‘Dear capitalism,’ began one of the handmade, cardboard signs floating above the sea of occupiers in Toronto, ‘it’s not you it’s us.’ Then, scrawled below: ‘Just kidding, it’s you.’
Over the past year and a half, events have highlighted a growing suspicion that capitalism is becoming a threat to anyone not a stockbroker, politician or CEO. This widespread movement had made itself felt in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece and Spain, in the crumbling of Wall Street, and in the people’s occupations transforming public spaces into tent cities.
I sit at one end of the foyer in the Coroners Court. A young blonde woman sets herself down next to me and then addresses the two older men seated by my side. ‘I’m Sarah, from the Maribyrnong Leader,’ she says. ‘So, um, what’s happening here today?’
Like ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, the words ‘Europe’ and ‘crisis’ seem to have a near permanent affinity these days. This constant conjunction tells us that the nature of the crisis is no transient thing. It is what Gramsci would have called an ‘organic crisis’, one that condenses multiple chronic problems at various levels of the system in a single, epochal spasm.
When the Occupy movement spread to Australia, many mainstream commentators were incredulous. Has Australia not been doing exceptionally well, having enjoyed a long summer of economic growth since the 1990s and escaping the worst of the global financial crisis?
Ramsay Street’s newest family is part of a deliberate campaign to diversify Australia’s most famous neighbourhood. The move has already met with public outrage: online comments criticising Network Ten’s decision have been filled with racist vitriol. Me? Well, I just hope that the Kapoor children have better luck in suburban Australia than I did.
Once upon a time, Victorian England had a reputation as such an arctic tundra of sexual frigidity that people believed the ridiculous claim that piano legs had to be covered with drapery to preserve decency; or that the typical mother’s nuptial advice was ‘Just lie back, dear, and think of Britain’.
Given the assignment of choosing a handful of books that to me represent, or inform, or speak to, or embody, or maybe manifest the spirit of the Occupy movement (that should probably be capitalised: the Spirit Of the Occupy Movement – SOOM), I went democratic: I asked around.
That’s how it started – an exchange via internet floated the idea to bring me to South America. Now here we are in Sao Paulo International La Gru shaking hands.
The winner of the 2011 Overland Judith Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets is Joel Ephraims for his poem ‘Rock Candy’. The two runners-up are Sam Langer and Patrick Jones.
Read 'The 2011 Overland Judith Wrigh Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets'
I once a bird flew in a blue moon . shell shocked she cuts across a lawn towards me and
A week after he killed himself, Dane Johnson came to visit Toby at the service station.
In Nepal my friend Cliff is trying to keep the wind away. A tiny disease has taken his face. Nothing that won’t repair, he assures me, that a month on the farm won’t fix. But it hurts to be alive.
This makes me want to scribe something long-winded and a little brutal to the diplomatic corps.
The academic formerly known as Cedric Pinkwattle sat with one leg crossed over the other, a position of repose typically favoured by women, libertines and intellectuals that he found pleasantly conducive to thought – in spite of the pressure his scissored thighs placed upon his testicles, creating a sensation that, if he paused to think about it, he would have to define as painful …
A scalpel chill snips through the weave of beanies. Woollen scarves put up a thin resistance. Night’s south-west wind goose-bumps uncovered skin,
My hounds will never find me,
even with the cracks in the tabula rasa.
They, after all,
Rotate the potato. A labrador is happiest collecting kindling. While the football’s on in the other room we salt the pigskin: O, giver of gout. Brie suctions the wooden platter. Wisteria bruises on the patio.
There are bees at her mouth and birds at her eye – flying. The dust, so scattered
the field out there is that expanse hazed in glary
this is hell to be got out of unpitied strip unpeeling in the massive heat
a lens no-one
has looked through
it is the hard
O man – that concrete powder twilight over Mayfield falls softly down into the mind; we’re skylarking, you see, on Vine Street, atop the hill, near The Gatsby House,
A few weeks ago, the embattled Planned Parenthood in Dallas, Texas refused a $500,000 dollar donation from Tucker Max. The Dallas clinic is one of only a handful left in North Texas, after Planned Parenthood lost $73 million dollars in funding in 2011, in an area with one of the highest uninsured populations in America – 25%.
Continue reading 'This project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com' 9
In a bar in Adelaide, I got into an argument about country music.
After a short break to work through a backlog, Overland is now once more accepting submissions of fiction and poetry. See our submissions page for more details.
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?
Continue reading 'Not for Children: HBO’s Game of Thrones' 21
I have long been meaning to write about atheism and the Left. The Q&A with Dawkins and Pell, and Jeff Sparrow’s long and thoughtful essay are as good an opportunity as any.
What does the change in leadership of the Australian Greens mean for Left politics? At one level, it would be easy to write off the shift as largely irrelevant, proof that there is an essential continuity in the party’s drift…
Continue reading 'An opportunity too easily missed: The Left and the post-Brown Greens' 11
A couple of years ago I acquired a guidebook to Lombardy and Piedmont published in 1914 in which I was especially delighted to discover a map of my native Milan drawn in the distinctive and attractive style of the Touring Club Italiano publications. Looking for familiar places, I came across the road in which my father spent all of his working life and found that a river ran through it.
Racism isn’t a simple thing to write about. It’s difficult to push readers to acknowledge their own complicity in a racist culture without also pushing the kind of buttons that make us curl up like echidnas. On the other hand, a book might have an anti-racist angle which does nothing but reward the reader for finding themselves morally superior to the characters within it.
My first thought on reading After the Riots, the newly published UK government report on the riots of 2011, was that it was written by The Onion. It could certainly use as a subheading the title of one of John Cage’s brief essays, ‘How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)’.
In high school my English teacher gave advanced reading to students who were keen, and the first novel was To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s book is a story of racism in the American South, as everyone knows, but it also included a salutary lesson about gender for me.
Continue reading 'You are not who I thought you were: race and The Hunger Games' 32
Ninety years ago in the title of The Waste Land TS Eliot played with the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King, whose wounded genitals blighted the regenerative powers of his kingdom as they blighted his own. Both lay wasted. The poem’s opening line, ‘April is the cruellest month’, makes spring a time not of green abundance but of pain, and overturns Chaucer’s invocation to the fertility of April which opens his Canterbury Tales.
Continue reading 'When you crack open your Easter eggs, think of wombs' 4
I’ve written an article for Counterpunch, using some episodes from Melbourne’s radical history to make an argument about the politics of the New Atheism. It’s really a continuation of a Meanjin essay from a couple of years back.
The abolition of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards represents a harbinger of things to come. Not just in that state, though you’d have to say that Campell Newman’s decision to cut a major book award bang in the middle of the National Year of Reading does not bode well for arts funding in Australia’s north.
Continue reading 'The abolition of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards' 23
I was reminded of it last night when Brian Ritchie, former bass player for the Violent Femmes and curator of Tasmania’s newest and most talked-about museum’s Festival of Music and Art, was a guest on the Hobart edition of ABC’s Q&A. The discussions about MONA on that episode – like the majority of profiles on the museum and its creator – were unfailingly positive.
Tariro Mavondo is an actor, poet and writer. Her article, ‘The dangers of a single story’, is featured in the new Overland, as part of the CAL Connections series. We spoke to her about her essay, diversity on television, the position of the migrant artist, and performing spoken word poetry.