in

“For I have turned aside from much that I knew, and have given up much that went before. What will not bring me, more certainly than before, to where I am is of no use to me. I have stepped out of the clearing into the woods. I have thrown away my lantern and I can see the dark.”

– Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”

in

"Then he began to write something about charity; but what he wrote on the paper one day, he did not see the next; for this happens to every one there when he commits any thing to paper for the external man only, and not at the same time for the internal, this from compulsion and not from freedom; it is obliterated of itself."

– Jorge Luis Borges, "A Theologian in Death"

in

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself."

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

attributive superheroic dissonance

in

In an effort to forget that I'm getting nowhere on MainFictionThing this morning, I've spent an inordinate amount of time leafing through several of the attempts past to bring superheroes to prose – Craig Shaw Gardener's THE BATMAN MURDERS, short story collections – THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BATMAN, DICK TRACY: THE SECRET FILES –, Andrew Vachss's BATMAN: THE ULTIMATE EVIL, an old MARVEL SUPERHEROES collection, etc etc – and I can't shake the oddity of seeing "Batman said..." in prose: there's a cognitive dissonance – in spite of being an avid fan of the old Shadow pulps where "The Shadow said" runs adverbly rampant – that I find irreconcilable (though the TRACY stories are a little easier since those are, excepting the villains, named with – for lack of a better phrase – real names, no matter the quality of the story); even Morrison's prose/comics mixture in the oft-and-unfairly-maligned BATMAN 663 (which I happen to love) jars me a bit.

Wondering: Is it because I'm so used to seeing others' interpretation of the character that I find it impossible, through a particular lacking of my own imagination, to picture the character as I see him? Is it the codename thing that just feels weird?

Can't recall if I had the same sensation with the few STAR TREK or STAR WARS novels/novelizations I've read (though I do recall enjoying Peter David's TREK novels quite a bit); might have been easier since there's really only one visual interpretation of Picard or whomever. And, like Dick Tracy, it's not a codename but a real name...

I still haven’t gotten anywhere with MainFictionThing.

in

"I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with *grotesques*, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these *Essays* if not monstrosities and *grotesques* botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?"

– Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships."

in

"There are few grounds for hoping that, in any immediate future, there will be any recovery of social sanity. It would seem that the vicious circle must become yet more intolerable, more blatantly and desperately circular before any large numbers of human beings awaken to the tragic trick which they are playing on themselves. But for those who see clearly that it is a circle and why it is a circle, there is no alternative but to stop circling."

— Alan W. Watts, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY