Never been in a similar state? It's not pretty at all. I know so many people who don't have time to read - well, I'm not one of them. Then this happens.

I have a friend who under particularly nasty political conditions (in her country) stopped going to the theatre. She just couldn't go, couldn't spend two hours in a theatre. She stopped believing the actors on the stage or something. Or couldn't find the story plausible - any story. And her husband was a playwright, go figure.

But mine's not that kind of predicament. I can't find political excuses for this.

Obviously, it is easier to finish a book when it is the most interesting thing in your life. But some good old fashion stubborn determination - the old Rocket Richard - I`m going to finnish this book if it kills me - attitude won`t hurt either.

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Although, variations in an assortment of attentional mechanisms may result in human diversity, the attention variant most likely associated with the ADHD continuum is individual differences between the optimal duration of attentional focus between saccades.

We do know that when the muscles of the eye are held still with local anaesthesia, the temporary loss of the ability to make saccadic (eye) movements results in the dissipation, then temporary loss of vision (or, more specifically, the temporary loss of the ability to process visual information in an overt fashion). For us to experience sight, the eye, it seems, needs to refresh its focus periodically through the production of saccadic movements. A saccade, which is basically the relaxing and regaining of attentional focus, can (and does) vary in breadth, but not in accordance to one`s placement along the ADHD continuum. What does seem to vary, however, is the length of attentional focus between attentional saccades.

I use the term, "attentional focus," rather than "attention span" or "sustained attention," since both these latter terms, as they are conventionally defined, may contain any number of attentional foci. For example, when reference is made as to the length of one`s attention span, the reference is usually to the interval of time with which a person`s attention remains drawn to a specific topic or activity. Thus, the more interesting the activity, the longer one`s attention span is said to be, while the more vapid the activity, the shorter one`s attention span seemingly becomes. In contrast, while the length of an individual`s attentional focus may vary according to the individual`s placement along the ADHD continuum, there is no variance in the duration of attentional focus associated with any one individual.

Irregardless of where one places on the ADHD continuum, the decision to return to the old focal point or to focus on something new has to be made during the occurrence of each attentional saccade. While there are no consistent differences in actual decision-making capabilities, there are marked differences, associated with one`s placement along the ADHD continuum, as to the frequency with which such decisions have to be made. Thus, explorative thinkers are forced by their biological attributes to make these focal decisions (consciously or unconsciously) much more often than linear thinkers.

The human default during an attentional saccade is to pick the stimulus among competing stimuli which is the most intriguing It is possible to override this human default and to focus, instead, on the least interesting of competing stimuli, but to do so takes conscious effort. The conscious effort employed to override this default decision to focus on the most flamboyant, novel or emotionally charged stimulus, must be made over and over again.

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I felt that, anyway. During the cram part, eg, I read much of Herder in a weekend -- I mean it, I did, I know I did ... But a year later, when I actually sat down to write, I found that I had to go back and reread in a different way, not everything, maybe, but a lot ...

Feeling too distracted to finish, though -- that I know from other disturbances ... life right now? Do you find that you're having to read passages over again? That's distraction, and I feel it now too. It's not depression exactly -- but where does one look right now? where will focus and concentration make a difference? I'm not surprised at anyone thoughtful who's feeling that she doesn't know how to answer those questions these days.

And academe does something to our reading habits, you and Andrean are right. I've noticed that most teaching and research staff at universities rarely bother reading the entire work. They have the skill of knowing exactly what they're looking for, going for it, scanning it, comparing it to similar works in their heads, underlining those 4-5 paragraphs that they think are crucial, classifying it, and putting the journal or the book on the shelf. How scary! I believe that some of them are brilliant and can be forgiven; others are just lazy and unaware of the sanctity of reading. I can clearly see how some of the tenured professors stop growing. Some of them even make reading lists that consist entirely of works from the 80s or worse...

I don't want to see that happening to me (in a non-academic environment).

You know what else I do? When I write, I have trouble finishing the sentence. I've noticed that most of my sentences end with [...]. I rarely make S is P statements; I tend to resort to "I guess", "I suppose", "one could say". My sentences always linger in one way or the other!

