if you have an hour or so to spare, drop by a bookstore and read eat when you feel sad, by wunderkind zachary german. the book is about one robert and the utterly normal things that happen to him -- he goes to parties, eats chinese food, listens to music, checks his email. all of this told in the sparest of language; i'm not sure if there's a sentence with more than one clause in the novella. it feels very gimmicky at first, but after a while you realize that it works, and once you buy into the conceit the rest of the book becomes pretty enjoyable, and even funny in a salingeresque kind of a way at times. it's not literature, i don't think, but it does capture how it feels to be lonely among people, and manages somewhat to use the cadences and rhythms of the facebook generation to pretty good effect.

i think it's pretty much established at this point that dissertating is (a) running my life, and (b) causing me to have nothing of particular interest to say here, so i'll kind of go quiet for the next few weeks until things are done. the defense date, in case you don't know yet, is 4/21, after which i'll collapse somewhere for a while and then rejoin the land of the living. wish me luck!