Following the relationship between boredom and distraction, the temporal logic behind an experience of novelty and repetition, as I have been describing it, offers the possibility of reading Goldsmith’s work differently. As I have said, Goldsmith’s texts don’t begin in boredom, their form of waiting is never indeterminate; the end has been given from the beginning as the gesture of the conceptual ‘joke’ that motivates the text, and the faith in a moment of transition from boredom to intensity is hardly present. Nonetheless, despite this refusal, to fix a massive amount of text into the form of a book, presenting the possibility of reading it through (or listening to it in one of Goldsmith’s long readings), still creates the conditions for a bored response.

The text as a book, its necessary temporal dimension as a set of pages irreducible to the concept they evoke, means that the tedium of reading traffic reports, or weather forecasts, or a copy of the New York Times can still be realized. Strangely, it is as if Goldsmith’s textual mass, against his word, or perhaps taking him at his word too literally, makes the demand to be bored, where boredom is no longer a given. Not to be interested again by going through a tedious experience, but to be bored despite the possibility, present at every point, of reducing the material at hand to a concept to be grasped without enduring it. Rather than excitement in boredom, Goldsmith’s work might be taken as an invitation to boredom against distraction.

Just as boredom is counterpoised to the shock-effect of avant-garde novelty, Goldsmith works in the other direction. He takes advantage of boredom’s underside, its collapse into a representation of tedium when one is unwilling or unable to actually endure it, and hence its capacity to evoke the immediacy of a conceptual gesture. But if this is the case, then his invocation of boredom as avant-garde strategy as articulated in ‘Being Boring’, is one that registers loss more than continuity. In fact, we might read it as a kind of longing or desire for the work that boredom had once been able to do. Although responding to contemporary changes in (digital) media, Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’ appropriates those older forms of media (the newspaper, the radio, the television) which provided the context for Mac Low’s appeal to boredom as an effective form of withdrawal and sheltering. But this context is very different today, to the extent that Michael Newman’s work on boredom, among others, attempts to understand precisely the loss of what he calls ‘great boredom’, a boredom that could carry the perspective of ‘transfiguration or redemption’¹.

It is here that we find the source of Goldsmith’s nostalgia – his ‘retro-avant-gardism’ – in the appeal to a strategy which the very form of his work can’t sustain. More than mere personal investment, however, we should understand this failure to be boring as an indication of the historical change in boredom and distraction, as experiences². In the urge for an avant-garde response to new digital media, striving to be ‘the most boring writer that has ever lived’, Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’ begins to register this shift. But it is rather in the bad timing of his avant-garde that this work is most revealing about the relationship of poetry to media change today.