In this highly anticipated new issue, we encounter brilliant examples of what writing can do in a hypernormal time – whether that's Benjamin Gready on the absurdity of fieldwork on land under active occupation or Zahid Gamieldien's short story about a dancing rat who finds itself enmeshed in systems too shadowy to be true. But, as with the emotional cycles of resistance, hope and snark are features too. Dan Hogan considers the lawn as a class obsession, and π.ο. asks a question: why people hate poetry? We also read about a rakhasa family who passes on wisdom to their young kin, a story by Shefali Mathew. And you’ll find new poetry by Eli McLean, Fiona Hile and Sol Chan, among others, as well as a comic by Safdar Ahmed, plus heaps more. Co-editors Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk write in the editorial, "Writing always matters, but it matters most directly in the face of this kind of thuggish assault on language, our first and last commons. We can’t let the bastards have it.”
OVERLAND 188 spring 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-5-2published 20 September 2007
Self Publishing
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publishers include James Joyce Marcel Proust Anais Nin Margaret Atwood William Blake Virginia Woolf D.H. Lawrence Walter Whitman Mark Twain Lord Byron Percy Bysshe Shelley Ouyang and Yu, even Benjamin Britten had to found English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 “partly (though not solely) to perform his own works” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten). That’s self publishing. If self publishing is a crime, issue proceedings against us and take us all to an international court where the presiding judge is a well-published and award-winning author who has never self published (Shame on Him!) and will sentence us all to a lifetime imprisonment of self publishers and a deathtime of self publishers
Now listen, to the rain self publishing again as it did 3000 million years ago, on the page that is my roof
© Ouyang Yu Overland 188 – spring 2007, p. 93
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