“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”

–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.”

The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler.  I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.

But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted.  For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.

Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

BENEDICT CAREY, “You’re Checked Out, but Your Brain Is Tuned In,” nytimes.com, 8/5/2008