The Revelation at the Rampart
Bronson had been assigned to repair a remote part of the wall, in an obscure area of the Empire. The notice had come, like it always did, in the curiously old-fashioned form of a note in a sealed envelope beneath his door. It was there in the morning, a simple folded slip of paper in the envelope with the coordinates, a time-line, an all-zones passport, a contact number, the familiar list of instructions, and a credit card. If this sounds mysterious and romantic, the stuff of spy novels, then consider that Bronson was a mere field engineer, a repairer of structures, part laborer, part designer, part theorist.
The first instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.
3:AM Press
Launching September 2012.
A modest proposal
Simon Critchley on contemporary art: It seems to me that if we look back at much of what is most radical and interesting in the art of the last century, we can see that we are no longer dealing with the sublime or indeed with art as the possibility of aesthetic sublimation, but with an […]
What happened to modernism
Will Self, modernist: In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici made some intemperate-sounding remarks on the English writers of the half-generation immediately preceding my own. He accused Julian Barnes and Martin Amis – among others – of, inasmuch as they responded to the modernist moment at all, reacting with a degree of puerility that saw […]
The Missing Links
James Salter on Jacques Bonnet’s Phantom on the Bookshelves. * Reading books in situ. * 15 of the greatest lists in literature. * A series of Beckett recordings from 1966, supervised by Beckett & accompanied by his nephews playing music. * Alex Ross on James Joyce & music. * “A dandy prone to pratfalls who […]
The view from here
The Panopticon treads just right the fine line between impassioned anarchy and elegant control. Jenni Fagan is not only victoriously, wickedly honest, but also a brilliant stylist. The words pause and tease and stop just where they should. The hallucinations fade into the ironically therapeutic Loch-side just in time. It kicks just where it should, and it’s gentle when it can be. Just when it might be getting too dark, there’s something dry, something sweet, to balance things out again. The little drags of comedy and delirium cleverly punctuate those weightier stretches.
Christiana Spens reviews Jenni Fagan‘s The Panopticon.