public apology to Michael Austin

Oh, sorry Michael… Until running across your blog post just now I had completely forgotten about the paper you sent me in early April!

A few explanations and comments, both to Michael and the public readership of this blog…

*HERE IS THE POST IN WHICH HE REFERS TO THE MATTER.

*I’m at the point in life now where I get lots and lots of e-mail. For the first time in my life, there is a genuine chance of simply forgetting even a very important and very exciting e-mail even from a close friend. The chances of this are magnified given my habit of reading the overnight e-mail first thing in the morning, while bleary-eyed and disoriented. Sometimes I go through a whole day feeling good for no evident reason, and then when I get home at night I realize it’s because of some e-mail I had read and then forgotten about.

*Lots of people send me essays to read now, even very long essays. I do what I can, but there’s no way to read it all, and I hope people will forgive me when I fall months behind, even infinite months. Maybe I’ll make it up to them on some other occasion.

*If you really want someone to read something you’ve written, the obvious way to do this is to write something about them. People are naturally fascinated to read anything about their own work, and of course this is how I was able to meet Latour back when I was just a newly minted Ph.D. People get surprisingly little intelligent feedback about their own work, even when they are ultra-celebrities. Bill Martin at DePaul once told me about the time he gave a paper at the APA (I believe during his student years) about Donald Davidson, and Davidson himself showed up– and liked the paper. You don’t have to suck up to the author in question, and neither do you have to try too hard to be “critical”. Both methods fail. Just describe what you see when you read that author’s work. Your vantage point will automatically be somewhat unique.

*Well, Michael did send me a paper at least partly about myself, and I still forgot it! How? Largely because I was travelling for several weeks.

*But… worse yet, I forgot it even though he surely became the first person ever to get an A+ grade for writing on object-oriented philosophy. And still worse, his blog politely states that he is waiting for feedback from me before making the paper available. I could hardly be more embarrassed.

Sorry Michael, so sorry… Sending me that paper in early April is the equivalent of having sent it to me just after I had woken up. Everything from early April has been washed from my brain by Dublin, Bristol, and Amsterdam.

I forgot, plain and simple.

But now I just need to get through Thursday and the week’s responsibilities. If you don’t hear from me by the end of the weekend, for God’s sake please give me a good shake via e-mail.

(ADDENDUM: just did a search, and my name appears *60* times in that paper. And still I neglected to read it. That’s professional malfeasance, as well as a missed opportunity for what is no doubt great fun.)