Quite unintentionally, over the past week I’ve indulged in three creative works whose (completely unrelated) stories take place in parallel decades, separated by 100 years:

- First, I cracked open my copy of Alan Moore’s and Eddie Campbell’s “From Hell” for long-overdue re-read. It’s a highly fictionalized/speculative take on the Jack the Ripper murders, so the bulk of it takes place in the late 1880s.

- Then, at the start of the weekend, I caught the opening of Running with Scissors. The Augusten Burroughs autobiopic covers the late 1970s to early 1980s.

- Finally, today I took in Marie Antoinette, which centers primarily on the 1770s and 1780s.

So that’s the 19th, 20th and 18th Centuries in the spread. Which, if you think about it, represents a roller-coaster ride of societal transformation.

The temporal/historical juxtaposition is largely coincidental, and is really the only thing linking these three diverse works of art. But seeing as how I’m occupying my leisure time with them in such a compact window of time, it seems to hold some significance from my perspective.