I subscribed to the Globe and Mail for the $6 student rate a month or two ago. I've read, maybe, 5 papers out of all of them. I saved the papers from the week of September 11th. But I start to read them, and I just can't summon the interest to continue.

Good grief, I can't be burnt out at the beginning of my second year. I really shouldn't have taken summer school courses. I should have gotten myself a job instead.

More to the point though, to break up the log jam, I've found it helpful to go back to the classics of my youth, some book I really enjoyed as a kid that is absolutely all pleasure and no effort. For me, it's Kiplings Stalky and Company, or The Tree That Sat Down and the Stream That Stood Still> by Beverly Nichols

Maybe not forcing books at all will help, and just enjoying sunsets for a while. All things come to pass.

It's why I don't really mind reading books by Linda McQuaig and then switching to James Laxer. Reading one fertilizes my mind to interrelate to the other and see where there's commonalities and differences and what I should fit into my own "grid of understanding".

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I've noticed that most teaching and research staff at universities rarely bother reading the entire work. They have the skill of knowing exactly what they're looking for, going for it, scanning it, comparing it to similar works in their heads, underlining those 4-5 paragraphs that they think are crucial, classifying it, and putting the journal or the book on the shelf.

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Don`t you dare try that with what the prof gives you. The professor is so used to the topic that he is just trying to avoid what is repetative and knows how to find what is new. He assumes that everything he hands the students is new and will put test questions for the most obscure part of the article to make sure you read everything.

A continuum is something that the WHole POpulation is on - and we all belong to many continuums and exist in the middle of many of them. I left out a discussion of individual differences in length of attentional focus so I left out ADHD. The point is that the problem is one of decision making and this is true for the entire population. If the book is interesting, EVerybody automatically redurect their focus to it and if they do that their "attention span" which is the word you brought up appears longer. If the book is boring, it takes more effort to make the decision to read the book rather than focus on something else. The problem is when you get tired or bored you get to the point where you are not really focusing at all. It is all a problem of decision making.

There are many tricks, a few I have already mentioned. One is reading like Rick Mercer would a political speach looking for humour. If the important thing is finishing something for the sake of finishing it when you are having trouble in that regard - rewarding yourself with your favorite food or a movie or something could be called for - but that stategy becomes destination focused rather than journey focused if you use it more than a couple of times.

Destination focus is what we complain about in right-wingers because it makes only one thing important (getting ahead) and everything else irrelevant.

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Audra only
The continuum doesn count because it is about everybody, I`ll try not to bring up anything about ADHD even if the topic is racism, education, creativity, social inequality, gender differences, conformity of thought, self-esteem,learning, prosiac or any other such topic that you don`t believe they should take part in.

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He assumes that everything he hands the students is new and will put test questions for the most obscure part of the article to make sure you read everything.

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I hate that. I had this question on a communications exam once: "A snake is an example of what?"

Huh?! It could be anything! The question referred to one little sentence somewhere in the middle of the text. Lord help you if you didn't memorize the whole damned book!

(The answer, by the way, was an anomaly, if I remember correctly.)

Michelle, I hope yours is just a school-work induced temporary nuisance. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Oldgoat,

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a source of comfort and pleasure has suddenly left me holding an empty bag

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...exactly! This is an exaggerated comparison, but it's almost like your world turned suddenly from colour to black-and-white. And I know what you mean by going back to the personal classics. Two writers that I've been worshipping since my teenage years are Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust.
Oftentimes, when I can't read, I go back to the Waves and read out loud, almost perform. Virginia Woolf's tone is always soothing to me! But although as a teen I hated the character named Jinny, now I read only her monologues! Actually, VW unkindly reduces her to a body and she's different from everyone else in the book in that regard. I like reading out loud Jinny's accounts of entering the room, or being gazed at, or absorbing the light: "I am arrayed. I am prepared. The fiddlers have lifted their bows."

As for Proust, I can't remember how many times I re-read Un amour de Swann. I really love each and every tome of La recherche, but I somehow always went back to the selected few. There were times when I would re-read Swann whenever I was in love.

The good thing about re-reading is that you get to choose your own menu. The bad thing - you're supposed to grow & expand your interests .

