Feeding the Monster

Friends,

I forwent reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting at my job yesterday, putting off for tomorrow the incredible amount of work I have to do in getting PhD materials together. Instead, I took to my new New Yorker issue.

James Wood, who is always good for a lengthy, interesting article about literature, wrote this one about Geoffrey Dyer's work. I had no idea who that guy is, but in reading the article, he wrote a book that immediately appealed to me.

It's called Out of Sheer Rage that, from what I gleamed from the Wood article, seems to be about Dyer's attempt to write a serious book about DH Lawrence and his subsequent failure because his thoughts were too crowded with other things seem more interesting to him at moment so it becomes this personal, autobiographical essay about DH Lawrence, sort of.

I could give two shits about DH Lawrence (unless he's guaranteed to be on the lit GRE subject test, then I suppose I couldn't give two shits about him...that is the opposite, yeah?). Anyway, that idea of being overcrowded with ideas and not being able to settle your mind on one thing and wishing to do everything at once. Yes, I identify wholly with that. Instantly, I wanted to read this book because I live that book...aside from the DH Lawrence parts.

Then it hit me. Reading a book about the problem that I have is exactly what I shouldn't be doing. And, even more, reading a review about my problem instead of working on one of those projects is even worse....and even now, writing a blog post about a review about book about my problem instead of working on one my problems...I'm just feeding this monster. This damn, damn monster.

viva el mustache