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…
Site Archives
Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis
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
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…