a fascinating reader message

Michael sends an especially fun message. I was given Pollan’s The Botany of Desire several years ago as a gift, but haven’t gotten to it yet, I’m ashamed to admit. (It’s dangerous to give me books as gifts, because they can easily end up in a stack of 40 others at any given moment.)

Anyway, this message opened up windows for me, and I’ll now get to Pollan sooner rather than later:

“I think I’ve found you another potential ally in Michael Pollan. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, he rose to awareness a few years ago
with his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Now, his almost painful argument
for eating meat aside (he takes some weird pseudo-Levinasian stance,
talking of respect for the animal as Other, and meeting their gaze,
etc, etc.) I think he is actually doing some very good object-oriented
metaphysics in the same way Ian is. When I first heard about Michael
Pollan, I was working part-time in a book store and I couldn’t believe
how popular his Omnivore’s Dilemma was, so I decided to find out more
about him. I picked up his earlier book, The Botany of Desire, which
is essentially a biography of four different plants, apples, tulips,
marijuana, and potatoes. The book details the co-evolution of these
plants with humans, shifting in perspective from us to them and
focusing primarily on the interactions between us and these plants we
find so desirable. He continues along this sort of study in the best
parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for example when he provides a brief
history of corn (it doesn’t hurt his co-evolutionary story that corn
apparently can’t reproduce on it’s own and actually needs humans for
fertility).

I just finished his latest book (which has been great bedside
reading), In Defense of Food. This latest is probably his most
philosophical, engaging less in the history of foods and serving
largely as a critique of reductionist food science which he calls
Nutritionism. Basically, science treats foods as if they are reducible
to their basic nutritional elements, while Pollan tries to show that
actually, food can’t be treated that way (as vitamin supplements show
us for example, the body simply hasn’t adapted for pure vitamins and
minerals and thus doesn’t absorb most of the tablet anyway). His
critique is very similar to your own critique of reductionist
metaphysics. He bases the book on three sentences: ‘Eat food. Mostly
plants. Not too much.’ with the major distinction in the book being
drawn between ‘food’ and ‘food-like-substances,’ those things which
are made from food to look like food, but are chemically ‘enhanced.’
This actually reaches a new level when he talks of science attempting
to promote the healthy foods from different regional cuisines, so when
they say something like ‘Well what makes the Greek diet so healthy? Is
it the nuts? The olive oil?’ as if it must simply be one object, if
not one nutrient (Omega-3s, etc). Pollan will say that while we engage
food on a whole-food level, these whole-foods (real food) is part of a
larger frame (object?) known as the cuisine. So not only can’t the
individual foods be broken down into the sum of their parts, but
neither can regional cuisines. The whole is always greater than the
sum of its parts.

One of my favourite parts of the book is when he talks briefly about
soy, how soybeans themselves actually contain anti-nutrients which
counter-act their own nutrients, so that when they are eaten, they
provide little sustenance. Centuries ago in Asia however, people
discovered that if you pound the soybeans, boil them, and then take
the liquid and let it solidify, you remove the anti-nutrients and tap
into the healthy core of the soybean, getting tofu. I think this is
actually a great example of one object combing the depths of another
as per OOP. Anyway, this may be nothing, but I think a lot of Pollan’s
work is perfectly in-line with what you have been doing, and probably
what the future of OOP could (should?) be, taking objects seriously
and writing about them.”

a good finishing note

One of the best strategic sayings to emerge from the U.S. Civil War was the ominous Stonewall Jackson’s injunction to “always look for chances to turn defeat into victory,” a maxim he often put into practice. (What makes Jackson so ominous? It’s his Old Testament level of battlefield zealotry. When the war first began, he wanted his corps to march into Pennsylvania under a black flag, meaning that every defeated enemy would be slaughtered, with no prisoners taken.)

In any case, this started as my least pleasant writing day in a very long time, but now everything is clicking (“defeat turned into victory”). If it weren’t 2 AM I’d keep the good times rolling, but it’s important to me not to slip into the darkness of a night owl schedule I can no longer handle very well, as too often happens to me when the structure of teaching schedules disappears. So, I’m going to rest on my laurels and try to have an earlier start tomorrow than I did today.

It wasn’t one of my hardest-working days, since I slipped into avoidance tactics whenever things weren’t enjoyable.

