March 17, 1999

Ten years ago today was my dissertation defense day. I’ll definitely be celebrating, having dinner tonight with some lovely Egyptian friends at a hotel.

Was I nervous? Yes: I didn’t care much for public speaking in those days. But it went extremely well. The philosophy muses came to me, and everything was not just easy, but triumphantly fun.

The circumstances were somewhat difficult, though. I had just returned from several days visiting my grandfather in intensive care in Kansas City. It looked very bad for him at the time, though he would partially recover and live for another 5 years.

The Kansas City-Chicago return flight was on discount airline Vanguard, which I think no longer exists. It was the evening before my defense, and damned if we weren’t taken off the flight because of a jammed fuel nozzle or something of that sort.

The situation was alarming. If I missed the defense I would have a hard time rescheduling soon, since one of my committee members was going to leave immediately thereafter for Europe, I believe (and in fact he never returned to DePaul, and I haven’t seen him in person since that day 10 years ago– that would be the delightfully entertaining Swiss epicure Niklaus Largier, author of In Praise of the Whip, which I translated).

Stranded in the Kansas City airport indefinitely, I gave serious thought to renting a car and driving however long it took to get back to Chicago, presumably around 7-9 hours. My defense was scheduled for something like 10 in the morning the next day, so it would have been exhausting.

But somehow they got us another airplane or fixed the problem, I don’t remember which. We landed at Midway Airport on the South Side of Chicago fairly late. Normally I would have taken the elevated train home to Bucktown (west of Lincoln Park) but under the circumstances I took a taxi.

And then I had to stay up for most of the night and write my (needlessly long) opening statement for the defense. It wasn’t as easy for me to ad lib in those days, and I wanted a prepared text as some sort of anchor. It’s available on the Speculative Heresy blog as one of the many unpublished papers that Nick posted there. It’s a good summary of Tool-Being and of my work even as it is today. The tone is a bit too cutting in a few places, however.

A lot has happened in the 10 years since, most of it good. On March 17, 1999 I had never set foot in Egypt or in 36 other countries that I have seen for the first time in the ensuing decade. None of the publications now under my name (which is something like 4 books, 3 translations, and 30 articles) were in print yet. I was still nearly 6 years away from even hearing of any of my speculative realism colleagues, let alone meeting them. (Actually, I had one of Iain Grant’s translations on my shelf, but his name wouldn’t have registered for that reason alone.) I had not yet exchanged a single letter with Bruno Latour. I didn’t know what the word “blogging” meant, and neither I think did anyone else. Despite living in Chicago for most of the 1990’s and paying somewhat close attention to local politics, I had never heard of Barack Obama, who would have been an obscure State Senator from the South Side in those days.

You get the point… A lot can change in 10 years, both in one’s own life and in the world at large. That’s why it’s important to resist the temptation (as incorrect as it is depressing) that time flies by and life is a brief candle. There’s a lot of time that can be filled with many interesting things.