jtimshel

Roland Barthes said, "Death of the Author," and society said, "Hey, why not?" They didn't actually kill them, and it wasn't just the authors, either, though there isn't much written about the artists in those early days. The theory was to pretend that there was no author, to better separate the text from the experiences of the writer. Of course, that's impossible to enforce. So society went the other way. If they couldn't separate the author's experience from the text, they'd separate the author from experience. It worked well, at first. What author or artist wouldn't leap at the chance to live in a commune full of no one but other artists

someday I will travel to Machu Picchu to see the ruined despondent glory in those desolate courtyards; memories of men and gods long vanished into the pack of tricks called history. to see mournful faces and backs bowed, but not broken by years of toil; to see the houses of the bitter, humiliated remnants of splendour long faded and touch the dregs of hope left in their shattered Quechua souls. I will witness the last breath of a viejita after whispering lies that she will never remember when I know there is nothing to ease slow, inexorable mortality. I will trek in the Atacama of men's hearts to find a couple dispossessed by

I live like a king in a place like a hovel. We are outcasts from the mainland, doomed to medical facilities for the "good" of our "weak minds". I know we are above this, so I still comport myself as I have all my life, for I have a higher purpose than sitting in disinfected rooms and letting them analyse my actions all wrong. They caught us in our visit to the White House, delighted to rectify the times when we slipped through their fingers. The shattered windows and toppled trophies and the neat pile of cleaned bones in the offices of the world's leaders had confounded them at first. Without the twisted guidance of their puppeteers - Presi