When reading House of Leaves I always found it really interesting that Johnny’s inserts usually began as relevant notes about Zampano’s analysis, and would then deteriorate into a commentary on something about his personal life that at times was completely unrelated. His footnotes appear to mimic his thoughts in an almost stream of consciousness way (not fully stream of consciousness because a lot of the time they make perfect grammatical sense), and I thought it would be interesting to examine how my mind wanders when reading a piece of scholarly work.

Tonight I had to read an article for French about university education, and I wanted to do my blog post on how my mind wandered whilst reading the beginning of that article. My mind definitely wandered and I found my thoughts similarly wandering as Johnny’s did, beginning with something related to the article and quickly going off on a tangent not entirely related to the subject at hand. This to me seemed very indicative of a student’s process in doing homework. I think that many of us have a huge problem with procrastination, and at times our minds just wander in directions completely unrelated to what we should be doing.