"Ozymandias Melancholia."

As I walked with friends in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (keyword: sylvan), we were surprised to be told that it was the capital of the whole gigantic state (gigantic should be spelled with a J {just my opinion}). So after getting on our android®s to check up on our forgotten grade-school civic-facts, we embarked on a tour of the two-mile radius downtown section…. At night!....Our tour guide was a stripper—believe it or not—lol. And that's a long story i don't feel like telling right now. Anyways, the capital of PA has these grand-but-decaying buildings that just brought Allen's Stardust Memories to mind. So I will embark on a project for the phrase.

It's a perfectly valid description of a particular phenomenon. It's that sad and depressed feeling you get when you realize that no matter how great and majestic and important something is at the time, in time it's going to pass. Just like the [Shelley] poem — eventually, time kills everything. It's just that rotting statue of Ozymandias, a once-great statue, and now a broken-down piece of marble in the desert. So you get a depressed feeling because it gives you a sense of the futility of life, that all that you're working for, and all the things that seem so meaningful, are nothing."

Woody Allen on His New Film To Rome With Love and Some Very Old Themes

By Karina Longworth Thursday, Jun 21 2012

The death of the author...?

La mort de l'auter.
(preliminaries of a larger essay i'm working on.... just my initial assessment)

Have you ever struggled with a book that you particularly didn’t see a point in reading, or found the verbiage of the book totally different from what you’re used to, or even found yourself asking if the plot is at all accessible? If you had, then Roland Barthes’ La Mort de l'Auteur is deceitful to say the least.

If I get what Barthes is getting across, then there’s a schizo-Balzac thing happening here: Balzac, the writer, who exists as a person (the ‘scriptur’), and Balzac the author—that voice you hear narrating a the text to you (the floating eyeball). The author, whom we usually assume we are conscious of when reading a story is, in Barthes' case, non-existent, or at least should not exist in terms of lit. criticism; he commands, “once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” Consciousness of the writer distorts because the “book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” and this is problematic as “every text is eternally written here and now” by the reading public.

The “language speaks, not the author, through a prereq. impersonality,” rendering the writer as conveyer of a message in the performative act of using the mosaic of words, phrases, and semantics from their culture, and for Barthes’ thesis, the author is irrelevant because “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Put that way, we have the Ecclesiastical claim that ideas are not original, and this is at the heart of the linguistic theory that looks only at the elemental matter of sentences, down to their basic abstract units: words.  With this reasoning, words exist in the aether as units of discourse while we wiggle through them ephemerally when we write. (I guess it’s kind of like breathing oxygen i.e. I’m no more special than anybody else for breathing. So writers are using words like we breathe; the text may be special, but not the ‘scriptur’). Semiotic rules viz. the "I" example of the signified and the signifier.