interview up

I’ve avoided blogging during this vacation on principle, but I know Indieoma would like me TO PROMOTE THIS INTERVIEW IMMEDIATELY, so there’s the link to it. (There was initially some loud music accompanying the interview, but it should be gone now. Still, don’t go there with your sound turned way up, just in case.)

Nick Srnicek is also interviewed in this issue, I think, as are some others. But it’s too hard to poke around on the web from this fairly subpar wireless connection.

More on Malta once I’m back in Home Sweet al-Qahira…. But Malta is definitely an A+ destination, and one of the most relaxing places one could ask for.

Grant, Sherman, and a Factory

After capturing Jackson, Mississippi, en route to the crucial conquest of Vicksburg:

“Sherman was to remain in Jackson until he destroyed that place as a railroad centre, and manufacturing city of military supplies. He did the work most effectually. Sherman and I went together into a manufactory which had not ceased work on account of the battle nor for the entrance of Yankee troops. Our presence did not seem to attract the attention of either the manager or the operatives, most of whom were girls. We looked on for awhile to see the tent cloth which they were making roll out of the looms, with ‘C.S.A’ [Confederate States of America] woven in each bolt. There was an immense amount of cotton, in bales, stacked outside. Finally I told Sherman I thought they had done work enough. The operatives were told they could leave and take with them what cloth they could carry. In a few minutes cotton and factory were in a blaze.”

props for zerO Books

Here’s part of the review:

“Zer0 books (founded by the charismatic Tariq Goddard) represent a tangible (as in physical) re-engagement with culture and thought. Positioning themselves beyond the ‘striplit malls’ of mass-media and the ‘neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy’, there is a genuine punk-like feel to their enterprise – Zer0 FEELS like an independent record label. Utilising an understated but immediately recognisable aesthetic at frighteningly reasonable prices (you could pretty much pick up their entire back catalogue on Amazon for less than £40) they have already published a number of works in their short existence (about a year or something) none of which have been less than fascinating.”

The “independent record label” metaphor has occurred to me quite often when dealing with zerO, sort of like Sun or Stax in the 1950’s/1960’s. They signed a lot of local talent; some of it panned out big (e.g. Elvis, Isaac Hayes), some didn’t. But it’s all great to listen to even now.

St. Helena

While tracking down some information on Napoleon’s exile there, I ran across THIS OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR ST. HELENA.

It’s one of those places (how many others are there?) so associated with a past event, and so out of the way in the present, that it’s a bit shocking to think of it as having a website.

Maybe Alexandria is like that for some people; maybe it was like that for me once, before I started going there regularly.

There must be other places like that.

Somehow, I also thought St. Helena was even smaller than that. Napoleon could at least have taken some nice, long walks.

the scope of Haiti

Just now I saw that the estimates for Haiti are 111,000 dead and 600,000 homeless, out of a nation of 8.3 million.

Percentage-wise, for the United States with 304 million, that would be 3,952,000 dead and 21,918,400 homeless.

Or in clearer intuitive terms: everyone in Oregon was killed, and everyone in Ohio and Michigan is homeless.

Proust on iPhone

From a Gratton post:

“I couldn’t imagine reading Proust as he suggests, though note to Graham, if it’s available I’d be interested to know.”

Sure it’s available, with each volume as a separate book.

I think I’ll do it. It just seems hilariously perverse to read all of Proust on an iPhone, and I’m curious how long it will take. Plus, after a year or so of Gibbon, I’m losing interest in holding heavy books all the time.

iPhone’s Moby Dick

Moby Dick is now on my iPhone, prompted by Gratton’s post. But it has 1,991 page-flips, and that can’t be right. I was thinking more like 7,000. That must just be a small part of the book, but I’ll keep looking.

hard to find a Twitter voice

I still have no idea what to put on Twitter that I don’t already put on this blog or on Facebook. Bogost seems to have found the right tweet-style: crisp one-liners that are stylistically just a little bit different from his books. There are other good Twitter people around. For my part, I’m still trying to figure out how to use that niche, and just can’t find a way so far.

Making Things Public

Agreed with this Bogost tweet:

ibogost: Once again Making Things Public gets recalled. Time to bring it back in print @mitpress.

In fact I didn’t realize that MAKING THINGS PUBLIC was out of print, but it’s a remarkable (and gigantic and glossy) book.

And yes, I have a short Heidegger piece in there, right next to one by Rorty (who for some reason originally left all his Heidegger references in German, and I had a last-minute request from the editors to put them all in English because I think they couldn’t find Rorty at the right moment).

But there are dozens upon dozens of authors in that collection. Never seen anything quite like it, in editorial terms.

Wait: Carlin Romano praised it? (He’s the guy who joined Emmanuel Faye in dumping on Heidegger in a way even Heidegger is rarely dumped on.)

“MIT’s version of a coffee-table tome, an astonishing anthology of highbrow meditations on culture and politics by world-class writers and intellectuals such as Richard Powers, Peter Sloterdijk and Richard Rorty, complete with lavish art. The first latte-table book?”
— Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

Gratton vs. the iPhone

He’s right about the phenomenon, I’m just not sure about the Moby Dick point here:

“Ok, so the next point is that I’m not the only one noticing a precipitous and troubling drop-off in reading in the last year and a half or so by my students. And I write that not in the usual ‘the heathens are taking over, this is the worst of all worlds and its only getting worse’ way that one always hears about in casual encounters around universities. I can’t help but think that this is somehow linked to the glow sticks they’re all walking around with, providing instant gratification in very small chunks of reading, with everything available at the touch of a thumb. Compared to that, the already big Moby Dick, first up in my Phil and Lit class this spring, won’t just appear long or even monumental, but downright Proustian. (What is it on an iPhone—a million page flips?)“

Grant’s memoirs are 2,667 flips in the medium font size, and if memory serves the book around 300-400 pages on paper.

It’s quite possible that iPhone ubiquity is creating attention span problems, so I won’t disagree there. But I’ve still found the experience of reading on an iPhone to be quite addictive. It also allows for reading in situations where I normally wouldn’t try to read– situations in which carrying a physical book would be a royal pain, or in which tiny little air bubbles of time appear while waiting for something, which would normally be used up in annoyance over the wait, but are now devoted to reading the words of General Grant for 5 minutes instead. I’m quite fond of this reading lifestyle. It means that I’m not just reading in 2 or 3 comfortable spots anymore– I’m reading just about everywhere, because obviously you’re going to have your iPhone with you just about everywhere.

I may in fact try Proust next on the iPhone just to see how long it takes. (One of the great holes in my education is never having been through Proust cover-to-cover.)