"Some adventurers have taken to exploring the sometimes dangerous subterranean world in the sewers and tunnels beneath New York."

That's the teaser on the front page right now. Here's the article it refers to. Excerpt:

We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end....

Filthy, backpacked, smelling of the sewer, we board a rush-hour subway....

The sewer under Greene Street was only four feet high (Erling is 6 foot 3.) It got smaller and smaller, until they were forced on hands and knees, then eventually on their bellies. Crawling through raw sewage. The ceiling was higher on Canal Street, they report, but the floor was caked with so much feces they sank in it like quicksand. They were turned back by an impassable mountain of waste....

Time to hop on the subway again?

Where should the intrepid explorer go when the world is totally over-mapped and Google-Earthed? Where do you go? And why? A rewrite of my favorite quote:

Why do we require a trip through the sewers in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean...  is the sewer more "real"? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is in the sewers? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about the sewers I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're — if your perceptions — I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go into the sewers, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just — I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean...

But, well, I agree with you...  But the problem is that people can't see the cigar store, now. I mean, things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something!

Well, why...why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they're bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they're just thinking: "Well! what can I do?"

Okay! Yes! We're bored! We're all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say "no"? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire...? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

Bore....

.........dom.

"What are your thoughts on feminism today?"

Fran Lebowitz is asked:

Well, now they’ve done it, and I believe that women have gotten pretty much as far as they’re going to get. Which is better, but not great. I mean, it’s immensely better. There’s no comparison. It’s against the law to say, “This job is just for boys.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of jobs you can’t have [as a woman]. And there are all kinds of things you won’t get. It’s just much more subtle now. And that’s progress.

But there are still girls who make it bad for girls. Young girls are always showing me their diamond engagement rings. “Look, Fran!” It’s so old-fashioned. I think that I am too old to feel that people who are kids remind me of my parents. Someone my age is supposed to be angered by kids. You’re supposed to say, “These crazy kids—what will they think of next?” You’re not supposed to say, “These kids are so boring. These kids are so regressive.” It’s like the 1950s. The 1950s weren’t just about great suits. That time was really suffocating.

So it seems to me that people, especially women, especially women who have all these choices, are now looking for things that aren’t oppressive exactly but are pretty suffocating. What used to be called middle-class respectability looked like it was going to disappear, but it didn’t. It’s returned. It just returned in a different costume. If you do it in a loft instead of a split-level in the suburbs, it’s still the same. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do it; I’m saying it’s suburban. This is why New York today seems suburban to me—all kids and babies in strollers. It’s 1950s domestic life. The sidewalks are the same size, but now you have twins and dogs.

"In an effort to relieve her boredom, Julie proceeded to throw a glass out a window."

Am I the only one here who remembers listening to "The Anecdote of Horatio & Julie" on the radio, late at night, in the 1960s... WFMU?

Steve Martin is in trouble.

For luring people to pay $50 to hear him interviewed and then having the interview be all about the art world and his book about the art world.

It is exactly — exactly — like demanding your money back because Elton John didn't play "Rocket Man." 

No, it's like going to see Elton John and demanding your money back because he played only classical music — and not at the level of a professional classical pianist.

"Also I don't want to be on television. It's become boring, arse-paralysingly brain crippling."

Says Elton John, explaining why he didn't want the job of "American Idol" judge. He kind of indicates that if he'd gone on he too would have been arse-paralysingly boring.

(Please make an extra effort to write high-quality comments. I can picture some really stupid wisecracks. I'm going to set up a special comments policy for this post: If you say anything predictable, I will delete. Let's see if anything survives.)

Biden to people in Madison: "You’re the dullest audience I’ve ever spoken to."

Uhhh...

Long ago Michael Kinsley found the most boring headline ever: "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative."

And now he may have found the most boring article:

The story that grabbed my inattention was in the New York Times on Monday, July 26. It was about a man who used to take long walks around the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, until he died last week. That’s it. That’s the story. In Silver Lake, he was wittily known as "the Walking Man." (You see, it’s because he walked all the time).

Was he a homeless man who walked because he tragically had no place to go? No, he was a family doctor named Marc Abrams. Was he an eccentric recluse who lived in squalor and scared the neighborhood children? No, he lived in a house with a hot tub next to the reservoir with his wife, Cindy. Cindy worked with him in his practice. Did he walk every day, rain or shine? No, only “near-daily.” Did he reject all conversational overtures due to the intensity of his need to keep walking, walking, walking? No, a local restaurant owner used to “walk half a block with him” and “strike up a conversation.” People along his route knew him from “years of drive-by small talk.” So what inner demons possessed him and caused him to take long walks nearly every day? The Times reporter asked neighbors. “He walked, he told them, to keep fit.” Of all things.

Ha.

The unnatural complexities of marriage and motherhood.

