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How To Tell When You Are Distracted
All evidence on this blog to the contrary, I do not have ADD. When I want to, I can buckle down and focus just fine. Nothing I say in the rest of this post will prove that, but I assure you it’s true.
So I am plugging away this weekend on my new project site, the bigger, better, more powerful version of O Pegasus. This is why it’s taking me so long to get that site to beta release—
First, there was Adam Lindsay Gordon. He wrote a poem or two that is already archived on O Pegasus. I copied “How We Beat the Favourite” over to the new site and, as I was cataloging it, wondered if the horses mentioned in it were real.
A few Google searches later, and I had a biography of Adam Lindsay Gordon in my hands. Well, on my desktop. Said biography contains a plethora of annotations. I stop entering “How We Beat the Favourite” in the database and make the general record for the biography. It’s clear this book is going to be very useful.
The new biography has pictures. Lots and Lots of pictures. I begin entering the pictures into the database.
One of the pictures is captioned with a stanza from another poem by Gordon. The stanza is part of an eight-part series. It is part of the last poem in the series, to be precise.
I stop entering pictures and start entering the series. Starting with the first poem. Of course.
Every poem in the series has an inscription / introductory quote. Suddenly I am entering Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (awesome) and Juvenal’s Satire VIII (seriously less awesome). It is only when I am contemplating whether or not I want to track down a poem referenced in the introduction to one of Sir Walter Scott’s poems that I realize I’ve gotten a little distracted.
After all, I’m supposed to be entering the poem in Gordon’s series so I can finish entering the photo in the biography, so that the biography will be done and I can go back to “How We Beat the Favourite” and footnote it.
I couldn’t tell you how many entries I actually created during this little side jaunt, but I can tell you that O Pegasus has 108 authors, 8 books, 169 texts, and 111 images. The new site has 101 people, 112 texts, 25 books, and 295 images. And I am nowhere—nowhere!—near to having all the OP texts moved over.
I can also tell you that when you are tired, “Bensurdatu attacks the Seven-headed Serpent” looks a lot like “Bensurdatu attacks the Seven-headed Squirrel.” I have to admit I’m a little disappointed; there is no way a fairy tale about a seven-headed serpent could be anywhere near as interesting as one about a seven-headed squirrel.
I bet someone, somewhere has written about seven-headed squirrels. Maybe I should go look it up… I mean, so what if I never get the site to beta stage because I can’t keep my Google impulse under control? Clearly I’m amused and keeping myself out of trouble. That’s a fairly significant accomplishment in and of itself.
Gordon. Adam Lindsay Gordon. I am supposed to be focused on Gordon. Why couldn’t he have written about seven-headed squirrels instead of nineteenth-century racehorses?
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Comments
Maybe you should write about seven headed squirrels. Who knows? It could be a great literary contribution, and then you could write an autobiography and footnote yourself.
On Feb 8, 2010, funder said:
Well, I had to go look him up, then look up that poem, and now I want to name my next bay mare Iseault!