pamphlets, the novel itself – all of these were born as the middle classes carved out a space against the aristocratic notions of hereditary hierarchy.

1 November 20121 November 2012 · Reviews

The Familiar Conservatism of Dominik’s Killing Them Softly

Rjurik Davidson

When Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs hit cinema screens twenty years ago, it began a revolution in crime stories that has yet to play entirely out. Tarantino’s modus operandi was an assault of style. Resolutely apolitical and uninterested in right or wrong – his early movies typically placed us on the side of the crims – Tarantino made films infused with self-conscious cool.

3 October 20123 October 2012 · Reading

Eric Hobsbawm: 9 June 1917–1 October 2012

Rjurik Davidson

Eric Hobsbawm’s death brings to an end an era of Marxist history. Having lived to 95 years of age, Hobsbawm outlived his contemporaries – Christopher Hill, Dorothy and EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, George Rudé, GEM de St Croix – many of whom formed part of Great Britain’s influential Communist Party Historians Group. If Hobsbawm’s achievements were not necessarily greater than some of the others, his influence, like his longevity, outstripped them all.

4 September 2012 · Activism

Memories of M

Rjurik Davidson

Between the words ‘I’ve got some bad news’ and those that follow lies an interminable space. Time stretches. The mind focuses. The body tenses. Then J said the words, ‘M died.’ It was a death both expected and unexpected. Others shrugged at the news.

Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012 · Culture

Film and memory

Rjurik Davidson

I must have watched a great many films from childhood to my teenage years (that phase when each of us becomes aware that we have particular tastes). Like many children, I devoured whatever was put in front of me, in film as in food.

13 August 201213 August 2012 · Reading

Northern Ireland and the cold eye of Steve McQueen’s Hunger

Rjurik Davidson

There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s 2010 film Hunger where the dying Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) lies alone on a bed. The camera moves in circular motions as life leaches from Sands’ cadaverous body. The frame darkens, insects seem to come from Sands’ body, but the sound we hear is that of birds’ wings. It’s an extraordinary image, one which stays in the viewers mind long after.

25 July 201227 July 2012 · Reviews

The ongoing life of Death of a Salesman

Rjurik Davidson

Several times during the new production of Death of a Salesman at the Belvoir theatre (soon to transfer to the Theatre Royal), I glanced at the audience. In the darkness, stricken faces looked on at the desperate plight of Willy Loman (Colin Friels), one of theatre’s most iconic characters. The audience seemed pinned to their seats in anguish and when the play ended, with light fading slowly into blackness, the theatre burst into applause.

10 July 201210 July 2012 · Reviews

The ambivalences of Mad Men

Rjurik Davidson

A great deal of modern storytelling relies on deep ambivalence. Modern stories move between two opposed claims at once: the cruel character acts kindly; the racist saves the drowning black man; the campaigner for equality rights turns out to be corrupt after all (this is not always true of past storytelling: see for example medieval morality plays).

18 June 201218 June 2012 · Writing

Beyond slow cooking: the 24-Hour Book Project

Rjurik Davidson

Evening. Monday 11 June. Pizza boxes lie on a table in the corner of the room, while around the table sit eight writers, feverishly tapping on their laptop keyboards. In a nearby room, the ninth writer hides himself away and works alone, listening to Hollywood film scores from the 1960s. There are only a few hours left before they must pass completed stories to a group of subeditors who will work through the night. By the following midday, in New York City, the book will need to be printed.

4 June 20124 June 2012 · Writing

Mad scientists, airships and class: the politics of Steampunk

Rjurik Davidson

The subgenre of Steampunk – that subgenre of speculative fiction set in a fantastical Victorian era filled with airships, mad scientists and mechanical replicas of people or animals – may well have reached its zenith.

10 May 2012 · Culture

The fastest growing bloodsport in the world

Rjurik Davidson

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’.

