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To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.


David Foster Wallace


#boredom #life #life



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Did you know about David Foster Wallace?

A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews directed by John Krasinski was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant phenelzine. Wallace's mother Sally Foster Wallace attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College—a community college in Champaign—where David Foster Wallace won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996.

With his suicide he left behind an unfiniDavid Foster Wallaced novel The Pale King which was subsequently publiDavid Foster Wallaced in 2011 and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story was publiDavid Foster Wallaced in September 2012. David Foster Wallace (February 21 1962 – September 12 2008) was an award-winning American novelist short story writer essayist and professor at Pomona College in Claremont California.

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