A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" is reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray. Here's a paragraph about marriage and motherhood:

Wedding nights “transform the erotic experience into an ordeal” that “often dooms the woman to frigidity forever.” It isn’t surprising, she adds, “that ‘conjugal duties’ are often only a repugnant chore for the wife.” “No one,” she argues, “dreams of denying the tragedies and nastiness of married life.” Conjugal love, in Beauvoir’s view, is “a complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness and hypocrisy.” Even marriages that “work well” suffer “a curse they rarely escape: boredom.” Already alarmed? Wait until you come to the discussion of motherhood. A woman experiences the fetus as “a parasite.” “Maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism.” “There is nothing like an ‘unnatural mother,’ since maternal love has nothing natural about it.” It is significant that the only stage of a woman’s life Beauvoir has good things to say about is widowhood, which, in her view, most bear quite cheerfully. Upon losing their spouses, she tells us, women, “now lucid and wary, . . . often attain a delicious cynicism.” In old age, they maintain “a stoic defiance or skeptical irony.”...

[A] pivotal notion at the heart of “The Second Sex” ... is her belief that... “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This preposterous assertion [is] intended to bolster her argument that marriage and motherhood are institutions imposed by men to curb women’s freedom....

De Beauvoir herself, did not marry. But her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre did propose to her. She told him he was being "silly."

"I know enough about a lot of things to be interesting, but I’m not interested enough in any one thing to be boring."

"I’m like everybody’s next-door neighbor, only a little bit smarter."

That sounds like something a blogger might say, but it was Art Linkletter, speaking in 1965, back when he was one of the most familiar faces on television. He died yesterday at the age of 97.

I remember watching him when I was a kid. He had kids on his show.



Being a kid, I was very interested in... how do I get on that show?

Later, young people my age turned against him. It had to do with this:

In 1969 Mr. Linkletter’s daughter Diane leapt to her death from her sixth-story apartment. Her father said that LSD had contributed to her death, and although an autopsy showed no signs of the drug in her body, the personal tragedy became a national event, suggesting to many Americans that drugs and the counterculture were making inroads even into seemingly model families like the Linkletters.

Mr. Linkletter, rather than retreating from the attention, became a crusader against drug use and an adviser to President Richard M. Nixon on drug policy...

Oh, how we callow youths mocked the poor man who, having lost his daughter, wanted to spoil our good times. LSD became associated with the urge to leap from windows and rooftops — an idea that many took seriously but many others — e.g., everyone I knew — thought was hilarious. Some of us seem to remember a National Lampoon illustration picturing the daughter at her window gazing at a hallucination of Art Linkletter floating in the air and beckoning to her.  I hope we won't go to hell for laughing at things like that.

Meanwhile, in heaven, there's "gold and diamonds." That's from the first kid interview in the YouTube clip above. Art asks little Roger Wong — a kid who wants to be a doctor — what heaven is like, and the kid says "gold and diamonds." Art suggests that, as a doctor, the boy will "keep people from going to heaven," which the boy takes the wrong way and denies. Art has to rephrase it: "I mean, you're just going to delay them a little, aren't you?"

Strangely, the same joke — that saving lives is only delaying death — appears in the current issue of The Onion. Humor is a funny thing. Sometimes cornball and hip merge, like that, and sometimes they are so thoroughly different — as with that beckoning hallucination — that it drives a sharp wedge between us.

Christopher Hitchens admits that he's one of "those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been."

His wife said that, back in 2006, adding: "There's a whole tough-guy, 'I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die' talk, which is key to his psychology – I don't care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing."

He now says it's true: "Yeah. Yes. One of the things I've realised, writing the book, is that it has to be true."

What did he feel on September 11, 2001?

"[E]xhilaration. Because I thought, now we have a very clearly drawn confrontation between everything I hate and everything I love. There is something exhilarating about that. Because, OK, now I know what I'm doing."...

"Do I ask myself... do I think our civilisation is superior to theirs? Yes, I do. Do I think it's worth fighting for? Most certainly."...

"Guantánamo slightly threatened at one point to change my attitude towards capital punishment. I thought it would have been good if some of those people could have been taken out and shot. Yeah, put up against a wall. Lincoln would have done it. Of course, I would have been against it if they had. But that's how I felt."

And he still believes believes he was right about the war in Iraq: "Yes, absolutely. I was right and they were wrong, that's pretty much it in a nutshell."

His mother thought there was "one unforgivable sin." It was "to be boring." And, according to the author of the linked article, there's a connection between the avoidance of boredom and the indulgence in alcohol:

He can't really manage eye contact. Once noon arrives, though, he brightens up, proposing the first scotch of the day with one of those bluff jokes about rules for drinking so dear to saloon bar bores the world over....

It seems to me so evidently the case that Hitchens is an alcoholic that to say much more feels unnecessary. But for the record, he trots out all the usual self-serving, defensive evasions: "For me, an alcoholic is someone who can't hold his drink" or, "I'm not dependent, but I'd prefer not to be without it." The longest he has ever been was a dry weekend "in fucking Libya", and he claims he drinks only to make other people less boring. So, presumably, he doesn't drink when he's with Amis? "Er, yuh, I do."