17 April 201217 April 2012 · Reviews

Not for Children: HBO’s Game of Thrones

Rjurik Davidson

To accompany the arrival of the second season of HBO’s series Game of Thrones in recent weeks, we have been treated to the predictable pronouncements that, ‘I usually don’t like fantasy, but I love Game of Thrones.’ ‘Which fantasy?’ one is tempted to respond. Homer and other ancient myths? Fairy tales, medieval or (like Angela Carter’s rewrites) modern? The modernism of Kafka?

Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012 ·

On Woody Allen's Romantic Worlds

Rjurik Davidson

My partner and I went to see Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry when it was released back in the 1990s. Though not one of his critically acclaimed movies, the film had moments I loved.

Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011 · Reviews

‘You are sick! This is not art!’

Rjurik Davidson

During a notorious incident at the Sundance Film Festival, a viewer leaped to his feet after the premiere of Lucky McKee’s movie The Woman and began to protest: ‘This movie degrades women! This movie degrades men! You are sick! This is not art! You are sick! This is a disgusting movie! Sundance should be ashamed! How dare you show this!’ As security approached, he continued: ‘Anyone else who’d like to talk in a similar mind about the degradation of women like this come outside and we’ll talk …’ A woman yelled in response: ‘Are you a woman?’

11 November 201128 March 2012 · Main Posts

Under the hammer

Rjurik Davidson

So you’re starting up a radical cultural space called Under The Hammer. The name comes from a quote from Mayakovsky (sometimes also attributed to Brecht), which reads, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Can you briefly describe the aim of the space?

21 September 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

The burned-out Sixties

Rjurik Davidson

A Very Irregular Head Rob Chapman When Syd Barrett retired from public life at the age of twenty-five, he become one of the most enigmatic figures in popular music history. For the briefest of times he had burst onto the London Underground scene of the 1960s. Like scattered fireworks, he quickly faded into darkness. His […]

Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011 · Main Posts

Rjurik Davidson on 'Mad Bastards'

Rjurik Davidson

When I first arrived in Perth in 1992, the struggle over the development of the Swan Brewery, located on a Nyungar sacred site of the rainbow serpent dreaming, was still raging. In the darkness of early morning, my housemates and I attended the picket line before construction workers or police arrived. Many of the influential activists of the time sat gathered in circles, including Robert Bropho and the wonderfully vital Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs.

5 July 201118 September 2014 · Main Posts

Robert McKee and storytelling

Rjurik Davidson

Robert McKee is the best-known screenwriting teacher in the world. A few years ago, I interviewed him for Inside Film. He was thoughtful and incisive. I admired his opinions about film, a subject on which he showed considerable taste, and at the same time felt wary of his certainty about himself and his notion of […]

Published in Overland Issue 202 Autumn 2011 · Main Posts

Imagining new worlds

Rjurik Davidson

Recently, a debate broke out in the pages of Overland and Kill Your Darlings about the relationship between politics and literature.

31 January 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

A touch of summer cinema: The Fighter and Black Swan

Rjurik Davidson

The holiday horror film season is over, though the forgettable blockbusters – let’s not mention their titles – are still dragging their way like decaying corpses across cinema screens. Still, this season has been different: for the first time in memory, there has been a cluster of films that I’ve actually wanted to see. This […]

26 November 201026 March 2012 · Main Posts

Literature, speculative fiction and me

Rjurik Davidson

Some time ago, I was talking to an old friend of my parents called Henry. Intelligent, liberal (perhaps back in the seventies he was a radical), Henry was the kind of person I grew up around. As often happens in such situations, the topic turned to writing. I explained to him that I wrote ‘speculative […]

8 November 201026 March 2012 · Main Posts

Fiction review: A Book of Endings

Rjurik Davidson

A Book of Endings Deborah Biancotti Twelth Planet Press Among the deleterious effects of the separation of genre from mainstream fiction – a separation that is in many ways a marketing invention – is the marginalisation of various authors. It’s a process that affects the genre writers more than the mainstream ones. Genre is, after […]

29 September 201026 March 2012 · Main Posts

The Overland line

Rjurik Davidson

Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious. Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 200 Spring 2010 · Main Posts

Liberated zone or pure commodification?