Total writing time on the day was only 3 hours and 19 minutes, which is a fairly weak effort on my part, even though they were intensely focused hours. But that yielded a respectable 5,262 words, meaning that about 4 pages of cuts will be necessary (from 17 pages down to about 13). 17 pages in less than three and a half hours isn’t bad, and proves the value of having a detailed outline by your side, even though the pages are still fairly rough. (I mean rough in style; the content is pretty good already.)

The real failing of the day was in taking the long breaks during the tiresome early sections, leaving me with no time for polishing the style. However, I don’t feel in the mood for it today anyway, and it can easily be done whenever I get around to it.

The closing notes of this first chapter are actually pretty stirring, and I came up with some new ideas in the final section, on the fly while writing.

Despite the short chapters there is actually a fairly leisurely pace to this book so far. Given that each topic already has a strictly demarcated piece of turf, it is possible to linger a bit over the set-up, slowly working my way toward the central concepts of the book.

One thing that came up is that I had the chance to show the strange eccentricity of Heidegger’s praise of the pre-Socratics at the expense of Plato and Aristotle. Yes, he has his reasons, but I think they are bad ones. And as much as I adore the pre-Socratics, you ought to sense that something is wrong if your version of the history of philosophy presents Plato and Aristotle as moments of decay. “It doesn’t pass the straight face test,” as they say. We’re just so used to Heidegger saying it that the absolute strangeness of the claim no longer shocks us.

Composition of Philosophy. July 17.

I’d better post this before the date changes, even though I plan to write a bit more before sleeping.

This won’t be the most edifying of posts, because it was a fairly flat and stale writing day until the last hour or so. There was the feeling of going through the motions, not believing things as I was typing them, and merely remembering that I usually believe them.

Days like that are inevitable. Sometimes they have obvious causes, at other times they seem to appear almost at random. The key is not to take them too seriously, because otherwise it feels like a mood that will never depart.

There are two basic options in such cases. One is to ignore it and stop trying and go do something fun to get your mind off of it, and come back with fresh eyes the next day. This will depend on your personality; in my own case, it only works if the suggestion comes from another person. In other words, if I think to myself “this isn’t working; I’m going to go for a walk/to a film/for dinner, etc.”, I just end up thinking about the writing problems the whole time, and just end up feeling like a procrastinator. But if someone else randomly happens to invite me to something at just that moment, then it usually works, and I always accept the invitation, because those feel like gifts from the gods to try to get your mind off of things.

If someone doesn’t take the initiative of inviting me to do something in those moments, then I tend to keep plugging away trying to fight through it.

Today was a bit of both. The sections weren’t going any more slowly than usual. They were just so painfully joyless that I would take extremely long breaks between each one, as opposed to the usual hour-long breaks.

Then one friend dropped by in the evening. Within a few minutes of that visit, another friend happened to call and invite me to something else for later, and that involved a leisurely shisha-smoking evening on a terrace overlooking the Nile, which was hard to refuse.

By prior agreement I limited that to a couple of hours (this friend knows what I’m up to these days) and returned home energized and things started humming again.

I’m still going to end the day a few hours behind what I planned, but you can never worry about those things. I won’t put a timetable for today because it’s all rough prose that was produced today. I didn’t think I had it in me to polish anything nice and shiny. One more rough section before sleeping will finish today’s work.

The current plan for tomorrow is to continue ahead, writing a rough version of Chapter Two, rather than polishing the current rough version of Chapter One. This would be more in keeping with my usual method. (But last night, as you may recall, the polishing was happening automatically along with the shortening, and this had me very enthusiastic about the polishing part. But that often requires a fairly happy mindset, and it just wasn’t there today, for whatever reason.)

Still, it was an exceptionally bad writing day, and I wrote 14 pages. That’s not bad for a bad day, especially since I didn’t do a thing before noon (damned night owl schedule I’m on all of a sudden). 14 pages in graduate school would have been a revolution, and now I can scrape 14 pretty good pages together while not even really wanting to do it. That’s called progress.

[ADDENDUM: Actually, it’ll be 16 or 17 pages by the time I call it a night. Even better.]

“earth almonds”

Cameron follows up with this gorgeous etymological gem:

“Peanuts are bâdâm zamini in Persian, literally ‘earth almonds’.”

“Sudanese bean” isn’t bad, but I’d rather call them earth almonds myself.

weirdest adjoining airport gates

Once, at the Memphis Airport, I saw a flight to Amsterdam neighboring the gate for a flight to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

strawberries follow-up

Cameron, who happens to know a lot about Persian:

“With regard to your note about the strawberries of Afghanistan, I thought I’d point out that the word for strawberry in Persian (and I’d guess there’s a 50/50 chance the village elder you heard interviewed was speaking Persian) is ‘tut farangi,’ i.e. European mulberry (farangi is literally Frankish – as you probably know).

