Yesterday, I made my 103rd monthly post to Storytellers Unplugged. It’s called Soap Gets in your Eyes, and it has to do with using the background processor in your mind to do important writing work. The funny thing is that after the essay went live, I went back to the story that I wrote about in it and scrapped everything I’d written and wrote 2000 brand new words that were, yes, based on something I cogitated over while going to sleep the night before. So, while the background processor does work, it doesn’t always do good or acceptable work. Or, at least, work that can’t be superseded by something else.
I also did a couple of book reviews this weekend: Sycamore Row by John Grisham and Snowblind by Christopher Golden. I finished reading Luther: The Calling by Neil Cross, who is also the creator of the highly recommended BBC cop show, Luther. This book is a prequel, leading up to the opening moments of the show’s first episode. I’m now reading The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry. It’s billed as a novel, and Amazon shows it to be 256 pages, but the ARC is only 82 pages long. It’s a fictionalized retelling of the friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Feels like a cross between Deadwood (without most of the cussing) and an Elmore Leonard western.
We watched The Golden Bowl, a Merchant-Ivory film starring Uma Thurman, Kate Beckinsale and Nick Nolte, based on the Henry James novel. Beckinsale and Thurman play friends. Beckinsale gets married to a poor Italian and then convinces her lonely father to marry Thurman. However, Thurman’s character and the Italian had a relationship in the past that she’s never told her friend about. It gets very complicated and messy. I thought they hammered on the metaphor of the bowl a little too much (get it? get it? there are flaws in the bowl and there are flaws in the marriage?) but all in all a good film. We like Merchant-Ivory in general and I’ve picked up a batch of DVDs for us to watch during the Thanksgiving vacation, since most of them don’t seem to be streaming on Netflix.
I missed Brian Keene’s twitter commentary about The Walking Dead last night. It was an interesting choice to move away from the prison completely for one week and perhaps longer. Good to see Kim from The Unit again (it took me a while to remember where I knew the actress from). It felt like a completely different show, and not necessarily in a bad way. As a self-contained set piece, it was not terrible, which is faint but high praise for a show that I stick with for reasons I don’t understand myself.
I would have bet good money that Red John wasn’t who we found out he was this week on The Mentalist. I’m half tempted (okay, maybe one-sixteenth tempted) to go back to where the character was first introduced to see whether that revelation holds up to close scrutiny. Next week should be interesting.
Sad to see “the bunnies” go home on The Amazing Race. I was kinda rooting for them, but they had the one-two punch of a Speed Bump and being U-Turned, which did for them. The justifications for U-Turning were on somewhat shaky ground, especially in their case. The team that did it believed that they did something shady at the airport, jumping the standby queue, but in fact they were completely in the right on that one.
Haven is getting really interesting. It’s fun seeing Colin Ferguson (Eureka) play William, who started out seeming heroic and is now, well, something else. Also fun seeing all the regulars playing different versions of themselves in Alterna-Haven this week.
