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Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

Excerpts from Journal July 8 2003 — Dec 4 2005

2003 July Father goes to look up word in dictionary and finds that he himself has been quoted as reference.             (Word was polysemous and dictionary was Webster’s 2nd or 3rd.) Georges Simenon claimed that he…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

An Introduction in One-Liners

The second part of this page is intended as a guide for readers to navigate our cluster. But first, an introduction:    Lydia Davis tends to slip from people’s personal canons. Why? As…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis, Uncategorized

Special Chairs

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

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…

Peer Reviewed Articles

Peer Reviewed Articles

Bored As Hell, Contemporaries Essays

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,…

Bored As Hell, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Bored As Hell, 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…

Bored As Hell, Contemporaries Essays

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…