Rjurik Davidson

Visit almost any university and you find students discussing their short stories in the cafes and food halls, or lying on the lawns composing poetry. Dreaming of becoming the next Helen Garner, Les Murray or Peter Carey, they pour into the creative writing courses that have multiplied in the last fifteen years. Where students once studied Virginia Woolf or Graham Greene, now they’re busy trying to emulate them.

9 September 201026 March 2012 · Main Posts

MWF – In conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

Rjurik Davidson

Sunday 29 August. Kim Stanley Robinson sat calmly at the front of the vast reaches of BMW edge. Lucy Sussex – a longtime supporter of Overland – interviewed Robinson in a freewheeling discussion about his work and opinions. It’s not surprising that that the hall wasn’t full: Robinson was the Guest of Honour at the […]

24 August 2010 · Main Posts

Future of the Greens

Rjurik Davidson

Saturday evening. 21 August 2010. The function room in the Victoria Hotel is hot. Crammed in are hundreds of people. At the rear, journalists circle around television cameras. They care little for the buzzing green-clad crowd: their focus is elsewhere. They scribble notes, look at the floor. It is artificially bright in this little area: […]

19 August 2010 · Main Posts

The Library of Forgotten Books

Rjurik Davidson

For anyone who is interested, PS Publishing in the UK has recently released my collection, The Library of Forgotten Books. There’s a plain hardcover and a cool jacketed and signed hardcover. The reviews so far have been pretty positive. One of the reviewers writes: Once in a while a book comes out of nowhere and […]

14 July 2010 · Main Posts

Fiction review – Slice of Life

Rjurik Davidson

Slice of Life Paul Haines The Mayne Press Genre publishing exists like a hidden enclave in the broader Australian culture, replete with its own publications and personalities, politics and institutions. Hidden away in this world are number of highly talented writers whose work deserves much greater recognition than it receives. At the literary end of […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010 · Main Posts

Editorial

Rjurik Davidson

We live in a deeply commodified culture that values style over substance, image over reality, the disposable over the sustainable. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, The Da Vinci Code and Transformers, Australian Idol and Border Security – these are the faces of mass culture. Filmmakers and publishers often justify the situation by blaming consumers. ‘We’re just giving them what they want,’ they argue.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010 · Main Posts

Issue 199

Rjurik Davidson

Contents Regulars Rjurik Davidson − Editorial Correspondence Towards 200: Sean Scalmer and Jackie Dickenson − The march of the insider CAL—Art and Life: Zanny Begg − I don’t know much about revolution but I know what I like * Meanland: Emmett Stinson − The pirate code Essays Cate Kennedy − Driven to distraction Michael Hyde […]

2 December 20092 December 2009 · Main Posts

Australian SF Writers

Rjurik Davidson

Readers of Overland may have noticed in the last couple of years that we’ve endeavoured to publish and review the best writers from the Speculative Fiction scene here in Australia. We’ve had stories by such luminaries as Margo Lanagan, Jack Dann, Lucy Sussex, Ben Peek. We’ve also interviewed international figures China Mieville and Kim Stanley […]

25 November 200925 November 2009 · Main Posts

Port Phillip Rising

Rjurik Davidson

A few Friends of the Earth activists are currently in the middle of walking from Sorrento to Port Melbourne, as part of an awareness campaign about climate change and rising sea levels. You can read about their trek here. Here’s a video from their third day: Safety Beach to Mornington – Day 3 from Port […]

4 October 20094 October 2009 · Main Posts

No SF Booker Winners

Rjurik Davidson

Recently there’s been a bit of a discussion about why no SF writer has won the Booker prize. As far as I know, it was begun by Kim Stanley Robinson in a piece for New Scientist. After quoting Virginia Woolf’s complimentary letter to SF great Olaf Stapleton, he wrote: Oh, I know there is a […]

