Month: December 2004

Idle hands: “David Pescovitz:
Mark Slouka wrote an amazing essay for the November issue of Harper’s Magazine called ‘Quitting The Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness.’ It’s about the beauty of doing nothing, and the fight against those who would deny us one of life’s greatest pleasures:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req¬uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle¬ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had ‘too much time on our hands.’ They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, ‘Quick, look busy.’

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir¬ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: ‘There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav¬ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.’

Link(Thanks, Terre!)“

(Via Boing Boing Blog.)

UPDATE:

Snappy notes the irony of bloggers of all people geeking out on the awesomeness of idleness.
I confess guiltily that I used this entry to test out the automagical posting powers of MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, which means I posted the entry in like eight seconds, with zero thought! To give myself a little excuse, I was reading the essay in its entirety while doing so. I’m a big fan of idleness, and have very little of it lately. Very little. And likely to be less as time goes on.

Somehow this all ties in with the essay I’m not likely to get around to writing in the near future, about all the big big lies of our culture. The work thing is one of them.

UPDATE:

Oddly, the author, Mark Slouka, says “Aileen Wuornos” when I assume he means “Karla Faye Tucker,” towards the end. Do read to the end.

I don’t remember where I got this link — probably MeFi — but Metamix is way way cool.

It takes an mp3 or other soundfile and makes a strange, mathematically based extended remix of it. You can play with the parameters to give different effects.

Oh, and I do mean “extended.” This is for playing in the background. Over long periods of time. Metamixed songs are potentially infinite, and they progress very slowly back and forth through the original piece.

I’m listening to a Metamixed version of Matt Hyland by Cooper, Nelson & Early right now and it’s oddly repetitive but beautiful.

Some songs work better than others with it. Hard to predict.

James responds to the critique of anti-consumerism I linked to here, better than I could, because he’s really into these issues.

Particularly he points out that the author of “Rebel Sell” seems to be misreading American Beauty completely.

I’m with him up to the last paragraph:

Above all, what is most sad about Heath and Powell’s article is the sense of resignedness it conveys. They are not unaware of the failings of consumerism, but seem given over to its all-pervasiveness. But I doubt that this piece will pacify many who are enraged by an enforced life of ironic compromises. They are entirely right that any movement that emerges against consumerism must be more critical in its thinking, and more aware in its history, but not, I hope, that such movements are necessarily flawed. However fanciful it may seem, imagination is the key.

That wasn’t quite what I got out of it. I got the impression that they thought that we could fight the problems of consumerism, or whatever it should be called, not by opting out as individuals, but by working together to fight as a society. In other words, by trying to work with the “big us” that is the populace as a whole (expressed through government through the magic of democracy) rather than a “small us” of fed-up rebels.

I suppose an argument against that might be that there is no hope of opposing the will of corporate influence in government, but that in itself seems a bit “resigned.”