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As well as playing lots of virtual football, when I get stressed - or, rather, when my body gets stressed (I am often unaware of the stress for a few days, there is a lag between my body's knowledge of its stress and my psychological knowledge of it) - the skin on my fingers, mainly on my right hand, curiously (the hand I write with), starts to go dry and die, spreading in separate constellations of little crop circles until they enlarge so much they meet and all the skin on the fingers (usually the index and one next to it) sheds itself. This process, once it has began, is unstoppable and takes roughly two weeks to work itself through.
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A vivid inner life is essential for a crap job. When I worked at Sainsbury's as a teenager, loading pallet-upon-pallet of chilled goods onto shelves, I imagined myself an artisan cheesemaker carefully placing delicate creations onto the shelf. In orange rubber gloves that made cheesehandling a clumsy affair, I would use thumb and forefinger to pluck a cheese from its bottle green plastic crate and place it on the shelf. In the time it took to make this action - a few seconds at most - an increasingly vivid story played itself out in my head, where the environment around me did not so much dissolve as metamorphosise into a French supermarket, which was staffed by people who (a) could wear their own clothes to work underneath the grass-green khaki waistcoat with Super-U or Petit Casino or Monop' written on it, (b) were surly with customers at no risk of sanction and (c) had a surprising gourmand knowledge of cheeses.
This story swatted away the boredom only intermittently. The attention required to prolong the pretense was already quite large, and an infuriating fact of the crap job is that it dulls precisely what one needs to get through it - one's attention. It is a horrifying and insidious catch-22. This job would be fine if I could pay absolute attention to what I'm doing but the fact that what I am doing is so mind-crushingly dull means that my attention is shattered. This unsolvable problem became a secondary - and yet just as exhausting - issue as the job itself.
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I have been attempting - again with only flickering success - to channel the lessons of DFW's The Pale King. The attempt to transcend boredom through attention.
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"Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. 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. Constant bliss in every atom."
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The gift. Who profers this gift? I'm interested in spirituality and what Wallace called the "religious impulse". When I read about this gift of life, I can't help but think religiously.
"Days in the desert" too. I think of 40 days and 40 nights; trial, suffering, struggle. Abiding. That word abide that pops up in Infinite Jest, as Gately undergoes his suffering in hospital, bearing it second-by-second. That word that pops up again and again when religion is touched upon - Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy.
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SpiffyToast3 is the name given to me by the computer when I connect to the worldwide web of Fifa11 players through the Xbox's internet connection. Two words, one a colloquialism. Does "spiffy" only come up for British players, with the Xbox working out location from the IP address? Are there appropriate colloquialisms for each playing country? Is "spiffy" even a word? Even a colloquialism?
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In a cruel irony, the museum sells books on how to stay happy and positive day-by-day. One of the key authors of this school of tat is a person by the name of Ulysses Brave, author of amongst others The Wit and Wisdom of Highland Cows and The Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers. These two "books" consist of glossy photos of aforementioned animals on the recto side with one-sentence, vaguely "Buddhist" musings on life on the verso. Brave is an elusive person, internet-identity-wise, though I did find a reproduction of the inside cover blurb on the person on an Amazon page selling one of Brave's works entitled Life Is Sweet (which has a long-haired, long-horned cow on the cover) (for no ostensible reason). Here is the blurb:
"Ulysses Brave is a self-help guru specialising in animal self-awareness. After carefully selecting his choice of images, he writes philosophically about his chosen text. Born in Newfoundland, Ulysses has studied and travelled throughout the world, honing his gentle wit through observation and occasional listening. He lives in East Anglia."
Here you can click to see inside. Brave has also written a series called How Not To Be The Perfect Husband / Wife / Teenager / Celeb.
