Lovecraft’s GOP diatribe

This comes from page 574 of the Joshi biography. It’s both amusing and “weird” to read Lovecraft trashing the Republican Party, almost as weird as the Old Ones visiting Vermont. This comes from his late “New Deal” period when Lovecraft renounced his former conservatism, and it’s quite a change:

“As for the Republicans– how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

maximum possible day

Looking back at my one-line-per-day journal, which I’ve kept since 1994, a year ago today I managed to write 8,000 words. It was about the third time I’d done that in a single day, but the first time it felt easy. However, that’s probably about my maximum; I can’t imagine doing more than that without utter mental/physical fatigue for many days afterward.

Also, I’m not sure if I could write 25 double-spaced pages of original philosophical material in a single day. (Others may be capable of it, but I’m pretty sure I am not. I can do maybe 14-16 pages of original material if the muses are with me that day.) The three cases in question were all review-type chapters, meaning that a fair number of the words were citations. And even more importantly, it’s generally a lot easier to comment on what others are saying than to express your own thoughts. The latter is quite a bit more painstaking, and always involves struggling for just the right words to say what you mean.

But just for fun, I was wondering what an entire year would be like if every day were like that one day a year ago (impossible, because I happened to be on sabbatical at the time and thus had no regular work duties, which is far from the case today). The total would be an absurd 9,125 double-spaced pages, which could easily amount to about 30-35 books, or one every 10 days or so (provided you had help with copyediting and indexing).

I mention this because you sometimes see c.v.’s showing that certain fanatics managed to publish 7 books in a year, and you wonder if ghostwriters were doing the work. But I think the answer is “no.” All it would take to write multiple books per year, assuming you wanted to do such a thing, would be the following factors…

1. A good and fairly consistent writing routine.

2. Plenty of time on your hands, without a lot of teaching duties or other obligations.

3. Fame.

Let me address #3 by making a point I’ve made before… Don’t compare your productivity to that of people like Derrida or Zizek. They’re not necessarily working that much harder than you are; they’re simply that much more famous than you are. And famous people get asked to write a lot. Even not-famous people with a moderate readership, like me, get commissioned to write new things pretty often. And when you’re asked, and if you’re in the habit of saying yes all the time, you don’t want to let people down. Almost nobody is independently writing 15 articles per year and sending them off to be anonymously refereed– if someone published 15 articles in a year, rest assured, they were asked to do about 12 of them.

So, just because it takes you a painful number of months or years to finish a dissertation does not mean that each future project you undertake will be equally painful or lengthy. Outside resources, and outside pressures, will tend to speed things up as you move along (obviously, this requires a better than average diligence and seriousness about your work).

To make a more general point, there is a somewhat wrongheaded tendency to assume that genuine intellectual life occurs on the interior of a private mind, and that all the outside factors entering into work are merely regrettably necessary corruptions and compromises.

By contrast, I believe (somewhat against the grain of my own ontology, and more in line with Latour’s) that we develop intellectually on the outside more than on the inside. Mental growth is not just an internal ripening, but also a series of external landmarks.

Example: the book I’ll be working on this summer would simply not be as good if it were my first one, even though I’d be the same age and thus supposedly of the same level of development as I now am. Why not? It’s not just that every book is good practice and makes you struggle to find the right words for where your thoughts currently are. It’s also because any finished piece of work brings you into dialogue and debate with others, who tell you to read different things you’ve never heard of before, and raise objections that you would never have thought of before. If Tool-Being had never been published, Brassier would obviously not have read it (why would he ever go scouring through dissertations at the University Microfilms website?) and there would have been no speculative realist gang. Thus, I would never have had to consider how to defend my position against their rather different positions. And I wouldn’t have given however many public lectures it’s been in the past four years, because there would have been no invitations. And I also wouldn’t have a reputation to protect by not making a fool of myself with a sloppy lecture, and so forth. Latour’s philosophy cured me forever of the two-world ontology of noble thoughts inside the mind and corrupt conquests outside the mind. That’s not what the map of reality looks like. We do not live inside our minds, but develop intellectually by reading new things, meeting new friends and enemies, finding new jobs, and accepting new social responsibilities.

