(no subject)

Not all bad Shakespeare plays are boring, though it's hard to not find all his boring ones bad.

Still, these ones are boring but probably not bad:

Henry 8; Coriolanus; Pericles; maybe Two Noble Kinsmen

Relatively bad but not boring are:

Titus Andronicus; Henry 6, Part 2; Henry 6, Part 3; Richard 3; John; Taming of the Shrew; Merry Wives of Windsor; Timon of Athens; Henry 5, if I'm allowed to say so; Merchant of Venice, ditto

Bad and boring:

Henry 6, Part 1; All's Well that Ends Well; Two Gentlemen of Verona

Henry 6-1 gets a partial reprieve for starting a non-boring but bad series, but if I ever read those last two plays again it will be out of perversity.

Such is the nature of life that I recommend the second group over the first, actually. But for after one's read and reread the ones I didn't list.

***

Sontag said boredom is a form of frustration, a phrase that's stuck in my head for fifteen years because it's presented with such authority despite so clearly being wrong. I mean, obviously a lot of boring things are frustrating because they're so damn boring.

Of course I see what she means - when you're trying and failing to grasp something, you're bored because you're alone with your own failure. The ungrasped something may be blameless. So there's a lame version of boredom, and I may have this re. Coriolanus. But there is also a completely justified boredom, like trying to wade through the non-Shakespeare parts of Pericles. If that's frustration too, it's a frustration that's a form of boredom.

I've been kind of annoyed with her ever since reading that. Never drop qualifiers - "can be" in this case - from an otherwise sensible statement to get attention. It's frustrating.

(no subject)

From a website ranting about the worst 50 people of the year - Lost writer Damon Lindelof gets an entry somewhere in the middle:

Lindelof first conjured a confusing yet entertaining sci-fi epic but then, despite its mechanical sound, the “Smoke Monster” turns out to be the ghost of the father of liberal philosophy, side plots about mental illness and alternate universes go nowhere, paper-thin characters inexplicably commune with the dead, and finally, in a clichéd, Old Testament-inspired supernatural battle, evil is defeated when a big rock dildo is crammed into a shiny hole by a handsome, emotionless doctor. And the whole damn thing—concocted entirely on the fly, with no eye toward resolution—from the plane crash to the time travel was actually just some brightly-lit, stained glass, feel-good, new-age, ecumenical afterlife delirium. Right. Fuck you, Damon Lindelof. Fuck you, for stealing 127 hours of our lives, giving us hope that television needn’t be utterly awful, and then shitting out the most hackneyed, series-diminishing, spiritually pandering, lowest common denominator deus ex machina to ever air on TV. Fuck you. Fuck you with a fake beard.

I don't understand the beard part. But I agree with the rest. I am still angry.

But after actually reading what I pasted: what does he mean the whole series was delirium? No it wasn't. All the dead people go to the Coexist afterland as they die is all, though starting out in a Swedenborgian foyer. The series stuff actually happened, it just wasn't explained. Other than the light in the hole being presumably the same vague benevolence that runs the next world. I had less of a problem with the afterlife tangent than with them not even trying to tie the plot up. That's the narrative sin we didn't even have a name for, pre-Lost, because it had never happened. (At least in the ranter's hallucinated version the whole thing was a dream, which would at least be a halfway-coherent cop-out.) We speak of plot holes, sure, but never a hole a whole plot's flushed down.