This is my first post as a "regular" contributor to this blog, and I thought I should explain that I'm pretty much a newbie. Here's what I mean:
*I only started watching Lost through the Sci-Fi channel and then on-line (courtesy of ABC.com--a truly brilliant move, by the way, for the network to put all their old episodes on-line) about nine-months ago, so I'm a recent "convert" to the series. Here's what happened. I'm a Star Trek fan--a "Trekkie" if you will. And on the Sci-Fi channel, Monday nights, they were playing back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (my favorite of the various franchises). My partner and I tuned in one Monday night, expecting some Star Trek love, only to find the pilot epsidoe of Lost. Disgusted, I went off to my home-office (I'm a professor, so Monday nights were my "guilty" pleasure-television nights, and I was very disappointed). My partner (who I refer to as "Southern Man" in my other blog Mixed Race America) decided to watch the pilot, and on my way to the kitchen, I sat down next to him and...well, the rest is history.
*I don't keep up with any blogs or websites or podcasts about Lost. Obviously, since I was asked to contribute to this blog (and here's the post that I wrote for my own blog which was cross-posted here a few weeks ago), I took a gander through the archives, but I don't really do a lot of blog reading in general (I have a few favorites that are either written by friends or deal with topics of race in the U.S., which is the research topic I work on in my day job). So I'm not really up on the language or threads or themes that most of you are probably familiar with. Which means that I may write on topics that have already been covered either on this blog or in other on-line forums. Forgive me--I don't mean to be repetitive or behind-the-times. I do hope, however, to cover some topics that perhaps haven't been hashed out already, which have to do with issues of race, gender, sexuality, class--all those big "identity" markers and issues of social justice.
*I'm new to blogging on Word Press. Which means I'm still getting used to this format (I'm more comfortable with Blogger).
OK, so enough of the caveats. I will say that I got hooked on Lost pretty quickly because of the storytelling (as an English professor I have to appreciate a good narrative). But I also was intrigued by the multi-racial, multi-national, multi-lingual cast of characters. And that's what I'll be largely focusing on in my weekly blog posts. I'm very open to suggestions about what to blog about, since there are so MANY things to talk about--Jin and Sun (the trajectory of their relationship and Jin's ability to understand more English than he lets on AND the actors being dubbed into Korean!), Michael and Walt--and Walt's Mom's relationship with her second-husband (Walt's step-Dad, who is really pretty cold...), the seeming absence of any queer characters (although doesn't anyone think that there may have been the potential of a *spark* between Juliette & Kate--like when they got chained together..wouldn't THAT have been a twist!), and maybe more on Rose and Bernard (which I did cover in the "I'll be LOST without Lost!" post). Anyway, I'll be exploring some (and many more) of these topics in the future.