26 August 200927 August 2009 · Main Posts

non-fiction workshop

Rjurik Davidson

For anyone interested, Express Media have organised this: The Art of Non-Fiction with Rjurik Davidson Saturday Sept 12 2-4pm $25 Interested in writing non-fiction? Fancy yourself as an essayist? Like the idea of writing reviews? Come and learn the art of non-fiction writing with Overland magazine Associate Editor Rjurik Davidson. In this workshop you will […]

5 August 2009 · Main Posts

Age of Stupid

Rjurik Davidson

I’ve recently written a review for Screen Education on the film The Age of Stupid, by Franny Armstrong, who made McLibel some years ago. It’s one of the most ambitious documentaries I’ve ever seen: it attempts a systemic analysis the oil economy and its relationship to global warming. And further, it also enters into the […]

29 July 2009 · Main Posts

Republican Short Story Competition

Rjurik Davidson

This arrived by email recently: 2009 is a milestone as it will be 10 years on 6 November 2009 since the republican referendum was lost. To commemorate this event and to remind Australians what they still don’t have the Australian Republican Movement is calling for speculative fiction short stories between 2000 and 4000 words that […]

6 July 20096 July 2009 · Main Posts

The Split in SF

Rjurik Davidson

Dave Conyers has reviewed my story “Domine”, reprinted in Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt’s the Years Best Australian SF Volume 4. Dave, in the Irish SF magazine Albedo One, writes: Domine’ by Rjurik Davidson is an improved effort from an up and coming Western Australian short story writer, with a science fiction piece concerning a […]

5 July 2009 · Main Posts

Bastardy

Rjurik Davidson

A couple of days ago I went to a fundraiser organised by some friends for the community environment park, CERES. They showed the documentary Bastardy, which is a portrait of indigenous actor Jack Charles, a wonderfully charismatic little man who was a heroin addict for thirty years. He was in and out of jail over […]

24 June 2009 · Main Posts

There Goes the Neighbourhood Book Launch

Rjurik Davidson

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Captain Rumble and I ended up at a party in Sydney after a writers’ festival dinner. The party followed an exhibition curated by a friend of mine, Zanny Begg. Well, the book that emerged from the exhibition is being launched in Melbourne: There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and […]

18 June 2009 · Main Posts

Fragments From June

Rjurik Davidson

1. At the soccer with D. His father is the perennial optimist. D takes the stand that Kennedy is no good as a striker. At each moment that Japan attack, a girl several rows back shrieks like a siren. As we leave, Australia having won the match, I wonder if there a more odious sound […]

14 June 2009 · Main Posts

Climate Change

Rjurik Davidson

My friend Damien Lawson, National Climate Justice Coordinator at Friends of the Earth, has an opinion piece in the Age today which is worth checking out. In it he makes the analogy of Climate Change and War – and makes an argument against the Rudd government’s proposed legislation.

13 June 2009 · Main Posts

Balibo

Rjurik Davidson

I went to a media screening of the new film Balibo yesterday, which covers the murder of the five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975, prior to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The film also follows Australian journalist Roger East, who is invited to Timor by Jose Ramos Horta and tries to discover […]

11 June 2009 · Main Posts

Going Down Swinging Launch

Rjurik Davidson

Going Down Swinging was launched at the Northcote Social Club last night. M and I attended, to watch a lot of spoken word (Going Down Swinging has an accompanying cd of spoken word) and the triphop band, MISO, who are very cool and remind me a little of Bjork. I did wonder, during the spoken […]

5 June 2009 · Main Posts

Artist-Activists Protest in St Petersberg

Rjurik Davidson

When I was up at the Sydney Writers’ Fest, Captain Rumble and I ended up at a party following the launch of a political art exhibition called There Goes the Neighbourhood, curated by political artist Zanny Begg. Zanny just forwarded the following news: On May 15, the young contemporary artist Artem Loskutov was arrested in […]

26 May 2009 · Main Posts

Master Class for Progressive Writers – An Explanation

Rjurik Davidson

The deadline for applications for the Overland Master Class is coming up, and I wanted to explain further our thinking behind it: 1) Fiction (and all art) is about taking the world and turning it on a certain angle, so that your reader can see it afresh, and by implication see their own place within […]

22 May 200922 May 2009 · Main Posts

Fragments from Sydney

Rjurik Davidson

1. Periodically the rain bursts down torrentially. The city is rambling and crumbling and green. Coming from Melbourne – which sits down in the south like a bunch of huts in a dust bowl – the weather seems exotic, like some Ballardian vision from The Drowned World. When not at the Writers Festival I’m typing […]

18 May 2009 · Main Posts

The Eternal Dancer

Rjurik Davidson

Occasionally I write stories for people – for their birthdays, or just as presents. This one I wrote about six months ago in a forty-five minute rush one Sunday morning. I wrote it for a dancer whose birthday it was. Thought maybe it would be nice to share, though there’s not much to it. The […]

18 May 2009 · Main Posts

Spanish Film Festival

Rjurik Davidson

The Spanish Film Festival is on at the moment around the country, and it has a stream on the Spanish Civil War which includes: A WAR IN HOLLYWOOD is an in-depth look at the impact that the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship had on the North American film industry. Hollywood used the Civil War […]

30 April 200930 April 2009 · Main Posts

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Rjurik Davidson

Managed to see The Baader-Meinhof Complex last night, a recent German film about the famous radical left-wing terrorist group. It continues in the recent vein of novels and films which a kind of critical but romantic view of the radical left-wing terrorist groups of the late sixties and early seventies (the Weather Underground in the […]

21 April 2009 · Main Posts

J. G. Ballard Dies

Rjurik Davidson

J. G. Ballard died on April 19. Best known probably for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, later filmed by Steven Spielberg, and Crash, filmed by David Cronenberg, it was always Ballard’s early work that had the most influence on me. Within science fiction circles, Ballard was one of the chief figures in the […]

14 April 2009 · Main Posts

Beautiful – the film

Rjurik Davidson

If you’re interested, you can catch my review of the Australian film Beautiful in the latest Metro Magazine (Issue 160). Beautiful is a psychological thriller set in a Lynchian mode. Each time I write a review, I’m constantly reminding myself that I shouldn’t write anything that I wouldn’t say to the person’s face. That’s my […]

3 April 20093 April 2009 · Main Posts

Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max

Rjurik Davidson

I saw Adam Elliot’s feature film Mary and Max at Metro Magazine’s 40th Anniversary Party a couple of days ago. Before the film Elliot asked people to come and give him feedback, both positive and negative. He seemed quite genuine about asking for negative criticism because, he said, he would only learn from his mistakes […]

30 March 200930 March 2009 · Main Posts

Master Class for Progressive Writers

Rjurik Davidson

I’ve recently had the following interchange with a writer about the Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers. I sent the writer an invitation to apply, and she responded: Hmm..not sure that I’m ready for something like this… Also not sure that I (should) write for a purpose…I have been thinking that it undermines the story […]

26 March 2009 · Main Posts

Jack Dann Interview

Rjurik Davidson

Expatriate American Jack Dann is a major figure in Australian speculative fiction. He is, among other things the editor of the recent massive SF anthology Dreaming Again, which has been getting a whole lot of good reviews (Andrew Macrae is reviewing it in the next issue of Overland. (As an aside, I have a story, […]

23 March 2009 · Main Posts

Response to Kris Hemensley

Rjurik Davidson

In the latest Overland, Kris Hemensley criticises the Overland editors’ decision to allow a response by poet John Kinsella to a review of two of his works by Elizabeth Campbell. Hemensley wonders why we have accorded special favours for John, when it is not our usual practice to publish responses to a review. We did […]

17 March 2009 · Main Posts

Watchmen

Rjurik Davidson

I saw Watchmen on saturday night, the much anticipated adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel (at one point Terry Gilliam was rumoured to be attached to it). After Zack Snyder’s last execrable effort, 300, a neo-fascist movie based on Frank Miller’s eponymous graphic novel, I was hesitant (and besides, I loved the graphic novel). I […]

