all-NBA team announced

This would be my choice for the all-NBA team as well:

Derrick Rose, Chicago
Kobe Bryant, L.A. Lakers
LeBron James, Miami
Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City
Dwight Howard, Orlando

Not bad that Kobe keeps on doing it. I’m too tired to look up his age, but I’m guessing he must be around 34 or 35 by now.

[ADDENDUM: My mistake, he’s only 32. At this rate he has a not-too-bad chance of retiring as the all-time career scoring leader in the NBA. The current leader, of course, is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and you may be surprised to hear that Karl Malone is 2nd. In my opinion, the critiques of Malone that he “wasn’t a winner” just because his teams never won the NBA championship are ridiculous. He and Stockton took Utah to the Finals in both 1997 and 1998, and they would surely have won both years if not for… the return from retirement of one Michael Jeffrey Jordan. No one was going to beat Jordan in the Finals. Don’t hold it against Malone.]

Happy Friday the 13th

Don’t break any mirrors.

an Oxford story someone told me yesterday

That the botanical garden where we were (and it’s mostly outdoors, as I should have guessed, with a few greenhouses) is pretty close to the launching point for Alice in Wonderland.

The tour guide did show us a beautiful black pine in the garden, a very old one that seems alive in the way its branches are twisted.

Our guide said it was Tolkien’s favorite tree. You really can see what looks like a face on the trunk of the tree, and for this reason he was speculating that it was the inspiration for the ents.

Tim Morton also tells me that the lamppost at Magdalen College was the inspiration for the one of Tumnus the faun in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I suppose Oxford must be as dense with literary myth as almost any place on earth. Makes sense, given the quality of people who have come through here over the centuries.

All right, I found a photo of the same black pine we saw yesterday. The face is more on the left side, if memory serves, and you can’t see it here.

Tim Morton’s Oxford claim to fame

I didn’t realize he had Oscar Wilde’s room at Magdalen College for awhile.

dodged the rain

Despite the ever-threatening skies on this trip, I would so far appear to have avoided any major rainstorms.

some sociologists hate OOO

I heard recently that a very prominent sociologist has been badmouthing OOO quite a bit. That’s fine; his work isn’t my cup of tea either. But maybe we’ll end up having a more explicit debate in the near future.

Levi on the generational aspect of OOO

I don’t disagree with any of this post:

“We have lived– as does the current generation that grew up in this ecology –in a world awash in objects of all sorts… And what we discovered, perhaps, as we began our studies in the world of theory was that that theory was deeply inadequate in helping us to understand this strange new world we were living in. Roughly we were presented with three options: the linguistic turn focusing on signifiers, texts, and signs, phenomenology focusing on the analysis of intentionality and lived embodied experience, and the new historicists with their focus on networks of power and discursive structures.”

I hadn’t stated it quite this way to myself, but it’s very much to the point. The main reason I was never captivated by Derrida or Foucault even though most of the people around me were completely swept up in them was simply because they didn’t seem to be a very good match for the world in which I thought I was living. Phenomenology probably doesn’t do much better in that respect, but I was excited early on by the resources I was finding there and so wasn’t put off by it.

To this day virtually any page of Derrida leaves me completely unmoved (this may sound harsh, but he always reminds me of someone who comes to a party and talks only about himself for the whole 4 hours), and Foucault I can enjoy only in the interviews, where we find a witty and flexible person who seems willing to be surprised by ideas that occur to him as he’s talking along. His books just don’t do it for me, for whatever reason(s). I’m always willing to decide I’ve been wrong, but…

NY Times story on crime upsurge in Egypt

My sense is that THIS ARTICLE is slightly exaggerated, but not horribly exaggerated.

Egypt pre-revolution was almost shockingly safe given the levels of poverty in certain segments of society. Authoritarian police states are horrible, but why pretend that they don’t cut down on the crime rate? Of course they do. So, it’s only natural that getting some free speech (which is dramatically better in Egypt now) and reduced police presence/power would make the crime rate tick up a bit. At present my sense is that the levels aren’t such that they should make anyone nostalgic for the government that was in place before.

But I think it’s important to be completely honest and say: “Yes, the crime rate is higher, but it’s worth it, and we’ll try to get crime back down in the future.”

Instead of this, I often encounter two tendencies that feel to me like wishful bending of the truth.

1. The claim that lingering remnants of the old regime are still the ones committing the crimes in order to make us all feel nostalgic and demand the regime back. That was definitely true in February, but I think it’s pretty late now to claim that this is still happening. (A counter-case could be made, I’m sure, but I’m not buying it this late in the game without evidence rather than wishful speculation.)

2. The claim that crime was already just as bad before the Revolution but that the news of it was simply suppressed. This strikes me again as nothing but wishful thinking. If you drag all suspects in from the street and threaten and abuse them and detain them without trial for indefinite periods of time, then of course you’ll drive the crime rate down (but at what cost?). You wouldn’t do it otherwise. I don’t think the police state was the only reason for low crime in Egypt, but I think it was one of the major ones. We could drive down the American crime rate to very low levels too– if we wanted a government like Singapore’s. And I don’t.

YouTube as radio station

It’s really amazing. Pretty much any song that is reasonably popular can be found on YouTube. It’s a dangerous discovery, since for nostalgia’s sake I’ve been going back and listening to pretty much any song I liked at all from ages 11-20 or so. Things I would never consider buying, but which are quite irresistible to hear free of charge.

“theft at night”

I feel sorry for the New Yorker imprisoned in Dubai, since he alleges having been tortured into a confession.

However, I love one of the categories under which he is being charged:

“The UAE has charged Foster with theft of government property, possession of police paraphernalia and theft at night.”

The crime of theft at night? It’s fascinating that that is a (presumably) aggravating factor in weighing the crime.

My two other favorite categories of crimes that I’ve seen in the past:

*Mexico charged the brother of former President Salinas with “inexplicable enrichment.” I love that that’s a crime in Mexico! It ought to be a crime everywhere!

*During the 1993 floods in the U.S. Midwest, some twit in Missouri sabotaged a levee simply in order to strand his wife at work across the Mississipppi River so that he could enjoy his extramarital affair for a few nights longer without his wife returning. (He was arrested after stupidly going on TV and claiming falsely that he heroically attempted to prevent the breach of the levee, thereby ensuring that the police would talk to him before anyone else.) There was millions of dollars worth of damage to farmland, and thousands of people stranded on the wrong side of the river, thanks to this idiot.

In any case, the crime with which he was charged was “Knowingly Causing a Catastrophe,” and if memory serves it carried a potential life prison sentence. But my father joked at the time that maybe he could plea-bargain it down to “Knowingly Causing an Inconvenience.” [ADDENDUM: Turns out that many people believe this man was a miscarriage of justice.]