10 years ago

February 6, 2000 was the day I received a job offer from the American University in Cairo. It would certainly rank somewhere among my five most exciting days ever, even though it didn’t come as a total shock (a few preceding communications had made it fairly clear that the offer would be forthcoming).

It just goes to show how much can happen in 10 years. On that day, the closest I had ever been to the Middle East was Rome. Now, even living in Egypt in retirement would be far from unthinkable.

Tool-Being was languishing on the desk of two presses. One of those was Open Court. I later learned that it had fallen through the cracks after the departure of an editor, and they weren’t even looking at it during this time– a good lesson for the young that it’s never out of line to pester a publisher, as long as you only do it every few months. Now that I’m an administrator part-time, I find that I even like to be pestered (as long as it’s polite) because it is very, very surprisingly easy when handling hundreds or thousands of inquiries per semester to let one slip. (Don’t assume that non-responses are always snubs. Sometimes, even if your message made a big impression, someone may have responded to you internally in the mind but forgotten to put in in writing.)

With Lingis still in town for a few more days, there’s always the outside chance of some crazy celebration idea surfacing. We did hang out at the Ibn Tulun Mosque yesterday as planned. Later, there was a nice 5-person dinner lasting three hours (Rob Switzer, my colleague at AUC, was also a Lingis student, and his wife Judy also knows Lingis well). It was a fabulous Indian meal that went on for three hours. When it comes to Indian food in Cairo, I generally prefer the less distantly located Kandahar to the more famous but much more distant Moghul Room, which is in the Mena House Hotel right next to the Pyramids. But the Moghul Room was a good choice for dinner last night. We walked over afterward and saw the Great Pyramid of Cheops in silhouette.

Otherwise, I am putting the final editing touches on The Prince and the Wolf. It’s a good read, but mostly because Latour is so funny. He beats me on the “[LAUGHTER]” crowd reactions by about a 10-1 margin. On the whole I think there are 80-some audience laughs on the day, which isn’t bad for a philosophy debate.