more on the Haunted Courthouse

Now that I checked in with Iowa Base about Haunted Courthouse memories, here’s what my mother had to say. I had forgotten this part of it:

“We were just talking about the Shueyville Haunted Courthouse – I didn’t want to go in so I sat in the car and this costumed zombie came over to the car and started hassling me. He wouldn’t leave. They were so committed to a complete experience.”

Now that’s a serious haunted house! Hassling people who linger in the vicinity.

They only did it for a year or two, back around 1981-82. I’ve still never seen a better one, and I’m talking about a tiny little town in Iowa.

And then my parents went to the 2004 Iowa Democratic Caucuses there. If it were me, it would have been hard to keep a straight face. Was the Kerry section in the werewolf room and Howard Dean next to where the bloody butchers’ knives used to be? Or vice versa?

campus haunted house

Killing time on campus at night, waiting for the bus, I decided to go through the student haunted house, which I believe is a first for AUC. This is really the first time we’ve had anything like serious on-campus dormitories, and the students need to keep themselves entertained.

Before going in, I saw a few girls come out of there looking like they were on the verge of heart failure. And the doorman did put on a horrifying act, so I was a bit leery of going in and letting my own students terrify me.

However, they’d send you in in groups of 8-10 people, and I ended up near the back of the group, and that weakened the effect quite a bit. The basic tactic of this particular haunted house seemed to be: ghastly humanoid figures emerging from unexpected places behind curtains or near the floor. But they always timed it to scare the front of the group. So I’d hear three girls ahead of me screaming their lungs out, but all I would see were arms retreating into holes in the wall.

So, judging from the reactions ahead of me, it must have been a terrifying experience, but I didn’t have the opportunity to be scared even once… And then I realized that by coming in the wrong way, I had inadvertantly butted ahead of about 70 students standing in line, so I couldn’t really give it another chance.

Best haunted house I ever went through, by far: The Haunted Courthouse in Shueyville, Iowa, when I was 14. Terrifying, and fascinating. Later my parents moved close to that area, and the “Haunted Courthouse” is now their voting place.

It’s strange, though, the amount of spiritual awe that sets in over a group of people waiting in line to enter a haunted house. You know full well that you won’t be hurt, that everything is an act, and yet something like genuine terror is in the air.

first talk show: Halloween night

It was looking like a fairly dull weekend of catchup work, but then I received my first ever (and perhaps last ever) invitation to appear on a one-hour talk show. It’s for Saudi TV. The host will be in Riyadh, and I suppose, sitting here in their Cairo studio (located in a surprisingly residential neighborhood), I will have the pyramids projected behind me as a backdrop, or maybe a night-effect Cairo skyline. Just guessing.

I’m invited not qua philosopher, but qua Associate Vice Provost for Research of the American University in Cairo. The topic is: international intellectual prizes. Are the award decisions biased? Do they have positive or negative effects on the recipients? And related issues. When I accepted the invitation, I thought he meant speaking for 2 or 3 minutes. But no, it’s going to be three people splitting an hour’s worth of air time.

Time to get a haircut.

waking up with a car on top of you

Talk about surreal perceptual experiences! You are awakened from deep slumber to find that there is A CAR ON TOP OF YOU.

weird imaginations

One feature shared by Aristotle and Husserl is that while both are viewed as respectably dull, stodgy, pillar-of-society killjoys in stylistic terms, both happen to have really weird philosophical imaginations. Their lack of literary pyrotechnics, and their lengthy soporific passages, combine to lull the reader into a drowsy state that is not conducive to noticing their weirder moments. But those moments are definitely there.

In Aristotle, in particular, they are sprinkled so liberally throughout his major works that whoever described Aristotle as “middle-aged” (wasn’t it Alasdair MacIntyre?) was perhaps not paying enough attention to the strange moments. Here’s a small but typical example, from late in Book 3 of the Physics (I’m quoting here from the Waterfield translation, Oxford University Press). The point under discussion is Aristotle’s view that the infinite only exists potentially, not actually:

“Third, it is absurd to rely on what can be thought by the human mind, since then it is only in the mind, not in the real world, that any excess and defect exist. It is possible to think of any one of us as being many times bigger than he is and to make him infinitely large, but a person does not become superhumanly large just because someone thinks he is; he has to be so in fact, and then it is merely coincidental that someone is thinking it.”

