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...

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On Our Mutual Friend and Not Paying Attention

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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Things We Should Be Reading

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.

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Confirmed Dead?

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.

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

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.

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