Two Scientific Papers Simple and Inspiring; Then NYT Article on "Our Boredom, Ourselves"

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

Had Lit Club last night. Marty and Ron Vissher. Both scientists. He with P&G and she with Children's Hospital.

Used their flat-screen against the wall and a computer (somewhere hidden; only extravagant mouse visible).

His was the very best presentation I have ever seen: Why I Became a Scientist, starting with his infatuation with bees as a six-year old, his coming from a family of scientists to begin with; using pictures taken on their property on top of Albion Street (forget the name now -- VeVerka's live on that street). Hers about the gooey film that baby's are born in, that is generally wiped off by attendants.

Both papers were simple but brilliant. Both papers started brilliantly-simply -- and could be given to third graders or people from any other age on up. Oh, did I say how simple but brilliant they were?

If these papers were given across the country many more children would become scientists and fewer Wall Street Traders or unrequited lawyers.

Like the Owl, the Vissers liven up our lives by their simple joy in the backyard miracles and their genius in swooping presentation.

Ron held up a hand-held night vision spotter and described the active owl population that prowls and temporarily (for any one owl) lives in our trees at night and goes after pretty much everything, including cats. It even attacked him.

o o


o o (pretend that the o's are wider apart; can't get the format to do this here)


o o (even more wider)


What is that? What he saw on the dark night (through the infrared viewer) as he realized that the owl he was viewing was attacking him and coming right at him, cocksure that he, (the owl was cocksure), was unseen. Ron backed into the house and avoided being dipped and pecked around the head.

o o


o .......o


o.............. o



The owl's eyes, of course. Reflecting the infra-red beam that gave out of his viewer.

:)

I loved it.

Now, to the opposite, a brilliant discussion of boredom in today's New York Times.


Essay
Our Boredom, Ourselves

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: January 21, 2010
If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying, regularity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving. Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in 2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.

This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring. (Trust me on this one.) Rather, boredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest — is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader. As a general state of mind, boredom is morally suspect, threatening to shine its dull light back on the person who invokes it. “The only horrible thing in the world is ­ennui,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore” dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun “boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to be bored, or worried about becoming bored.
Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries. In her ingenious study “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (1995), Patricia Meyer Spacks describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”
In Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator — a writer who spends the “final Eisenhower years” trying to write the definitive treatise on boredom — describes it as “a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, . . . accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.” But boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.
Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek relief in doodling or daydreaming.
It’s common to decry our collective thaasophobia, or fear of boredom, manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking. One cellphone company has even promoted the idea of ­“microboredom,” which refers to those moments of inactivity that occur when we’re, say, stuck waiting in line for a latte without our BlackBerry. But novelists, for all their own fears of being dismissed as boring, continue to offer some bold resistance to the broader culture’s zero-tolerance boredom eradication program.
In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown & Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro: “He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”
For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we’re idling. Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. “Bliss — a second-by-­second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” Wallace wrote in a note left with the manuscript. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
It remains to be seen whether “The Pale King” will break through to the ecstasy beyond boredom, or just put readers to sleep. (Or perhaps cause serial brain injury, like the unreadably dense experimental novel that keeps laying waste to readers in “The Information,” by Martin Amis.) But if Wallace’s last work turns out to be unbearably dull, perhaps we should be grateful. After all, if it weren’t for all the boring books in the world, why would anyone feel the need to try to write more ­interesting ones?
Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.
Next Article in Books (21 of 27) » A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2010, on page BR23 of the New York edition.


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