About my interruptive/interactive quote/comment compulsion: Yes, it is treating a written text as a real-time conversation (in which you don’t normally hear the end till you reach the end).
Some (many) mea-culpas: Even in real oral conversations, I tend to interrupt before the person gets to finish, sometimes because I have already anticipated the finish or think I have (I’m of course sometimes/often wrong) and sometimes because I’m just impatient to reply (often because I’m afraid I’ll forget otherwise).
In my defence, on my own end, I don’t much speechify; I say my bit with minimal words, so as not to subject the other party to the kind of frustration I feel when someone is being long-winded. (I stop reading novels as well as monographs, too, when it’s obvious (or so I think) where they’re going, and it’s just words).
I think my interruptingness is also related in some way to my indiscretion, my saying things I shouldn’t say, divulging secrets, partly even a Trumpian hyperbole, stating things that I conjecture or wish were so as if they were fact. There is a definite impulsive/compulsive component to these ejaculations.
And of course the failure of open access and skywriting, which was specifically motivated by my belief that everyone was inclined and inspired to real-time interactivity, as I was — but instead turned out to be an olympic event at which I perhaps excelled but for which no one but me had any interest or appetite!
I tell it (or perhaps rationalize it) all here:
Harnad, S. (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines.
(It’s against my nature, having said all this, to refer anyone to chapter-and-verse instead of just restating it simply and compactly on the spot, so I’ll say it: I thought the human brain (and thinking itself) evolved language for real-time, “online” exchanges at the speed of thought, not for the long, offline monologues that later supplemented it across time, space, and generations, in the form of writing and print.)
But it was just a fantasy, based on a compulsive quirk of mine.
‘Nuff said. Since then I have learned what I knew (as we all know) already, but had ducked for 50 years: It’s not about me (unlike this bit of self-indulgent self-flagellation).