Have mac, will travel

I’m here in lovely southern California; but instead of playing tourist today as I’d hoped, I’m sitting at a cafe with my Mac, writing a paper that’s still not done even though I made myself promise to finish it before I arrived yesterday. Well, since the promise was just to myself - easy come, easy go, eh? In any event, I don’t do ‘tourist’ particularly well. I chaperoned a friend and her sisters across Europe one summer (their extremely traditional father insisted on a chaperone, otherwise he wouldn’t have let them go on the trip), and they complained that all I wanted to do was to sit at cafes and watch the pigeons walk by.

I only visit California occasionally, but I’m always surprised - given the New York sensibilities that I’ve acquired after many years of living there - how friendly people are over here. Good morning! How are you doing? Have a nice day! And that’s just from the passersby, no less. After arriving last night, though, I would have killed for a deli or diner but everything in walking distance (driving is another thing I don’t do, which is another reason why I live in New York) seemed shut down at the ridiculously early hour of 9:30. Still, I could get used to this. There’s absolutely nothing like taking a morning walk on the beach, watching the seals loll about while being pestered for food by the thuggish gulls, to get the creative juices flowing. Too bad my paper isn’t supposed to be fiction; everything else about the setting seems otherwise opportune.

Dream sleep

Last night, after a long weekend, I decided to catch up on a couple of episodes of Dexter before going to sleep. I then proceeded to have the nightmare of my life, even if it was of a fairly familiar sort, i.e., being chased down a dark hallway by axe-wielding murderers and that kind of thing. Now I don’t have this kind of dream every time I watch Dexter, which I find funny in a disturbingly creepy way (or creepy in a disturbingly funny way?), but this nightmare was pretty remarkable for its clarity and sustained sequences. Ordinarily, my dreams take me all over the place, transporting me from one fuzzy scene to the next with no rhyme or reason. Could it be attributable to the fact that I’d spent much of the day reading up on dream iconography in the Italian Renaissance, and Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘dream sleep’ induced by capitalism over 19th century Europe, all part of my seemingly never-ending paper on the sociology of sleep? More likely, it’s due to to the double cheeseburger I had for dinner, the kind of meal I really should no longer be having.

On an aside, I’ve not posted much recently. Though I continue to read other blogs quite regularly, I find myself casually forgetting that I have my own blog, which isn’t a good sign. I think it’s one of those phases that I - and many other bloggers, I think - go through now and then when the plan of having no plan becomes something of a burden, and a rethink of the whole enterprise becomes necessary. We’ll see.

Horror

Over the weekend I watched the stylishly entertaining Korean movie ‘Oldboy,’ a marriage of the Count of Monte Cristo with some Grand Guignol tale in which a man, taken and held captive for 15 years for mysterious reasons, is released only to carry out a revenge plot that turns out to have been designed by his captor to wreak further, violent cruelties.

But even as I thought ‘Oldboy’ enjoyable in part because of its outlandishness, comes this horror from Austria about a man who kept his daughter imprisoned in his basement for 24 years. If proven true in all of its details - the father has apparently confessed - this will surely be the most mind-bogglingly nauseating ‘family’ story I’ve heard in a while.

The sociology of sleep?

Having frittered away a considerable amount of my April on things like furniture shopping and mindless reading, I realized late last week that the semester’s end is looming, and that my paper for my Contextualization seminar is in no better shape than it was in January, when I submitted my initial proposal to join the course. And since I decided to cut short my semester and fly out in early May to San Diego and Los Angeles to do various things, it also dawned on me that I have less time than I thought to get something credible on the table. Hence, the past few days have been a frantic rush of reading and note-taking.

Though, I shouldn’t worry so much. It’s the only thing left for me to finish this term! And, I have to give the professor for the seminar some credit. He’s told us to worry less about submitting an artificially polished, finished product than developing an original, substantive idea that interests us (and, by implication, him) and that might form the basis for a viable research project that one can really ‘dig into.’ But then again, last week he talked a bit about a project that he started in 1970 that he’s only now returning to, so that may not be the best model, either! Even though I came to the class thinking it would be theoretical at a very high order of abstraction (the course description alone provoked widespread puzzlement among classmates as to its possible meaning), it’s been very down-to-earth, even surprisingly earthy in a good sort of way.

Robot programmed to move according to eye movements during REM sleep

For my own part, I’ve been writing on the sociology of sleep, which - even though it has ostensibly little to do with my field, the sociology of education - has been marvelously fascinating. Part of my interest is prompted in all of these ongoing developments in sleep science, sleep research, and the commercial ’sleep industry’ (the ’sleep industrial complex,’ as a recent NYT article put it). Part of it is personal - I am, quite frankly, a terrible sleeper (although this is in turn a terrible reason to research something), so reading all of this stuff is a bit self-indulgent. But it’s interesting because there’s a paucity of theoretical or systematic work in the sociology of sleep (though that may be changing: Simon Williams’ recent Sleep and Society may be an indication), even though of course there’s more than can be read on dream analysis and interpretation as well as the neurochemistry and physiological aspects of sleep. But given my focus on sleep as a kind of context, some of the more fruitful readings that I’ve been filtering through have been from the humanities - including Roger Ekirch’s history At Day’s Close and Eluned Summers-Bremner’s Insomnia: A Cultural History. The question I’ve been struggling with is: whenever we talk about sleep it soon becomes a discussion about something else - privacy, intimacy, family, work, health, and so on. There are much more established literatures in all of these domains, in which sleep makes a ‘guest appearance,’ so to speak. What would be the basis, if any, for an independent sociology of sleep, if that even makes sense at all?

How to find a spouse

For those who want to know, follow this bit of advice. Thanks to SC for passing it along.