handset email again

No wonder I couldn’t get the Blackberry email to work: it wasn’t within my power to do so. I had to call the Vodafone Egypt guys and exchange a series of code words and information about my past accounts. Now it’s up and running again. My last Blackberry died over two years ago, and I missed that red indicator light saying that email had arrived.

I’m satisfied with the iPhone in the abstract. But in practice, they are not yet as effective in Egypt as the Blackberry. The email download time on iPhones here can be really annoying. The title of the message appears, but then the wheel spins and spins sometimes for 2-3 minutes before the message itself becomes legible. Sometimes already-downloaded emails vanish and are re-downloaded on the iPhone here, again quite annoying.

None of this ever happens on the Blackberry, for some reason. I’m assuming that iPhones don’t have this stupid glitch in North America, or everyone would be using the Blackberry exclusively. iPhone does have a large clientele in Egypt, but for some reason it tends to be older and less hip than the Blackberry kids. All the AUC students seem to prefer Blackberry. I like both devices a great deal, but when my iPhone recently broke (fairly lamely, with a jammed button only 17/18 months after purchase, with repair costs nearly as much as a new phone) I had already resolved that another Blackberry would be next.

jumping distances

It’s a minor skill for most humans but crucial for cats: discerning safe and unsafe jumping distances when moving above the ground or floor.

Tamanya does very well in this area, considering that she wasn’t even born yet as recently as March.

One thing she likes to do is perch on my shoulder when I’m sitting in a chair, then look for the nearest thing she can jump to from my shoulder. Usually that’s the desk. What I usually do is roll the chair slowly closer to the desk, out of curiosity as to how close she deems safe enough for a leap. She’s not foolhardy, but not overly cautious, either. She’s become willing to take more risks as her ability to withstand falls has increased. I’ve seen her fail on jumps a few times, and she’s a good sport about it. Just dusts herself off and goes back to business.

animals and mirrors

I’m too tired to go researching this on the web right now, but it’s an interesting issue.

One always hear talk of which living creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors: just a few primates, I believe, and then with humans there is all kinds of talk about the mirror stage in psychoanalysis.

But then there’s another interesting question: which animals can recognize themselves in mirrors without knowing that it’s themselves? What I mean is this. Sometimes I’ve held Tamanya up to a mirror to see how she will react to her own reflection. It turns out I have to hold her very close to the mirror to get any reaction at all, but once I do, she clearly thinks her reflection is another cat. She is curious about it, and mostly friendly, but does swing her paw out at that “other” cat.

So too with the oven in this place, which has one of those smoky, dark-glass fronts that has a mirror-like effect. She’s really convinced that there’s another little kitten inside that oven, and a bit confused by it.

When we had pet ducks, they too would interpret their own reflections in mirrors as other ducks. In one case we brought a tall mirror outside, and the white pekin (the really aggressive one) actually walked around behind the mirror to see where the other duck was.

I’m not sure that it works with dogs, perhaps because dogs trust their noses more than their eyes in most cases. However, my parents’ fox terrier did become quite agitated by that Hartford Insurance commercial where the big buck jumped off the right-hand side of the TV screen. Woody would bark and go look out the front window next to the TV to see where the buck had gone. He was an inveterate deer-chaser, since my parents’ front yard has deer walking through all the time, being in a semi-rural location.

now she has a last name

Lara writes:

“You will have wonderful times together I am sure – Dr. Zamalek and Tamanya Tortoise (tort-toi-ze)!”

Tamanya Tortoise it is.

Lara rescued a couple of kittens from the streets of Cairo herself. One day soon thereafter she was going to dust her carpet over the balcony, and one of the kittens, appropriately named Tomato (you’d have to meet/see that reddish-tinted joker to understand), crawled out of the rolled-up carpet at the very last instant. She very nearly threw him over the balcony without knowing it! That would have taken her a long time to recover from.

more on libraries

I tend to like the librarians I meet. They’re often omnivorous in their intellectual interests, and they are also supremely practical, forward-looking, and public-oriented in a way that is not always true of intellectuals in the departmental disciplines. You might expect librarians to be nostalgic book-hoarders, but if that was ever true in the past it’s certainly not true of the new, younger breed.

In any case, Diarmuid comments as follows on my earlier post:

“Just a thought on your recent fate-of-libraries post. I’ve worked in a university library for the past 3 years and even in that short period I’ve seen some incredible changes… What might be coming to your library soon? Well, in the most recent refurbishment we dispensed with so many print books and journals (a consequence of the immense popularity and accessibility of e-resources not to mention their increased fiscal importance in the budget) that, in the space previously occupied by book stacks, the library now houses more computer clusters and group study areas than anywhere else on campus, a cafe, a careers center, the university bookshop and an independent archive. Unconfirmed rumours that the next refurb will see the inclusion of a Chucky Cheese, a go-cart track, a cinema, a petting zoo and two Tescos.”

