In the one-paragraph story “Special Chair” (2001), Lydia Davis describes the situation of writers who teach in the university system as one of shared longing. “He and I are both…
Archive for June, 2022
Three Poems
Mother: “Behind every successful woman there’s a sink full of dirty dishes.” — the journals of Lydia Davis, December 2003 Commerce I don’t believe in love. I believein commerce. I have…
Amiri Baraka’s Changing Same as Anational Sociality
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz
Bored Housewives
In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, an aristocratic, worldly mode of resignation yielded to bourgeois withdrawal into the “interior” — literally, of the home and, figuratively,…
Traumatized by Capitalism? Novels of Bored Workers
As Zadie Smith suggests in her recent essay collection Intimations (2020), the containment of pandemic quarantine revealed our need to find “something to do” — anything to pass the time.1 Driven by…
Boredom, Redux: A Reflection on Higher Education
Thus the [human individual’s] existence . . . is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. And if we look at it also from…
Give me death or give me boredom?
“A butterfly that lives forever, is really not a butterfly at all.” — Data, character in Star Trek: Picard 1 Immortality is desired by many, figuratively and literally. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18…
So Bored I Could Laugh
How would you define boredom? If you are a philosopher (my condolences), you may have some convoluted answer involving words like “existential” or “ontological.” If you’re Google, you opt (unhelpfully)…
Wrestling with Boredom, or, On Inspiration in Academic Practice
Let me be honest. I don’t want to be writing this essay; it feels like a monumental digression I can’t afford. I wish I could get out of it but,…