another from Issa

Haven’t posted any Issa poems in awhile:

The rice-growing region’s
lucky, lucky
heat.

And Cairo’s unlucky, unlucky heat. It’s another ridiculous day, and I can’t even bring myself to make the 10-minute walk to see a possibly good second half of North Korea vs. Portugal (the Portuguese now up 1-0; who thought the North Koreans would turn out to be a formidable opponent in this Cup?). [ADDENDUM: Not so formidable. 7-0 win for Portugal after North Korea collapses in the second half.]

One of yesterday’s choice remarks from the ESPN GameCast guy:

Italy tries something clever with the free kick, but they succeed only in confusing themselves.

Being and Time

Just received a notice from Amazon that SUNY Press is putting out a revised version of Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time, with the revisions apparently made by Dennis Schmidt.

The more the merrier, but I never quite understood what the problem supposedly was with the original Macquarrie & Robinson translation. There are a few weird hyphenated coinages in there, yes, but the fact they were able to nail it well enough in the 1960’s that the translation is still used almost half a century later is a remarkable achievement. Most translations don’t last that long.

And besides, I kind of like de-severance for Ent-fernung. I say that half-jokingly, but what I mean is that Macquarrie & Robinson gave us a sort of King James Bible of Anglophone Heidegger studies, and even its weirdnesses have soaked into our bones by now. I’d be perfectly happy to know it would be around for another century or so.

I did actually reread all the main English Heidegger translations not too long ago, in 2005. The occasion for doing so was writing Heidegger Explained. Even though that book uses no footnotes or quotations, I wanted to relive the experience of a first-time reader of Heidegger in English. And on the whole, I didn’t find the translations too bad. (Not to shoot fish in a barrel, but the Beiträge was the main exception. “Abground” is hard to forgive as a new English word. Let’s hope the OED has tough doormen these days.)

There’s a saying in the military that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” You could give an academic version of the first half of that sentence by saying “amateurs nitpick translations.” There’s no easier way to look clever than to strike a pose as being appalled by some piece of translation or other. (Which is not to say that bad translations do not exist, just to say that the ratio in academia of complaints about bad translations to actual bad translations is relatively high.)

Anthony Paul on Laruelle

Anthony Paul Smith, who likes Laruelle better than I do, thinks I actually overstate Laruelle’s potential impact. See the following useful post. (I’m on a machine with popup blockers and so have to just list the URL for now.)

http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/on-the-difficulty-of-writing-on-laruelle/

I don’t think I agree that Brassier’s remarks on Laruelle are harsher than Meillassoux’s, but perhaps the case can be made as Anthony Paul tries to do.

it’s the scientists’ turn to be mocked

Someone recently sent me a link to SNARXIV, a random parody of the Arxiv site where scientific preprints are posted.

This is a necessary step. One of the obvious problems with Sokal’s hoax and all the various postmodernism generators (all of which I heartily applaud) is that they were taken to be deadly rips on postmodernism. But I always interpreted their success more as rips on academicism more generally. And it’s perfectly true that the academic discourse of the natural sciences ought to be as susceptible to parody as that of “theory” in the humanities. (And sorry, but that use of the word “theory” has always sickened me and continues to sicken me.)

And furthermore, let’s always remember that it’s not only bad things that can be parodied. Those deadly parodies of Rilke didn’t make me stop liking Rilke, for instance. And absolutely anyone can be nailed by a good comedian doing an impersonation.

Sample parody abstract from Snarxiv:

Orientifold Planes
O. L. Randall, X. Strassler, E. Euler, V. Einstein, T. Bogoliubov
Comments: 9 pages, reference added
Subjects: High Energy Physics – Phenomenology (hep-ph)

Geometric Langlands-duality in low-energy Effective Theories offers the possibility of reviewing the extension of M-Theory deformed by local F-terms. Thus, among mathematicians, partial progress was made on field line inflation to explore questions such as the Clebsch-Gordon decomposition conjecture, at least in the context of chaos. We determine an elaborate correspondence between cosmic rays at the weak scale and bubbles in the interstellar medium. The Clebsch-Gordon decomposition depends, consequently, on whether large mass fluctuations after reheating turn out to be equivalent to the formulation of type IIB strings deformed by loop operators. After explaining instantons in the CMB, we discover that U-duality on an E_7 bundle over K3s fibered over a del-Pezzo can be brought to bear in extending a conifold singularity at ATLAS. Given this, our work may seem quite extraordinary.

the L.A. Ring

These are the opening words of the NY Times article on the new Los Angeles staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle:

“LOS ANGELES– The high chord that opens Götterdämmerung keened out, and the stage burst into light, revealing three Norns looking like Teletubbies in their bulbous costumes. As they sang of the one-eyed Wotan, eyeballs floated into view. Rings and fragmenting lines (Wotan’s broken spear?) appeared on a scrim, and spectral figures representing time’s passage floated across the stage.”

And on the second page:

“Some Wagnerites were put off by reports about Mr. Freyer’s staging, rooted in Brecht’s theater of alienation and rife with light sabers, LED lighting strips, garish costumes, masks, a huge puppet head worn by Alberich straight out of an Otto Dix Expressionist painting and whimsical touches, like turning Siegfried’s magic helmet into a golden top hat.”

