Our Heroine Regrets that Anthony Cooper Will Not Be Sacrificed Tonight for Your Viewing Pleasure

Y'all, I am so frustrated with tonight's episode of Lost. No doubt there are bloggers out there writing screeds about what happened. Here are just a few of my thoughts as bullets (Warning: Spoilers):

• The producers have repeatedly denied that the island's inhabitants are dead and living in Heaven/Purgatory/Hell/etc. So why do they keep feinting in that direction? I am specifically referring to Anthony Cooper's insistence tonight that they were all in Hell.


• When did Cooper develop a Southern accent? He never had one in all the eps we've seen him in, and he suddenly developed one while talking to Sawyer. I know it was supposed to convince me that he's the con who scammed Sawyer's parents, but it called too much attention to itself.


• If Sawyer killing Cooper fulfilled the requirements of Ben's "test," than anyone killing Cooper should have fulfilled it. Why didn't the Others just kill him if the real crux was just that Locke's. Dad. had. to. die, not that Locke hisself do the killin'?

I know the Others are supposed to be mysterious and creepy, but the writers have succeeded in only making them ridiculous, like kids playing spy-games. The most affecting episodes remain those that focus on the Losties grappling with the terrifying dangers of the Island itself. I hope the last three episodes focus more on that than the faux threat of the Others.

Our Heroine Tells The Target

JAPANESE ARCHERY (H/T Alias Clio)

1.
The hand tells the bowstring:
Obey me.

The bowstring answers the hand:
Draw valiantly.

The bowstring tells the arrow:
O arrow, fly.

The arrow answers the bowstring:
Speed my flight.

The arrow tells the target:
Be my light.

The target answers the arrow:
Love me.

2.
The target tells arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:
Ta twam asi.

Which means in a sacred tongue:
I am thou.

3.
(Footnote of a Christian:
O Mother of God,

watch over the target, the bow, the arrow
and the archer).

Aleksander Wat

Translated by Richard Laurie
From My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. New York and London: Norton, 1988.

Our Heroine Don't Tolerate

...Unless what I'm being asked to tolerate is Lyle Lovett!! Here is something about our heroine that you may not know. I love Lyle. I really love him. My friend BMT can attest to this, she spent a hiking trip with me out West in which I sort of, maybe, forced her to listen to The Road to Ensenada and My Baby Don't Tolerate about, say, a katrillion times. To the point where for her own sanity she had to lash out at me with the cruel words, "His songs all sound alike."

There was much pouting in the car after that.

Anyhoodle..I have been waiting for 3 years for Lyle (I call him Lyle, people, deal with it) to perform in NYC. The last time he was here was 2004 when he performed in Battery Park for the Fourth of July. I wore a giant straw hat and sang my head off. Now he's performing with another fave, k.d. lang, on June 21 at Radio City Music Hall, and my trusty partner in country-music crime, kherman, is going with me.

Fortunately, this will not impact my continued reading of The Iliad at all. I repeat, The Iliad will not be interrupted for this concert. It will be interrupted for a thousand other things, like my Shakespeare class, or Father A's reading group, or my new copy of The Violent Bear It Away (thanks, MM!), but it will not be Lyle's fault. He is merely, well, I'll let him tell you himself:

Well I'm a long tall Texan
I wear a ten-gallon hat
Yes I'm a long tall Texan
I wear a ten-gallon hat
Well people look at me and they say
Is that your hat?