Spinning discusses te myth of the west, which takes a lot of forms. One of the ideas that gets me in Blood Meridian is a seeming contradiction between space and border. The novel explores what is far and what is close, but in a way the landscape doesn’t suggest a peaceful openness, an openness that evokes freedom. There is an awe striking effect to the description. A sense of menace. Distance as alienness.

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained in it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

Chapter 7. Watchmen. The scene begins with an odd reflection and a slash across the left lens of a pair of goggles. The view backs out to reveal a hand, Lauries hand, her finger raised where it had smeared off accumulated dust on the Night Owls costume. Well learn a little later that the goggles give night vision. Laurie says, Dan, this is fabulous. This must be what its like having powers . . . special vision . . . (7.10).

Prior to her pressing the flamethrower button, the scene exudes quiet, intimacy, and slow movement about the laboratory, especially given all the action of the prior chapter. We learn that Dan was into birds and flight (7.5). We learn about dusk woman. The issue of the past keeps coming up. Inside the ship, Dan fiddles with the controls, observing this and that about machinery. He and Laurie discuss cravings (7.7). No, Dan says, . . . I dont know why I hang onto this stuff. I mean, I know the romance is over. As we progress, the basement laboratory becomes an environment of subtle interplays and a relationship is developing. How? Dan talks as if things are over but he never shows any observable amazement at what he is. Hes showing Laurie around. The right middle panel on page 8 reveals something else. That Laurie is inside Dan. He speaks of Hollis, being with real heroes. Note Lauries face. Shes surrounded by wonders, wonders soon to be put to good use. This is a circle: we make it to the Dan, this is fabulous. The intimacy has climbed to a minor climax. Then she mentions Jon and the dramatic tension drops like a brick on Dans head. Getting late, he says, his face gray and washed. We are inside the goggles Laurie is wearing, watching his reaction to the Jon comment.

We have another spell of rising action as we move deeper.

Nuclear dreams.

Susan wants me to answer her assertions about Dr. Manhattan. Here’s a summary of the disagreement. She asserts that DM reveals human qualities. I argue that while he tries to fit in, he can’t, because the distance from his humanity is too great: here’s Susan’s argument:

I am still convinced that Dr. Manhattan is more human than you think. Although this viewpoint was established on the same day my alter ego has reflected on her own lack of emotion, it is not made in the vein of comparison, which might make Dr. Manhattan look like an effincrybaby. It is through evidence within the Watchmen itself, both visual and textual.

Chapter 3, p. 16both visual and textual, an obviously upset Dr. Manhattan says, I said to leave me ALONE! (surprising with that much angry emotion that he didnt burst his blue text bubble!)

Chapter 3, p. 5, middle row, lst panel on leftwhere you can see both Dr. Manhattansand both are wearing different expressions, one of pleading and concern, one with brows knitted in concentration with his work.

Chapter 3, p. 20,21p. 20, lower left, bottom row, sense of change or loss, and p. 21 top row, upper right: Just look at that face and tell me he talks like a robot!

There is much, much more to substantiate his human responses. Though I wouldnt call him sensitive either.

My theory? He was blasted to atoms, reconstructed himself by gathering atoms from here and there, with evidence of human sexual need stolen from some poor men, why not atoms of the limbic system of the brain that controls emotion as well?

I have nothing to contradict any of this really. I’m not disputing that DM doesn’t react or act in human fashion. He does deside that he must exile himself to Mars, reasoning that he’s a danger (which is, of course, a reactive choice and the “wrong” decision, but since his action had already taken place, it doesn’t matter). He shows remorse; he shows concern for Laurie and the need to explain himself; or is he just “letting” things occur because for him they already have occured.

Problem is he is “beyond” human by degrees. He’s a superman, not quite close enough to Laurie, and not quite able to change because “things have already happened.” He can go to Mars in a snap. Normal people can’t. He can’t resolve this. The logic of this character dictates that he will know how Laurie will react to his two selves, how things will happen, which leads me to conclude that we have to read him as Susan does, as a struggling man, but not quite able to synthesize the past, present, and future. He may feel but he doesn’t understand those feelings, because he never has the time to do this: he has no “fixed” position by which to reflect, because the time for reflection has already past. Note that as he “flashes” back and provides backstory, he never emotes: he relates events, and then he analyzes their significance as they relate to time and proportion.

Manhattan would never speak as Lear or Gloster would in King Lear.

To the gods we are as flies to young boys, Gloster says in paraphrase, they kill us for their sport.

Manhattan is totally beyond human concept; this is the source of his wretchedness: metaphorically, he can never touch Laurie. He “feels” yet he can never “touch.”

As we begin our adventure into Watchmen, it strikes me how far we’ve come in Contemporary Fiction. We’ve met numerous approaches to telling stories. The numerous kinds of reading that this implies is interesting. Kinds of reading.

We began the discussion with the idea of reading a comic panel. I threw an abstract series of squares up on the board and quickly got hit with the idea that the panels in Watchmen reveal a strictness of geometric form in the sense of architecture. Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place writes that architecture can teach in the sense that it is humanly designed environment. Watchmen, like any story, is designed, but the kind of design that it is will direct the reader into reading according to a specific form, in this case the dialectic between visual drama or composition and textual rhetoric. I would argue that this creates a different kind of meaning for the audience much as music is “read” differently yet “means” something. This happens in chapter one in the discrepancy between the detectives’ conclusions about the Comedian’s murder and the intermittent panels which reveal a different story. Yet Rorschach is also on a mission of detection or decipherment. We could conclude that this similarity or parallelism binds Chapter 1. Will he, like the detectives, be thrown by the clues he is limited to? If the reader is a detective in a sense, will we also be thrown by the play between the art and the writing, the clues that we are given to decipher?

