Word comes this morning of the death of Jacques Derrida, and the summing-up-the-career obituaries are coming fast and furious.  Says the BBC:

Fellow academics have charged that Derrida’s writings are “absurd”, but his mark on modern thinking is undisputed, correspondents say….

Jacques Derrida could claim to be one of the few philosophers of the late 20th Century who people other than students of the subject had actually heard of, says Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield.

That did not mean that they understood what Derrida was on about though - as deconstruction is a highly complex, not to say obscure, school of thought, he says.

And Reuters:

Derrida, who divided his time between France and the United States, argued that the traditional way we read texts makes a number of false assumptions and that they have multiple meanings which even their author may not have understood.

His thinking gave rise to the school of deconstruction, a method of analysis that has been applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

It is heralded as showing the multiple layers of meaning at work in language, but was described by critics as nihilistic.

And the AP:

Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or ways of interpretation. This challenges the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning.

Deconstructionists like Derrida explore ways to liberate the written word from the structures of language confining it, opening up limitless interpretations of texts.

The deconstructionist approach was controversial.

Absurd, nihilistic, and controversial—but also sufficiently key to the ways we read today as to seem obvious, invisible.  Perhaps there can be no greater testament to his importance to contemporary critical thought than the levels to which his work has been simultaneously internalized and reviled over the last several decades.

Salon’s War Room [yeah, yeah; subscription or ad-viewing required] reports this evening on a story set to appear in the November Vanity Fair, suggesting that Bush and Cheney may have so carefully orchestrated their appearance before the 9/11 Commission in order to prevent discrepancies in their stories about Cheney’s actions after the attack on the World Trade Center.  At issue is whether Cheney in fact cleared his orders to have fighter jets shoot down civilian aircraft with the president before issuing them:

…one commissioner told the magazine (also anonymously) that the panel’s members simply did not buy Cheney’s account. “We tried to work out language that allows the reader to get that,” he said, “without saying the vice president did not tell the truth.”

Indeed, as the article further details, the bipartisan panel was forced to perform some linguistic acrobatics on the issue, after the White House applied intense pressure:

“A series of staff statements issued by the commission, as well as the final report, were first sent to the White House for review. The draft of staff statement No. 17, dealing with the shootdown, brought an angry letter from [White House counsel Alberto] Gonzales, objecting to the wording. Cheney also telephoned both [9/11 Commission leaders Thomas] Kean and [Lee] Hamilton, complaining vociferously about the language.

“Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director, confirmed that changes were made, and approved by the commissioners, in both the staff statement and the final report after the White House letter was received and Cheney made his phone calls. But Zelikow said ‘our fundamental judgment’ had not changed. ‘Which is the President and Vice President have offered an account. Their account could be true but we can’t find corroborating documentary evidence to prove conclusively that it is true.’”

I’m curious to see how much play this story gets over the coming days.

Though part of me wonders if I’m taking comfort in it because it reaffirms my general sense of the world:  that, for instance, the entirely too-reasonable-sounding guy I just finished watching on television is, in fact, the public face of evil in our time.

(The private face, in case you were wondering.  Interestingly, it’s basically an uglier version of exactly the same thing.)

Ah, at last: the stars have aligned, the cables are plugged in, and my schedule has a free moment in it, allowing for a brief return to the subject of my obsession, real estate.

To begin, I’ll give you a few quick shots of the building as it appeared about two weeks ago; the scaffolding had gone up, preparatory to the addition of the building’s outer skin:

Here are two more images that may give you the sense that, yes, in fact, the scaffolding does go all the way around the building:

What you may notice at this point is that the place has begun to develop windows, meaning actual glass panes where mere holes used to be:

So I wandered around and admired my new windows for a bit, but the sun was going down, and I was hungry, so I headed for home. But on the way, I thought I’d take a few shots of what passes for the neighborhood, at this point.

I say “what passes for the neighborhood” because the whole area where the condo is going in is in the process of being redeveloped into what will be henceforth known as the Village Expansion. The Village is a lovely area on the east side of Indian Hill Boulevard with odd little mom-and-pop shops and restaurants that are usually not terrible. It’s nice, and quaint, but notably lacking some key amenities. Like a bookstore (caveat here: there’s one great used bookstore, but nothing with recent releases, and I’m all about the recent releases). Or a movie theater. Or, say, a cool place for me to live.

But voilà: the Village Expansion, on the west side of Indian Hill. You know it’s an expansion, because the rocks tell you so:

No, really. They do.

The “last packing house” referred to on the plaque is still referred to as the Citrus Packing House. It’s still standing, though in a bit of disrepair; the plan, apparently, is to renovate it into a mixed-use space combining artists’ lofts and shop/gallery features. I’m mighty curious what that’s going to wind up looking like, because this is what it looks like now:

Through the trees, you can spot a smidge of the first building in my complex. I’m in the fifth building, about a block and a half down.

R. and I passed back by the place on Sunday, and were amazed by the progress: the building’s outer skin has begun going up, and so the place was coated in what appeared to me to be tar paper and chicken wire, in preparation for stuccoing, which is supposed to begin imminently.

We also managed to get inside the building, and inside our very unit, because of a somewhat complex story about the rear balcony looking like it was much smaller than it was supposed to be, a story about nervous new homeowners in which neither of us comes off terribly well, so I’m just going to leave that part out. But the interior of the place is looking pretty nifty, if a bit filled with big stacks of wallboard at the moment.

Of course, I didn’t bring my camera with me, because I AM AN IDIOT. But having gotten in once, I assume that I’ll be able to do so again. Next up: interiors. Come hell or high water.

Did you?

The entire experience was excruciating.  I bit my nails, pulled my hair, screamed at the screen, covered my face with my hands.  Afterward, I was drained, but it still took hours to get my blood pressure back down to normal.

I’m talking, of course, about last night’s debate.

The Bush campaign has gone into massive spin-mode, as expected, but all immediate indications suggest a massive victory for Kerry.  Bush’s squirrellyness was too too evident—the rapid blinking, the increasingly high-pitched strain to his voice—while Kerry seemed to settle in as the debate wore on, becoming calmer and more forceful and more clear with each question.

As an editorial in the Boston Globe this morning suggests, it’s hard to imagine anyone watching that debate thinking, in the end, that Bush looked more “presidential.”

But stranger things have been known to happen.  And just because I survived last night doesn’t mean I’m going to make it through the rest of the debates, to election day, and through the inevitable lawsuits to follow without having a stroke.