Live Together, Read Alone: A LOST Book Blog

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Recapping the Recaps - Maybe next week with actual links!

2010-02-09T19:08:00.000-06:00

Recapping the recaps.

Red Pen http://redpeninc.blogspot.com/2010/02/lostin-815-or-fewer-words-la-x.html: I think it is so cute that someone uses their completely Non-lost related blog to Lost-blog.
" Lost is for those of us who crave braingasms on a regular basis." Yep. Questions heavy, answers light? Disagree.
Dharmalantis is a good one. Hurley moving up to hero status. Yep.

Fishbiscuit. Yay! Pictures!. Disagree, we know the Bomb went off.
“For every story, there is an anti-story” – Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Nice.
"And if we find out later that Sayid isn’t really Sayid any more, will that mean that Ben hasn’t ever actually been Ben?" Good one.
Zen Jack. Interesting and good point.
"Basically, until we observe a specific reality, all possible realities are equally true. And unless I’m mistaken (which is definitely one possible reality) I think that’s where we are headed this season on OtherLOST."
OOF.Oh yeah -- I knew there was something different with Rose and Bernard. Together instead of middle and tailie.
Ha they think OtherSawyer is a nice guy. No, secret, he's back to being a major skeez.
Whoa Sayid has an Iranian passport? This is why I read recaps for tiny tiny details.
Ahh Haroun was Desmond's book. Cool. Reading List!
Kierkegaards “Fear and Trembling”! That's cool i kind of want to read that!
The Bath as Jewish mikveh – a ritual bath of purification. Why not just immersion baptism pretell?
On Juliet: "The medical genius who went toe to toe with Ben Linus was reduced to the adoring helpmate of James LaFleur and then sent for a little spin through a meat grinder. The fact that so many online fans keep having multiple orgasms over this sexist storyline makes me sad."
Huh, I kind of don't disagree. Although -- maybe they were making each other better? Her dying does kind of put a different spin on things.Just another used Lost-woman?
One of the logical deductions of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that morality is irrelevant. Whether good or evil is done, whatever the consequences may be, whatever happens … it’s just another branching point, a different set of consequences, a new chain of cause and effect. No reality has dominance over another. No outcome is superior or more desirable. Everything just is what it is.
NOPE. Just because things will happen the way they happen doesn't make morality irrelevant.

Erika - I Love Locke!
Hey me too!
Totally different take on everyone's attitude -- not as certain that everyones fixed in new non-crash timeline. And I have to agree.
I’m trying not to dwell on the straight-outta-my-1998-screensaver fishies- word.
"Then we’ve got Ben, who’s decided it’s a good idea to side with Fake Locke. ?!?!" Yes. Because he totally promised the smoke monster already. I think he's pretty beholden. Duh.
"But I’ll tell you what it meant: it meant that Juliet’s consciousness jumped over to the Alternate Timeline and she saw that her peeps never crashed on the Island" Ok. Good I was looking for an explanation for that.
Did you catch that little black shadow creature that ran behind Jack?(!?). No! Pictures please!
"Dogen understood English but was a big snobby brat about it and wanted everyone to just leave him alone so he could continue making like Mr. Miyagi with his bonsai tree-trimming."Hehe.
1) At what point did the Temple stop being Smokey’s Playground? --good question. Maybe they are only freaking out so much cuz everything is out of balance.
The Dogma theory!! Yes I am pretty much behind this. Finding the loophole, ending the world.
Agree that Jack-Locke exchange is best part of non-crash timeline.

Robz888 - Who is that?
Blah blah. Boring.
How many of you fell for John's story about his walkabout? - I did!
Sayid has it better in ATL. Yes, and that makes me happy.
Is it just me, or have the Others lost some of their cool factor? - I agree!
Meh. Nothing new here.

Nomad- uhhh
Yeah you have terrible grammar and maybe are not a native english speaker? But I can't fault you, my lost notes look the same.

Vozzek69- is this the overly heady one?
Hm. Think brain is broken.
From the beginning, you can see that Jack remembers stuff. Yep.
Hm-- more other-y others, who therefore are more in touch with island forces. I buy it.
Smoke Monster+Jacob serving penance on Island. interesting.
Decent.

Anna-
I hope I wasn’t the only one who got a little teary when we actually saw Flight 815 touch ground. Definitely a weepy moment
In this timeline the idea is that she did not kill her stepfather but instead a plumber in the house explosion she caused. (Huh? What?)
If he has been working hard at finding his “loophole” then I am pretty sure he has been pushing and manipulating our Flight 815 survivors from the very beginning, starting with the form of Christian Sheppard in his white tennis shoes. -Yep.
Aliens? No. No way.
Personally, I am starting to think that MIB’s Home is what one might call the Underworld, or the Dimension of the Dead.
Meh. I think this is a more Christian/Greco-Roman universe than you'd like to believe, Gal.

Type rest of the post here

2010-02-02T19:33:00.002-06:00

LA X

Type rest of the post here

27 days!

2010-01-06T18:52:00.002-06:00

Till the final season. I'm commencing a 5th season rewatch. I am excited but terrified for the end of this.

I really really hope they use this song- the probability of apocalyptic events in this final season seems.... high to me. Or at least I have my fingers crossed. Can't you see LOST L.A. falling to pieces to this song?

It's over!

2008-05-31T21:01:00.003-06:00

It's been a long, troubling year, but I've finally reached the end. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to quit, how often I thought to myself "why would my show do this to me?", how badly I just wanted it to be over already.

Psych, not season four. I loved this season. But close to a year after I started it, I finally finished the mother-fucking Fountainhead! 687 pages of pure selfish objectivist psychobabble. A herculean task, if I do say so myself. It is a monument to my incredible devotion to LOST (and the fact that I can be pretty stubborn complete-ist) that I got all the way through. Especially because I knew by about page 50 just how little it really has to say about the show- like the Dickens references, this one is much more about the creative process of making the show than the content itself. But I'll go into this more in a follow-up post, when my head's a little clearer. For now, all you need to know is that The Fountainhead sucks, and I am awesome.

LOST guys eating stuff.

2008-05-19T21:42:00.020-06:00

I just fell in love. Not quite as in love as I am with LOST, but pretty close.
An old school chum of mine just started her own site... about...get this...
Guys. Eating. Stuff.
Sounds pretty hot, doesn't it? Well, you should check it out. And in honor of her, I thought I'd do a little montage of Guys From Lost Eating Stuff...these pictures just scratch the surface. Heck, I could do a whole post of just Locke. Eating. Stuff. I could do a whole entire separate blog about that.
Now THAT is my idea of hot. Phew.

So here goes:

Locke Eating Stuff

Hurley eating stuff (really?):

Ready for more?

Alright...you asked for it...

Eko eating/tasting "stuff":

Jack eating similar "stuff":

Sayid eating some Beans, yo:

Charlie ready to share some peanut butter with his lady:

Hey Freckles, Sawyer likes the look of them bananas.

Hehehehe. Jin sometimes eats things other than fish?

BEN doesn't like to eat alone:

I know there's a lot more where these came from...but here's one for the road, from an episode I actually watched at the aforementioned friends house.... so...here's a turkey...

Now who could be eating that Turkey?...

Right on John, Right. On.

Post Script: I showed Aurora this post and she was like uhhh you're weird. And now she's having trouble going to sleep because she's thinking of all her favorite LOST food moments. Dork.

...and other stories...and other stories

2008-05-15T19:00:00.002-06:00

I'mma keep this one brief.
First of all, anybody see Cabin Fever? That scene with Horace was very Invention of Morel.
I wonder if maybe the books are turning more to problems of the Island itself and away from characters and their interactions...I will think about this and get back to you.

So I read a couple of stories on the advice of my papa, from the book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. There are 3 stories that are different reorganizations of these words, and I read two of them. These different permutations of one phrase are reminiscent of the imaginings and re-imaginings done in the LOST mirror structure we've heard so much about.

The first story I read, "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," which was basically about a little boy who was a part of a monster story and didn't know it.

The second one I read was "The Death of Doctor Island" which was the most clearly LOST related one...and it was kind of awesome...about a simulated island that's a satellite of Jupiter on which 3 crazies are placed, and the 'island' talks to them...there was a part where the Island says:

"This is what mankind has always wanted... that the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and, here on me, it is fact."

Whoa, it's true. And also...I am pretty sure it's true on LOST. What else happens? The main character is a lobomotized teenager who comes out of a hatch, there's a homicidal dude, and there's a girl who believes there is a bird in a cage inside of her. At one point the homicidal dude and the main character are swimming to catch fish and they see the dead island god on the floor of the "ocean"...the god looks like a big insect...it actually all sounded very Looking Glass to me. There's some also some good stuff about Dr. Harlow and his monkeys. In the end, it turns out that the Island, not so great a place to be after all. Huh, sort of troubling for a Pro-Islander like myself. I suppose its not canon (name-dropped or cover-flashed) though, so phew.

There's another story which I didn't read...called "The Doctor of Death Island" which starts with a Dickens quote and looks like it is about books and nations. Holler.

I kind of have a feeling that Darlton read this and aren't going to tell us--it's suitably vague and vivid, scientific and magical at the same time. Good times. No picture.... LOST is on in 3 minutes. :)

The Invention of Morel: A Librarian's Dream....and lots of other news.

2008-04-24T19:12:00.002-06:00

In Honor Of The Return of LOST tonight....

Adolfo Bioy Casares. BFFs with Borges. Borges....everybody likes him for some reason. This book? Sort of like a less bloodless Turn of the Screw for South America. I'm not sure I was in love with it, but I am sure it was pretty darn good and had a lot of layers and was the perfect length (about 90 pages) and is incredibly relevant.

In Eggtown (4x04) Sawyer's trying to read this in the Others village while Hurley watches Xanadu. At this point I would like to say that looking at Ben's bookshelves in the background of scenes at his house is such an incredible tease. Ahhhhh someday. Actually, in the promo pics for "The Shape of Things to Come" books are flying off the shelves like crazy. I hope to God that they don't all get destroyed. I guess there will be books in the real world too.

So here's the story of the Invention of Morel: There's a sort of crazy convict dude on a sort of deserted island seeing people that might be real or apparitions. He figures out that this Morel guys been able to record entire experiences...he falls in love with a projection of a lady...he tries to break the machine, it doesn't work, he surrenders himself, putting himself into this rotating recorded paradise/hell.

So-to copy what I was saying from my notes of "to write later": So. This is about Sawyer and Kate (Sawyer's the convict narrator watching the inexplicablely untouchable love of his life slip by) ...I wonder if this says something about the nature of "leaving" the island entails. I wouldn't be surprised if they were still there in some way, with the circular nature of the storytelling.
It's also about Ben and Juliet, which is indicative of Ben's general possessiveness. The titular Morel invents this machine to record and replay entire experiences, which in the process, destroy those that they've captured and preserved. Ben seems to have a problem with hoarding things and sucking all the life out of them while keeping them captive--yes I'm talking about ghostly Others like Harper Stanhope, about Jacob, about Ben's mom....if he has some blame for this, he's got some serious splainin to do.

The implications of the invention mean that times are being played "over" each other. Is this happening on the Island beyond the flashback structure? Are times.. or realities?..being superimposed over each other?! Ah!

Ultimately this book has a lot to say about consciousness (through the unreliable narrator), reality, and the delicate balance between life and death and what it really means, cosmically, to be alive. On a very small scale, on a small, hot, spooky Island. That's Lost if I ever saw it.

In other news, I had a no duh moment last month. I'm a member of Goodreads, which I highly recommend--social networking around concrete things! And of course, someone started a LOST Book Club there. It's pretty solid. I'd like to start some more rollicking discussion there though.
Also, of course, check out my Goodreads Profile. It's great. ;)

In other news....Um... My daddy is finishing Season 3 and enjoying it pretty well. He read a short story called The Death of Doctor Island (in the book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories And Other Stories) which he says relates...I'll have to see for myself. It sounds totally weird. Also, I like to think that Darlton and Co. are geeky enough that they've read fairly obscure science fiction that pretty much nobody else has read that influences the show ALOT.

We're also watching equally culty old TV lately. Star Trek v.1 is amazing--it's easy to not know how good it actually was and think it can be defined by its parodies. But DAMN. Twin Peaks is also great, and relevant...as Alex said "There could be no X-Files without Twin Peaks and there could be no LOST without the X-Files". And then he made us chickory coffee.

So I guess that's mostly it. The names of the upcoming episodes of LOST are delectable, cultural reference wise. The Shape of Things To Come being the first. H.G. Wells fictional history...which reminds me of his War of the Worlds (there's a great episode of RadioLab on the subject about getting way too into media). ALSO there's a song by that name--[Nothing Can Change] The Shape of Things To Come, from the 1960s movie (a favorite of my pops) WILD IN THE STREETS. The movie is about a world where nobody is allowed to live past 30. I think its apt.

LINK CITY. Well--I'll leave you. I'll get to The Death of Dr. Island in the next 2 or 3 weeks. And then...we have till next January, man. Anything can happen. I'll end on this note...

On Our Mutual Friend and Not Paying Attention

2008-04-01T12:36:00.004-06:00

Desmond, maybe you should pick a different book to read before you die.

This book has been my cross to bear in our quest, as the Fountainhead has been Aurora's. I'll say straight off that I'm not much of a Dickens type, or at least that I haven't given him a chance at any point yet in my young life. So I'm probably not the person to have read this book. And I gave up on reading the words pretty early--Our Mutual Friend is in the public domain, so it's been recorded for Librivox as a Book on Tape, v 2.0 . Pretty good quality stuff to listen to. Of course it made it a lot easier to tune it out while I was at work trying to get actual work done.

So here's what you need to know. Our Mutual Friend is the book Desmond wants to be the last book he reads before he dies. It's where he keeps the fail-safe key. It's what he gets back when he gets out of Prison. It's wrapped up in rubberbands. It has something to do with how much he loves Penny, etc. etc.

Darlton have cited John Irving as their inspiration, since he wants it to be the last book he reads before he dies. What do I know about John Irving? Even less than I know about Charles Dickens. Does that deflate some of the mystery of Desmond's fascination with it? Perhaps.

Our Mutual Friend is wordy to the point of absurdity. Characters have funny, extra-long names, there are subplots about pubs and parents and the Thames and the doll's dressmaker. I think (I might be wrong) there's a lot of stuff that seems like filler but is actually serious A-Plot-enhancing B-plot. The book was originally published as a newspaper serial so eh, eh it's just like a serial television show! Um...so now I'm going to do some bullet points, in the interest of not betraying just how little sunk in.

Social class (read MONEY) issues: There are poor people who got rich, rich people who are jerks, poor people trying to get rich in bad ways....basically a lot of stuff about what bad things bad people will do for money and how good people are good regardless of money or lack thereof. Money (3.2 million dollars?) is becoming an increasingly important factor on LOST. Come to think of it, it always has been (Hurley and the lottery, Sawyer's cons, Sun selling Jin out to her dad to pay his mom, Michael losing Walt to Walt's rich jerk mom, Kate's Australian farmer's mortgage...we could probably dredge up something for everybody)..Maybe it's that money is just omnipresent in life anyway, but I think it's a bigger deal than that. Come to think of it, there's a lot about how money doesn't matter on the Island (see Expose). And it's probably going to be a challenge for the Oceanic Six back in the real world. I think the money things important--but I think it's intrinsically evil in Lost, in Our Mutual Friend, it's really only a problem for the low-lifes who are clawing for it. Unless you think Widmore and Ben are more scheming low-lifes than Big Bads.

Love stories that transcend these issues: Desmond and Penelope are in good company with John Harmon and Bella Wilfer. Except it's sort of reversed. In Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon is secretly rich and Bella is of a bit lower station than him, and their love is set up from the beginning. And even after The Constant, I still doubt Penny's original intentions a little. I feel like she just knows too much about the freighter--she's going to have some splainin to do...I think there's a possibility that she's part of Widmore's plot but either doesn't understand the seriousness of it or is going to use it to her (and Desmond's) advantage. Ok..complicated class-crossing love stories.

Resurrection stories: John Harmon is presumed dead, because a body with his papers on it is found in the Thames. He takes on a new identity so he can approach the girl he is supposed to marry. In the end, he is finally able to reveal his true self (back from the dead, in a sense!). There's also another sequence that I actually managed to pay some attention to, in which another character nearly drowns, is brought back from near-death, and goes on at some length about his resurrection. Hmm...In exciting drowning and near drowning news (tiny spoiler alert), a body's going to wash up on the beach and Jack's going to try to identify it! There are sort of a disturbing number of people it could be. A little chains we forged in life eh?

Daddy issues: John Harmon can only get his dad's money if he successfully marries Bella (and I think at some point previous to this deal, his dad disowned him). Bella loves her dad more than anybody in the world but lets the Boffin's adopt her for a while. Lizzie Hexam loves her dad too and is pretty bummed out when he dies.....Fathers and daughters are important in this book. Mostly fathers and sons in Lost, but either way, mothers are absent or vaguely unpleasant. I don't know what to do with this but I know it's important...Ben and Alex? Meh.

That Serialization stuff. Yeah. Thank goodness for newspaper serials for giving some pre-existing pattern for television to follow. Thank goodness for television serials for improving upon the concept. Not that they are better than Dickens, just that serial form one chunk at a time is better on TV I am guessing.

So there we go.
Our Mutual Friend. The end.
Next up, the Invention of Morel, which was so short I had to pay attention to it.

Evil Serves Good Despite It's Cunning: Valis and Me.

2008-03-22T23:36:00.007-06:00

Valis. Ok, it seemed totally scary. All I knew about K. Dick was that a lot of supernerds like him.
And then I read the Eggtown reviews on DarkUFO that explained what happened in the book (specifically J. Wood) and I was like uhhh this is gonna suck and be way way too technical but the front cover looks cool. So I checked it out of the library and let it sit around until it was overdue. Then I picked it up, and read it, and guess what? It ruled.

Valis is introduced at the beginning of Eggtown, when Locke brings it down to Prisoner Ben. Ben says "I've already read it", and Locke says "You might catch something you missed the second time around." Of course a wink and a nod to the rewatchability of Lost, but after reading this book I can say that you could read this book 20 times and keep catching (and losing) things... It's freaking crazy. In case we missed how hard they beat the "This Book is Important" idea into our heads, Ben's reading the book in The Other Woman and asks "Has the revolution begun yet?" which, if I'm not mistaken is a line in the book.

So what's VALIS about? I'm going to try to keep it to one paragraph. It's Philip K Dick's theological manifesto. It's about cosmic dualisms and time as the 4th dimension (referencing Wagner (which is also relevant to LOST)) and the 5th Savior (Walt? Aaron?) and the overlap of world and the rationality/irrationality of the divine and drugs and madness and early Christianity and gnosticism, and suicide and illness and pink lasers that transmit information that cures people in mind and body, and about death and resurrection, and how questions of death and resurrection are affected when time turns into space. But mostly, it makes no sense and doesn't have a plot and is kind of like a cross between Vonnegut and Flann O'Brien (Third Policeman guy). Ok, you know that sounds like Lost. You know it. And it's brilliant, and it makes no sense. And it's really interesting to see how it's played out in the episodes after Eggtown, episodes especially full of madness (Freighties), time-lapsing mind travel (Desmond), and ...not pink, but lasers nonetheless...and complicated unclear cosmic dualisms (Ben vs. Widmore for serious!)...and oh, here's Daniel's pink light:

So I think the thing to do is to quote wholesale from the book, because I can't explain it myself. Lets do that after the jump..

Here's the first one re: the powers that be and the power that they have over the rank and file:

"'The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself...During the interval in which he experienced the two world superimposition, he had seen not only California, USA, of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. Everyone dealt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world."

After the characters see the movie VALIS...Screencaps anyone?:

Well, we'll all have to go see the picture again...ninety percent of the details are designed to go by you the first time-- actually only go by your conscious mind; they register in your unconscious. I'd like to study the film frame by frame.

The 2 year old 5th Savior tells them:

God has also set the one over against the other; the good against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good; the good is preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones... This means that good will make evil into what evil does not wish to be; but evil will not be able to make good into what good does not wish to be. Evil serves good, despite its cunning."

After they leave this 2 year old girl who speaks in ancient tongues and who they think is the 5th Savior. .. And keep in mind this is the late 70s, about 25 years ago, so 20 years forward would take us nearly to the present day, when, maybe, the forces of evil are back at the helm?:

Where would she surface? ...Would we have to wait until she grew to adulthood? That might be eighteen years. In eighteen years Ferris E. Fremount, to use the name in the film [a stand-in for Nixon], could have taken over the world--again. We needed help now. But then I thought, You always need the Savior now. Later is always too late.

The book sends in a paradox of hopefulness and hopelessness, complete madness and utter sanity, still waiting for the 5th savior. A few lines from the last page:

The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself...The divine intrudes where you least expect it...My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.

Ok, so I know that sitting and watching TV looking for some sign of the divine is a little (or a lot) pathetic, but then you can come back out from that and look for it in the real world too. For all its schizophrenic sci-finess, VALIS is equally and crazily a theological treaty; and for that reason I read it with glee. LOST Season 2 looked like it was going in that direction with Mr. Eko and the Claire as Mary Vision, but it pulled back in Season 3. Season 4 has seen hints of the deepily paranormal creeping in at faster and faster rates, and I couldn't be happier. The religiousness of VALIS, and of LOST by extension, is totally crazy and totally drawing parallels and pulling together the stories and world views of the Dogon people and the Zoroastrians and Norse Myth and Greek Myth and Buddhism and the Christians and everything without prejudice or apology, and all, ultimately for Good. Crazy good, but good.

Which is why I think Lost is going to have a happy ending, when it all comes down to it. It might be a crazy, tiny beer-can sized sign of the divine sort of happy ending, but it will be there. If you're not with me on that I understand. Read VALIS again, you might catch something you missed the second time around.

To break from that: I'm not actually as crazy as Dick. but I did enjoy feeling a little bit like it while reading his book. I do think being open to the good and awesome stories in past, present, and future religious and mythic traditions is a worthwhile endeavor. Thanks Horselover Fat. And thanks Darlton. I'm hooked. I want to read the Brothers Karamozov next if I can, but I've seriously got some Harry Potter to read before I do so. And we've got to add Jules Verne to our list don't we? Well, goodnight friends. Happy Easter.

In which I meet the one and only Terry O'Quinn

2008-03-11T12:04:00.006-06:00

So about a week and a half ago, our third friend (yes,we have another friend) told me that Terry O'Quinn was going to be visiting Illinois Wesleyan University to see his brother who works in the theater department and to talk to IWU theater students. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but I am totally crazy about TOQ. Duh. My heart stopped at the very mention of him on g-mail chat. So I said PLEASE, let me go. Alex said: sure, you can even go in my place, since my mom can bring one guest. I said hm...okay I am just that greedy. I will plan to just totally take your place. Over the weekend we decide that we'd drive together and we'd both try to get in.

The fateful Tuesday arrived. The winter storms came through--freezing rain followed by snow and blizzard winds. I watched the IDOT as it said that the highways were clear of snow, then 25% ice cover, and then 75%. But Alex arrived at lunch time, ready to brave the frozen wasteland of I-74 for the purposes of our quest. The drive was more-or-less white-knuckle, but he never flinched--instead he spent a long time explaining Battlestar Galactica to me. Gee thanks. This is what the weather looked like when we arrived. Quite appropriate.

Upon arrival in Bloomington, we went out for lunch with Alex's mom and she informed us that she had been to a department lunch with Mr. O'Quinn and he was very nice, but shorter than she had thought. I drooled to know I was in such close proximity to him...but maybe that was just the pico de gallo.

After our lunch, we went to the student center to get some hot cocoa and wander around until it was time for his talk. I remember the moment perfectly. Alex got skim milk in his cocoa, I got 2% with whipped cream on top. We were chattering happily and waiting for our drinks when we suddenly fell silent. Basically here is how it went: in a nearly empty student center, on a snowy march afternoon, I saw John Locke in the flesh walking towards the coffee counter where I was standing, ultimately stopping pretty darn close to us. I tugged on Alex's arm over and over--he had frozen up completely. He finally acknowledged what was going on by moving to the far side of the counter, as far away from Mr. O'Quinn as possible. When our cocoa came after what seemed like ages, we ran off as fast as we could, because, if we had stayed we probably would have been weeping in reverence at his feet.

We rushed off talking about how our hearts had basically stopped, and burnt a little more time going to the beautiful Anderson Library. Finally we pooped out and went to wait in the Theater lobby, listening to goofy undergrads and talking about how glad we were to not be them. Of course, of course, Mr O'Quinn showed up again (it was where he was talking after all) and he walked back and forth in front of us, stretching his arms, listening to the theater kids say silly theater kid things. We got antsy and decided to go in, knowing we'd be listening to him for another hour.

The Q+A began. People asked polite theatery questions and then tried to fit polite theatery questions to questions about Lost, and then asked questions about Lost. I wanted to ask about how his youth in Newberry, Michigan had shaped his manly, solitary, survivalist character, but I knew that was a little specific, eh? It was pretty surreal- he spoke and moved and shoved his hands in his pockets pretty much like Locke --and I loved it. I think I squeezed Alex's hand too many times, but it was ok.

After all was said and done, I got in the rush of folks who got photographed with TOQ and had him sign my copy of the Wizard of Oz on the page with the Wizard's throne. I still think he's Dorothy since he's on the biggest journey of anyone. Here's our conversation--
Me: "Could you sign this?"
TOQ: "Hmm.. The Wizard of Oz? Interesting. Anything you want me to write?"
Me: "uh..uh..."
TOQ: "What's your name?"
Me: "Emilia? My roommate and I uh..read all the books on Lost?"
TOQ: "Hmm.."

THE END. I don't think it could have gone any better. I don't think I could be any happier.
I'm looking forward to future episodes during which I can say: I've met that guy! Yeah, that guy! Yeah, and it was AWESOME. Here's the evidence: aren't we cute?

The end. The best time ever.

And books, what books?

Things We Should Be Reading

2008-02-28T11:02:00.002-06:00

They've been bringing them in fast of late....

In The Economist, Sayid found the Koran on Ben's Bookshelf of Secrets, and we found out that one of Ben's aliases is Dean Moriarty... of On The Road (modeled on Neal Cassady, who Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats totally adored..which is not someone Ben seems like he would be. Although I suppose Neal Cassady was a great manipulator).
We may try to read some Koran. We will not be reading On The Road, but we should probably read The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

In Eggtown, Ben refused to read Valis by Philip K. Dick (and it looks like that was for good reason..the DarkUFO description I read of it was complicated as hell). Nevertheless, I went and checked it out of the Library. It seems like it would be a real challenge.
Sawyer was reading The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares with Frankenglasses 2.0 while Hurley watched Xanadu. Needless to say, we will find a way to do the same. I am particularly excited for Xanadu.

Xanaduuu.

In other news, I'm nearing the end of Our Mutual Friend. How much attention I've payed is another matter altogether. Maybe someday Aurora will grace us with some thoughts on the Hero's Journey and the world of Lost. We had a good conversation about it over martinis last week. Woot.

Confirmed Dead?

2008-02-08T13:40:00.000-06:00

Charlotte Staples Lewis? (C.S. Lewis)
Baptized in the Island?
Anybody? Anybody?

That is to say- I liked the new episode, I like the new characters.

Hurley "Hugo" Reyes: The Clown of God,or: An Excellent Start to Season 4

2008-02-05T01:13:00.000-06:00

So, in lieu of actively reading Lost Books (and I have heard that this season should be bringing us a few more), I'm happy to devote some more time on the blog to fan-ish pursuits. Namely, I think it's okay to talk about what things LOST reminds us of. I can't purport to be too involved in the socio-political and philosophical threads running through LOST, but I am always interested in picking up on the mythical and religious threads that are right there for the taking. And my bias is from the Catholic story of the way things are, so be warned. This gets a little (or a lot) kooky.

So, basically, Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen The Beginning of the End.
I think everything Hurley saw, even in dubious circumstances (some other crazy guy saw it), was very very real. Especially Jacob's shack and Charlie. The show went to some length to prove this (or to get people who want to believe it to believe it) : Christian (who Hurley has never seen) was in Jacob's chair, Charlie stated as much: "I am dead. But I'm also here." So we say: How the heck does that work? Is it uhhh the smoke monster? Is it just Hurley being a looney?

Here's how I see the visions/appearances. I think that the things Hurley is seeing, and at least some of the other people who should be dead that we've seen--Christian, Ben's mother, etc. are not the smoke monster or delusions or even run of the mill ghosts--they are instead, super-real, beyond our earthly perceptions. Why do they show up on the island? Hm. Good question.

Aurora was trying to explain her sense of this to me, and I finally got it with some stretching. You know how Jesus rose from the dead? When he came back, he rose bodily, he wasn't a ghost, but he wasn't alive either. He could probably do some pretty awesome not-alive-not-dead stuff. In the Catholic tradition, of course, saints and the Virgin Mary show up every once in a while to tell people important stuff, and..though I don't know if they're physically there, they aren't ghosts in the spooky sense either. So that's what I think these appearances are: the dead among us, not in our heads, not a party trick, but the real deal. They are so real they defy our perception.

So why Hurley? Well, I think, as you may see above, that Hurley is a Clown of God, in the Christian tradition of the Holy Fool. On a less churchy level, there's a nice idea that says that maybe the people we think are crazy really have supernatural sense. The religious model is about the same...Those who don't succeed in the eyes of greater, and often-times very flawed society, but who have an inner peace and insight that helps others and also brings them closer to the divine.

The wikipedia article has some interesting insights into the phenom:

"The madness of the yurodivy was ambiguous, and could be real or simulated. He (or she) was believed to have been divinely inspired, and was therefore able to say truths which others could not, normally in the form of indirect allusions or parables. "

and from Anthony the Great:

"Here comes the time, when people will behave like madmen, and if they see anybody who does not behave like that, they will rebel against him and say:"You are mad", - because he is not like them."

Hurley is not an outcast per se but he is a far cry from the status quo, and his greatest gift, consistently, has been gentleness and peacefulness which has helped all of the Losties at one point or another. He doesn't have a great drive to succeed, or get rescued, or get revenge, or figure everything out. When Big Mike threatens to send him to the nuthouse he says "Please do!". He doesn't function that well as a regular member of society, and he shouldn't have to. Sometimes, as in Hurley's case, it ain't broke, but everybody keeps trying to fix it anyway (I think this goes for Locke too)...On the island, you don't have to fix it.

Anyway: I think Hurley is like the Clown of God. The Clown of God that I'm most familiar with is the Tomie dePaola story about a traveling clown who was always on the fringes of society, enjoyed when he was performing and sort of ignored (and sometimes derided) the rest of the time. In the end, he brings his gift of juggling to the statue of Mary and Jesus...and makes a stern statue of the child Jesus smile. It's better if you read it. It is one of those kids books that makes me cry when I think about it.

The point is, that even if society doesn't recognize or incorporate your gifts, God does. And I think somebody out there is looking out for Hurley. Of course, something is also out to get him (oh hey, the numbers), but Jacob loves him (assuming Jacob is good) and Charlie loves him (and I am sure Charlie is good). And that last one is really important. Hurley is blessed, and blesses other people with his gifts all the time.

And that's why he can see Charlie. Or so I think.
In the very likely case that I'm wrong, oh well. But it's nice to think about what a hardcore good dude he is. At the very least, I think there's alot more going on then simple mental instability. There always has been. Thanks, all.

The Lost Weekend: I am pretty sure it is the reason television was created

2008-01-21T15:56:00.001-06:00

Here goes nothing. Greatest Hits, in which I probably cry for half of the episode again..

Alex is here! I am pondering the cleanliness level of Desmond's shirt. It is suspiciously clean. Alex is standing up like a little bitch.

Oh the heart-breaking Hurley diss.
Ok

So we're in the last episode, having a discussion about whether Jack's ex-wife is a b.
Alex is suggesting that all the deaths are misunderstandings. Um. I am too numb to understand now.

Jack is on drugs--says Alex--and booze. We have questions about Alex, ourselves.
The episode gives Aurora a stomachache.
My vision is starting to blur.
Sometimes Matthew Fox is a better actor than I give him credit for--see crying and punching when he thinks the beach guard gets shot.

Phew. Total fake out on the lives of our buds.
BREAKING NECKS. We discuss taking wisdom tooth painkillers in honor of Jack's oxycodone abuse. "Attention others, come in, others." I am in pre-emptive tears over Charlie's imminent death.

SO, we're done.
Life is good.
Our love for Lost has in no way diminished.
Aurora says, it is nice to stop thinking about everything else and just think about Lost.
As for our unraveling of mysteries, we have not made much ground.
We understand character motivations a lot better this time, for better or worse.
We learned that Alex is a goof, but we love him.
We learned about temperature fluctuations in our apartment.

We learned that ...THE END THE END 4EVZZZZ.

And so we barrel towards the finish

2008-01-21T11:45:00.000-06:00

Ok. I mopped.
And we're in the home stretch. I've finished the 2nd Harry Potter. We had some bread and olive oil for lunch. We thought for a while in Catch 22 about how everytime someone follows the wire they get into one of Rousseau's traps (Sayid, Hurley, almost-Charlie with the arrow). Why does she feel so compelled to protect it?

I also appreciated Juliet's bedside manner alot. She is so good at talking to Sun about her baby.
We talked for a little bit about why Sawyer could kill Locke's dad but Locke couldn't/didn't want to do it. Dude was never out for blood.

Oh MAN we are at Jacob's cabin. That is crazy stuff. Seriously.

Aurora is reading to me, Genesis 35:16, about how Benjamin's mom died in childbirth in the Bible. The biblical references are criss-crossed, but worth thinking about.

Oh man, 10 o'clock timeslot. Giving us room for arrows in the neck and gassing deaths. That is some gross stuff. At this point I will take a second to reflect on the nature of the Purge. If there were still people in the stations, I'm sort of assumng that they didn't get killed in the purge. Is that because they were on the Hostiles side or does that have something to do with the quarantined signs on the stations. Like someone came along and put them in quarantine before/at the time of the purge? See: "I was one of the people smart enough to make sure I didn't end up in that ditch."

God, The Man Behind the Curtain is BRILLIANT.

Aurora points out that the Others didn't bury the Dharma-ites the same way they bury their own dead...sending their own dead out to sea, just throwing the Dharmas in an open pit. Why would they bury them so openly when "nothing stays buried on this island for long."

Ok. I think I'm going to give the last disc it's own post. Ceremonial new disc switch moment of silence.

Season 3 Begins.