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Paying attention involves not thinking about paying attention. But boring things don't gain your attention without an active choice to pay attention to them, which obviously involves thinking. Something you are trying very hard to achieve can only be achieved by not trying at all. I have tried looking very very hard at a £4.99 cotton shopping bag, tracing its weave, its graphic depiction of the new museum, the way the price sticker doesn't stick to the bag because the bag is made of a type of coarse cotton that doesn't respond to flat, plastic surfaces. It is difficult. I don't want it to be so much effort; what I am trying to pay attention to doesn't deserve it; I am wasting my time.
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DFW had a "personal self-help library".
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In a cruel irony, the museum sells books on how to stay happy and positive day-by-day. One of the key authors of this school of tat is a person by the name of Ulysses Brave, author of amongst others The Wit and Wisdom of Highland Cows and The Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers. These two "books" consist of glossy photos of aforementioned animals on the recto side with one-sentence, vaguely "Buddhist" musings on life on the verso. Brave is an elusive person, internet-identity-wise, though I did find a reproduction of the inside cover blurb on the person on an Amazon page selling one of Brave's works entitled Life Is Sweet (which has a long-haired, long-horned cow on the cover) (for no ostensible reason). Here is the blurb:
"Ulysses Brave is a self-help guru specialising in animal self-awareness. After carefully selecting his choice of images, he writes philosophically about his chosen text. Born in Newfoundland, Ulysses has studied and travelled throughout the world, honing his gentle wit through observation and occasional listening. He lives in East Anglia."
Here you can click to see inside. Brave has also written a series called How Not To Be The Perfect Husband / Wife / Teenager / Celeb.
*
*
Paying attention involves not thinking about paying attention. But boring things don't gain your attention without an active choice to pay attention to them, which obviously involves thinking. Something you are trying very hard to achieve can only be achieved by not trying at all. I have tried looking very very hard at a £4.99 cotton shopping bag, tracing its weave, its graphic depiction of the new museum, the way the price sticker doesn't stick to the bag because the bag is made of a type of coarse cotton that doesn't respond to flat, plastic surfaces. It is difficult. I don't want it to be so much effort; what I am trying to pay attention to doesn't deserve it; I am wasting my time.
*
DFW had a "personal self-help library".
Wonderful post, Mark. A few notes: "spiffy" is (despite my incredulity) a colloquial term in Vancouver, and perhaps Canada as a whole, equivalent to our "swish", e.g. "Say, those are spiffy sneakers!"
ReplyDeleteFollowing up your reference to the temptation in the wilderness of 40 days and 40 nights, it's worth remembering that the Israelites were made by God to wander the desert for 40 years before they could enter the promised land. Numbers are important in the Bible, and this kind of parallel forms part of the hermeneutics of biblical scholarship. In fact, a lot of what we do in Eng.Lit. derives, I believe, from scholastic practice.
When I too worked at Sainsbury's as a teenager, it was on checkouts, and sometimes I had a quiet period, during which I would open the machine for printing receipts, unroll a foot or so of the spool inside, and use this for doodling, writing out poems or jotting thoughts. Sometimes I was sent out to bring in trolleys with my friend Rob - a remarkable chap, with whom I'd have very interesting conversations about philosophy while we worked. Rob was also heavily into marshal arts, and sometimes I would see him in another part of the car-park doing roundhouse kicks as he advanced on a set of trolleys.
Good luck with the hand. H.
Sainbury's - employing future academics since some time in the 90s/early 2000s. Glutton for punishment that I was, I actually went back and worked there for the summer after my first year of undergrad. Not a good idea.
ReplyDeleteLittle did the manufacturers of receipt printing machines know what a life-saving gadget they were fabricating -- continuing your de Certeau-ian tactical use of their paper, I now at the museum use the very same rolls for letters to Claire Strickett, "to do" lists (which when it comes round to Monday morning and I actually have time to do them I don't want to do), and as well as various conference abstracts and PhD notes, PhD funding applications and research statements! My desk is subsequently covered in small scraps of paper (it's a weird paper that has a sort of shiny sheen to it) with my writing on - it's quite possible that in the acknowledgements section of the final PhD I will have to thank Streamline and Glasgow Life for their unintended, yet essential, support of a struggling scholar