BOREDOM, which is sometimes called THE BLANK CANVAS or THE EMPTY CANVAS, is a 1960 novel by the Italian Alberto Moravia.

BOREDOM is almost plotless. It is, appropriately, about how sterile, alienated modernity – bored, in other words – is also oddly obsessive and wildly driven.

Driven for what reasons? To avoid boredom at all costs by being self-defeating. We demand unsatisfaction in daily life to distract ourselves from how banal it is.

Fix toast. Scrape off burned layer. Apply butter. Dessicate burned toast in microwave in order to melt rock solid butter and in the process produce Toast Jerky. Lose crown chewing it.

Rinse and repeat all day long. Dirty socks. Broken vacuum cleaner belt. Mower leaves clumps all over lawn. Internet down again. We subscribe to the Orioles at great personal cost and watch every inning, including rain delay filler, even though they always lose. We eat crackers in bed in order to not sleep soundly because of the bed of crackers.

Wouldn’t a romance with a sex machine solve that boredom?

Moravia was nominated 26 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was PEN International’s president from 1959 until 1962. He edited and owned literary magazines, wrote nonfiction as well as fiction, and lived a good, long, productive life. He died at about 82 in 1990.

He is almost forgotten today.

Artists having affairs – or just plain sex – with their models is a hackneyed subject of many movies, novels, and short stories.

Sometimes, in older works such as this one, the artist entices a model into his studio for purposes of sex. Sometimes the model is a poor waif in search of income, any income. Sometimes the model dreams of marrying a successful or not-so-successful artist and living a glamourous or at least intellectual life.

The artist back then is inevitably a man. The model is a woman, a young woman. The plot possibilities are fertile and as endless as romance and intrigue permit.

But BOREDOM is almost plotless. The story, as such, is about how boring constant and obsessive sex-in-search-of-possessing-the-partner can be.

Which is not to say that BOREDOM is boring. It’s an intense, existential show-and-tell of how sterile 20th century life can be.

True love or even just good sex demands a reciprocal exchange between partners in terms of intimacy, of what we call “sharing” ourselves.

Dino, the rich 35 year old who lives like a poor person on purpose because he simply dislikes money or dealing with it, doesn’t need a model because he’s an abstract artist who doesn’t even paint at the moment. But he catches the eye of a nearby artist’s model, Cecilia, and before long, *bang* we have a story.

But Cecilia is a blank slate. A nymphomaniac who picks up other sex partners. An automaton. A sex machine.

She represents, for Moravia and eventually for his artist character Dino, the modern masses. The insensate masses. The typical Italian or American or whatever of 1960. The indiscriminate consumer of movies, art, television who can’t even remember what they streamed last night.

In other words, Cecilia is a musician’s, or artist’s, or writer’s worst nightmare. Somebody who consumes your deepest, real, creative self without giving anything back. Except maybe hot yet cold sex. Or money. Or something else meaningless in the end.

“Cecilia isn’t fond of anybody,” her mother cries, when the 17 year old girl doesn’t visit her dying father in the hospital.

As a rich guy, we assume – as does Dino – that he could have any man or woman he wants as a lover or life partner.

But he can’t possess Cecilia because she’s coreless. She’s the final product of late capitalism. Any new car is interchangeable with any other new car. Any skirt can be shucked off for any other skirt, on a whim.

Any lover can be fun, just like any other. Any penis is as good as any other.

She can’t remember what food she just ate. “I don’t look at my food when I eat it,” she says.

She eats up people.

Dino eventually resorts to driving Cecilia to his family estate. A monied party is going on. But Cecilia is not impressed, even though this is the first time she knew Dino came from money.

A car dealer once lamented to me that customers today are no longer “Ford men”, or “a Mopar family”, and so on, but indiscriminately wander from brand to brand. It was more fun back in the old days when you couldn’t pry a Chevy out of an old man’s hands.

We no longer love anything. We no longer acknowledge reality. Or money even. Or others.

We consume them.

This is a problem for everybody. But it is even worse for artists of all kinds, artists who by definition strive to possess an audience. Or at least a curator, or an editor, or a gallery owner.

Alberto Moravia is almost forgotten today. He knew that he would be in 1960.