Overland literary journal

terrible news

We just received this:

Dorothy Porter died in Melbourne this morning from complications due to cancer. She was 54.

A writer at the height of her powers, Dorothy's most recent publication was EL DORADO, her fifth verse novel. It was shortlisted for the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize (Age Book of the Year Award), the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction, and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards and the Australian Book Review described it thus: ...this mature and accomplished work... puts her at the top of the distinguished class of contemporary Australian poets when it comes to livres composés.

4 months ago Dot was diagnosed with metastesized breat cancer. She has been in treatment since. She was very positive - and wanted to keep this to herself as she was sure she would defeat it. Unfortunately there have been complications and she was admitted to hospital 2 weeks ago and ICU 10 days ago. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 10-12-2008, Comments Off

over there

The misbegotten occupation of Iraq has now entered a new phase, with the Iraqi parliament finally approving a new security pact with the United States.

Parliament's deliberations took place against the backdrop of the huge anti-American demonstrations of the Sadrists (there's some extraordinary photos of them here).

The Sadrist MPs voted against the pact, on the basis that it didn't deliver an immediate US withdrawal. Nonetheless, the accord is definitely being presented to the Iraqi public as a timetable to get the Americans out: the Arabic translation of its title reads bluntly: ‘Agreement between the United States and the Republic of Iraq on the withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq'.

Like all Iraq's post-Saddam leaders, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has depended on US support. But the security pact shows how that's starting to change.

Earlier in the year, Maliki relied on Iranian backing to stare down the Sadrists. His tilt away from the US and towards Iran is expressed in a clause in the new agreement which the US agrees not to use Iraq as a launching pad for operations in other countries in the region.

That's intended, obviously, as a sop to Iran. One of the most remarkable and enduring outcomes of the Iraq war is the extent to which it has strengthened Iran, an original member of the ‘Axis of Evil' (remember that?).

The provision about future invasions is not the only point on which the Americans didn't receive what they wanted. During the negotiation process, a number of US demands were leaked. They included an insistence that the agreement be totally open ended, that the US retain control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet, and that American soldiers and private security contractors remain fully immune from Iraqi laws.

What they got was quite different. The agreement says explicitly that all US combat forces will pull out from cities, towns and villages ‘on a date no later than 30 June 2009' and that ‘all US forces are to withdraw from all Iraqi territory, water and airspace no later than 31 December 2011'. Not only do US contractors lose their legal immunity but it will henceforth be impossible for US forces to arrest an Iraqi ‘unless it is in accordance with an Iraqi decision'.

Mind you, signing the pact is one thing; implementing it, quite another.

Maliki has agreed to hold a referendum next year to ratify the deal. Iraq's revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed concerns that the pact makes too many concessions , and his statement which will add impetus to the Sadrist campaign against it. Indeed, the Sadrists have gone so far as to suggest they may even resume armed struggle.

But if Maliki faces opposition within Iraq, he also has to wonder exactly how the Americans will respond.

In the negotiations, the US argued for 58 military bases to remain in Iraq permanently. The security deal explicitly rules that out.

Yet, all through 2008, massive construction projects have been taking place on the American facilities. In June, Tom Engelhardt noted:

Think of this as the greatest American story of these years never told -- or more accurately, since there have been a few reports on a couple of these mega-bases -- never shown. After all, what an epic of construction this has been, as the Pentagon built a series of fortified American towns, each some 15 to 20 miles around, with many of the amenities of home, including big name fast-food franchises, PXes, and the like, in a hostile land in the midst of war and occupation. In terms of troops, the President may only have put his ‘surge' strategy into play in January 2007, but his Pentagon has been ‘surging' on base construction since April 2003.

As well as the bases, there's the US embassy: a massive town in its own right, occupying 104 acres with its own electricity and water systems, anti-missile defenses and shopping precincts. It's a facility often compared to the Vatican City, housing a thousand people and costing over a billion dollars a year to operate.

