Harvard coffee

If you’re ever visiting Harvard, DON’T DRINK THE COFFEE.

Cairo cabbies still for Obama

I’ve been reading a few articles in the press lately about Egypt already souring on Obama for not doing enough yet.

I suppose it’s possible, but that’s certainly not the sense I get. Whenever Cairo taxi drivers ask me where in America I’m from, I always says Chicago– the most accurate answer they would be likely to understand. And the word “Chicago” always leads to genuine delight on their part about Barack Obama.

So, as far as I can tell, and as far as Egypt can be taken to represent mainstream public opinion in the Middle East (Gaza is a different story, of course) then I think Obama still has a time cushion to work with. I hope he can make good use of it.

For instance, both of my cab drivers today staged fist-pumping Obama victory celebrations. One of them followed it up with a frown and, in English: “Bush, shoes.” (Shoes are often the locus of insults here.)

tomorrow

Don’t ask how I know this, but tomorrow will be my 2,500th day spent either totally or partially in Cairo. I guess that’s the equivalent of staying put for just over 7 years without ever leaving.

Which means that I have spent a total of almost 2 years on the road while living here. Or roughly speaking: I’ve been in Cairo around 70% of the time, and out of Cairo around 30% of the time. Is that a healthy ratio? It feels like it, at least.

[ADDENDUM: It’s closer to 80% of the time in Cairo and 20% on the road. Basic math skills sometimes suffer just before going to sleep.]

beautiful room

Just now I was again admiring this classic photo of Oriental Hall, at the Tahrir (downtown) campus of the American University in Cairo.

This gem of a building will not be sold, though other parts of the downtown campus will be, now that we have relocated to the desert. The massive School of Continuing Education will continue to be based downtown, as will the AUC Press.

Oriental Hall is located in Main Building, which literally used to be a palace before the American University was founded in 1919. I gave my first public talk on Tool-Being in this room, in the fall of 2002. In December 2003, Bruno Latour visited Cairo and also spoke in this room, on the topic of “How is the Price of Apricots Determined in Paris?”

Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, and Czech President Vaclav Klaus have also spoken in this room. (Among many others. Those are just the people I’ve seen there personally.)

on intellectual correctness

I just saw the following sentence in a story about a train accident outside Mumbai:

“India’s rail network, which crisscrosses the country, has been marred by a poor safety record.”

The typical language nitpicker might find fault with this sentence: after all, doesn’t any rail network, by definition, crisscross a country? etc. etc.

But I find it to be an excellently written sentence for a news story. Just saying “India’s rail network has been marred by a poor safety record” would be factually accurate, but completely bland.

Adding “which crisscrosses the country” may technically be redundant, but it adds intensity and special emphasis, and creates a sense (an accurate one, too) of lively sprawl about the Indian rail network, while dramatically contrasting it with a lingering sense of danger from the poor safety record.

Some people continue to think that “good writing” simply means conveying clear and accurate facts without contradiction and with as much economy as possible. That’s not true. Good writing means bringing things to life rather than merely abandoning them to clarity and economy.

And this is why good writing is perhaps the most important instrument of philosophy. To present something clearly and economically is at best only Step One of the philosopher’s job. We can see things clearly and economically while still seeing them purely externally and superficially. In every topic there is much that escapes exact definition, and you need to be able to hint vividly at it, to give additional texture and depth to your subject matter.

One professor I knew of would always smugly demand “good plain English” of student papers. Fair enough. Good plain English is better than muddled, obscure English. But it’s insufficient. The demand for good plain English assumes that fuzziness and lack of precision are the major problem with most people’s work. I would argue, on the contrary, that an excess of clarity and precision is often the problem, since not everything in the world is clear and precise– or at least not at the outset.

Clarity is merely a useful tool or means to an end. The real goal is lucidity. And lucidity demands that we admit the dark spots on the map when they are there.

I really don’t mean to keep picking on analytic philosophers, because as a group they are superior to the continental tradition in a number of ways (I’m afraid I’m preferring Russell’s Leibniz to Deleuze’s version at the moment). But they also have a stranglehold on prestigious institutions in the Anglophone world, and hence I am not sure why they are sometimes touchy about the critiques of an obscure ex-continentalist in Egypt. But while there is a bottomless supply of clear writing in analytic philosophy, almost none of it is lucid. There are virtually no analytic philosophers one would read simply for the pleasure of reading them. You would read them to refresh your memory about a certain line of argument, not because there is an inherent philosophical pleasure to reading them as one would feel when reading the prose of Nietzsche or Bergson. (Personally, I feel a similar end-in-itself pleasure when reading Latour. Note: much continental writing is simply awful, and I have never claimed otherwise.)

Making mistakes is not your biggest danger as a thinker. Your biggest danger is seeing things merely externally and correctly.

