http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/67005
Below are sidebar comments.
Attention span, the internet, reading, thinking, in a way I don't even feel like completing a sentence. First off I've started several books and not gotten through more than a hundred pages in Finders Keepers by Seamus Heaney, The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn, Farewell to an Idea by T.J Clark, In Defence of Anarchism by R.P. Wolff, and of course Capital, still stuck on page 427 somewhere in chapter 15.
I can blame the internet, but it's a little different for me. It's the fantastic number of political events that pull me almost everyday to web searches for news of the world. Think of just last week. The Arizona shooting and Tunisia which is still storming. Fucking Duvalier's return. There are always the collapsing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the forever shaky economy that might be good for the elite, but is a completely doomed catastropy for the rest of us.
John Ross had a poem about the revolution is not a faucet, it can't be turned off and on---no doubt tripping on Billy Holiday's classic. It's always leaking out and you can't call a plumber to fix it. Well, it seems to be leaking worse than usual lately, and while everywhere it seems the forces of repression and or chaos seem to be on the rise, so do the forces of resistance and revolt.
I don't even know if this perception is accurate, but I think it is which is why I spend so much time following the news traces of it. Then there is always the possibility that I am simply selecting what I want to find.
The psychological effect of this seemingly impossible dreaming is to make books much less interesting than the world. There are other effects, like the ability and inability to trace a series of ideas in writing.