Belgrade wrapup

First, sorry for weird punctuation while here. I could never quite figure out the Serbian keyboards. Things weren`t always where they were supposed to be, and I couldn`t always find certain punctuation marks no matter where I looked.

Second, I would recommend Belgrade, and Serbia more generally… especially if you`re a youngster who can profit totally from the night life.

Third, on that same theme… I`m a bit surprised by how troubling the death of Michael Jackson still feels, and I guess it is more a generational wakeup call than anything else. All right, the guy was born a full decade ahead of me, and other than Billie Jean which I think is one of the great mainstream pop tunes of all time, I haven`t cared a hill of beans for his music since around 1979. And obviously, he was increasingly creepy and unsympathetic for the past generation or so.

But… I witnessed the rise and fall of this guy`s career over many years, the first time I am old enough to have done so for such a long career as his, and that`s mildly disturbing, and another small taste of mortality.

For people around my age, then, I guess he`s our version of Brando. People a bit older than I am saw Brando at the height of genius and then saw him become a pathetic and troubling figure. Personally, I only got to see Brando as a pathetic figure except when I went back and rented the films a bit later. And people ten years younger than I am probably saw mostly the pathetic and dysfunctional side of MJ.

But… much as I dislike mainstream pop, there was a certain snap to the Jackson Five, and as a kid I really liked MJ as the Scarecrow in The Wiz. I haven`t seen it since it first came out, though, and will not vouch for the film.

Hey, I am so glad to be closing down the Belgrade CyberShark with cool employees for a change…

Long, long train ride coming up tomorrow…

no worries, ANTHEM

I KNEW WHAT YOU MEANT.

There was a lot packed into that Zagreb paper, and I know you meant “dense” as a compliment, as one of my fellow speakers clearly did when saying so from the audience after the paper itself. Anyone who reads my books, articles, or even this blog knows that my writing is not “dense” in the sense that the blog in question apparently pretended to mock (I didn`t read it except for the parts that you quoted). In fact, I think it`s important to put a lot of effort into making things communicable. No need for ANTHEM to apologize for a feeble and irrelevant word-play made by others.

The one criticism heard in Zagreb that I do take seriously is that at least one person said that I read the paper too quickly. I should have been more careful about that with an audience consisting of many non-native speakers, especially since both my Chicago and Cairo students have often said that I should speak more slowly (and hilariously enough, Latour even said that my lecture at the ENS was read too quickly). Shortening these lectures a bit would assist to that end.

However, I think the content of “Realism Without Materialism” is clear enough, and I`m not sure why the very idea of realism without materialism would sound funny to people. It`s explained in detail in the lecture itself. Materialism, as I see it, is an inherently idealistic-leaning philosophy (however counterintuitive this may sound), and I`m far from the first person to say so.

As recent posts have tried to explore, there is a big difference between criticisms meant sincerely by people who are risking a position with those criticisms, and the sort of tiny-minded blog lawyering that looks for devil`s advocate bargaining chips in every possible situation. No one would waste time on such a thing unless they completely lacked any project other than parasitically one-upping those who are doing actual work.

In everyday life we all have freedom of association and utilize it by associating with those whose company is valuable, energizing, and inspiring, and tend to avoid those who suck the energy from a conversation or from the room as a whole. The blogosphere evidently contains a higher percentage of the latter sort than normal intellectual and social life do. Others understand the sociology of this phenomenon better than I do, but the fact itself is empirically undeniable.

just so that Serbia is not blamed…

Just to be a gracious guest in a country that has treated me so well on the whole, I should say that the most evil employees I ever encountered were actually in my normally very friendly home, Iowa.

I speak of those hideous excuses for human beings who used to work at the driver`s license bureau in Marion, Iowa, a sort of suburb of Cedar Rapids.

There were two or three of them who were so pettily evil that they drew complaint letters to the newspaper on a regular basis. I never met a person from Eastern Iowa, no matter how kindly, who didn`t wish ill on that malevolent crew.

The last time I went there, it was the same people, but they were all smiley and inviting, and obviously had come within an inch of losing their jobs after all the complaints.

You really had to be there and suffer from their decade or more of horribleness to know what I`m talking about. But the basic idea is that not only were they openly rude, they would also set petty little traps to make customers look stupid. If you ever saw Saturday Night Live`s Total Bastard Airlines skit, it was comparable to that.

In my own least favorite incident, one of them told me to `Look West` for my photo to be taken. Now, despite having a pretty good sense of direction, I don`t necessarily think in terms of compass directions while inside a building. So, I floundered a bit, looking around. That nasty person smirked and pointed sternly to the correct wall, where a gigantic sign was found reading `WEST` in letters each one meter tall. Good God, they were rotten.

