forever in progress

burn after reading

I'm feeling precious about starting another book. My nightstand has, let's see

one
two
three

four books in various states of completion, speaking to a larger lack of discipline, or perhaps a phone-eroded attention span. This is at least part of why I'm rubbish at being a scholar, apart from the requisite smarts, I mean. I lack the monomania necessary to run the contours and plumb the depths of a given subject, arriving finally, and with a show of faux modesty, at the punchline of that old joke:

Q. What is a expert?
A. Someone who knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.

Tempting to look this up on Quote Investigator to determine its provenance and current state of corruption-cum-evolution, but that's how a hundred blog posts before this one wound up abandoned. Then again, just this morning I saw someone bandying about a saying by “G.K. Chesterton”.... or was that “Neil Gaiman”...?

Anyhow, I'm co-prepping a class for the fall on monsters: their socio-psychological origins, their cultural meanings and uses. And being not-expert on monsterology, I told myself, “Self, for once in your life you ought to exercise Discipline on your reading habits, first by reading more than you currently do, and second by reading only books on the subject of monsters in order to stand before a classroom of first-years and at least sound like you know what you're talking about.” And it worked––for a while. I got halfway through Skal's Monster Show! And half way through Asma's On Monsters! And now, rather than picking up either of those books, I'm reading Simon Spurrier's Hellblazer comics (very good) and casting come-hither-stares at the wall of unread books behind and to the right of me, and frankly in nearly every room of the house because, again, No Discipline.

Let this be my guilty confession, then, because we all know how this is going to end. But will it be half of Ken Greenhall's Elizabeth or half of Clive Barker's Weave World?

#tsundoku