on changing gears

I’ve spent the past couple of days revising lectures and articles for publication, and am happy to report that it’s gone surprisingly quickly. Of all these pieces, I think the best of the lot is the lecture I gave in January at the American University of Paris– remarkably tight, and reads well. It’s out for a promised quick review by a journal already, and maybe soon I’ll be able to point you to it. Latour liked the piece a great deal when he read it in February; I was jaded by it at the time and didn’t see why, but now I think he’s right– it’s one of my better pieces of writing in recent years, and is a good summary of where things stood for me philosophically 6 or 7 months ago.

I’m still dissatisfied by the fact that the first half of L’objet quadruple, despite needing only a reasonable number of hours, took 16 days to complete rather than the intended 7 or 8. I’m going to try to do the second half more quickly, even though the material is more difficult. Paradoxically, that might actually help… Miniaturizing familiar insights may be tougher than writing new ones, despite Aristotle’s generally correct maxim that “it’s more pleasurable to review familiar truths than to learn new ones.” I can’t remember which book that comes from, but he’s right.

I think it’s important not to let long stretches of time glaze together into a giant continuum, since in that case they begin to feel like eternal prisons. It’s good to build little walls that break off one stretch of time from another, and this is especially important during summer vacation, which can easily turn into a three-month desert unless there are variable activities distinguishing each part of the summer. This is also the reason that I like to move every 3 or 4 years at least, because otherwise memories all start to melt together.

One obvious and easy way of building walls to separate chunks of time is to read something you weren’t expecting to read, just to pick up some new energy. For the past few days it’s been Philip K. Dick. I’m not sure what led me to pick up that volume and reread the biographical section. The Man in the High Castle is the only novel I’d read before in full. That’s the one set in a world where Germany and Japan won the war, and Goebbels is in the midst of defeating Heydrich in the struggle to succeed Bormann as Führer. Africa was subjected to total genocide, and all West Coast Americans have picked up Japanese grammatical quirks in an effort to please their new masters.

Yesterday I went and read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which having seen Blade Runner I’d previously decided I didn’t need to read. But the book is almost completely different, other than some character names and the basic idea of killing androids (not called “replicants” in the book, but androids or andys). Even the cities are different: L.A. in the film, San Francisco in the book. Incidentally, the book is set in 1992 (!), which must have seemed unspeakably futuristic when it was written in ’68. But reading about past major android technology breakthroughs in 1987 is a delightfully ridiculous experience. The world-wide web didn’t even exist in 1992. I remember in Leipzig in the summer of ’94, my brother (a professional web person) excitedly telling me to look and see if the machines at the Univeristy of Leipzig had Mosaic on them. I had no idea what that was.

Luckily, I was able to read the book without imaging Harrison Ford as the main character. When reading Raymond Chandler, I’m unable to picture Marlowe as anything other than Bogart.