2008-01-20T20:33:00.000-06:00

It does. With Alex putting his fist into a wine glass for fun.
What else?
Klara's cookies were delicious.
Aurora and Alex theorized at great length about the Other's plan for taking Jake/Kate/Sawyer and no one else. Klara had a cute nap, I tried to touch Alex with my feet and annoyed him.

We slept through Enter 77 and that Claire one where we learn--shocker! that Jack is her half brother. Snorlax. I dreamt of kittens and being on the city bus with Unitarians. Seriously. Weird.

Now we've been through um.. Man From Tallahassee and Expose. Here's the Kate+Juliet mud-wrestle episode. Bleh. Time to eat an orange and mop.

Disc 4: Oh hai, Henry Gale

2008-01-20T11:13:00.000-06:00

Locke flashback! We're in the serious stuff now. It makes me a little mad how Helen leaves him.
This is the sweet episode with the blast door map and Sayid digging up the grave.

....

Dave time! I observed that Libby treats Hurley like a baby and it's really infuriating.
Everybody interrogates Ben angrily. Aurora observes that watching it the first time around this seemed like the weaker part of the season, largely because we had no idea why Ben was so important. This time around, the first half with all the tailies introductions and interactions seems like the boring part and Ben seems like the interesting part, especially when you spend some time considering what he did and didn't know in retrospect. Like: does he actually know what this hatch is for. And when he says "He'll kill me!" he is talking about Jacob, maybe even sincerely?

Alright. So ends, a little bit sadly, our Season 2 coverage. My mom came over with some bagels, I fell asleep during "Two For the Road", she told me not to fall asleep, and then she fell asleep.
She left, I took a bath, and then Alex showed up bearing bread. Then Klara and her man, Zeb showed up too and brought bunny cookies with the numbers on them. Sweet.

The one revelation of the end of Season 2: I have a much higher opinion of Claire than my companions. Oh well.

Now we are well into season two (ok like 4 episodes in). Hooray for us! To blog!

Disc 3: ah luff her.

2008-01-20T00:12:00.000-06:00

Oh Kate. What you did. I love the Kate-sick Sawyer interaction.
And this is probably the strongest Kate flashback.
I like that this is the one where you really start to get the sense that Kate completely doesn't know who she is. And that she's really alternately, and unpredicatably, fragile and hard. She is so willing to be vulnerable as long as it doesn't actually mean anybody helping her or calling her on her stuff.

Also the Orientation film!
Also more Eko/Locke hour.

I'm going to move my bed in, have some cereal, and go to sleep. Crappy episodes coming up. Wow, the 2nd season is so full of dithering. We will have guests tomorrow. And hopefully eat our guacamole, and keep working on our pasta salad, and do some mopping, and make more headway in Harry Potter.

I'll say goodnight now. I look forward to falling asleep during Eko's episode.

Disc 2: The Season of Sad Piano

2008-01-19T21:16:00.000-06:00

Ew. The bald guy. A S/J Flashback is no way to start off a disc.
Seriously that was also a boring episode. I do not want to have to go to bed on just boring episodes.

**
So, the second episode was the Shannon episode, in which I felt really sorry for Shannon. She gets seriously and completely screwed by her stepmom. I am not saying the Boone death episode and the Shannon death episode are the only times I've cried. But they are, ok. Yep.

Aurora points out it was about the baby. Oh, I also cried a little when Bernard was like "Is Rose with you?" OH MAN!

Another important point of this episode is when Sawyer is about to pass out, and his eyes are strikingly blue. What a babe.

Oh, and importantly, the Others steal an awful lot of the Tailies. I think this might have something to do with the Tailies involvement/lack thereof with whatever the reason the Losties are on the island.
**

Ok the other 48 days. You are a pretty great episode. I have maybe 2 or 3 episodes left in me though, man.

"It took you forty days for you to speak?"
"It took you forty days to cry."

Shucks.
**
Ana Lucia's first flashback. This is probably the first episode of the season that I actively enjoy.
Ana Lucia has a great, and truly unique back story, and some actual justification for her anger.
All of the troubling questions raised by the first encounter between our guys and the tailies.
And the kindred spiritude of Eko and Locke. sweet.

Vigilante justice booyahhh.
Remember when I started this liveblogging in vaguely full sentences? Yeah, me neither. :)

Ok Cry #3 or #4. Jin comes back to Sun, breaking away from the rest of the crowd. So sweet.

One more word on Ana Lucia. She's capable of such good and such bad in a way that no one else seems to exercise. Ok. Well, I've said enough. She's my fave.

MAKE YOUR OWN KIND OF MUSIC

2008-01-19T18:20:00.000-06:00

Best season opener in the history of time.
It's interesting to watch Desmond without seeing his face. I really pictured a different, less adorable face.

It's dinner time! Oh great, a Jack flashback. Sort of unneccessary, though his hair is a hoot.

Oh hai desmond, good job running up the stadium stairs. This episode is a little too slow too, and it doesn't give you enough to go on, and its too main characters (Jack, Locke, Kate) focused. Although its got some good Hurley-tude. And it's all in the dark.

Sarah's recovery would be a miracle? says Jack.
Lift it up, says Desmond. What? says Jack. Your ankle, says Desmond.
I reflect for a while on the nature of Desmond's religious conviction. I am convinced he has at least some.

Sarah's recovery is a miracle. Does that make Jack a miracle worker, or just lucky? Or maybe a little bit of both.

.....

and on to the second episode. Adrift. Hey, guys on the raft/in the water. this is when Michael really starts acting like a little bitch. I also have some anger about the legal system.

Um, it's COLD in our house. HEATER TIME.

This is the episode where Sawyer pulls the bullet out of his arm. Awesome.

Season 2 seems like its going to be a little rough. There's some character development, but also alot of character rehash. Hm.

I am blogging about how I resent how mean Aurora is about Michael. He has some dumb feelings, but they come from an honest-ish place I think. So there.
Well, "Michael, Others" has been uttered.

**

And Episode 3.
OMG OMG THE TAILIES. Gosh, I forgot how much I love Eko. And this is a really great introduction to them. I was just bitching about Season 2 being slow, and now I remember how much I like the tailies. Ooooh and it's a Locke episode.
Oh, well oops. I took a nap. Thanks alot 2nd chapter of Chamber of Secrets.

**

Episode 4? It's Hurley time!
The DVD player is making a grumpy high-pitched noise. I think we need to give it a ten minute break after this episode. Possibly watch an episode or 2 on the computer.
Eh. Oh no, it's not the computer. It's like somebody forgot to turn the Helipad siren off. It is troubling.

Um. We are making comments about Sawyer's lack of power virtually all the time. "Every character except Claire beats him up," says Aurora.

Also in this episode I am reminded about how hot Locke looks when he is eating with his hands and knife. It is a real skill.

Disc Done. Still sort of holding to my attitude about Season 2. Oh well.

Exodus PT ONE AND DEUX

2008-01-19T16:15:00.000-06:00

Ok. Well.
Now its time for some serious housecleaning. Aurora got Swiffer rags and a mop and bucket.
Too bad I am hungry and am going to have a snack instead.

This is the season finale in which Rousseau is super-shady. For REALS.
OMG ANA LUCIA. Ok here goes the snack.

Nope, no snack. Just Klara. Rousseau. You are crazy..
Arzt is turning in a tour de force performance. And I like the ensemble flashbacks.

That smoke shot at the end of Part One is so great and the film quality is different.
Terrifying.

Alright here goes Part Deux. Time for some Cider. LOST drinking game anybody?
Well, Arzt is having a little grump. I love him. We also spotted original Nikki and Paolo. Much less "hot" then the 3rd season ones. Arzt's combustion freaks me out every time.

Now they are on the raft, Billy Ray Cyrus hair Sawyer!

Charlie just tried to punch Sayid, and Sayid took hold of his neck and held him off. Sayid is fierce.

Ok let's see. It's almost time for Locke to see the monster.

Aurora would like us to note that perhaps the watch Jin is bringing to America is important. Paik's connection to Widmore I think backs that up. Does it have anything to do with Jack's watch?

The second episode is an hour and a half. Maybe a little too long? especially like the 5 minutes at the end without speaking. Ok, on to season 2.

Born To Run: Kate kills people by accident.

2008-01-19T12:18:00.000-06:00

Nice fake wig Kate.
ARZT! Hearts.

Ummm.. And Michael gets accidentally poisoned.
See, I like the raft story, but it has some unneccesary twists.
And the Old Time Kate story with her childhood sweetheart. Hm. I like it. But I really need the Marshall's part of the story to to have all of her pieces together. I still don't understand why she's such an outlaw. She's got some splainin to do.

Seriously, Kate. You have made a mess of things. And an alcoholic dad is totally not enough reason for that. Maybe it's because you're Canadian.

Yeah, that episode was sort of filler.
Shh.

The Greater Good: Sayid's best episode

2008-01-19T11:51:00.000-06:00

It's the TAKE A NAP episode. Jack is delirious. It's sort of adorable. Claire also needs to take a nap cuz she just had the cutest baby ever. Sayid has a flashback about his terrorist pal. Locke comes back to town with a bloody shirt on.

OOH now he is washing his shirt. Hot, shirtless Locke.
So...

I remember the first time I watched this episode, and Sayid had two stupid choices he could make (participate in terrorism, turn terrorists in) and I was so worried for him to do either. I am glad it worked out. And the male friendship stuff in this is priceless, and underrated. Gosh, Sayid is cute. Especially with a ponytail. Hm.

I feel like I focus to much on how cute the people on the show are. I hope it is evident enough that their cuteness is just an added bonus to the great story and pretty wonderful acting. And possibly those two things help their cuteness. I wouldn't watch this show if it was dumb. And now I am just stating the obvious.

So. Apparently, Nadia "works as a lab tech for a medical testing company". Mittelos/Widmore /etc. much? Dude. And we're done with that. Now it is time for aaaaa Kate episode. Great. Bleh.

NUMBERS: In which Hurley gets a raw deal...and which I do one blog for a whole disc

2008-01-19T09:32:00.000-06:00

I love Hurley's mom. Almost as much as Jin's dad.
It's time for breakfast...And aurora is going to make some pasta salad for late. I am going to start the 2nd Harry Potter.

This is the 1st Introduction of the #s I think. Maybe? Probably in earnest.
I like how much of the show is revealed in this episode. and when hurley makes friends with rousseau.

Now its DEUS EX Machina time... I think i'll keep with this post.
The trebuchet. euh. This is the point where I get sick of the funny names for things.
Some other things happen in this episode. The circumstances surrounding Locke's kidney loss still seem shady to me. I spend some time reflecting on the Jater Skater deal.

And on to ...the one where Boone dies. I know this episode is kind of frustrating but it's also a really great ensemble work thing--Everybody helps out in their own way. And for the record: I think it's ok that Jack doesn't go to Claire's aid and leave Boone. We have some fights about it in our house, but people have been having babies for millenia. So. Anyway. Time to post. On to the last disc of season 1.

In Translation; Good morning!

2008-01-19T08:42:00.001-06:00

O hai, iz morning.
Well, we are on Disc 5. Sleeping through LOST makes it go a lot faster. And oh great, another Sun and Jin episode. I guess I missed the one where Sawyer gets tortured. :)

This is the one where Jin finds out Sun speaks english. and the raft gets burnt down (yes!) and Jin is sad like the whole time. That's about it. Locke says that the problem isn't among the Losties, its with "them" , in the jungle.

The whole raft plot has some problems, its true, but in retrospect, it basically set the scene for the whole second season. So I watch it fondly now.

The Moth: more tedious first flashbacks

2008-01-19T01:24:00.000-06:00

so. charlie's a drug addict.
woot.

Sawyer, it is not becoming to be skeezy to kate when jack is being all sentimental. I know which one works better. I know why it took me so long to warm to you.

There is alot of misunderstanding and self aggrandizement going on all around in this episode.
Waaah bloody rock god. I'm totally going to have some nap time before I finish HP. 40 pages is just too many. Adios for now. I think I'll post this. I should be back by around Hearts and Minds or so. Maybe not blogging then. I might start the disc and go back to sleep. GOODNIGHT.

ME!

The House of the Rising Sun: A bad pun, and the lamest flashbacks

2008-01-19T00:43:00.000-06:00

Aurora observes that their babies are going to have great bone structure.
I really love their on island arc. I really get weary of their flashback arc. Except for Jin's dad. He rules.

Kate says "We" in disbelief as if she's about to say "whats this we stuff white boy" to Jack.

Ok, frankly, this episode bores me all around. I'm trying to finish Harry Potter so I can go to bed. I just ate a small bowl of cereal and am drinking some water from a Jurassic Park cup. It is going to be a wonder if I don't get a horrible bellyache.

Charlie and Drugs, hawshoo.
Kate and Jack and the Cave/Beach debate hawshoo....I do like Adam and Eve though.
I also really like when Sun is about to leave at the airport and then doesn't.

I love this "Are you sure this is where you want to be" song. I think I am going to go buy it on iTunes. Oh man. It is meaningful.

White Rabbit: Is this the one where Sawyer gets tortured?

2008-01-19T00:06:00.000-06:00

I hope so.
OOOH i think this is the one where they go to the caves. The water is running out. Hurley has pulled Charlie into the Jack's bitches gang. Jack is having a little huffy fit. UGH. BORING.
Ok, now you know my biases. Everytime I watch Christian Shepard, I like him more and Jack less. Seriously. I don't know if this is what they want, but seriously, Christian is mostly just a regular dude with some flaws. I think it's something about having unrealistic expectations of your parents. I mean seriously, being a spinal surgeon is totally hard.

How come when Jack throws a hissy fit its stupid and when Boone does it it is so hot.

Jack's mom says "You don't get to say I can't." It's an interesting point about Jack having the luxury of choice, where as someone like Locke who doesn't get a choice for his pre-island life doesn't want other people to say "You can't." There's something about destiny and free will here.
But that idea always bores me.

So....Oh maybe this is the one where Sawyer gets tortured... "A rat will always lead you to his hole." Smoochies! Fingernails! I am about 3/4 of an episode away from bed.

Euh. This fear of failure stuff is really boring, Jack. Although he's doing some of his better acting in this episode. It's because the situation is believable too.. that helps. He just bashed in his dad's empty tomb if you will. I love that. It's such a great image.

Oh man. I need some water... how apt for this episode. The titular line of our blog...uttered in a speech that is a more negative rehash of Sayid's speech from a few days ago.

WALKABOUT: In which the love of my life is explored

2008-01-18T23:14:00.000-06:00

Oh Locke. Ohhhhh I love you. I remember how great it was when I was worried you were going to break my heart and be evil somehow. Dudes are having a pretty fierce argument about whether or not to burn the bodies. Jack's being super-utilitarian, and Sayid's all "we should figure out what these dead people would want" and Jack says "We don't have time to sort out everybody's god".
Way to go, ecumenical Sayid.

Jack's Gay-like Neckerchief time!
John's giving the Boar Speech! Way to go! It is weird how against hunting Sawyer is. Such a study in small contrasts.

Locke's adding machine sounds like the monster.

So what I love about this season is the easy pervasiveness of sentimentality and sweet humanness and the novelty of the outdoors and the adventure of it all. It does turn as the seasons go by, and some of the turning is sort of awkward. We can look back and see that it was necessary but it's nice to go back and think of the better days gone by.

Locke is wearing a hot hunting vest. And it's time to clip my fingernails.

"Shut up, Randy Nations" says Aurora. We're eating a few teddy grahams, and there are already 7 soda cans on the table. BRING IT ON.... "Where one derives strength from the earth and becomes inseperable from it..." That's what Locke says a walkabout is, and that's what happens to him on the Island.

I love the footshots of him. Love the gold toe socks.

And so Charlie and Hurley become friends while fishing. I love how it just seems like the actors are having fun. Time to read some Harry Potter.

Shannon is way rough on Boone. "Go rescue a baby bird or something." She really thinks he is a sissy.

Man the first time Jack sees his dad by the tree is terrifying....Not much happens in this episode. I love it though. It's what I'm saying about the first season. It's totally slowpaced, and episodes really flow into each other. It's like they have all the time in the world. And it is nice.

And a little secret between me and you. I get tired of "Don't tell me what I can't do." Double negative much?

The end of Disc 1. Woot. Time to get the mattress out!

Tabula Rasa: in which I have strong opinions about characters

2008-01-18T22:34:00.000-06:00

The first time that Sawyer calls Kate Freckles! So GREAT!

Hehe. Well I am reminded about how it took me a while to warm to Hurley. He wouldn't eat the Urchin, he whines about blood. Or something. Oh, and apparently Boone goes on Peace Marches.

I love Australian Farmer.

Sayid is doing some serious people-leading. I am maybe crying about how good of a leader he is.

I don't like Hurley in these episodes so much, because he's sort of Jack's Little Bitch.. "Hey, Kate's a Fugitive!"

There's an amazing meaningful little exchange between Jack and Saywer in the fuselage about how/if Jack should waste antibiotics on the marshal. It's Jack ignoring the greater good and going at the most immediate problem. Aurora suggests that probably Sayid is the most leader-y one actually interested in the greater good. Sawyer isn't for a long time, being all venture capitalist, "in the wild", but I think he comes around at the end. I think it's important that Sawyer's one of the dudes who sticks around to take on the Others at the end of Season 3. But man, I am worried about that guy.

And I should take this moment to note that it's pretty awesome how early they realize there are other people on the Island.

