Thursday, September 08, 2005
(2:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The spine
I have officially renamed my bookbag The Adam Kotsko Memorial Library, memorial because it's going to kill me. I always overestimate the number of books I'm going to use -- when I have moments to spare, I want to have several options so that I can cater to my ever-varying moods. Since this is the beginning of the school year, I am also buying many more books than I normally do. (For instance, Derrida's Book On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy just showed up on the Co-op's shelves today.)Aside from the physical burdens involved, this semester doesn't seem like it's going to be unreasonable. "Contemporary Hermeneutical Issues & Strategies" (a PhD required course) in particular is a blessing from the Lord. The best part is that I already did a lot of work on my Patristics directed study, so now I only have about 80,000 more pages to read before I'm done.
In other news, I'm apparently a hack.
Should I start learning Italian? I was going to ask on Tuesday, but I decided to wait until I had gotten a feel for the level of work this semester was going to represent. Two key questions:
- Is there any reason to believe that I could move quickly enough to be reading Agamben by the end of the semester? This would partly be a factor of how much of my French would be transferable -- obviously I can't know that until after the fact.
- What are the odds of my being able to keep up with it during the infamous Semester of the Damned?
