with a whimper

Well, 'round our way, 365 dreamt-of review posts turned into 100 hoped-for posts (not that I mentioned it), turned in to a scant 86, for a variety of reasons, including the add'l chaos introduced into what I laughingly call my workflow by the long delays in getting our (Bree's and my) co-op in Jackson Heights completely squared away, my inability to bring along to So. Cal. some things I wanted to write about over the holidays, a symptomatic relapse of my Dragnet (radio version) addiction when I discovered that nearly every episode is available at archive.org, and, I think most decisively, my inability to say - at least in this venue - one think about a given piece of work without it leading to several other observations, comments, etc. -- and ramifying onward from there. Oh, sure, I could try to stick to the pith, could write, say: [8x] Slajov Zizek, Violence (2008, Profile). Anti-foundationalist potboiler. without going on and on about (i) what's wrong with that Adam Kirsch review, (ii) Kirsch's rightness, whatever his motivation, in pointing out the odiousness of Z.'s structuralist-inflected treatment of homosexuality as "inversion," (iii) the hit-and-missness of Z.'s pop instancing this time out, (iv) the tension between Z.'s strategy of make explicit the unappealing logical consequences of certain seemingly inoffensive starting points, a strategy in which I do, actually, recognize what I think of as philosophy being done, and his seeming lack of interest in avoiding self-contradiction at any level other than the most local, or (iv) how puzzling the discussion of not-voting is, read against a recent TLS piece which invokes Kant (or maybe even Rawls), in suggesting that, upon the election of Obama, "Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity." (Would he have said this whatever the outcome of the election?) I had some other last thoughts for the year, mostly about the president-elect and Bon Iver, but it's now seven minutes to midnight, and there are other ways I'd rather spend them. I don't know what, if much of anything at all, will appear here in 2009 -- except possibly to a top-ten for Dragnet beginners. Health to you all.