DrC - tactful as always...

WingNut: I do feel a bit uncomfortable about my room, to which I moved a couple of months ago. But I changed the lights, re-organized the furniture, got a new bed, put good books at strategic places, tried all sorts of creative disorder. Zip. There are several spots in the city that are reading friendly. But I can't possibly spend more than 2 hrs. a day in a coffee house. And it doesn't work too well either.

It can't be my job. I started working about 3 months ago, nobody can get burned out so quickly.

Thanks Michelle, you're right.

BTW, DrC, didja like Laxer's Stalking the Elephant - if I remember the title correctly? I thought it was terrible, I was very surprised.

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I do feel a bit uncomfortable about my room, to which I moved a couple of months ago. But I changed the lights, re-organized the furniture, got a new bed, put good books at strategic places, tried all sorts of creative disorder.

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Nesting! Or nesting behaviour as a defence! Aha!

Trespasser, I have yet to have the famous Babble dream, but just as I drifted off last night those lines above came back to me and got me thinking about birds and squirrels.

I once watched from a friend's apartment window a squirrel who'd just lost part of his normal route from a rooftop to the ground (a tree that brushed against my friend's windowsill had been cut down). Squirrel would run along the ledge towards the place where the tree had been, stop, groom himself madly, turn around and run back to the far end of the ledge, turn, run back, sit and groom madly -- etc etc etc, for the half-hour I watched.

And I think I've heard that birds, when disturbed about their environment (are crows/hawks moving in to this neighbourhood?), will begin fussing over their nests, picking away, rebuilding, picking away, to no obvious practical purpose ...

- Robotech: Genesis
- Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
- Culture Jam

I'll finish them eventually, really I will.

M'Boy, I used to have too many scattered livres de chevet all around the place. I would grab one of them, pat the covers, open and smell the pages (love the smell of print, weird, eh?), read two sentences and get terribly annoyed. (It's gotta be the wrong choice of titles that causes all this, it just occurred to me.) My chevet has been a real wasteland until last night - I got hold of an old box of French Dictionary Cards and now I play with/read those before sleep. Each card displays an English term and its French translation on the flip side, it's fairly interesting for reading-deprived like moi.

Maybe I'm romanticizing.

I was often so distracted by the design of a publication I didn't pay much attention to its content. When I changed jobs (for other reasons) I got better.

But now I realize that I have about six or seven books on my desk that I'm halfway through, or less, and they've been sitting there for weeks or months.

I didn't lose interest -- they're all good (OK, except one) -- but somehow my plans to read them steadily fell by the wayside.

I still like to read -- the New Yorker, for example, or some books of short stories we have lying around. But anything longer has been a problem for most of this year.

I can sympathize in other ways too. I've always been on the cautious side, but after grad school (history) and more undergrad (geology), I find I'm always qualifying my statements (almost always, anyway!). My "professional" life (ha!) has a lot to do with this too.

As for academics who don't read -- I was never keen on doing a Ph.D., but was even less so when people told me how they had to read to prepare for comps. Not for me, thanks.

skdadl is probably right about the hawks and crows -- they've been on my mind too. And maybe words are just too much with you. You finished grad school in April -- that's not really a long time. And you work as an editorial assistant. Maybe your mind/body/soul is saying you need to take a break from reading. Too much of a good thing, and all. I guess I'm a fellow-sufferer of a kind.

Some counsellors recommend to couples with stale sex lives that they resolve to refrain from sex for a while -- nothing but holding hands, or kissing on the cheek, or whatever. Supposedly these restrictions end up getting people hot, or rather thinking about breaking them does.

You know, for two days now I've been reading (trying to read) Ann Hansen's book that got so much space on Rabble home page. Fernwood is distributing Between the Lines books, so I found a copy of Hansen on my boss's desk as soon as it was out. There have been two or three times when I wanted to throw the thing out of the window. I mean, on the page one of the book about the most violent forms of Direct Action the author offers descriptions of nature - you know, snow-covered cliffs, whales and seals in the ocean, agony! And before p. 60, where I'm at currently, there are least 4 occasions in which she writes how she, and her other female comrades-in-fight felt attracted by male leaders of those militant groups.