C&H Commentary Rough Draft-intro

C&H Commentary Rough Draft-intro

Who is it that denotes the legitimacy of something? Who determines what is useful, and what is useless? It's not one person in particular; it's everyone.

Society makes these decisions. But not as a whole, however, as we can all rarely agree on one thing. What I have determined from my attempt to be a flaneur of my own construct is that instead of a larger hive-mind determining what to save and what to scrap, it's small pockets of societies distributed evenly throughout the larger portion of humanity's consciousness — sub-cultures that are so divisive, so widespread, that they inevitably impart their own take upon that which they have garnered their attention towards. This would explain much of the cultural ephemera that I have observed in my own *Useless Archive*.

A Useless Archive contains the forgotten; the discarded information thrown into the refuse pile of cultural happenings — ;from this amalgam of useless information, you make something new; something no one has ever experienced. I thought, "what could I discuss that hasn't been discussed before?" That question bothers me to my core. I have often struggled with feeling inadequate in my creativity in other capacities. In this scenario, to think that I was tasked to make something, not from nothing, but from something else, was a surprisingly daunting goal. I thought and thought about what I could inspect: interests, studies, hobbies — they all sounded appealing. But to draft a narrative that diverges from the canon would be difficult if I dealt with something I was wholly familiar with. It would be difficult to shake off prescribed mindsets. And then it I saw him: I was sitting at my desk at my apartment one evening, and saw the left quadrant of a cartoon boy's spiky yellow hair obscured by other books on my shelf. I pulled it down: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. I was familiar with it, sure, but only on a superficial level. I think anyone could have been if they read the newspaper in the last twenty-some years. I had actually purchased the book used during the summer while out with a friend. I felt obligated to buy something, and this looked to be the best of my options.

While at my desk, I looked through it and thought about it — Calvin and Hobbes is perfect for this. It's popular enough to provide a wealth of resources; its wit and depth are uncharacteristic of the genre; a medium that I can already speak towards on an intellectual level; and really, it just looks fun. I like fun. I never would have realized, however, how enthralled other people are with Calvin and Hobbes.

Enthralled is the appropriate descriptor here, because I mean some appeared to be controlled by it; their outward experiences, their frame of perception, and their creative outputs.

These people have formed tightly-knit groups, or sub-cultures, like I aforementioned, and have taken the Calvin and Hobbes universe and made it their own. Just like the taxonomic view we can apply to my archive, we can also look at the Calvin and Hobbes fan-base in this way as well. I have found that there are different ways to classify them. I have deemed them: the dreamers, the artists, the vandals, and the marked.

Jarrod