Actual logorrhea

We got the upstairs carpet shampooed and scotch-guarded recently, so for the past few days there have been little squares and rectangles of paper leading up to my room for me to step on so that whatever’s on the bottoms of my feet doesn’t dirty up the drying fabric. It’s kind of cool, since I like to pretend that I’m in a video game hopping from platform to platform as I go in and out of my room. I think I played the same kind of make-believe several years ago when climbing around the ruins of Machu Picchu, only then there was an actual possibility of serious injury. Game Over.

I wouldn’t say that I was ‘depressed’ or ’suicidal’ last year, but…

Hmm…

‘Lost’ going off the rails

Although I’m still fan of the show Lost, I’ve been a bit upset at the pacing lately. That and the glut of unnecessary peripeties that’s been shoving the plot swiftly into soap opera territory over the past season and a half. Damn networks ruining another show by trying to stretch it out!

Or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it, and I think I’ve got a fair bit of back-up in the voice of Borges. The following point about the requirements of the adventure genre, as opposed to the psychological or realist genres, is from his introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ “La Invención de Morel”, which novel apparently made a cameo appearance in a recent episode:

“La novela de aventuras, en cambio, se propone como una transcripción de la realidad: es un objeto artificial que no sufre ninguna parte injustificada. El temor de incurrir en la mera variedad sucesiva del Asno de Oro, de los siete viajes de Simbad o del Quijote, le impone un riguroso argumento.”

I recall saying several times within the first couple seasons that two of the main reasons I enjoyed Lost were A) that you knew pretty much every detail was going to be important and would eventually be explained in some reasonable manner with reference to accepted “rules” of the “normal” world, and B) it was accordingly character-driven.

My rationale for part A veers a bit off topic into why I don’t consider the show to be proper Science Fiction, time travel and all notwithstanding, so I’m not going to go into that. As for part B, the character psychology in the show functions more in line with Borges’ description of an adventure novel as opposed to a psychological novel. We’re not terribly interested in who the inhabitants of the island are except insofar as it moves us along in the set narrative, since that’s the point of the show. I have a hunch that this is part of why people seem to find Kate’s backstory so flat. It’s not that it’s not an interesting story in and of itself, but rather that it doesn’t [yet] seem to have a bearing on the greater story that’s proportional to the detail we’ve been given. We don’t really want to know Kate’s psychology in depth, or Jack’s or Sawyer’s and the details of that love triangle, since any attempt at making the audience reflect upon the implicit psychological realities of those individuals pulls those characters out of the overarching narrative matrix and jars the fundamental suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the show as a good adventure. In other words, when we start to think of a few characters as more psychologically “real” than others, that undermines the deterministic basis for a good adventure story, in which all the cogs are supposed to fit together and run smoothly. Moreover, the fact that we’re pretty well aware by this point that we’re watching an artificial “adventure” and not a “psychological romance” totally flattens out any in-depth treatment of any character’s emotions. While we’re willing to tolerate occasional specimens of romantic flatness from an adventure since we know that it has a greater purpose in moving the plot and that we’re not supposed to dwell on it, the more an adventure forces us to endure relatively isolated plot turns, romantic or otherwise, the more the adventure slides into the hack territory of soap opera.

Look, but don’t touch…

While reading this article on bordom (thanks to Works and Days!), my eyes wandered over to the sidebar leading to further pieces on the site.  Much to my bemusement, the advertisement had stacked the story “Eliot Spitzer not alone in high profile apologies” right on top of the story “Images from the Patriots’ cheerleader tryouts”.  Interesting…

Morning notes

I’m rather amused at one reaction to the recent bout of sub-zero wind chill we’ve been having here in the Chicago area. All the brow-furrowing and idle chattering about global warming–which used to be a by-word back in October, when it was so hot that people running the marathon were dropping like flies–has suddenly ceased. Of course, that’s not to say anything at all one way or the other about the scientific underpinnings of the issue…but given the nearly hysterical attention received by one side (sometimes at the expense of dispassionate accuracy), it’s slightly schadenfreude-licious to see all the shivering.

In other news, my gym has recently posted amicably clever exercise-related messages in various places, one of which on the fronts of two sequential stairs reads something like:

Before the Stairmaster

There were Stairs.

See? That’s mildly witty and enough to get you started along a decent mood curve for physical activity. But as I was pedaling away at the recumbent bike, it occurred to me: What if instead of that, it read:

Before the Stairmaster

There was the Master…

Impressionable

This article reproduces the following quote from Seventeen magazine [emphasis mine]:

“Sex is so confusing. On the one hand, you’re being told not to do it (by parents and teachers) — that it’s ‘wrong,’ that there’s no way you’re ready, or that it could lead to diseases. On the other hand, you see (in real life, in movies, and on TV) that sex is a natural, healthy, and fun part of loving relationships. You also have information about birth control coming at you from every direction: friends, TV commercials, maybe sex-ed class. You think you know how to protect yourself, but it seems like such a hassle when all you want to do is focus on those totally romantic, wonderfully tingly feelings you have about your guy!”

Um…prescinding entirely from the question of adolescent sexuality, is anyone else bothered by the fact that movies and tv shows popular with the high school female demographic are asserted as accurate representations of the content and consequences of “real life” in explicit contrast to the advice of parents and teachers?

Harry Caray

This is wonderful.

Far better than I could have done

This is precisely why I’ve been banging on and on for years now about things like The Daily Show and why the “It’s only a joke”/”Free speech” argument isn’t quite as airtight as most people I’ve talked to about it seem to want it to be.

Less is more

 Having been a bit under the weather and blowing my nose raw lately, I was wondering just what the petroleum jelly I’ve been been putting on my nose was and where it came from.   So Wikipedia satisfied that curiousity…

…but down among the other uses for the product is listed “personal lubricant”…Ewww!

You know, it’s funny how these supposedly more tactful sexual circumlocutions in fact have a way of ratcheting up the smarm factor by a couple powers of 10.

A Sermon I want to remember

This is just to jot down in order to remember, the basic idea of an intriguing sermon given by Rev. Jeremy Caddick at Emmanuel College chapel last year.  I can’t at the moment recall the reading, but the gist of it was familial.  Rev. Caddick began by noting that we commonly draw a distinction between our relationships with our family members on one hand, and with our friends on the other, the underlying rationale being that while we are given the former, we choose the latter.

He went on to point out, however, that in spite of the fact that we may freely associate with one person or another in our individual lives, the church we have is the church we are given, at least in terms of personal composition.

I think there’s a lot there to ponder.