Progressive culture since 1954
After the huge vote for the neo-fascist National Front, the philosopher Alain Badiou excoriated the French intelligentsia for their complicity with the new anti-Muslim racism. ‘As always,’ he wrote, ‘the idea – no matter how criminal – precedes power, which in turn shapes the opinion that it needs. The intellectual – no matter how appalling – precedes the minister, who constructs her followers.’
What they are waiting for is el tren, the now infamous freight service that takes them to Ixtepec, Oaxaca, and on into the cartel-controlled state of Veracruz. There, many are beaten, sexually assaulted, robbed, extorted, kidnapped or killed – and there are few, if any, lucky ones.
If I listed all the insults, I’d fill a page. I note them here to show that fat prejudice is rife in Australia. Sometimes it is women who look over their glasses and direct their eyes up and down my body in shops where they don’t stock anything over size fourteen.
In March last year, only days after NATO’s military intervention in Libya, the French ‘New Philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy held a reception for Libyan insurgents at the Hôtel Rafael in Paris. Among the guests was Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who played a major role in popularising the so-called ‘right to intervene’ on humanitarian grounds.
By now, it is the stuff of legend: Muhammad Bouazizi, fed up with police harassment and poverty, douses himself in kerosene and sets himself alight in front of the local municipality. And so it began, more than one year ago in the ruin of a Tunisian backwater called Sidi Bouzid.
Obama has little incentive to follow Roosevelt’s example, in light of the major differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The working class no longer has the leverage it had in the 1930s when the US was still heavily invested in manufacturing.
Earth Overshoot Day marks the point when human activities use more resources than nature is capable of regenerating each year, an imbalance well established by the end of last century, creating a gap that has increased most years since. If we use models devised by the UK’s New Economics Foundation (NEF) and the Global Footprint Network, Earth Overshoot Day in 2011 fell on 27 September.
Overland in conversation with industry insiders Jo Case, John Weldon and Malcolm Neil.
Without doubt, the porn question has, since the 1970s, been the most controversial and divisive issue in the women’s movement.
In 1987, when KW Jeter penned a simple letter describing his books to Locus magazine, his words were prophetic: ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective … Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like “steampunks,” perhaps’.
Without doubt, the porn question has, since the 1970s, been the most controversial and divisive issue in the women’s movement.
Overland in conversation with industry insiders Jo Case, John Weldon and Malcolm Neil.
Walking around Cabramatta today, you could be forgiven for not believing its history.
The day before Eleanor died she had spent the afternoon drinking cocktails with her friends.
At night-time, the river sounds like a dozen lanes of blackest highway bitumen.
When I got myself this Starvation Box my daddy told me son you’re bound to lose you ain’t never gonna make no money playing that guitar
I am sleeping tonight side by side with my mother on spring and feather, matching queen-sized mattresses, in the adjoining room my brother and his family.
once
upon
a time
one way is for the temperature to fall this happens on clear, calm summer nights. a cloudy sky acts
Photocopied peaches taste sour in the afterthought of extricated blue. The relationship manager’s understudy
He tells me the summer grass is worth more than gold. The seed in the worm’s mouth
somebody is flinching by the mobile florist, getting lynched with fatigue and crumbed tobacco
choose from chicken or beef these delicious soups are jam-packed with chunky pieces of vegetables and meat offered in a convenient ring-pull can microwave and serve
Your bath is generous, impersonal, whitely curved, bloated with self-importance and scummed with a delicate rim of grime.
The tower was locked (its future being chained to the mast
like a breeze crossed with water from the past tense (that
immense wall of sound’s collage (its anagram eye, loveless
Ben Kingsley as David Malouf Nicole Kidman as Alison Croggon Anthony Quinn as PiO