Excisions: 9 ( ██████ )

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.

When, earlier in this series, I wrote about the excised meme “You forgot the little wounded duck,” I said I liked to think of it as a ‘ghost meme.’ This was because I had posted it on Facebook during the period of the Batman Meme Project (January to March 2016), only to take it down an hour or so later. It was a compulsion for completeness that led me to want to include it in the book – but good sense prevailed and I excised it from the manuscript.

There was another ghost meme,  called █████████, that was also removed from the initial line-up and hence must be dealt with in the Excisions series:

The meme is so bad that, as you can see, I have redacted its title and most of its text, leaving only the few worthwhile words in it and the final exclamation mark!

I am writing about this meme out of chronological order. It should have appeared after Excisions: 5 (Happiness) since it was originally posted, for that brief hour, on March 14th, 2016. I failed to write about it earlier because I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of what to say about it – and because I feel so ashamed of it! I finally decided to take the bull by the horns and was rewarded, almost immediately, with the idea of presenting it in a redacted version.

Even redacted, one can glean a fair amount about the meme. Robin is evidently reporting something he has heard. It is likely a rumor, given that it involves “they” and not some more precisely specified person or persons. That Robin may be trying to fool Batman is suggested by Batman’s “falling for that.” If Robin were trying to put one over on Batman, that would make sense of the slap. On the other hand, the slaps don’t always make sense. Perhaps Batman is mocking Robin for his gullibility. We cannot tell.

OK, there was never any prospect that I was going to make myself regret having culled this execrable piece of work. And in fact, I feel nothing but relief over my decision. I do regret, however, not having used the device of redaction in a meme. I think it looks pretty cool, having those black strips inside the speech bubbles. Redaction done by these means is an essentially visual phenomenon. The words inside the bubbles, though, are representations of spoken language, which would have to be redacted by a beep or something. I don’t see exactly how to do it offhand, but there is room for some creativity here with the different modes of redaction. A lost opportunity.