Meanwhile, from the depths of my attention deficit disorder...

...while I peck away at my thoughts on the Dhalgren thing, I'm continuing to muddle my way through a spazzy time of life, no book quite right for the moment. For the time being, I've gone back to my tried and true maxim: When in doubt, read some Kazuo Ishiguro. This time it's A Pale View of Hills, his first novel, and the last of his I need to read. After that, it's nothing new until he writes it. Which is distressing. And yet, exciting. Something fun about being so enamored with someone who will be read for a long time to come (if I have anything to say about it) who is still, hopefully, at a mid-way point in his writing career. It's fun.

But then, it's like, after this book, after I finish Hills, then what? A half hour trip to Half Price Books with my girlfriend tonight yielded empty hands and a peculiarly heavy wallet. About the best I was able to come up with was the notion that it's safe to say that Faulkner was out, for the time being. Shoddy attention span and all. (Which means this, which I saw a copy of tonight at the store and kind of had to laugh a little bit, is probably out, too.) Beyond that, though: beats me. I suggested maybe what I needed to do was take a month off from books entirely, and before I could finish the sentence, my girlfriend said I'd never make it. Which is true. I wouldn't make it. Even if I wasn't reading, I'd still be reading. Weird, I know.

It's possible this will lead to interesting things in the near future, at least. If it works out the way I suspect it might work out--a couple pages, here and there--that's at least a couple minutes each day to keep my mind from choking on itself. Still, though, there's other free minutes in the day, begging to be filled. Might it be time to re-learn how to work my PlayStation?