I took this shot of the Texas Capitol about a year ago while walking around downtown with my camera on a clear and lovely February day.

Things come to mind…

When I worked downtown, I used to eat lunch on the lawn surrounded by statues and trees, statutes and lawmakers.

One week back in the early ’90s, word had gotten out that Willie was going to play a free show on the south steps. It was a Sunday afternoon, I think, and I decided to check him out. I rode my bike down to the capitol and waited with the small crowd. Finally, Willie came out and stood in front of the single microphone. He had no band; it was just him and Trigger, all beat up and full of holes.

He played a solo acoustic set that included many of his most famous tunes. I remember the weather was beautiful, the crowd was happy, and Willie seemed so pleased to just be making music for a small group of fans in his home city. Afterwards, he stayed up on stage while people passed him boots, belts, LPs, guitars, and posters to sign. He joked with the audience and didn’t leave until he’d signed everything that anybody wanted signed.

In college a budy of mine and I used to rollerblade in there at night, gliding through the silent halls.

Spinning under the dome is kind of cool too.

And I think of Star Wars: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” (I’m not talking about that Willie show either…)

From Aldous Huxley’s Island: 

“In those days, Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.

[…]

Meanwhile, the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer. What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable.”

Finally, I’ve reached the end of the Lost Book Club, at least until more books crop up in Season 4, which starts tomorrow. The last one was Huxley’s Island, a book that was never seen, but was referenced in the Season 2 episodes “?” and “Live Together, Die Alone.” The reference is in the name of the pier where Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken prisoner by the Others. It’s called the Pala Ferry, and Pala is the setting of Island, a book Huxley wrote as a counterpoint to Brave New World.

Island is the story of a journalist named Will Farnaby who is shipwrecked on the island of Pala where an ideal society flourishes. Palan culture is a perfect blend of Eastern spirituality and Western science created through an alliance between a nineteenth century Scottish surgeon who came to the island to save its Raja’s life. The two developed an ideal for living laid out by the old Raja in Notes on What’s What, a book within the book. In short, it is a healthy combination of Buddhism, modern psychiatry, psychedelic drugs, limited industrialization, Enlightenment style reasoning, and free love.

Will arrives on the island as an agent of a major oil concern that wants to take over Pala, industrialize it and exploit its abundant natural resources. The inhabitants of Pala fear this as it will lead to the kind of overpopulation, militarization, and systemic poverty (both material and spiritual) so rampant in the outside world. Over the course of the novel, Will comes to love the island and its inhabitants even as the dictator of a nearby island plans his invasion so he can auction the island’s resources off for cash to fight his wars.

It’s a good and heady read that falls in nicely with certain other “ideal society” books that have shown up on Lost particularly Stranger in a Strange Land.

What most gets me is how it provided a possible framework for thinking about the Others. The Pala Ferry references came at the end of Season 2, a time before we met the others. It would have been fun to have read this one before Season 3 as it contains some clues as to what to expect about the Others.

The Connections:

1. In Island, the secular surgeon, Dr Andrew,  is brought to Pala to operate on Pala’s leader, who is suffering from a horrific tumor. This is precisely why Jack was taken in Season 2: to save Ben, the Others’ leader, from a tumor.

2. Pala, like Lost Island, is a place that is essentially hidden and off-limits to the outside world, but as with Pala, there are people who want to come to the island, and the Others, like the Palans, fear this above anything else. They believe it will be the end of their way of life. We won’t know for sure until Season 4 gets underway tomorrow, whether the outsiders on Not Penny’s Boat have good or ill intentions, but the title of the Season 4 opener, “The Beginning of the End,” suggests Ben’s fears may be well founded.

3.  Both islands have a temple. We haven’t seen Lost’s temple, but Ben did mention it. This hints at a society with roots that go far back, perhaps as far back as four-toed beings? Who knows. Also, both the Others and the Palanese wear white muslin outfits for their ceremonies.

4. At the end of Season 2, we didn’t know that the Dharma Initaitive and the Others were not one and the same. We did know, however, that Dharma like Palanese society, was a fusion of sorts between Buddhism and western science.

5.  As on Lost, Pala has scientific research stations scattered around the island geared toward discovering saner ways to live.

But unlike with Pala, something has gone wrong. The Others carry guns and kidnap people. They con and torture. Theirs is a corrupted island, a twisted version of Pala, that must be healed and made whole again. Perhaps, that is what John Locke must do, and what Jack seems to have realized in the Season 3 finale only too late.

