house without a cat

It feels peaceful and a bit dead.

The driver came earlier tonight to take Tamanya to Nasr City, to someone I trust. She’ll be fine there, and will enjoy the other two cats and the grassy courtyard.

She’ll then move to Ma’adi by Sunday or so, to spend another few days there before I return.

another weird thing from Gilot’s book

This is so strange I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before.

Picasso’s estranged Russian wife Olga, from whom he had been separated for over a decade, was a bit of a stalker. But it was a little weirder than that.

She would find out where Picasso was, at all times. When he was in Paris, she would go to Paris. When he was in the South, she would go to exactly the same town in the South, even though both Picasso and their son would ignore her whenever she tried to speak to them.

Françoise Gilot got it even worse. Whenever she was walking down the street holding her baby, Olga would follow her. Once she came up behind her and pushed and pinched her.

Whenever Olga met Gilot inside a building, she slapped her.

One day at the beach, Gilot was reclined backward with her hands in the sand. Olga came up out of nowhere and walked across her hands in high-heeled shoes. Whenever Gilot put her hands back in that position, Olga would again reappear and walk across her hands in those sharp heels. Finally, Gilot tripped her and she fell face-first in the sand, and never returned to bother them at the beach. But Picasso found this fight hilarious, and laughed straight through it.

At those times when Picasso was in Paris, Olga would send him harangues in letters virtually every day about what a terrible person he was. Often, she would include a picture of Rembrandt with the notation “if you were like him, then you would be a great artist.” Somewhat bizarrely, this would bother Picasso a great deal.

There are several troubling aspects to this story. One is that it’s told even by Gilot in the manner of: “what an annoyance!”, whereas for most of us in 2011 it would be more along the lines of: “we need a restraining order against this psycho woman immediately!”

But perhaps the more troubling aspect is how Picasso left such a trail of these mentally broken women. That’s not such a surprise; you get a taste of it from even the briefest biographical sketch. But it’s disturbing to see so much evidence of his callousness through one chapter after another.

an idle thought experiment about cats

Obviously, humans tend to like furry mammals as pets, in part because they seem emotionally accessible, somehow similar to us in desires and motivations. In return, this little kitten seems to recognize some sort of similarity with me. She looks me in the eyes, seems to know basically what various human limbs and facial features are for, and so forth.

But with this upcoming Lovecraft manuscript in mind, I was wondering how a kitten would react to being raised by squid-like or jellyfish-like Lovecraftian monsters. Assuming they fed the kitten and played with her to a sufficient degree, would the kitten be satisfied? Or would the kitten somehow always feel a bit horrified by the physical incongruities between herself and them?

Tamanya’s upcoming week

It will be much better for her than I thought it would be. Her regular babysitter is off to Alexandria for a few days. But another great one materialized. The new babysitter already has two cats (a mother/daughter pair) and even a small outdoor courtyard where the cats play, which is something I can’t possibly offer at my place.

Better yet, the two babysitters are friends, and will trade off Tamanya during the long 6 weeks of my summer absence in the States. Very kind of them, but on the other hand, they really love her. As well they should. This is a great kitten I found.

what would make me revoke my citizenship

“John McCain: Sarah Palin Can Beat Obama In 2012”

An easy target, yes. But Palin deeply annoys me. Consider the following string of clichés and inanities:

“I am so adamantly supportive of the good, traditional things about America and our free enterprise system, and I want to make sure that America is put back on the right track, and we only do that by defeating Obama in 2012. I have that fire in my belly.”

There is not one genuine thought expressed in that entire passage.

Some people think it would be entertaining if she were the nominee. There might be some entertaining moments, yes, but I think it would be too scary to be worth it. Some last-minute Obama scandal is all it would take. Just imagine what four years with Palin as President would feel like. It might be good for poking fun at ourselves for a couple of weeks (smart Americans as a group tend to enjoy talking about how stupid America is), but then we’d have to live with it.

[ADDENDUM: Though admittedly, the more I think about it, Rome obviously survived some much worse leaders than Palin. I’d take Palin over Caligula or Heliogabalus, for instance.]

Egyptian banker in Straus-Kahnesque trouble in New York

HERE.

Being a hotel maid is becoming a hazardous occupation when bankers are nearby.

question from a reader

A blog reader writes:

“You mentioned it on your blog recently (but it’s also a point in Prince of Networks) that for you (and also for Latour, according to your reading) things need to be explained in terms of the interactions of individual concrete objects.

Would you say then that you subscribe to methodological individualism then? (‘the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions’)”

The reader also gives THIS LINK for methodological individualism, where we read as follows: “This doctrine was introduced as a methodological precept for the social sciences by Max Weber, most importantly in the first chapter of Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.”

