Vicissitude and Season

Well, ha, seems today is Martin Freeman's birthday - which means my two biggest celebrity crushes have birthdays one day apart. And both Virgos like me, which totally figures. I am glad and not surprised to see Tumblr turned up the noise for Michael Emerson yesterday.

I had a fine time wandering around the grounds of Monticello yesterday, geeking out about gardening. I've got plenty of notes on Tomatoes for the Southeast and Innovative Home Composting, and a vague pleasant impression of how awesome the Svalbard Seed Vault is, though I was getting fairly sleepy by that point. Nothing like sun and nice scenery and tomato tasting and folk music and healthy green juices to make you sleep well. I bought garlic (for planting) and fig-ginger and plum-lime jams and hickory syrup (did you know that was a thing? I really did not) and a veggie muffaletta and a lemon-ginger popsicle, and then had bacon-wrapped figs and salmon in pastry and a Dark and Stormy for dinner downtown. Charlottesville is always so great to visit.

Tomorrow I need to make lists.

So it is entirely typical of me that a declaration of new intent results in a) a little bit of publishing research in between being busy with other things, b) a depressive spiral, c) my cat getting sick. And today was migraine day. But I think I'll be back on track soon. (And the cat is improving, though I was really worried for a couple of days because he stopped eating, which is kind of like a fish not swimming.)

All that (plus having finally finished the seasons of "Castle" (which, semi-yay for the final relationship and career cliffhanger, although the show is lunging shark-wards) and "Doctor Who" (which, I have had it with Moffat, I mean it this time. I want to scrub it all from my brain and replace it with a vid of Clara to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun")) meant that I watched a heck of a lot of Lost episodes, semi-randomly (my initial plunge-through this spring started not where I'd left off but with the first episode Ben (Henry) was in halfway through season two, whereupon I watched straight through to the end, and then, naturally, started up at the beginning again until I got back to halfway through season two. And since then I've been dipping in occasionally, first to watch all the Ben-centric episodes again, and then to watch nearly all of seasons five and six. So this week's dose was the parts of three and four I'd ignored before (except for "Exposé" which I'm not likely to ever watch again).) Re-immersion prompts a few observations:

1. The level of detail entirely rewards multiple viewings, as does the intricate plot. Knowing what's coming makes me appreciate even more how well-woven the storyline is. For example (trying to say this without horrible spoilers) the episode in season three where Mikhail helps save Naomi, and then Charlie doesn't want to let him go, but Desmond does anyway, oh so painfully ironic, considering what Mikhail does at the end of the season, ow ow ow. I know from personal experience how weird serendipity can be when you're writing something long and complicated, but the number of times things work out tidily in this plot means huge amounts of planning as well. (Not that they tie up all the threads by any means, but it's so fun watching them construct what knots exist.)

2. The villains are beautifully villainous in their differing degrees, and it's an understatement to say they don't shy away from violence, but it's interesting to observe that none of the violence is sexual. Imagine how much more creepy Martin Keamy would be if he threatened to rape people. I mean, I'm glad they didn't go there, but it's kind of weird that they didn't. The show objectifies right and left (and yeah, there are more shots of scantily-clothed women, though let us also note the entire episodes that Sawyer spends with his shirt off (well, there's at least one)) but all the sex is consensual (even if Jack's tattoo isn't, god I wanted to slap him so hard). I'm wondering if the non-sexual villainy all spun off of Ben somehow; he's capable of many horrible things, but I can't imagine him raping anyone or ordering it done.

And okay, speaking of which:

3. Michael Emerson your face. (Also holy shit what a wonderfully-constructed character; I cannot say it too many times. I could write entire essays, but I won't subject you to them.)

On another topic entirely, I may entertain myself this summer building that playlist-by-minor-association that I've been intending for ages. This is the one in which the order is determined by bits of lyrical coincidence such as (to pull from my previous subject lines) Laura Marling's "Goodbye England" next to Ella Fitzgerald singing "A Ship Without a Sail" because they both mention hats. Or "I Think You Know" by Julia Nunes with "When I Decide" by My Terrible Friend, since both reference large hands. I've always wanted to organize a library this way, but can't since a) I share mine with other people and b) I can't keep it all in my head anyway. I did manage to graft this desire onto my 17th-century Amsterdam bookshop-owner Maarten Rijnacker (one of my more adorable creations if I say so myself); here's the discussion other people have about it:

"I am not yet come to that place in my tale," said Saskia haughtily. "But it is strange that you of all those assembled should ask..." She shook her head. "No. It is a tale that must be told in the proper order. But what is that order? My mother, in her tidy house, would know; my father, looking over the carefully-kept accounts of his business--"

"Then think yourself into Maarten's shop," said Olivia, "and pull a book off the shelf, and then the next, and find that there is sense in their ordering, no matter how strange it may first appear--"

"You have been there!" cried Saskia. "Do you know, I once discovered that he had shelved Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum adjacent to a manual on breaking and training horses, in French not even English so the witticism did not strike me until days later. The training method was horrible and vicious and I was sorry for the poor horses; it did not occur to me then to be sorry for the sailors. And a romance about Alexander on the other side of Grotius."

I am hoping to do some library-reorganizing this summer, but it'll consist of moving all the drama and perhaps other categories to Younger Son's room once he gets his childhood toys packed off the shelves, so as to create some room on the downstairs bookshelves for everything now shelved on the floor, like my entire Reginald Hill collection and half my gardening library. No, there is no such thing as too many books...

Finally got around to watching this Huffington Post interview with Michael Emerson. Really I don't think the man could be any more adorable, or there would be some kind of law against it. (Shakespeare, gay rights, smoke monster, embarrassing kissing of one's own wife on TV: half an hour of utterly charming.)

Happy Mother's Day to me. *goes back to writing*