Morton’s keynote at Temple University

HERE. I’ll probably be able to attend, fortunately.

Iran and nuclear power safety

The following LINK was sent to me this evening.

the inertia of human worries

There’s a strange human experience that everyone knows, and which becomes more common as you grow older and get stuck more easily in habits. I’m referring to those cases where you’re worried about something, then someone eliminates the worry completely by providing new information, and then a few hours later you’re worried about it again, having somehow forgotten that the problem is now completely solved.

Sometimes this happens over the very long haul. The most obvious example, in my own case, is that before trips I’m always annoyed that I don’t know what sort of weather to dress for in the place I’m going. And from time to time I realize: “this problem was solved long ago for anyone with internet access.” And thus, this evening, I found myself annoyed about not knowing how to dress for Philadelphia, until I remembered the obvious fact that a few mouse clicks can clear up the problem. Philadelphia is, unsurprisingly, quite a bit colder than Cairo right now. But not as big a discrepancy as there would have been a month or two ago.

There’s another weird variant on this, which is that upon waking up in the morning I’m sometimes annoyed at not knowing how to dress for Cairo weather. But in fact, there’s a huge balcony right off the main bedroom here, and all one needs to do is open the door, go outside, and feel the weather for oneself.

Much of this is just the result of comical human absentmindedness, but there’s a real issue here that probably exerts a strong influence on history. In addition to the many looming problems we don’t suspect, there are also plenty of problems that are already solved without our knowing it, simply because our patterns of thought are aligned with older historical conditions that are no longer applicable, if only someone could point that out to us.

This can happen on the global level, but also on a more local level. In the last week or two, for instance, I’ve heard some people remark that such-and-such policies of our university were built to address conditions that are no longer applicable, and in several cases this came as a surprise and as a complete revelation: the remarks were correct. This happens in philosophy too, and I’m sure everyone can think of numerous examples.

the coming trip

I’ll be in Philadelphia as of Wednesday night.

On the remaining few days I’ll make my first visit to Annapolis in 20 years, and will also get to spend some time with Herr LINGIS. We saw quite a bit of Lingis in Cairo last year; his Cairo hotel was just up the street from my place. Now he’s living near Baltimore. If you were never in State College, Pennsylvania during the Lingis Era, you never really went to graduate school. A whole book could be written about things that happened in and near that house.

Passing through (tomorrow): London, but no time to leave the airport.

Passing through (on the way back): Chicago and Rome. No time to leave the airports in those places either. But since Spring Break in Cairo starts the moment I get back, I’m hoping for the option of getting bumped from the flight. Especially if it’s Chicago, in which case I might try to spend the whole of Spring Break in the vicinity.

I’ve only been bumped from a flight once, and I got a free Lufthansa ticket out of it.

great bookstore moments

Since I mentioned bookstores in the previous post, it made me wonder what the greatest bookstore moments in literary history might be. The first one that jumps to mind is Nietzsche coming across some Schopenhauer while browsing in Leipzig. There must be other good ones.

My personal best bookstore moments are simply discover-and-purchase moments. I don’t tend to stand there and read things I haven’t bought yet. Instead, like an eagle, I take the prey away to a nest somewhere nearby. So, my better moments of being rapt for hours with a newly discovered book have mostly taken place in libraries, or perhaps in a bookstore-then-nearby-cafe combination.

more on the academic status of blogs

Last night I was reading a passage in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black about the low social status of bookstores in the Eastern France of 1830. The mayor makes sure to get a subscription to the store in the name of his lowliest valet, things like that. But in other times and places, perhaps including ours, bookstores can be viewed as the very epitome of a serious physical location.

Blogs are still perhaps in an analogously unserious social-academic position. But that’s destined to change at some point, I’m fairly sure. And here’s a nice step along that path: in announcing the launch of the Speculative Realism series, the emailed version of the Edinburgh University Press catalog has linked to this blog, and to THIS POST in particular.