“What are you doing this summer?” must be one of the most dreary questions in all of the world’s languages, right after “Was it anything I did?” and “Is there anything I can do to pass this class, professor? And I mean anything.”
Actually the last one isn’t so bad, sometimes.
It being summer and thus the educational institution where I teach these days[1] having closed its doors for the time being, in anticipation of this traditional enquiry I tend to find myself contemplating to write another tome the world hasn’t really been waiting for; maybe a few hundred pages about neotextual convergence in the Rigveda (or ऋग्वेदः, as we sanskritologists[2] say) would exercise the old brain for the next weeks, but upon spending a few minutes browsing the local library in the small village I am staying in, I found out that my good friend Bernard Vegnaud has just written “Neotextual Convergence in Vedic Hymns” and is currently selling tens of copies of it.
So, naturally, I turned my sights to reinventing the study of social realism with a treatise on Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and, buoyed by this most excellent of ideas, set out home to assign research to my PhD students immediately, only to find a draft of H. H. Hallerstrøm’s new book “Not so realistic after all, Mr. Loach?” in my mailbox with a nice letter asking for a blurb quote, which I sent him by dictating it over the phone to Sophie-Anne (which is how these “blog posts” end up on the internet; the whole process still being a bit of a mystery to me[3]): “Hallerstrøm’s new book is the most concise and hilariously fantastic critique of Ken Loach I’ve read in years!”
Still, that left me without a project. Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point, as we Frenchmen say, or the early bird catches the worm; with me — presumably being a “late” bird, though not in the sense of decomposing, one hopes — getting no worm at all, as if that were a bad thing, which, of course, it just might be for birds. In any case, wasn’t it René Descartes who has said Dubium sapientiae initium, or in plain English that doubt is the origin of wisdom? So what kind of philosopher, wise men one and all, would I be if I did not doubt the generality and universality, one might go so far as to say the wisdom of this ignoble saying, this Pinocchio of idiomatic phrases?
No philosopher at all.
Indeed it has been argued that not only does the second mouse get the cheese, but also that the early worm gets eaten, which goes a long way to explain the arrival times of my students, though not, I assure you, dear reader, my dietary habits.
Ah, the blazing sloveness of summer, with sudden and ample free time, often whole hours between conferences and ministerial lunches, between speaking commitments and dinner invitations, when the relay of dusk to dawn to dusk to dawn is but irregulary noted by the the attempted act of feeding oneself… After some more Absinthe and some shelving of other ideas — for example, a paper called “On Reading Reading Lolita in Teheran in Teheran” which I could have composed during the 74th Iranian Philosopy Summit ’10 in that very city — as too juvenile even for the book on precultural deappropriation it would have appeared in, I hit upon the grandest idea of them all.
This, finally, has not been done before! I shall read the seven volumes of Rowling, J.K.’s dystopian schelmenroman “Harry Potter” over the next few months and I shall delve into their meaning and context, into the subtext, the neotextual convergences, the übertext (not to be confused with hypertext) and the pretext[4].
We shall begin next week, as Therasmokritus kept saying for years.
[1] Having taught at some of the most prestigious of universities in my career, I do have to say that the American campus life does not lack a certain charm that one cannot help but associate with the Oscar Wilde quote “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
[2] Abbout, C. Mohr: “There’s no need for that kind of language: Sanskrit.”, Willmington University Press, Willmington, 2005.
[3] Thusly explaining the riddle about the Gauloise, the glass of Absinthe and the non-existant third hand alluded to here. See, philosophy isn’t that hard after all.
[4] Resmussen, Raul: “Pretextual Studies of The Lorbeerbaum Effect”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1992.