Excisions: 3 (You forgot the little wounded duck)

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I decided to excise a number of the memes that were going to be part of my book. It was sufficient for a meme to be excluded that I did not envisage being able to write anything of interest (to me) in the commentary on it. I have now set myself the goal of posting the excised memes here, in an occasional series, and trying to write something of interest (to me) about them, thus proving my decision to exclude them mistaken! Also, in this parergonal space around the book, I will write about the memes without the pretense that their maker is someone other than myself. I am curious to see how this affects the nature of my writing about the memes.

How I hate this meme! It was made impulsively after I viewed the final episode of season 2 of Transparent, on March 8th, 2016. The text of the meme refers to events in that episode. Josh and Buzz (Josh’s mother’s new boyfriend) find a wounded duck and bring it back to Buzz’s apartment. Josh breaks down and Buzz gives him a fatherly hug. (I may have misremembered the details a bit.) I honestly have no idea why I thought this would be a good meme. Maybe the appeal of the absurd?

I posted it on Facebook on March 9th, and took it down about an hour later. It was only going to be included in the book for two reasons. First, and principally, I originally conceived of the book, to a much greater extent than I do now, as a record of the social media art event that was the Batman Meme Project. The book, after all, has the form of an exhibition catalog and it was the posting of the memes on Facebook, between January and March 2016, that was the original ‘exhibition’ (of which the other memes in the book were parerga). I felt, then, some responsibility to include all the memes that were part of that project, even those that were not very good. Secondly, this and one other meme (that will show up in this series of blog posts, Excisions, in due course) were the only ones that were posted and then taken down soon after (or at all, for that matter). I thought of these as ‘ghost’ memes. The idea of ‘ghost’ memes seemed, and still seems, like a cool idea; but its coolness has come to be outweighed, in my mind, by the desire to have only memes that are either good in themselves or the catalysts for interesting commentary. This meme is certainly not good in itself, and I am completely at a loss as to what kind of commentary it might occasion that would be interesting and worthwhile.

Still, as I write this post, I do find myself regretting this meme’s excision for another reason. The book involves a notional split between the artist (who created the memes) and the editor (who comments on them). In excising some of the memes from the original selection, I solidify the ‘totalizing’ character of the book as a whole. That is to say, the fiction of the split between artist and editor becomes more of a mere device that is part of the total work, which in reality is engineered by a single auteur. The notional split is, by contrast, strengthened and made more real to the extent that the memes on which I am now commenting are alien to me. To some extent, that effect is achieved by the passage of time, which inevitably means I forget quite a lot about the memes I created over two years ago. (I wrote about this a bit here.) But it would also be achieved, in an interesting and challenging way, if I disliked and did not want to have to deal with some of the material that required editorial commentary. The true editor, after all, has to deal with what is in front of them, like it or not. Had I not excised this meme, I would have had to deal with it, like it or not, and to that extent, the totalizing aspect of the work would have been disrupted.

OK, once again, I seem to have given a good argument as to why I was wrong to exclude this meme from the book. The point about the disruption of the totalizing nature of the work has utterly convinced me. Very sad now this meme is a goner!