(no subject)

[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect, apart from anything else, that some people like to be bored and actively seek it out -- which is an instinct completely opposed to frustration, I think.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't doubt you're right, but that's far enough from what I find possible myself that I can't think of examples.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Well, to paraphrase Noel Carroll -- most of the novels that are published are boring. Not just slightly boring: excruciating, single-bullet-to-the-base-of-the-skull tedious. Entirely predictable plot, cardboard characters handcuffed to rigid character arcs, prose like a caveman attempting to copulate with a pile of bricks, insight of a cave fish. Why do people buy the things? Constantly?

Answer one, the common-wisdom answer, is that a lot of people are just stupid or tone-deaf and really do find the thrillers thrilling, the mysteries mysterious, the romance romantic. This might be right but, even if so, isn't very informative. I think the unpacked version includes an account of the appeal of the boring.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

(Further, the question itself is one of those not-quite-interesting problems in which Carroll seems to specialise.)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The unpacked version might include it. You don't seem to understand this any better than I do!

Maybe the answer's that a lot of people don't know how to locate or process true excitement, except as beyond-the-pale danger they avoid. For them what we find extremely boring is the most exciting segment of that part of life they find controllable. Murder She Wrote murder is admissable, but no contemplation of messier versions. And maybe the nearness of that to the border of their circumscribed sphere of awareness is itself enough of a danger to take the boredom away? Because they don't look or act bored, reading these novels, or sound bored mentioning them.

I just don't see how anyone could deliberately do something boring. Without some ulterior motive making the experience exciting or necessary.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Partly I don't understand it and partly I'm doing the old philosopher-coward approach of framing a question rather than venturing an answer that I know is going to be speculative and hazy. (An inverse of qualifier-dropping, which I also commit far too often.)

There's definitely a comfort/security component. "May you live in interesting times", which, like most chinoiserie humour, is partly a sort of displaced satire. Bland offends nobody, except on explicitly aesthetic grounds. Sort of homeopathic thing going on, I think? Casual games, where there's just barely enough simulation of the texture of actual gameplay to keep the restless parts of the brain on life-support, while the rest wallows in comfortable tropes.

Also, Boring 2010. Though that appears to be a case of Hipster Irony Will Eat Itself rather than sincere dedication to tedium.