The answer in my case (and probably even in Latour’s) is “no.”

The fact that I think the world is made up of individuals, ontologically, does not mean that I grant primacy to human individuals over larger individuals such as Germany, the EU, or Generation X. Quite the contrary, since I don’t grant primacy to any particular size of object as being the place where all the action occurs.

Latour has certainly made attacks on the reification of Society as an all-encompassing whole that defines everything else. But that doesn’t mean his method, either, grants primacy to individual people over larger actors. His method (and mine) simply disallows any granting of primacy in the other direction in such a manner that individual people would simply be products or dependents of a larger system called “Society.”

another weird incident chez Picasso

Dora Maar is having a mental breakdown over the course of several weeks, claiming to be the victim of attacks and robberies on the streets of Paris that, all evidence suggests, are complete delusions. This is to a large degree connected with her separation from Picasso, who treated her with his usual mental cruelty at the end.

In the middle of this period, Maar shows up at Picasso’s home one evening and begins raving. He feels unequipped to handle it alone, so he phones Paul Eluard, a very close friend of Maar’s from their days together in the surrealist movement. But Eluard’s arrival only makes things worse. Maar begins denouncing both of them, tells them they are going to burn in hell, etc.

Picasso leaves the room and phones Jacques Lacan (I kid you not). Lacan arrives at Picasso’s studio/home, succeeds in calming Maar, and takes her away to his clinic for what would ultimately be a three-week stay.

As soon as he leaves, Eluard shouts at Picasso and blames him for Maar’s mental state. Picasso counters that if Maar is now mentally deluded, it is the fault of early surrealist influence on her. Eluard becomes so angry that he picks up a chair and smashes it on the floor.

Picasso then tells the story to Gilot, who tells Picasso she agrees with Eluard that it’s Picasso’s own fault that Maar is in such a state. Picasso responds with a cold quasi-Darwinian speech about how people who are too weak must fall by the wayside, and that Maar must be weak by nature anyway. Gilot responds that people can have temporary weakness without being fundamentally weak, but Picasso remains unmoved.

This is one of my favorite reads of 2011. I wish Fernande Olivier had written something similar about the early Picasso, though it’s unlikely Olivier was as sharp as Gilot, who is really very interesting and insightful.

The story about Eluard, Maar, Picasso, and Lacan together in the studio also gives some taste of how insular and incestuous these Paris cultural circles could be. They really did all know each other.

a weird scene from Gilot’s book

The closer Picasso feels to Gilot, the more he wants to show her scenes from his past life.

The weirdest scene of them all is when they return to Picasso’s former marital residence where he had lived with Olga, his Russian ballerina wife and mother of his first child.

It’s 1947, and it turns out that no one has entered the house since 1942. Due to various legal complexities, Picasso and Olga were unable to get an actual divorce (under French law at the time, marriages between two foreigners could end only according to the laws of the husband’s home country, and Franco had more or less ended divorce in Spain by then). So, they’re technically still married and the home is joint property, but for whatever reason, neither Olga nor Picasso has been in to look after the place.

Five years’ worth of dust covers everything. There are priceless Matisse paintings on the wall. Someone had left in a hurry… there is a five-year-old breakfast on the table, and in the bedroom of Picasso’s son, toy cars are still scattered all over the floor.

But then they enter a tiny storeroom, the weirdest scene of all. Picasso was apparently a bit of a pack rat, so there is all kinds of sheer junk in the storeroom. But mixed in with the junk is a watercolor by Seurat, notes from Picasso’s maid mixed in with important early correspondence between Picasso and Apollinaire and Max Jacob, as well as a 17th century Italian puppet, and– a box filled with gold pieces!

They then open a closet. It contains a half-dozen of Picasso’s old suits, eaten down to transparent fibrous outlines by hungry moths.

As Gilot describes the house:

“The chance accumulation of so many unrelated objects, end to end, had achieved a result that was more Picasso than anything he could have put together consciously. In fact all these objects seemed so obviously and intimately related to his work that I had the impression of having entered the cave of a very familiar Ali Baba, but an Ali Baba who would have preferred looting an alchemist’s shop…”

Egypt telecom blackout was planned since April 2008

HERE.

Most disappointingly, all three mobile phone companies operating in Egypt (Etisalat, local favorite Mobinil, and Vodafone) were in on the the rehearsals for it.

Granted, I’m sure none of them were given much choice in the matter, and it would have taken an utterly heroic CEO to probably give up all of the company’s investments in Egypt to date to take a stand on principle. Nonetheless, it gives one a sickened feeling about having to use any of the three companies at all.