::HEARD MENTALITY::

In the way to and from Port Aransas, I listened to a book on tape. The novel I heard was Chuck Palahniuk's "Lullabye." Unabridged, it was 7.5 hours long.

(Knowing that I read much faster than the spoken word makes me agitated -- there's no way I'd've finished the book in that amount of time if I'd been reading it. I guess overcoming the inertia of living outside a book's world for a while is hard to do.)

I couldn't've been happier with my choice of novel, though. Palahniuk's writing is self-referential, great for the non-audio learners like me; he employs mantras and revisits and parallel constructions in a way that loops my narrative conscious and keeps me remembering. The story stays in my active memory. Every time the narrator, Carl Streator, describes a character's suit, he uses the same construction. It's not (color); it's (rampantly detailed color description). See:

"The suit she's wearing, the skirt is fitted to her hips. It's green, but not the green of a lime, more the green of a key lime pie. It's not the green of an avocado, but more the green of avocado bisque topped with a paper-thin sliver of lemon, served ice cold in a yellow Sevres soup plate. It's green the way a pool table with green felt looks under the yellow 1 ball, not the way it looks under the red 3."

Yum.

Listening to it, I was one of "these sound-aholics, these quiet-ophobics" to whom the narrator refers.