Last night’s episode of House reminded me of the French movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was inspired by a French editor who suffered a catastrophic brain episode and ended up completely paralyzed except for one eyelid. His mind was unaffected, so he was effectively trapped inside his body. That movie started out, like last night’s House, told completely from his perspective. Eventually that pov proves unsustainable and the directors in both cases were forced to broaden their perspectives. In the case of the French editor, he learned to communicate by blinking when someone read a list of letters to him in order of frequency of use. In that tedious fashion, he went on to write a book. An ambitious undertaking, that.
24 has reached that point in the season where it seems to be turning in a completely different direction. Having dispatched with General Juma and all of his threats, there’s now a new bad guy (who was behind the scenes the whole time only we didn’t know it) and a new set of crises that seem unrelated to everything that’s gone on so far. It always feels like an awkward transition. And we know Keifer Sutherland’s character won’t die from his infection because he’s announced that he will re-up for a new season.
A few episodes in and Castle can still put a grin on my face. I’m liking officer Kate Beckett more and more all the time. She manages to find new and credible ways of expressing her exasperation with Castle. She can do a lot with her eyes and the way she sighs, and it always seems genuine, not sit-com-ish.
I finally tore myself away from my Dead Reckonings reviews and sent them off to the editors this morning. I tend to revise reviews pretty much the same way I revise short stories. I get to this point where I’m flipping words around and I know it’s time to stop. Though I have a new short story to write during the month of April, I think I’m going to work on updating another story that’s already written for a few days. That will get me back into the fiction groove and potentially get something else off my to-do list. I was inspired by a recent rereading of Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and have some ideas about how to thread that into the story to give it some deeper resonance.
