beautiful night in Alex

Whenever I come up here I rotate through about 4 different hotels, depending on impulse. All are within about 5 blocks of each other, very close to the sea.

Alexandria is laid out mostly east-west right along the sea, with little geographical depth due to a large body of water directly south of the city. The long corniche stretches for miles and miles along the waterfront. The only thing comparable in my experience would be Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, and the traffic becomes nearly that speedy the further away you get from the historic center.

What I often like to do here at night is get on the streetcar and head east for as long as I feel like it, then walk back to the center either along the corniche or on the side-streets. The streetcar is wonderful. It costs less than 5 American cents for a ride (you simply get on, then a ticket vendor comes down the aisle). The streetcar lurches at a fairly uneven pace and stops at unexpected points. Visibility is poor from inside the car, since the window designs don’t allow you to look very far forward. So looking out the window is almost as limited as watching television. Strange and interesting things flash past. There may be donkeys pulling carts, street arguments, or a barrel of flames inside a construction site with people warming themselves.

Then I get off whenever the mood strikes, usually about a half hour’s walk from the city center, though occasionally further. Due to the close proximity of the sea to all points, it is nearly impossible to get lost in Alexandria.

Tonight I found that I’d gone about 10 minutes’ walk past the new great library, so I guess that was again about half an hour’s walk from the hotel. The sea breeze was fresh and brisk, the racing traffic on the corniche was a thrill, and it was alluring to see the full moon move behind minarets and then apartment blocks, only to reappear again a few seconds later (cloud cover is minimal tonight).

I would definitely be interested in living up here if circumstances play out that way. Three years ago I came very close to renting a weekend apartment near the library, but refrained for various reasons, and now there are some complications with my schedule that make it a more difficult idea.

Places are not universal. They don’t all work for all of us. But Alexandria works well for me.

Husserl parody

THIS HUSSERL PARODY is basically very funny, and can be much appreciated for that.

However, many parodies undercut themselves through excessive use of “punch lines,” and this one is no exception. (This topic deserves a full-length essay of its own.)

See for instance the final sentence: “The dispute between Lebenswelter and Gaston-Gaston will very likely come to a head this July in Vienna when, at the annual convention of the Phenomenologists International, the two men will meet in the finals of the world-wide Eidetic Intuition Competition. (15) Whatever the outcome, we may confidently expect a revindication of Husserl’s classic dictum: ‘It is bad to be wrong, but it is worse to be understood.'”

I stopped laughing when I saw the phrase “world-wide Eidetic Intuition Competition,” and actually sighed and rolled my eyes at the final sentence. Why? Substandard comedy always does this, turning into caricature. It’s the equivalent of imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger and improbably saying “I’ll be back” or “Hasta la vista, baby” in even the most grave political scenarios. But that’s not the way to imitate Arnold. The way to do it is to just stick to getting the vowels and grammatical mannerisms right, while translating them into unprecedented settings.

This part of the parody is perfectly excellent, and should have been sustained all the way to the end:

However, the disagreement remains and, to get to the heart of the conflict, let us at once examine a passage in the Seventh Meditation that has been the focal point of the dispute. (6)

“By referring to destitutive analysis, we must not be understood as intending (in the sense of radical directedness-to-a-preliminary-perceived objectivity) to imply that, speaking — as always — strictly within the finite-infinite limits of transcendental apodicticity, the object ‘part-whole synthesis’ is even partially reducible to the noematic correlate of affective suspension (in the sense of ideally intended noesis subsumed and founded by the epoche). (7) For, although this is, of course, the case, our concern is this realm of a fully concrete living of the a priori, is, as we have repeatedly said, solely to lay bare the horizontal quasi-content of this analysis’ teleology. Here we may invoke Descartes’ realization (fundamentally uninformed and absurd as it was, being formulated in a reasonable and intelligible way for the first time in our Logische Untersuchungen and even there still lacking the proto-foundation of a full scale synthetic analysis on the level of transcendent egologicism) that some things (res) are hard to understand.” (8)

Now that’s good Husserl! Here the parodist captures a number of nice features that I’m too lazy to itemize at the moment.

Much can be said about effective and ineffective parody, and there is some real philosophical weight to this problem.

new position

Though I was waiting for the AUC Provost to announce this, it has apparently leaked through Senate channels (and there’s no big problem with that, since they were not told to keep it quiet).

My new position in the fall will be:

Associate Vice Provost for Research

I’ll still be teaching, just not quite as much. The goal of this position (I’ll be the first holder of the office in AUC history) is to help turn our very good university into a great one. To that end, I’ll be doing a very thorough year-long study of all the things we do well and less well on campus. And I have plenty of ideas about that already.

You may also see me in a suit elsewhere than the speculative realism workshops, too.