The world needs to be populated by a full complement of archetypal characters.

The bad guy/gal needs to be unbeatable, being a force as strong as death, human nature, the speed of light, whatever.

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away fro something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Now that’s what I call fan-fiction. Benjamin here echoes the ending of The Great Gatsby. He reveals in a way that is hard to ignore how society moves through history. Always nostalgic for a past that we can never reach because it never really existed.

Also, in the introduction to Illuminations which is the available collection of Benjamin essays, Hannah Arendt says that Benjamin wanted to write a work of literary criticism that was entirely made up of quotations. No original words. I’d imagine it’d be like taking cuts of the work you were criticizing and juxtaposing elements to reveal underlying concepts. I was so caught up by this vision that I am trying to write essays that do this kind of thing for my undergrad creative nonfiction workshop.

Really, I think the best solution is to use an RSS reader. I have a folder called “webcomics” in my Google Reader that’s larger than I’d like to admit, and it saves me a lot of time from visiting individual sites and seeing if they’ve updated, as well as the annoyance when they haven’t. To be honest, webcomics are part of the reason I first learned to use RSS, although I use them more for reading material nowadays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiblah#From_space

It’s just close enough to real, and just fanciful enough not to be. It’s just close enough to silly, and ever so much closer to sublime. That’s Kafka.