“Well ain’t that a coincidence… I was just thinking of a superhumanly large person, and I’ll be damned if there isn’t one coming toward us right now– over there.”

Aristotle is also hard to beat as a closer. Here are the final words from Book 3:

“This is all I have to say about the senses in which there is and is not such a thing as infinity, and about what infinity is.”

Recalling my theory of how each person “gets away with” certain things that no one else can, perhaps Aristotle is the only one who can get away with such a statement, just as Nietzsche is the only one who can get away with lines like: “Since I will shortly confront humankind with the heaviest task that has ever been set before it…”

To take another of my favorite examples, Sade is surely the only writer who can get away with using the phrase: “The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign…” as the opening to a pornographic novel. And I do think Sade is one of the great stylists, and obviously quite irreplaceable as a literary voice. (Not to mention as a human character. How many people literally escape from prison by putting a mannequin under the blankets to fool the guards and then rappelling down the prison wall with sheets tied into a makeshift rope? And forcing that maid to trample on a crucifix showed some real flair, don’t you think? Now that’s what I call a pervert with a sense of style.)

In any case, this is perhaps the litmus test of great style, whether literary or personal… What can a given person, author, musician, or geographical place do that cannot possibly be done by anything else? If you can eventually figure out how to answer that question in your own case, then you will have found your true vocation.

And if you’re lucky enough to find it– run with it. No one else can do it. You’re not interchangeable: no one is. But you can be lulled into behaving as if you were interchangeable, serving a function that anyone else could serve just as easily.

Dundee in March

Now that MIKE BURNS has posted it on his website, I guess it’s all set and I can post it too.

I’m looking forward to meeting Adrian Johnston finally. This will also be my first visit to the Department at Dundee. (I passed through briefly as a tourist in 2003. Rarely, in the course of my travels, have I had a harder time finding a hotel room.)

*****

Real Objects or Material Subjects? A Conference on Continental Metaphysics

Keynote Speakers: Graham Harman (American University, Cairo) and Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico)

Dates: March 27 and 28

University of Dundee, Scotland

The aim of this conference is to stage a debate between two dominant strands of contemporary continental thought, as represented by the object-oriented realism of Graham Harman, and by the transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity recently proposed by Adrian Johnston.

Along with the debate between Harman and Johnston, we hope to attract papers from both advanced graduate students and early career researchers on related topics. Suggested topics include:

realism v. materialism, the contemporary relevance of ‘critical realism’, materialist theories of subjectivity, object oriented ontologies, the place of the political in the realism/materialism debate, the persistence of dialectical materialism, recent continental appropriations of eliminative materialism, realism and materialism in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, continental naturalism, the role of the physical sciences in contemporary philosophical materialism, the persistence of religious themes in recent materialist philosophy, the continued importance (or lack thereof) of thinking the ontological in conjunction with the political.

Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted to m.burns@dundee.ac.uk by January 15th, 2010.

Do not hesitate to contact the organizers with any questions.

a professional treat tomorrow

Tomorrow, Book 2 of Aristotle’s Physics. Which means that I get to spend my late morning introducing a roomful of Cairo 20-year-olds to the four causes. I love these sorts of teaching moments, because (as with the myth of the cave) there’s a chance you’re giving some of them something they will never forget, not even in old age once I myself am long gone.

a Tarkovskyesque moment

CNN headline:

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

an older Shaviro post

Perhaps I already linked to this and have no memory of doing so. But Gratton’s blog just reminded me / first alerted me of its existence while I was tracking down Gratton’s thoughts on something else.

It’s Shaviro’s take on THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY POSITION AND MEILLASSOUX’S.

rain, rain

On the whole, it is roughly accurate to say: “it never rains in Cairo.”

Obviously, that’s not quite literally true. A colleague told me today that there are on average 5 days per year when it rains here. That sounds about right. And “day of rain” doesn’t mean a day of constant downpour, it means that it drips for awhile– usually 5 minutes, but sometimes as much as 10 or 15 minutes.

The rain is never very hard, either. But today there have been 3 or 4 outbursts of rain, and though the showers are laughable by the standards of anyone who doesn’t live in a desert, their very unusualness makes them shocking. One never has an umbrella nearby, for instance, and as you can imagine it is rather hard to buy them (unlike Amsterdam, where there’s always an umbrella for sale within a few dozen meters of wherever you happen to be).