tonight’s graduation

A moving ceremony, for obvious reasons.

There is a Parent’s Association Cup that goes each semester to the student who best mixes academics with extracurricular activities. The 7 or 8 other nominees this year all withdrew so that Omar Aly Mohsen could win it. He probably deserved the award anyway.

The University is also inaugurating an Omar Mohsen Cup for excellence in athletics, and unsurprisingly, Omar won that one too, which he very much deserved.

Both awards were picked up by his father, whose sorrow was visible despite his stoicism. There were a number of chants of Omar’s name, and then some chants proposing certain political changes in the country.

When Omar’s turn came to pick up his diploma, a young man took the stage, not in commencement gear. Whether it was his brother or a friend, I’m not sure.

The world is probably better off without a death penalty, but if we had to award it to a few deserving recipients, then whoever was behind this massacre would be good candidates. We always think of one family in particular at AUC, but there are more than 70 families suffering from the same ridiculous cause.

athletes aging before our eyes

It’s somewhat difficult to gain a good perspective on the whole human life cycle, since we ourselves are implicated in it. Schopenhauer advises us to make sure to live to at least 60, an age when all masks have long since fallen away and you can see who you’ve been dealing with all this time– you can fake a life through age 40 and possibly even through 50, but not through age 60. So goes Schopenhauer’s idea. But this implies that we’re just as old as those we’re observing– as for those who are now around 60, I wasn’t there to see all their earlier masks, so it’s hard to learn much in that respect. And by the time I reach 60 myself, my early memories of my peer group will be pretty hazy anyway, so once again it becomes difficult to command a panoramic view of the entire life cycle.

The main exception is when someone we know dies young. Last fall, someone I had known well since infancy died tragically of a drug overdose at age 32. That was one of the rare cases where I was able to observe the course of an entire life, though at the prohibitive price of an early end for him.

But in sports, since “lifetimes” are so compressed, it’s more feasible to observe the entire cycle, even if it’s a rather long one by normal standards. Such is the case with TIM WAKEFIELD, the ancient knuckleball pitcher who retired yesterday from the Boston Red Sox.

Ancient? He’s only two years older than I am, but 45 is extremely old for a baseball player. I remember his debut for Pittsburgh in 1992, his total collapse with the same team in 1993, and his promising return with Boston two years later. Then I lost track of him a bit, but all that time he was piling up near-historic career numbers on the Boston team leaders chart.

Baseball fans will miss Wakefield, though he was never a superstar– just above average and exceptionally durable.

Chinese movie titles

Back when the now bankrupt Spy magazine (the American one) was in its heyday, they had a small feature on how American movie titles were translated into Chinese.

One thing I remember is that Arnold Schwarzenegger was known in Chinese as “Devil,” and all his movie titles would refer to his presence in the film. So, Total Recall became “Devil Goes to Mars” while Kindergarten Cop became, perhaps implausibly, “Devil, King of Children.” (In Egypt, he is referred to simply as “Arnold,” with no last name. We do that too, but will add the last name whenever it suits us, whereas in Egypt they sometimes don’t even seem aware of it.)

The Chinese apparently couldn’t figure out what to do with The Shawshank Redemption, and simply called it “Excitement 1995.”

Someone also told me that Microsoft in China is translated, quite literally, as “Small and Soft.”

also the anniversary of Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake

Hat tip, Cameron. Today is also the 412th anniversary of Bruno’s burning at the stake in Rome in 1600.

If you’ve never read Bruno, you’re missing a lot. His philosophy is interesting (if somewhat underdetermined in places). In terms of literary talent he has sometimes been mentioned in the same breath as Plato and Nietzsche. And in terms of sense of humor, he joins Žižek and Diogenes of Sinope on a very short of list of “philosophers who could also earn a living in stand-up comedy if they needed to.”

Incidentally, it’s not just that he was burned to death. It’s that he was in a dungeon for over a decade before that and was tortured for much of that time.

Among the heresies for which he was burned, my favorite is surely “that the Devil will be saved.”

My favorite Bruno book is Cause, Principle, and Unity. Give it a try; see what you think.

Happy Birthday, Michael Jordan

He’ll always be my favorite athlete, even if not a very original choice. He turned 49 years old today, which is a bit scary. But let’s celebrate with one of his great moments that I remember watching on TV as it happened. December 4, 1992 vs. Portland. Pippen misses the free throw. Jordan comes from nowhere and jams it.

AUC graduation tomorrow

Graduation is tomorrow for those who finished their Bachelor’s and Master’s work during Fall Semester.

Missing from the ceremonies will be Omar Aly Mohsen, who died on February 1 in the Port Said massacre. His parents, who were already on campus for the memorial service, will return to AUC to pick up his diploma. He will graduate with a degree in Economics, having completed all his requirements by late December.

looks like a very interesting book

I had the chance today to meet briefly with Sandra Lehmann, the Vienna-based German philosopher. She gave me a copy of her recently published Wirklichkeitsglaube und Überschreitung: Entwurf einer Metaphysik. One can only think good things about a book with that sort of subtitle, which announces an independent line of thought. Just from thumbing through it, it also seems to be very well written.

Looks like good bus reading. At the moment, I’m deep into the Garcia review and can’t read anything on the side, but will get to it soon.

forthcoming TARP publication: “Not Nature”

HERE. Timothy Morton and I will both be in the volume, and I will be writing about… Timothy Morton!

It’s supposed to be a short piece, so I will only be considering The Ecological Thought.

musical interlude

“Lost River,” featuring (among others) Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead and tabla wizard Zakir Hussain. It comes from the early 1990’s Mickey Hart album “Planet Drum,” which all sounds kind of like this song, and is an absolute feast if you have a taste for world music.

exchange between Jean-Clet Martin and Tristan Garcia

This was just sent to me by Martin Fortier. I’m headed off to teach and won’t be able to read it until this evening, but post it here now under the assumption that it must be good.

It’s all in French.

Jean-Clet Martin first gives what is described (by Martin Fortier; I haven’t seen it yet) as a Deleuzian critique of Garcia’s book, HERE.

Garcia responds, HERE.

Well-timed, since I’m going to get back to writing my own review of Garcia tonight, and hope to be finished within a few days.

[ADDENDUM OF FEBRUARY 26, 2012: Sorry, looks like I pasted the links in backwards, putting Garcia’s where I said Martin’s was, and the reverse.]