Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts / Writing Machine Code David Musgrave My eyes are like machine code, running lines up from the lanes and screens or avenues of trees my limbs walk down, open mouths or sideways squints which open up my mouth or make me squint. It’s one thing to think about it, another thing to live it through, when resemblances cannot be told apart from repetition. Bubbles wobble and rise from a morning dive in the pool where after several laps I tire and lose count. If comparisons were true instead of pathways, fishing lines, I’d happily shut down but it’s not the truth that wakes me up at 3 am, just its piercing semblance. David Musgrave David Musgrave is a poet, critic, novelist and publisher at Puncher & Wattmann. His latest books are Phantom Limb (John Leonard Press) and Glissando: A Melodrama (Sleepers Publishing). More by David Musgrave 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 23 February 202324 February 2023 · Writing From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author Rob Horning Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.