Certain local Postmasters have a reputation for being rotten people near my home area as well, so just to be perfectly clear, I do not blame Serbia or Belgrade more specifically for offering up one truly abhorrent human at CyberShark. However, people like this make you wish for a big fat punching bag to work over for 15 or 20 minutes.

re.press faster than Amazon

A final note based on some emails just received… re.press seems to be delivering Prince of Networks very quickly. Amazon is sort of bluffing about having it in stock, but if you order from them you will receive a fairly appalling timetable message a day after ordering, or at least I did.

re.press, environmentally conscious that they are, prints copies on demand in the UK and USA as well as Australia, so they arrive quickly if you order from in or near any of those places.

one employee sometimes changes everything

Even in the smallest part of everyday life… Had to come back into this place to look for an important message. Was expecting the same old passive aggressive gauntlet of shrugs and smirking nods. But her colleague is here instead, and not only is the colleague actually friendly and warm and apparently happy rather than violently sulking, she even has much better taste in music, as has been obvious since I first began frequenting this place. If I were staying in Belgrade a bit longer, I would simply know not to come in here until after 1700 or so. Sorry, but it drives me up the wall when people can`t find even a cupful of warmth when dealing with the public. What, then, is the point of living. I don`t get it.

I`d love to sit in here and detox for half an hour, but this is the last night in Belgrade and there is too much fun to be had. We did go over to the Habsburg neighborhood, and my local friends also pointed out the Chinese Embassy that was bombed in 1999, supposedly by accident… And one must admit, it seems suspiciously remote from anything that might seem to be any sort of expected target. Also saw the old bohemian district of the 19th century over lunch and dessert, just before that.

Music`s getting better in here all the time, but I must go. There may be nothing else here for awhile as I have two travel days coming up followed by a pick up the pieces day.

Ciao for now.

if there is a hell for minor crimes

One class of people I`d like to send to that hell for at least a few hours to straighten up is the following category…

Service workers, generally found in coffee shops and cybercafes, who think it`s really cute to respond to your words and questions with nothing but facial expressions, shrugs, and nods.

Just thought of that because the person who just sold me the credit for this session has done the same thing 3 times running now. And it is not a language problem.

I was once appalled when someone I knew very well bragged about having done the same thing regularly at one of her jobs. Well, congratulations on that victory over the human race and its normal standards of politeness.

Letting someone know that you are putting less energy into the interchange than they are might seem in some twisted way like a triumph, but what it probably really indicates is that you are so short on vital energy that you don`t have much to spare. And that`s a disturbing sign, I would tend to think.

That`s the great thing about dogs… Plenty of energy to share with everyone! Everyone is invited, as long as they don`t do anything really nasty that might be remembered.

by the way, Zagreb

The memorably named Mama in Zagreb deserves a bit of advertisement, even if you need some rare language skills to navigate the page to which I just linked.

Tucked away in an alley near the city center, they host numerous talks and other events, and also house a very nice philosophy library and a good number of internet terminals. I hadn`t honestly heard of this institution until being invited to speak there a few months ago, but many others you have heard of were there before I was.

Zagreb is lucky to have such a place, and I wouldn`t be shocked if it serves as the venue for a number of important events over the next decade and more.

the ultimate lazy day

There`s never been a day this lazy-feeling. It`s a Friday that feels like a Sunday. It`s not just me, but also everyone I vaguely know or have even loosely met in Belgrade. Part of it is that we all woke up to a moderately heavy rainstorm. But it really feels like a strange magnetic field has come over the city.

But it`s not quite lazy in the sense of “unproductive.” All sorts of good ideas have been kicking around my head this morning, I simply don`t feel under any pressure to attack them with much speed. Nor does anyone feel any pressure to do anything else until later this afternoon, if even then. It`s actually a great feeling, as though time has stopped somehow, and we are all free to do private mental things at a private pace, and maybe we`ll do other things later on today. Or maybe not. It doesn`t matter.

The mini-bus goes back to Zagreb tomorrow at the horrific hour of 6 A.M., because someone has a flight to catch. (Nice of the mini-bus driver to accommodate them, but I`m just wondering why, if you have an 11 AM flight out of Zagreb, you would choose to spend the preceding night in Belgrade rather than in Zagreb itself.) So, I will take the train. I love trains the way a 5-year-old does. This particular ride will take 7 hours, but I have an iPod along on this trip, and also have my notebook for L`objet quadruple, which incidentally is becoming more interesting to me almost by the hour.

Michael Jackson

What a strange life he had. I never read any biographies of him or anything, but simply from memory can remember various stages of that life. We`d all grown so used to viewing him as a sort of living carnival freak that it can be easy to forget what he was, say, during the late 1970`s. Even back then he was maybe just a bit too pop for my pre-teen tastes, but there was also a remarkable originality and charisma to his talent back then, beyond the usual cookie-cutter pop stardom.

I suppose my own hypothesis is the obvious one… his leap from stardom to megastardom was so extreme that he basically lost his mind. But I`m not sure there are any lessons to be learned from this. Some people do lose their minds at that point (Kurt Cobain made similar complaints). But then again, some people only flourish psychologically in the wake of public stardom.