Realismus jetzt!

It’s now available for pre-order on Amazon.de, though not yet published. HERE.

But I’m not sure what that means: that the book is actually closer to being published? Or only that Amazon.de has finally caught up with their paperwork backlog.

The last I heard, the book was scheduled to appear in late 2012, but I’m not sure. It consists of German translations of some speculative realist writings. In my case, it’s the 1999 “Object-Oriented Philosophy” lecture from the UK that is contained as a chapter in Towards Speculative Realism.

an amusing moment from last night

When it turned out in immediate post-lecture conversation that my favorite physicist is Niels Bohr, and Zeilinger’s favorite philosopher is… Niels Bohr.

last night in Kassel

Now killing a bit of time in Oslo Airport, which is quite beautiful. The only other time I was here, I was a 23-year-old on a train, so this is my first time in the airport. The architects used a few “Viking lodge” effects in a very humane way that makes arriving passengers feel like they’ve entered the land of timber and adventure. And of course, Norway always jumps out at you as being rich and clean. I was in Stavanger 4 years ago, just not in Oslo for over two decades; Looking forward to this.

This is also my first free moment to talk a bit about last night. The conversation with Zeilinger was fascinating– both the public discussion itself, and the informal conversations I had with him before and after the event about where he thinks physics is heading. Since that was informal and off the record, I’ll stick to the things he said in public.

On paper, Zeilinger and I might look like polar opposites. He’s an anti-realist in physics who thinks realism is the stumbling block to imaginative progress; I’m a realist in philosophy who thinks that anti-realism is the stumbling block to imaginative progress.

However, it also turns out that he finds the relational interpretation of quantum theory to be untenable, and when discussing superposition emphasizes the fact that this involves isolating certain properties of a thing from its relational context.

There are probably still plenty of disagreements, of course. For example, certain aspects of object-oriented philosophy would still probably look to him too much like a “hidden variables” theory of the Bohmian sort. But there’s room for discussion there, and you can have a good conversation with Zeilinger.

They also do Friday night poetry readings at an upstairs bar in the Hauptbahnhof (which despite the name, is no longer really the Hauptbahnhof, but services mostly or entirely slow regional trains; Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, a bit further out from the city center, is where the high-speed trains go).

For a train station bar it was surprisingly bohemian; only the bongo drums were missing. I started the evening with 20 minutes or so of poems from the Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl and the Japanese haikuist Issa. They’re a nice emotional contrast: Trakl grim and lurid as can be, and Issa utterly whimsical. As an organizing principle, I used only Trakl poems that referred to poppies (mixed in with simulated Trakl poems referring to poppies, from the Trakl emulator that I’ve mentioned on this blog before). As for Issa, I did about 30 haikus referring to fireflies and 30 referring to Buddha. It was a smart, hip young artsy crowd with a good sense of humor. After I finished, it was open mike time. Despite being extremely tired, it was so fun that I stayed till the bitter end at 2 AM.

My only regret was not having another week or so available to hang out at Documenta.

object-oriented literary criticism

There’s a free download available of my article from the journal website itself: HERE.

thunderstorm

Looks like I will arrive in Oslo for the first time since 1991 simultaneously with a huge thunderstorm.

the line on Syria

With reports that Syria’s Vice President has now defected, I made my usual look at Dublin-based Intrade to see how their bettors are interpreting the news. But I was astonished to find a listed 48% chance that Bashar al-Assad will no longer be President as of midnight on December 31.

Only 48%? Seriously, does anyone really think there’s a 52% chance that Bashar will still lead the country on December 31? Really? 52%?

He already lost four top officials in a bomb attack that looked like an inside job in a high-security building. He has faced a wave of defections from people high enough in the food chain that they would have a lot to lose by defecting if they thought Bashar still had a chance. There are also probably some foreign intelligence agencies in there trying to give a final push to the regime.

I think I’d give him maybe a 3% chance of lasting until New Year’s Day, just because there’s probably a 3% chance of pretty much any remotely plausible thing happening in a given 5-month stretch.

I’ve never gotten around to putting any funds in Intrade (it’s a pain for Americans to join, because we’re not allowed to use credit cards for what is classified by our government as an offshore gambling operation). But I’ve noticed quite a number of cases where one could make a killing simply by only going for sure things, such as Bashar’s downfall.

Documenta

Fun time tonight, both the discussion with Anton Zeilinger (a very sympathetic character) and the poetry reading I did of Trakl and Issa.

Tomorrow, back to Frankfurt, then off to Norway.

Rio de Janeiro video (from August 2)

If you don’t know Portuguese, you won’t understand the moderator or Erick Felinto, but of course my talk was in English.

octopus hatching

Another nice photo floating around Facebook. (And I doubt this one comes form a desktop computer program.)

Lund in October

I had planned to talk about Simondon, but changed my mind and will speak about Karen Barad instead.