The world of the Others is nothing like the perfect society of Pala, but to the Others it is. It is perfect, and it is in danger, especially now that it has been found. Their ideal society is threatened, and the survivors of Oceanic 815 are going to have to decide between protecting the island and going home to a world that might not be the one they left.

Season 4 starts tomorrow with “The Beginning of the End.” In the meantime, go here for a list of all the Lost books I’ve reviewed.

Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun is a Hercule Poirot mystery in which the intrepid detective finds himself working a murder on a resort island off the English coast. There is a large cast of potential suspects and one body, that of a promiscuous actress who had been blatantly carrying on with a married man. In short: murder, most foul.

It wasn’t as good as the only other Christie novel I’ve read (Murder on the Orient Express) but I did enjoy it, although I started to have a sense of how the murder had occured before Poirot figured it out.

Sawyer is seen reading Evil Under the Sun in Season 3 of Lost in the Nikki and Paolo episode “Exposé,” an episode that is essentially a muder mystery.

Like Lost, Evil Under the Sun has a large cast and takes place on an island. There aren’t any big clues about Lost’s mythology hidden in the pages either, which seemes appropriate as ”Exposé” represents a break from reveals about the island, serving mostly as just good, albeit twisted, entertainment. Kind of like Christie’s novels: nothing earth shattering, but loads of fun.

There is, however, a clue in the book that hints at the way the episode plays out. In Evil Under the Sun, (watch out, here come spoilers) the actress’s corpse is found on the beach. Her lover goes to try to save her, while the woman who discovers the body with him runs off for help. Eventually, we learn that the “body” was a ruse; it was the murderer’s female accomplice. Now he can murder his lover, the actress, while the woman who went off for help can vouch that he was with her the whole time.

In “Exposé”, Nikki, an actress who may or may not be promiscuous but is a murderer,  shows up seemingly dead on the beach. The episode revolves around finding out who killed her and her lover, Paolo. Only at the very end, do we learn that she wasn’t dead. Unfortunately for her, only the audience sees her eyes open as Hurley and Sawyer are busy shoveling sand on top her in the island graveyard.

In this case, the inclusion of a book served to signal the type of episode we’re seeing (murder mystery) and offer a possible clue. Perhaps if Sawyer had read it more carefully, he might have realized that while Nikki seemed dead, she might not really be dead, but as we learned with the whole Of Mice and Men incident, Sawyer doesn’t always read that carefully.

Season 4 of Lost starts on Thursday with “The Beginning of the End.” Sometime before then, I will post my thoughts on Aldous Huxley’s Island, the last of the Lost books on my list. In the meantime, Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever has a great preview with no spoilers and lots of good theorizin’.

An index of all my Lost Book Club posts is here.

The pups are tired today and don’t feel like starring in the blog. Instead, they direct you to a recent article on CNN.com about people who save the lives of greys and how those greys help save the lives of other dogs:

A group of 55 greyhounds rescued after a life of racing are helping to save more canine lives with the donation of their blood.

The dogs, most owned by professors, technicians and students at the Ohio State University veterinary school, visit the school several times a year to give blood.

Greyhounds represent the bulk of the donors, and with good reason because they typically have a universal blood type that any dog can receive.

Greyhounds also have big neck veins that make drawing blood easy, said veterinarian Guillermo Couto, who works with the animal blood donor program at OSU.

They have big hearts too.

***

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.

James Patterson’s Double Cross is an audiobook I got for Christmas. As I listened to it, I realized that I knew the main character - Detective Alex Cross from a movie I saw and blogged about (remember Monday Movie Roundups?) called Along Came a Spider. Back when I wrote about it, I mentioned that “I’d almost forgotten it by Sunday evening” (how fun it is to quote oneself). Perhaps the act of blogging about it is why I even remembered it at all. As I recall, I started rounding up movies on Monday precisely to help me remember what I had seen. Then I got lazy and stopped doing it and now I can’t even remember the last movie I saw. Sigh.

So, back to Double Cross. It was engaging. I probably wouldn’t have read it in book form, and it was full of the kind of cliches that give genre writing a bad rap, but still, I liked it. It was entertaining, and once I was engaged, there was no way I wasn’t going to not learn how Alex Cross was going to stop the two serial killers out to get him.

I find myself enjoying audiobooks more with each successive one I listen to. It beats the hell out listening to how the world is falling apart on NPR. I mean, I read about that in the blogs.

