The Unbearable Lightness of the Boring

Heidegger's Hut

2006-11-19T11:27:00.000-08:00

The Heidegger obsession continues.

"Die Hütte," as he called it. From the summer of 1922, Heidegger occupied this three-room “hut” in the Blackforest Mountains of Southern Germany. Adam Sharr, a practicing and lecturing architect, has written a book on the subject. Apparently, many of Heidegger’s most famous and more mystical writings were written here (including Being and Time). According to Sharr, Heidegger claimed an “intellectual and emotional intimacy with the building and its surroundings, and even suggested that the landscape expressed itself through him, almost without agency.” My interest is drawn toward the essay “Building Thinking Dwelling” that Heidegger wrote here, which has become a “touchstone for late twentieth-century architectural theory.” You can read the essay here, if you are interested (it is from Poetry, Language, and Thought, the same source of the Holderin essay that Andrea mentioned last class).

The relationship between boredom and architecture is an interest that I am considering transforming into a topic for the final essay assignment. This relationship first surfaces in our course with Benjamin's The Arcades Project, while Heidegger seems to reinvigorate it in his mystical and seemingly incoherent way. Lisa Robertson's text Occasional Work and Seven Walks for the Office of Soft Architecture is attuned to this subject matter. The chapbook collection includes an essay called "Playing House: A Brief Account of the Idea of the Shack," in which she argues that the shack, perhaps much like Heidegger's hut, is an allegory for origins. And in particularly Benjaminian fashion, she says that "The city is the shack inside out. It choreographs the delicious series of our transience" (185). Despite her idle walking, the flaneur too must dwell.

But it is Robertson's "Seven Walks" that intrigue me the most. My constant post-presentation lamenting is, in part, a regret for not incorporating Robertson. There are particular passages in the Walks that bear striking semblance to Heidegger's conception of attunement as a necessary part of being-in-the-world. I think listening to Robertson read from the walks seems to attune one to the significance of objectivized mood in her work. You can do so here. To cite one such example, Robertson says:

It was as if everything we encountered had become some sort of nineteenth century, this long century that encroached so splendidly on much of July. We would lean on its transparent balustrade, rhythmically adjusting our muted apparel, waiting somewhat randomly to achieve the warmth of an idea. But you should not assume that my guide and I were entirely idle. Waiting was many-roomed and structured and moody, and we measured, then catalogued, each of its mobile affects. We dawdled morosely in the corners of waiting, resenting our own randomness. Or we garnered our inherent insouciance towards the more subtle sediments of passivity. (231-2)

I must part, with only these few notations made, for I must write an essay on a subject almost entirely unrelated to this. It is in these moments, the moments of these last weeks, that I become convinced boredom is a luxury, one that a student cannot afford. I wish I could wait here, wait for the emergence of a more coherent idea.

PS: I nearly forgot to say that I am intrigued by the groundedness of Heidegger's hut. Literally gripped by the mountain, perhaps this is in some way the foundation for the essence of Dasein.

still holding onto his hammer

2006-11-18T21:54:00.000-08:00

Digne Meller-Marcovicz

Rudolf Augstein and Martin Heidegger, Todtnauberg, Switzerland, 1966

This is a tenderizing image, I think. Heidegger is about 77 years old in this photograph. I am aware that it is a critical no-no to psychologize an author or a thinker, but I can't resist. Many decades after he argued that the hammer need not be described, but rather should be understood in relation to the totality of things, he is still holding on to the part through which the totality must be formed. The hammer, as its qualities are sensed through his grip, continues to hammer.

And I love this photograph.

