Some Loose Notes and Links

First off: Happy Birthday, Christie. Best wishes. And belated birthday wishes to Anne, who I once again forgot... Sorry Anne. :-(

The National Post printed a very funny discussion about the Buffy finale that's worth a read. Though I disagree with their response to the episode, there are some damned good bits that reflect a little too baldly how so many of us indeed sat and watched the show. I particularly like this bit about the Slayer-ing of every damned girl on the planet: "Joss is definitely going to be invited to guest host The View." LOL. I also like this article from the National Review Online which is the first article I've seen which was less than impressed with the series' ending. It's very well-written.

For the truly obsessed, check out Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Some articles to be found: “'Killing us Softly'? A Feminist Search for the 'Real' Buffy"; "T. S. Eliot Comes to Television: Buffy's 'Restless'"; and "Love, Death, Curses and Reverses (in F minor): Music, Gender, and Identity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel." Reading through some of these articles is sometimes interesting, but more often than not it serves more to remind me how lame the academy has become. There's a lot desperate stretching going on, to say nothing of idiosyncratic jargonizing. Worse, most of the writers have very little flare for writing. The article on Buffy and Eliot, for example, has precious little to do with Eliot and suffers from stilted, ponderous writing. Check this sample of an introduction (which took three writers!) that is eye-rollingly bad:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer investigates the means of its production as a television series. It examines the meaning of viewership, or what, in Buffyspeak, we should call being a watcher. Buffy parodies television language and mass-media iconography to seek out an affective politics for its medium, refusing anaesthetic passivity in favour of culturally astute self-consciousness. The program invites viewers to negotiate the tension between access and restriction; at issue are the structure and dissemination of information itself. Buffy offers a critique of the social and the cultural — of the content of the on-screen world, of television as a genre, and of the American socius — and of the processes by which those bodies of cultural and social knowledge are shaped. Two correspondent modes of viewer response are interrogated and challenged in Buffy: identification and mediatization. Its viewers consider how watching television fosters passivity, in audience identification with characters and events — how we learn the thrill of looking at things happen, rather than making them happen.

Oy, oy, oy. We're treated later to the claim that "We also witness an abrogation of agency in viewing: we are mediatized, willingly relieved of our immediate rights as social or cultural actors." Oh dear Lord. Mediatized. Spare me. Alas, this site is very typical of the stuff that goes on in the academy these days. In the words of King Lear, "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"