library infrastructure

One of the genuine concrete academic difficulties of living in Cairo is that you can’t really get whole books on interlibrary loan. Understandably enough, most American libraries are wary of sending their books all the way to Egypt.

However, it’s no problem getting chapters of books scanned electronically, here as anywhere else. The process is always fascinating. First of all, it’s very fast. Second, it’s always enjoyable to see where the material comes from.

In this case I wanted a copy of Meillassoux’s article from that Badiou anthology Penser le multiple, which I don’t own. It seems to have come to me from Emory (Atlanta), and the cost to the American University in Cairo seems to have been $10.

This would have been a much, much tougher job up until the early 1990’s than it is now. In university documentation, you still occasionally see certain provisions justified on the grounds of “the unusual difficulty in many fields of carrying on normal scholarly work from Egypt.” And there are still the occasional inconveniences, but to a large extent these problems have been obsolesced by the internet. It would be a terrible pain for me to live here without email or the web, but that’s precisely what many of my older colleagues did here for so many years.

When I first arrived here in 2000, a few of the young American interns knew about a couple of free phone call websites. Those were quickly shut down by the Egyptian government, but then Skype emerged just a few years later.

More and more, Cairo is becoming not such a difficult place to live, even when compared with just a decade ago. I may go to London fairly soon on business and was shocked by the cheap ticket prices, to give just another example. It’s actually quite affordable to hop up to London for a weekend from here, which sounds absurd on the face of it.