The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

20 The New York Review

society, or coterie, of facts that the au-
thor has pushed his way into first, and
then it’s a matter of making up your
mind to cooperate with what you read.”
Yet the better he gets at cooperating,
indexing with fervor in bed, in the bath,
the more he finds himself itching to in-
trude, to press the particulate grime of
his life into the book.
The index, for which he is criticized
by his editor, reads in parts as follows:

kindergarten experiences of (hav-

ing been told to bring in something

from home to exhaust a couple of

minutes in show-and-tell; having

brought in the only toy she ever

cared for—a toy drive-in theater

[tiny cars, a tiny projector that

beamed film-stripped cartoons

onto a tiny screen]; not speaking

up when a boy in the class claimed

the toy was his or when the teacher

naturally took his part; how, that

quickly, there was a way for her to

go about not rising in the world),

00; kitchen of, lit by pilot light,

00;... laxity, 00; on “learning to

live without yourself,” 00; legs

gone out from under, 00; libraries,

behavior in, referring to spines of

books as “snouts,” 00; life briefly

coming to a head on, 00; “lifelike-

lessness” and, 00;...

The littlenesses of the entries, piled

high, do amount to something im-

mense. There is life here, thick with

people, chancy with encounters, bur-

nished with memories of childhood

injustices and injuries, with body parts

that faithlessly disappear (“legs gone

out from under”) and books that grow

companionate body parts (“referring to

spines of books as ‘snouts’”). Yet in the

form of the index, it is life slivered into

“lifelikelessness”—distilled, detached,

frozen; quoted and paraphrased until it

seems to have taken place somewhere

beyond the reach of the person who

lived it. Shot through someone else’s

words, smuggled in through someone

else’s book, the index refuses to let

life add up to anything continuous or

whole or graspable.

The narrator reflects on the lifelike-

lessness of language at the end of the

index:

verification that “it starts when you

discover that you can keep yourself

at arm’s length: you practice con-

ducting your life at farther and

farther reaches from the body—

except you do not want to be al-

lowed any longer to get away with

calling it a body (which would be

an arrogance) and insist instead on

being required to regard it at most

as a steadiment: the station, that

is, which the heart, the mouth, the

eyes, etc., can be said (variously)

to occupy, to be the ‘guest’ of, or

to trespass upon,” 00; visitor book

discovered, 00; voice of, said to

“desert” the mouth, 00;...

What the index lacks in inhabitability,

it gains in hospitality, however brief or

surreptitious. As a “steadiment,” it is

an instrument, an extra appendage to

settle one’s rocking, wavering self. As a

“visitor book discovered,” it is a textual

form that invites its reader to “trespass

upon” a heart that has fled an uninhab-

itable body, a voice that has deserted a

speechless mouth—not the hand, but

where the never-quite-living, never-

quite-dead marks traced by the hand

now reside. It makes the life of lan-

guage, a life apart from life, available

to anyone who might take the book into

her hands and place her finger on the

vein of fiction. She will feel the lifelike-

ness that courses underneath, pulsed to

the arrhythmic beat of the “00s.” Q

Once as a kid, I was so bored at my parents’ office that I made a deck of cards.

How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think.

I wonder what would bore a tortoise.

I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.

It’s almost like there should be different words for “boring because simple”

and “boring because complex.”

You can call this banality versus tedium, or “bad boring” versus “good

boring.” Kubrick movies are often great while also boring.

Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is.

You could also call “boring because complex” interesting-boring (boring

in an interesting way) or slow-interesting (interesting, but at a pace that

sometimes resembles boredom).

To state the obvious, all good poetry is slow-interesting.

I often wonder why having a beverage makes something boring more

interesting.

I wonder why we don’t get bored in the shower.

Michel Siffre lived alone in a cave in Texas for six months and got so bored

he contemplated suicide, making it look like an accident.

I heard on the radio that lazy people have higher IQs—because their minds

are more active, they don’t get bored doing nothing.

I don’t think this is true.

Some people outside are having a boring conversation about dogs in general.

When it rains it’s boring.

When it rains it bores holes into your body. Turns out it was acid rain!

Being so bored you actually start crying must be a transformative experience.

Just speaking for myself here but I love being bored.

Like to me, sex is not art. Once it’s over it’s boring again.

We’re in the bargaining stage of civilization, and it’s boring.

Civilization got bored with itself.

Pretty cool how we’ve evolved to find peace boring!

A boring man war movie.

“This is boring.” “No, it interrogates boringness!” “This is doggerel.” “No,

it interrogates talent!”

What, poets can’t be bored by eclipses?

How boring not to have a crush on anyone.

You can only be bored almost to death.

Did you ever have a kiss so bad you felt like you were the bad kisser?

I think this is related to how boring people make me feel boring.

Did you know that you can trick people into being more interesting by being

more interesting yourself?

I used to be bored around my parents, which made them boring. In my

thirties I was shocked to learn that I didn’t know everything about them.

So if you have to spend time with boring people, try being DA Z Z LI NG.

I’m glad Andre Gregory knows the Andre character is a “raging narcissist”

man splaining bore.

My most common thought while lucid dreaming is “God, what a boring

dream.”

My TED Talk topic would be “Jiro Dreams of Sushi Is Not an Enjoyable

Movie.”

I would just make people watch it and stop it every now and then to say, “See?

This is boring and oppressive.”

A totally fascist approach to sushi.

Execution in art has become a great tromping bore but: sorry artists, you still

have to execute.

I sometimes think After Hours is the worst movie that’s anyone’s favorite

movie.

I associate it strongly with Joe Versus the Volcano, since I think of both as

somehow “angry boring.”

It takes a special kind of mediocrity to be offensive and boring at the same

time.

I’m so over the “boring on purpose” defense.

I think I mean if the language is boring there should at least be some emotions

or ideas or something.

Boring through, or thoroughly boring?

I was very boring today.

Sometimes the dystopia was boring.

At least everyone was boring at the same time about something inherently

interesting.

—Elisa Gabbert

NEW THEORIES ON BOREDOM