Progressive culture since 1954
children roast in the fires of this terrible century
and no love is enough no elegy sufficient
That’s regular Overland contributor Alison Croggon in her 1997 poem, ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’. Her words circulated on social media recently, at a time when the powerful seemed to have declared war on children.
The jocular internet expression ‘Too long; didn’t read’ reflects the demands on our attention from an abundance of information. It’s an impatient dismissal of anyone who clutters up online space by using too many words to express themselves.
In English it’s called the right to be forgotten, but the French, who were the first to legislate it, call it le droit à l’oubli – the right to oblivion – evoking not just the state of being forgotten but also forgetting, not merely being overlooked but also ceasing to be.
David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King appeared trailing clouds of hagiography when published in 2011. References to his suicide were frequent but circumspect, usually alluding to his use of anti-depressant medication, of which Foster Wallace himself was reportedly too ashamed to speak.
One morning in January, I woke up and thought: ‘Today, I absolutely must get a kitten.’ I don’t know what I’d been dreaming. It was one of those thoughts that comes out of the blue, with no idle trail of kitten-musings to warn me that felinophilia would strike me on that particular day. I rose with purpose and vim and made phone calls.
A warning, before we begin. Most of the writing you’ll ever read on writing will try to persuade you that there is something about putting strings of words together that is very special indeed. Writing, you will be told, is the most human and enduring of the creative professions.
A few years back, Chimamanda Adichie warned of the dangers of a single story. In her widely viewed TED Talk, Adichie laments writers’ tendency to fall back on cliché and generalisations, to reduce the richness of real lives to familiar and, in the case of Africa, often racist tropes.
For Overland’s sixtieth-anniversary issue, editors from other little magazines, both in Australia and overseas, were asked to comment briefly on their project. Why produce a magazine?
There was a time in my early twenties when I found it excruciating to sit in front of the computer. As a teenager, I’d been excited to write, and stories had flowed from me freely. Then this, from nowhere.
I can see myself lying on the bed. I’ve been awake for days; I’ve lost track of time. I feel like I’m somebody else. I’m busy, busy pretending to forget who I used to be. The music inside my skull backgrounds everything I do, high frequencies standing up the hair on the back of my neck and turning my mouth dry as sandpaper.
The last time Ng Shui Meng saw her husband, Sombath Somphone, alive was early in the evening of Saturday, 15 December 2012. Sombath was driving his old jeep home. Shui Meng, who was travelling in her own vehicle in front of his, noticed him being stopped at a police post on Thadeua Road, a main thoroughfare in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
Literature’s magical power has always been in its ability to name. This power – from Les Murray’s ‘This country is my mind’ all the way through to critiques of stereotyping – is a common ground over which conservatives and radicals quarrel, and it’s what has been done with these shared assumptions that I want to explore below.
Why, then, do Romani victims of the Holocaust remain peripheral to historical memory? Part of the answer is that majority populations in Europe continue to use Roma as a racialised scapegoat. In contemporary Australia, it is rightly considered offensive to refer to Jewish people by the derogatory terms used by the Nazi regime.
More positively, socialist realism was centrally concerned, as a Soviet ideologue put it, with promoting ‘revolutionary romanticism’, expressing in literature ‘the very soul of the proletariat, its passion and its love’.
The third of these Fancy Cuts is from Christos Tsiolkas, who needs no introduction to Overland readers. His story ‘Petals’ responds to Brian Gorman’s ‘Afternoon among flowers’, which first appeared in Overland 33 in December 1965.
I am imprisoned. I am in here for three years. I am having to endure and more two years and three months. I don’t know if I can endure. I don’t speak. This is a curse and there is no reply to make back to a curse.
He brushed the dirt from his cheek and sat back on his haunches to relieve the strain on the leg muscles. He dimly realised that the right leg would be numb and tingle when he stood up.
Some kind of pain, Jolene says as they hand her a baby still bloody and wet. Then, Perfect. A bit of blood marks Baby’s chin, or is it a beauty spot? Even that is perfect.
Kandinski orbited through the kitchen, past the water cooler, past the toilet block, past Yang’s desk on the right – the carefully timed three-minute lap of the office’s gravitational path. He awarded himself another lap, a bonus for four cramped hours at his desk.
Riding on such instruments as a large aluminium
hemisphere, syndicated falconry of gifts and predilections
propose dilutions of solemn music played through ploughs
conjecture
if I can’t come up with anything
I’ll crawl over and tap out one note
a dead bee
on the bus seat,
a bipolar daughter
Our time starts now Here under home skies I’m reflecting on your question ‘why are there things rather than nothing’
What if Persephone remained a hard woman? An ethics of care turned towards oneself. Love’s harvest, the halves of intimacy in these latitudes.
Driving over Styx Creek, appropriately laden with heavy metal,
the TAFE maintaining a cold shoulder, where transgender trainee
librarians from Kurri, meet Penny Wong’s ex-speech writer,
Terra incognita transfers across a plain,
a wing blends the graces, tarmacs, macadam,
concrete being so concrete, the tar-sick travel.
