when it rains, it pours

Meeting a South African acquaintance in Cairo today, and a Tunisian acquaintance tomorrow. Everyone is descending upon Zamalek!

there goes the wheel

All right, I guess that’s the official end of this Blackberry… The wheel is no longer just thumb-torturing, but is now actually jammed to the point that it cannot be pushed in to select options. For the record, it lasted 2 years and 10 months, admittedly with heavy use (though for my 5 months in Amsterdam it wasn’t used at all– two and a half years of heavy use, then).

I guess I’ll get an iPhone next. There are kindred options even in Egypt, and I could weigh them all, but my brother’s an iPhone pro now and I may as well get in on the new family business.

Blackberry thumb

My 2006-era Blackberry has that ergonomically disastrous wheel on the upper right. It’s been a nice little device for me for the past three years, but when the wheel starts to deterioriate it becomes harder to control, and that also means even more thumb soreness than is usually the case. Time to replace the handset, I guess.

Empire

What happened to Hardt & Negri’s book? Fell out of favor, I guess.

Some of you will remember the gushing NY Times review of the book in July 2001. I was on the way back to Cairo from my first summer vacation away from Egypt. I must have picked up the NY Times in the St. Louis Airport; this was back when TWA still existed.

Having something like a 14-hour layover in New York, I decided to go look for the book. That was a fool’s errand, since everyone in the entire city of New York had read the same article I had, and Empire was completely sold out everywhere.

The first place I tried was Borders, and arrived simultaneously with two other shoppers looking for the same thing. That’s a meaningful memory primarily because that Borders was next door to the World Trade Center, and would be crushed by rubble less than two months later.

Having lived in Chicago for a decade I’m quite familiar with the Hancock Building and the tower formerly known as Sears (what is it now, the Willis Tower?). But I remember being shocked by the sheer height of the Twin Towers on that July morning, perhaps mostly because there were two of them side by side. That was my only time in that part of Manhattan, so the memory really sticks out.

In fact, one of the tragedies of my existence is the fact of having spent only 7 days total in New York. No end in sight to that unlucky streak, but I’d love to spend a year there at some point, at least.

more “getting away with”

Some people may not like this remark, but here goes… Deleuze gets away with being one of the least clear writers of anyone of his philosophical stature. Certain individual sentences by Deleuze are breathtaking, but three quarters of the time I find his central point maddeningly unclear. This goes all the way back to the Hume book (his first), and at times I’m afraid it seems deliberate.

Only Wilfred Sellars, a very different sort of thinker, makes me expend more time per unit of understanding than Deleuze. (My gut sense of the difference is that Sellars is trying to be clear but fails miserably due to sheer lack of facility with written language, whereas Deleuze seems to enjoy being oblique.) Even Hegel’s Science of Logic, possibly the most difficult book of philosophy ever written, is perfectly unambiguous once you’ve figured out the grammatical meaning of each sentence.

By contrast, Simondon is generally quite lucid. It’s odd to me that he’s taken so long to reach this point of public esteem. Yes, the lack of translations has everything to do with it, but the lack of translations is itself the surprise.

Incidentally, has anyone gone out on a limb and claimed that Simondon is actually the more important of the two thinkers? (I’m not prepared to say that myself; just wondering if any faction is saying it.)

Sellars has something to say, but he’s my personal prize winner for the worst writer of any prominent philosopher. The last time I read Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, nearly a year ago, I was taking breaks every 3 or 4 pages. Seriously.