Word: boredoms
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...mobile, solitary life: the sense of helplessness that descends when fighting with the phone company; the awkwardness connected with buying a gun; reading somebody's meaningless leftover notes in a rented memory typewriter; going to a Chinese hypnotist for writer's block; discovering why "deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power." By the flares of such insights, one finds the way through Pitch Dark, a wise and beautifully shaped book...
...deleterious effects of erotica and pornography on society and those who are more concerned about the dangers of censorship. The former point to, among other things, rape statistics in certain cities; while the latter point to, among other bits of evidence, the low crime rate and apparent boredom with the sex market among over-exposed Scandinavians. Given the lack of hard evidence behind either side, the debate will probably go unresolved for as long as Americans remain protected by the First Amendment...
...those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power-of those who see a way out of the shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic social falsity, into what they take to be a vibrant and desirable life." Kepesh, a randy academic, discovered his freakish freedom in The Breast, a tale about a man who turned into a mammary gland...
That diplomat probably returned to work with those "assholes" for the same reasons Buckley writes: a sense of obligation as a citizen and a fear of boredom. "I do not like to write," Buckley says, "for the simple reason that writing is extremely hard work, and I do not 'like' hard work." Rather he may write to escape boredom or serve his cause or maybe not. "It is easier to stay up late working for hours," Buckley reasons, "than to take one-tenth the time to inquire into the question whether the work is worth performing...
David Rabe's war play Streamers takes place in a kind of boot camp on the border of national psychosis. Here boredom sinks into despair; high spirits become hysterics; the killer instinct can flare with switchblade speed. Set in 1965, Streamers was written soon after the 1975 fall of Sai gon, and Rabe's dialogue glows with the white heat of hindsight. His four young draftees are doomed from the start, either by their blithe ignorance of the horror to come or by their premonition...