on tap

Taking Lingis sightseeing today. (This is so bizarre, to have him living in Cairo for a few weeks.) He was here a couple of times in the past, but hasn’t seen everything by any means. In particular, he has never been to the IBN TULUN MOSQUE, which is one of my favorite places in Cairo, so we’ll go there.

Tomorrow will be the 10th anniversary of my receiving a job offer from the American University in Cairo, and I suppose I should celebrate in some way, since there are only a handful of life-changing days that one has of that magnitude. But what amuses me is that there was a bit of AUC pre-history involving people I know, before I was ever here.

*1998, my fellow DePaul student Kelly Coble came here first, and remained until 2002, so we overlapped in the same Department for a couple of years.

*c. 1995, Lingis was here as a visiting speaker

*early 1990’s, my youngest brother was always interested in things Middle East, and really wanted to come here as a student, but for various reasons it never worked out. (And I do remember thinking that the American University in Cairo sounded pretty interesting.)

*1985 or 1986, weirdest of all… A visiting speaker from France was invited to AUC. He was a veteran world traveller, and brought along his talented son, who usually resisted his father’s travel invitations.

That speaker was the economic anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, and his young son was of course named Quentin. And it turns out that Quentin Meillassoux, fresh out of lycée, went for a camel ride in mid-1980’s Cairo with several people who would be my senior colleagues 15 years later. (If you’re looking for the really, really early pre-history of Speculative Realism, then Quentin Meillassoux in Cairo has to be the starting point.)

There’s another Meilllassoux anecdote I never knew from about that same time. (He just told me this in Paris when I was there in September.) Right out of lycée, he and a few of his friends took a bus trip all the way across Canada. I knew he had never been to the USA, but was wrong to assume that he had never been to North America at all.