I assume the final sentence is tongue-in-cheek, but stranger things have happened.

So You Want to Study at SOAS?

Hat tip, Tariq.

Levi’s post on love

HERE, with a nice citation from Lingis’s The Imperative, which Levi has been enjoying lately. It’s my favorite Lingis book, with The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common a close second.

Too many of the assessments of that generation of SPEP thinkers are overly influenced by the political/institutional weight of the people in question. As more time passes, I think the originality of Lingis is really going to stand out among that generation of Anglophone continental thinkers.

Morton in Sydney

He’s in another country I’ve somehow never managed to visit: Australia.

You can follow his liveblogging of the conference on his regular blog, HERE.

Greenberg as a writer

It’s ironic that Greenberg fell out of fashion so quickly for his supposedly depoliticized formalism, given that his background was so heavily Marxist. I for one think he’s fantastic, filled with insights.

A reader wrote this morning:

“Deleuze was correct in one thing; the best writers are usually the best thinkers and Greenberg is by far, the best writer of the 20th Century in my opinion.”

I also tend to agree, with Nietzsche who said it before Deleuze, that writing and thinking go hand in hand, and I’m skeptical of the idea that it’s possible to hide superficial or half-baked ideas with pretty rhetoric; you have to have a poor ear for rhetoric and style to be convinced in such cases that the style is good. As I’ve complained before, analytic philosophy tends to suffer from the false notion that good writing simply means clear writing, as though unclarity were the main problem with bad writing. A whole essay could be written on why this is wrong, and at some point I’ll get around to doing that.

As for the reader’s comment, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that Clement Greenberg is the best writer of the 20th century (there’s a lot of competition for the honor), but he does have a powerful voice. As stated yesterday, he really capitalized on the limitations of his medium –the short review article– to form a highly compressed style that has the feel of deliberate allusion about it.

Brentano’s wonderful essay on the four phases of the history of philosophy talks about how in some ways the history of philosophy is like science (in the sense of Kuhnian “normal science”) in that rigorous methods might be thought to lead to incremental progress, whereas in other ways the history of philosophy is more like the history of art, with rising and declining phases of ripeness and decadence.

In order to measure phases of ripeness and decadence, you can’t use the sorts of “scientific” criteria that could be formalized and plugged into a machine. You need discerning individual judgment, and that judgment can only be judged by educated and matured personalities. When Greenberg fires off phrases such as “the impressionists’ inadvertant silting up of pictorial depth,” he doesn’t have enough space in his reviews to “prove” it or to “unpack” what he means. But you already see that he knows what he’s talking about, and that you couldn’t have put it better yourself, and that that’s why Greenberg deserves your respect. I have the same sense when reading good literary critics.

So, why are philosophers usually such poor philosophy critics? Because we’re in too big a hurry to look for who’s right and wrong. And I don’t much see the point of that, since I don’t see that philosophy is becoming more and more right over time. That’s not an argument for relativism– in fact, it’s an argument for a fairly demanding elitism when assessing the relative weights of important philosophers. But it does mean that philosophy is not a matter of making fewer mistakes than in the past. In fact, making even more mistakes might be the way to go. The best way to avoid mistakes is to be an opportunistic sandbagger who never risks a vivid statement, and no one reads those sorts of authors for long.

Incidentally, there’s a funny story behind how I first encountered Greenberg’s phrase “the impressionists’ inadvertant silting up of pictorial depth.” (And incidentally, that’s his explanation for why Cézanne had to find some immanent manner of suggesting physical depth on the canvas surface without returning to traditional perspective.) Namely, I once had a student who plagiarized that phrase from Greenberg’s essay. It was such an amazing line, and of course I knew that this 18-year-old non-native English speaker hadn’t come up with it, and through searching I discovered that Greenberg was the author.

administrative lecture in Morocco

On November 14 I’ll be doing a conference panel in Casablanca with Hassan Darhmaoui (Morocco) and Mohamed Limam (Tunisia). I won’t be speaking about object-oriented philosophy, but about “Research in the MENA Region.” (MENA stands for “Middle East/North Africa,” in case you’re not familiar with the acronym.)

That will be my first time in Morocco, but unfortunately I will have no time to explore anything outside Casablanca, it being the middle of the semester at that point.

Actually, when is the Eid al-Adha vacation this year…?

Nah, it’s November 5-9. Too bad.

I will be joined in Casablanca by, among others, Dean Sherif Kamel and Associate Dean Nagla Rizk of AUC’s School of Business, both fun people. Sherif’s an LSE Ph.D. and has a lot of the actor-network theory sort of background.