Every Ring staging has to have its new gimmicks, and they always seem to be stated right at the front of the reviews. This suggests a fun new party game: concoct an imaginary Ring Cycle.

Or better yet, some website ought to provide a “Ring Cycle Generator,” in the spirit of the postmodernism generator and the Kant simulator. It could begin with a random world city, and then serve up randomly chosen bits of staging information.

But as for real-life Rings, I remember a great review of the one in Bangkok a few years ago, which did have a heavily Asian theme. And as an undergraduate I was delighted by reports that the Seattle Ring had Wotan wearing a sombrero and an eyepatch.

The following is an actual image from L.A.’s Götterdämmerung. Looks like a dream come true for The Onion (and I say that without sarcasm; I like the looks of this staging):

old-fashioned dreams

Recently I was reading about Chief Tecumseh’s dream at the time of initiation into manhood (during the required period of solitude and fasting in his tribe). And the dream was something like this: a shooting star turned into a panther (the tribal emblem) and chased away a dragon. This was considered a good omen, for obvious reasons.

Similar sorts of dreams are, of course, reported constantly by ancient historians, but I doubt that any of us have dreams of this kind anymore.

On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time reading Freud, for instance, you’ll find yourself having a number of almost comically Freudian dreams right away, as if your unconscious were trying to give Freud what he wants.

There’s been some talk lately (I think I linked to an NY Times article on this topic) about medical symptoms not being natural and physical, but being drawn from a cultural repertoire of one’s time and place. For example, anorexia seems to have been solely Western initially, and “running amok” where reasonable untroubled males suddenly go on crazed killing sprees without warning seems to be a Southeast Asian disorder. (These examples come from the article; I can’t vouch myself for the geographical specificity of them.)

If medical symptoms can really be cooked up by one’s body in response to available cultural types, then it would seem even easier for dreams to adapt themselves to these types. Maybe there will again come a day when people dream in heroic, omen-like fashion rather than in the manner of disguised wish-fulfillments.

3-1 Brazil

But Kaka was red-carded and will miss the Portugal match. (Of course, Brazil has pretty much advanced now anyway.) And Drogba played all night and scored on a header for Ivory Coast.

Oh, the GameCast guy says Brazil has mathematically clinched an advance. I hadn’t tried to calculate it yet, but I’ll trust what he says. So, Kaka gets a rest.

flat ontologies and administrators

Michael wries:

“[Latour is] Vice President for Research and now you are Associate Provost for Research Administration. An interesting and spooky turn in the intertwined saga of the Prince and the Wolf.”

Yes, though I think it makes sense.

A sizable number of intellectuals despise all administrators, politicians, and other such figures as hopelessly compromised mediocrities. From a Badiouian perspective, for instance, such people could only represent the “state of the situation,” not truth. Latour disagrees, and so do I, and there is a philosophical basis for this in both cases (though it is somewhat stronger in Latour’s case than in mine).

Latour in Irreductions talks about how moving the furniture around in your apartment is no different from a Kuhnian paradigm shift. A window washer moving his head around at different angles to see if the streak is still on the glass is no different from Popperian falsification. Manipulating subatomic particles in an accelerator is no different from putting varnish on a canoe or arguing with your spouse. (He uses all these examples himself.) Latour is able to show up to an invited philosophy lecture and speak about how the price of apricots in Paris is determined each day.

It’s clear why this fits his philosophy, which is a very flat ontology indeed. All forms of shifting actors around into powerful combinations are in principle equivalent. And so it follows that for Bruno Latour, operating research policy at a major university is no different in kind from writing his next book.

It’s slightly different for me, since I don’t have a completely flat ontology. Like Badiou, I agree that much that happens changes nothing, since (unlike for Latour) I have a distinction between real and sensual realms and the former is sometimes not affected at all by the sideshows underway in the latter.

Nonetheless, I do still have a flat ontology in the sense that, as for Latour, Adidas shoes are just as real as wooden peasant clogs and advertisting jingles as real as Hölderlinian hymns; the order of rank between these comes later.

Like Latour, I don’t see any difference in kind between running university research policy and writing my next book. And I like working hard and organizing and clarifying things that used to be messy, and these are personality traits that Latour and I do share in common. It may be chance that we were both offered such positions at some point, but not chance at all that we would both be inclined to accept. I can think of many very capable people who wouldn’t consider such a post for a second.

However, I think Latour’s job is busier than mine. (*knock on wood*)

1 miserable day down, 1 more to go

I’m speaking here about Cairo weather. Today was one of the worst I can remember. The high today was 107 degrees fahrenheit (42 celsius) and not as dry as you would expect. Two moments stuck out as qualitative expressions of the heat:

1. Left home with a bottle of water, walking over to the Hostel to catch part of Italy/New Zealand. By the time I arrived, the water was undrinkably warm.

2. On that same walk, I saw a big crow on top of a car with its beak open, looking like it was panting. Watching crows struggle with the weather has an ominous feel to it.

Tomorrow is supposed to hit 109 fahrenheit (43 celsius).

Right now it’s 95 fahrenheit (35 celsius). At 11 o’clock at night. It was disgusting to be alive today.

All right, found a photo online of a crow doing what I saw this afternoon:

new position

Since it has now been officially announced, I can say that my new position in Cairo is Associate Provost for Research Administration. I’ll have the final word on all the grant money, basically. And a new office.