20 May 2009

Following the lead of a few others (though it feels a bit pretentious, given my tender age and my relative lack of any real competence), I want to lay out my goals for what I’d like to accomplish this summer. Not because you really care, obviously, but because it seems helpful to provide myself with a kind of checklist, and because declaring myself in public makes it feel more serious. Ergo:

Language. Most of the summer’s working hours will be devoted to language study, in an effort to reinforce a few things before the year starts and I actually need to use these things. Since Rousseau will figure in a couple of my fall classes, I’ll slowly work through The Social Contract and possibly also the Discourse on Inequality in French. I’ll do something similar in Latin, picking a few texts and just working with them for a bit each day, with a wider variety: sections from Gratian’s Decretum, probably, some of the Carmina Burana, maybe Unam Sanctam… My girlfriend will join me in this one, and we have yet to decide on the texts. My French and Latin are basically secure (though still far from effortless), so this is just an effort to ease myself back into their academic use.

More strenuous will be my effort to learn German, more or less from the ground up. I took a reading course a few years ago (which I’m enrolled in again this summer), but I never used it and very little of it stuck. This summer, my goals are to work through the reading book (again), to practice actually speaking with a handful of friends who already can or need to learn, and to practice reading some simple piece of prose (Hesse’s Demian has been recommended).

Reading. A friend and I carry on a little reading group in contemporary critical theory, which I’ll keep up with—and which might take up all the reading time I have remaining. We’re in the middle of Nancy’s Inoperative Community now, to be followed up by Blanchot’s Unavowable Community and possibly Agamben’s Coming Community (though I’m not actually sure that last one is at all related to the former two). With what time remains, I have a little pile of political theory and social criticism I’d like to start before I have to go back into theology full force: Michael Walzer’s The Company of Critics, and Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution and Crises in the Republic.

Writing. Little to none. I’d prefer not to stop writing completely in the months leading up to the start of my degree, but I really don’t have any time left if I plan to do all of the above (plus buy a house and move!). What little I do write will be on this blog, or on a few simple, just-for-fun projects I have going on the side—a short commentary on the Schleitheim Confession, and disputed question on infant baptism.

As usual, that’s probably more than I can realistically hope to do. Oh well!

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