of marvelous things heard

A friend of mine returned from a philosophy conference, where she heard a paper arguing for a Buddhist intellectual influence on Hume during his time at La Flèche. I like the idea, and look forward to hearing more.

Alexandria

One of the interesting things that’s turned up in my recent return to reading pre-Empire Roman history is just how embarrassed Julius Caesar, Mark Antony et al. were by how badly Rome as a city was outclassed by Alexandria at the time. In fact, this seems to have been the major impetus behind the urban improvement projects of Augustus– Rome needed to be made worthy of its status.

It’s satisfying for an Alexandria fan like me to read this. Admittedly, much of the Alexandria in question is now underwater, and the rest of it is under the pavement on which one now walks while there. It’s all about seaside and climate now… There are a few patches of history, but nothing like what you’d expect. You can see an old Roman amphitheater near the train station. There are also some catacombs, as well as “Pompey’s Pillar” (actually much much later– from Diocletian’s time). Pompey was struck dead the minute he landed in Egypt, though I can’t remember whether it was in Alexandria or Marsa Matrouh.

Even so, it always feels to me like there are plenty of ghosts about up there. And even if there weren’t, it would be a nice seaside getaway.

and over at ANTHEM

Peter Erdélyi links to two reviews of the Bristol reunion of Speculative Realism:

http://www.anthem-group.net/2009/04/29/speculative-commentaries/

Levi on *We Have Never Been Modern*

Still too busy with polishing off the index to post much, so just to keep things moving along, I’ll link to a few other sites.

Here’s Levi on We Have Never Been Modern (along with some kind words on Prince of Networks). This has been up for a few days but I didn’t notice it until a link for it showed up on Facebook, of all places.

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/latour-hybrids/

a small but vital invention

Now I realize why the indexing is going so amazingly fast this time compared with the past… the simple ability to scroll with two fingers on the track pad rather than having to move the cursor to the bar on the right of the screen and click and hold to navigate around the index-in-progress. It allows you to zip around the page just as easily as you’d move something around the desk with your hand.

Come to think of it, I’ve been subconsciously noticing the importance of that little feature recently– every time I’m on an older computer that doesn’t have it. A certain inarticulate frustration builds up while using those computers, and now I know why.

In any case, that little gimmick is saving me hours this time. Looks like there should only be around 3:45 remaining; there may be a bit of real weekend in Cairo after all.

wandering on Planet Index

That’s why I’ve been away. It’s going relatively quickly this time, and relatively easily, but it still takes a considerable amount of time and attention.

Most painful index I ever did? No question, the one for my translation of Krämer’s History of Palestine. Indexing a historical book is brutal compared to a philosophical one– so many more details, proper names, and locations, all of whose entries must be analyzed in-depth to be of any use to the reader. The Largier whipping book would have been just as hard, but Zone had someone else do it for me, bless them. The Palestine history took just about the most miserable week of my life to index. I’d rather have taken a morphine overdose and just faded away with the sunset. It was awful.

With your own books, it can be kind of fun for reasons mentioned earlier… It’s a good last chance to hang out with your book before it goes into the world.

Also, it’s mildly amusing to see what terms end up next to each other in the index by purely alphabetical means. Best I’ve seen so far in this one is Judith Butler right next to George W. Bush.