I’ve been an ostrich for the past… however long. There was a moment there where the cracks in the corporate internet looked like everything was about to come tumbling down, and with it the Death of Capitalism! and we’d all just be sassy anarchist trash animals dancing in the flames… But we’re in a slow crumble, not a cathartic collapse. I felt keyed up and ready to fuck shit up, but I didn’t know what to throw rocks at, and so I didn’t, and in the meantime I still got bills and people I care about so I guess I’ll just keep going to work until something changes. Things do change… But never in the “right” way. So now I’m in a rut that feels like it has all of us, where I’m constantly tired, barely making ends meet, and unable to do anything with my life aside from work and maintain myself so I can still work.
I wasn’t supposed to come back online for the first time in months to run off on my usual, literally tired rant. I was supposed to come on to tell you to read “The Mysteries” if you haven’t already.
I only just picked up my copy two days ago. I had seen the video about how Bill Watterson and John Kascht had spent years figuring out not just how to make this book, but how to even rectify their apparently incompatible styles and methods. The story of two folks who one assumes must be friends (and if not friends, clearly had a lot of respect and admiration for each other) who spent years banging their heads against a wall together and somehow managed to not bang heads too hard against each other is remarkable. The story of this book could almost overshadow the book itself…
Except the book is very, very good. Given what I had heard going in, “An adult fable, a picture book, with an aggressively stylized aesthetic,” I was worried I would enjoy it, find it charming and something nice to look at, but somehow inescapably trite. Instead I found my anxieties mirrored and acknowledged, and told to remember we are all dust. Not an original meditation, but a gorgeous attempt at rendering it.
I’m not going too in-depth on the “narrative” here, or what I think one should take from it. It’s just an incredibly brief parable of human social evolution (I’d say “social progress” but whether or not that is debatable is, at least from the narrative’s timeline, irrelevant). This is mostly a visual piece.
The book feels like a collection of… almost colloidion photography, with it’s concrete starkness that sublimates into a dark etherealness. Everything has the feel of long shutter speeds and slow emulsions, a moment caught in molasses instead of film. The stark shift from John’s eye for detail and Bill’s efficient abstraction likely punches this effect up considerably. I’m not someone who knows much about art, but I’ve always fallen for it more when it heavily intersects with craft. And these images were absolutely crafted. If I’m ever in a situation where I could have wall art, I would deeply like prints of a few of the pages from this book… but given Bill’s history with merchandising, I don’t see that happening in any official capacity. I’m also loathe to the idea of any one of these pages out of it’s context.
(Continued in the comments)
I have the opposite view, I think Waterson got too full of himself and produced a book that’s just not very good or interesting.
It’s about 100 words long, and in the end it’s just another example of the “watch out, learning too much is bad for you!” genre of anti-intellectual, anti-progress, anti-science stuff.
In his book Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny had Yama say this:
And I vastly prefer that sentiment. Ignorance is not to be cherished or elevated.
I burned $20 on it based on thinking that Waterson might create a cool modern fable for adults. I wish very much I had looked at it in the bookstore first, I could have spent that $20 on something better.