The Heidegger/Holmes Connection

2006-11-18T21:40:00.000-08:00

Originally, I began working on this post before my presentation, after some amateur sleuthing turned up this image above. At the time, I figured that “X” marked a clue of some sort, despite its apparent arbitrariness. This diagram is referred to as the work of Sherlock Holmes, although Watson’s signature is conspicuously located on the right bottom corner. In actuality, this is a doubly pilfered reprint from The Original Sherlock Holmes (Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 1976, p.125), which is a reprint of the original (“original”) in the Strand magazine tales. Particulars aside, it is the “X” marking the location of “Heidegger’s body” that is of so-called importance here. At first, I assumed that this is the site of Heidegger’s dead body, but, then again, he’s a slippery guy, as any reader of his work knows well. On second thoughts, after the initial excitement aroused by finding such a curious connection subsided, the dates didn’t appear to match up. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 and died in 1930, while Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 and died in 1976. So, there is significant overlap here, but Doyle first tried to kill off Holmes in 1893, albeit unsuccessfully. In other words, I cannot be absolutely certain that the Heidegger referred to here is the Heidegger that discohered all of my cognitive processes over the weekend. Although I suspect it is. In any case, it’s irrelevant. And although I have thus far failed to transform this mundane detail into an extraordinary analytical event, my initial finding of this diagram spurred consideration of what Holmes and Heidegger have in common. And that is, of course, the everyday, which is quite clear after our last class. Nevertheless, I am inclined to take on the subject again, with particular attention to the everydayness of Holmes, since I have yet to take on the problem of the everyday on my blog.

The connection that first forms in my mind is their similar distaste for the everyday, a distaste that is contingent with their necessary immersion within it. Svendsen recognizes Heidegger’s elitism, which is wrapped up in his apparent sublimation of the everyday: “There is a constant tendency is Heidegger to rewrite everything low, dirty, painful, or evil as something grand, namely as being an expression of Being” (131). And, to reiterate, in “Figuring the Everyday,” Highmore argues that Holmes’ everyday life is “decidedly undecided,” marked by a “passionate ambivalence” of rationality that “transforms the insignificant and everyday into ciphers for the bizarre. Holmes’ approach to the everyday generates mystery at the same time as it demystifies it” (2, 4). In each case the everyday is necessary, useful, but nevertheless repulsive and in need of reconfiguration. And we call them both geniuses for their ability to generate mystery within the everyday, for transforming the known into a seemingly unknowable phenomenon. Highmore cites Nancy Bentley who comments on the irony of such “rational mastery,” and that is, the relationship between the mastery of a subject and a consequent alienation of the subject matter (12). Despite one’s familiarity with the “dragging of time” and the “state of limbo” that Heidegger attaches to both superficial and profound forms of boredom, the confrontation with the essence of being that Heidegger masters for many, is likely to be wholly alien to the person who waits for the train everyday.

Yet similarities only seem to lead to differences. Holmes is forever detecting his way through minute differences, while Heidegger seems to obliterate them. It seems as though the thought process is similar, in the movement from the sensible and knowable objects to the extraordinary and objectified manifestation, but the ways in which they read the everyday are different. Both Holmes and Heidegger seem to share the goal of providing a solution, to apply a solvent to the everyday (in the sense of cleansing in order to produce the extraordinary). But Holmes seems trapped within the material world of differences; he is never fully able to transcend the immediate experience of being-in-the-world. The success of his cases perpetually relies on his ability to recognize and negotiate differences. Heidegger, on the other hand, transcends the differences of the everyday in his pursuit of pure Being. When concerned for the totality of Being and the isolation of pure time, differences fall away, and perhaps this is a way to think about Heidegger’s profound boredom: as an attunement that is caught up in the problem of whether boredom responds to an overwhelming confrontation with difference or to an overbearing front of similarity. Perhaps Heidegger’s “One is bored,” in which one is bored with boredom itself, becomes transgressive in reaction to similarity. Dasein turning back on itself through profound boredom opens it up to infinite possibilities, that is, it reopens the world of differences. But perhaps I am confusing sameness with the cohesive totality that is pure Being with Heidegger. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to understand Heidegger, to get a grip despite one’s own thrownness. If the description of totality seems like sameness, and we are animals, albeit symbol-users, that are dependant on differences, then it seems sensible that the confrontation with pure Being would diminish the boundary that allows one to reflect on oneself as a thinking self existing within the totality that Heidegger outlines.

For the sake of time, that won’t seem to drag, this case must remain unsolved.

Dust & Disintegrating Texts

2006-11-02T22:17:00.000-08:00

Dust seems to keep surfacing in our readings. What follows is a semi-spontaneous accumulation of thoughts on the significance of dust in both Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Warhol’s “The Tingle.”

Stand warned: Dust seems to induce vacuous thoughts while burning connections.

