2020-11-26 08:54
Rainy gray morning. I finished my rewatch of John From Cincinnati. The ending of the last episode feels like it was written after they knew the show wasn't coming back for another season, as it has a good bit of kind of hoaky summarizing in it mixed in with scenes in the normal mode of the show. On the whole though, totally worth the revisit. Kind of like Deadwood the show is, in a sense, about community and community building as the weird John guy starts to bring all these people together in different ways. Like The Leftovers (which I might rewatch next) it's also got an unexplained mystery at its heart, but John's is much less dark and dramatic. His is more about healing, while The Leftovers is so much about grief and loss. There are no simple answers to the mysteries of John but there is plenty of room for interpretation.
Also finished Balzac's Lost Illusions today. I got a little bored with parts of the ending where it goes too deep into a bunch of legal maneuverings around one of the protagonist's debts and how he gets swindled by a bunch of people. All in all... I was entertained by the novel, and there were aspects of it that were more interesting than others (the content about the printing business and journalism). Reading some of the end notes in my edition it also showed how many different side characters in this novel were the protagonists of various other works in Balzac's Human Comedy.