some of the best music out there

If by chance you’re not familiar with Bartók’s six string quartets, I envy you your first encounter with them. I was just discussing them via email with Tim Morton, who tends to like all the same classical music that I do and vice versa. I’ve usually listened to the famous Takacs Quartet version, but Tim thinks the Tokyo Quartet version is even better. The bits I’ve sampled on YouTube do seem excellent.

It’s one of those great remembered scenes from my youth. Packing my dorm room in Santa Fe on the last night on campus my freshman year. One floor above me is a graduating senior, nice guy, with his friends over having a small party on his balcony to celebrate his graduation the next day. He has something playing on his stereo, and it’s unlike anything I’ve heard before. For some reason no other dorm rooms are playing any music, so this piece has a monopoly as it echoes over the mountainous campus with its sweet piñon fragrance.

My recollection is that I’d been planning to go out and do something, but the music froze me in place for about 20 minutes. I was about to go up and ask N. what he was playing, when opportunely enough, someone came along at ground level and shouted the question up to him before I could do it. It was Bartók’s First Quartet.

When I got home that summer, one of the first things I did was check the whole set of LP’s out of the local college library near where I lived, and it’s probably been some of my most-played music for the past 24 years.

Tim refers to the “grinning skull” quality of the Bartok’s quartets, and that’s a nice description.

Merry Christmas

It’s always a pain to go to the airport this early on Christmas Day, but every year, I’m glad I did it. Nothing beats an empty airport and an empty flight.

2012 prediction remains the same

Obama over Romney is still my prediction, and the prediction is looking a lot better than it was at various points over the past 6 months.

Bottom line 1: Romney’s the best candidate the Republicans have. And at least he wouldn’t ruin the country if elected, unlike many of their candidates. Romney is basically a moderate (though also a heartless/robotic corporate type). He still drives me up the wall with that personality, of course.

Bottom line 2: You can find plenty of reason to complain about Obama’s performance. But people still basically like him. And in electoral terms, this is probably the first time since Truman in 1948 that a Democrat has not been vulnerable to portrayal as a national defense weakling, which is traditionally where Democrats lose even when you expect them to win (cf. John Kerry, 2004). And finally, for all the repetitive talk about how “people only vote their pocketbooks,” this case will be the exception to the rule. I think people basically realize that the economy tanked under W.

With national defense issues probably off the table (barring some other 9/11 sort of incident or scary world crisis before next November) and the economy possibly creeping back a bit, I’m not sure why so many people still think Obama’s a one-termer. It looks to me like he’s in a very strong position, whether you’re disappointed with him or not.

I’m a lot less disappointed with Obama than many have been (too many Baby Boomers have weird retroactive fantasies that Hillary Clinton would have been some sort of cutting-edge progressive force; the Clintons have always been very smart, politically effective but manipulative sell-outs, and nothing more). It seems to me that Obama’s biggest failure has been the relative waste of his once-in-a-generation rhetorical gifts. Obama has the oratorical power (and inspiring symbolic power, as the first black President in a country haunted by ghosts of the slave trade) to excite people for big causes that might have seemed beyond all possibility– such as a dramatic move away from oil, a backtracking from the post-9/11 paranoid security state concept, and more evenhanded treatment of the Palestinians. But he’s preferred a politically safer course. Perhaps his relative unwillingness to take risks is what enabled him to get to where he is today, and to edge towards re-election. But it’s depriving him of the chance at a historically dramatic Presidency. Then again, the mere fact that he was elected already secures his place as historically dramatic. But he could have been even more important than this.

getting ready for the NLH essays

Tim gives an unexpected preview of my essay, HERE.

That issue will be out next summer, we are told.

Sandmonkey

With a fairly grim assessment that is, in my view, largely accurate. HERE.

Conspiracy theories are always very popular in Egypt, yet I am far more inclined than most Egyptians I know to believe in conspiracy theories about the election. Sandmonkey is an exception to that rule; I’m not at all surprised by his election stories in this piece. (He was a failed candidate in Heliopolis but a successful campaign manager in Suez.)

the degeneration of the discourse in Egypt

Here’s a good example:

Military council hastens to distance itself from contentious remarks by ex-officer who called for anti-govt protesters to be ‘sent to Hitler’s ovens’

a related post by Robert Jackson

HERE.

