Full Bore
Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily comes this interersting meditation on boredom (yes, a paradox) in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Liberating and terrifying, benumbing and enlightening, boredom raises questions about meaning it can't possibly answer. Is experience itself a void, as 20th century artists like Beckett, Cage, Duchamp, Warhol and others often suggest? Or is boredom a failure of our own spirits and imagination? That, as Thick Description Artistic Director Tony Kelly puts it, gives boredom its inevitable, strangely energizing "sense of dread."
A culture frantic to entertain, stimulate, divert and inform us is in no danger of drowning out boredom. If anything, it may make that placid sense of turning off and turning away, buoyantly detached and rising to the opportunity, more valuable than ever.
Whole goddamned thing here.
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Zzzzz zzzz zzzzz…
“Is experience itself a void, or is boredom a failure of our own spirits and imagination?”
I used to think very deeply about philisophical questions like this, now I just figure it just depends on how you wanna look at it. Have I become more or less boring?
As to the second paragraph, there may actually be something to that. During my travels in Mexcio, I’ve been impressed with how well behaved the children usually are compared to Amrerican kids, even in situations where one might expect kids to be bored shitless, like on a bus. There may be lots of reasons for this, but one that comes to mind is that perhaps they’re not as accustomed to expecting easy stimulation from without.