My Secret Wars of 1984
Each illustration holds potential for intensity, for intensities that require several word balloons. Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. Each superhero has an origin story for misunderstanding what makes a power. Each time, the image is more distinct. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction. Elections with margins.
By Dennis Etzel Jr.
No subject is terrible if the story is true
And, via Bookslut, James Campbell’s ‘Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster” in the TLS.
Reloading Beckett’s philosophical libraries
Beckett did indeed have doubts about the stabilising anaphoric resources of language. He did feel the existential unease of both the nihilist and the Heraclitean, where his sympathy is with Holderlin’s lines, “…suffering humanity perishes and falls blindly from one hour to the other, like water dashed from crag to crag year after year, down into the unknown.” But it is through the resources of classical logic that the sorites has been understood as a problem of ignorance, and human fallibility. Beckett takes ignorance to be an essential aspect of the human condition. He gropes blindly towards the epistemic solution to the sorites rather than via deviant logics, nihilism or contextualism.
By Richard Marshall.