Download or read book Enduring Military Boredom written by B. Maeland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often said that war is 5% horror and 95% boredom. In this sense, military boredom is historically enduring as well as personally enduring for the soldiers who have to endure it. This book contributes to a deeper understanding – historically, empirically and theoretically – of the complex phenomenon of boredom in a military context.

Download or read book Boredom is the Enemy written by Amanda Laugesen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War is often characterised as one percent terror, 99 per cent boredom. Whilst much ink has been spilt on the one per cent, relatively little work has been directed toward the other 99 per cent of a soldier's time. As such, this book will be welcomed by those seeking a fuller understanding of what makes soldiers endure war, and how they cope with prolonged periods of inaction. It explores the issue of military boredom and investigates how soldiers spent their time when not engaged in battle, work or training through a study of their creative, imaginative and intellectual lives. It examines the efforts of military authorities to provide solutions to military boredom (and the problem of discipline and morale) through the provisioning of entertainment and education, but more importantly explores the ways in which soldiers responded to such efforts, arguing that soldiers used entertainment and education in ways that suited them. The focus in the book is on Australians and their experiences, primarily during the First World War, but with subsequent chapters taking the story through the Second World War to the Vietnam War. This focus on a single national group allows questions to be raised about what might (or might not) be exceptional about the experiences of a particular national group, and the ways national identity can shape an individual's relationship and engagement with education and entertainment. It can also suggest the continuities and changes in these experiences through the course of three wars. The story of Australians at war illuminates a much broader story of the experience of war and people's responses to war in the twentieth century.

Download or read book The War Against Boredom written by Seth Kaufman and published by Sukuma Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Great fun! An engaging collection in the finest tradition of Douglas Coupland and Timothy McSweeney."—Ben Schott, author of Schott’s Original Miscellany Hilarious and wildly inventive, The War Against Boredom is a welcomed assault on the mind-numbing effects of the modern world. Reverse-engineering obsessions with Big Data, the Internet, movies, coffee shops, pot, spying, rock stars, relationships and sex scandals, author Seth Kaufman morphs reality into comedy with 21 short stories and satirical columns. It's a must-read for fans of the author's acclaimed novel, The King of Pain, and anyone who likes adventurous humor writing. Notable skirmishes in The War Against Boredom: • A husband hires a business consultant to help improve his marriage. • An assistant engineer recalls working with Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury and a llama. • An insurance actuary becomes a star by decoding the odds for the Academy Awards. • A caustic National Security Administration advice columnist answers questions and exposes employees. • Cheech and Chong reunite to over a golden hookah. • A techie conducts an old school search for love in the intriguing “Segway in Overdrive.”

Download or read book Boredom by Day Death by Night written by Seth A. Conner and published by Tripping Light Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A soldier's account of the Iraq War as told though his journal and letters.

Download or read book The Empty Canvas written by Alberto Moravia and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Space of Boredom written by Bruce O'Neill and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless, O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.

Download or read book Terminal Boredom written by Izumi Suzuki and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them. And in the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

Download or read book Did You Kill Anyone written by Scott Beauchamp and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most American soldiers in Iraq had a deep, thick plastic box called a guerrilla box which usually sat at the end of their cot. Soldiers would keep all kinds of things in their box. Weapon cleaning kits. Extra equipment. Blankets and pillows from home. Footballs. Protein powder. Mine was full of books. These are not confessions. Nor are they essays. Nothing is off the table in Did You Kill Anyone?, a hybrid compendium of thoughts and observations whose narrative thrust is propelled and shaped by the inquiry itself. Drawing from and elaborating on years of the author’s work on the peripheries of this subject, published in such outlets as The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The American Conservative, Did You Kill Anyone? asks a question that is rarely, if ever, discussed publicly: ‘why do soldiers miss war?’. With the intimacy of a memoir and the force of a critical analysis, Scott Beauchamp gives his daring, counterintuitive take, interrogating the frivolous conformity of our increasingly inhuman(e) culture.

Download or read book Armed with Abundance written by Meredith H. Lair and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war

Download or read book How to Be Bored written by Eva Hoffman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latest installment of the acclaimed School of Life series, learn how to make peace with your down time—and even benefit from it. Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing, but in the modern world the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Uninterrupted activity can seem exciting, but it can also leave us emotionally disorientated and mentally depleted. How can we recover a sense of balance and a richness in our lives? In How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman argues for the need to cultivate curiosity and self-knowledge and to relish moments of unplugged idleness and non-virtual contact with others. Drawing on psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and a wide range of literature, she emphasizes the need to understand our own preferences and purposes and to replenish our inner resources. This book aims to make readers more vigorously engaged in their lives and to restore a sense of depth and meaning to their experiences.

Download or read book The Pale King written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. "The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon

Download or read book Out of My Skull written by James Danckert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of the Year A Guardian “Best Book about Ideas” of the Year No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn’t bad for us. It’s just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we’re bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn’t working—we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, might lead us to live fuller lives. Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we’d like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It’s time we gave it a chance.

Download or read book Hours of Boredom Moments of Terror written by Don Bidwell and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2016-07-16 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1955 two Russian MiGs attacked a US Navy Neptune patrol bomber with its crew of eleven which was flying on the US side of the International Date Line. For years, Russia had endured multiple US violations of its airspace. Finally, they attacked a completely innocent patrol plane flying over international waters. The attack set one engine on fire, destroyed the hydraulics, the electronics, and electrical power, and wounded six crew members. The pilot gently crash-landed the critically damaged, flaming airplane, thereby saving the lives of his crew. The position of the bomber at the time of attack was verified by its own radar and navigator and multiple radar sites on the Alaskan coast. Even though the evidence was not conclusive to the Russians, they admitted to a share of the responsibility and paid half the cost of the plane, an unprecedented move. The role of the Russian submarine and the USAF fighter response is the author's invention.

Download or read book Critique of Bored Reason written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity. Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition. Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.

Download or read book The Noonday Devil written by Jean-Charles Nault and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The noonday devil is the demon of acedia, the vice also known as sloth. The word “sloth”, however, can be misleading, for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest as busyness or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaning Abbot Nault says that acedia is the most oppressive of demons. Although its name harkens back to antiquity and the Middle Ages, and seems to have been largely forgotten, acedia is experienced by countless modern people who describe their condition as depression, melancholy, burn-out, or even mid-life crisis. He begins his study of acedia by tracing the wisdom of the Church on the subject from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He shows how acedia afflicts persons in all states of life— priests, religious, and married or single laymen. He details not only the symptoms and effects of acedia, but also remedies for it.

Download or read book Experience Without Qualities written by Elizabeth S. Goodstein and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the emergence and evolution of the modern discourse on boredom in French and German literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, this book fills a gap in the intellectual and cultural history of European modernity.

Download or read book The Culture of Boredom written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.