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

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...