some clichés can be endured, others can’t

It’s hard to know the rule for when they work and when they don’t.

Just to give a personal example…

I love the Eiffel Tower, even though it’s an ultra-cliché. Yet I cannot stand Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker,” even though it’s as great as everything by Rodin, simply because I flinch with annoyance at the banality with which philosophy is always associated with that sculpture. I’m afraid the sculpture is ruined for me, and I can’t get it back.

Imagine that your absolute favorite piece of music became the jingle for an idiotic television commercial played hundreds of times over and over again, and you can see how the music might be ruined for you.

I was never a huge fan of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” but United Airlines more or less destroyed whatever remaining fondness I had for the song through overuse, and now I can’t hear it without thinking of O’Hare Airport and their twisted, sickening variations on it played in various parts of the terminals. (Or at least that was still the case in the 1990’s. I rarely pass through O’Hare anymore.)

more OOO and art

In Sydney, SAM LEACH does a show called Present at Hand.

Only one caveat… The statement “SR is also known as object oriented philosophy” is historically false. The latter was a subspecies of the former (despite being 8 years older). Of course, if everyone else wants to abandon the name SR and let me have it, I’ll be happy to keep it, and then the equation of SR and OOO will evolve into a truth.

L’Objet quadruple, the cover

Click this link:

harman_objet(vert)-1

We couldn’t figure out what “Associate Provost for Research Administration” would be in French, so I just used Latour’s job title from Sciences Po (we have the same position). Directeur scientifique is an elegant title, I think.

November 10, one month from today, is the publication date. Spring if you want the English version.

Tony Gwynn news

Tony Gwynn HAS CANCER, though they seem to have caught it early. He thinks it was from chewing tobacco.

Gwynn was one of the best pure hitters ever to play the game of baseball, as well as one of the classiest people in the sport. I wish he were still playing.

Serengeti highway

Why it SHOULD BE STOPPED.