the things they notice

Today was the 10th and final rehab session. I’m glad it’s over. My back is now perfect again, except immediately after those bus rides, and even in those cases I can walk it off in just a few minutes. Those machines are great; they stretch you all out.

But the final warning I was given was weird… Apparently, when grabbing objects I have a habit of hyperextending my elbows, and this will supposedly lead to joint damage in the long run. It’s hard to correct strange habits you never knew you had, and I’ve probably been doing it since I was 5 years old or so.

Oh yeah, one other thing that was said, and may be of more general use to my readers… When stretching your shoulders, it’s good to rotate them in circular fashion, but they told me do not do this with your head when stretching your neck. The head, they claimed, should only go up and down, not in a circle.

I try to make this a multi-purpose blog.

laryngitis

This is going to scare the heck out of Tzuchien Tho, who arranged my lecture in Maastricht, but I’m only talking about as well as The Godfather today. Don’t worry, Tzu, it’ll be fine. A friend is watching over me and ensuring that all the right potions, vitamins, juices, etc. are consumed before the trip.

I’ve never had to give a lecture without a voice, but did pass the oral component of my PNdS exam (that’s the one that enables you to be a student in a German university, I think superseded by a new exam now) with laryngitis, which was one of the funniest things ever. I can actually whisper good German, perhaps one of the few who has ever tried to pass the test that way.

on a comment by Levi

First, it’s exasperating when people claim that you’re just saying things without making arguments, and then admit that they haven’t even read your books! There’s nothing to be done about that but hope that others say “please read his books first,” which is just what Levi does in the thread to which I will now point.

Anyway, I just wanted to agree with THIS PART OF LEVI’S COMMENT AT COMPLETE LIES:

“Here, I think, is perhaps a major difference between the ontology I am proposing and the ontology Harman proposes. Where Harman is a strict actualist holding that objects are completely concrete, I argue that objects have potentialities and capacities that differ from the actualized acts.”

This is accurate. Like Latour, I don’t believe in the concept of potentiality. Potential or power seem to me like relational concepts: capacity for a new future relation with something else. But for me this dodges the question of where in the actual the potential is inscribed (“matter” doesn’t quite do it for me, despite my admiration for Aristotle).

And that is where I differ from Latour on this point. We are both “actualists,” but I (unlike all other actualists that come to mind) do not identify the actual with the relational. In other words, the actuality of a thing recedes from all current expression of it, not just the potentiality.

And there is still the other difference between me and Levi, mentioned on this blog a few days ago. I don’t quite understand how he can accept that the relation between any two entities is a translation and still not see a metaphysical problem with causal relations. For it cannot be the case, as I see it, that two things make direct and unproblematic contact and only then translate each other into something rather different. The initial contact will also be with a translation. But there will be plenty of time to do a pre-Atlanta Auseinandersetzung on this point.

the door to North Korea

Can’t remember if I posted this photo before, but I have it up on Facebook now, and it’s an interesting one. Here I am standing at the Korean Demilitarized Zone with a South Korean soldier, in June 2007 on my Korean stopover from Tokyo back to Cairo.

You can be photographed with the soldiers, obviously, but are not allowed to engage them in conversation. The conference room where we are standing has a line painted down the middle that is the actual border between North and South. Since we are at the door to the North, I am technically trespassing on North Korean soil in this photo, and could be jailed if captured for however long North Korea may have wished. So, before visitors are allowed into the room, a couple of South Korean soldiers enter and lock the door to the North.

I’m wearing a U.N. badge, because technically that’s whose supervision I was under. The earpiece is required as a method of emergency communication between the group leader and all of us. The oddest rule at the DMZ is the absolute ban on waving or pointing. The claim was that North Korea airbrushes such photos to show visitors giving them the middle finger, to be used for propaganda purposes.

Mike Johnduff defends S.R.

HERE.

Brazil Street blues

The number of soldiers on my street has actually increased tonight. I hadn’t checked the news in several hours, but made sure to look immediately to see if there was a cause for the new tensions. All I could find is that PRESIDENT MUBARAK WEIGHED IN on the issue, saying that Egypt would not tolerate the humiliation of its nationals abroad. The reference is to reported attacks on Egyptians leaving the stadium in Khartoum by knife-wielding Algerians.

Those are the reports that triggered all of the past few days. And I can definitely say that people here are taking it very seriously (though Sudan is now angered at the Egyptian media, saying they blew it out of proportion). I’ve seen anger on the streets here about Iraq, multiple times about Palestine, about the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, about George W. Bush, and also about the actions of the government in Cairo. But I’ve never seen anger of this sort about a non-political issue (there were bread riots, but that was ultimately a political issue about governmental legitimacy). Egyptians are temperamentally quite mild and likable, but large crowds are a different story and can become heated in a hurry.

