A LESS THAN MAXIMALLY TRANSPARENT EYEBALL: See now, I am interested in so many of the same subjects as Motime Like the Present. And I am semi-hemi-demi-steeped in academic litspeak. And yet I find myself utterly unable to comprehend more than half of what he posts. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just the old Emerson vs. Nietzsche conflict? Anyway, for whatever reason, I never do feel like I’m using words the same way he is. So from now on, assume that any comments on MLTP posts are simply my riffs, possibly unrelated, on whatever he’s posted.

Nonetheless, I agree with everyone and his mom that MLTP’s Watchmen series (start here and scroll down, or start here and scroll up) is totally worth your time. And I’m really looking forward to the new Animal Man series. I don’t know that I’ll understand it; in fact, I expect I won’t. But I hope it will provoke fruitful misprision.

Also, Commonplace Book has a fantastic post on one image from Watchmen, and the relationship between order and hope in the book: “Where in Watchmen do we see evidence of meaning, of the higher hand? In the structure. Where are the fingerprints of the forces that shape all things? In the repeating patterns, the reiterating Hiroshima lovers, the ubiquitous bloodstains. Our lives are messy with the taint of thwarted love, betrayal, rape and violence; we look like mere human stains, defacing the natual happiness of orderly faces on Mars. But this mess is itself orderly, itself patterned, by a hand higher our own grasping, slapping, embracing ones. Moore has always been a religious writer it seems, and here he gives us The Book. Does this make Moore God? Only by way of metonymy, since his point is and always was that we are all heroes, gods in our souls. …But Moore does find despair a sin, and he attacks it with the whole book, as opposed to any one part.”

Speaking of, I will note, contra MLTP, that I have known at least one nihilist who could take a joke. It didn’t make him any better, though. (This was the character that Ratty and I decided was a hideous hybrid of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard III, and Lady Anne. This sounds interesting in description but in actual fact was not so much.)