Comments on: Idleness as a Point of Conscience: Nice Not-work (if you can get it)

By: Josh Glenn

Josh Glenn — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:16:44 +0000

Felix, I wrote for the British zine/journal called The Idler, not the Canadian magazine.

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:08:32 +0000

Bordem? Good grief . . .As in Javier presumably . . . .

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:07:57 +0000

As ever, the godlike genius of the late Vivian Stanshall had something to say about this – http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wuzJoaK4_6E
Please note, you may experience some levels of bordem while watching this . . .

By: novakant

novakant — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:48:52 +0000

I don’t have anything interesting to say, but the topic reminded me of the following books that each deal with the matter in one way or another (and they’re good too):

Huysmans: A Rebours
Flaubert: Bouvard et Pecuchet
Alasdair Gray: 1982, Janine

By: gl nelson

gl nelson — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:29:32 +0000

Hello. I’m Garth, and I am a faineant. These thoughts are being transcribed by my mother’s mind reader-cum- housekeeper. I intentionally stopped “doing things” about two years ago. Now, I find, to my delight or chagrin (I’m not sure which, and caring enough to make the distinction has become so so difficult.), I’m also thinking less. My ideas begin to fade after fifty or sixty . . .words . . .until . . . .

By: felix culpa

felix culpa — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:37:52 +0000

Ha!
Academic anointing; your value as a person who must be listened to is contingent upon the degree you prove yourself capable of juggling multiple obscurities, and finer-grained deep obscurities offer higher status to what, frankly seems to me a False Idle, a pretense that ‘disembodied’ thought stands outside the Labour City limits, and that on two counts: it suggests that reflection is not labour; and that labour is a bad thing, equivalent to drudgery.
Here of course we return to the question of ‘subjective? moi?’ Aquinas understood himself blessed in the act of cleaning stables. Perhaps it drew him closer to the void; it might well draw me that way. But he was on good terms with the horror, I think, and suggest that his ‘saintliness’, his calm, was not a function of a childlike, innocent mind (re his last confession) but one who having stood in the void had no trouble keeping his footing in God’s own world.
This all draws me toward the possibility that boredom, expressed in other than terms none-too-searching (the far less interesting side of idleness), is unease in the face of impinging Chaos, when we feel exposed, ill-defended, because our customary idle pleasures have proven themselves fair-weather friends.
Nor, reverting to popular psychology, should we discount the notion of boredom as more precisely an expression of hostility or anger frustrated by social convention.

Josh:
The void and I thank you for your kind words, especially the void.
Is this the same Idler that was published by David Warren in Toronto? I recall being incensed by one of their pet reactionaries and devoting the better part of a week to a response, which friends discouraged me from posting; too much abrasive irony, or something. Somewhere back in the late Eighties.

Lovely. Thanks.

By: Mark Kingwell

Mark Kingwell — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:03:23 +0000

Ha! Clearly this is the really clever point. I can’t ever complain of being misread if reading ‘correctly’ is made to feel like WORK…

By: ejh

ejh — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:09:02 +0000

Is there a long German word for the contempt the hard-working feel for the idle or uncommitted? Lazysleepwalkingbasterdpergriffen?

I asked a couple of Spanish friends the other day if there was a Spanish term to express the concept “can’t be bothered”. I had to explain the concept: they were unable to think of an equivalent.

By: Sandwichman

Sandwichman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:12:18 +0000

The Sandwichman will be posting The Sandwichman Stimulus Plan tomorrow on EconoSpeak. Walter Benjamin, in his Arcades Project referred to the sandwich man as the "last incarnation of the flaneur". The flaneur was the archetypal Parisian idler. So, in effect, it will be an idler's stimulus plan, which, although that may sound somewhat contradictory, is entirely consistent with J.M. Keynes thoughts about post-war full employment, as stated in a letter to T.S. Eliot.

By: Josh Glenn

Josh Glenn — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:52:16 +0000

Felix—enlightening horror makes several appearances in the Glossary. I redefine AVOIDANCE, for example, so it’s no longer a “passive-aggressive means of abandoning your responsibilities” and becomes instead “the act of clearing away received truths, in order to face the Void.” Speaking of the Void, the most well-received thing I ever wrote for The Idler was an essay on hangovers (I was in my mid-20s at the time) as a route to enlightenment.

By: felix culpa

felix culpa — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:28:52 +0000

“the experience of boredom can trigger the more enduring, horrible-yet-enlightening states I’ve called ennui or spleen.”

Elegant.
Although I feel that inquiry into “horrible-yet enlightening states” is idle without reference to the benchmark, the “horror of great darkness” visited upon Abram in his encounter with YHWH; the emptiness at the heart of all things (including oneself), the isolate lostness in an unbounded vastness of Nothingness. Truly nauseating and dreadfully ‘enlightening’ horror as the final truth from which all of society and culture is a desperate distraction.
So get busy!

Ah, the pleasures of the idle mind.

By: john holbo

john holbo — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:56:42 +0000

Hey Mark, I fear I must have read your introduction a bit too – what’s the word? – lazily? Idly? Because I didn’t really notice that you had that bit about Lao Tzu, which basically anticipates the point of my post. Lucky miss on my part! Because if I’d noticed I might have despaired of having a clever point to score off you in public, and thereby failed to write the review entirely. So the reclining posture in which I drowsily perused the volume provided an unexpected benefit for all of us.

By: Josh Glenn

Josh Glenn — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:22:17 +0000

Thanks, everyone, for the comments. Katherine, I used to be a contributing editor to The Idler. I wrote a short series about Idler Etiquette, and a few features on “Idle Idols” like Henry Miller and Baudelaire. (I published a zine/journal called Hermenaut; The Baffler and The Idler were sister publications—we all wrote for each other.) A preliminary version of the Glossary appeared in the first perfect-bound issue of The Idler (#25), in 1999. And I dedicated this new book to the Idler’s editor, Tom Hodgkinson, a good friend who just stayed with me here in Boston recently. So yes—all hail The Idler.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:16:16 +0000

Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Holbo?

By: JP Stormcrow

JP Stormcrow — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:05:29 +0000

“Is a product of idelness when appended to its quotation” is a product of idleness when appended to its quotation.