A little light reading

Michel Foucault, anyone?

Although I *could* be spending these weeks between terms reading something blissfully light, it seems graduate school is tranforming me into a psychology geek.

Here is my reading list, which I am cycling through at variable intervals:

The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, by Michel Foucault. This is about how the Greek virtues have influenced our understanding of sexuality, how we conceptualize desire and what uses we assign to sexual activity. It is about the intersection of four critical aspects of self and sexual relations (as it pertains to men): the body, marriage, homoerotic relations with boys and wisdom.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, also by Michel Foucault. This work traces the "archaeology of madness" in Western civilization from 1500 to 1800, a time when society made the transition between being at ease with "crazy" people and the decision to establish loony bins to separate the "insane" from the rest of the population.

The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz, which is a book my cousin Spitfire recommended. It's a quick little "Toltec Wisdom Book," that finds its home in the "general metaphysics" section at Powell's. The four agreements are: Be impeccable with your word, don't take anything personally, don't make assumptions and always do your best.

What I like about this book is the concept of "agreements," as it's one I've been chewing on all by myself for a couple years. In short, all of "reality" is merely a collection of agreements about what we're doing and what we're witnessing. Language is an agreement that certain sounds and symbols carry certain meanings. Money is an agreement based on power and influence. We agree -- more vaguely -- on colors, tastes, volume, smells. We agree considerably less on what's funny, what something "means," etc.

So this book posits that all of our attitudes and perspectives are highly informed and influenced by agreements we accepted as we were "domesticated" during childhood, and that we took on these agreements because children are maleable, incited by fear of punishment and motivated by the desire for reward. (Freud said the same thing a century ago in "Civilization and Its Discontents," by the way.)

I also have another Focualt book I'm picking at in little bits. Abnormal is a collection of lectures he gave at the Collége de France in 1974 and 1975 about the rising power of psychiatry and the classification of people who "resemble their crimes before they commit them."

At the same time I picked up these other books (as well as volume 1 of The History of Sexuality), I picked up a copy of On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I'm letting this one take a lazy buggy ride for now. I've got my thumbs in enough books already -- not to mention The God of Small Things, by Arhundati Roy, which I've been poking at since December. But I'll have to turn my attention to Kübler-Ross soon enough.

And, on top of all of this, I am studying -- FINALLY -- to take a psychology exam I was supposed to take more than a year ago as a final for a Intro to Psych course in my grad program. A YEAR!!! It's hard to believe that much time has passed, and I've been so adept at ignoring this thing. Thankfully, a year ago or so, S2 gave me the printouts of her study guide, and I have been diligent about keeping track of them.

I will take this exam by May 11. That is my promise to myself. Best to put it in writing somewhere, because I am gifted with amnesia about such things.