Why did Locke make a whistle, seriously? Weirdo. I guess maybe Walt told him about Vincent. What a nice dude. It's really interesting to watch the Walt-Michael dynamic when Walt doesn't understand that Michael has a right to be overprotective of him, because he hasn't been his father for a long time.

"Three days ago we all died. We should all be able to start over." -JACK! Three days ago, really? Easter!

One of the things I really like about the first season is the sort of sense of zen and thankfulness. We're mid-ending montage. Sayid throws Sawyer an orange. More in favor of Sayid's awesome leader abilities. I'll say more on that later.

Adios.

Pilot Part 2: shut up and stop trying to be charming.

2008-01-18T21:50:00.000-06:00

Here goes.

Will was trying to make a point about who was in which bathroom when the plane crashed.
Oh Shannon, I hate you. ( I get used to you in the 2nd season)...

We have gotten sour with each other over what Aurora will keep track of.
Poor Hurley and his early lines. "Some people have problems. Us...him." BLEH.

Talk about side wounds! The Marshall has a masterful one.

It's SNACK TIME. Fruit Snacks all around.

We are talking about the nature of Vincent. Whether or not he is always a real dog. And if so, what kind of a real dog. Seriously, that dude is weird. Also, it led us to discuss the nature of the Horse. It seems like it should always be a hallucination....but Sawyer sees it.

Sawyer is being Emo. Will points out that he's in a fuselage part that looks like a cradle, and says
"he wants to be good." And then Sawyer offers that priceless line: "I'm a complex guy sweetheart".

Aunt Mary Jo has joined us!

I am wondering about Jack's scratch marks on his face. They look like something from Watership Down. Like the bad bunnies marks...I'm not sure about this

Way to shoot a polar bear, Sawyer.

Basically this episode is about being ADORABLE. In which Hurley faints on the Marshal.

Sawyer is "The Prisoner", says Sayid. So who's Number 2?

Oh here comes the radio signal. I still don't believe that none of these people know even a little French except for Shannon. Oh well. It's convenient that Rousseau speaks English. Why the hell didn't she use it when she record the Message?
Ok done. Seriously, adorable.

The Pilot

2008-01-18T21:13:00.000-06:00

#1 I am excited for the whole half season of Ian Somerhalder. I love him so much.

Charlie is so cute when he is wandering around.

Jack's side is sort of pierced in the beginning. Does that mean he's like Jesus? Watch for more on that theme. Does that make Kate his Mary Magdalene? Aurora points out that she decides not to lie about her name even though she's been lying about her name for years. Because he makes her want to be better? Like Jesus, and Mary Magdalene.

Oh I miss the old days when they relied on the stars on the beach for ambience.

The Monster showed up for the first time! Terrific!
Apparently Rose says "there's something very familiar about that sound"...which Aurora points out makes sense because she's from the Bronx and it is taken from a taxi cab meter sound.

It starts to rain, and everyone is freaked out. Except Locke who is sitting out in it happily. A foreshadowing of his later love affair with the monster? Probs.

Oh hai, Greg Grunberg. I am totally not trusting you.... I am really starting to believe that there is some serious setting up going on here. Especially in the event that someone controls the Monster, I think lil' pilot could have made it out ok, and the things he is telling the Losties are just a way for whoever is controlling the island to set them up. It seems to me like he's trying to see if the Losties are listening when he tells them how they crashed. Aurora points out that he conciously puts down the radio.... I guess this doesn't mean that the monster is controlled by something, because the Others might have hoped that the pilot might have survived to further infiltrate the Losties. Eh. I dunno.

And Pilot Part One. DONE.

Live-blogging the LOST WEEKEND!?!

2008-01-18T19:27:00.000-06:00

Ok.
Here's the deal.
It's time for the LOST Weekend, where we watch every episode of Lost in a 3 day time span.
Eat a lot of junk food. Do some house-cleaning. Read books at the same time. Maybe apply for jobs.
But mostly and most importantly. WATCH LOST.

It is going to rule. And we will keep you, our fair readers posted on it. And maybe take this opportunity to catch up on the Blog. We're still reading....well.. I'm listening to Our Mutual Friend and Aurora has some older stuff to catch up on.
Oh, and I should probably say some words about "And Then There Were None".

Oh and I think I am going to have a "Cowboy Up" shirt made.
And change my ringtone to "Make Your Own Kind of Music".

This is going to be hella hella fun.

Curiouser and Curiouser...

2007-09-21T19:03:00.000-06:00

Ok, well, I'm back. It's been too long, internet. First of many backed-up posts, weakest first.

So I read Alice Adventures in Wonderland, but my honest opinion is that it has basically bugger-all to do with our show. It's just a long series of silly weirdness, without much deeper meaning. Furthermore, it's clever little nonsense tone really gets under my skin. Haha puns! Math jokes! Long parodies of poems people had to memorize back in the 1800s! I'm sure it was funny once. If you were Lewis Carroll.

Alice and Wonderland is pretty high up there in terms of number of direct references. In the first season episode "White Rabbit", Locke encourages Jack to follow his vision of his Dad, comparing it (him?) to the titular rabbit. There were more literal white rabbits all over the place in season 3: being shaken to death, leading lil' Ben towards his dead mom, being eaten. And, of course, the season 3 finale was called "Through the Looking Glass" --same as Alice's sequel-- and our new station "The Looking Glass" has a little bunny logo.

So I was hoping for some really profound clues, but all I really found were puns. If you've seen the Disney movie you know everything interesting that I have to say. Quick highlight reel: Alice follows a white rabbit (with a pocket watch and clothes) down a hole, falls for awhile, unwisely follows the advice of 'Eat Me' cakes and 'Drink Me' bottles, goes to a Mad Hatter Tea Party, meats a Cheshire cat, plays croquet with a flamingo-mallet, eats some mushroom (because a hookah-smoking caterpillar told her to), almost gets beheaded by the Queen of Hearts, and then wakes up. Because it was all a dream. Great.

It's not that it's not fun, because it is. But for every cool image and clever joke there are three or four that don't work for me. It's fun, but it's all surface. I think a search for deeper meaning here is the surest way to suck the life out of it. It's a story about a convoluted journey through a place where logic works against you and what should make sense doesn't. Don't ask me to take it any farther without magic mushrooms, or at least some "Drink Me".

That said, it seems to me that the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has a chance of being more relevant. It has time distortion, opposite mirror-selves, a giant chessboard, and a Jabberwocky. So I'll give that a shot, even if it all turns out to be all a joke about binomials and Tennyson.

Apocalypto: I liked it, and it is relevant.

2007-09-13T18:49:00.000-06:00

First things first.
We're not dead. In fact, we just got steady internet service, so hopefully we'll be back with a vengance. We have, however, come to an impasse. We've read most of the easy (less than 500 page) books, and are left with, basically, The Fountainhead and Our Mutual Friend (ok Catch-22, The Mysterious Island, Tale of 2 Cities, etc). Aurora's got tons of posts to make--she's listened to the Odyssey and Alice in Wonderland on Librivox, she read the Tommyknockers....I'm almost done with the Time Quartet. It's had its ups and downs , including the death of its author, Madeleine L'Engle. She will be missed. In TV world, we've been watching The Prisoner! Also, I managed to get my sister and mom through the entire series up to this point. It was nice to see my mom hate and then love Sawyer, see the Sun-Jin switch, see the Michael switch, see Tess stay faithful to Sayid, or, as she calls him, " Number One Iraqi ".

And yes. Last night we watched Apocalypto. All the negative Mel Gibson buzz aside, it was a pretty decent film --it was amazing to look at, and steeped itself so deeply in a people and a time that is rarely represented, while at the same time being a pretty simple story of human determination, human flaws, and the problems that come with power. Sound familiar? Well, I think so. So does she...It didn't help that the film started out with a tapir (relative to the wild boar) getting gored by this really awesome really primitive trap. The film leads us to identify with this village of Mayan natives who are pretty unassuming and sometimes play jokes on each other and so forth. Then, lo and behold, the big-city punks come in, a bunch of the old dudes get killed, the young-and-able get captured, and all the kids get left behind. On the arduous walk to the big city, they encounter a small, really creepy child who tells the big-city meanies that their society is going to fall. She reminded me of vision-Walt. In the big city, they realize that they're not being taken to work, but to be sacrificed. Pretty brutally. Our hero escapes this fate because there is a solar eclipse which makes the boss guys declare that the sacrifice should stop--instead the rest of our village friends are taken out back and killed for sport with arrows, javelins, and big-ass rocks. Fortunately, our hero escapes, and spends the rest of the movie leading his captors on a chase through a waterfall, quicksand, poisonous snakes, man-eating jaguars, and that awesome impaling trap from the beginning of the film. Finally, he gets home to his wife and child--only to find the white man arriving on the beach. She says "What are we going to do?" and he says "We're going farther into the jungle," which is totally the right thing to do cuz the white man is a bitch. And the white man is just going to bring another big, ugly power structure that twists people into doing really bad things in the name of society.

SO. I think it sounds familiar--besides the jungle with big bodies of water nearby, there are some really interesting things going on with society asking people to put a really low value on human life...which the corporations on LOST could easily be doing...which real-world society (which Lost draws from) does all the time with our really dumb wars and police actions, and which lots of people stand dumbly by for, or cheer on. But hey, isn't there a temple in the big city of Apocalypto? So maybe the bad guys here are sort of like the Others, with a pretty flawed power structure and a lot of myth and superstition to bolster them. Ultimately, though, I think the movie is about the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations--not just these Mayans, but Rome and the U.S., and everybody. The thing is--I could see this story playing out on the Lost island hundreds of years ago--see it being played out now--and see it being played out again on the future island. And that is spooky, and also totally awesome. The power of the same story playing out over and over again, unable to be stopped, only briefly avoided, is part of why Apocalypto is good, and why LOST is great.

And that's that. I just found out Our Mutual Friend is on Librivox. That is going to make things 10 times easier.

Lions and Aliens and Christians, Oh My!: C.S. Lewis Kicks Butt.

2007-08-12T22:52:00.000-06:00

I am working my way through finishing C.S. Lewis's book-length works.
C.S. Lewis has been in my blood for a decade, both because he is a great storyteller and a pretty darn well-reasoned spokesperson for Orthodox Christianity. But what does that have to do with LOST? Well... In both the Chronicles of Narnia and the Ransom trilogy (which I'll be talking about), a great mythological world that seems, in some ways,very unlike our own, teaches Christian morality and belief in action without reducing it to 10 commandments or a Golden Rule. It's harder to pin that sort of thing down on Lost and it definitely has less of a clear message about what the "right thing to do" is, but I think there are some interesting points of contacts nonetheless. Let's dive in....

The Ransom Trilogy makes the most sense. In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom travels to Mars, meets and befriends its fauna, and gets to know about the way God (who in this case is pretty Christian) works on other planets. But not in a hokey "everything is like Earth" way, but rather in a "Maybe Earth is a little bit less in tune with God than other planets"...which actually in some way or another, seems to be a pretty loud tune in SF. In the second book Perelandra, Ransom is charged with the duty of protecting Venus's ethereal Adam and Eve from their own Fall. He is successful, and Venus looks like its shaping up to be a very different world than fallen Earth.

But the most relevant book, and the last, That Hideous Strength, takes place right here on Earth. That Hideous Strength finds Ransom back on earth, preparing to manage an interplanetary response to the threat of apocalypse. The devil's arrival, it seems, is about to come at the hands of overeager scientists and academics who really messing with the natural order, some knowingly and some because of their own ignorance and disconnectedness from the real world. They are a pretty nasty bunch of academics, lets say. Eventually, albeit briefly, Ransom gets Merlin on his side and calls down the gods (from their corresponding planets) to foil their plans. Merlin and the gods as ancient magic are neutral, so its okay that the Christian heroes co-opt them. Which, needless to say, I love, since it takes a big man (LEWIS!) to really celebrate the reality of non-Christian elements being important in the Christian tradition....

Which, to come back to LOST , seems apt in a world where Christian(Eko of course, and others by way of their virtues...and by allusion in the show) and Pagan(The Island) have to put down their own suspicions of each other to fight something more evil than they seem to each other. At least I hope that's what is going to have to happen with the Losties and the Others. Yep. And maybe it goes with my continuing feeling that Dharma really wasn't up to any good, and the purge might have actually been justified. Although I don't think Clive Staples would have been on board with that. Anyways, the point that those who are calling the shots aren't always the good guys and make it hard sometimes for you to see how bad they are, is an important one.
But in the end, in the very end, someone good is going to call the shots. Kapish? Hm. Just read it.

Narnia is a little bit less clear, since it is, after all, a children's story. Since it is in another time-space... and Carlton has said something to that effect. I felt a connection most seriously in "The Man Behind The Curtain" actually. In The Last Battle there is a False-Aslan (a donkey put in an Aslan suit by a tricksy monkey, seriously) which people are mistakenly worshiping, and Narnia is falling apart. People who believe in him are wrong, people who don't believe in him decide not to believe in Aslan at all, the southern people who believe in Tash instead of Aslan (thinly veiled Muslims) are arguing about his meaning....and Aslan is nowhere to be found.
Plus the Monkey cultivates everyone's reverence for the False Aslan by way of smoke and mirrors and complicated ritual, which real Aslan didn't need.

So when Ben was getting all up in Locke's face being like "I'm going to take you to see Jacob" and everyone was all "ooh Jacob! We've never seen him but we here he's pretty great," I was pretty skeptical about him--I know Wizard of Oz came first but if Jacob is the Island/the Island God/imaginary or false Island-God or what have you, he has a lot more in common with Aslan/False-Aslan than with little Mr. Marvel. But we saw Jacob...right? I'm not ready to believe Jacob is what people think he is, or if he is, Darlton and Co. did a pretty good making it hard to tell what he is. It's not a one-one correlation,but The Last Battle does focus on what the Followers think and do with regards to their Leader as much as on what that leader is. And isn't that we've been watching the Others do for the last season?

Well--I know I haven't done justice to my favorite guy in the world, so, seriously, read his books.
He balances myth-making and very serious meaning really really well. Sort of like LOST!

What's coming up?
Well--I guess I took a little break to read comics. Our Mutual Friend and The Fountainhead are still being slogged through, and I'm reading the Time Quartet, and school is starting! But we've got a bunch of hiatus to go, and plenty of books to read, both long and short and Stephen King-y.
Plus we've started The Prisoner. So creepy. So...
Be Seein' You!

In which everything turns to a mush in my head, or what Jack should learn from Buffy

2007-08-12T18:56:00.000-06:00

This isn't about any book specifically, it's just random rambling on my part. Spoilers for all Harry Potter and Buffy (and Star Wars, but that seems ridiculous). So as I've been totally reabsorbed by Harry Potter, Emilia and I have been working out way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it got me thinking about the importance and awesomeness of "the trio". Which got me wondering about whether other trios can give us any hints about how things might work out for Lost's main triangle. So let's take a moment to ignore all the other characters and focus on Jack, Kate and Sawyer. Just pretend it's the start of Season 3. Jump with me, won't you?

Seems to me there are two basic structures, with Harry Potter and Buffy in one camp and Lost and Star Wars in the other. Harry, Ron, and Hermione square up eerily well with Buffy, Xander, and Willow, as the brave, whiny, and burdened by destiny hero, the loyal, earnest dork, and the clever, insecure and socially awkward brain. Lost's big three of Jack, Kate, and Sawyer line up with Luke, Leia, and Han Solo as the earnest, whiny, daddy-issues hero, the tough, ballsy heroine, and the scoundrel with a heart of gold.

Now I do have a couple of actual points here, besides that archetypes are fun. First and most personal, why is it that the hero always seems to have issues with being a little whiney-pants? Dear to my heart as all these stories are, there are moments in all of them when I find myself yelling at the screen (or book) for the hero to shut up already. I guess it’s sort of the problem with being the hero: it really is all about you, and at some points that's a real burden. There are times when you just gotta deal with that by yelling at your friends for no reason (Harry), running away and being a waitress (Buffy), straight up ignoring Yoda (Luke) or some good ol' crying in the jungle (Jack). The good news is, by the end of the three finished stories, Harry, Buffy, and Luke have all pulled it together to the point where they are (usually) able to focus calmly on the mission, drawing on the strength of their friends and family, and act as brave and selfless leaders. Jack has a ways to go on every front.

Ok, the next, sort of counter-intuitive thing I notice is that the hero hardly ever gets the girl (or guy). It seems that in all four examples, romance within the trio is between the two seconds, not the hero and a second. All of them have false starts, misleads or confusion in the other direction. Xander likes Buffy, Luke is entranced by Leia, Jack loves Kate, and Harry and Hermione….well I don't see it, but there are enough mixed signals to start a huge shipping war lots of 13-year-old girls still have internet scars from. But none of those couples get farther then a kiss- the real chemistry and balance was in a hero-less pairing.

Of course, if you watch Buffy you know that Willow and Xander didn't work out either, but they had a real, if screwed-up, romance (you have to give Buffy some leeway. Unlike the other three stories I'm talking about, Buffy was never planned out farther than a season or two ahead, and the constant need for drama frequently eats through long-term story satisfaction. We are talking, after all, about a show that suddenly decided in season four that Willow was a lesbian). And I'm sure that our Lost triangle is (groan) far from resolved. But if Ron/Hermione and Han/Leia are any clue, bet on the couple that bickers.

