Montreal
As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to take a short trip to the disunited state of Canada before heading back to Europe and I must say that Montreal is every bit as great as I heard it would be. After four months of America it is truly relaxing to walk the streets filled with good restaurants and small cafés, hearing french spoken all around you and smelling someone smoking pot every few hundred yards – in the middle of the day and in the middle of the town. And nobody seems to mind the least. There is also some of the most impressive graffiti around that I have seen anywhere.
Cornell blues
And so the six weeks of 2009 School of Criticism and Theory have came to end. It will be strange and certainly sad to leave Ithaca – I’ve really gotten into the groove with seminars, lectures, colloquia, gym, receptions, sitting in library, participating in reading groups, etc. With about 80 SCT people around, you’re always bound to meet somebody where-ever you go, and often those meetings turn into spontaneous evenings spent together with food, some booze, and good discussion. In a strange way people have really grown together and I am sure that many of us will be meeting in the future. I am seriously considering coming back to the US for the next year’s ACLA conference, for the reason of meeting SCT people as much as to hear the actual presentations.
Anyway, tomorrow it will all be over and this means that I will drag my 30 books to a post office and mail them home and then slowly start thinking of moving back towards Europe myself. My initial plan was to fly from Montreal to Paris but meanwhile when I was trying to make up my mind over how and when exactly, the Paris airfare for next week flights went up about 4 times. As I am so close to Canada now – and as I hear that Montreal is a very nice place in August – I will probably just go there anyway and then make my way back to NY and catch my flight from there.
Isn’t it ironic…
David Pogue reports in his blog that Amazon zapped two book from its’ e-book reader Kindle as “the publisher [had] changed its mind about offering an electronic version”. I.e. people who had purchased the e-book suddenly discovered that it had disappeared from their e-readers with money credited back to their account.
This is of course a bit strange and certainly provides much ammunition to the ranks of Kindle-skeptics and opposers of e-books in general. However, the otherwise silly and unfortunate incident acquires a whole new level of irony by the simple fact that the books so recalled happened to be Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. And the cherry on top of this hilarious situation is of course the fact that both books’ copyright has actually expired and the full text is available in many places on he internet (for instance here).
I mean… what were you thinking, Amazon?? In terms of PR blunder, this thing surely ranks at par with the recent news about Gazprom’s Nigerian joint venture.
Reflections from damaged life
Despite of having made myself a promise last year NOT to teach anything before I have the draft my dissertation finished, I agreed this week to doing a seminar in anthropology this fall in Tallinn. And although the idea is exciting right now I can already see myself wondering somewhere down the line in October that HOW THE HELL did I get myself into this once again. I guess my excuses are that 1) it is only two months and not the full semester, and 2) I was given a free reign to choose the texts and approach. Besides, it’s a graduate seminar so I really don’t feel that I’d need to overly restrain myself in choosing the reading material – both in terms of volume as well as difficulty. So I will pick three ethnographies (Jackson, Mahmood and Klima) and read them side by side with theoretical texts that have inspired as well as provided a structural framework for them (such as Adorno, Benjamin, Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Sontag). All this should amount to a fun and interesting experience, at least for those who are able to consider reading ethnographies, critical theory and philosophy as fun.
One of the texts I will assign is Adorno’s “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” and thus I braced myself to re-read it with attention. I must say that, now having managed to almost completely detach myself from what would normally be my quotidian existence, this is probably the perfect book for me to read at the moment. It consists of short but incredibly rich and allusive reflections on everyday matters, something that results from a towering intellect such as Adorno taking a step back and looking at life in a critical yet almost Proust-like (who also gets a formal nod at the very beginning of the book), slightly nostalgic and deeply ironic way.
Here’s a small sample for you:
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, delibration, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?
