Yesterday's Pie

I've been taking another crack at watching the latter portion of Twin Peaks' second season. These episodes I haven't watched since high school--after "Lonely Souls", the last one Lynch directed before leaving to work on Wild at Heart, I only sometimes watch the next two episodes concluding the whole Who Killed Laura Palmer arc before skipping to that legendarily fucked up final episode directed by Lynch. The trick when watching Twin Peaks, I've discovered, is to allow at least two weeks to pass after you've watched a Lynch directed episode. Otherwise I feel kind of gross--like following up a gourmet meal with a microwave dinner. You have to give it some time before the microwave dinner seems okay. The other directors just lack Lynch's singular instincts.

I'm glad the pilot episode is available at last on the gold box set. The first DVD release of the first season in the U.S. skips the pilot and begins with an episode not directed by Lynch. I hate thinking of all the people whose first impressions of the show are from that episode. It's not their fault--there are plenty of shows that don't really start until their second episode. But the two hour pilot is like a fully formed David Lynch movie.

Anyway, I don't know how many more second season episodes I can take before skipping to the end. Then again, my whole experience might be different now after more than a decade. But I can't say I'm looking forward to Billy Zane in his cowboy costume or the solid brick of wet sugar that is the Dale/Annie romance.

I hated how the other writers would take some of Lynch's weirder ideas and make them normal. Nowhere is this epitomised better than in the character of Agent Cooper. Cooper's a good guy from the start, but he's weirdly callous and perverse. It's hard to imagine late season two Cooper grinning as he cracks open a copy of Flesh World or a dead girl's diary. Part of me just wants to watch because of the chess game subplot.

I'm still reading Inside the Victorian Home. Its good qualities far outnumber its bad, which kind of makes the bad bits more jarring when I hit them.

I was reading the chapter on the bedroom the other day and it was going into detail about the kinds of mattresses used for beds and the various cleaning routines--just the sort of thing I'm interested in. I was reading a bit on how a bottom mattress cover sheet was washed once every fortnight before a top cover sheet, which then became the bottom cover sheet. Then I read this footnote;

This system, known as "top to bottom, bottom off," was still being used in British boarding schools in the 1980s--and possibly still is?

Er, you're asking me? It seems like something she wouldn't have too much trouble finding the answer to (we're talking about boarding schools, not al-Qaeda training camps), but if she couldn't or didn't want to, why mention it at all? I suppose this sort of idle, conversational segment doesn't seem too strange isolated here as it is in my blog, but when you're happily reading a steady stream of impersonal facts, these things feel a little weird when they crop up. I guess it could be the influence of Internet literature is changing literature as a whole on a fundamental level.