Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts / Writing By the sea Philip Hammial I want it so the dead are blind. Blind the way Easter comfort washes a stick-dry corpse, passion as misplaced as that derailed train (Ann Arbor, MI, 1947) that ended up in a church, in a school room, in my parent’s bedroom, can’t remember which. What’s happening to my memory? My first dog’s name? The ladder joke? Blind as in the rage our boss manifests when he can’t find some fool to work for a dollar, his third world mindset hopelessly irreconcilable with our first. What about those boys who were playing cards on a tomb in a shit-infested seaside cemetery in Rabat (Morocco) in 1963, they probably would. Speaking of which: Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin in Sète that I visited in ’60, sitting for an hour or two under a pine tree wondering if I’d ever have the what-it-takes to write a cemetery by the sea poem. Probably not, at seventy-three I don’t like my chances. Which could be why I want it so that the dead are blind (& deaf as well, this poem as raucous as the Arabic of those boys in Rabat). Philip Hammial Philip Hammial has had twenty-eight poetry collections published. More by Philip Hammial 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.
