X-Men and Sherlock Holmes Compete for My Attention

Some random thoughts:
There are too many shows that I need to watch. It seems impossible that I should ever get to watch all of them. A couple I’ve happened on lately: Sherlock and Burn Notice.

I enjoy Sherlock a lot, and I was encouraged to discover there aren’t that many episodes to catch up on. It seems intimidating (as intimidating as watching television shows get) to see six or seven seasons of a show I’ve never watched before and to be faced with the daunting prospect of watching them all. I feel the same sense of reluctant dread when I discover a long book series.

Maybe dread isn’t exactly the right word, but the self-inflicted pressure to consume and finish the long volumes or series can feel very much like a trap of wasting time.

On the subject of wasting time, a book that has grown tedious, boring, and/or generally lacking in joy can be a hard thing to abandon. Staying with a difficult text can be a rewarding experience when that moment of epiphany is finally reached. I will finish Moby Dick, though I’ve set it down for a bit. (Actually, I’ve enjoyed most of Moby Dick, but the chapters on the specifics of whaling get repetitive after a while.)

A rewarding experience I had with a difficult text that I finished was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I was 200 or so pages into it and ready to give it up (it’s a 700+ page book). I set it down for a while and came back to it. After finishing it, I was glad I did. The story of the architect who never compromises his ideals no matter what became a compelling, if sometimes frustrating, book. I had read The Anthem by Rand, but that short volume had done nothing to prepare me for the lengthy tale that was The Fountainhead.

My most recent book that I’ve put on ice [and there have been books I’ve never come back to (at least not yet), namely, for one, Iain Banks’ space opera The Algebraist. I first heard of Banks in passing through one of the prompts for National Poetry Writing Month, an event I hope to participate in again after an aborted attempt last year. The prompt was to write a poem with the same title as one of Banks’ novels.] is a collection of letters from weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft to a young correspondent named Robert Barlow. While the collection was originally intriguing, it developed (devolved?) into repetitive and uninteresting minutiae. A critic of my critique could argue that the personal correspondence of an author to a fan and aspiring writer would definitively be little else but minutia, but I had read from more than one source that some of Lovecraft’s letters were as good as any of the fiction he wrote. Still, Lovecraft wrote approximately 100,000 letters in his lifetime; I suppose they couldn’t all be literary masterpieces. Surprisingly, Lovecraft named the young Barlow his literary executor in the elder correspondent’s will.

I think the 2 volume set with Lovecraft’s correspondences with Robert E. Howard will be more interesting, though I obviously can’t be sure. I’ve skimmed through them, and they look to be longer for one. The fact that Lovecraft wrote these letters out long hand (he despised using typewriters according to respectable sources) is compelling, although perhaps a long typed letter would be more difficult to write in the 20’s and 30’s than a hand-written one.

While starting to write this blog, I was watching an episode of Sherlock that I hadn’t seen before, but I stopped it because I like to give the detailed stories my full attention. It’s one thing to have a show like American Dad, South Park, or Family Guy running in the background while reading or writing is one thing (and I do enjoy these shows; I think they’re funny and can be good mindless entertainment, though lacking the quaint and more frequent heart of The Simpsons), but to enjoy shows with intricate plots I like to be paying attention.

Actually, I do still have an episode of Sherlock going at the moment, specifically the one with Irene Adler. The actress playing her is very attractive, and I definitely don’t mind watching this episode again, or any episode of this show for that matter. 
When I first watched this episode, something about the name of Irene Adler seemed familiar, and it wasn’t from the Sherlock Holmes stories. A character named Destiny from X-Men comic books borrows the name as her real name.