Something else I notice about the three finished stories is that by the end, the hero has to face death in a very clear, conclusive way. Harry, Buffy, and Luke step willingly, defenses down, into the arms of certain death. In DH, Harry accepts that he will have to sacrifice himself, faces Voldemort wandless, and dies. Buffy has the distinction of dying twice, first in season one when she faces her prophesied doom at the hands of the Master, and more certainly at the end of season five when she dives into a dimensional portal to save her little sister (and the world). At the end of Jedi, Luke presents himself to Vader, and goes willingly into the Death Star (I love George Lucas, but subtle he's not), fully expecting to die.

I'm not saying Jack will die- all the characters I just named are smiling contentedly as the credits roll on their stories. I'm also not sure that I'm right about the way the triangle will play out. I'm just guessing about the way this will work, but it seems clear to me that the three finished stories point in particular direction, especially for Jack.

If Jack is going to step up and be the hero of the story, he's gonna need to get in line with the hero path. First, he should stop pushing people away and bogging down in his own shit. Less Order of the Phoenix all-caps Harry, season two sad Buffy, whinny can't lift the X-wing Luke. Be the leader and the hero, stop letting your problems push you away from the people you need. Second, he's gonna need to step fully out of the way of Kate and Sawyer. However that plays out, it's not about him, and him staying in the picture is dragging everyone down. Finally, there is going to come a time when Jack's going to need to step between his people and death, and he'd better be ready for it. And I'm not talking "I'll get off the island and come back for you guys" sacrifice. If the other stories are any guide, our Doc's gonna have to accept death with open arms. I really hope he's up for that.

Ok, coming up next, a Jurassic Park post. Also, someday we'll blog about old BBC show The Prisoner, which based on the pilot is basically Lost, but with funny jackets and an evil balloon. Don't laugh, it's totally terrifying.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: the best book title ever

2007-08-08T15:00:00.000-06:00

Dear Stephen King,

I love you. Have you heard? I love that you do not require me to make a commitment to a world outside of my own understanding, let me read a book in a few days, and manage to set stories in a very specific time by mentioning such cultural identifiers as Surge soda and Tubthumping, and that you don't require me to be a devoted fan to have a lot of fun with any individual book.

I really love The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a short novel about a 9 year old girl who gets lost on the Appalachian trail. She strays from her mother and brother's bickering for a moment, and ends up having to fend for herself in the wilderness for quite a long time, to the tune of a few weeks. She hikes and falls, tries to sleep, wades through pretty large marshes, makes wrong turns that take her to Canada, and has a prolonged vomiting and other bodily emissions spell as her body adjusts to its primitive diet of nuts, berries, raw fish, and dirty stream water. Eventually, hallucinating like crazy, she finds her way to a forest road, she confronts the fear that has been chasing her through the woods, and a hunter finds her and takes her to the hospital. Although he's interested in putting her through a lot of pain, King is interested in letting the girl die... but in how she manages to live.

Although the book isn't mentioned or read in Lost, it was featured on a Lostpedia Stephen King connections list, and with good reason. The whole scenario of being thrown off the beaten path and surviving on your wits has been played with on Lost--There was plenty of survival questions being asked in Season 1 that the introduction of the Hatch sort of diverted us from.
Remember the good old days of Locke skinning boars (and the camera dwelling on it for long periods of time). Of Charlie trying to catch a fish to impress Shannon? Remember when everyone would sit around the fire and talk and the montage-y music would play and the camera would pan out to the stars? Sigh.

In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, survival doesn't depend on society..the only other person out there is an hallucination. Trisha has her Walkman with her, and is able to tune in to Boston Red Sox games for a few days before the batteries run out. Tom Gordon, the relief pitcher, is her hero--she wears a Red Sox hat and his jersey while in the woods. She talks to him, and sees him with her every so often, and he keeps guiding her through the woods when she feels like giving up. Along with this good spirit, she also senses (and King hints spookily at) another, malevolent, presence, whom she decides is "The God of the Lost," who basically wants to get her and tear into tiny pieces. These visions, like those on LOST, serve a clear (albiet spooky purpose for the seer. Furthermore: both good and evil in the supernatural--since we don't know what is good and evil on LOST at this point, I'm going to make a guess that things like the Smoke Monster and Jacob are a little bit of both. There's even the slightest hint of a yearning for God: Trisha thinks back to her father's belief in "the subaudible", the spiritual essence in everything, and gets mad. The Subaudible isn't going to help you when you're lost in the woods for days on end--she needs real protection and more importantly, strength, and in Tom Gordon she gets it.
I guess it might be nice to mention, too, that King doesn't go very big in making up mythologies and supernatural stuff for this book (which I think makes it sort of unique for his work?)...which makes it kind of like Lost, in that its just enough to whet your whistle.

So basically it's great, there's survivalism, cultural context, good and evil, and a little yearning for divine protection. Thanks Stephen King! So what else is on our plate: I'm going to report on the Ransom trilogy (I just finished it! Yay!!), Aurora's still going to talk about trios and Harry Potter and other nerd things, and she's slogging through The Fountainhead while I slog through Our Mutual Friend. But as she pointed out recently, we've got 7 months to go. We've got plenty of time to get through lots more books.

A couple of tidbits, survivalism+Lost related.
I read a piece about Jeffrey Lieber, who gets created by credits, but envisioned the show as way more just about survivalist, Lord of the Flies type stuff. The article is a little whiny, but interesting. I Love The Monster, so...I can't be too sad he wasn't kept on.

ALSO: Yesterday I found out the Terry O'Quinn is from Newberry, Michigan!!! This explains so much! I've been there a few times. It's in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Lake Superior, pretty far from much of anything, especially in the Very Very Snowy Winter. It's not hard to see how he could have some seriously engrained experience with big,scary woods and basic survival skills up there. As if it weren't already big enough, my love for him grows and grows. How could it not?... Bye!

Island: Will Tantric Yoga save the world?

2007-08-01T23:49:00.000-06:00

This is a tough one. Aldous Huxley's Island than a little bit pontificating, so its going to be sort of hard to talk about it as though it had a plot. But it's definitely food for Lost thought. isn't excellent--it's kind of manifesto-ish and moreThe novel is set on the Southeast Asian island of Pala, which is the namesake of the "Pala Ferry" mentioned in the Pearl Station Orientation video and the General Orientation video in Ben's flashback. Its unused dock is where Michael's boat takes off from (and where Jack, Kate and Sawyer are bound, gagged and hooded) at the end of Season 2, and where Sayid and Co. dock their boat at the beginning of Season 3. Still, even with all the action going on around it, (surprise, surprise) it's not entirely clear what the Pala Ferry is...it seems to have taken Dharma members from station to station and possibly from island to island.

Aldous Huxley's Pala is a little bit more clearly defined. The book serves as a corrective to the dreary distopia of Brave New World by presenting a working utopia that benefits from a synthesis of western science (especially medicine) and eastern spirituality (especially Buddhism). We learn about Pala from its inhabitants alongside a British journalist who has been sent there to scope out its oil resources for his boss (hello Widmore?) but who ends up getting pretty enthralled by what the Island has to offer. What is that exactly? Aside from the initial thrill of learning how much the Island inhabitants value tantric yoga, there are also carefully administered magic mushrooms, Mutual Adoption Clubs where children aren't tied to one set of parents for their whole childhood, and shared communal duties, both physical and intellectual, which strengthen all of the society...there's a really nice little jab at Western intellectuals who study one thing to the exclusion of others and become gross little blobs instead of whole people.

Of course there's a little bit of conflict thrown in for good measure...the soon-to-be rightful ruler (of a ruling family that had control over the island since before this utopian period) and his over-bearing mother, aware of the money they can get from selling off Pala's lucrative oil reserves, are about to really ruin things by cutting a deal with a nearby island that has westernized too fast, leaving a huge gap between the haves and have nots. Having something like this to be in opposition to makes the smooth functioning of Pala all the more appealing.

This could be a really great story, I think, but as it stands, it reads more as Huxley's own musings on the ideal society. And hrm..how do I put this? I am a little skeptical. And not only because the book was constantly proposing Buddhism-based alternatives to Western Christian attitudes about the way society should be. I will digress here: it is a noble effort for someone, like Huxley, so concerned with the problems of Western civilization, to offer an alternative, but the fact remains that he is a Western thinker and can't completely explain or understand Buddhism. Anyways, I'm skeptical because I think that any working utopia is going to seem a bit far-fetched. It requires too many people to be in sync with each other, or else it has to be so self-contained (as in the case of this island), that it hardly seems like a viable solution for the rest of the world. Which I guess is okay, if a little sad. Plus, dystopias are just so much more fun!

In the end, Pala's new ruler sells the place out for that all too-tempting oil money which he can use to buy himself happiness, by way of material posessions (like scooters purchased from catalogs). Although I hadn't bought into the Pala utopia wholesale, it's easy to see how depressing it is to give up a mellow and equitable society for industrialization, pollution, and gross economic disparities. But the ending of the book seems to suggest that, though the society was destroyed, it lingered in the hearts and minds of its adherents nonetheless.

So where's Lost in this? The Palan establishment is probably just a teensy bit like Dharma, which has ideals and goals that are intellectual, spiritual, and community-building in nature. Admittedly, its not working as well as Pala was (with folks like Roger assigned to one duty that just pissed them off), but maybe the name was chosen in a spirit of high hopes bythe Dharma Initiative.

Then there's the threat of big oil spoiling the fun. Although it doesn't seem like its going to be Big Oil, the corporations who are threatening to ruin the Lost Island(s) seem to want something, and maybe want to send others in to do it for them. I think its entirely probable that some of the Losties could be unwitting pawns for the Bad Guys who are also capable of being turned to the preferability of Island Life (like the reporter character in Island). At the same time, somebody had an inside man (a native son like Pala's ruler) in Dharma once: Ben. Although of course, the Hostiles were around before Dharma was...nonetheless, the crossing paths of the outsiders accepting a society that they were originally sent to hate, and of the natives betraying it are an important part of the big Lost Puzzle.

All that said, I think it's time to admit that the Others/Dharma/Hostiles/Natives jumble has gotten me so mixed up that the more times I allude to it, the less I know what I'm talking about.
Recently Aurora pointed out to me that I was operating on the assumption that the Hostiles (specifically Richard Alpert) were the good guys. And I said oh yeah, he is pretty evil, and I was embarrassed. But really, I think that the "special properties" of the Island have been protected by something good(?) for some time (as in centuries)...does that mean that there's been a bad around all this time too? Oh, man, I cannot wait for some of the Island mythology. If only for the simple fact that I could chase it around in my head for weeks and never get anywhere on my own.

Finally, in fun Huxley facts from Wikipedia, this was Huxley's last book, written after he was diagnosed with cancer. Near to death, he asked his wife to inject him with LSD, which much like the magic mushrooms in Island, eased his mind in his dying moments. His death got little public mention, though, as he died on the same day as President Kennedy and...get this..C.S. Lewis!
I love C.S. Lewis.

On that note, adios. I'll be dropping by for a short post on The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon soonish. I've started Our Mutual Friend (oof!) and want to finish the RansomTrilogy and talk Lewis a bit. Aurora should be doing a bit on literary and cultural threesomes (um?) and what they can tell us about looking at Jack/Kate/Sawyer. I for one, am looking forward to it.
Bye!

The Wizard of Oz: I can't come back, I don't know how it works!

2007-07-17T12:00:00.000-06:00

What can really be said about The Wizard of Oz that hasn't already been said?
Not too much, especially since its not all that complicated of a book, and most of what people say sort of ruins the fun. Besides, its lasting fame is due just a little more to the 1939 movie then to the 1900 book. LOST , for one, references a line from the movie in one of its most awesome episodes: 3x20: "The Man Behind The Curtain". In the book, after all, he's behind a wood screen, not a curtain. And the red shoes on a man buried under rubble that Desmond sees in Flashes Before Your Eyes come from the movie--in the book they're silver.

In the interest of not rehashing a plot that anyone with much interest in popular culture probably knows, I'll talk about where I saw connections and had questions, giving a little bit of thought to the differences between the film and the book.

One of the best things about The Wizard of Oz in any form is the well-developed characters and their interactions with and concern for one another. Along the way they all demonstrate that the gifts they seek are already inside of them. Sound familiar? Well, I think so.

I was really trying to develop some theory of who was who in the merry band. Some have lovingly lined up the characters with Michael/Jacob's list for the Others --Kate, Hurley, Jack, and Sawyer are Dorothy,The Cowardly Lion, The Tin Man, and The Scarecrow respectively (thanks, Lostpedia). I'd totally get behind Hurley as the Cowardly Lion--he has a lot to offer but has some trouble doing it, as he showed in the last few episodes of Season 3. Other than that, I pretty much disagree. I think Sawyer's the most like the Tin Man. In the book, particularly, the Tin Man goes back and forth between making sure not to step on cute little bugs and (on multiple occasions!) decapitating beastly enemies that threaten his comrades. Sawyer, in his own words, is "a complicated guy, sweetheart." He's maybe the biggest romantic on the show, but he's also probably the most hardened by his pre-island situation. Plus, he comes through in a pinch. I think the one connecting factor between him and the Scarecrow is his straw-y hair. So who do I think is the Scarecrow? Hm. I'd really like to give this to Jack. He's a know-it-all, he's bossy, and um, just dumb sometimes. There are also times when he's a good leader, and his brand of bravery pays off. Similarly, when the Wizard of Oz leaves, he leaves the Scarecrow in charge of the Emerald City...Hm. Is someone going to put Jack in charge?

Which brings us, rightfully so, to the love of my life, John Locke. Sigh. He can probably be the Scarecrow too--he's wrong as often as he's right, but when he's right its pretty useful. But I'm going to have to make a weird case. I think he's Dorothy. Sorry Kate, being pretty and a girl isn't going to cut it. So here's why: Dorothy is in a different position than the others in her little band. She's more curious and more amazed by the entire world of Oz because she is truly a stranger to it. For her, the whole trip is an exploration. Nobody has picked up on seeing the Island as a fascinating new world to explore more than Locke has. For another thing, Dorothy has the power of the silver/ruby slippers pretty much from the get-go. Locke's got something going on in the magic department early on too, with his miraculous ability to use his legs and all. And...although Locke doesn't want to go home and Dorothy really does, both of them are interested in asking the big questions and getting sufficient answers. I'd also like to make the case that Dorothy infiltrated the Wicked Witch's castle most successfully since the Wicked Witch can't touch her due to the shoes, and that Locke most successfully infiltrated the Others and wasn't touched for similar reasons (they might have been a humbug, of course). But well, does that fall apart when Ben pits him? Maybe. Ok, there's my wacky little assessment.

That takes us to titular Wizard. Aside from some physical resemblance to Locke (short and bald!), I'm going to argue for a split bill between Ben and Jacob. The case for Ben is that he's definitely keeping some things for the Losties, and, as evidenced by the tumor and the ensuing mess he gets into with his fellow others, he doesn't have as much power as he'd like to make it seem. Be that as it may be, he's still the boss, even if he's pulling some humbug. So why'd he call himself Henry Gale--wouldn't he be more aptly named Mr. Marvell? I know, its not a one-one correlation, but I must think about it.

I'm going to throw Jacob into the mix now. I know that The Wizard, the Man Behind the Curtain, is a humbug, but there's plenty of real magic in Oz too. In the book, particularly, The Wizard makes himself appear in different forms to the different visitors--to Dorothy, a giant head, to the Scarecrow a beautiful woman, and so forth. I'm on the "Jacob appeared as an older Locke" train, and the smoke monster appears to people in different forms, I think the idea that different people see the Wizard differently ties in well. If Jacob/The Island/The Smoke Monster is being controlled, who's making Jacob appear the way he does?

So is there really a humbug in The Wizard of Oz? Clearly--in the book, everyone in the Emerald City wears green glasses so that everything will appear green, and the Wizard is a fake. But there's plenty of real magic in the Land of Oz too--heck, there's a living scarecrow, flying monkeys, and magic shoes! I think its sort of the same on Lost. There's certainly some humbug going on, but there's magic bigger than the humbug too.

And ooh! Who reveals the Wizard in the book and film? Toto! Who makes sure that "nothing stays buried on the Island for long"? Quite arguably, good old Vincent! Hooray for the weird dog as plot device!

There are a couple of other loose ends--The name Oz recalls the poem Ozymandias, which is about pride and the fall of empires and which.... everybody loves! It comes up in other LOST influences like the Watchmen, and Lost's four-toed statue has been seen as a reference to the broken-down statue of the ancient king. In the Wizard of Oz, likewise, The Wizard is the ruler of an opulent city at the center of a much simpler kingdom. The story has been seen as a populist fable (which I don't want to spend much time on, really)... are the tyrants supposed to be falling in LOST and is the common man to be championed? Well, I hope so, but I'm not really counting it. The rise and fall of empires is fascinating, no matter.

There's also this experiment I got to in my Wikipedia searching. Make of it what you will. But the whole human-technology interaction thing rings a bell with me. And of course, it's mighty nifty that Oz is a nickname for Australia. I'm sure you got that, but its fun.

Thats all I've got. I think the Wizard of Oz is totally relevant--it presents a cool mythology but relies on character development, it employs both real magic and slight of hand, and it keeps getting at that question: who's in charge and what does it mean for the little guy? Read it, watch it... enjoy it. In the mean time, I'm still working on the Ransom Trilogy. I love C.S. Lewis, you know. Aurora will be working on Harry Potter for a good while... so it might be a few weeks. In the mean time... read!