You learn to build by building, and you learn the limits of your ideas by watching them partially fail in any given project. Never completing a project means never having to see your ideas fail, and thus the reality test is deferred. This is why perfectionism is a very poor excuse for not finishing things. You will perfect yourself far more through a series of (inevitably only partial) successful executions of projects than through the false integrity of thinking that to finish a job means to be sloppy and unconscientious.

Critchley’s review of Meillassoux

Somehow I missed this until now… SIMON CRITCHLEY’S REVIEW OF MEILLASSOUX’S BOOK.

Just one point of detail… Despite what Critchley says here, Meillassoux has never used the term “speculative realism” for his own system. He simply agreed to appear at Goldsmiths under that umbrella term in April 2007 with the rest of us.

Meillassoux’s preferred term for his own philosophy, then and now, is “speculative materialism.” I was willing to go along with that as the name of the Goldsmiths event, even though I am definitely not a materialist myself, just because it was proving hard to come up with a suitable bulk term.

But then Brassier came up with the now-renowned “speculative realism,” which I seem to like more than the others do.

world academic pettiness alert

Mikhail has the details on a NASTY MANEUVER BY A DEAN in Turkey.

chess fun

Writing breaks this time have mostly consisted in playing around on the following website:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=54641

This one is Karpov vs. Korchnoi 1978, but from the pull-down menu you can choose from all kinds of championship matches. By clicking on individual games, you can even watch them unfold one by one with the right arrow key on your computer. I’ve seen some amazing things on the chessboard this way.

And I do this purely as a spectator, since I can’t concentrate in the right way to be even a mediocre player myself; I’m just plain bad. But that makes it more fun to watch, since it’s pure spectacle and I’m never tempted to make pompous commentary even in my own head. It’s a good example of a critique-free experience. Not that we’d want to have such experiences all or even most of the time, but there’s a certain enjoyment to be had simply from watching things happen.

Old Falaki gone

It might symbolize everything or nothing, but my initial office building in Cairo is now completely gone. They’ve been tearing it down slowly since mid-December. I haven’t been by the site since early February, so it may already have been gone for a month or more for all I know. But today was my first sight of a relatively rubble-free vacant lot where Old Falaki used to be.

Lest I sound sentimental, I hated that hunk of junk. I was fortunate to spend only my first semester in there before Philosophy moved next door to New Falaki in February 2001. Afterward I had a number of classes back in Old Falaki, including some of my best ones, but the acoustics were always hideous in there, and the stunning view of the Citadel of Saladin from the top floors was not enough to compensate. New arrivals to our Department would always get stuck in that depressing building for the first year or two before getting an office in the main quarters, and it inspired pity.

Many of our old campus buildings will be sold once the property market improves, but not New Falaki, which will house the massive School of Continuing Education with its 40,000 students spread throughout Cairo and elsewhere. New Falaki’s a fine building, especially when contrasted with its hideous predecessor, and we all have many good memories associated with it.

back to work

Back to work on the Bristol lecture. I had too much fun last night and this morning walking in a neighborhood not far from here but not on my usual route. On last night’s route I had the feeling I’d run into somebody unexpected, and did.

Despite being a city of many millions, it’s a fairly small world in terms of the number of places where I’d often go, often eat, etc. That’s probably an effect of the highly stratified class structure here. It’s a safe and welcoming city and one can go just about anywhere and be treated with great warmth. But the sorts of restaurants in which I would usually eat, modest by Western standards, are out of price range for the average Egyptian. As a result, you end up running into people you know all the time.

The Onion strikes again

They were obviously awake smoking crack all night before doing this one:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/kim_jong_il_announces_plan_to

is it too late?

To encourage Badiou and Zizek to enter noir periods?

“Baboon Metaphysics”

Looks like I missed my chance at a runner-up award in 2005. From John D:

“LONDON – A heavyweight study of the future of soft cheese won Britain’s annual competition to find the year’s oddest book title on Friday. ‘The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais,’ by Philip M. Parker won the Diagram Prize, awarded by trade magazine The Bookseller. The runner-up was primate study ‘Baboon Metaphysics,’ by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.”

The cheese book is out of my league, however.