Slow fade into the system
Steve Finbow‘s biography of Allen Ginsberg reviewed: As any good biographer, Finbow demystifies rather than promulgates romantic notions about his subject. In fact, he is resolutely straight-shooting about Ginsberg’s neuroses, his guilt over his mad mother, his suicidal tendencies, his petty jealousies and sexual perversities, mentions of which perforate the slender volume throughout, individually as […]
The Revelation at the Rampart
Bronson knew the answer, had known it since he first received his instructions: he was being sent to the wall not to repair it, but to destroy it. The age of symbols was over. They weren’t real enough, and what wasn’t real no longer existed. Representation itself, of what use was it other than to obscure the real? The wall, at one time, had been a symbol of something, but what? This ambiguity was precisely what had saved the wall from destruction. As long as its meaning was unclear, the Empire could care less whether it existed or not. But once the wall again began to assume the shape of meaning and assert itself as something, it posed a threat. Reattached to a referent, the “wall” spiraled out of the tight, pressure-locked linguistic controls of the Empire. Meaning begat meaning.
The fourth instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.