Tuesday, October 26, 2004
(10:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
What I'm Reading Tonight
I am re-reading Alain Badiou's brief study of St. Paul tonight. The first time I read it was in the down times during the festivities surrounding Richard and Kari's wedding, so I was not as attentive as I could have been. This time around, I have been completely absorbed. As I said of Moby Dick, "It's so fucking good you won't believe it." But don't take my word for it:A note for a future post: my super-attentive reading was mostly enabled by not having my computer in the same building as me; I was in a coffee shop. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I noticed the details of the bland public restroom with the eye of a novelist -- I could have captured the moment of my urination and its aftermath with an Updikean precision. Even if I do not post as often as the "professional" bloggers, blogging has a tendency to creep into every corner of my life -- the rhythm of checking my SiteMeter constantly at work, knowing that I'll have had about 100 visits on average by 10:30, about 250 by 5:00... -- and I wonder if blogging requires and inculcates a certain mental dispersal. I'm not quite ready to say that such mental dispersal is bad in itself; an overly concentrated mental effort toward blog posting would be a grave genre error. I am, however, ready to say that it is more than a little worrisome that the only way I am able to shift decisively to a more concentrated mental state is to place some kind of physical obstacle between myself and the means of blogging.