Stranger in a Strange Land: a Cocktail Party to which I was not invited

2007-07-12T10:06:00.000-06:00

I decided to read Stranger in a Strange Land because Wrinkle in Time got me so keen on science fiction. And Stranger in a Strange Land is billed as "the most famous science fiction novel of all time." Um. Give me a break. I guess I might be cynical, but this book was light on science fiction and heavy on early 1960s hangups dressed up as radical breaches of authority. Ugh. So perhaps it is apt that it gave its name to the worst episode of LOST ever (sorry), The One With Bai Ling. I wonder if that was on purpose...

So here's how it goes. Years before the book started, a crew of astronauts landed on Mars. Though they all died, one of them had a kid, who was raised by Martians. When another crew of humans picks him up years later and brings him back to Earth, it becomes clear that life on Mars has changed the way he experiences things--he can make people disappear if he is displeased with them, he goes into catatonic states for long periods of time, he can speak into peoples minds and see through their eyes. In short, he is in the business of "grokking" things, which is a combination of understanding and loving and being a part of them. Cool, right?

Well, what do you with that sort of guy? He teaches people about Mars, but he also teaches them about themselves. The book gets caught up describing the political details involved in the rescue of the Man From Mars (Mike Smith) and subsequently spends a lot of time describing the swinging lifestyles of Smith's coterie, which includes a number of beautiful, free-spirited women and an oldish wise man who also happens to be sort of a swinger, named Jubal. Jubal guides Smith's education, which involves a lot of dissing on organized religion and a lot of learning to find women very, very attractive. Eventually, after a visit to the Fosterite Church (an early prediction of the importance of the jazzed-up mega-church phenomenon), Mike sort of gets it in his half-martian head to start his own religion. What this basically consists of is everyone walking around telling each other "You are God" (ugh) and enjoying the benefits of free love (or more accurately, free sex). He's also teaching them how to be more like Martians, in terms of clairvoyance and seeing through other peoples eyes and so forth and the Martian language. In the end, though, good-old future Americans can't handle his blasphemy and stone him to death, whereupon his followers eat his body in order to fully "grok" him (because thats what they do on Mars). Bleh.

There is some Urban Legend stuff about Charles Manson loving this book, and my parents tell me that all the druggies liked it in their high school, so apparently it was pretty brazen. But it seems like the Man from Mars was just a cheap excuse to talk about and praise sex and rock+roll in a 1961 context. And even then, it seemed insincere. It is hard to make good literature which attacks social mores at length unless it comes from a position with some willingness to actually explore the workings of those social mores. Science fiction, at least in this personal story over broader political fable story, doesn't quite seem to be the right medium. And this dwells far too long on whats wrong with the world, taking it on faith that we agree. Some critics suggest that the book is a satire of attitudes, but I guess that either I don't enjoy that and that the joke seemed too messily and obtusely executed. Also, I don't think that those druggies took it as a satire. Finally, I don't think that LOST brings with it this attitude of insincere dismissal of social mores, and doesn't really show any hint of changing them. As far as religion goes, whether it loves or hates it, LOST is gladly in debt to its stories and attitudes. And as far as sex goes, Aurora says "It's almost neck in neck with Buffy for the sex is bad theme." Even if it ends up anti-religion and pro-promiscuity, I already know that Lost did a good job exploring the cultural norms that those go against. End complaining.

There is one thing I think might be of some use--the Martians have a signifier for a level of being beyond corporal existence. These folks are called "the Old Ones", and are more or less guiding spirits who dictate Martian life. The existence of wiser, bodiless creatures who direct the planets affairs might be of some use to our conception of the Island--both the whispers and Jacob could be this sort of thing, although just how wise and controlling they are is up for debate.

There is too, the alternate way of looking at this in terms of LOST, which I like better--simply that it refers to the verse of the bible.. Exodus 2:22: And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land. Or to Oedipus at Colonus:

Patience, stranger--
  here in a strange land, poor man,
  hate with a will
  whatever the city holds in rooted hatred,
  honor what the city holds in love.

The implication of these, I guess, has something to do with the person who doesn't fit in anywhere but has to fit in somewhere to go on, a characterization which could apply to many of our Losties. Are they strangers in a strange land on the island? Will they be strangers in a strange land when and if they return to the real world? Is Richard Alpert a martian? (teehee)...Is Bai Ling an alien?! Or is it simply about Jack, who, his escapades in Asia as proof, is a little less together and has a little more trouble fitting in then he'd like to let on? His tattoo says that "he walks among us but is not one of us." Hm... I know its easy to say there's more about our characters than we're seeing, but Jack has something other than his dad and his divorce and his waning power over the Losties bothering him. And I have no idea what it is. Do you?

So, I'm reading the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy now as a break.
He presents a much more affable version of mars, and I am enjoying it. Sometime I will blog about the Space Trilogy, and also The Chronicles of Narnia, as they relate to our show. Which I think they do.

Also: Locke's dad plays Jason Segel's mean dad on Freaks and Geeks. He's so scary! Bye!

A Wrinkle in Time

2007-07-08T20:16:00.000-06:00

Nothing will ever beat the Chronicles of Narnia for me. There is my prejudice. However, I am starting to realize I must acknowledge its peers and competitors: this and the Dark Compass books, and later, perhaps, The Lord of the Rings, and maybe, when I am 50 or so, Harry Potter. Sawyer reads Madeleine L'Engle's story in 1x19: Deus Ex Machina, in his sexy Frankenglasses. That's right, I'm putting a picture of them up. Here.

A Wrinkle In Time is a pretty short, and very tightly written--alot of fantastic things happen without too much fanfare. We're set up with a sort of grumpy, but intelligent, teenage girl named Meg and her weird little family. In particular, her much-younger brother Charles Wallace seems to possess some extra-ordinary connections. Her mother and long-absent father are scientists. The book starts out with a bit of ambiguity about their work, but that is only so that the rest of the plot is all the more interesting. There are three witchy types( Mrs Who, Whatsit and, Which) who end up transporting our heroine, her brother, and a boy from her school to far-off planets, to save Meg and Charles Wallace's father who is trapped on a planet called Camazotz. This planet is consumed by"the dark thing" which also threatens to consume Earth, so our heroes get a chance to see what they must, in later books, save the earth from.

But how do they get around, you ask? Well, this is probably the most obvious Lost-esque element of the story. We found out gradually that Meg's parents have been working on the concept of "tesseracts", which are more or less the titular wrinkles in time of the story. By folding time, people and non-terrestial beings can travel very great distances very quickly, to other planets, especially. Yes, LOST's time-space continuum movement methods are blurry at present, but if they're as simple as this, then I say hooray.

One of my favorite fantastic conceits from the book is the planet of Camazotz. It was the classic industrial-type distopia: everyone does everything in unison--children bounce balls in perfect time, mothers call them in all at once, anyone who shows the slightest sign of weakness, like a common cold, is quietly exterminated, and creativity and self-expression are non-existent. I couldn't help but think of my favorite film, Brazil. Ok, that envisions a world where everything is supposed to be regimented but is in reality a huge mess...but well, I just like that thread that something that seems so ordered can be so deeply messed-up. So is this what the Island is protecting the world from? Is the black smoke anything at all like the black thing that looms over Camazotz? The Smoke Monster seems to have good reason for attacking the people it attacks on-island, but maybe it has bigger consequences.

Another important point brought up in the book is psychic communication. The evil ruler of Camazotz, "IT", speaks directly into the brains of our heroes, and eventually takes control of Charles Wallace. While plotting how best to save him, Meg, Calvin, and her father end up on a planet where eyeless, tentacled, fuzzy monsters engage in some less sinister mind-to-mind communication. While again (surprise!) we don't have hard evidence of psychic communication on the island, psychic powers do seem to be a strong theme, and communication could well be one of them.. could mind control be?

Finally, there's the cultural and intellectual milieu that this book is set in. One of the witchy types talks only in philosophical and artistic quotes, usually in different languages. One of the great evils of Camazotz is its lack of concern for art and beauty. The black thing threatens to sap the world of these things. Although I think that the conscious cultural reference thing is a parallel with LOST, I maybe resented them in a book intended for kids...I think LOST does it better. The one place where I didn't mind it, was in a quote from the Bible in the final chapter of the book...

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, bretheren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are." —1 Corinthians 1:25–28

Sigh. Thanks, Bible. Now I am not saying that I think that the Losties are particularly foolish, but I think in a lot of cases they have shown themselves to be less than mighty. And thats a good thing: they might have the world to save from the hands of the mighty, after all.

Finally, this book ties science and magic and religious faith together, without any of them seeming particularly false or contradictory to one another. I think LOST does that too, with equal or exceeding panache, and it is pretty rare these days, so I really value it. Anyways. I think its definitely worth a read, if only because its not very hard and has a few really elegant images of other worlds. Yep. That's that.

I'm currently working on Stranger in a Strange Land. Here's a preview: I think its insidious. We will find out if that is the right word. I'm also trying to read Out of The Silent Planet. They are confusing themselves in my mind. Oh space travel. Adios.

Rainbow Six or Showing My Pinko Colors, for reals.

2007-07-05T13:02:00.000-06:00

I think I confused Tom Clancy with John Grisham, and eagerly picked up this book.
Unfortunately, I am not a White, conservative, deeply heterosexual 35-65 year old man interested in paramilitary secret service members of a similar demographic, their guns, their nemeses, and the innocent women and children that they endeavor to save. And I did not completely admit to the error of my ways until I was about 400 pages into a 700 page book. Oh good Lord. Now don't get me wrong, I like morality plays, and I like stories about the world in peril, and I am not really against maintaining social norms, but Rainbow Six rubbed me the wrong way. We'll discuss.
Rainbow Six was seen on the Swan Hatch bookshelf in 2x03-Orientation.
Lostpedia points out that R6 was published in 1998 so could have come in a supply drop.

Rainbow Six chronicles the founding and early missions of an international counterterrorist organization. Conveniently, our heroes are pure-blooded Americans--ok, one of them is Hispanic- with stalwart values. There's an exciting encounter with plane hijackers in the first chapter, but after that the terrorist incidents they deal with seem predictable and relatively small-- a bank holdup, Marxist idealists holding up some rich dudes Castle, Basques or a close approximation thereof holding hostage sick children at pseudo-Euro-Disney, and finally (horror of horrors!) the provisional IRA taking our heroes wives, one of them pregnant no less, hostage at the hospital they work at. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the good guys always win with maybe one casualty on their side, and plenty of pontificating on the nature of their Very Important Work. Perhaps the best part of this plot line is how quaintly "terrorism" was defined less than a decade ago, and how exciting the start of the internet age is--some time is taken to explain the wonder of "e-mail" and other computer technologies. Aw.

The other plot, which is interwoven with the counterterrorist one, is a bit more interesting and relevant to our show. Some folks, whose identity eventually becomes clear as a major drug company, abduct some homeless dudes and then some young career women and start testing some deadly virus on them. It is sinister and shrouded in mystery, and sort of fun to read. As it turns out, the culprits are planning to release a virus at the Australia(!) Olympics which would eventually wipe out most of the world's human population. It's sort of ingenius, but their motives, again, are sort of cheesy: They want nature to be returned to healthier balance...some of the members of the organization are even...*gasp*..vegans.

The Rainbow group intervenes in the eleventh hour, of course, and literally saves humanity. Not that I'm not grateful, but really, I'd like to think that the implications of mass plague ( as in The Stand) are more interesting than just the threat of it. Interestingly enough, the tip-off comes from a master terrorist named Popov, who had been coordinating the terrorist incidents in the book as a sort of middleman between the world-annihilating corporation and the terrorist groups. When he realizes who he's really working for, he bolts and saves the day. Although he's a sneaky, sly, amoral Russian, a eye-roll worthy stereotype in many respects, ultimately, he knows where to draw the line. And he was probably the one thing in the book I couldn't predict from chapter to chapter.

So what does this have to do with our show? Some looming threat of bio-terrorism on the broadest scale in one form or another, certainly( there's some intimation of this in the Lost Experience, apparently). Along with that comes the balance between the natural world and the encroachment of man: I don't think LOST comes down for either over the other, but they're definitely in some conflict. Then there's the evil of big corporations (which is sort of a relief in the conclusion of this book after the parade of unpopular political separatists who I'd probably side with over whitey in some situations). What I hestitate to say this book shares with LOST is its world-view. It is so simple and black and white. LOST doesn't approach its storytelling in that way, and doesn't present morals without some nuance. That's not to say that there aren't moral extremes on the show, as in Evil Under The Sun, good and evil do exist and are real. But they can't be taken care of by secret services, at least in the conventional sense.

Here's what I think: the book was in the Swan Hatch, and Kelvin Inman was there (he was sort of a cutie). Kelvin was in Sayid's flashback as a member of the American forces in the Gulf War, and tells Desmond that he was a spy, "but left because '...men followed my orders.'" It's unclear how he came to the Island, and its debatable what his true work there was. His arrival, after the first Gulf War, would also be after the Dharma Purge, and the initiative would be defunct. So, was he a true or misguided Dharma-ite, or was he an Other in Dharma clothing? Oof. I don't know, but a military book read by a military dude on an Island whose nature (both regular and super-type) people struggle to retain control over, seems to make some sense.

So that's it. I don't want to talk about it anymore. And like that, it is out of my life. Read it, if you have tons of time or if you don't feel guilty doing some skimming. It could be a much better story in someone else's hands, since the structure of it doesn't completely stink. Or play the video games. They seem to be pretty popular. And I'll get back to reading!

Watership Down: "It's about bunnies."

2007-07-05T12:52:00.000-06:00

After much thought, and more thought, and some research, and some semi-absurd surprisingly long discussion, I am still confused about the extent of the relationship between Watership Down and our old trusty show. It's not that I don't think it has to do with LOST- I do think it relates. But just how is another matter...Lostpedia gives some basic points and the LOST Community is doing a book club which very recently put together an in-depth podcast on the bunnies. Check it out! The book first showed up in 1x08-Confidence Man, as Sawyer reads it on the beach. Boone had been reading it on the plane (aw, Boone), and Sawyer took it from his luggage. He's also seen reading it in 3x15: Left Behind. Geez, Sawyer, finish it already.
In the meantime, we've seen plenty of bunnies and bunny books and so forth: the White Rabbit episode, Ben's #8 Bunny, Of Mice+Men, and Alice In Wonderland. So, here goes.

Watership Down is the story of a group of male rabbits who leave their warren to join or form a new warren in a safer place. They're not sure when they set out. They decided to leave on the advice of Fiver, a runtish type with some unexplainable connection to the rest of the natural world. There are some inevitable and interesting hurdles: they spend some time in a spooky new-agey warren,which it turns out, is being provided for, and taken from, by a farmer who lets the warren grow but takes rabbits for food at his leisure by way of a fencing system (hello, electric fence thing). When they get out of that mess, they establish a happy warren on Watership Down, and start making friends with the surrounding wildlife, most notably helping a wounded gull named Kehaar, who in turn will help them. With what? Why with getting does and procreating of course!

The climatic conflict of the book is their infiltration of the Efrafa warren. Efrafa is run by General Woundwort, a rough sort who rules with an Iron Fist, organizing his warren in a military fashion with groups of rabbits who patrol so that no one can get in or out of the warren's lands. The warren is well-provided for and well-guarded, but sort of miserable-some does are unable to have babies (hello, baby theme!) because they are so unhappy, and the Watership Down guys are doing them a service by taking them. So they take some does, by seemingly supernatural means (at least to the Efrafran rabbits): they enlist Kehaar to attack and confuse the Efrafrans and they escape in a boat! Eventually, though, Woundwort follows them back to Watership to retrieve (and punish) his errant does. Our heroes fight him and his thugs off through sheer will and another trick--A dog released from a nearby farm. Then they settle down, a bit worse for the wear, but able to have babies and have a happy, more or less utopian (in a not creepy sense) existence.

So here's the party line, which I think is great in some ways. The Losties are Fiver's gang, they're trying to start a new, better life that is safe. There are differences of personality and of talent within the group as there are in the Downies. Fiver especially, with his intense connection to the natural world (which leads to his premonition about the doom of their previous warren) could be compared to Walt, Desmond, or my favorite candidate, Locke...(since he's most deeply connected to the island, not to the general psychic world). Other rabbits are good leaders (Hazel), good problem-solvers (Blackberry), good strong-armers (Bigwig), etc. They have to learn to work together, and they manage to succeed by making the Right Choices. I can pretty much get behind this.

The general consensus is that The Others are the Efrafans, and Ben is more or less of a Woundwort figure, ruling with an Iron Fist, somewhat militaristically, dispatching his minions at his will, telling them only as much as is necessary, punishing them harshly if they try to leave, and making some of them (like ol' Juliet) just plain miserable and eager to get the hell out. In the end, Woundwort's choice to flex his own military muscle outweighs what's really best for his people, and does him in. Will Ben's?

Ok, I think this works. Or I think it worked pretty darn well, before the events of the last few episodes of Season 3 went down. So I will propose two alternate theories. My first theory, dismissed by my blog colleague to some extent, is that the book was introduced early enough that the extent of the Other's evilness wasn't quite fleshed out. This book expertly hints at the problems of society-building that the Losties were going to encounter in a somewhat general sense (with great nods to breeding, psychic, and supernatural themes and their later importance) but maybe it doesn't predict the show arc, which may not end so simply. Which is fine with me.

