Monday, December 28, 2009

I YET LIVE: UPDATE

After months of absence, as the new year fast approaches, I've at last gotten around to updating the blog's... ENGRISH. Trudging through the archives I came across a number of foggy sentences and mysterious metaphors whose intended meanings I could only begin to guess at, and this coming from the guy who wrote them in the first place. Seeing as "morrisonbatman" is an annotation site, whose stated goal is to dispel textual difficulties, this simply would not do. So I edited the previous entries for clarity, and believe you me, it was no small feat. As anyone who's had the displeasure of revisiting his or her past writing can attest, it is an experience that can only be summed up as unmitigated agony. The process, or better yet “the ordeal,” digs up feelings of shame, guilt (since you realize someone else had to read that shit that you wrote), and inadequacy and then rolls them up into a handy cannonball to be fired at your self-worth. Not kidding, during the days of the edit, I had to swear off the blogosphere completely, since I couldn't bear to read the unbridled eloquence of site masters like Jog and Tucker Stone. Doing that would inevitably lead to self-comparisons where my writing came up woefully short. Of course, I couldn't quit the Internet entirely (it's practically 2010, who could?), so I stuck mainly to professional sites (ok, porn), whose writing I could pretend was handled exclusively by robots. Can’t expect myself to compare to robots, now, can I?

This entry is rapidly degenerating into a how-to discourse for depressives looking to revise their past writing, and that isn’t what I want. I just want for you readers out there to bear with me. I’m not a writing major, nor does my field necessitate the use of literary English in its scholastic discourse. So when I submit a barbarous sentence or ten to the site, please try to give me some latitude. Try to see through the words I’m (ab)using to the points I’m making about Morrison’s text. It’s the content of the annotations more than the style of their phrasing that comprises the heart of the site (although morrisonbatman is very much an experiment in writing for me as it is in close reading). And besides, now, after the edit, the phrasing is improved at least 0.63 units over before! (scale from 1-100)

I realize that this is not the update readers of the site were looking for. I promise you though; in front of me now sits the first Philip Tan issue, which I will get cracking on today. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll grind out the annotations for the next two issues, and that should put us right back on track, since B&R #7 (with pencils by Cam Stewart, YES!) doesn’t come out until the end of January. Till then, wish me luck.


Figure 1: Me hard at work bringing you annotations.