China Mieville and the future of Melbourne

The various Overland events at the Melbourne Writers' Festival are now listed here. You'll note that Overland 196 features a special supplement (made possible by the City of Melbourne) with SF writers imagining different futures for the city. We're very pleased that joining the panel will be the utterly awesome British writer China Mieville. You can read an interview Rjurik did with China here. Oh, and you can also hear me babbling away about Killing on the RN Book Show here.

pullback

what makes the green grass grow

'Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?'
'Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!'
- popular US Army training chant before deployment to Iraq

cut grass, cut the

sentiment. but bug-eyed faces poke
glaring from between upended earth

dolls left buried by the kids that used to
live here but have since left buried

as some television ad for trouble elsewhere
poor kids hummed in a bloodless bubble

the boy who bucketed the dust before the café
is a facebust off an IED and

other people die, too

You might have heard that Michael Jackson died recently. No, really -- he did. I was of the generation that had Thriller shoved down our throats, and that's spoiled any appreciation I might have had of Jackson's talents. People say that Off the Wall is a good record and maybe that's so. As for his personal life, well, David Walsh of the WSWS wrote a quite sympathetic obituary that's worth reading.

Anyway, the coverage in recent days got me thinking about musicians whose deaths really did affect me. Our reaction to pop music is very personal, perhaps more so than other arts. It's difficult to think about a song or a band without remembering the first time you heard them, and thus a whole raft of other associations. Quite possibly, the list below will leave everyone else cold. Well, so be it.

Time to study Australia's role in the tragedy of Iraq

From Crikey today:

Our arrival into the military airport in Baghdad was like something from the ‘Charlie Don't Surf’ scene in the movie Apocalypse Now -- US air force jets taking off and landing, Iraqi forces with a heavy presence, US helicopters flying low and loudly across the skies, and the four Australian light-armoured vehicles waiting in the distance.

That’s the Australian -- "the only media outlet invited" -- reporting on Julia Gillard in Iraq, visiting the 90 Australian soldiers still there.

little michael (a poem)

dear michael / would you believe it
congress stood for you today
& not just the coloured section
the whole goddamn fucking chamber
you might have guessed by now
mike / that jesse jackson made them
bt i swear / for real / we heard
no whisper of objection
oh michael / wz the least
we all could do / sixty seconds
quiet / for lifetimes
of what we did to you / oh
little michael / who brought
salvation back / little michael
witnessing the streets / jehovah
come in a five inch afro
& size ten bell-bottom jeans

all shook our heads & stood
for you / little michael
silent / not knowing
wz the worst that we could do
cz all yr life folk stood around
& watched / here comes little michael
everybody shhh check out
what he can do

oh michael / would you believe it
today congress stood for you
same old little michael / nobody
spoke / we found gabriel in
that voice of yours / & looked past
the empty eyes / childhood
locked up / behind a thug on
a tour bus / nobody spoke up
& little michael / a tired
twelve-year-old / sold
platinum / how 'bout that
everybody wz sayin
little michael / y' know
small black boy with the
hair / cute smile / sings
that song ABC & somethin else
'bout salvation

oh / little michael
congress stood for you today
& not just the coloured section
the whole goddamn fucking chamber

(c) Maxine Clarke 2009.

overland underground

Under Hawthorn with @Sophiec and Doug.

Stuff I've been reading this week

We don't have quite the room in our print magazine for reviews that we'd like, and I am rather lacklustre when it comes to regular blogging...so I'm going to try and write a weekly post about the books I am getting into. Needless to say these aren't reviews proper, just the scattered associations of an idle reader. Jeff got me thinking with his post about Australian landscape in literature and music. I can't be near a surf beach in Sydney without thinking of Puberty Blues, and can't lie on the concrete in a glaring summer day without thinking of Garner's Monkey Grip. But both of these are essentially forms of nostalgia for the never-experienced for me, published so many years ago, typifying aspects of the end of the seventies and eighties. These days I wouldn't be surprised in Tsiolkas has got Preston/Click to read full article