10 March 2009 · Main Posts

Radio Lajee

Rjurik Davidson

On the radio station RRR this morning, I heard Daz Chandler talking about the Radio Lajee website. Here’s how the website describes itself: www.radiolajee.com is the home of an exciting new series of podcasts by Palestinian refugees aged between 11 and 22 years. Established by Australian new media enthusiast, Daz Chandler, in collaboration with the […]

9 March 20099 March 2009 · Main Posts

Writing For Change: Overland Short Story Master Class

Rjurik Davidson

We’re really pleased to announce the following: Writing for Change: Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers The Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers is aimed at writers exploring political ideas in their fiction: investigations of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. The master class will feature special sessions with acclaimed writers Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and […]

6 March 2009 · Main Posts

Jon Stewart

Rjurik Davidson

I really like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. He manages to combine incisive political commentary with comedy. There was a really good episode a couple of days ago on the media and the financial bailout in the US which you can catch here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=220250 But my all-time favourite video is of Stewart on the US debate […]

28 February 2009 · Main Posts

How are you feeling today?

Rjurik Davidson

I received an email yesterday, promoting a particular book (Kasey Edward’s Thirty Something and Over It, if you’re interested), which contained the following happy statistics: – 98 per cent of people are unhappy in their jobs – 26 per cent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don’t want the […]

25 February 2009 · Main Posts

Slumdog Millionaire

Rjurik Davidson

So I was surprised that Slumdog Millionaire won so many Academy Awards. I thought the film was good, but not a sweep-the-awards type of picture. Why not? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while. In the end, I felt that the romantic fantasy element of the film didn’t quite settle comfortably with the […]

17 February 200919 February 2009 · Main Posts

Houllebecq on Realism and Lovecraft

Rjurik Davidson

I’m currently reading novelist Michel Houllebecq’s (author of Atomised amongst other things) book on great American horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, subtitled ‘Against the World, Against Life’. It is by far the best piece I’ve read on Lovecraft, who has claim to being the 20th century’s most original horror writer. The great thing about Houllebecq’s […]

13 February 2009 · Main Posts

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino

Rjurik Davidson

I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film, Gran Torino a couple of days ago. Despite his sometimes deep conservatism, some of Eastwood’s earlier films are exceptional, especially Unforgiven, which has a claim to the best western of all time, and Mystic River. It seems to me that in his later years (once he was past his […]

6 February 20096 February 2009 · Main Posts

Whaling in the Southern Seas

Rjurik Davidson

At the Age there’s a report on the ongoing (and it seems yearly) stoush between Japanese whalers and Sea Shephard anti-whalers: Sea Shepherd leader Paul Watson said the 8000-tonne factory ship Nisshin Maru repeatedly tried to ram his vessel Steve Irwin, and three harpoon boats trailed ropes to entangle its propeller. In the five-hour conflict, […]

18 December 200819 December 2008 · Main Posts

Naomi Klein profile

Rjurik Davidson

The New Yorker recently did a profile of Naomi Klein which was quite good. I didn’t realise that Klein comes from a long line of radicals. The one thing that writer MacFarquhar doesn’t quite highlight is that Klein’s politics are very much of the sixties variety. Instead MacFarquhar accepts Klein’s own self-positioning: Klein was born […]

10 December 200810 December 2008 · Main Posts

Australia and Australian Film

Rjurik Davidson

Over at the Age, Peter Costello is holding forth about Baz Luhmann’s film Australia. In Costello’s eyes, ‘As a love story the Baz Luhrmann film Australia is pretty good. If only the filmmaker had left it at that.’ Costello’s objection is, of course, that Luhmann’s film criticises the policy which resulted in the stolen generations. […]

Published in Overland Issue 188 Spring 2007 · Culture

Writing against reality

Rjurik Davidson

Speculative fiction - an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, horror and other non-realist forms - has always been peculiarly suited to political radicalism since the form investigates a world that is ‘other' to our own, a world which is in some way changed or altered. It is a thought experiment: by developing this sense of estrangement, science fiction asks us to think back upon our own society.