

Harum Scarum-like Helter Skelter-murder-cults-maybe? What does it mean, damn it!?

What do you suppose the chances are that radical feminists will form some kind of-nah-nah, forget it. (I wonder if the Coen Brothers wish they had thought of that…) Presumably incidental, Clowes may have thought some kid with fond childhood memories of eating breakfast at a certain restaurant in the Wisconsin Dells who has been obsessed with death and mortality since his aforementioned childhood would read this work and innocuously meaninglessly ruminate over these elements. As a Midwesterner, the idea of a Paul Bunyan Funeral Home threatens of a strange cathartic dread as inexplicable as the idea of a Paul Bunyan Funeral Home. Personal thoughts that won’t mean anything to anyone, including myself: Perhaps this book is precisely the anti-revelation we need. If even one thing (such as this graphic novel, or a David Lynch film, or a devastating tornado) can’t have any meaning ascribed to it, existence itself as we ‘understand’ (wink wink) it is in jeopardy.

It makes us feel like this:Įverything has to mean something it just has to! If it can’t be figured out, accompanying it is sheer madness and chaos. It infuriates us when we experience something we can’t quite piece together, especially when there seem to be hints that suggest some sort of cohesiveness is there to be discovered.

We are pattern seeking creatures with aggravating limitations on understanding. Have you been here before? Have you made love on the shore of that small island? Have you seen that (I-swear-to-god-that-exact) boulder in your dream? Have you been served by an egg-laying, pseudopodinous potato lady in that diner? Have any meaningless events ever lead you somewhere you know you had been before? Have you ever recognized something you have never seen before? Have you ever seen something or someone somewhere and said to yourself ”I shouldn’t be here right now”? He encounters many eccentric meaningless characters with ponderous meaningless theories about existence and what everything means and stuff. This book is meaningless, therefore nothing exists (especially not this book).Ī man undertakes a particularly futile meaningless endeavor to discover the origins of a fetish film. Existence is what gives meaning its meaning, and its existence. Books that don’t mean anything have no right to exist.
