The Prince and the Wolf

Tonight I read Peter Erdélyi’s draft Foreword to the LSE Transcript, and it’s a wonderful piece of work. It was nice to relive those months through reading, and certain aspects of the history of the event were new to me, or only vaguely remembered until reading the Foreword.

Perhaps the most surprising fact was that the recording of the event has had *1,300* listens on the ANTHEM blog alone, and presumably even more on the LSE blog; furthermore, it’s still getting daily listens almost 20 months later. (Latour obviously deserves the credit for that, not me. He’s the one with the colossal fan base.)

It was surely the luckiest academic event with which I’ve been associated so far. The number of coincidences (and pieces of technology) needed to make it happen are more than I can recall even half an hour after reading Erdélyi’s essay. But Facebook, Palm Pilots, EasyJet, and the EuroStar were all important pieces of the puzzle. Not to mention penicillin…

Until 2009 (the curse is apparently now ended), I would have an automatic throat infection on almost every trip to London. In April 2007, for Speculative Realism I, the infection was so crippling that it was painful to speak, and I could barely pay attention to Meillassoux’s paper, the last of the day (which is why I was later so shocked upon reading it). In February 2008 the infection luckily began early in the trip, so I was able to get some antibiotics on my first morning in London (not the easiest thing for a foreigner to do in the UK, and certainly not the cheapest, but ultimately doable). It didn’t stop me from being physically miserable for my first two lectures in Bournemouth. But if memory serves, the pain had subsided by the time I returned to London for the LSE event. And it was nothing like ’07. In fact, it hurts even to see myself in Peter Hallward’s photos of S.R. I, because I can still remember how miserable I felt that day.