Not yet retro

 

If you’re not on Facebook you may not have encountered the above image or its many, many variations: essentially someone picks a job or a location and finds six pictures that illustrate six different perspectives on it. I think I first saw it on about Tuesday or Wednesday, and it was already getting tired by Thursday evening. If there’s a single phrase that seems to characterise modern society, it’s “easily bored”. Remember Benton/Fenton the out-of-control labrador? Within days of his arrival on YouTube the very mention of his name was enough to provoke guffaws from the audience of Radio4 comedy shows; a week later, he was utterly forgotten. If you go for a more-leisurely-than-normal poo, it seems, you’ll find you’ve missed seven flavours of the Zeitgeist by the time you’re finished. Actually, do they still have Zeitgeists?

It’s nothing special

Yet more stuff that I should have included in the Noughties book; from the 2000 edition of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode, who died on Tuesday:

Since most people, one supposes, understand that the connection between apocalypse and millennium is fortuitous, the mildly apocalyptic stir of anxiety or interest induced by the year 2000 is (except for fundamentalists, who in any case are confident that they will be carried off to safety before Armageddon) only a faint, modern, vestige of an older and greater dread, belonging to a vastly different understanding of the world and of time... What we cannot say is that the millennium is somehow more real, more a part of the nature of things, than the apocalypse we dismiss as a fantasy.

Now, as someone who was shot by both sides in the academic wars over structuralism and postmodernism, Prof Kermode took a risk when he so glibly set up reality as being equivalent to “the nature of things”. And I’m not sure whether “most people” – as distinct from most people that he knew socially – gave the whole calendrical coincidence thing much thought. I wonder whether he ever went to the bloody Dome.

Ceci n'est pas un blog

Just in case you haven't heard, blogging is dead, and Twitter killed it. Says so in Wired. Must be true, then.