My alternate theory is fairly crackpot, but I need to say it because other fans haven't, to my knowledge. I don't think that Ben is like Woundwort, and I don't think that the Others are Efrafa. For one, Ben is a Trickster, not a General..he's vicious, sure, but as of the end of Season 3, I think there's something to his pleas of being the "good guy". For another, it seems like the Others have some higher purpose, and I found Efrafa so depressing because they seemed so regimented and ordered and banal like the real world, which the Others lives don't. Furthermore, the Others more or less initiate contact, not the Losties, just as the Downies, not the Efrafans, are the infiltrators. Its really tough for me to parse out who is who.

And here's where my hypothesis gets screwy: I think if the Others can be tied to anybody, its the farm-fed warren with the inexplicable customs and self-delusion (which is what the Dharma Initiative turned out to be, in a way). The Watership Down warren ends up integrating some members of that warren, some rabbits from the nearby farm, and some of the Efrafans, who all bind together to defeat Woundwort. Just as I think the Losties are in the process of binding together with nominal Dharma-ites (Desmond), and Others like Juliet, Alex and Carl, and seeming foreigners to both groups like Danielle (who's been compared to Keehar)...against some Big Bad who is bigger, a lot bigger, as in the whole world bigger, than Ben. SO...I think its Widmore and Co. But I am pretty big on this Corporations are the Bad Guy thread of Lost. So ....There you have it. They're up against The Man.

So what about the storytelling? Glad you asked! What I loved most about Watership Down was not the society-building, but the importance of stories both as history and as religion. W.D. has interludes of El-ahrairah, legends of the trickster rabbit who all living rabbits looks up to. The book is careful to make note of the different ways these stories are told in different warrens as indicators of how they operate, and also to make clear their continued relevance to the values and actions of the Downs warren. The ending of the book is by far my favorite part. Our heroes hear their stories being told to baby rabbits, with a little exaggeration, as legends of the rabbit god...and in the very end, Hazel, the chief rabbit, old and content, hops off into the bunny afterlife without a great deal of fanfare.

Also, Richard Adams lays bare the importance of Watership Down as a social allegory and as influenced by other stories of society building, by way of quotes from philosophers, Shakespeare, Robin Hood, and so on.

At the risk of sounding way too entranced with Lost (who, me?) I think it has a similar reverence for the value of storytelling as a transmitter of values and of history, since LOST itself is very complicated storytelling with an important in-show mythology! Like Watership Down, too, it makes clear its debt to other stories and societal ideas by naming them or showing them--By featuring what Sawyer reads, it reminds us what it owes to other stories, and what maybe someday other stories will someday owe to it.

Next up: Rainbow Six (ugh) and A Wrinkle in Time (hm). Hooray!

The Moon Pool

2007-07-03T21:59:00.001-06:00

This is the book when I realized I was going to see Lost everywhere I looked. The Moon Pool itself has never been on the show, but people think that constant mentions of the moon pool -aka submarine dock- in the Looking Glass Hatch might be a reference to this classic early science fiction novel. Me, I'm not sure, but it was interesting anyway.

MP is a classic pulp science fiction adventure story from 1918 (Project Gutenberg has it). Basically, it's about this mysterious island and the people stealing monster it contains. Unlike our monster, this one is made of pure, shining moonlight. "The Dweller" or "The Shining One" steals people to feed off their emotions, and holds them captive thrall forever. The monster comes with an eerie cysteine tinkling sound, and when someones sees it their face contorts with "utter agony and utter ecstasy".

The story follows a very international little group, drawn to the island for different reasons. The main character, Doctor Walt Goodwin (spooky) is trying to find his old friend, who has been taken. He is joined by adventurous Irishman Larry, a Norwegian looking for his wife and child, and a evil Russian looking to harness the monster for his own sinister purposes.

So far it's very Lost, right? Well, I'm sorry to report that once they get to the Island, we break pretty hard with the show (at least as far as we've seen). On the island they find an ancient lost civilization, and the story gets really tangled in the technologies and politics of this world. And dwarfs and frog people. The plot is pretty standard science fiction stuff about two races, one dominant, lead by an evil priestess. The priestess and her ilk worship the shining one, the good people (including beautiful handmaiden Lakla) worship and older trinity called "The Silent Ones". Eventually there's an epic battle I'll talk about after I stop and explain some things.

There's some character alignments that are pretty eerie, although it might just be that everybody's using the same archetypes. The Irish guy, Larry, is a wisecracking, nick-naming, adventurous ne'er-do-well who's always clutching his pistol. He's the past's more innocent version of Sawyer. The Doctor is very Jack: earnest, brave, and constantly pointing out that he believes in science, not supernatural crap. Larry falls hard for native lady Lakla, and they hook up while the Doc looks on pathetically. The friend Doc is going after? His name is Throckemartin, called Throcke, and he chides the doctor for his inability to believe in higher power, or the unexplainable.

Back to the plot. It turns out that The Shining One was actually made by The Silent Ones. They're remnants of an ancient race, who believed that they had grown so wise that they could create powerful life. But this belief was prideful, and their pride infected their creation, and it became warped. It fed off negative emotions, and grew stronger. First they made sacrifices to it, but it's gotten out of control and started taking people. The evil priestess (and the evil Russian) are going to try to use the monster to take over the whole world, so its time for an epic battle between good and evil. The Shining Ones tell Larry that the only way to stop the monster is with great sacrifice. Larry and Lakla will have to throw themselves into the Shining One, and the force of their love and purity of their sacrifice will kill it. They choose to do this.

Except for no good reason, it doesn't kill them, just the monster. It dies, and its thousands of captives fall : "no longer dead-alive, now all of the blessed dead, freed from their dreadful slavery!" Yay. Larry and Lakla decide to hang around and help rebuild her society, and the Doc seems inclined to do the same, but all of a sudden the Russian (suddenly back from the presumed dead) knocks him out, and he wakes up locked out, with no way back in. Everything that was is covered by the sea. "There was no road to Larry- or to Lakla! And there, for me, the world ended." Poor lil' dude.

I have to say I see parallels. Or at least potential parallels. The show hasn't gotten close enough to the question of what the monster actually is, let alone the ancient lost civilization that the ruins have hinted at, for me to have anything but a feeling that this seems relevant. And the mix of ancient power and modern greed is very Lost. The idea of the captive dead fits for me too, depending on your interpretation of the way the whispers and visions work. It's interesting to consider the monster as a being that feeds off negative emotions and is rebuffed by positive ones, although I hope Lost could be a little subtler about it. Reading this book made me reconsider the importance of our monster, who's been lurking in the background lately. I wonder if the end of the show could include a similar final showdown with the monster, possibly including a parallel noble sacrifice.

I recommend this book if you like science fiction, especially older stuff. Anyone else is probably going to get bogged down in the middle. I think there's a lot that connects to Lost here, but I genuinely can't decide whether it's intentional, or if its just because they're both working from the same stack of sci-fi tropes and character archetypes. Either way, it's a good excuse to read some melodramatic pulp adventure, and I say take it.

Evil Under The Sun: I think TV Mysteries are better than Book Mysteries.

2007-06-27T10:33:00.000-06:00

Agatha Christie is something of a new-comer to the LOST Literary List, and I'm a new-comer to her work. Evil Under The Sun, a complicated mystery set on an island, is read by Sawyer during 3X14-Exposé and Lostpedia says, one of Christie's best. In it, Hercule Poirot must find the killer of the beautiful, vamp-y Arlena Marshall amongst the vacationers staying at the Jolly Roger which is on a secluded island. This, helpfully, narrows down the number of usual suspects to a manageable list, some of the standouts including her husband, her step-daughter, her lover, her lover's wife, a spooky, certifiably crazy minister, and a jovial man involved in the heroin trade. Well, well, well.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot because I don't particularly want to give it away and its one of those complicated mystery plots. Instead, some plot elements that I thought were pertinent: good and evil (mostly Evil), an isolated island, heroin (yay!), the practice of witchcraft, and messing with time. The best part of this messing-with-time thing is a stealthy adjustment of a wristwatch. Would that our LOST time conundrums could be explained so elegantly and simply! Alas.. So what's it got to do with LOST? Beside those basic plot elements which I won't explain further, at the very basic level of being a mystery, it reminded me of the basic operations of interpersonal mysteries on the show. As a reader of Evil, you must be conscious of everyone and trust no one. There are specious alibis and informational gaps galore. There are overlapping and equally probable motives which cause characters to act in certain ways. No real surprises here.

Also, I think that it's particularly interesting that it was in Nikki and Paolo's episode. It's sort of fluffy: they're sort of fluffy. It's sort of conventional: They're sort of conventional! They do some unfortunate and deadly rich-person blackmailing, and there's some hint of that in Evil. Also, I personally, was a little let-down by their death, after being won over by them in the course of the episode, just as I was a little saddened by finding out the identity of the killer in Evil, as I'd grown to like them. Oh well.

Here's my favorite quote from the book though, as spake by the Crazy Reverend Guy, apropos of not much: "Nowadays, no one believes in evil. It is considered, at most, a mere negation of good... but, M. Poirot, evil is real! It is a fact! I believe in Evil as I believe in Good. It exists! It is powerful! It walks the earth!" ..He is a crazy reverend guy who was in the looney bin, but I think, going out on my own religious limb, that there's something to this statement. What with the prevalence of religious motifs on Lost, and the questions of morality it likes to pose, I think it takes Evil into account as a real force. Uhm. How? Meh.

I don't think this book is terrific--It made me realize how thankful I am that there are mysteries on TV--it's just not as easy to keep track of characters and all their motives, alibis, etc. in book form. I know, it's a little harsh, and I think it makes me sound lazy. Read it if you want to... Aurora's mentioned a weirder Christie,And Then There Were None, which is also set on an Island and has stronger character parallels. Maybe, if you're looking for something weird, check that out instead. Go ahead. I very well might.

Laughter in the Dark

2007-06-25T22:17:00.000-06:00

I'll talk about other things in the post, but part of me really thinks that the whole reason they showed us Laughter in the Dark is one quote. The main character is hooking up with his new mistress for the first time. "As in his most reckless visions, everything was permissible; a puritan's love, priggish, reserved, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu."

Charlie found LitD in Sawyer's stash in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", and Hurley picked it up and started to read it. It's from the same author as Lolita, but it's less disturbing, less sexy, and just generally less good. It's a long and twisty story, but here's a basic plot. A basically happy married dude, Albinuis, becomes infatuated with a teenager, and eventually leaves his wife and daughter for her. But she's no angel, manipulating him for his money and influence. She starts hooking up with an old lover, and Albinus doesn't notice for about 50 pages. He finally figures it out, but then he almost immediately drives into a telephone pole and is blinded. So he has to rely on his mistress for everything, and he convinces himself he was mistaken. Mistress and old lover sneak around him in all these crazy mean ways, and are only stopped when Albinius's brother-in-law steps in and saves him. Or he would be saved, if he didn't decide he had to shoot mistress. Do you remember he's blind? Not surprisingly, it doesn't go well, and he ends up dead.

So there's a little bit of Lost stuff in there, with the conning, and the attempted revenge, but I think it's a bit of a stretch. There's a couple of big coincidences—old lover just happens to be a business associate of Albinus's, Albinuis turns out to have a painting that's actually a forgery that old lover made years ago—but they don't seem like Lost to me. They're handled a little too ironically. The whole book has a detached melodrama to it that's not very Lost at all. So I guess I really think it was just the polar bear quote. It's a fine book, and I enjoyed it, but I can't see as it's very relevant to our beloved show. Read Lolita instead.

Of Bunnies and Ben

2007-06-25T20:32:00.000-06:00

When I first saw season 3's "Ever Man For Himself", which features Of Mice and Men very prominently, I was confused. EMFH is the Sawyer episode where he recalls his time in prison (reading our book); Ben fakes him out about the pacemaker, and generally breaks his spirit. Sawyer makes a casual reference to the book, and Ben quotes him a long passage. At first, I couldn't figure out why they picked this book, but now that I've reread it, it makes more sense to me. I think this book is meant to connect particularly with this episode, and less with the larger show.

OMaM is a simple story about two wandering farmhands in the depression. Tough George and sweet, slow Lennie have been together for a long time. Lennie is obsessed with touch and soft things, but he doesn't understand how to be gentle. George tells Lennie again and again that someday they'll have a farm all their own, with rabbits for Lennie. They work on a farm, get a little ahead, and for a moment it seems like that dream might actually become a reality. Then this terrible woman tries to seduce Lennie. He gets his hand caught in her hair, panics, and accidentally snaps her neck. He runs away, and when everyone else on the farm finds out they set out to try and kill him. George finds him first, and, calmly telling Lennie about the farm for the last time, shoots him in the back of the head.

It's pretty brutal. Now, there's a lot in the story that has straight up nothing to do with Lost: the importance of a man working his own land, how the bossman sucks, how hard it is for a man to get ahead on an honest wage. Whatever. But there's one theme that makes sense to the show, and I think especially to this episode: the importance of "having somebody" in a mean world. Other characters, and George himself, constantly raise the question of why George puts up with all the trouble and hassle of Lennie. The answer is that a person can't travel alone, it's just no good. Here's the passage Ben quotes: "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. It don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell you, I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick."

Ben's making the point that no matter who Sawyer pretends to be, no matter how many times he tells Kate "It's every man for himself", it just isn't so. But, as OMaM shows, our inescapable bonds to other people come at a cost. Ultimately Ben doesn't break Sawyer with the pacemaker, or even the impossibility of escape. He, just like Kate and Jack, are held tight by bonds of love.

Okay, one more paragraph and I'll shut up. There's a great parallel between Ben and the character he quotes, 'Crooks'. Crooks "the Negro stable buck" is a bright but deeply lonely man, twisted literally and figuratively. A painful spinal problem twists his back to the left (which side was that tumor on?). Because he's black, he isn't allowed to bunk or assiociate with the other men, so he spends all his time in his room in the stable reading and thinking. In the scene the quote comes from, he toys with an unaware Lennie, taunting him with the idea that George will abandon him. When Lennie freaks out, Crooks apologizes, explaining his behavior with the quote. It continues "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets alone and he got nothing to tell him what's so and what ain't so....He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here…" It's interesting to consider Ben as a man warped, maybe to the point of losing touch with reality, by isolation.

Recent Discoveries

2007-06-22T09:51:00.000-06:00

Yo dudes,
As webmaster par excellence (teehee), I am always thinking about the blog. Out of love.
And Lost, out of what I'm coming to realize is a debilitating obsession. Eh? To that end, I just started my mom and sister on the show.

For the blog's sake, I did a little serious google searching and found other sites dedicated to Lost Books. Here's the best one I've found, someone who is doing basically the same thing: Coyote Mercury! Way to go guy, I think you are awesome, and will try not to crib from you.
A different approach is going down at the the Lost Community Book Club, where readers are invited to read and discuss one book a month, this months is Watership Down.
Consequently, I'll be taking Watership Down and Evil Under the Sun on my trip this weekend.

But here's the real reason I'm posting, lets be honest. Aurora showed me a fan video yesterday, and it is just too good. So Ladies and Dudes, here it is: Sawyer/Gaston!

The Third Policeman: DeSelby, Desmond, and the Living Dead

2007-06-18T07:53:00.000-06:00

Weird books merit weird entries.
This book is actually summarized pretty well on Lostpedia, and also on Wikipedia..at least as well as you can explain a Flann O'Brien book. I don't even know where to start on this one. Thinking about it is terrifying me. The book is seen on Desmond's shelf in 2x01 and he grabs it as he leaves for his exile in 2x03: Orientation.

The Third Policeman starts out like a regular old book. Our beloved narrator tells us of his sad childhood and his current situation, running a pub with a friend named Divney. Divney decides they need to kill a man named Mathers and steal his black box full of money. They do kill him, gruesomely, with shovels, our narrator (somewhat unwillingly) giving the final blows. Divney refuses to give him any of the money, instead hiding it, only telling him where it is after a year has passed. The box is hidden in the floorboards of the murdered man's home. As our narrator goes into the house to get it, the book moves into its second movement: the one where nothing makes sense and there is no real plot.

It's basically one long hallucination. Our guy finds himself in the house, unable to get the box, but in the company of two policeman whom, he eventually realizes, know that he killed Mathers, and are preparing to hang him. In the meantime though, he walks around his town, I guess, and describes ill-defined buildings which he is stuck in, has arguments with them about the nature of bicycles, and goes to sleep a few times. Ugh. And did I mention the extensive footnotes (written by the narrator) on the non-existent philosopher DeSelby which hoard page space in otherwise reasonably long chapters? It's fun at the exact moment that you are reading, but once you close the book, you have no idea what you just read and no idea what you'll be coming back to when you start reading again. It's pretty futile for much of the book, and all you need to know is that something went terribly wrong when he went into the house.

The LOST connections are pretty well outlined, the most interesting of them being a map on the ceiling of the police barracks which shows a map of the town... one policeman avers that "I did not [make it] and nobody else manufactured it either. It was always there and MacCruiskeen is certain that it was there even before that." The policeman also says that it shows the way to eternity. Does that bode well or ill for the Hatch map?

So they go to "eternity" by way of some sort of elevator. In Eternity, no-one ever need shave since their hair never grows (hmm...Jack?). Also, they come upon a cabinet/machine that produces objects which "lacked an essential property of all known objects"--it reminds me of the smoke monster...there is a certain unexplainable, or as Charlie points out in 1X02 "a certain gargantuan quality" about it.

