Poor, poor beleaguered experts. How can one possibly survive the onslaught of the unwashed (and uncredentialed) blogospheric masses?
Thanks to Aunt B. for the reference, and for the citation, as well. It’s no accident that the first chapter of The Anxiety of Obsolescence cites Schickel’s article on the death of film, but I hadn’t realized that we were also facing the imminent death of film reviewing…
I’m quite behind the times on this (appropriate for mon état, quand je souffre du décalage horaire), but the talk of the lefty blogosphere a couple of weeks ago was the much that was being made of W’s having been spotted drinking what his advisors insisted was a non-alcoholic beer (and, of course, the Beeb’s somewhat tickled connection of that beverage to the “stomach bug” that apparently knocked him out of commission the next day. One might also note the gleeful reminder of H.W.’s stomachal gift to the prime minister of Japan back in 1992).
Here, however, what’s being circulated with equal schadenfreude is the video of an apparently drunken Nicolas Sarkozy in a G8 press conference. His advisors insist that Sarko never drinks, and that he simply wasn’t used to the long hours and late nights of negotiating, and that lack of sleep produced his wooziness. It’s hard, however, to imagine a late night with Vladimir Putin that could conceivably end in sobriety.
On the other hand, if I’d been asked to give a morning press conference yesterday, I might have looked much the same. Today, after a full night of sleep (though one admittedly produced with a bit of prescribed assistance), I’d be a little more on my game.
In no particular order:
– My sleep problems continue unabated. Last night, I slept fairly well from shortly after midnight until sometime around 4 am, and then was awake between 4 and 8 am (and actually out of bed and reading between 5 and 7 am), and then asleep again between 8 am and 9.45ish. I’m positively exhausted, and yet I know that come midnight tonight, I’m going to be all keyed up again.
– Aside from waiting on a few pieces of information from this year’s crop of graduating seniors, I’ve finished my program’s annual report. This means that all of the tasks that remained between me and my own work are essentially cleared out of the way.
– I’m doing some reading toward the new project today, and it’s in an area that I’ve spent a fair bit of time avoiding thus far in my career, not least because I found the material so difficult. I now find it utterly fascinating, but that hasn’t alleviated the difficulty. (Nor has my insomnia helped, for that matter.)
Further thoughts as the brain cells necessary to produce them regenerate.
Well, I’m never gonna get it.
Since arriving here in Paris, I’ve been waiting for the bad night, the one in which sleep eludes me regardless of what counter-measures I take. That night is tonight, apparently. I went fairly directly to sleep around midnight, and then woke up sometime before three. And that was pretty much the end of it. Took a sleeping pill at four, to no appreciable effect. It’s now ten after five, and I’m sitting in the living room, enjoying a bit of networked whinging.
Having done so, I’m going to lie here on the sofa and read, and fully expect to be asleep just in time to get up for breakfast. Tomorrow — er, today — is likely to be an ugly day. But at least the bad night will have come and gone, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it.
Incidentally, if you’ve been reading Planned Obsolescence via an RSS feed, you’ll no doubt have noticed that the feed URLs have changed since the migration to WordPress. The feed is now available, conveniently, at http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/feed. At least one major feed reader caught the migration automatically and updated the feed URLs, but others may need to be changed manually.
Of course, if you’re only reading via an RSS feed, and if you’re one of those who needs to update the URL manually, it’s possible you’ll never get this message. A technological conundrum.
I suddenly find myself with about a dozen things I’d like to write about, which is a remarkable change from the blankness that I’ve experienced when pondering the blog. At least a couple of these things I’m quite behind the curve on, given our recent preparations for travel, and our travel, and our adjustments to travel, but I’m operating in the spirit of better late than never today, which seems only appropriate to my pitifully jet-lagged state.
So, the first of those things: the finale of The Sopranos. Folks have weighed in on this everywhere (so everywhere, in fact, that I’m not going to bother linking), but I found the episode’s ending compelling enough that I want, however belatedly and repetitively, to record my reaction to it. For propriety’s sake, I’ll note that one should stop reading now if one is among the three people left in the country who don’t know how the episode ended.