In theory, it's possible that, having built these monstrous facilities, the Americans will immediately start dismantling them ... but you wouldn't put money on it.

And here's a straw in the wind. Questioned about the contrast between, on the one hand, the Bush administration's refusal to set dates for withdrawal and, on the other, the explicit timetable contained in Maliki's security agreement, Press Secretary Dana Perino explained that, when you negotiate, you have to concede some points. ‘One of the points we conceded was that we would establish these aspirational dates.'

If you compare Perino's ‘aspirational dates' to Maliki's insistence on a definite withdrawal, it's clear that someone, somewhere, is being lied to. But that's always been the story of the Iraq war.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 10-12-2008, Comments Off

Young Liberals’ senate inquiry fails

A piece of mine in Crikey yesterday:

Last week, the Young Liberal-inspired Senate Inquiry into academic bias dribbled to a predictable close.

The Age reported:

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly "undergraduate" tone.

"Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical," it said. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 9-12-2008, Comments Off

lists for 2008

For some reason, the production of 'best of' lists seems to start earlier in the USA than Australia. Both the New York Times and Salon have given their top tens for 2008, which are duly listed below.

The NYT list goes like this:

FICTION

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER: Thirteen Stories By Steven Millhauser.
MERCY By Toni Morrison.
NETHERLAND By Joseph O’Neill.
2666 By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH By Jhumpa Lahiri. ... read more

Written by admin on 9-12-2008, No comments

paradise anthology launch

There's more information -- including guidelines and the list of seven new libraries where events will be held next year – at www.paradiseanthology.com.

Written by admin on 8-12-2008, Comments Off

everything must pass

One tends to think of books as so permanent but it ain't necessarily so.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 6-12-2008, Comments Off

More Overland-Meanjin soccer action

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 5-12-2008, Comments Off

The rest of Overland 193 online

The remainder of Overland 193 is now available online.

In ‘“Eyewitness” in a slouch hat’, Kevin Foster explores the woeful media coverage of the war in Afghanistan:

If, in December 2007, Richard Tanter could question, ‘Why are we in Afghanistan?’, it seems more pertinent now to ask, what’s happening there and why do we know so little about it? Not a single Australian correspondent is based there. As such, the news we get from Afghanistan, ‘almost every picture and video of Australian troops, every audio “grab” and almost every quote from a digger comes from ADF [Australian Defence Forces] “public affairs and imagery specialists”’. These are soldiers ‘trained to use cameras and write press releases’. ... read more

Written by admin on 4-12-2008, No comments

We wuz robbed: Overland loses cup to Meanjin

On Sunday, Overland and Meanjin held a joint Christmas party in Melbourne's Edinburgh gardens, an event that also revived the two journal's half-century old sporting revival. Fittingly enough, Chris Wallace-Crabb (pictured here with Overland's John McLaren), who opened the batting at the first Overland-Meanjin cricket test, took to the field for the first Overland-Meanjin soccer game.

... read more

Written by admin on 1-12-2008, Comments Off

Activism is not a crime, so why the snooping?

From Crikey:

Jeff Sparrow writes:

The Age this week continued what seems to be an irregular series on the Victoria Police’s covert intelligence operations: ... read more

Written by admin on 28-11-2008, Comments Off

Walkley Awards

The full results of the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism are available here.

Congrulations in particular to Stephen Dupont, whose work features on the cover of Overland 193, for winning the news photography section with a photo entitled 'Afghanistan — A Suicide Bombing'. ... read more

Written by admin on 28-11-2008, Comments Off

seven per cent

Some weeks back, a list of members to the neo-fascist group the British National Party leaked to the media. 

The British National Party has lost its membership list - the whole thing has been published online.

The list includes names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of all members up to September 2008. It also includes some people's ages, especially those under 18 - the BNP offers family membership for £40. Many entries also contain more personal comments about jobs or hobbies. That's how we know that that BNP members include receptionists, district nurses, amateur historians, pagans, line dancers and a male witch.

