Category Archives: distraction

Let’s Talk about Jennifer Love Hewitt

Posted on by under distraction

Anytime I leave my office door open, I can expect to see my department head, Dr. Ken Calhoon, standing in the doorway with an expectant look. For most people, the sight of your supervisor awaiting your attention might cause alarm; but for me, it is a welcome distraction.

Ken wants to talk TV – usually True Detective, which he knows mostly by heart. I’m pretty sure that the common reference of the show is just bait for me to give my own performance, Cajun impressions and colorful descriptions of what life is “really like down there.”

true detective

It’s reassuring to me, somehow, that an old scholar of German, a “serious” man with an intimidating intellect, could spend so much time streaming Netflix. I treasure these awkward office transactions as positive distractions: sure, I fill far too many 50-minute segments of my life by consuming stuff that other people have made, like my girl crush Jennifer Love Hewitt’s show (don’t judge!), rather than creating something in this world (a change of mind, a poem, an idea, inspiration, laughs, memories, what I will not imagine because I am too busy with empty, avoidant distraction), BUT I also find meaning in the distractions that I choose when they are enriching, when they lead to something beyond themselves, even if that it just a conversation.

TV can be the most insulating and numbing of distractions, if we are doing it to avoid thinking about our own lives, much less the world. But it can also provide connections to deepening relationships or interested participation in culture.

Distractions drive your desire to live your life – they are how we “get drunk,” and they are how we fill the painting that one day we will stand back and admire, if we’re lucky. So choose wisely.

Exiled from Plato’s Republic (An example of a distraction blog post)

Posted on by under distraction, productivity

I am sitting in a graduate seminar this term — just for fun – and we’re discussing Plato’s Republic, specifically why Socrates calls for poets to be banished (even though he loves them).

I am very familiar with this text and with the professor’s take on it; he is one of my academic idols and I could just bask in his intellect all day long. I’m also fascinated by the power of poetry – I’ve staked years of my own life on it – and how its place in society has been argued for and against ever since Plato’s Republic. Needless to say, this is my shit!

But as we get further into the reading, about 2 hours into the seminar, I feel my eyelids getting heavy, and I let my vision blur on the page – not even the page that we’re on.

When I notice that I’ve been drifting, I try to force myself back into at least some appearance of alertness, but my focus is gone.

Rather than return to the text and to the voices in the room, my thoughts turn to the memory of seeing someone in our first COLT 211 class struggle to keep his eyes open (this student dropped, by the way, so I’m not shaming anyone!). At the time, it made me a tiny bit sad – that I could be THAT boring.

But now that I am experiencing the difficulty of staying awake when I am absolutely invested in what’s happening and yet can’t keep my fucking eyes open … I have empathy. I don’t take it personally. This realization brought a flood of memories from my 7 years of teaching at the U of O, and I start delighting in how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown as a teacher and a person, that I could be here now, no longer caring what my students think about me so that I’m giving every ounce of my energy to what we’re doing as a class.
Then I recognized that I was not at all present in this class, and that being in this class – in academia – is such a privilege and I’m not making the most of it. Because I can only talk about theory for so long before … I’m ready to get back to real life, to my life. As Socrates himself (allegedly) said, you are what you do.

In a sense, I just enacted point of Plato’s Republic: to get rid of distraction (poetry) from the task of serving a society based on reason.

For so many reasons, I would have been banished, too.

But I did manage to produce something in the margins, SOME NOTES FOR THIS EXAMPLE POST!

distraction in the margins

Learning to Read with Distractions

Posted on by under distraction, productivity, reading

Is distraction an idle threat? 

The word comes with the negative connotations of lost concentration, attention deficit disorder, even cultural degeneration, raising alarms about the future of practices that have shaped human society since the invention of language.

mass distraction

But distraction can also be positive; it can put forward ideas that could never have happened otherwise, under conditions of focus.

This potential for productivity in distraction is what we will be exploring in this class, COLT 211, taking our cue from the words of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar:

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”

door-and-cloud-rene-magritte

Not all distractions are created equal – or rather, create equally – and some distraction, as we’ll see, can be strategic, intentionally opening certain doors that we wouldn’t see without getting lost.

Rather than think of distraction as derailing your reading, we will learn how to read with distractions, and see that perhaps all reading is distracted reading.

1425920792402

When has distraction turned out to be productive for you?

Skip to toolbar