Short attention span theater

I'm looking at the list of 100 books, and I'm thinking that although
I've read some of them (I couldn't be arsed to count) I read them a long
time ago.  And you know why? 

Because I can't focus on anything anymore.  Here is my reading so far
this afternoon, after I got the taxes to the CPA.  I started by
wondering about the book S**** Pit.  Can't remember what triggered it. 
Oh, yes I do -- I heard a recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poem
Daddy on some XM channel. So I started thinking about crazy chicks and
political analyses of crazy chicks. 

So I used one of my gray-market library cards and found a 1979 article
about the difference between the movie and the novel (S**** Pit, that
is), analyzed in political/feminist terms.  The woman who wrote S****
Pit was sort of lefty and it was unclear whether that was partly why she
had been committed.  That article made reference to the Children's
Bureau publication from 1914 called Infant Care.  So I read that.  Well,
partway.  It got boring about how to fold diapers. I got through at
least 10 pages, though. I noticed that Julia C. Lathrop was the head of
the Children's Bureau.  In 1914?  A woman was head of a gov't agency in
1914?  So I looked her up and it turns out I really should have known
about her because she was in with the Jane Addams/Alice Hamilton
Hull-House crowd. 

So back to my online library account.  I looked up Julia Lathrop and
found some correspondence between her and a working class woman from
right around 1914-15 and it was just riveting, and heart-breaking,
because I swear conditions for poor women in Chicago have actually
gotten worse in the last 100 years.  Then I got led off into a puzzler
about the Progressive Movement and the conflict between the radicals and
the reformers, and found some material that described the criticisms of
the Settlement House programs, which were assimilative and promoted hard
work and sobriety and a bunch of other conservative, unpopular stuff.  

Then I needed some M&Ms and I thought about how I really probably would
have been better off if I had just sat down and ground my way through
some more of Plath's poems, and just thought about those, but my head
just constantly explodes and with teh Intarweb being universally
available I now cannot stay focused on anything.  

I'm sorry, what were you saying?

-- 
Dover