I’m sure the strawberries of Afghanistan are most succulent, but they were introduced to the region from the West.

Tomatos, by the way, have a very similar name in Persian. They are goje farangi, i.e. European greengage. They must have named them before they saw them properly ripened – because a goje is never red like a ripe tomato.

It should be noted that the variety of strawberries most commonly cultivated around the world is, like the tomato, a New World crop.”

I didn’t know any of this. But on a similar note, peanuts are called “Sudanese beans” in Arabic.

interesting remark on innovation

I found this remark on the derLAB blog through a Bogost tweet:

“From this perspective, being ‘innovative’ then does not mean that you have to be the first to do something. It means that you need to treat everything as if it were new…look at it as if you’ve never seen it before and try to figure out how it might be useful to you or those around you. Sometimes these new things aren’t very useful by themselves but paired with other things become very interesting.”

This reminds me of something I read in an interview with management guru Peter Drucker, who said that usually the second person to do something is the one to make it work.

This could probably lead into some more general reflections, but I’m trying to enjoy lunch, while listening again to a wonderful CD sent to me by the German electronic musician FLORIAN HECKER (speaking of innovators).

the Souriau re-release

Good grief, I just opened the file containing the Bruno Latour/Isabelle Stengers introduction to the PUF reprint of Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence. It’s 67 double-spaced pages! But Souriau’s book is so brief that there was plenty of room for a long introduction. And in all future years, if Souriau stays in print, this will become the classic introduction, since it will have been Latour and Stengers who brought Souriau back from the intellectual dead. Will the effort succeed? One can never quite predict.

Anything co-authored by Latour and Stengers, who really seem to click in intellectual conversation, is something I want to read soon. I suppose I should print it and read it during work breaks, though I also really want to start reading my bootleg copy of Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine.

late lunch

And along with that ice-cold bottle of grapefruit juice, I have some excellent beans to cook for lunch. The Pythagoreans would be appalled. As some of you may know, among the many rules of the Pythagorean order was an absolute injunction against eating beans (as well as meat). There are Pythagorean hymns denouncing beans. (Though it may have been Empedocles who said: “Wretched, wretched people, keep your hands away from beans!”)

I’ll do a Composition of Philosophy post just before sleeping. The early part of the work day was like pulling teeth, I’m afraid. But either that will have changed by the time I make my post, or if it persists, I may have some thoughts about how to deal with such days.

One problem is that I’ve already fallen into my usual summertime vice, which is to fall into an all-nighter schedule of a sort that no longer works well for me.

They say you tend to become more like your parents as you get older. Let’s make it even simpler by assuming that you tend to become more like your same-sex parent as you get older.

Am I developing in the same way that my father did? Largely so, I think. Since my parents had me very young, I have very clear memories of them from their 20’s (an age that seemed incomparably old and wise to me at the time).

With hindsight, I think my father in his 20’s was an intense and creative type with widely scattered energies, perhaps too scattered. But then I remember how in his 30’s he acquired an almost fanatical power of concentration, while gradually shifting toward an early-bird lifestyle that made a severe contrast with his previous late-night self (if you’re a semi-professional musician as he was for much of that time, there’s no escaping the late-night lifestyle).

I’ve seen those same things happen to me with age, and I also hope I continue to pick up more of the easy agreeableness that makes him almost universally popular with all age groups, from small children to the elderly. True, people have been saying this about me too since just about the time I moved to Cairo, but it’s still coming primarily from the outside. (As I’ve said before, it is a weird experience to be called “incredibly outgoing” by Egyptians, who are generally the most incredibly outgoing people I’ve met on this planet.) But it still doesn’t have that sense of convinced inner certainty that characterizes the most ingrained prejudices of our self-understanding.

But this is a wider and extremely interesting philosophical topic that ought to be explored some other time. There is still a prejudice that introspection is more accurate than our impressions of others, but that’s not necessarily true. Self-misunderstanding is probably rampant. And I’m willing to bet that we learn more about ourselves through feedback from the outside than from hours of introspection, assuming such a thing even exists.

a tweet from Shaviro

“Dreamed last night about a hidden connection between Freddie Mercury and the object-oriented philosophy of @doctorzamalek”

I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike…