Being interesting - see also 'live in interesting times'?
Yesterday, Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian Weekend magazine: Can we make ourselves interesting? Boringness in a conversation partner is much easier to define than interestingness.
Everyone would like to be thought of as interesting, but the quest is fraught with dangers. "Before you read this discussion of how we can become more interesting," wrote Amy Vanderbilt, the etiquette queen, in a 1965 booklet called How To Become A More Interesting Woman, "think of this: not every man wants an interesting woman, any more than every husband wants or could even tolerate a beauty. It is a very difficult thing to be a woman."
That particular consideration may be somewhat less pressing today, but learning to be interesting remains a very difficult thing, for men and women. Self-help books promise to show you how, yet usually end up parroting Vanderbilt's comically counterproductive advice. For example: "Find some subject that really interests you and become an expert in it." We all know people like this, who won't shut up about their specialism. But we don't tend to describe them as "interesting".
....
Specialist-subject bores, Edmundson observes, aren't even the worst: the worst are those who think they're experts in your specialism.
Sing it!
The conclusion rests in ambivalence: 'An alarming possibility rears its head: are all attempts to become interesting inherently self-centred - and thus prone to make you more boring?'
It is also possible that in some instances 'interesting' stands for 'train-wreck', and it may be from a similar inability to look away from the scene of a disaster when one would really much rather that I found myself reading this interview with Liz Jones in Observer Woman, which is a curiously meta experience. O what a struggle to constantly have to be finding something interesting enough to write about in a confessional column, we reflect, and what a natural match she is for the Daily Mail.
And a gruesome example of the desire to be unnecessarily interesting analogous to the efforts of some directors to get yay tricksey with some gem of the classical theatrical repertoire, via
arjuna_lj, who remarks that this is clearly intended for the non-reader, the Book Porcupine. What is it about people who don't read and the desire to do something Fun With Bookshelves that has no conceivable reference to their purpose of keeping books in some fashion that is not piles on the floor and able to be seen? Just think of the number of wholly conventional bookshelves one could provide oneself with for £950.
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