Sunday was a nice day for backyard birding. The Carolina chickadees (above) came back with a vengeance. I hadn’t seen any since March, but since Sunday, they’ve been everywhere. I assume a bunch of babies must have just fledged nearby.

In addition to the chickadees, blue jays and grackles took turns on the hanging seed block. A house finch seemed to enjoy the safflower block that the squirrels find distasteful, and house sparrows dotted the ground looking for the small seeds that fall off the feeders.

Of course, we also had the usual flock of white-winged doves as well as one mourning dove that hangs with his white-winged allies.

Ignoring the food, a Carolina wren brought bits of fluff, twigs and even some Phoebe fur up to the nest box on the porch. The previous couple moved out after their babies left the nest so it’s nice to see someone moving in. As of today, there are two eggs in the nest.

Earlier in the day, I spotted a tufted titmouse, which was exciting because prior to him, I had only ever seen black-crested titmice in the yard. Incidentally, I hadn’t seen any titmice of any kind since March. I suppose they’re in cahoots with the chickadees.

And finally, just before we went in, a cardinal came by. I rarely see them in the yard, and when they do come around they always fly away just as I notice them. This guy actually stood still long enough for me to take his picture.

Each day around feeding time, the trees fill up with white-winged doves.

They’re harmless, of course, and easily frightened, but there’s still something eerie about being watched by wild animals…

There’s something deliciously perverse about reading JRR Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Perhaps it’s the secret glimpses into a writer’s process, or maybe it’s because I now know more about the royalty of Númenor than I do about the royalty of England (although the relevance is about the same). Either way, it’s an odd read.

There are really only three unfinished tales here: “Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” “Narn I Hîn Húrin,” and “Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife.” All three stories take place thousands of years prior to Lord of the Rings, and all three are imminently enjoyable despite their unfinished state. Of course, “Narn I Hîn Húrin” aka The Children of Húrin (see my post on The Children of Húrin) was recently published as a stand alone novel after the discovery of the rest of the manuscript.

Most of the rest of the book reads more like history than fiction, and there are two kinds of history at work here. The first is the history of Númenor and Middle-earth, and the second is a history of Tolkiens’s process. Regarding the former, it’s fascinating to learn more about Middle-earth even if it is in essays about the Istari (wizards), palantíri (seeing stones), the founding of Rohan, and the geography of Númenor (the Atlantis-like island from whose ancient kings Aragorn is descended). It’s all interesting stuff for those of us who can’t get enough of Middle-earth.

For fans of Tolkien’s better known works, there are some interesting pieces here. “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields” tells how Isildur lost the One Ring (this tale was part of the prelude to Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring) as well as two sections narrated by Gandalf. In “The Quest of Erebor,” Gandalf explains his reasoning behind sending Bilbo on the journey with the Dwarves recounted in The Hobbit. “The Hunt for the Ring” has Gandalf telling of what transpired between Aragorn, Gollum, Gandalf and Saruman in the years between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring.

Equally interesting are editor and compiler Christopher Tolkien’s notes and commentary on the texts. It is here that we see the depth of JRR Tolkien’s creation. Here we learn that everything in Middle-earth has a history. Every word in the languages, the names of all the rivers and mountains. It wasn’t enough for Tolkien to just stick some syllables together to make up a word for something or slap a name on his map. All those places, all those words the characters speak, all their names had to mean something. They all have linguistic history and lore associated with them, and Tolkien spent much time working all of that out.

I don’t know if he intended for all of these notes and histories, essays, and explanations to be published, but they are fascinating nonetheless and they provide insight into the discovery of - for it does seem as if Tolkien was discovering rather than inventing - the most fully realized imaginary world ever created.

Inititially, I expected to enjoy the Lord of the Rings related sections the most, but it was the older tales that really hooked me. Perhaps beacuse they were new stories that added yet more depth to a world I have already come to know and love.

Right outside the front door and 238,000 miles away, it stops me in my tracks every time.

Joey watches.

And plans.

***

Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.

If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.

So there.