I wouldn't say he's exactly boring himself when dry, but drink certainly makes him livelier company than the 10am sober version, and we pass a highly enjoyable few hours in a pub garden, during which he tries out successive renditions of a Shakespearean sonnet, Being Your Slave, What Should I Do But Tend, on the photographer [a beautiful woman, who, earlier, had expressed disbelief in the effectiveness of seducing women with poetry].

Now, doesn't that make you want to read his memoir? It's "Hitch 22."

"After a while, you start to go on automatic pilot. Too many times I was sitting there bored."

"The audience deserves more than that ... and I can't hide when I'm bored."

(Great pic at the link.)

Words used to decline an interview.

Basically, the answers to all these questions are already on the blog. If that sounds enigmatic, I mean to be enigmatic. I'm bored by whether something is right wing or not and how can anyone be right wing and so forth. The point of the blog is not to be bored.

AND: Suddenly, I realize this is my inspiration. I know more about what you do — and you don't even have to ask me how or why or anything — just by looking than you'll ever know about me. Ever. I could tell you, you know, I'm not a right winger and explain to you why, but you wouldn't really understand. All you could do: You would nod your head, you could nod your head. I couldn't even be willing to try. Every word has its little letter and big letter, like the word "know," you know, K-N-O-W, and, you know, the word "know" capital K-N-O-W? Like each of us really knows nothing but we all think we know things....

Jobs, best to worst, ranked by "environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress."

Actuary is #1, so... shouldn't there be more factors? Like something about how interesting it is... especially to do over the long haul? Is whatever gets categorized as "physical demands and stress" always necessarily bad? Shouldn't there also be deductions for lethargy and ennui?

Last place, #200, is roustabout. Yeah, but Elvis Presley never made a movie called "Actuary!"

"How would you feel if your new boyfriend kept calling his ex?"

And his ex was Madonna.

My theory, Kate: Madonna is more interesting than you. He called her because he wanted to talk to someone who had things to say. But it does make one jealous, and jealousy makes you more boring. It's a vicious circle.

Is this really still something that we should give a damn about?

I'm only linking to Memeorandum for this as a way to say I don't give a damn anymore.

"Charles Gibson leaving 'World News.'"

Oh, blah. Who cares? I didn't even know there was something called — so boringly — "World News." Charles Gibson (Charlie Gibson)? I'd have to click my tag — see below — to ascertain whether I dislike the guy. Was he mean to Sarah? I don't remember.

Haven't watched network news since the 80s. Or was it the 70s?

I figured out why reporters tweet so much.

Figured it out while reading another generous handful of tweets from Ana Marie Cox. In reverse chronological order:

Thank God Nico is so tall. He let me stand in front of him. Fuck you line cop. #whp
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

HuffPo's Nico Pitny just placed in 2nd row of SRO by WH staff. Now why could that be? (Nice "fuck you" to guy next to me playing line cop)
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

.@jaketapper says photogs "formally request" no rising in their way when O enters. And those of us standing might try to take their seats.
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

And my view if I turn around... @mikememoli says hi. #whp http://twitpic.com/872ib
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

RT @newmediajim @anamariecox prodded me into taking updated POTUS view. Crowd has grown! http://twitpic.com/8719t // #1stcome1stservefail
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

My view. http://twitpic.com/871bj
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

.@newmediajim standing in for POTUS. The resemblence is remarkable, no? http://twitpic.com/870pq
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Actually I have just elbowed my way to the front. I am refusing to believe you can "save" a space on the wall. #whp
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Sitting in an edge seat that I know will be taken has benefit of putting me in place to have a good place to stand... #whpresser #whp
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Hey that red blob in the middle is me standing up! RT @newmediajim: POTUSeye view of the White House briefing room http://twitpic.com/86xmg
about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck

They are so often stuck in waiting situations.

AND: Related question: Why do law professors blog so much? Ha ha.

"It's just unbelievably fascinating that he could write a novel about the most boring and unpleasant parts of life..."

"... and make it interesting and exciting and worth writing about.... This is the stuff that our life is really made of, and the challenge is to find a way to be happy."

And David Foster Wallace committed suicide in the middle of writing this book, "The Pale King." The "most boring and unpleasant" thing he was writing about was the IRS.

Today, the pages of "The Pale King" sit in bins and boxes around [editor Michael] Pietsch's desk at home, but he bristles at the suggestion that he won't get through them in time to publish the novel, as he has promised -- and as Little, Brown has announced -- in the spring of 2010.

It doesn't seem to faze him that among the various drafts are sometimes "10 different versions of one chapter or one scene."...

"You do not change a word if someone's not there to argue with you or discuss it with you," he says.

What this means is that he has his work cut out for him. "It's not clear what the intended structure was," Pietsch admits, although Wallace left copious outlines and notes about "The Pale King" that he will use as guides. The published book "will just stop where it stops," and may include some of Wallace's notes and journals.

Good God. May I suggest not making a book at all, but a website? Put everything up, connected with links, and just let us try to find our own way through it ... or give up, as Wallace did.

"If they're mean, I'm bored."

Aw, come on. Mean isn't boring. You need a less boring word than "boring."