the Machen story

“The White People” strikes me as a failure, on the whole, though maybe I’m just missing something.

The first section (the conversation on good and evil) is both insightful and brilliantly written. I was excited by the end of that section, and Machen seemed completely in control at that point.

The second section (the little girl’s notebook) is delightfully weird for the first 10 pages, but becomes a bit of a bore after that, for me at least.

And I also see no good reason not to paragraph it. (Anything we write is going to be read by real humans, and real humans are easily bored and distracted. Give them information and images in digestible chunks.)

I like the matter-of-fact transition to the final section, but find the section itself vague, confusing, unmoving, and somewhat spiritually pretentious. It certainly doesn’t live up to the ominous promise of the opening discussion.

Too little has been made of the stylistic bond between Lovecraft and Poe, and both take unfair criticism about style from various quarters. One of the things at which they both excel is that both are in constant communication with their readers. There is rarely a sentence where either of them lose me, in their best work. I never start skimming when reading Lovecraft or Poe. There are other stylistic links as well.

100 Views of the Moon

Just stumbled across this collection by Yoshitoshi, which I first (and last) ran across in about 1994.

100 Views of the Moon

dinner

Tonight’s dinner was at La Bodega in Zamalek, with two friends. It was a lucky incident where I had accepted the invitation, then cancelled via e-mail (having misplaced a key phone number), but the e-mail was never received by the other party and a “where are you?” phone call followed when I was about 8 minutes late. La Bodega is just a couple of blocks away, so I was there in no time, having changed my mind about the cancellation.

We were speaking of our Dean (positively, as she deserves) and a few minutes later she appeared like a ghost in the doorway. Even though it’s not statistically so unlikely, those moments always feel strange.

I chose the mushroom ravioli. It always tastes fine, but this dish is mostly a pleasure for the teeth, which we usually do not take into consideration as food critics. What I’m referring to is the firmness but also pliability of the ravioli. It is flattering to the teeth by making them feel necessary, but soft enough that one feels that not even minor damage is being done, unlike with hard candy or even certain nuts. And somehow the mushroom filling always seems to augment that effect in ravioli.

The dessert was a so-so crème brulée.

on tap for tonight

Thursday is an off-day for me anyway, but the entire University is closed due to a new national holiday: Taba Liberation Day.

Taba is in the Sinai, exactly on the border between Egypt and Israel. It was a disputed territory under Israeli control, but was eventually awarded to Egypt by international arbitrators, which I believe happened in the early 1990’s.

I’ve been to Taba once. There’s not that much to it… Essentially just a really nice Hilton and maybe one other hotel. There’s a nice reef for snorkeling on the beach behind it. It was constructed during the Israeli period of Taba (some old travel guidebooks refer to it as “one of the best hotels in Israel”), and hence there are a lot of Hebrew signs all over the hotel. The border of Israel is literally just a baseball’s throw away, most of the guests are Israeli, and even the hotel meals have a heavily Jewish flavor. When I was snorkeling, some friendly Israeli kids came up and started speaking to me in Hebrew, of which I don’t know a word except for the Arabic cognates, of which there are many.

In 2004 the hotel was severely bombed. (I had been there in 2002, and the wing where I slept took the brunt of the blast.) There was a large bomb concealed beneath some fruit in the back of a truck, and I think there was also someone with a suicide vest next to the swimming pool. It was disturbing at the time to read that many of the dead were Egyptian desk clerks, because those people were very kind to me, letting me go into their office to check e-mail at one point. No doubt some of those who helped me so kindly were killed. This was just one of my many recent cases of being at specific sites not too long before attacks. I hope my luck remains good.

Incidentally, there’s also an unusual “triple cities” effect there, especially at night. Taba (now Egypt) is right next to Eilat (Israel) which in turn is next to Aqqaba (Jordan). You can see all of them simultaneously from the Hilton, by day and by night.

Anyway… it’s been a quiet holiday in Egypt because of Taba.

I’ve already done a lot of work, but still need to make revisions to one pending article and write two lecture abstracts.

In between, I’ll be enjoying more of the Lovecraft biography (I’m now up to about 1926/27, so the “great tales” are beginning following his return from New York to Providence.) I also plan to read Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” which Lovecraft apparently ranked as the #2 weird tale in English following Blackwood’s “The Willows,” to which I linked on this blog last night.