Or, rather, here:

1. “Bulldog Front” - Fugazi* - 13 Songs 
2. “Sangria Wine” - Jerry Jeff Walker* - Great Gonzos
3. “19th Nervous Breakdown” - Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks
4. “Break Charmer” - Cujo - Trip Hop & Jazz Vol. 3
5. “…Meets His Maker” - DJ Shadow - The Private Press
6. “Countess from Hong Kong (Demo)” - Velvet Underground - Peel Slowly and See
7. “I Want to Talk About You” - John Coltrane - Live at Birdland
8. “The Messenger” - Ray Wylie Hubbard - KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 6
9. “Improv 3″ - Earl Harvin Trio* - Unincorporated
10. “Oleo (alt take)” - Grant Green - The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark
11. “Elements of Style” - Paul Newman - Frames per Second

The *’s by the ones I’ve seen live reveal my catholic (lower case) tastes in music, particularly the first two.

My first club show was at the Rocket in Providence, RI. A buddy and I had gone up from Newport one Sunday to catch Newport’s own Verbal Assault. Opening for Verbal Assault were G.O.D., Operation Ivy, and Ian MacKaye’s new outfit - Fugazi - playing one of their earliest shows. I still remember the sheer intensity of  ”Suggestion” and “Waiting Room” and how they just blew whole crowd away.

Later that year, I moved to Texas and began to dig the Texas music. One summer, while shooting video for a summer camp in Marble Falls, Jerry Jeff showed up and played a set in the chow hall. His daughter was a camper there. A year earlier, I had worked as a PA on one of his videos: “Hill Country Rain.” You can’t love the hill country without loving Jerry Jeff’s tunes.

There are other interesting things to accompany the hard core to country opening. Grant Green, for instance. Would that I could play guitar the way he did.

Note: If you haven’t yet seen the Season 3 finale of Lost (”Through the Looking Glass”) you might not want to read this - major spoilers…

Season 3 of Lost ended with last night’s “Through the Looking Glass” and as the producers promised, it changed everything. As predicted, it left viewers wondering how the show can continue for its remaining three seasons considering that the castaways appear to have gotten off the island.

I’ve been saying for about a year (ever since I started studying the Lost books) that we were dealing with some kind of alternate or parallel timestream. Books like A Wrinkle in Time, Alice in Wonderland, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, and The Third Policeman all point that way. Some of this season’s books - A Brief History of Time, On Writing, and Through the Looking Glass (all links go to my posts on the books) - only reinforced that notion. And that’s just the books; I’m not even going near all the other alternate time references.

After “Through the Looking Glass,” I’m convinced that Lost is a time travel show. I started to see it about half way through last night’s episode when I began to suspect that the flashback wasn’t what it appeared to be. It was neither a flashback nor a flash-forward. In fact, the scenes on the island were the flashbacks and the stuff with Jack as a bearded drug-addled nut were the “present.” Surely Jack will start reading some Philip K Dick in Season 4.

The problem for Jack is that somehow he seems to understand that he didn’t come back to the same world he left. He is in a world where Christian Shepard is still alive (”Go up and get my dad, if I’m more drunk than him you can fire me” or something like that) and Kate is driving a nice car, apparently not a fugitive. It’s the world that Naomi and her rescue ship came from looking for Desmond. The world in which Oceanic 815 was found along with all the dead bodies.

Here’s how. The island exists between timestreams or parallel dimensions/universes (”snow globe, brotha”). The only way on or off the island is to go through the looking glass station (or possibly also along a very precise set of coordinates which would explain the Dharma food drops and Michael and Walt’s escape last season).

We know this because Charlie talked to Penny Widmore in the looking glass station - the link to the original timestream - and Penny had never heard of Naomi. I actually believe Ben is telling the truth when he says that Naomi isn’t who they think she is. Ben knows she didn’t come through the looking glass station and therefore can’t be from the universe/dimension/timestream that the survivors came from before being sucked onto the island when Desmond let the counter run down in the Swan Hatch as revealed at the end of Season 2.

Somehow Future Jack knows this. This is why he so desperately wants to get back to the island. He knows that he didn’t return to the world he left and his life is a shambles - or more of a shambles than it was - as a result. The only survivors whose stories we can glimpse at this point are his and Kate’s, and Kate seems to have it better than when she left Australia in handcuffs bound for the US under the watchful eye of that federal marshal who died in Season 1. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, this new timestream must look pretty good to Kate. I wonder if we won’t see Ben washing her fancy new car for her next season.

