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…
Contemporaries Essays
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,…
Introduction: “I’m Not in the Mood”
In early 2020, before the pandemic, an artist visited the class I had been assigned as a teaching assistant. It was around the time I was writing my dissertation prospectus,…
Art Acts
“Which game would you rather play? I’ll give you a choice of two. One. Every picture tells a story. Two. Every story tells a picture.”1 So proposes Daniel Gluck to…
Shifting Sands: Re-Reading Ali Smith’s Autumn
I first read Ali Smith’s Autumn in book club. Serendipity dropped me onto an Upper East Side studio couch, and for many months after, I found myself crowded in amongst a cohort…
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life.” — Woolf, The Waves I was reading, desultorily, the stories of Muriel Spark during a…
Ali Smith’s Poetic Attentions
We call a poet a “poet’s poet” when they’re read mostly by other poets. By implication, a poet’s poet is difficult or obscure or both. When I call certain novelists…