By Scott Hamilton

It is unusual for the details of an academic course to become a hot topic of conversation in the blogopshere, but over the last week or so a paper offered by Mohsen al Attar at the University of Auckland’s Law School has engaged the attention, if not the intellects, of scores of commenters at New Zealand’s most popular blog.

After Kiwiblog proprietor David Farrar posted a link to the outline of Mohsen’s paper, which is called ‘Colonialism to Golobalisation’, comments boxes quickly filled with denunciations of the propagandists for communism, political correctness, civil unions, and similar abominations who supposedly dominate Kiwi campuses.

For the keyboard warriors who fight for liberty at Kiwiblog and other red meat sites, Mohsen al Attar makes a perfect target: he is foreign-born, he has a Muslim name, he is preoccupied with the history of of Western imperialism, and he is unafraid to flourish fashionable if slightly obscure left-wing phrases like ‘counter-hegemony’ and ‘anti-globalisation’ in his lectures and texts.

Read more »

Colin Ward one of the English language’s most eloquent advocates of anarchism has died. The author of Anarchy in Action – a brilliant exploration of anarchist ideas – was 85.

The Independent has a good obit here.

And for a taste of Ward’s work here’s an extract from Anarchy in Action.

Anarchy and a Plausible Future

Anarchy in Action Originally published in Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973). Excerpted in Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming December 2010).

For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest country in the world, until I woke up to know that what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the coming days of poverty we may get more of these …
–W.R. LETHABY, Form in Civilisation

This book has illustrated the arguments for anarchism, not from theories, but from actual examples of tendencies which already exist, alongside much more powerful and dominant authoritarian methods of social organisation. The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. Is an anarchist society possible?

Read more »

Press Release

Alan Greenspan has been judged the economist most responsible for causing the Global Financial Crisis. He and 2nd and 3rd place finishers Milton Friedman and Larry Summers have won the first–and hopefully last—Dynamite Prize in Economics.

In awarding the Prize, Edward Fullbrook, editor of the Real World Economics Review, noted that “They have been judged to be the three economists most responsible for the Global Financial Crisis. More figuratively, they are the three economists most responsible for blowing up the global economy.”

Read more »

A new book is set to uncover the secrets of John Key and National’s success in the 2008 general election.

Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 is a series of insiders’ views on our most recent general election, showing how John Key became New Zealand’s 38th Prime Minister.

Edited by Victoria University Professors Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts and published by Victoria University Press, the book offers accounts from politicians, campaign advisors and media commentators who reveal insights into how John Key successfully rode a popular mood for change to overthrow Helen Clark’s Labour Government after three terms.
Read more »

A People War: Images of the Nepal conflict 1996-2006, edited by Kunda Dixit

Kathmandu: Publication Nepa-laya, 2007. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

KUNDA DIXIT is a remarkable journalist and an inspiring communications innovator. He has been one of the visionary writers who have been able to make sense of development journalism and development communication theory and translate this into practice. A decade before this book, his Dateline Earth: Journalism as if the planet mattered (1996) became a sought after classic and should be in every South Pacific newsroom (but is actually in very few).

It should also be widely cited in Australian and New Zealand journalism schools as well. Reading it would contribute to more perceptive reportage of the region by young journalists. Dixit’s prophetic view that issues such as jungle families sickened by mine tailings, peasants impoverished by global free trade, countries harmed by toxic waste and general environmental neglect were often ignored is now widely accepted in the region with a wider range of environmental and human rights reporting now a normative.

Read more »

Australian writer Chloe Hooper will join the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week in March, following a year of plaudits and prizes. Her latest book, The Tall Man, is a non-fiction work as haunting as her debut novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime. James Robertson speaks with her about telling dark tales in two genres.

Chloe Hooper is a writer whose talent seems unbound by genre. The 36-year-old Australian has written two books, a novel and a work of non-fiction, and both have met with international critical acclaim. So which form does she prefer? ‘I like books where people are trapped in spooky houses and trying to escape,’ she laughs over the phone from Melbourne. ‘I think, psychologically speaking, we’re all trying to do that.’ You might guess as much from her work, which, in both genres, provides compelling insight into the darker side of human psychology.

Read more »

Victoria University’s remarkable New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has recently made a copy of a Novels and Novelists a 1930 collection of Katherine Mansfield’s collected reviews available on-line.

Here’s a taste of what’s on offer:

The Rescue — By Joseph Conrad

Reviewed by KATHERINE MANSFIELD

The writer who has achieved more than a common popularity, who has been recognized as one of the very few whose place is not in the crowded and jostled front rank but a delightful airy perch among the mountains, is to be envied—and not to be envied. The distinguished position has its special drawbacks. Whether it is the effect upon him of the rarefied air, or of the dignified solitude, or of the cloud interposing and obscuring the smaller eminences, the valleys and the plains from his, at one time, eager gaze, we do not know, but the books which come down to us from the mountains are no longer the books they were. They are variations upon the theme that made him famous; they are ‘safe’ books, guaranteed to leave unchallenged the masterpiece that put him there. Who would tempt Providence twice? And so from timidity or pride, from poverty of imagination, or a high sense of his ‘unique’ duty, he continues to repeat himself, and it is only his memory which is in our flowing cups richly remembered.

Read more »

by Greg Palast
In the sixth grade, the Boys’ Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word “fuck” in it. Since the Boys’ Vice-Principal hadn’t read the book – and I don’t think he’d ever read any book – he couldn’t tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world’s vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

Read more »

Zone of the Marvellous by Martin Edmond

Auckland University Press 2009. Reviewed by PAULINE DAWSON

Martin Edmond’s Zone of the Marvellous is an amazing treasure box of fact, fiction, myth, history, fable and imagination in search of the antipodes. Helped on its way by a Copyright Licensing Writers’ Award won by the author in 2007, in eight discrete essays, the author writes that what he seeks “to do is describe how this other place was first rumoured, then imagined, then looked for, discovered, plundered, colonised and finally domesticated”.

Following the rather ’straight’, yet lyrical telling of the historical story in The Supply Party (Edmond’s last book), Zone of the Marvellous goes back to the densely packed stories and tangents found in Luca Antara. While Supply Party had strong undertones of loss and absence, Zone, although also telling tales of journeys, is much richer. Perhaps this is simply the contrast of the Australian outback to the tropics of the Pacific and the Asian spice routes.

Read more »

Steve Braunias encounters the madding crowd of a literary gig

I suppose it might’ve been hard on family and friends, but the thought occurred at the Buddle Findlay gala night launch of New Zealand Book Month in October that the nation’s cultural life would benefit greatly if a fire broke out in the handsome, high-ceilinged room of Auckland’s Hopetoun Alpha building, and incinerated everyone. The event was excruciating and strictly humourless, a damp little bonfire of the vanities – pretty much what I expected, except worse. Where’s an arsonist when you need one?

Read more »