From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 1148:
The vacancies of attention that we must fill appear during public transport journeys, on lunch and toilet breaks, during impasses in dinner conversation, or in those frequent interludes in working life where there is nothing to do but the employee is obliged to look busy. If we didn’t have somewhere to put excess attention, who knows what dreams would come? The stars are a magnet for excess attention: attention-sinks. And they are made, not born.
Mark Carrigan 