Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Re Collection

W alter Benjamin, in "Unpacking My Library," writes

The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. (60)

Today, I'm thinking of my exam areas and the respective lists--collections, really--as temporarily locked items in magic circles. I'm semi-officially in the exam phase of my program of study, and although I have yet to type up a reflective essay (a post-coursework "Stuff I'm Thinking About") and get thumbs-ups from the grad committee in the fall, my lists are reasonably well set. With a streak of good, steady studying, I hope to examine in November.

I filled two hours this afternoon with shelving toward what Benjamin calls the "mild boredom of order" in a book collection. I'm still missing a few; they should arrive from various half.com sellers in ten days or twelve. My library hunts are complete, and I have nearly all of the article length stuff in pdf, html or paper. And a couple of (bold) books on my list are neither in Bird Library nor in the collections of my examiners. For these, I'll wait a few weeks before deciding what to do about it. I have a slim margin of excess in my lists. That is, they're built to withstand subtractions. And I should expect, as I would with any reading, that a few items in the collections will peel off and drop away while other shadow texts will be recruited into the sets along the way. About the "mild boredom of order": I tend to keep books loosely organized into chaopiles. But ten-book stacks were beginning to wall in my desk space, so I picked up a cheap shelf and dedicated it to housing exam items.

I've half-joked before that exam lists could just be randomizations of titles from the book collections of our committee members. In such a system, each examiner or committee member would provide a long list of books, an idiosyncratic list of books ever-before-read. Examinees (or computers!) would determine student's exam lists by running a randomization rule on the larger list. And then read. Eccentric, sure. But I'd bet you a quarter that the stuff I'm reading (collections more or less of my own design) wouldn't diverge in drastic ways from randomizations pulled from my examiners' collections.

There is still more work to do with the formal statements defining each examination area. I have rough starts, but those will have to be polished before the first grad committee meeting in early fall. Although there's no provision to allow for such a thing, I'm tempted to break precedent and submit a photo for my exam proposal. I doubt it would fly. Maybe just for the exam on visualization and new media. Might improve the proposal's odds if I appeared in the photo, reading or even posed-as-if-about-to-start-reading.

Posted by dmueller at June 14, 2006 10:00 PM to Exammunition