OOO event in Dublin

Dublin is a place I’ve always felt comfortable. It’s also the place where I received my first copy of my first book via FedEx, obviously a good memory. And furthermore, UCD gave me insanely good treatment as a visiting speaker two years ago– they gave me an office, and a bunch of cards for free coffees, and some Euros for pocket money. But the office was the real shocker.

In any case, Dublin will now be host to the following event this Friday, and I’m sorry to miss it:

Public Discussion and Seminar: What is an Object?

The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Please join us for discussions which look at how the question, “What is an Object?” might be answered from different artistic, philosophical and theoretical perspectives.

Public Discussion: 4.30pm. Thursday 24th Feb. 2011

Participants will include:

Noel Fitzpatrick

Hermeneutics, phenomenology and intentional objects

(Noel is Research Coordinator, Fine Art, D.I.T)

Tim Stott

Systems, play and objects

(Tim is a writer and lecturer, D.I.T)

Isabel Nolan

What does it mean to try and make a new thing?

(Isabel is an artist represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin)

Seminar, 11.00am, Friday 25th Feb.

On Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus; Object Orientated Philosophy and the occult strangeness of things, lead by Francis Halsall and Declan Long (both NCAD). Reading for the seminar will be provided on Thursday.

What is an Object? is the third in a series of public events staged, by MA ACW (www.acw.ie), in the context of the current Richard Tuttle exhibition, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

the weirdness of Saif al-Qaddafi’s speech

Jon Leyne of the BBC calls it one of the weirdest. And keep in mind, he was in Cairo for Mubarak’s recent bizarro speeches:

“This was one of the strangest political speeches I have ever watched or listened to. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi blamed everyone from foreigners, exiles, drug addicts, Islamists and the media for the crisis. He offered almost unlimited concessions – but warned of civil war if the trouble continued. Then came the threat: His father Col Gaddafi would fight till the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.”

Yeah, it’s the drug addicts’ fault.

Leyne doesn’t mention the additional weird threat that if a civil war happened, Libya would slide back into colonial rule. Yes, I’ll bet the Italians are just licking their chops, waiting to swoop back in and take over.

self-doubt in monkeys

Interesting ARTICLE about macaques passing on difficult questions.

I don’t have any experience with animal experimentation, but to layman’s eyes this looks like a simple yet wonderfully designed experiment.

Gravity’s Rainbow

Not to be mean, but by any chance did Alan Sokal pull another prank and write the 2nd paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow?

“Gravity’s Rainbow is transgressive—not only because it questions and inverts social standards of deviance and disgust but also because it breaks down, or transgresses, the hermetically sealed either/or boundaries and categories of Western culture and reason. Frequently digressive, the novel subverts many of the traditional elements of plot and character development, and traverses detailed, specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines.”

Like I always say, that’s the real problem with Western culture and reason: all those hermetically sealed either/or boundaries. Let us transgress them.

scientism action figures

At MORTON’S BLOG.

why taking Egypt offline backfired

This article explains why. It both angered some indifferent people, and also forced people onto the streets to get their news. Notice that even Libya restored net access after a few days of protests. Pulling the plug doesn’t seem to work.

“‘Frankly, I didn’t participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites’ blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets,’ wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.

‘It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled,” he wrote. ‘Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, “this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,” I went down and joined the protests.’

For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. ‘During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day,’ he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. ‘Tell you what, I didn’t miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter.'”

three policemen arrested in Alexandria

On suspicion of HAVING FIRED LIVE AMMUNITION against protestors. We know it happened, of course. It’s just a matter of identifying those who fired.

“Egypt supports American workers”

Go to TIM MORTON’S BLOG for a nice video from Egypt.

Libya tipping point

It feels to me like we’ve just about reached it:

*Saif’s weird speech

*the defection of several tribes to the protestors

*a newsflash just seen that Libya’s Ambassador to India has resigned in protest over the harshness of the crackdown

Pretty soon all the opportunists in the middle will react to the shifting of the wind.

Libya

A friend wrote during the night to say that he had seen Seif al-Qaddafi’s speech and found it rambling, incoherent, and panicked. Now I find that the NEW YORK TIMES ACCOUNT agrees: “In a rambling, disjointed address delivered at about 1 a.m. on Monday, the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country…”

This is a real sign of panic. Seif al-Qaddafi came to speak here in Cairo last spring and I thought he was quite a polished speaker, and he also came off as a surprisingly decent guy. But I guess that was just the “good cop” side of the family we were seeing last spring; I’m not cutting him another inch of slack after the despicable way they’ve responded to the protests. [ADDENDUM: And if I’d done more background research before his visit to Cairo last year, I’d have learned that he’s not a decent guy at all. His remarks about the Lockerbie case were in fact quite horrible.]

Until now I had thought the capital was still under government control, but now I read this in the TImes:

“Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Sunday night said protesters were converging on the capital’s central Green Square and clashing with heavily armed riot police. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes. The police had retreated from some neighborhoods, and protesters were seen armed with police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. The protesters set Dumpsters on fire, blocking roads in some neighborhoods. In the early evening the sound and smells of gunfire hung over the central city, and by midnight looting had begun. ‘The state has disappeared from the streets,’ said Mansour Abu Shenaf, a writer living in Tripoli. ‘and the people, the youth, have practically taken over.'”

When reflecting on the Colonel in the past, I usually focused on his eccentricities, as in the Wikileaks report that when asked to supply a photo for his visa to travel to the U.N., he told the American government simply to take a photo of any of his many billboards in Tripoli and shrink the photo down themselves.

But at the moment I’m not amused by the eccentricities. The nature of the crackdown was vile, and if he pays with his life in this situation I won’t have the least bit of sympathy.

Go, Libya:

“In Benghazi, the second-largest city and the starting point of the revolt, three witnesses said that special military forces called in as reinforcements had instead helped the protesters take over the local army barracks. ‘The gunshots you hear are the gunshots of celebration,’ said Abdel Latif al-Hadi, a 54-year-old Benghazi resident whose five sons were out protesting.”

The army barracks in Benghazi is under protestor control, amazingly. And with Tripoli now coming apart, it seems possible that Qaddafi might actually fall.

The problem seems to be tribalism within the military, rendering it a less credible takeover force than in Tunisia or Egypt.