The Third Policeman also contains a suspicious story about an incident with a hot-air balloonist: when his balloon was pulled back to earth, he was nowhere to be found--but when the balloon was sent back up without him 2 weeks later and then brought back to earth, he was in it "without a feather out of him." What? I don't get it either.

Finally, there's the issue of the titular of the Third Policeman. HM! He apparently never comes into the police station, and no one sees him, and he's busy all the time...He's sort of Jacob character, hazy but important. So whats up? Wait for it...when the narrator finally meets the third policeman, he seems to be Mathers, the man he killed! It turns out that the narrator's been dead this whole time, and he's in a sort of hallucinogenic hell! The book ends with the narrator finally tracking down Divney, in a classic ghost story moment where he doesn't realize that he's the ghost. It's been 16 years, and Divney has a wife and kids, but the sight of our narrator gives him a heart attack and kills him. The end of the book starts the whole cycle over again, with Divney going through the same things alongside the narrator, and no one the wiser, including US, the readers.

So wow. What does this really have to do with our beloved show?
Well, first of all, it seems to give some (more) credence to the Purgatory theory, which, I know, I know, has been debunked, but nevertheless continues to serve as a guiding force for the way the show toddles along, passing judgment on its characters through the smoke monster. The blurry line between the living and the dead, and the punishment meted out to the narrator by his victim (like the visions of Eko's Brother or Ben's mother) also seem quite Lost-like.

Less positively, the inclusion of this book also suggests to me something about the dead ends, and things that just don't make sense on LOST..they might very well not get explained. To some extent, as with The Third Policeman, analysis is futile. I'd like to think that just some of our analysis is futile. To spin that another way, I think this could be some sort of indication of Desmond's psyche more than anyone else's--the inhabitant of the Hatch and "flash" sufferer that he is. I'm going to go out on a pretty shaky limb here and say that he isn't experiencing reality in quite the same way as everyone else, having more than the just the flashes to worry about... I don't think we need to doubt everything we're seeing on the island, but we may need to be more skeptical of some characters' perception of it. UM. yep.

As crazy as this book is, it hasn't stopped people from reading it. In fact, after being featured on LOST, it was bought by so many fans that an extra print run was warranted.
That's awesome. I just wonder what all those Lost Fans thought after they read it.

In other news, Desmond's one fine-looking crazy guy.

Lancelot.

2007-06-18T07:34:00.000-06:00

I think I am getting suckered by this whole quest to read all the books from LOST, because, well, I've enjoyed every book so far (with the exception of Rainbow 6, in progress)... Lancelot ,by Walker Percy, in particular. Sawyer is seen perusing this book in 2X15 Maternity Leave. I'm still puzzling over it being in this particular episode.

Lancelot has some superficial connections to Lost. So here's the plot, where the superificial connections are. There's a guy in the looney bin (like Hurley) named Lancelot, who was once a sort of twisted sort of Southern gentleman (like Sawyer) and at the same time an emasculated overly-educated middle-aged loser who loves his Bowie knife above all (oh, Locke, I love you). The book revolves around his discovery that his wife was cheating on him and had a child with another man (Sun+Jin-esque), a fact he didn't figure out until his daughter was about 6. When he figures it out, he plots revenge on the culprit, which ultimately results in the explosion of his home. He narrates the story to a friend of his from his youth who in the intervening years became a doctor and then a priest (Jack/Eko?...I'm pushing it). He talks about how he's (creepily) into the girl in the room next to his in the asylum (Libby-like)...

There are also an important Kate connections, I think...
Sawyer's Kate predicament echoes Lancelot's, since Lancelot's wife is at once his and not his. Lancelot notes a couple of things in particular: that he could "gauge her sexual desire by her freckles," and spookily that his "jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time
loses its structure. Time stretches out."...it's also worth noting that Kate blew up her father, sort of the reverse of Lancelot..although Lancelot manages to get his daughter out of the house first. I'm not sure what to do with that.

Then there's the way the house getting blown up occurs. Lancelot goes to punish Jacoby, who is sleeping with his wife. He ends up cutting his throat in the glow of a kerosene light in the middle of a hurricane. The whole scene seemed sort of eerie in a Man Behind the Curtain sort of way.
After Jacoby is dead and Lancelot's wife is pleading with him, he relights the lamp which somehow blew out. This spark ignites a methane leak which destroys the house and blows him out of it, "wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight." Could another shadowy exchange with LOST's Jacob end this way? Um, I hope not.

There are broader literary connections too--The narrative style is retrospective, flashing back to the main events of the story. The narrator is constantly concerned with the past, present and future, especially when it comes to morality and restoring it: "I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are a part of this age." Finally, and I don't think I'm pushing here, he's effectively trapped in a Purgatory of his own making, mixing delusion with the truth and morality with perversity at every turn. In particular, the final pages of the book turn into a cryptic dialogue with what may be the listening friend (who is hazily defined) or may simply be his own troubled conscience (a device also used in The Third Policeman)...he states that he's getting out of the asylum but the final feeling is one of extreme, inescapable claustrophobia: he's never really getting out.

My strongest feeling about this book didn't have much to do with Lost, however. Lancelot, when all was said and done, seemed not unlike Humbert Humbert of Lolita (whose progenitor, Laughter in the Dark, is on our reading list)--He's a major creep who forces you to be in his head alone. Lancelot says pretty crude things about the people around him, particularly women and black people, while at the same time insulting the morality of others, and assuming that people think he's enlightened (he's a sometimes-civil-rights-lawyer and a historic home repairer)...when he knows, and we know, that he's not. He reflects nostalgically many times on his first wife (who sounds like H.H.'s childhood sweetheart Annabel) and his final confrontation is with a portly naked man (like Quilty in Lolita)...is there a Humbert Humbert in the LOST world?

If I had to add it up, I'd say this book was Lolita+Kurt Vonnegut+Lost.
As with most of these books, I don't think it has a ton to say about the big questions themselves, but it does say well that personal morality is a tricky thing...the choices we make and the way we execute them are often quite hard to understand outside of our little heads. Also, to crib from Aurora's words, I'm realizing that LOST uses a lot of standard literary tropes, which is why we are seeing so many connections--and that's a good thing. Its skill is really in the way it weaves them together. Good Job, LOST.

P.S. Check out near the end of Chapter 5 starting with "Lock, I need a favor..". I think it describes Locke pretty darn well. adios.

Coming up: The 3rd Policeman, addenda to TOTS and Of Mice and Men...

Carrie.

2007-06-12T22:09:00.000-06:00

Dang, Carrie.
Stephen King's first book makes its first appearance in Episode 3x01 "Tale of Two Cities". The Other's book club is meeting to discuss it at Juliet's pad, and their bickering is interrupted by the cacophonous arrival of Oceanic Flight 815. It also appears in Juliet's flashback in 3x07 "Not in Portland" and is read by Ben in 3x16 "One of Us."

Here's the exciting news I have to report: Carrie the book is better than Carrie the movie, and probably applies a little better to LOST. The book and the film cover almost exactly the same material: the terrifying terrain of high school, hyper-Christian home-life, and telekinesis. However, the book gets inside of multiple characters heads by interspersing real-time narrative with fictional news articles and book excerpts which discuss the origins of Carrie's telekinesis and the impact of her prom blow-up.

Carrie, a misfit, gets her first period in locker room showers and other girls make merciless fun of her. The girls who made fun of her get in trouble. One of the teasers gets barred from the prom, and plots revenge. Another feels bad, and gets her boyfriend to take Carrie to prom. Carrie's mom is a crazy Christian who is obsessed with battling evil, especially in the form of sexuality, and is thus furious about Carrie's period, prom plans, and basically anything else she does. Oh yeah, and Carrie realizes somewhere in here that she can move stuff with her mind.

Bucking her mother's demands with teenage will and telekinetic force, Carrie goes to the Prom. Once there, she gets crowned Queen, gets pigs blood dumped on her head, gets laughed at and loses it, starting an electrical fire which more or less kills every prom-goers. She then goes home, starting some fires in the town along the way, and stops her mothers heart with her mind, but not before her mother stabs her, causing her to slowly bleed to death. Oof. Heavy stuff. Gorey. And tons of fun--Carrie lays it on thick with teenage angst, questions of good and evil, supernatural occurences, and some serious, but not senseless violence.

With the exception of teenage angst, all of these sound pretty darn Lostean. And we know that Stephen King is an unapologetic Lost fan whose also had some pretty serious influence on the show. The Carrie connections are less grandiose than The Stand's end-times battle or the multiple realities of The Dark Tower. What it comes down to, for me, is the "special child" thread which Stephen King and LOST both embrace. Walt's possible special powers come to mind, especially his apparent ability to appear in more than one place at a time.

But since she's a major player in the three episodes where we see the book, Juliet seems like a stronger candidate for a Carrie connection. Stephen King depicts Carrie as a social misfit both by nature and by situation, and lets us sympathize with those who have cast her out at times ...though the book follows Carrie, we never really get inside her head. We know that her actions aren't all bad (she's getting some rightful revenge) or all good (she's hurting tons of innocent people). This seems to me much like the way we can't be certain of Juliet's motives, and feel ambivalent about them even when she seems to explain them...or does she? Furthermore, Carrie focuses a ton on the danger of female sexuality--Juliet's life's work involves fertility, an important part of that sexual equation. Plus, yo, Juliet's kind of creepy, pretty unhappy, and one time she willed that her ex-husband get hit by bus, and lo and behold, he did. She's proved that she could be a powder-keg, in a manner of speaking, if the circumstances were right.

That said I think there could also be some special child stuff going on with Hurley, Ben, or even Alex. Alex, especially, since I saw her recently on an episode of That's So Raven as a telekinetic kid. Eerie.

But I digress. In addition to the "special child" theme, I can see the Terrible Parent (a mother instead of a father this time around), extremes of good and evil and the space between them that the most people occupy, and the news reports, interviews, and book excerpts which effectively let the reader flash back and forward, as pretty Lost-like.

So that's it. I don't (at this point) think that this book is going to be any real key to the show, but its got character, thematic, and literary style connections, plus its fun. I like to say that what little Stephen King I have read is sort of like a bag of potato chips--you can devour it all at once, and you feel a little gross afterwards, but it sure was tasty while you were eating it. And that while you were reading it, at least, it made you feel like you were smart for understanding the dilemmas at hand. Not unlike Lost, in some respects.

p.s. Emilie de Ravin was in a 2002 TV remake of Carrie, as the girl who plans the pigs blood stunt...hmm... bad sign for her?

The Turn of the Screw

2007-06-11T21:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, here we go.

LOST stuck this book in one of the most prominent spots on the show, no freeze-framing or squinting necessary to catch it. In episode 2x03, "Orientation", Desmond tells Jack and Locke to watch the titular film, hidden behind a copy of TotS. So is this book our training video?

Man, I hope not. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed TotS. But it's designed to be a frustrating experience, a ghost story with lots of questions and no clear answers. Just like the orientation film, TotS is both mesmerizing and frustrating, important details missing, enigmatic phrases suggesting layers you'll never see.

The basic story is pretty simple *Heavy spoilers for the book ahead, so proceed with caution*: a young governess is put in charge of two seemingly angelic children, Miles and Flora, at a country estate. She begins to be haunted by two ghostly figures, and becomes increasingly convinced these ghosts are trying to steal, possess, or kill the children. The governess finds out that the ghosts she sees look like two dead former servants who used to spend a lot of time with the kids but died under mysterious circumstances. The children, in turn, act increasingly bizarre, sneaking away, lying, and being generally creepy.

After she finds Flora wandering outside alone, she sends her away and attempts to confront Miles. In this final confrontation, she tries to get him to explain what's going on and own up to some past misdeeds, and he starts to do so. In the midst of all this, she sees the ghosts again, and pulls poor terrified Lil' Miles close to her. The governess thinks she is finally beating this thing, but Miles jerks suddenly, and falls into her arms, dead. The End.

Phew. Those summary paragraphs were incredibly hard to write, mostly because I've left out one important detail. Through all of the story, no one but the narrator ever definitely sees the ghosts, and we have no idea whether all this is in her increasingly unstable head. Apparently scholars have argued viciously about whether you can trust this unreliable narrator ever since the book was published, with no consensus yet.

The ghosts are pretty Lost-ey, and not just because they refer to them as "The Others". The governess begins to suspect that the apparitions are trying to lead the children to their doom, like happened to Shannon with Walt, or might have happened to little Ben with his Mom. The governess speculates about why a ghost might want to take the children "She suffers the torments...of the lost. Of the dammed. And that's why, to share them...she wants Flora." Yick.

The creepy little boy in the story reminds me pretty hard of Ben. He's constantly lying, and saying shit like "I'll tell you everything, I will. But not now." It's never clear in the story whether he believes in any of it, or how much he's been corrupted by the evil that surrounds him. Is he a conniving demon or a just a gullible, lonely boy? Search me, man.

I totally recommend it, both for pleasure reading and for Lost purposes. For one thing, it's a classic with a tough reputation, so that will make you feel smart. But its not really that hard, and only 100 pages, it's a quick read. As far as Lost goes, I don't think you're going to find a book that says more about the way the producers are building their mystery (sorry, anyone who has Sarah Mclachlan stuck in their head now). I just hope Lost doesn't end in a way that leaves scholars arguing about it for a hundred years.

This is how it will work.

2007-06-11T17:22:00.000-06:00

Alright.
Here's the deal. We are best pals and roommates (thus the blog title). We are Lost Fans. We have hour long discussions about it, have a door devoted to pictures from it, and do the jigsaw puzzles. Not surprisingly, distraught by the hiatus from its very first day, we sought something to fill that void in our lives. Some might have taken a walk, volunteered with children, or learned how to cook. We, however, decided to fill our TV void with books.

As any good fan knows, Lost has lots of literary references, obvious, implied, and in episode titles. A lot of these books are classics or just plain good stuff that I am embarrassed not to have read yet, so it seemed like a great opportunity. Stuff like Watership Down, The Turn of the Screw, Catch 22--It is a worthy challenge!

So here's the rules: We're going to read each of the books. I'll read some, and Aurora will read some, and we'll both read important ones. We'll weigh in, give a summary of the book, talk about interesting plot threads, how we think it relates to Lost in general or to specific characters or episodes. We'll talk a little about cultural ties and criticism of the book outside of LOST. Finally, we'll give our opinion of the book on its own and its potential relevance to the show. But um, probably we will spoil books a little, and we'll be talking about LOST through the end of Season 3, so don't get spoiled, OK?

Lostpedia's list serves as our guide to what we will read, DarkUFOs list works too. J. Wood's blog is probably a little (a lot) smarter than ours will be, but we will probably be indebted to it sometimes, and its cool. We don't plan to read any of Lost's philosopher references, and it will probably be awhile before we get around to The Fountainhead, but we'll read some comic books, maybe talk about related TV and films a teeny bit, and about books that we see connections to which haven't been mentioned on the show.

We will also let you know if we see Locke's face in a peanut butter sandwich. Here's hoping.

Coming Soon: posts about The Turn of the Screw, Carrie, The Moon Pool, Of Mice and Men, Lancelot, and um.. Rainbow 6.

In the mean time, please enjoy this Sawyer montage.
Adios.

Orientation Pt. 2

2007-06-09T11:15:00.000-06:00

Hi Internet. How are you today?

Favorite Book: The Watchmen, Matilda.
Favorite Lost Character: Hurley. Sayid is a badass, and I love Sawyer, but make fun of Hurley and I will cut you.
Other TV Shows I Enjoy: The Office, Buffy, Veronica Mars, Jeeves and Wooster.
One Thing I Think Would Make Lost Better: Swordfights.
One Thing I Would be pretty mad if Lost did/stopped doing: Was completely and utterly explainable by science.
Favorite Pizza Toppings: Banana Peppers, Olives.
5 Reasons I Watch Lost:
1) The WTF.
2) Thinking about it, trying to be a detective, learning all kinds of weird interesting shit.
3) The characters.
4) Its lack of cynicism and willingness to take on themes like redemption and faith. I can't think of another show that even talks about this stuff.
5) It's funny. Remember that time Jin told a ghost story?

Orientation Pt.1

2007-06-08T19:55:00.000-06:00

Hi.
Ok, so we're going to read books that are featured on LOST, and we thought it might be appropriate to make clear our deep devotion to the show before we get started.
We've already started reading, but we're still working on our format, which we will let you know about soon. In the meantime...

We have introductions to attend to! So. Here are some self-posed questions about Lost and other cultural subjects. And here are my answers:

Favorite Book: Peter Pan!
Favorite Lost Character: Locke (duh). Sawyer OR Hurley second.
Other TV Shows I Enjoy: The Office, Veronica Mars, Boy Meets World, 21 Jump Street.
One Thing I Think Would Make Lost Better: Another strong (not romantically entangled) female.... Ana-Lucia.
One Thing I Would be pretty mad if Lost did/stopped doing: Had it be all in someone's mind. Sorry, Dave, you were a great episode, but you would have been a let down.
Favorite Pizza Toppings: Anchovies and Green Olives
5 Reasons I Watch Lost:
1) Really Good Storytelling
2) Christian Undertones
3) Roughing It.
4) Really smart literary and cultural references
5) Hotties. Or good actors, either way.

And that is all I can think of. I'm sure many more of my feelings on our beloved program will soon come to light. Now dharma whateversenstein will introduce herself.
Good luck, dweeb.

LOST

2007-06-07T17:49:00.001-06:00

LOST