Parikka responds

HERE.

Essentially, he says that (a) people are getting too touchy, and (b) he doesn’t care much about this debate anyway.

But there was nothing touchy about my previous post. I was simply expressing surprise at the following facts, which Parikka completely sidesteps in his response.

To repeat, for the past two years I’ve ben hearing from various good sources in the UK that Parikka has been trash-talking me in conversation a bit (I’ve never met or corresponded with him). I have no problem with that. There’s plenty of trash talk in intellectual life, and it’s not always juvenile, locker room stuff. Quite often it’s simply the “sportive” side of intellectual life, generated by everyone’s aspiration to excellence.

During those two years, none of my sources were ever able to explain to me just what it was that Parikka found so blameworthy about OOO. For this reason, I was intrigued when I saw earlier today that Levi was responding to Parikka’s earlier post, HERE.

But I was then astonished to find him more or less admitting to not having read OOO texts at all. He’s heard about it from other people, and he also has some complaints about the usual connotations of the word “objects.”

In his follow-up post of this evening, Parikka refers in scare quotes to my call for a more “productive debate.” Sorry, but I don’t see that Parikka has the right to scare quotes here. We now see that his trash talk about OOO for the past couple of years (and it never sounded especially vicious, just for the record) was based on no reading of OOO sources.

On that basis, I would have to say that my call for a more productive debate is fully in order. Normally one reads something before attacking it, or at least before attacking it on and off for years at a time.

No hard feelings against Professor Parikka. I haven’t yet read his Insect Media either, primarily because the Amazon shipment to Egypt was lost and the replacement hasn’t arrived yet. But I certainly won’t be raising any “questions” about his work on my blog until I’ve actually read his book. That seems to me like fair play.

I’d also have to repeat the point that some of Parikka’s fans in his comment threads are out of their minds. But we can’t hold him personally responsible for that.

remembering Marvin G. Harman

My grandfather would have been 102 today, though we lost him in early 2004.

Among other things, he was probably the kindest man I ever met. He had a beautifully resonant singing voice, and opened all wrapped gifts with a painstaking delight– as if all gifts were treasures that came directly from the king.

For most of his life he lived in or near Iowa City/Cedar Rapids, working as a mechanical engineer designing rock crushers until his retirement in the early 1970’s.

In 1985, he and my grandmother moved to the Kansas City area, where she still lives.

When you have a birthday jut two days before Christmas, no one will ever forget it.

a more general consideration

It was interesting to see that Parikka’s comments thread, which seems to be populated largely by Deleuzian types, was nearly as rancorous as the sorts of remarks that OOO gets from Brassier’s sour-faced crew.

It’s obvious that the theme of objects really bothers certain people, and it bothers them at many different points of the philosophical compass.

What this helps illuminate, yet again, is that so much of the business of philosophers these days is to attack individual objects. Either you pulverize them and turn them into something accessible only to the sciences or treat them as sterile surface encrustations (these are both “undermining” maneuvers) or else you claim that objects represent a reactionary positing of hidden essences lying beneath networks or events or happenings or performances (these are “overmining” maneuvers). As I have tried to show at least twice in print, these two opposite strategies always team up together in the end, and this is why I’ve referred to them recently as “the beast with two backs.”

This is why Aristotle (along with Husserl) is the most maltreated of all great philosophers in today’s cutting-edge continental philosophy. Notice that what Aristotle and Husserl have in common is precisely their focus on individuals.

For Aristotle individuals are the primary substances, and his tradition has developed this idea whenever it has enjoyed a resurgence, as happens from time to time across the centuries.

As for Husserl, idealist though he is, the root of phenomenology is the notion of objects within the realm of experience, which is precisely what one does not find in British Empiricism, which treats experienced objects as arbitrary or habitual bundlings of qualities. (As far as I can see, one doesn’t even find it in Brentano, which is why people are going way overboard when they say that Husserl simply pirated everything from Brentano. Husserl’s own central idea is nowhere to be found in Brentano, for example. And I say this as a great admirer of Brentano.)