Friday, August 01, 2014

Re-reading Is Fundamental

I think it's a common enough occurrence that when we re-read something we find new stuff in a text.  We either notice stuff we missed the first time around or we can connect it to new thoughts in our head.  That's why I reread the 1st edition DMG from cover-to-cover every couple of years (Though it's been more like three right now.  That's grad school for you, I guess.).  And there's a line from an Frantz Fanon piece that I didn't understand when I was assigned it as an undergrad and I didn't understand it when I was assigned it again the first year of my Masters degree.  Just last spring I was assigned the same chapter a third time and I think I've finally got the gist of that one sentence now, but I don't understand it well enough to trot it out casually in a discussion, or to make it a key component of a paper.  Maybe that'll come later, after further wrestling with the piece some more.

Which brings me to an idea I've been pondering for a while now: levels of spell comprehension.  Because the world needs one more way to make M-U's more complicated, right?