Like a shoebox that opens into Narnia…

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a simile from Emily Nussbaum…

Here’s one of the reasons I read The New Yorker each week. It allows me to learn about things I would never in a million years otherwise know. For example: online Indie TV. Who knew that was a thing? My 20-year-old kids probably do, but the blighters had never mentioned it to me! It took New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum to break the news.

She did so in a spritely June 9/14 column headlined “Taster’s Choice,” in which she reviewed an online indie show called “High Maintenance.” I didn’t have time to watch more than a couple of minutes but it seemed funny, well-written and well-acted (alert: it’s about weed dealer and the few minutes I saw were funny but a bit raunchy. Watch it at no-charge here but consider yourself warned!)

Here is the line in the Nussbaum review that makes me want to tip my hat to her:

Yet despite its D.I.Y. origins “High Maintenance” doesn’t feel like a self-indulgent pet project—instead, it’s more like a shoebox that opens into Narnia.

I hadn’t been lucky enough to read C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia as a child; I discovered them as an adult. But my wonder was no less for that. And I totally get Nussbaum’s comparison. Something as banal and unexciting as a cupboard — or a shoebox — that opens into Narnia is something worth watching.

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