Besides my general literary interests, I actually watch some TV when time permits.  Ironically, TV has become somewhat of a luxury for me.  Even though I don't usually find anything I like to watch with regularity, I do have a couple of favorite shows.  The most recent of which are Seinfeld and Northern Exposure, which A&E currently carries.  Below are some pictures from that show, a link to a great Northern Exposure Web site (click on the first picture below), and my generally useless analytical commentary on the individual characters.

Here's the main characters of Northern Exposure, Joel Fleischman and Maggie O'Connell, engaged in what was to become one of the sustaining elements of Northern Exposure: a typically hostile dialogue implicitly examining the nature of heterosexual relationships while exuding a deep and primal sexual tension.  (In other words, they dug each other while at the same time were repulsed by each other's "world views.")  They eventually recognized their problem and, working together, diagnosed their paradoxical love/hate relationship with the phrase "mutually desirous incompatibles" if memory serves.

This is Adam on the series; he plays a crotchety, cynical war veteran skilled in guerilla combat tactics.  Another element of his character is that he's also a sensitive and genius gourmet chef.   Don't ask me.  That mix seems to "work" on the screen.  Incidentally, his wife's name is Eve.   But most people recognize him from the TV show Chicago Hope.  I don't know his character on that show, but I think his real name is Adam Arkin.

This is Marlyn Whirlwind on the show.  Her character's function seems to be calling out Dr. Joel Fleischman on his egotistical, neurotic, urban, citified personality.  She acts like the "wise woman," or native consciousness, who holds all the healing medicine.  This seems to be why she is Dr. Fleischman's secretary -- to make the contrast between conventional, drug-dependent, "white" medicine and "nontraditional," native, spiritual medicine.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Chris Stevens, a convicted felon who serves as the town's philosophically gifted disk jokey for Cicely Alaska's radio station KBHR.  One of my favorite episodes is the one in which Chris defends his Master's thesis by taking two ideologically opposed English professors out to the baseball field in the dead of winter to re-enact the folk poem "KC at Bat."  Ultimately, Chris teaches them the essential significance underlying the poem in such a way as to make both "professors" speechless.  This picture captures him deep in his frequent musings over humanity's dichotomous nature or Albert Camus' existential meaning in the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus."
 
 

Jorge Luis Borges.  Works of Fiction:  Ficciones (1945), Labyrinths (1962), El Aleph (1949).  This link takes one to a professional literary and philosophical site examining the works of Jorge Luis Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges.  This link is a nicely put together tribute to the author's life and works.

James Joyce. Dubliners (1914), Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916 U.S.), Ulysses (1922, 1934 U.S.), Finnegans Wake (1934).  Links one to probably the most comprehensive and in-depth site on James Joyce.

Herman Melville.  Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) Billy Budd (Posthumous 1924).  Another well-designed and comprehensive site.

William Shakespeare.  Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and The Tempest. (No dates give due to perpetual controversy.)  Dr. Massi's authoritative and widely recognized site on Shakespeare.  Includes everything from plot summaries to criticism to teaching resources on the Bard.

Gabriel García-Márquez.  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).  An intricately designed and well-written overview of the author's life and works.

Julio Cortázar.  Hopscotch 62: A Model Kit (1968).  Not as glitzy as the rest, probably because the author's a professor, but certainly worth a look.  There is much scholarly criticism, so it is intended for the "initiated," and not for the faint of heart.

Fyodor M. Dostoevsky.  Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and Notes From the Underground (1864).  While this site isn't the "best" out there (by its own admission) it does claim to be the first one dedicated to Dostoevsky.
 
 

Albert Camus.  The Plague (1948), The Stranger (1946),  and The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955). A visually appealing site designed for the philosophically inclined web-surfer.  It includes a well written overview of existentialism and that movement's major players.