Full Description
Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity.
Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages—intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.
Contents
Aimlessness: An Introduction
Aimlessness and Literature I: The Essay
Aimlessness and Literature II: Poetry
Aimlessness and Collage I: Out of Control
Aimlessness and the Nomad I: Deleuze and Guattari
Aimlessness and Method I: Definitions and Disclaimers
Aimlessness and the Nomad II: Lyotard and Genghis Khan
Aimlessness and Collage II: Tokarczuk, Nietzsche, Morris
Aimlessness and Collage III: The Encyclopedia
Aimlessness and Travel I: The Horizon
Aimlessness and Idleness I: Nietzsche, Adorno, and Idle Work
Aimlessness and Life I: Drugs and Self-Doubt
Aimlessness and Literature III: The Novel
Aimlessness and Travel II: Bad Road
Aimlessness and Death
Aimlessness and Life II: Intimacy
Aimlessness and Method II: Gertrude Stein, Jan Zwicky, Lao Tzu
Aimlessness and Life III: Stages
Aimlessness and Travel III: Intention
Aimlessness and Idleness II: Workaholicism
Aimlessness and Attention I: The Stream of Consciousness
Aimlessness and the Nomad III: Vehicle and Tenor
Aimlessness and Attention II: Excellence
Aimlessness and Idleness III: Restlessness
Aimlessness and Method III: The End
Aimlessness and Attention III: And Then
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
