interesting link

The blog is less active than usual just because we’re still in the midst of the completely unexpected Lingis Era in Cairo, so all of my free time (and there isn’t much of it in the first place) is spent walking a few blocks up the street to hang out with Lingis for 5 or 6 hours at a stretch. We’re getting to know that hotel restaurant very well by now.

It’s hard to pull oneself away much faster than that, because Lingis is simply one of the most interesting people you’re likely ever to meet, and I haven’t seen him in 8 years. He just renewed his room for another week, so I’ll probably have the chance to have another 3 or 4 of these hilarious chats before he leaves Cairo for… I think Lithuania is next. It’s the birth country of his parents, and they’re quite proud of him there and often invite him to Vilnius (which is a wonderful city, by the way; was there in 2005).

Partly, it’s that Lingis is just a funny storyteller. And partly, it’s that he’s a window onto a long-gone era in continental philosophy. He did his Ph.D. at Leuven in the 1950’s, and would occasionally go to Paris to see the luminaries of the day. Just tonight I was treated to his story of a Sartre lecture at the Sorbonne… All tickets sold out weeks in advance. But Lingis looked along the line for the least intelligent-looking student who was most likely to be going to the lecture just for fashion value. He found the appropriately dumb-looking guy, offered him 4 times the face value on the ticket, and the guy eagerly accepted the offer just as he expected. Merleau-Ponty was in the audience, and it sounds like Sartre gave an absolutely brilliant 2-hour lecture, without notes, with everyone in the audience following every word of it.

A few years later, Lingis went to see Sartre lecture in Paris yet again. To kill time before the lecture, he was reading Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialecticque. After the lecture, he said the French students all simply left the hall with studied coolness. But there were a number of Cuban students there that time, and they enthusiastically rushed the podium to get Sartre’s autograph, many of them on whatever they randomly happened have on hand: cigarette packages, etc.

Lingis saw this as his big chance, and rushed the stage along with the Cubans. And Sartre did autograph Lingis’s copy of the book. I’d never heard that story before, nor seen the book.

[ADDENDUM: Also heard, for the second time, his story of taking JULIA KRISTEVA to a Schwarzenegger film in Chicago. He has great memories of her. Says she’s as enthusiastic about life as a 20-year-old, alert and engrossed.]

But I digress. I meant to post about THIS LINK, by an interesting blogger who happened to have discovered all 4 original Speculative Realists independently rather than as a group.