With Benjamin, dust is often coupled with the ominous phrase “Stifled Perspective.” Dust is part of the crumbling of the “long experience” resulting from the emergence of the “immediate experience.” Dust stifles the traditional vision of historical continuity. The bourgeois fascination with ornamentation seems to magnify the presence of dust and impel its circulation. Dust no longer rests as it used to. “Plush as dust collector,” writes Benjamin, “Mystery dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’” (103). The objects that are of most value collect the most dust; and the more objects of value the more dust in circulation. It’s bourgeois natural law. Dust is, quite obviously, about surfaces. But it is not itself artificial. It is organic matter that becomes visible only on that which is artificially produced. Dust seems to act as the microcosmic parts making up the insulation surrounding the private dreaming self that becomes bored through the immediacy of social being. But this is not pure negativity. Dust is sucked into the vacuum of Benjamin’s dialectics. Hence the many Nietzsche citations: “ ‘The world lives on itself: its excrements are its nourishment’” (115). Dust is made immediate but is nevertheless moving through the cosmic circulation of the " 'eternal hourglass of existence [that] is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust of grain of dust’” (118). Benjamin’s vision of dust is bound up in the Nietzschean concept of the “eternal recurrence,” especially when Benjamin says that he is “Thinking once again the thought of eternal recurrence in the nineteenth century makes Nietzsche the figure in whom mythic fatality is made anew” (118). Dust, this archaic matter, is attracted to the new; it returns, over and over again, to mark its decay.

In Warhol’s “The Tingle,” B fetishizes dust, among other, less minute things like yellow rubber gloves, Q-tips, and cocks cut out from muscle mags. The only thing she will not dispose of in her perpetual cleaning is the ancient Hoover, for it stands like a memorial of her early, more imaginative days as a child when the “Ideas” and “Movie Possibility” folders could be filled with original ideas like vacuuming, rather than sweeping, the grass after the garden party. The old Hoover holds B’s earliest memories of the “tingle” effect. And this “tingle” effect seems to be chalk full of connotations, referring to a “thrill by a peculiar stinging or smarting sensation, physical or emotional,” and also to a vibration often said of the ears: “to be affected with a ringing or thrilling sensation at the hearing of anything” (OED). “So I decide,” B says, “ ‘I’m going to, just for the excitement of it, run it along quickly underneath.’ Underneath, below the tag, where the floor is getting old and cracked and there’s a few nails. I can always hear ‘ZZZZDDDZZZZZPPPP’ and I’m picking up a lot. When I get to the closet I get really excited, I take everything out and I’ve always got five hundred million pieces of chipped paint that have fallen from the walls of the closet onto the floor, and I can hear those go up the vacuum cleaner, and I love it. I really love the feeling of hearing it go up” (211).While the act of vacuuming incites physical sensation, in symbolic terms, B’s obsessive cleaning is a constant rewriting or overwriting of her personal history, an elimination of memory’s interior clutter, a perpetual abjection of the self that seems to smart through the reader. Although she is often comic and absurd, B is so dejected and pathetic that the reader must engage through the darkest of humours. But it is not as though B does not confront the Eternal Recurrence of dust: “I have to accept in my mind that this is a never-ending thing. The top drawer is always going to be messy and I’m always going to have to vacuum” (208). It’s just that the recognition is so momentary, immediately dissolving into particular possibilities; and is ironically followed by a diversion through optical play. “Now there’s a jar of Vaseline Intensive Car Cream,” B says, “Now it’s not dirty but the top has coffee grains on it, a few crystals of salt, a hair, some lint…if I look at it closely with a magnifying glass maybe I’ll see that some soup dropped in it” (208). So it seems optical toys continue to produce imaginative possibilities. And dust seems to have a similar presence, its necessary absence being related to a bourgeois obsession with the interior. B is also insulated by dust, though more literally than in Benjamin’s portrait of the nineteenth-century bourgeois Parisian.