We almost need a new term. By analogy with “politically correct,” I would use the phrase “intellectually correct” to describe the sort of thinking that is concerned only with making accurate pronouncements, with no attention to all that is left out in such pronouncements. Such thinking pays no attention to rhetoric, and by “rhetoric” I do not mean “deviously persuasive ornamental speech at the expense of honesty,” but “skilled attention to the background that is subtly present in any explicit utterance.” Aristotle already saw the great importance of rhetoric in this sense, and realized that it was not mere sophistry, but built into the very structure of language and thought. Aristotle, for Pete’s sake.

Guantanamo playlist

HERE IS A LIST of 35 musical artists whose music was used during Guantanamo interrogations. The Sesame Street theme song is probably the most chilling of them, for some reason.

sweat lodge

Those sweat lodge deaths sound MUCH WORSE THAN I HAD IMAGINED.

The following passage is typical of how J.A. Ray’s attitude is characterized in the piece:

“At one point, someone lifted up the back of the tent, allowing light into the otherwise pitch-black tent. Ray demanded to know where the light was coming from and who committed the ‘sacrilegious act,’ Bunn said. A man, yelling ‘I can’t take it, I can’t breathe, I can’t do this’ had crawled out, Bunn said.”

When the story first appeared, I sort of assumed it was a self-help retreat gone awry through a bit of carelessness, but if this story is accurate, Ray certainly deserves criminal prosecution.

Here’s another passage from a related article:

“In one game, guru James Arthur Ray even played God. Within an hour of entering the sweat lodge, people began vomiting, gasping for air and collapsing. Yet Bunn says Ray continually urged everyone to stay inside.”

deceptive oration

From pp. 160-1 of Dallek’s JFK biography:

“Whimsically taking advantage of the climate of suspicion and the extraordinary ignorance of his audience, Smathers shamelessly described Pepper in a speech as an ‘extrovert’ who practiced ‘nepotism’ with his sister-in-law and ‘celibacy’ before his marriage, and had a sister who was a Greenwich Village ‘thespian’.”

after the Republic

Next up: Aristotle’s Physics. Greatly looking forward to it. I’ve done the Metaphysics too many times in the last half-decade, and wanted a change.

No one in our circles really likes Aristotle anymore. He’s taken to be the synonym for all that is boring and “classical”. This attitude is a mistake. Yes, I know all about school texts and the rebellion of modern philosophy against them. But the intermittent moments when Aristotle enters philosophy have quite often been fertile moments, or even moments of renaissance. I’m reminded of this whenever I dip into Leibniz, and even whenever I dip into Zubíri (I say “even” only because he lacks Leibniz’s breadth of influence).

Gradually, a consensus has built up that individual substances are gauche, that essence is both gauche and oppressive, and so forth. Many of my frustrations with Le Pli come from Deleuze’s failure just to admit that individual substances are in fact the core of Leibniz’s position (his attempts to explain it away are rather feeble). The Whitehead/Latour outlook is just another way of dodging individual substances, and yes, scientific naturalism is yet another.

In a sense, the whole object-oriented program can be described as a weirder version of Aristotle– weirder insofar as OOO’s substances are more elusive, and insofar as “objects” in my usage of the term are a far broader category than substances. (And to repeat: no, I do not hold that all objects are “equally real.” That’s the early Latour, not me.)

avoided the dogs again

Today’s back treatment was even better– I was allowed to use weirder machines, and even had the chance to lie for half an hour on something resembling quasi-molten brown wax. Since they overdid it with the shoulder exercises last time and I could hardly pick up a pen for three days, they slacked off on it this time. But I remain shocked by how easy this has been to fix so far.

It seems absurd that I put up with that pain for 13 months– which wasn’t constant misery, but did make me walk a bit like an old man for the past year. And I couldn’t have run at all, except in an emergency. But I didn’t exactly wait a whole year to deal with it. I’ve actually been trying to solve the problem since March, but they tried all the wrong specialists at first, for some reason: neurologist, hematologist, etc. But finally it was the orthopedist (the TV celebrity) who knew exactly what the problem was, knew it was minor, and knew where to send me for the instant miracle cure. I may as well do the remaining 6 or 7 weeks just to make doubly sure, but it feels like this problem is solved. Nice to know that nagging problems can be solved rather quickly when the right people are in charge.

Those two mean dogs were there again today, in that vacant lot on my route to the hospital. (And the nearest alternate route is about 10 blocks longer, thanks to a branch of the Nile in the wrong place.) I’m getting the sense that they’re not strays, but are deliberately stationed guard dogs for the building that’s under construction. But there’s no barrier across the driveway to that site, and their sense of territory often extends unfairly to the sidewalk. Today they were grooming themselves as I passed and didn’t feel like stopping it to chase me. On my way back they were nowhere to be seen, but it’s a big piece of property.

The peasant gentleman who oversees the site doesn’t have a lamb tethered on the second floor of the building as I originally reported: it’s three goats. What a weird life, to be a goat and spend most of your existence tethered on the second floor of the skeleton of a new high-rise in Cairo.