I understand that some folks were really perturbed by what seems like the series’s non-ending — the sudden cut to black in the midst of not very much happening. Not least of these, my mother; my phone rang four-point-three seconds after the credits started rolling, and when I answered, all she said was “I don’t get it.” The good news is that we’d watched the east coast feed, rather than waiting for the west coast, so I could give her my sense of what had just happened, at least as it was then developing.
That sense is this: the scene is filled with a very intentionally constructed and uncertainly located though not in the least vague sense of menace, a menace which emanates from some expected places, like the hinky guy at the counter who keeps looking at Tony over his shoulder and the fairly tough-looking guys apparently scouting the jukebox in one of the last shots, but also from some unexpected places: the man sitting with a table full of Cub Scouts; Meadow’s repeated inability to parallel park. The scene pays just a bit too much attention to the small details of what’s going on around Tony, encouraging us to begin guessing what’s going to happen: the hinky guy at the counter is going into the men’s room to get a gun hidden there, à la Godfather, or he’s just given a signal to the toughs at the jukebox, who are going to open fire; the Cub Scouts are going to get caught in the bullets’ path; Meadow is going to be a horrified late witness to the scene that’s just unfolded. Or, perhaps, Meadow is going to get caught in the crossfire, and the Cub Scouts are going to be horrified onlookers.
Or perhaps none of that. As Tony and Bobby Baccala discussed earlier in the season, probably you don’t even hear it when it happens, and so it’s very likely that the cut to black is that end: the shots that Tony never sees coming. But on the other hand, perhaps what’s after the black isn’t carnage, but just more of the same, and this last scene is just allowing the viewers to enter into the world that Tony will, as long as he lives, continue to inhabit: a world filled with unlocalizable menace, in which every moment could well be the last.
For both of those reasons — that you don’t hear the bullet that gets you, but that if you think it’s coming, you hear it everywhere — the only way that the series could conceivably end was simply to end, precisely because, as Steve Perry reminded us, “the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on.” And that, I’ll confess to thinking, was a brilliant choice, and evidence of the show’s impact: “Don’t Stop Believin’” finds itself, 26 years later, at number 22 on iTunes.
The world’s going to be a bit different without The Sopranos, but on the other hand, the world’s radically different for their having existed. There could have been no Six Feet Under, no Deadwood, no The Wire, no The Tudors — or, for that matter, no turn toward complexity in network television, either — without The Sopranos leading the way. It’s an appropriate end, I think, for the series not to end, but rather to go on in imagination and discussion and argument. Not a big fuck-you to the fans, as some have accused David Chase of delivering, but one last thing worth thinking about.
The last three days have been utterly consumed with departure-for-Paris business. We head off tomorrow morning, and there are at least three things I need to do before I go. The most pressing of those is sleep, which I’m off to do now. More from the road, as there always is.
I’m tinkering a bit with my categories, trying to make them a bit more tree-like, but given that I’ve already got two systems represented here (the old tripartite novels/networks/inbetween structure and the more recent whatever-occurs-to-me structure), they’re not organizing terribly well. In any case, several of the categories at right expand when clicked upon, in particular “life,” “media,” “technology,” and “work.” But I’m dissatisfied, as some of the subgroupings are uncomfortable. Is “reading” really a child of “media”? (For me it is, which may say something about which way the wind is blowing in my academic affiliations.) But is “blogging” better considered “media” or “technology”? Or “work,” or “life,” for that matter? How did I end up with both a “blogging” and a “metablogging” category? Wouldn’t a blog post labeled “blogging” automatically be an instance of metablogging? In which case a blog post that consciously labeled itself “metablogging” would be, in fact meta-metablogging?
Sigh. More changes under the hood are afoot, though one hopes they’ll be pretty subtle.
So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?
The good news is that I’ve got approximately three more days during which to do any college-related business; then we’re off to Paris for seven blissful weeks. The two of us, the computers, a select number of books, and the summer projects I’ve been dying to get to — and thousands of miles and many timezones between me and the administrative tasks that have been keeping me from it.
I always hate the first part of the summer, because it goes by painfully quickly and is always far more consumed by recovery and reports than I want it to be. But I’m working on reminding myself that far and away the bulk of the summer is still ahead, and that the next two months promise both relaxation and productivity to spare.