Written by admin on 27-11-2008, Comments Off

Overland 193 poetry

All the poetry published in Overland 193 is now available online. That's 'Sunbathing' by David Prater, 'A vanishing city' and 'This is the Hikari Super Express' by Sarah-Jane Norman, 'We Watched the Waves' and 'Cherry Blossom' by Aden Rolfe, 'Half Life' by Joel Scott, 'High Tea with The Muse' and 'Textiles Exhibition' by Ivy Ireland, 'i took the hand of a preacherman' and 'franchisee, revisited' by Ted Nielsen, 'Interior Life' by Anwyn Crawford and 'in a hurried life' by Kevin Gillam. ... read more

Written by admin on 26-11-2008, Comments Off

Kruddiversary: the post-belief PM

From Crikey:

Jeff Sparrow, editor of Overland writes:

In Victoria, where the Education Revolution has skipped straight past the Five Year Plan and settled into the Great Purges (Victoria University, for instance, will sack an unprecedented twenty-five per cent of its staff in the next few weeks), you might expect academics to have something to say about the Rudd government’s first year. Yet, last week, RMIT’s School of Global Studies, Social Sciences and Planning cancelled its scheduled conference on the anniversary due to a lack of enrolments.

How to explain that collective scholarly yawn?

Here’s one theory: recent events have starkly demonstrated the limits of political office, showing all our politicians to be less the shapers of the world than the shaped, and thus rendering analyses of their performance rather less interesting.

Politics today is all about the financial catastrophe, an event that revealed almost overnight the resemblance between our most cherished economic nostrums and the proverbial umbrella full of holes -- they work perfectly, except when actually needed. The latest New Yorker documents, for instance, how, with the system falling all around him, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, discarded the financial orthodoxy to which he’d devoted his professional life and, like, just started making sh-t up.

As the bankers, so the politicians. George Bush’s conversion from free market fundamentalism to a mutant Keynesianism came, at least, as something of a shock, since W (or, more exactly, the people jiggling his strings) had been genuinely committed to neo-conservatism. But Kevin Rudd’s similar transformation (a year ago, he promised to rein in spending; today he wants local governments to make like drunken sailors) seems entirely unremarkable, since from day one he’s carefully avoided any suggestion of believing in anything much at all.

When assessing Rudd’s first year, the more interesting comparison is not with John Howard but with Peter Costello.

Say Costello had prised Howard’s withered claw from the tiller early enough to win the last election. What would have distinguished his government from the one we have now? Leave aside IR for the moment. What else? It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Costello, who famously marched for Reconciliation, might even have managed the Apology, though he almost certainly couldn’t have brought it off with Rudd’s panache.

And that’s the point. Compared to Rudd, a PM Costello would have been hampered by some lingering beliefs, with his hard Right attachment to IR reform most probably necessitating a die-in-the-ditch defence of WorkChoices. Rudd, by contrast, remains unencumbered by any ideological baggage at all, and so can simultaneously denounce Howard’s IR extremism, while allowing building worker Noel Washington to face gaol for not co-operating with the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

After running a campaign almost entirely devoid of specific policies, Rudd has room to reinvent himself according to the circumstances. His continuing popularity stems less from anything in particular that he’s done and more from a vague impression of youth, energy and pragmatism that counterposes nicely to the angry granddad image of John Howard in his final years.

Howard famously boasted that the times would suit him. Rudd might today say the same thing. An era of economic turmoil, in which politicians find themselves buffeted this way and that, suits a leader without any fixed qualities. An inherent willingness to trim to the prevailing winds is, after all, in its own peculiar way evidence of an inner consistency, along lines that Sam Hoffenstein once explained:

The small chameleon has the knack,
Of turning blue or green or black.
And yet, whatever hue he don,
He stays a small chameleon.

Which is nice for the chameleon. But, with the world gripped with intractable problems (climate change, anyone?), it’s not great news for the rest of us.

Written by admin on 25-11-2008, Comments Off