Dublin roundup

The hotel really is a charmer. The room is gigantic, and has a 3rd floor (in the American system) view over the Green. It won’t be the quietest room I’ve ever had, but my new Zamalek flat in Cairo on Brazil Street is a noise machine and I’m already used to it.

The only hassle is that the Club is all booked tomorrow night for a wedding, so I have to move out tomorrow for one night and then return for the final three.

I decided not to go back to campus today. It’s too gloomy and foreboding with rain for the seaside, but I want to reflect on tomorrow’s lecture in silence a bit more. I’ve seen the room where I will be speaking, which is something I find very important. It’s always a bit unnerving not be able to visualize the space in which you will be on the spot for a couple of hours.

Wandered down a side-street to look at books. I picked up a Levinas collection, just because I had never read his rearks about de Waelhens, and since de Waelhens was the Ph.D. advisor of Lingis that whole scene is my own indirect connection to Levinas. And by the way, the stock price on Levinas is still far too low. The reason is that most of his defenders defend him for unconvincing reasons. Levinas has become associated in the public mind with pious, finger-wagging drivel, and only a certain percentage of the intellectual public enjoys that. In fact, the Levinasian ontology is brilliant: the stuff of science fiction. It’s just ignored in favor of injunctions about being nice and treating the Other with respect, which perhaps we don’t need philosophers to know how to do.

Then walked across the river to Soup Dragon. Thanks to Tom Sparrow for the tip. They had about 6 vegetarian selections. I chose the mushroom and lentil, and yes it was tasty. But knowing that fungus is a closer cousin of humans than plants, mushrooms are about as close to outright cannibalism as a vegetarian ever gets.

Then crossed over the river again and found my 2002 hotel. It has sentimental value, because that’s where I received my first-ever copy of a book authored by myself, and that’s a great moment for any author. From Ireland I was going straight back to Iowa that time, and thought I would drive into Chicago to pick up the books from Open Court. What happened is that they ended up printing it 3 weeks ahead of schedule. Carolyn Madia Gray, then the marketing director at Open Court, was kind enough to FedEx me a copy in Dublin. In fact, I am now sitting in the very cybercafe from which that entire transaction was arranged. I was able to follow the shipment on the FedEx website going through London. Then it showed up at the hotel only minutes before I left on the train for Galway.

This time, there was a different sort of book waiting for me at the Club– that Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Stories anthology, which I asked Amazon to ship to me here. That’ll make for good reading in the definitely “Weird” atmosphere of the club where I am staying.