of things heard

Can’t find the original news, but several people this morning tell me a new poll shows that over 50% of the opposition party thinks Obama is a Muslim, and 24% think he “may be the Antichrist.” And I think that was meant literally. Oh yes, the percentage who think he’s not really a U.S. citizen is also up around 50% among the opposition (though again, I can’t find the original source).

The President will be speaking tomorrow in my original hometown, Iowa City. I’m proud of Iowa’s role in launching his campaign to ultimate success, with his surprise win there in January 2008.

cat evolution

On my morning stroll in Zamalek today, I saw a typical event for this city: a stray tomcat sauntering in and out of traffic in death-defying fashion. Drivers in Egypt are even more dangerous for cats than they would be in the United States, simply because they move so irregularly. They speed up and slow down without warning, lurch into empty spaces as soon as they appear, and (though it would make little difference for cats) even the body language of the drivers is inscrutable as to what they might do next. The methods of driving here are dangerous even for human pedestrians, let alone cats. (But in all fairness to Egypt, I’ve seen even worse drivers elsewhere: Brazil and especially Goa. Must be something about that Portuguese blood! Though strangely enough, I found all the dire Lonely Planet warnings about crazy drivers in Portugal itself to be completely false.)

In any case, these Cairo cats have obviously evolved in some way to enable them to survive in this environment. It seems like a good subject of study (stray animal survival in cities) and if such a study exists it would be interesting to read.

McLuhanite Dean?

Our new Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences is art curator Bruce Ferguson (announced late last night). Not only is it refreshing to have a dean from the arts, but I also discovered while browsing the web that he has a background in McLuhan (somehow that point never surfaced during the search process). All the better. We can talk McLuhan next year.

I’ve spoken about overrated figures in this space before. But if the topic were underrated figures, I happen to think that McLuhan’s depth and seriousness are grossly underrated. I think he’s one of the handful of most important thinkers of the 20th century, and will eventually write a book showing why. (A few articles are already out there.)

Heidegger film

Here’s the trailer for A FORTHCOMING FILM about Heidegger’s philosophy, “Being in the World,” by Tao Ruspoli. It features a good lineup of analytic Heideggerians, Dreyfus included. (Hat tip, Bogost.)

interviewing the boss

Here’s my new interview of AUC VICE PROVOST ALI HADI, for those who may be curious about this university.

just for the heck of it

Brown Jenkin, Lovecraft’s least typical but possibly scariest monster. But this model misses one of the scariest features described by Lovecraft: the human hands in place of the paws.

At the close of the story, Brown Jenkin tunnels into the hero’s body, devours his heart, and then tunnels out the other side. I’ve often reflected on what makes that extra detail so horrifying. I suppose it’s because one would expect a “mission accomplished” from Brown Jenkin after eating the heart, and by the principle of economy of effort he/she/it should simply have retreated along the same route. But continuing to tunnel out the other side makes it seem like there was a spatial trajectory as a key feature of Brown Jenkin’s movement, almost as if the heart were devoured in passing, as an afterthought. (That’s not the case, of course, since the deadly attack is an act of revenge for the hero propelling Brown Jenkin into a deep abyss a bit earlier.)

Dreams in the Witch House remains a bit of an anomaly among the great tales, since as a New England witch horror story it seems only tangentially related to Lovecraft’s usual extraterrestrial creatures with barely recognizable physical shapes. He does tie them all together, of course, but it makes an awkward fit in the case of this particular story.

Issa of the day

Boom! Boom!
Ka-boom! All are duds.
Fireworks.

Hypertiling denounces Italy

A trashing of Italy by the Italian, Fabio Gironi:

“So, my international friends, next time you plan a mediterranean summer vacation, visit the wonderful beaches of Tunisia or the vineyards of Spain. Avoid Italy.”

one point from the Fisher interview

Mark and I have discussed this in the blogosphere before, but it bears repeating:

“So there were increasing amounts of bureaucracy, in the form of performance reviews, spurious planning documents, log books: a proliferating thicket of self-surveillance and auditing, very little of which had any prospect of improving teaching – or of having any sort of effect at all, beyond demoralising and further exhausting the teacher. This kind of bureaucracy involves a kind of ritual acting out of one’s own subordination; that seems to be the point of this bureaucracy, actually. It has a ritualistic function – you have to mouth the words, use the vocabulary.”

On the one hand, he’s completely right. On the other hand (as Mark knows, and has already explained effectively), I personally have a different reaction to academic paperwork : I actually love it. Why? Because if you do it the way it’s meant to be done, it actually does force you to reflect on your trajectory. Writing my research statement and teaching statement for tenure/promotion in 2005 was a wonderfully rewarding exercise that made me think more seriously than ever before about what it is that I’m up to on both fronts.

I also love writing grant proposals: a chance to explain my work in terms intelligible to grant committee members such as choir directors, Arabic language teachers, historians, political scientists, anthropologists. And now that I’m in charge of reading all the grant applications on campus, I love that too. It gives me the chance to read about campus research ranging from robotics (one colleague is in the midst of inventing a robot snake) to gender studies in Upper Egyptian villages to case studies of Middle Eastern businesses. It’s wonderful to be able to learn about and support this work by colleagues, many of whom deserve more encouragement. (In fact, that’s how I largely see my job in this administrative post: Encourager-in-Chief. A little bit of a morale boost to each person you deal with really adds up on the level of the University as a whole.)

And finally, I love writing my annual reports, even though a couple of people have been lazy and repeatedly didn’t read them when they were supposed to. I write the annual reports, too, as an exercise for myself, reflecting on all that was accomplished in the past year.

Nonetheless, Mark is right that it can really be just as grim as he says when it comes to academic paperwork. One reaction I have is that my goal is to improve academic paperwork rather than simply create more of it. For example, right now our faculty are asked to submit their annual publications lists about four different times per year for various purposes. It ought to be easy to fix that and make it just once, and we’re in the midst of doing it. And being a good Latourian, I see streamlining paperwork as no different in kind from making a conceptual breakthrough. (It’s little wonder that Latour himself is now a Dean, Nigel Thrift a Vice Chancellor, and so forth. It fits in with their intellectual work quite nicely, and in some ways it fits well with mine too. There is a lot you can do in these positions to make people happier with just a little bit of effort and reflection.)

If administration becomes surveillance, then it has failed. But think about this… Have you really never been fortunate enough to know at least one great university administrator? These people are a joy to work for. You never feel like you’re under surveillance, you just feel like there’s an adult at the steering wheel and you can forget about it and do what you do best.

Mike Watson interview Mark Fisher

Another good item in Indieoma is this INTERVIEW OF MARK FISHER, still rolling from the momentum of Capitalist Realism.