So who was in that coffin? Whose death would have such a terrible impact on Jack that he would lose all hope and come to the verge of suicide? I say it was Ben.

Ben left the island because he couldn’t stay. Everything blew up in his face (or rather the faces of The Others sent to steal the pregnant women) and with Locke still alive, The Others would know that Locke can communicate with Jacob now. They would also probably be pretty annoyed about the fact that Ben’s plans wound up killing so many of The Others. Ben’s only hope would be to leave the island and take his chances in the ‘real’ world. Probably by pretending to be John Locke, who probably doesn’t need that name anymore now that he can be the Wizard of O(ther)z.

Once Jack realizes the he has not returned to the world he left, I think Jack would understand that Ben was right about leaving and he has probably come to regard Ben as his only hope in getting back to the island so that they can escape correctly - back through the looking glass - and into their own timestream.

With Ben’s death - unmourned by the other survivors - Jack is on his own. So where does Lost go from here? Jack’s still lost, but not on an island. He’s a castaway in time and in order to save himself, he needs to get back to the island. But first, he’ll need to figure out a better plan than riding around in planes getting drunk and hoping they’ll crash. Fixing time itself seems the perfect thing for the man who always needs something to fix. There are certainly three seasons worth of stories there. At least.

I suspect that much of Season 4 will take place off the island, and we’ll get to see our survivors trying to decide if they like their new lives or their old ones better. We’ll see Jack trying to find information about Dharma, Widmore and Hanso. We’ll also see who stayed on the island. I’m betting Locke, Rousseau, Carl, Danielle, Rose, and Bernard stayed.

There are still many mysteries to solve. Why hasn’t Alpert aged? What was Libby doing in the mental hospital (perhaps that’s where they put people who claim to have come from another dimension)? What is the smoke monster? What about the four-toed statue? Jacob? The temple?

This show isn’t over by a long shot, but it’s following in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica’s third season when the whole show took a radical change of course, if only for a while. The rest of Lost will be about some of the survivors getting back to the island. And perhaps, The Others trying to prevent that from happening. Or, maybe the returnees will team up with The Others to keep the outside world off the island.

This was a brilliant episode. In fact the last two months or so of Lost have been the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s depressing to think it won’t be on again until February 2008, but I still have some books to tide me over:

• From Season 1, there’s The Mysterious Island 
• From Season 2, I still get to meet Our Mutual Friend and Island
• From Season 3, I’ll be wading into The Moon Pool, The Fountainhead, Evil under the Sun and, of course, rereading Through the Looking Glass.

I’ll read these between now and February, but I’ll probably hold my posts until then and do a kind of lead-up to the season premiere.

Here’s the link to the index of my Lost book posts.

For more good analysis of “Through the Looking Glass”, and predictions about Lost’s future, please see:

• EYE M SICK where you’ll find another blogger’s take on the alternate reality question
• Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels busts out a Star Trek II reference while commenter CJ at Lost…and Gone Forever comes up with a Jack’s-beard-looks-like-Spock’s-beard = “Mirror, Mirror” alternate reality episode of Star Trek.
• Lost-vivor for the Season 3 champion.

I saved Stephen King’s On Writing, which was referenced in the Lost episode “Every Man for Himself” for the end of the season. When school gets out, I’ll start plugging away more seriously on my next novel, and I figured that perhaps King might offer some inspiration if not a swift kick in the proverbial pants.

King begins with a series of snapshots of his childhood and young adulthood leading up to the publication of Carrie. This is the memoir section of the book wherein King relates the tales of his wonder years interspersed with commentary about how these things led him to becoming the writer he became. From there, he shares advice and wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of writing. Some of it useful, some of it entertaining.

The most vivid portion is the end. This is the project he was working on when he was hit by a van while walking along a Maine highway back in 1999. He was very nearly killed and spent months in and out of surgery and in rehab learning to walk again. The end of the book, fittingly titled “On Living,” describes how getting back into writing helped him through that event. It’s powerfully written and terrifying in the way that reality often is.  

