Head Rattle

I.
Yeesh! Too many things coming back in the past week.... In the tempting fate department, how about that Australian billionnaire who's going to build an exact replica of the Titanic? What else will it be but a ghost ship? And what sort of morbid sickos will want to cruise on it? How many lunatics or terrorists will see it as an opportunity to repeat history? One could ask the same question, I suppose, about the new One World Trade Center, still unfinished but already New York's tallest building. And the space shuttle Enterprise landed at Kennedy Airport a few days ago, on its way to becoming a museum piece -- an obsolete spacecraft named in memory of a 1960s TV show landed at an airport named in memory for a slain 1960s president. It's all too much nostalgia for lost glories and might-have-beens for one week, surely.

II.
I am attempting to read a book on my e-reader (Russell Banks' Lost Memory of Skin) and listen to an audiobook on my iPhone (Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang) at the same time -- not simultaneously, of course, but in alternating sequence. Two very different books, but it's creating the weird effect in my mind of conflating the two. I'm confusing which characters and plot points belong to which book, as if it's all one long, bizarre story. Maybe multitasking is not the proper strategy for imbibing modern fiction.