Saint-Exupéry and tv

A friend recommended J. Wood's posts at Powell's, and now I love reading what he has to say after watching Lost. But he outdid himself with this wonderful literary analysis of The Little Prince (in reference to the episode of the same name):

A strange thing then occurs in the sixth chapter; the narrative voice changes to second-person. The audience was in the third-person objective position, and is all the sudden being addressed as if the audience were displaced into the subject of the story. The switch from objective to subjective space is interesting, and it changes back to third-person objective in the seventh chapter. This is just one of the elements the story shares with Lost; like the island characters' experience of cut-up time mirroring the audience experience of narrative time, or how the characters' search for pieces of the overall puzzle is carried over beyond the show proper into the broader experience of the audience; this short chapter mirrors that unstable position where the audience falls into the fiction. Like the fox says in The Little Prince, words are the source of misunderstandings.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing and would really love for him to delve into more of Joyce's Ulysses (as he begins to discuss in this same post). Since next week's episode "316" is partially inspired by what's found on that page in the Vintage edition of Ulysses, he just might.

Confession

I just finished solving a fun little puzzle on the Lostpedia Blog. (Yes, I'm one of those people.)

I owe what cryptogram skills I have to Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Fours Crossing by Nancy Garden. Both stories had me solving the cryptograms in the local paper when I was a kid. (In the evenings after Jeopardy!, of course.)

Thanks to Lost for helping me relive a bit of my childhood...

By the way, their book club is currently reading Carrie (a live chat will happen on the 23rd, but this discussion thread is interesting). Lord of the Flies is September's selection.