I broke

For the last week or two I've been preparing for university with such vigour that the world of now has become hazy and unreal by comparison. With my mind already in the 27th, is it any wonder that I've been struggling to keep myself from starting on the course readings from the textbooks I've got so far? I didn't want to start them too early, though, in case I got stale or confused.

But last night The String Theory Landscape in Scientific American just failed to inspire me. There were other things I should have been doing, anyway, including excavating the ages-old layer of dust on top of my desk. So naturally my response was to sit down with one of the SOSC 303 textbooks instead. It's called Deviance, Conformity and Control, so from here on, in SOSC 205 style, I'll refer to it as DCC.

I only read the introduction - eight pages or so - so it was hardly the most inspiring stuff. It just ran over the familiar "normative definition" of deviance and pointed out some of the problems with that definition style (because, in any sociology text, the first action after making a statement has to be discussing all the reasons why that statement is unlikely to be true). One of the main problems with defining deviance as "a violation of accepted social norms" is that the norms themselves are socially constructed, raising the inevitable question of who constructed them. More precisely, some groups in society may have more power to label other groups as deviant, altering the general norms of society in the process. So deviance is about social power as much as it is about criminality - although of course that which is deviant is not necessarily criminal, and vice versa.

When I finished Choke I ran out of things to read before university. Everything else on my list is likely to take more than one week to read, and thus be thrown aside before I finish it, once lectures overtake me. The one item which probably would be a quick read is still on loan at Wellington City Libraries, leaving me bookless. So there's not really much reason to avoid my textbooks any longer, is there? Now, if only Vic Books had my ECON 224 text in, I could get onto that tonight...