Champion’s blog

THIS BLOG BY MIKE CHAMPION, who is based in Sussex, offers mostly favorable thoughts on my writings. (I’ve exchanged two or three emails with Champion, who seems to be a great fan of McLuhan, which I find strangely rare in the UK where he is almost always dismissed as a “technological determinist,” a demonstrably false view: saying that our explicit thoughts are dwarfed by the medium in which they occur does not mean that changing those background media is outside our power.)

There is also at least one extremely rude anonymous comment on Champion’s page, including one in which I am actually called the c-word for the first time I’m aware of (by someone who thinks my name is “Harmen” and strays from the Tao in other, more serious ways). I’m not sure why people are inclined to say things like that.

another thought while reading Schopenhauer

Another thought I had while rereading “The Ages of Life” was about Nietzsche (since thinking of either Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Wagner often triggers thoughts about the other two as well).

The thought is this: Nietzsche was insane at age 44. Although his persona often feels more like that of an Archaic Greek than a 19th century German, all of his writings are those of a rather young man, even if we allow for the more rapid biographies of those days.

I wonder what the “late period” of Nietzsche would have been like. And that’s another interesting thought experiment… Nietzsche as a respected commentator in 1914, weighing in on WWI, a celebrated figure and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He barely missed living long enough to see the end of his obscurity.

more on Schopenhauer

Today I came to campus for no other reason than to avoid the martial law district of Brazil Street, which is still pretty hard to enter and exit. I passed through the library and picked up some more Schopenhauer essays.

One can only have mixed feelings about Schopenhauer. On the one hand, he’s just a grouchy old misogynistic crank who focuses on the bad side of everything. On the other hand, he writes wisely much of the time, and beautifully all of the time.

In what sense is Schopenhauer “wise”? In the sense that he is one of those philosophers who says things that sink down into the very fabric of your view of the world, and stay there. He often says things that you can use as practical tools to become more reflective.

Even while rereading just two of his essays (the famous ones on the ages of life and on reading), I realized that about 5 or 6 of his remarks were ones I had found so compelling 10 or 12 years ago that I had simply adopted them as practical maxims ever since. One of them was his famous advice not to read recently published or currently popular books automatically if you can avoid it, since in that case you are just getting caught up in the whirlwind of whatever the Zeitgeist happens to be interested in. And I realized that that remark did change my habits about how quickly I pick up new books. Now I tend to wait a little while until the storm has passed and the reviewers are silent.

There are cases where you can’t or don’t wish to avoid picking up new books, of course. But I do tend to share Schopenhauer’s distaste for contemporary literary magazines and reviews, since there’s always more Montaigne or Tacitus to read first. Give things a few years to see if they look like they’re panning out. (And presumably, readers of this blog are aware that I’m by no means hostile to innovation. I just don’t think it does any harm to read a book 3-5 years after its appearance in many cases, rather than instantly. But you have to use your judgment, because there are things you need to jump on right away.)

I also think Schopenhauer’s basic outline of the different periods of life is correct, though I wouldn’t put such a hopelessly pessimistic spin on them as he does. In particular, the idea that each person’s character shines best in one period of life is very strong, and it is perhaps also the case that each nation’s virtues are best suited to one particular historical era. (Like many people, I’m expecting Asian dominance of the world before too long.)

One striking moment is when Schopenhauer refers to age 50 as “an age when one has outlived most of one’s contemporaries.” The fact is well-known, but rarely do we hear it expressed so starkly by someone who actually lived in such a time. I still remember my high school teacher (born on the West Side of Chicago in the 1930’s) reflecting on how many of his classmates had died from various diseases between Kindergarten and the end of high school.

It is also important when Schopenhauer talks about how slowly time seems to move when you are young compared with later. I feel the same way about that remark now as I did over a decade ago… I don’t think it’s youth per se that makes time move slowly. I think it’s novelty, and that’s part of why I travel so much. I still remember how during my first semester in Egypt, each day seemed triple the normal length, for the simple reason that my brain was encountering all sorts of unfamiliar stimuli. Other faculty members here have made similar remarks. But it fades away over time, and now living in Egypt, while still interesting, is almost as normal to me as living in Iowa. Indeed, the effect is now almost reversed– on visits home, U.S. Dollars feel as strange in my pocket as pirate gold. America is becoming foreign to me. If it becomes foreign enough, I may actually be able to stomach the thought of moving back some time.

still eerie outside

It’s still before sunrise, and there are many fewer soldiers on the street than there have been. (By the way, whenever I say “soldiers” I mean Interior Ministry forces, not regular army troops.) But Brazil Street is usually a very busy thoroughfare, and it’s strange to see it shut down like this.

I’m no longer so sure that this is going to blow over so quickly. There’s obviously a feeling of outrage here, and along with the petition request I received to expel Algeria from the World Cup, I’ve also started to hear the rumor that Egyptians were “killed” in Sudan (but I’ve seen no news reports to that effect). Rather than being a quick outburst of emotion, this feels more like it’s going to be with us for awhile.