Frankly, I think dust is about memory. Or at least it seems that dust insulates the social being like memory insulates the private dreaming self. But this distinction seems to crumble easily, back into dust, that is. In Warhol, A, the author figure, has a memory problem, making him seem machinic: “I have no memory,” A says, “Every day is a new day because I don’t remember the day before. Every minute is like the first minute of my life. I try to remember but I can’t. That’s why I got married – to my tape recorder. That’s why I seek out people with minds like tape recorders to be with. My mind is like a tape recorder with one button – Erase” (199). A anthropomorphizes the machine to make himself seem machinic. This may be the reification of bodies under capitalism for which Adorno chastises “the people.” But to get back on the road leading toward a point, dust is made part of A’s immediate experience through his telephone connection with B. The totality of experience is forgotten in the face of so many interesting details. I don’t sense the vacuum of Benjamin’s dialectics here. The immediate experience (Erlebnis) of dust is not dialectically interacting with a reflective consciousness (Erfahrung). In Benjamin, dust seems to have transcendental qualities, being a something that is nearly a nothing, acting as a material particle of the collective transitions between memory and oblivion. But in Warhol, dust seems trapped within the confines of pure immanence.

Dust is a motif in these texts -- I hope to have made that much clear. But these texts are also "dusty," in the sense of having disintegrative structural features. The Arcades Project is a pastiche of fragments and citations, while "The Tingle" seems to drop off...and tune back in...representation...fragmented...without the implication of silence...these blanks...with dots...that disrupt the interpretative context...not to say...we don't wonder...if we missed nothing...rather than some other mundane....and dusty...thing...

These vacuous thoughts on dust and all the literal and symbolic decay it seems to represent eventually leads to the relevance of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Basinski constructs music disintegrating as it plays. With old tape loops of simple orchestral chords decaying as they turn, music is literally falling away. And we have an image reminiscent of Warhol’s Empire, as well as an art form that seems to self-reflexively draw attention to the medium itself. And like Benjamin, Basinski captures a particular moment in history. Coincidentally, Basinski's completion of the re-recording of the loops was timed to the events of 9/11. I strongly suggest reading a more poignant review of Basinski’s work here.

I've left a lot of work for you to do, dear Reader. I hope you have read the questions between the lines that seem to have been sucked into the gaps. If not, just take a magnifying glass to the dust between the keys of your board.

Boredom & the Abject

2006-10-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

“Our happiness” “our naïveté” “our attraction” “our regalia” “our humiliation” “our intention” “our grooming”: this is the habitual formula I have used. While normally such a grammar would indicate a quality belonging to us, in this landscape the affects took on independence. It was we that belonged to them. They hovered above the surfaces, disguised as clouds or mist, awaiting the porousness of a passing ego… I insist that we did not choose to submit to these alienations and languors. It was they who chose us. “No space ever vanishes utterly,” said my guide. Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

The abjection of the self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror

Before I became a blogger, I wrote a response exploring the relationship between boredom and abjection, using theories of the latter to try to find a way into the problems culminating about the bored subject. As such, this entry will be part regurgitation, with a harking back to our earlier readings, and part extension and clarification, with attention to my afterthoughts.

We have gathered from Goodstein that boredom intersects with the struggle to maintain a boundary between the self and the world, a struggle that boredom exasperates with its adherence to both objective and subjective viewpoints. Paradoxical (or perhaps dialectical) in status, boredom “individuates” and “isolates” through the subject’s recognition of her failure to create meaning; and yet, in the contemplation of this meaninglessness, “self and world collapse” in confrontation with nothingness “or something like it” (Goodstein 1). Goodstein’s hesitancy to explicitly call boredom a perception of nothingness echoes Julia Kristeva’s delineation of the abject: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which nothing is insignificant, which crushes me” (“Approaching the Abject” 2). Through Goodstein’s historicizing lens, psychoanalytic perspectives seem dissatisfying because they fail to elucidate the relationship between boredom and modernity; and yet, psychoanalytic perspectives might be called modern phenomena.

These expressions of boredom as more than nothingness, but less than something-ness, seem to problematize our ability to exclusively attribute boredom to either subjective experience or objective knowledge – it seems to transgress the border of the either/or framework and become a both/and matter. Kristeva’s notion of the abject seems transgressive in a similar fashion. Although we expel the abject to delineate the “I,” the abject inevitably returns to destabilize the boundary between the self and the world that its banishment produced.

