Published 16 December 2009 · Main Posts Questionnaire Alec Patric by A. S. Patric Are we more disconnected? Are we more superficial? Does the internet cripple the creative life? Are we more distracted? Debased and disillusioned? Do we abandon a spiritual centre for a cyber stratosphere? Or is it merely two centimetres of distraction? Are we ourselves filtered through the thoughts of others? Are we distillations of the failures and successes of our parents, or perhaps, just our social networks? How much of myself is originated solely from the private recesses of the singularity that is my ego? How much of me is already historical, global, communal, whether I want it or not? Where is all this going? Where is all this happening? Is there some point of culmination where consciousness experiences itself as a collective phenomenon? Do we understand where we have been? Do we understand where we will be? Have we seen all the tools we have made, and all the tools we will build, for the machines that are our past and future? Has an everlasting moment always slipped through our fingers? Do we stand alone below the stars? Have we always wondered how to see them properly? Have we always wondered how to see you properly? Are there really nothing but questions? Nothing more than a code of 0s and 1s? Combinations of such broken figures? Just so many broken fingers? Do you think in such fractured circles –> wear such incomplete rings? Have we been little things? Have we been voiceless? Have we been a sum on the other side of the sun? Have we dreamed and found all our answers and then forgotten such sunless places? Have I known you and lost you? Have I misplaced our misread faces? Printed them wrong, forgotten and gone? Will we now drift? Each from each? Clusters of poetry turning into rings, barely detectable, and spinning around Jupiter? Powdering out in white dust as far away as Pluto’s underworld? What we where when we discovered that our planet offers us an absolute answer to everything we could ever ask? Answering 1 + 1 1 + 1 1 + 1 Answering everything else with zeros Alec Patric AS Patric is the award-winning author of The Rattler & other stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011), Las Vegas for Vegans (Transit Lounge, 2012) and Bruno Kramzer (Finlay Lloyd, 2013). More by Alec Patric Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
