The End

Currently at UW: -0.4. High today: 4.4.

Discovered yesterday that the emus are now in the bird pen--the pen that the lost lonely bird was trying to get back into last fall. The emus seemed pretty chipper. The young swans are still afraid of the squirrels. Saw some nuthatches, hanging out with a bunch of chickadees. Nuthatches look a lot like bigger chickadees, and I think I've seen nuthatches hanging out with chickadees before. Or is it chickadees hanging out with nuthatches? Once, in Pickering, there was a budgie hanging out with some sparrows.

The New Jersey Devils, if the Yahoo hockey stats are up to date, are now one point out of first place, and three goals away from being the lowest-scoring team, in the Eastern Conference. It must be said: since I congratulated myself, mid-way through last season, for successfully predicting that Martin Brodeur couldn't hack it in The New NHL, he has been, by a pretty wide margin, the best goalie in the league.

Saw The Grifters on TVO tonight. Not sure I'd ever seen it all the way through before. Only seen it at all once, on TV, probably fifteen years ago. At the time, I was just left with the thought--was that a good ending? It sure is powerful, but--is it just manipulative? Is it gratuitous? It's really something, now, seeing the whole thing, knowing how it comes out, how the ending doesn't seem like a twist at all; you can see how everything points toward the end. Something I noticed tonight: John Cusack's eyes, a lot or most of the time when he's talking to someone, jiggle back and forth, like he's looking from one eyeball to the other, like you do when you have to look someone in the eye and you're self-conscious about it. (Which has vagulely bugged me when it's happened to me--I've had the vague thought, how is it that I'm having this problem now; what is it that I'm doing when I don't have this problem? I mean, when it happens, it seems like it has to happen; how can you look at both eyes at once?) So now I'm wondering whether Cusack does this in other films--whether it's a problem with him as an actor--or whether he was doing it deliberately in this film, because his character is self-consciously trying to hide something all the time. If it is deliberate, it's really amazing in its perfect subtlety--it's like Tom Hanks's shaking hand in Saving Private Ryan, the guy keeping himself under complete control except for this one thing where his body escapes and betrays him, except so much more subtle.

I had vaguely resolved--vaguely resolved?--that I would not be moved by the death of Jean Baudrillard to read any Baudrillard (not that there's actually necessarily anything wrong with that; a collective concentration of focus can be productive, even if the circumstances that bring it about are accidental), but then caspervonb made a post about Baudrillard and I was overcome with annoyance that I couldn't really actually say with any confidence what this simulacrum stuff is all about, apart from the slogan--"copy without an original"--and so yesterday I thought I'd give Simulacra and Simulation another go at the library, but it was out, and there were two holds on it--and most of Baudrillard is out of the UW library. Death run, or is he really that popular these days, around here?

So I settled for Illusion of the End, which I'd seen somebody in some obit say had something to do with Fukuyama and "the end of history", and got a couple dozen pages into it before deciding that this guy is, really, just saying stuff. But not just saying stuff like that book on Tony Blair and Iraq is just saying stuff, because that book on Tony Blair and Iraq (which, I was disappointed to discover, is actually a bunch of London Review of Books pieces strung together) throws in things like William Gladstone's self-flagellation--good and useful stuff to know. Baudrillard is just saying stuff that doesn't seem to have any determinate meaning, making declarative statements with no obvious reference. (It has always struck me as an important deficiency of mine that I am unable, unlike the high theoryheads of my acquaintance, to have inherently indeterminate texts crystallize immediately into determinacy under my gaze. I'm slow to pick things out of fuzzy images, too. It's one of those enabling disabilities....)

And so, of course, the very cute thought occurred to me that Baudrillard is a simulacrum--people think that Baudrillard has said something, they think that Baudrillard thinks something, they think they have thoughts that are Baudrillard's thoughts, but if you go to the original, there's no original there. But, you know, maybe by the time he was writing that book, he had just gotten lazy; maybe it's a pale simulation; maybe there's an original somewhere earlier....