But to return to Either/Or, we see that Kierkegaard’s aesthete, who places emphasis on setting boundaries between the individual and the totality of human relations, uses the vocabularies of abjection to represent his detached perspective. “A” claims the starting principle that all men are boring “possesses to the highest degree that power of repulsion one always requires of any negative that genuinely provides the principles of motion. Not merely it is repellent, it is infinitely forbidding, and the person with this principle behind him must necessarily have an infinite momentum to make discoveries with” (CC 4). “A’s” ethic that we “ought to amuse ourselves” suggests that our capacity for boredom repulses, repels and forbids us to resign ourselves to our experience of it. Perhaps the aesthete’s ethically infused ironic claim that boredom is utterly repellent is braided in with the self’s inclination to abject that which it lacks the desire or the ethical foundation to find meaningful. I am referring to a potentially necessary “ethical foundation” for meaning here because it may be the theistic nature of Kierkegaard’s existentialism bringing these vocabularies of abjection to surface. Or not, in which case, it is a desire that motivates the expelling of boredom – a desire to maintain a coherent system of meaning that boredom threatens. The threat of boredom seems bound up in the aesthete’s necessary detachment to create meaning. Boredom threatens the ascending, omniscient perspective of aesthetic detachment by dragging the self down into the mud where differences between “I” and the “Other” are not cleanly distinguished.

These vocabularies of abjection extend to “A’s” attitudes toward socializing. In these ironic terms, it is as though the en masse plebeians who bore us, we abject, perhaps for our own amusement, while those “select” who bore themselves, abject the self for the amusement of others. With regard to friendship, “A” says that “identical desires and identical aversions are the foundation of firm friendship and [are] extremely boring at that” (8). Dependent on differences, the “select” friend may be bored by relationships that fail to confront and destabilize the boundary between that which he finds desirable, which includes that which he desires to expel from his system of meaning: the boring. The ideal friendship seems to threaten the borders of a system of meaning just enough to prevent boredom, but the system cannot be threatened too much or else meaning would collapse and boredom would ensue.

I have read somewhere, not to sure where exactly, that memory is a topic Kierkegaard regarded with seriousness in other writings, which may bring further force to “A’s” claim that “Forgetting is the shears with which one clips away what one cannot use…In saying that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved” (8). Kristeva, although sincere, stands in accord with the aesthete: “The abject from which he does not cease from separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered…The time of abjection is double time: a time of oblivion and thunder, or veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth” (8-9). Therefore it is an illusion that we forget, that we can completely expel what we find meaningless – to exclude the bored experience is to abject the self.

Finally, the pseudonym Victor Eremita bears striking resemblance to “eremite,” meaning “hermit,” recluse,” or “one who has retired into solitude for religious motives” (OED). Kierkegaard, the victorious hermit in his own day, performs the abjection of his own self, his authorial voice. I think it was Mike who said that he sensed Kierkegaard’s boredom in this work, a recognition that factors into notions of the abject – Kierkegaard expels his own boredom with philosophical debate through the adoption of an aesthete persona.

But to return the problem that I have been repressing, the problem of whether we can exclusively attribute boredom (or abjection for that matter) to the self or the world. As Susan asked on my response paper: “is boredom the experience of sameness or of ambiguity? Is it what we experience when once we expel difference, or the confusion that we experience in the moment when the abject returns? Or both?” I think it’s both, however, I am not inclined to say that it is equally one and the other, but I can’t find my calculator amongst this textual mess.

But I think the fact that boredom is both individuating and annihilating in relation to the self is better expressed as a dialectic, rather than a paradox, and that abjection is one adequate name for the threshold between the two. I suspect that the ways in which subjective and objective vantage points inform each other symbiotically are bound up in a metonymic kind of dialectic – within those relationships between the parts and the whole, the finite and the infinite, the fragmentary and the totality. With modernity, life is no longer present in the whole; and since boredom is defined through life, it seems that we can no longer attribute boredom to the whole either. Rather we are forced to substitute the parts for the whole, without ever having a concept of the whole itself. This seems to be especially the case in the postmodern context. At the most, we have a heap of fragments that may have a coherent meaning so long as one doesn’t impose a formal ideal or a systematic logic on the heap. We now have to revel in the dusty fragments left over from the deconstruction of all our archaic totalizing systems; and when we don’t, we’re are bored with the fragments, not the totality. Or perhaps we are bored with the metonymic process we have employed to try to put together the pieces. For these reasons I think boredom is more a problem of subjectivity; it’s what we experience when we are heaping the fragments together, when we are incorporated into those dirty differences.