And, to bring this full circle, when I learned there was another Alex Cross film with Morgan Freeman again in the lead role, I rented and watched Kiss the Girls. Not as good as Along Came a Spider, but now that I’ve blogged about it, I’m sure to remember it.

So I’m a few years behind the times. One of my goals this year is to read as many of the books I own and haven’t yet read as I can. One of those was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

I already knew the big controversy and everything about the Holy Grail supposedly being the truth about Mary Magdelene as Jesus’s wife and mother of his children. The church cover-up, the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei, yada yada yada. Yes, I watched those late night specials that got to the “truth” of the Da Vinci Code all those years ago when the book was fresh.

And, yet, I couldn’t put it down. Not because I thought Dan Brown was providing me with some incredible insight into a new Christianity that might come to recognize “the sacred feminine,” but because it’s a hell of a chase story. It’s the simple things that make it a page-turner: murder most foul, close escapes, an American “wrong man” teaming up with a beautiful and smart French woman, shadowy characters whose intentions may or may not be malicious, clever chase sequences, and vivid descriptions of exciting foreign locales. More than anything, it reminded me of The Bourne Identity.

It was fun, and even though I knew what the secret of the grail was, I didn’t know what the characters would do with that knowledge once they secured the proof and found the grail for themselves. More than anything that kept me going. It always comes back to Faulkner and the human heart in conflict with itself, I suppose.

Afterwards, I had to look at all the paintings Brown describes in the book as well as read up on all of the various churches. I wasn’t surprised to find that many of the details in the book were simply made up or that much of it is based on conspiracy theory, but then I never expected it to be anything other than just clever fiction.

Still, it got me harking back to my art history classes in college, falling in love with a lot of that Renaissance art again. And, it does make one think about the structure and history of the church, which has got me going reading more history of the early Christian period as well as finally getting around to reading the Bible. King James, of course.

Using only cuteness to communicate, Daphne requests dinner and, perhaps, a lick of ale.

***

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.

I took this on Donner Summit near Truckee, California while there in June 2006. There’s something peaceful about this little alpine lake even if it is right off the I-80 access road.

Photography is all selection. I get in the moment, frame the shot, and everything outside the frame falls away. Usually forever.

When I return to a familiar site, those unshot surroundings are always a surprise, unknown and alien.

Vultures are fun to watch. (But only when they’re flying.)

When I was a kid living on Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, the standard school field trip was to go tour whatever ships were in port. My favorites were the submarines with their cramped interiors and lack of windows. The men on board often wore beards and their world was as hostile and unforgiving as outer space.

On another fieldtrip we visited the base post office. They had a big whiteboard in there that listed all the ships in the Pacific fleet and had the dates and location of each ship’s next port call so the mail could be delivered appropriately. Except for the submarines. They just had red dots. Nobody knew where they would show up next or when. I always wondered if that bothered a friend of mine whose dad was captain of the USS Grayback, one of the subs we got to tour.

That fascination with submarines led me to read about the NR-1 last summer, which in turn led me to Sherry Sontag and Christoper Drew’s thrilling 1998 history of cold war submarine espionage, Blind Man’s Bluff, a perfectly titled book.

Sontag and Drew recount the adventures of cold war submariners including daring attempts to follow Soviet missile subs, the illegal and very dangerous wire-tapping operations in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea, attempts to salvage a sunken Soviet sub, and the mysteries surrounding the loss of the USS Scorpion along with the various cover-ups that these operations entailed.

It’s an interesting look into one of the most secret and fascinating realms of cold war history, unknown to most Americans including, oftentimes, the crews of the submarines themselves. Sontag & Drew describe briefings with the newly elected presidents Carter, Reagan and Clinton in which they were told of the submarine operations about which they were previously unaware. By the end, each new president is sitting on the edge of his seat. Blind Man’s Bluff kept me there as well.

One of the most interesting things is that the authors interviewed many former Soviet naval officials and submarine commanders and learned the other side of the story as well. It is interesting to learn that the Soviets never really had a first strike capability against the US. They were building up in fear of - and to retaliate against - our first strike capability. But then cold wars are really about fear more than anything else.

When the cold war ended, one former Soviet admiral is reported to have joked that the end of the Soviet Union would be the most damaging thing that could have happened to the US submarine force since their enemy was being taken from them.

After the mid-nineties, the authors admit information is scant and classified. Subs are still out there under the waves, likely spying and playing cat-and-mouse with Chinese and Iranian submarines now, tapping new cables, and listening, always listening.

I guess, now all these years later, I can finally imagine how some of the blanks of that post office white board would be filled in.