After a couple of technical snags, my Powells.com blog post for the latest Lost episode is up, Lost Exposed. I had a couple extra meetings on Thursday and couldn't get to writing until later in the afternoon, and since I included a image of some graphed narrative connections in this one, an extra page had to be added. It meant a day late, but hopefully, it's not missing too much. The people at Powell's Books have been great with this stuff, can't thank them enough.
Bill Keveney of USA Today interviewed me recently about the use of philosophers in Lost. His story just ran with me and a philosopher from La Salle University, David Thomer, cited for "expert comment". It's a nice sum-up of the many philosophical names that appear in the narrative and the use to which they've been put.
*Note: They used my full first name, Joley, which I almost never go by because it's a family last name, I'm a dude, and it's just confusing.
The secret of how Locke ended up in the chair is out, and so is my Powell's Books blog post about it, Locke's Unlucky Episode. Powell's posted my piece yesterday, and it's generated a hell of a lot of traffic and response -- it was an intense episode that brought many narrative threads together, and Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson turned in maybe their performances of the year. It's a noteworthy episode.
The blog post all about the episode Par Avion, and eyes and lies and Ayn Rand and Mikhail Bakunin, is up here: Lost Shrugged. If you like your metaphysics in a market mode, if you like a little mental self-torture, and if you really really like yourself, this may be the post for you. My publisher said it melted his two brain cells into seizure. He meant that in the good way.
But last night's episode had plenty to offer; they're slowly building up a kind of social experiment on the island, the Others have already done that, and we're part of this experiment.
I've been meaning to get this post up before the day of the next episode, but the mountains of work have fallen on my head -- on Spring Break, no, less. Gach.
But Enter 77 was one of the more intriguing episodes of this season, what with the Russian soldier and the revived mysteries of the Others and now this purge business. And the whole subtexts of torture, forgiveness, and political anarchy (in the namesake of Mikhail Bakunin, and the sub-subtext of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia and that work's subtext -- a sub-sub-subtext of the episode -- Thomas More's Utopia).
The next Powell's Books blog post is up for Tricia Tanaka is Dead. It actually went up a few days ago (every Thursday they go up), and has a good discussion going. But for some reason I couldn't post this message. And now I finally find out that Vox will let me compose a message in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox nor on Konqueror in Linux... this is vexing. I really don't want to use IE for anything, let alone just posting these blog messages.
EDIT: The Firefox problem was an issue with the Adblock Filterset.G problem. Need to go to Tools - Filterset.G Updater - and force an update. That took care of the problem, and I'm happily posting in Firefox again.