Another Version of Feminist Boredom, or Rereading Langbauer

2006-10-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

It is particularly tempting to write a history of feminist theory – precisely because it is feminist – which stresses or even implies “progress.” Yet it is important to acknowledge that, even perhaps especially within feminism, there is a ever present potential of regression, uneven development, failure and disillusion, not to mention misunderstanding. For some, what had once been enabling is now perceived as a restrictive and tiresome paradigm, which generates analysis after analysis, but little new insight. There is a kind of ennui which haunts the project of feminist criticism at the moment and which has become increasingly visible. Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane

Boredom is a very useful instrument with which to explore the past, and to stage a meaning between it and the present. Fredric Jameson

Politicized boredom, and its relation to feminist discourse, is a topic I have given further attention to in light of my rather brash criticisms of Langbauer and the equally uncouth backpedaling that followed. To reiterate, Langbauer argues that the identification of women with a “bankrupt dailiness” marginalizes them from the “fears and fantasies” of masculine everydayness to such an extent that women become indifferent to those dominant forms; and this “boredom or indifference can open a space within ideology’s overwhelming constraints” (CC 58-9). Langbauer is primarily engaging with boredom as a political strategy, a practice of “destroying it in others, along with the privilege it connotes, by assuming it tactically oneself” (63). She acknowledges that these “practices tend to ignore the debate about ideology – perhaps the only way right now out of the theoretical impasse that debate has become,” and consequently, they may be “daily practice[s] of getting on with things even when our understanding of them is impossible – something that can only happen at the margins of our consciousness, that we experience as boredom” (67). On second reading, Langbauer’s articulation of this practice of inhabiting the ideological differently “through an in-difference to constraints” seems imbued with a paradox that I think I may have mistaken for a contradiction – a paradox that may be particular to feminist discourse.

Langbauer’s qualifying use of “in-difference” rather than “indifference,” although microscopic in its difference, is her most explicit acknowledgement of this paradox which seems related to the claim I took particular issue with last class, that the “tedium of the [Holmes] stories that reflect only a limited and unceasing male point of view have driven women to tune out, daydream, read against the grain” (65). If you recall, I claimed that you don’t read against the grain when you’re bored. And since Langbauer emphasizes on more than one occasion that she is “reading against the grain” (59), then she can’t be bored, but rather she is aggravated (like a feminist “should” be). Therefore she contradicts her argument; she advocates boredom as a strategy for politicizing difference, yet fails to practice it herself because she is actively engaging, resisting, perhaps even circumventing a dominant ideology. I think that’s how my argument went. Oh no, don’t forget the “if feminists were bored with dominant ideology, wouldn’t the whole area of criticism collapse?” As foolish as that echo sounds in my head, it hedges on the paradox that I have been begging for some time now. Langbauer isn’t bored with dominant ideology; she’s bored with feminist criticism of dominant ideology. And yet, as a feminist, she is tied to the historical tradition of female letters that advocates progressive criticism. Feminist discourse, it seems, has always been grounded in a kind of modernistic impulse to express a newness and to “shatter the long experience” as Benjamin writes. Despite feminism’s innovative strategies for representing history, it seems as though feminist criticism has become a boring way of representing that very novelty. Performing boredom, then, seems to be the most useful tool for disrupting the monotony of conventional representations of the feminist perspective – a reclaiming of the critical approach from the boring through representations of boredom.

But I may have botched it again. If such is the case, at least I’ll be able to defer becoming bored with my own critical perspective.

Introductions

2006-09-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

In the past few moments I had an experience of self-recognition that must be disclosed, although it may bore you. I can no longer repress my desire to become a "blogger." So here we are, finally together, in this placeless and paperless context. Besides, as Jeff Derksen notes, self-censorship is rarely practiced by the right people. And now, I am postponing, for a short time, the exposition of my analysis of boredom.