Locked In, the Kantian Concerns

When House was a fresh and unique network morsel, a nurse wrote a column, on Salon, perhaps, that the cast "did everything," and her complaint was accurate but ignores the narrative intent of the show, which was to examine human nature through medical detection as Doyle famously developed it for a reading Victorian audience as it headed into the 20th century, and as I professed on LiveJournal, which I am leaving in an agonized and frustrated fashion, I missed the homage to Holmes initially, a lazy ass who needs Wiki for everything but will not help them with their entries, at least not yet, but that the allusion did not sink in at first is understandable. I have read some Doyle in print, but not a great deal. His detective mostly filtered through my perception due to video, and when I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of Jeremy Brett, who is my favorite Holmes actor. Canonical but modern. I do not readily take to Doyle's diction, and that remains the case despite free kindle downloads. Shoot me, I'll grin while you pump the bullet into me, and say that House at its best was more than an examination of the price of genius, and episodes like "A Simple Explanation" and the later "Lockdown" illustrate the alienations of our increasingly complex domesticated existence. You have to be a follower of the series to appreciate these micro moments as great dramatic episodes, but Lockdown pulls it off without a hitch, with the banal and the urgent and the tragic interlocked like a small fifty minute work of art. The give and take between Laurie and Strathairn, who is also increasingly one of my favorite character actors, is nothing short of agonizingly, hair rippingly perfect when it comes to the irony of the human condition with life swirling on about the dying and the existential in monotony. It also illustrates why I am a little weary of using shared experiences for affirmation. No, the hundreds of personal narratives that New Mobility publishes are not valueless, but they are bad journalism that distracts from reforms that would help those of us who have been wounded by the ideology that Cassie the fraud and Josie the pedestrian dike with MS tirelessly embrace. Louise wanted to share that she had crushes and dark impulses too, and gee, my experiences are not unique, just as Dr. Nancy Rubel tried to help me see that she was not perfect, and divorced, and had her parents in her head. I may still have her card where she called me a strong woman, and I am, just as she was a savvy therapist. This doesn't change the fact that disability centers, and state vocational offices, have a certain ossified sterility about them, and we need reforms.

Requiem, mid service

One of the few pleasures of my life was settling down with a decent meal or snack on Monday nights to watch House, and the real public crisis in American culture is that this transplanted English hybrid is coming to an end. I may be mildly curious about the game being played on Awake, with Laura Innes reprising her ambiguous alien role from The Event, at which I glanced for less than twenty minutes to know I wasn't going to follow it, and I may tolerate Grimm, though it borders on mawkish cute, but I have no other attachment as I've had to Hugh Laurie's vehicle for the last eight years; when these last eight episodes air, I have no idea where my next outlet will come from, streaming cable shows aside, although, as an aside, I could dwell on the actress in her own variation on the physically impaired doctor on ER., except for the fact that the ensemble studies were not quite comparable to the arc on the aforementioned upgrade, and her struggle as a lame woman with her need for nurture from another pair of flouncy nipples was unconvincing, in the minutes given to it. ER did deal with the loss of ability, and the coping that follows it, but the show was a steroid soap, more or less, centered around the tensions of triage.

As for Hugh and his resume trail in late 20th century English farce, the genealogy not at my fingertips, this is not about accolades for the actor. However deserved, Laurie does not inspire affection, and imperfect as the show is, I'd still argue is the best the commercial networks have put out there. Utilized in this or any subsequent account I shall have it will be, even as it cycles into reruns, but I am officially in mourning for my feeble, but no less loyal rave, for eight years into my imminent senior life.

If I survive, and become affluent enough within that survival as age encroaches, I may buy all eight seasons of the series, and memorize them, and can recall, with sufficient clarity, that I thought the pilot episode of House was a rip off of the NIH medical thriller on NBC, which burnt out with the speed of a flaring bushfire. I missed the influence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle entirely. Proof that I am a dipshit just like everyone else. Impatience tempers my admiration of Doyle's most famous caricature. My fidelity to Laurie's upgrade merely proves what I used to post on the literature network. I prefer the next generation.



I spent the morning immersed in the terms of literary theory, pushing a little, with close calls over physical instability. Lucky.