Consider this act of sight reading. In Watchmen we are going to “see” that the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan are similar creatures. In this culture we determine difference through ethnicity, size, history, place, and norm. Dr. M is different because he is not exactly human. How? In a particularly interesting scene, Laurie wakes up to two Dr. Manhattan’s feeling her out and she reacts as we would expect, with revulsion. Yet, Manhattan doesn’t appear to get why she would react so viscerally to his perverted approach. He doesn’t “see.” She flees to Dan, who is “human.” Dr. Manhattan, for some reason, is amazing. He can change form, shift matter, and time. But he cannot “see.”

Sight is a metaphor for understanding. Do you “see” what I mean, is a frequent turn of phrase. In the scene mentioned above Laurie is humanized, while Dr. Manhattan is read as simply odd, at a distance to Laurie’s humanness. Like the atom, which is far beyond our understanding as an object that makes up reality, Dr. Manhattan as a character is “beyond” Laurie. In a sense, so is the Comedian, rapist, killer, and perpetual ironic figure. But we will get this reading by deciphering the panels not just by following the text. We will see that Dr. Manhattan is immense, distant from understanding, and this will make Laurie and Dan that much more readable, and the story of Watchmen that much more interesting.

I think our journey through Adam Cadre’s Photopia is going quite well. As I observe the progress what impresses is the different stories that come from the experience. We talk in groups about IF differently than we do about Cortazar. We talk about what is behind Alley’s story; we talk about the programmer as story-teller or fiction writer. We talk about the computer interface. We talk about frustration. “I lost the seed pod.” Can one, as a reader, loose Persky’s box. It is Kuglemass who’s trapped in the Spanish text. We remain at the reader’s remove, safe (define?), watching Tsun traverse the labyrinth, and we wonder at the garden. But in Photopia we can get lost in the box and we try as many commands as “we can imagine” to free ourselves from the underwater castle. But can we prevent the tragedy?

I believe that writers should always attempt to understand expressive styles as a matter of “feeling out” the history of craft, while also understanding that styles are also “natural” to form or native to voice. This is an issue of hearing and voice and what promotes individual flare and gusto. Here Spinning goes after a minimalist juxtaposition

After I fired, I stood in the alleyway looking down at a pile of clothing and nothing else. He was gone, totally gone, and Im sure would not even be missed because he was obviously homeless and living on the streets for a long, long time.

I think the writer here captures the abstractions well. Here we have a willed “distance” from the subject that in a way points back to the author and the reader. What I see is the shooter standing over strangeness.

I think we saw in Thursdays Contemporary Fiction that trying to understanding what Donald Barthelme meant by “Me and Miss Mandible” is pretty tough business. We saw that one reading began to cancel itself out after a time (the protagonist is a man; the protagonist is a fantasizing boy. No yes no yes and so forth). As if the more we tried to enforce logic or follow a cogent narrative design, the more the text begins to squirm out from under our foreheads (I don’t know: for some reason this points me to Oedipus). Can a 35 year old man appear at school and the children and teachers simply accept this without comment. Maybe, if the account is written as fragment? The story isn’t really even a conventional story; it’s a journal/diary, which we experience in conventional sequence, but then again not quite.

In a sense the jugglesome nature of the text can be found in this randomly chosen selection:

Nowhere have I encountered an atmosphere as charged with aborted sexuality as this. Miss Mandible is helpless; nothing goes right today. Amos Darin has been found drawing a dirty picture in the cloakroom. Sad and inaccurate, it was offered not as a sign of something else but as an act of love in itself. It has excited even those who have not seen it, even those who saw but understood only that it was dirty. The room buzzes with imperfectly comprehended titillation. Amos stands by the door, waiting to be taken to the principal’s office. He wavers between fear and enjoyment of his temporary celebrity. From time to time Miss Mandible looks at me reproachfully, as if blaming me for the uproar. But I did not create this atmosphere, I am caught in it like all the others.

There are lots of interesting tidbits here: How can Darins dirty picture excite even those who havent seen it (does it excite the readersee below)? The picture itself, according to the narrator, is sad and inaccurate (ironically so is the narrators presentation of it) and is interpreted as the act of love in itself. The narrator is incredibly sneaky here. He hints that the picture is a mystery because it is: its an eleven-year-olds rendition of a sex act. This is key. He doesnt show the picture to us: we cant see it. All we get is a brief textual hintpicture drawn by kid, judged as dirty. But we as readers really dont know this. After all, who decides? As Joseph asks on December 7th, Who points out that arrangements sometimes slip, that errors are made, that signs are misread?”

The signs are misread, misread, misread.

Adam Szychowski in My Life with the Wave: A masterpiece of Ultrarealism (the joke is that he’s going write against a surreal attribution of Octavio Paz’ story) writes “They fall in love and settle into a routine . . . [and the wave] rebels; this time against the slow rhythm of domestic life, instead of the tides.”

I don’t know if I agree with this rebellion against the slow rhythm of domestic life, but I wonder about the notion of rebellion in the story that Adam points to and the issue of domesticity and the wave. What, in the context of the story, points to a rebellion of this kind? I guess my question goes this way: is the wave rebelling against domestic life (what kind) or does this have something to with nature, and does this question also have something to do with Kugelmass? Could we put a border around the idea of domestic life in order to define it more precisely, and then would Borges laugh at us?