FoolsCap

The subject line is my tribute to Kant.

I’ve not been reading, much to my dismay.  Or rather, I’ve not been able to get to the reading I want to do outside of my coursework.  Frustrating, of course, because I worry that I’m missing opportunities to get ahead of the game.  So, despair.  I did find time over the recent break to read Freakonomics, that "weird" economics book.  I’ll offer some cherce bits from it later, but on the whole it didn’t offer much to me.  The cover image, though, is provocative: an apple sliced open to reveal an orange’s interior.

I wonder if there’s an interesting assignment in the idea of comparing (as Levitt and Dubner’s book claims to) apples and oranges.  Possible assignment:

Student randomly picks two objects out of a box.  No information is given about the objects.  Through research, the student has to find some number of things the objects have in common and three ways they’re different.

Sort of a vague sketch for an assignment, I know.

Essentially, the big point to be made in the book is that often data don’t reveal their secrets not because the people working with them aren’t brilliant or are incompetent, but because the question they’re asking presupposes some answer rather than another.  something to think about.

Other things I’m not reading (in order they’re not being read):

• Shaviro’s Connected
• Ulmer’s Internet Invention
• Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther
• Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse
• The Essential Foucault
• The big stack of rhet-comp articles I printed in, oh, late January or early February
• Eisner/Miller
• It’s Superman! by, um, some guy [Tom DeHaven–Thanks, Amazon!]
• Stern’s Tristram Shandy
• DeLillo’s Libra
• Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff

Savvy readers will know that I’ve been stuck in the middle with (Thanks, Steeler’s Wheel!) Shaviro and Ulmer for quite some time now.  I promise myself–and you, dear readers–I will finish those books by semester’s end.

One of the books.

By the end of summer.

I swear.