Rudders

Last night my wife watched Mary Poppins while I watched the second season of Dexter. I think this says something about our relationship — namely, that there is a lot more Mary Poppins in my future and a lot less Dexter. I told her who knows the kids might like Dexter more than Mary Poppins, but she thinks I am wrong on this one.

In other news it is the end of the semester over here and I’ve been shifting my readings habits away from fieldwork and virtual worlds (the topics of last semester) to discussion classes and ethnographies of businessmen (the topics of the break). It is hard to steer yourself off a trail of reading after sixteen weeks on it. Like the steady, deep resistance you feel as you move a rudder — at least until it slips into place and then it becomes just as steadily and deeply unmovable as it was before.

I recently read two popular members of that small genre entitled ‘academic self-help books’: Mortimer Adler’s How To Read A Book and Magnum’s Teaching What You Don’t Know. They have a lot of similarities — both based on a mixture of experience and the psychological literature (such as it existed in the 30s, when Mortimer first published his book), padded up with cutsey anecdotes that slow down the pace, and both end with a list of great books. I wish I had Magnum’s book back when I was teaching what I didn’t know more often, and that Adler’s book was more easily excerpted for undergraduates. But there you go.