don’t die without hearing Palestrina

I’ll close the blog out for tonight with the opening of Palestrina’s Missa pappae marcelli.

screamers in the hotel

Why would you want to rent a hotel room and then sit in it and scream like a drunk high schooler?

two best live musical acts I ever saw

1. Ravi Shankar, Iowa City, 1993. Can’t be touched. Musical perfection. Never saw anything like it, will never see anything like it again. This was a free ticket from my youngest brother through his U. of Iowa radio show. One friend actually turned down a free ticket to this event. Fool!

2. All Mighty Senators, Annapolis, 1989. A local Baltimore band made up of art students. I suppose “acid jazz” would get you in the ballpark to describe their style. But it was really the showmanship: the weird lighting, the hula girls, the Dr. Seuss films projected behind them, the charismatic frontman (I believe his name is Lance, but I’m digging that up from a distant memory).

The Senators still play. I found a few YouTube clips, but they all capture what I saw so imperfectly that I won’t embed them here.

some thoughts on 2010

As we end this science fiction-like year of 2010 (though both of the “Space Odyssey” films couldn’t even imagine the Cold War being over by now), a few thoughts.

Tim Morton, you are definitely the new person of the year for 2010. Just 9 or 10 months ago I was pretty miffed that you played that “Dr. Johnson kicking a stone” card on us in the Speculations interview, but we were all on the same wavelength just a few months later. I’m sure Ian and Levi would agree with me that it now seems laughable that you weren’t there in Atlanta in April to launch OOO. Much can happen in just half a year.

The Warsaw intelligentsia are also up there on my list of new people of 2010. That is a serious group! Looking forward to returning there soon.

I saw lots of amazing new places this year too, but I’m going to give first prize to Masai Mara Game Reserve in southern Kenya. It was the first of 6 parks I saw on that safari, and it was the best of them all. (Our randomly assigned extra group member, a young Italian named Marco, had been on 6 safaris and told us he’d never seen anything like Masai Mara anywhere else in Africa, so we should have believed him.) There was just one animal after another, almost no moment without viewing some amazing animal doing the sorts of things you expect to see only on television documentaries. That park is a world treasure.

Even the geography really resonated with us. The human species did originate around there, after all, and some psychologists claim that people in every country spontaneously rank savanna scenes as the most beautiful of all possible landscapes when presented with a choice– as if the African savanna is still burned deep into all of our ancestral memories as Home, given how long we were there before leaving. And why leave such a mild and beautiful place anyway? We should all still be living in African savanna instead of in frozen Northlands. It’s what we were designed for in the first place, so no wonder it’s a happy thing to spend time there.

Another place which I liked way, way better than expected: Sicily, where I went as an afterthought, on a day-trip from Malta. It wasn’t at all as I expected, and is geographically one of the most interesting places on earth, the way Mt. Aetna dominates the entire island.

Most productive month: August.

Most satisfying month: November. Three new books published, plus the Africa safari, plus the beginning of the L.A. trip.

Fun surprise: Lingis showing up in Cairo for three weeks without warning. Always entertaining to have Alphonso around.

Least favorite aspect of 2010: that bus commute is starting to wear me down.

Cyprus cultural note

In the southern part of the Old City there’s a Starbucks that’s just a plain old Starbucks, sure. But out here at the edges of Nicosia, the chain coffee shops function almost like bars. I’ve never seen anything like this before, so if this is an emerging global trend, it has escaped me until now.

What I mean is, chain coffee shops here are all large, airy, fancy, and seem to function as a young adult dating scene. The music is cool. Everyone’s dressed for show. The stuff on the video screens is stuff you would normally see at a bar, such as runway models on infinite loop.

There are at least 4 chain coffee shops in a row out here that fit that description.

recovery day

Was tired and probably also fighting some sort of virus. At least that’s what it felt like.

Didn’t cross over to the North, didn’t even go to Nicosia’s Old City at all. Stayed here and proofread The Prince and the Wolf for the last time. Also finished off my Annual Faculty Report, which I and one administrative colleague are dedicated to gutting and replacing during the coming year. It’s a profoundly complicated document in its current form.

And anyway, God willing, my last-ever academic promotion is just around the corner, so these things start to become a lot less stressful. Who cares if I forget to put something in the report now? (And actually, I did forget on the first draft. Forgot to mention that I continued to slave through the first half of 2010 as Chair of Senate Faculty Affairs, which was a lot of work.)

We are getting a new President and new Provost in 3 days, but it’s not alarming because we already know both of these excellent people in different roles.

Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

The best utterly devastating song I can think of.

another download site for The Speculative Turn

Alex A. recommends THIS SITE to download the book. He put it there himself.

Mitcham interview

Laureano Ralon’s latest interview is with philosopher of technology CARL MITCHAM.

Mitcham wouldn’t remember me, but I vaguely remember him. We overlapped at Penn State during 1990-91, and I passed him in the hall a few times. At the time I wasn’t aware that I had any interest in the philosophy of technology, and thus I ended up not taking either of his graduate classes that year.

Besides, I seem to recall that Mitcham was only partly in Philosophy and partly in an STS program at Penn State, an acronym that meant nothing to me in my dim, distant, pre-Latour days. In fact, that’s probably one of the more interesting “what ifs” of my own academic life: what if I had struck up a conversation with Mitcham at a party and ended up getting involved with STS at Penn State? Among other things, I might have read Latour (and related authors) about 8 years earlier. [ADDENDUM: Yes, I’m aware that his group doesn’t think highly of Latour, but I would have read him and thought highly of him.] I’m not sure what that would have done to my trajectory, but I’m absolutely sure that We Have Never Been Modern would have delighted me at any time from about age 18 onward; I simply happened not to read it until I was 29.

Prince & Wolf in the factory

The Prince and the Wolf is now in the factory, meaning that Peter Erdélyi and I have done our final correction of proofs, and from here on out the book is out of our hands. (NOTE: his last name is Hungarian and is pronounced something close to “air day.”)

The project has been “cursed” by strange delays, such as the manuscript getting misplaced in the system a couple of times, but it now ought to be on track.

Peter really deserves the credit for this one. There would never have been an event at the LSE in the first place if not for he and his friends arranging it. Then, the LSE taped the discussion and paid for transcribers. Then they decided to give me the rights to the transcription even though they paid for it. Then Peter jumped in and fixed a rather lackadaisical job by the transcribers. (And then he wrote a very nice Introduction as well.)

The result is a very interesting and only lightly edited transcript of the LSE discussion of February 5, 2008.