never heard of this before

This story is remarkable. German woman who in 1971 as a teenager survived a 3 km fall into the Peruvian jungle from a destroyed airplane, then walked her way out.

Finally!

Finally, I have my copy of Prince of Networks. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to read it until after the England trip, most likely.

Normally I am interested to read my books quickly when they first appear, partly out of excitement, partly to try to record all the typos (they always exist) for future reference.

After that, I find that I am unable to read the book again for many years afterward. It always makes me cringe.

Riding in the taxi back from dinner tonight with two book authors, and both agreed with me. One of them said she hasn’t even read her last book once, and will ask a graduate student to check for the typos.

I wonder how common that experience is. Roland Barthes had the same issue with his own books, though at one point a few years before his death he went back to read them all and found the experience delightful.

in defense of the Midwest

Critical Animal, not a Midwesterner himself, sums up the usual outsider’s view of the Midwest as follows (apparently not agreeing with it):

“The midwest usually exists in writing not as an in-itself but as a foil for cultural production. The coasts produce culture; the center produces grain and meat. The center is a means, then, and the coasts are its end. In terms of travel, it is also an area through which one travels, not to which one travels. It is a geographic exemplum of Hegel’s negativity, that zone through which the truth must travel to continue to become itself against the force of history.”

The most devastating counterpunch to this typical attitude is provided by another author who was non-Midwestern, to say the least. I speak of no less a figure than Alfred North Whitehead (from the Dialogues with Lucien Price):

“It often seems to me that European [civilization] was at [its] best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualizing… The early cathedral builders –even the Norman and Romanesque– did not theorize; they built; and the poets went to work much more directly. We of today over-elaborate.

The only place I see where another great flowering of European culture might come is in the American Middle West, where the start could be fresh and from the ground up… Americans must not copy Europe. They must be themselves, must create de novo. These American imitations of Europe will always lack interest and vitality, as all derivations do…

My remark was that the only place I know where European [culture] can still create civilization on the grand scale is in the American Midwest.

Q: Between the Appalachians and the Rockies?

Yes, roughly the Mississippi Basin.

Q: Why not the coastal regions, Atlantic and Pacific?

They are rather transmitters of cultures, and their cultures are likely to be more derivative. In the Midwest, culture, soil, and food –those three preconditions to a flourishing civilization– are favourable…

[The Midwest] has a human soil further favourable to a new civilization: not only is it a self-selected stock; the country people and the people in small towns still hold a favourably large proportion, as compared with the population of cities. Man’s best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such an environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed.”

super-colony of Argentine ants taking over the world

Click on the sample to read the full thing:

But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects’ global ambition.
The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony.

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

this is your brain on Twitter

Nick having too much fun with the new medium (stanzified by me for your reading convenience):

nsrnicek#harmanrap #harmanslowjam

baby i just wanna touch you /
but this infinite separation does cut through /
gotta reach inside and allure you

nsrnicek #badiourap

my multiples are inconsistent /
so you gotta keep persistent /
forcing it like a militant

finally getting around to writing

Mike sends the following gem from Erich Auerbach. I’ll include Mike’s preliminary description of the passage as well. As for the Auberach passage itself, hang on for the final sentence.

Your recent posts made me think of this, which is taken from the Epilogue of Erich Auerbach’s Mimeses, one of the grandest and most distinguished pieces of literary criticsm/history ever written. Auerbach wrote it while in exile from WWII in Istanbul, and in many cases had to consult his memory rather than notes for the sources of certain arguments and ideas. All he had were excerpts from his favorite works of classical, medieval and modern European literature, and of course the free time granted to write from the terrible shadow of the war. There is a certain modesty here — mixed with terrific audacity — that is really singular.

“The individual chapters [of my book] treat individual epochs, in some cases comparatively short ones, as little as half a century, in others, much longer. There are frequent gaps—that is to say, periods which have not been treated at all: antiquity, for example, which I use only by way of introduction, or the early Middle Ages, from which but too little has been preserved. Additional chapters could have been inserted later to deal with English, German and Spanish texts. I should have like to treat the siglo de oro more extensively; I should especially have liked to add a special chapter on German realism of the seventeenth century. But the difficulties were too great. As it was, I had to teach with texts ranging over three thousand years, and I was often obliged to go beyond the confines of my own field, that of the romance literatures. I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified. I trust that these probable errors include none which affect the core of my argument. The lack of technical literature and periodicals may also serve to explain that my book has no notes. Aside from the texts, I quote comparatively little, and that little it was easy to include in the body of the book. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing.”

another Ortega passage

Again from What Is Philosophy?, this time from pages 47-48 and 49 and 50:

“Each of us is half what he is and half what he is made to be by the atmosphere in which he lives. When the latter coincides favorably with the peculiar make-up of the individual, our personality becomes entirely realized, feels itself supported and confirmed by its surroundings and is spurred to an expansion of its interior resources. When the surrounding atmosphere (which is a part of us) is hostile to us, it forces us to a perpetual state of struggle and dissociation, it depresses us and makes it difficult for our personality to develop and come to full fruition. This latter is what happened to philosophers in the atmosphere imposed upon them by the tyrants of the experiment… Philosophy had been reduced to little more than a theory of knowledge. This is what the greater part of the books on philosophy published between 1860 and 1920 call themselves… The assumption, neither discussed nor discussable, which the thinker of the mid-nineteenth century carried in his very bloodstream, was that in the strict sense of the word there is no other knowledge than that contained in physical science, that there is no other truth but ‘physical truth.'”

“psychic hygiene”

From the close of Alexander Herzberg’s 1920’s work The Psychology of Philosophers:

“Thus the biological value of philosophy is threefold. Philosophic thought firstly serves as a substitute for practical action in the discharge of excess impulse-energies. Secondly, it creates, in the place of harsh and intractable and therefore unsatisfying reality, a painless and tractable and therefore satisfying world. And thirdly, it leads, by means of a detour, to the real satisfaction of powerful interests. And in all three ways it serves to maintain mental health: its value lies in mental hygiene.”

It’s a quaint work that I discovered one day by accident on our library shelf. It must have been taken pretty seriously in its time, since this English translation of the German original was done by a major British press fairly quickly. Much in the book seems extremely dated and even implausible. But somehow I still enjoy it.

weird call

Now that has to be the weirdest call I ever received… Vodafone woke me up from a nap.

Why? To tell me that I’m a “special customer” and will receive 25% off my next bill.

Sounds like a set-up to sell me something, right? Especially since I was initially, understandably I think, a bit snippy to find out it was only Vodafone who woke me up from deep sleep, and noticing my snippy tone the nice woman on the other end asked if it was a “bad time” to talk. Since the sleep part was already ruined, I figured I’d just get the sales schlock over with and asked her to go ahead and proceed.

But nope, that was it. She just wanted to know if it was a bad time to tell me that I’m a special customer and will receive 25% off my next bill. Nothing else.

Let me just say- if that was a prank call, it was genius.

another Onion avant-garde literature piece

And I hadn’t even seen this one before! Hat-tip, Karim M.:

Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play