Calvino playing tricks on us

Graeme Wood wrote this morning to say I needed to read a certain Italo Calvino book while here this time. I wrote back saying that I needed another book to read like I need the proverbial hole in the head.

The first laugh went to Graeme Wood, however. Everyone at the Biennale kept handing me leaflets and programs, and I wanted to keep them. But you can’t carry that many loose leaflets without dropping them often. I realized I needed a bag to carry everything in, and decided that buying a book was the best way to get one. So I walked into a bookstore, and the only book there that interested me was –behold!– the exact Calvino book that Graeme had recommended. Score a point for him.

But the next point goes to Calvino himself. Upon returning to Padua, I found that all the Biennale leaflets are in the bag, but the Calvino book alone is missing. I must have dropped it on some side-street in Venice en route to the station. Someone will have an interesting and appropriate discovery.

the Irish

The Irish are treating me very well (among other things, they actually had a girl of about 9 years who has read the ferris wheel chapter of Circus Philosophicus). Heading back to their pavilion for an event tomorrow morning.

Did see three of my Egyptian friends, not yet my Croatian friends. The Egyptian show is nicely produced, though at times too disturbing to watch for long.

Moving from Padua into Venice itself tomorrow, which will help make the event more enjoyable.

political figure sighted in Venice

Egypt’s pavilion is on a sort of large island. Trying to cross the bridge back to the main area, I was stopped by a number of very serious Italian police with automatic weapons who told me to stay on the other side.

The Israeli pavilion is right on the other side of that bridge. Soon a flotilla of speedboats arrived. One of them was a curtained wooden craft with uniformed Italian security and presumably non-uniformed Israeli security as well.

Who could it be, I wondered? Netanyahu? Shimon Peres? Some lower-level cultural official from Israel? An Italian government official?

It was Shimon Peres, not 20 feet away from me. And he was immediately swarmed by a crowd of Israeli journalists as soon as he stepped out of the boat.

Venice Biennale

If it’s already this crowded on a day where passes are needed to enter, I can only imagine what tomorrow will be like.

The Egyptian pavilion is as powerful as anticipated. Ahmed Bassiony did get some great footage of the first few nights of Tahrir before losing his own life there, and it’s interspersed with fotoage of one of his final artworks, “Running in Place for 30 Days” (a backhanded dig at Egypt running in place for 30 years). Shady was a good friend of Bassiony and so it’s moving to see him here running the show in his friend’s memory.

I’ll be back for the official opening at 4 PM, when some Egyptian new government officials should be showing up as well.

Biennale

Breakfast, then the Biennale. It doesn’t technically open until tomorrow, but some curators sent me a preview pass.

kitten update

This made my day:

“We miss you! Don’t worry about Tammy, she is having the time of her life at N.’s. :)”

She’s playing with two other cats there, and must also be enjoying the courtyard.

OOO/SR panel in Cyprus

Ennis has THE DETAILS.

on shooting oneself in the foot

In the past several months I’ve seen at least four people make the (rather snobbish) argument that real philosophy can only be done in traditional academic media, not the blogosphere.

While there are things to be said both for and against this argument (and I’ve already said them in this space), the much weirder point is that the people making this claim generally have only a tiny fraction of the academic publications of those they are criticizing for wasting their time with blogging. That makes the argument a bit deranged, doesn’t it?

This first happened a few months ago with one guy who attacked Tim Morton at a conference, sneering that people who are blogging must have little time left over for real academic work. I checked this person’s track record, and he is certainly in no position to be giving the prolific Morton any lessons about traditional academic productivity.

But since then, oddly enough, this argument has continued to be heard from stalled academics and early-stage Ph.D. students, telling me and my friends that we need to stop blogging so that we can publish real academic work.

If we published any more traditional academic work, our heads would explode. If you want to read some of it, do a simple library search.

In the meantime, our critics are doing stunningly little of it. The truly productive people in our generation are not the ones making this criticism.

The Speculative Turn hits Notre Dame

From their course offering for next year:

ENGL 90721
The American Novel and the Speculative Turn
Kate Marshall
Monday 3:00-5:45

The focus of this course will be the constellation of questions that have emerged under the theoretical umbrella of “the speculative turn” in the humanities. We will examine examples of such thought including speculative realism, object-oriented ontologies, and dark ecology from the point of view of narrative fiction, and ask what key texts from the American literary tradition might contribute to such debates.

At the heart of our literary study will be the recent international literary movement of “New Weird Fiction” and its correspondences with the cultural productions of what Greil Marcus has referred to in another context as “Old, Weird America.” The range of fictions, therefore, will travel from Melville to Miéville by way of H. P. Lovecraft.