As for “The Willows,” though I wasn’t blown away by it last night, it was certainly a good read. More importantly, I’ve found it sticking in my imagination all day today. That may be a better criterion than our immediate impressions of a work, since in the latter case we may be too focused on the immediate emotional impact of a tale, and this might be overly influenced by our mood or physical state at the time. (Last night, for example, I was in a state of utter physical exhaustion, and it’s hard to concentrate fully in such a state.)

But already last night, on a first reading, I could see that the mood of “The Willows” was about as eerie as it gets. And the crowning horror, with the vague yet horrifying description of a creature near the fire, and the Swede’s poignant “oh no, it’s found us” is truly terrifying.

This is also a story that might have benefitted from being made into an entire “mythos” cycle. If Blackwood were famous for 40 or 50 “haunted Danube island” stories, this one would gain in weight from the others, just as many of Lovecraft’s stories reinforce one another through their systematic interlocking. (My favorite such moment is when the narrator in “At the Mountains of Madness” refers to the unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth, the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The least that can be said is that the faculty of Miskatonic University have had an unusually broad range of bizarre experiences.)

Graham Harman’s new blog address

I’m still getting e-mails from people not realizing that the blog still exists but at a different location. That’s obviously my own fault. Hence this post… Does this still work as a way of making the Google results more helpful?

GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS
GRAHAM HARMAN NEW BLOG ADDRESS

For all I know, this may not help people find me at all. If that’s the case, pardon me for what is really a rather juvenile-looking post in isolation.

ANTHEM reminder

Just a reminder, or first-time announcement for some of you, that Peter Erdélyi’s ANTHEM blog is worth consulting with regularity if you have even a remote interest in Actor-Network-Theory, and especially if Heidegger is among your interests as well:

http://www.anthem-group.net/

another Eliot parody

Thanks to Karim for today’s laugh. This is “Chard Whitlow,” a parody of Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”.

Better yet, the following website also has a recording of Dylan Thomas imitating Eliot’s voice while reading it:

“As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.”

more on fast publishers

re.press says they will now almost definitely have the Prince of Networks page proofs ready by the close of the weekend. Consider this remark a full-fledged endorsement of re.press.

If I still had a comments section, some energy-sucker would now write in with a sneer about “instant gratification”– that’s the sort of tedious crowd the former blog was drawing by the end. But I think “What Would the Energy-Sucker Say?” might be a fun feature to add intermittently to the present blog. Giordano Bruno usually had a Latin-spouting “pedant” character in his philosophical dialogues. Perhaps I should start writing dialogues that always have a sneering, contrarian cynic as one of the characters. Then, like Bruno, I could have a clown who mocks and finally slaps the cynic, along with two central characters having a legitimate philosophical conversation.

But speaking of instant gratification, I don’t see what’s so “instant” about quick publication of a book that has required three years of work. After that much labor, it’s nice to have a publisher move quickly. But one of the motivations of slow work is to convince oneself that it’s better work. (Remember Zizek’s remarks about how a certain period is needed between the taking of an exam and the receiving of the result? That’s perhaps why many found it so unnerving when the SAT’s and GRE’s in computer format began to give immediate score information to test-takers. I’m from the tail end of the old generation that took those standardized tests on paper and had to wait 4-6 weeks to receive our scores from Princeton.)

My sense is that publication speeds vary not just from publisher to publisher, but more regularly from country to country. American publishers tend to be slow. I don’t know so much about British publishers, except for my dealings with the New York office of Cambridge University Press (and they were excruciatingly slow). French publishers are known for being extremely fast, but Bruno Latour tells me the price for that is the publication of a lot of half-baked junk. Latour is impressed that most academic books published in America are at least passably competent, and I suppose he’s right about that.

I have a “dirty old man” sort of academic colleague, who once regaled several of us with a detailed discussion of the difference between various European national pornography genres. Some of that was predictable, some of it quite interesting (he told us that many Italian porn films have priests peeking around the corner and watching)… But so far I can’t think of anyone I know who has dealt extensively in similar fashion with all European national publication styles.

more generally

In fact, ethics really needs to be based altogether on the difference between energy-sucking and energy-enhancing people.

Yesterday I ran into a woman I know somewhat as a fringe acquaintance. I made a point of complimenting her on a nice article of clothing, which was indeed stylish. But within 3 minutes of conversation (there was a third person there, male) she had introduced about 4 or 5 topics obviously chosen to put me on the defensive. There’s no mystery here; I know what her problem is, I just don’t feel like discussing it on a blog. And the sad thing is, I really wish her nothing but the best.