On the whole, I can’t say I learned much that I didn’t know about the craft - that section of the book is thin and frequently not much more than an arrow pointing to Strunk & White - but what I got was a wide open sense of anything being possible. That kick in the pants to get me going this summer when I will have the time (starting next week) to finish the next book. Indeed, King himself describes the book as a permission slip:

…you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.

King’s unabashed belief in the literal magic of writing is a sentiment that I share, and probably the one thing, that more than anything else keeps me banging out these words despite the fact that so few wind up reading them. It is still worthwhile and as much my work as the things that pay the bills.

The optimism and inspiration are the best parts of On Writing.

This magic is also where On Writing connects to Lost when King explains what writng is.

Telepathy, of course.

He explains that the writer sends his thoughts out across time and space to readers scattered around the world and existing in different times. King points out that he is writing in 1999, but that the book won’t be released until 2000 so all readers are at least a few years down the timestream from him. Here king gets at the permanence of writing and suggests the great dialogs that have gone on in print for thousands of years much like (I think) Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose who described libararies as great silent conversations.

To illustrate his point, King sets up a little thought experiment and this is where King’s telepathic powers manifest themselves on Lost island:

Look — here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot stub which it is constantly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.

He then argues that most readers of that paragraph will fixate on the ‘8′ on the rabbit’s back, and it’s this thought that creates the telepathy. It’s this image that the writer has projected into the reader’s mind. I agree; it’s what jumps out and creates the sense of mystery that will keep me wanting more. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the numbers, I want to know why it’s there.

I’m sure Sawyer did too.

In “Every Man for Himself” - an episode that also references Of Mice and Men (”Tell me about the rabbits, George”) much more explicitly than it does On Writing - Ben has Sawyer strapped to a table. He appears to have just come out of surgery. Ben shows him a rabbit in a cage and proceeds to give the cage the kind of shaking that kills babies. The rabbit dies. Ben tells Sawyer that the rabbit had a pacemaker just like the one he’s had implanted in Sawyer, which will explode if Sawyer’s heart rate goes too high as it might if he were to try to escape or sleep with Kate. It’s a clever scene, but what stands out is the blue ‘8′ stenciled on the rabbit’s back. Later, Ben tells Sawyer about the rabbits, or at least rabbit-8 when he confides that there were no pacemakers; instead, it was an elaborate con designed to break Sawyer’s will.

Referencing King’s thoughts about writing and telepathy appears at first to be a clever and subtle reminder of the apparent, though unexplained, role of telepathy on the show. More interesting, though, is the way it begins to lay the groundwork for seeing Lost as a show about time travel, which I think it is. I’m not sure we’ll see characters time traveling as in Back to the Future, but I think we will see (and have already seen) their consciences and thoughts projected through the timestream, which is really what King was talking about so I’m chalking On Writing up to being yet another literary hint about alternate or parallel or shifted timestreams on Lost.

There’s something else, too, aside from the fact that this bit of On Writing is another rabbitcentric literary reference joining Of Mice and Men, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Watership Down (all of which makes me wonder when Donnie Darko, a time travel film laden with rabbit symbolism will show up on Lost) and that’s The Stand.

I’ve never read The Stand, and it hasn’t shown up on Lost, but I do know that the show’s creators have said that it is an influence on the show. This is interesting because in On Writing, King devotes some time to describing the problems he had in completing that novel. He said there were too many characters, too many storylines. In the end the solution was to blow a bunch of them up.

Sound familiar? That would resolve many of the storylines and propel the other ones towards conclusion. As season 3 of Lost closes out in tonight’s “Through the Looking Glass” with the survivors hoarding dynamite and making plans to “blow the Others to hell,” I can’t but think that this sounds an awful lot like King’s recollection of how he moved The Stand to conclusion.

I suspect some storylines will end tonight and what remains will be the situation that propels Lost to its ultimate conclusion in 2010. Hell, I’m predicting mass doom.

Be sure to check out:

• Pearls Before Swan for more thoughts about On Writing. (h/t as well since this is how I learned that rabbit-8 was referencing On Writing)
• Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels also has a theory about the season finale: mass doom… or mass rescue?

Click here for my Lost Book Club index page.

It’s easy to forget the small things, the little details that make a place whole.

Simon has it pretty good, no?