Recent moments

I was just reading Josh Hilberman's (aka Josh Carmen) very funny blog when I realized that, dammit, I was supposed to be writing myself.

I was at somebody else's house yesterday for a kitchen-warming party and found myself blathering on at length about the adventure of our lost cat and the impostor who sought to usurp his place in our household (read here if you missed that episode).  I found myself almost unable to omit details, and I even asked the person I was speaking to if I should speed up.  "I'm enthralled," she said.  She has a dry wit, but she seemed relatively earnest, or in any case just earnest enough.

But I have to wonder why it is I feel drawn so inexorably into what I can only think of as "narrative recursion," a feeling that no story can be really complete without going back a step or two to give the reader some tasty background tidbit.  On the other hand, it is getting late, so I should really just stop before I start theorizing at length.


As an aside, let me just say that we just watched Jane Campion's Top of the Lake on Netflix.  A seven-part mystery for the BBC, it is in many ways a transposition of much of the basic material of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- minus the technophilic genius of the female detective -- into the jaw-dropping beauty of some mountains in New Zealand.  It is good watching, some nasty sexual violence implied but never too graphically onscreen, and lots of cleavage and sex from our refreshingly normal-looking if fit heroine. I displayed the virtues of having a PhD in literature by guessing two key plot twists several episodes in advance.  Not that it's too hard.  Worth watching.