But the much more interesting point is the general one… If you’re in a conversation where you’re trying to keep the other person on the defensive the whole time, unless there is a specific history of exchanges that justifies this, then you’re being an energy-sucker. It’s unethical behavior. We’ll all be dead soon enough– why try to extinguish the flames of another decades before it’s necessary?

thanks, guys

Good advice yesterday from a couple of the most positive-energy people I know…

a prominent literary scholar:

“This is the difficulty of becoming prominent and interesting in one’s field: you become the guy to go after, and so it doesn’t really matter what you say, minnows will swarm around you in order to try to score points. I saw [academic celebrity name withheld] negotiate this time and time again. Welcome to the big time.”

a prominent blogger:

“In a sense of course having to close down comments should be taken as a compliment, since it indicates the degree of success necessary to attract the mentally unwell/congenitally rude. I also think a lot of the opprobrium you attracted was due to two things: firstly you probably [have one of the largest profiles] out of all the people blogging, within this corner of continental philosophy certainly, which makes you a target (ie- they can’t access Badiou or Rancière, because they don’t blog, being ancient relics of ’68- but if they did imagine the crazies they would attract!). Secondly your genuine enthusiasm for philosophy and pride in your achievements (which is refreshing compared to a kind of put-on detachment, false-modesty and cynicism all too common). Keep fighting the good fight…”

A genuine question: how do you know when you’re dealing with a “minnow”? I think there’s a genuine answer to this question. The minnows are the ones that just nibble at everything you do and never offer much in return. These are the people, in other words, who think that saying “no” is automatically an act of great intellectual significance. But in the end, none of us are really judged by what we claim to refute. You have to take your stand on something, or else you’re really just trying to knock other people down a peg. And if you’re doing that all the time, then frankly, you’re spending too much time thinking about other people and not enough about the cosmic jam we’re all in.

Of the two people quoted above, I know one in person and the other only through e-mail. But both of them give me a similar feeling of health and well-being. Why? Because they are doing serious, important things, and it makes me want to do the same.

This is why it’s important to keep good company and avoid cancerous individuals. How do you define “cancerous individuals”? Easy: they’re the ones who are looking for alibis in advance for the failure they know is just around the corner. By contrast, the ones who give me a feeling of health and well-being are the ones who are doing good individual work, and by definition such work is always irreplaceable. That’s what seriousness means. (And only serious people can be entertaining, by the way.)

To give just one of many examples… In late November it was my good fortune to have dinner simultaneously with Peter Hallward and China Miéville. There you have two people who are far too busy doing things to waste time dishing out minnow-nibbles. I think my brain worked at double functionality for a week or more after that; nothing focuses the mind like spending time with productive people, just as nothing corrodes the mind like hanging out with cynics and wasters.

ADDENDUM ON THE SECOND COMMENT: This comment even makes a good point about pride in one’s achievements. Understated false modesty is generally praised, because it is implicitly contrasted with raving, boastful arrogance. But both options seem like bad ones. The former is perhaps less offensive in polite society, but it’s just as insincere as the other. The best attitude, I think, it to have a healthy sense of your achievements as well as your failings simultaneously. False modesty should not be replaced by ruthless boasts, but on occasion it can be replaced by fair statements of what you think you’ve honestly accomplished.

That’s why I basically find it refreshing when Badiou claims to have written a great book of philosophy to be studied for centuries, or when Eric McLuhan claims that he and his father came up with the most important intellectual discovery of at least the last couple of centuries. The reason I feel this way is because:

(a) they are taking a big gamble on these statements– the gamble of looking ridiculous. Better yet, the gamble helps all of us, because it let’s us know to take something very seriously, and even gives us the possible chance of an easy mock at their expense. It’s a surprisingly generous act on their part to make bold claims for the importance of their work.

(b) They have the money to back up the gamble. If some bratty 19-year-old claims to be better than Heidegger, that’s a lot more annoying than Badiou claiming to have written a book to be read throughout the centuries. And I think the reason for this is obvious– the 19-year-old in this case has nothing to lose with that claim. At worst, a handful of acquaintances might remember 10 years later that he was an insufferably cocky undergraduate. Badiou, by contrast, risks looking like a laughable fool to all future historians for making his claim, and I admire that highly risky “wager” on his part.

And finally… if “modesty” is your #1 concern (and usually one is concerned only to see that others observe it), then speculative philosophy is probably no better a career choice than particle physics or becoming a fighter pilot. In all such cases you are inherently claiming to have something important to say about matters of life and death for everyone, and humility is not the top job qualification for such professions.