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Lapham's Quarterly: Lines of Work
The periodical is published four times a year. Each issue has writings about a particular topic (The City, for example). These writings date from antiquity to contemporary.
Paperback
First published March 1, 2011
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About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 16, 2014
I rarely struggle with the decision of whether or not to pick up the latest issue, despite the hefty (for a magazine) price tag. If the topic is of interest to me, I know I'll regret not getting it. But some, i.e., sports, celebrity, don't tempt me at all. "Lines of Work" took all of two milli-seconds to convince me. Thoroughly enjoyed the introductory essay, and have been well rewarded by the selections thus far.
March 28, 2014
May have to subscribe to this publication. It is excellent.
October 11, 2018
real mix of quality, most pretty interesting in their own way. Also eye-openng experiences from around the world and thru time. Worth reading.
September 11, 2012
Poseidon sat at his desk, going over the accounts. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and indeed he had quite a number, but since he took his job very seriously, he insisted on going through all the accounts again himself, and so his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed the work; he carried it out simply because it was assigned to him -- indeed he had frequently applied for what he called more cheerful work, but whenever various suggestions were put to him, it turned out that nothing suited him so well as his present employment. Needless to say, it was very difficult to find him another job. After all, he could not possibly be put in charge of one particular ocean. Quite apart from the fact that in this case the work involved would not be less, only more petty, the great Poseidon could hold only a superior position. And when he was offered a post unrelated to the waters, the very idea made him feel sick, his divine breath came short, and his brazen chest began to heave. As a matter of fact, no one took his troubles very seriously; when a mighty man complains one must pretend to yield, however hopeless the case may seem. No one ever really considered relieving Poseidon of his position; he had been destined to be god of the seas since time immemorial, and that was how it had to remain.
What annoyed him most -- and this was the chief cause of discontent with his job -- was to learn of the rumors that were circulating about him; for instance, that he was constantly cruising through the waves with his trident. Instead of which, here was sitting in the depths of the world's ocean endlessly going over the accounts, an occasional journey to Jupiter being the only interruption of the monotony -- a journey moreover from which he invariably returned in a furious temper. As a result he had hardly seen the oceans, save fleetingly during his hasty ascent to Olympus, and had never really sailed upon them. He used to say that he was postponing this until the end of the world, for then there might come a quiet moment when, just before the end and having gone through the last account, he could still make a quick little tour.
-- Kafka, "Poseidon"
What annoyed him most -- and this was the chief cause of discontent with his job -- was to learn of the rumors that were circulating about him; for instance, that he was constantly cruising through the waves with his trident. Instead of which, here was sitting in the depths of the world's ocean endlessly going over the accounts, an occasional journey to Jupiter being the only interruption of the monotony -- a journey moreover from which he invariably returned in a furious temper. As a result he had hardly seen the oceans, save fleetingly during his hasty ascent to Olympus, and had never really sailed upon them. He used to say that he was postponing this until the end of the world, for then there might come a quiet moment when, just before the end and having gone through the last account, he could still make a quick little tour.
-- Kafka, "Poseidon"
July 29, 2011
I subscribed after a recommendation from an acquaintance, and found this first issue of my subscription to be an entertaining and thought provoking read.
My only complaint was that I found much of the more contemporary "Further Remarks" that make up the last part of the issue to be far less interesting than the rest.
My only complaint was that I found much of the more contemporary "Further Remarks" that make up the last part of the issue to be far less interesting than the rest.
April 7, 2017
Lines Of Work. Jobs. Earning a living, a livelihood, food on the table, a roof over one’s head, survival.
Having now read all 37 back issues of L.Q. save one (and not counting the 38th issue current), I found this one different from all others. I generally like every issue and have almost always given a 4 or 5 out of 5 rating on Goodreads. Flesh, Fall 2016, is the sole earner of a paltry three.
I lightly annotate when I read. I’ll enclose noteworthy sentences and paragraphs in brackets, mark the same with an asterisk if especially thought-provoking, and perhaps add a word or two in the margin. If I thought the entire extract was notable I’ll put an asterisk by the title. There’s the rub.
As I ploughed through reading, not too fervently because it’s a history journal and not usually a murder mystery, I realized that nearly every extract/essay on this seemingly mundane topic of Work was getting a title asterisk. That is unusual. Nearly every extract piqued my curiosity. Food for thought.
Editor Lewis Lapham’s Preamble: The Servant Problem is insightful as always. Of his starting quotes the one I found more jarring, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor” by Voltaire. How true. In older times a more captive audience of poor was widespread, today it is less but not nonexistent.
Lapham notes the high unemployment rate in America (Spring 2011). That is in the news even as I write in Spring 2017. The better we get at gathering statistics it seems the more we can stretch and skew them to our particular purposes.
“The lines of work… …divide broadly into employments bent to one’s own purpose and those bound to a purpose other than one’s own.” (p. 14) In America’s founding “The newfound land and its newfound independence both were to be cultivated by employments bent to purposes of the individual…”. (p. 15) It wasn’t always so, as most of this issues attests to. Slavery in America was an exception to these lofty constitutional ideals.
Other than a few very literate Greek and Roman freed-men presented I was curious throughout about lesser lines of work regarding slavery. I presumed they had little time or education for writing. Freed-man Olaudah Equiano in 1789 does comment on slave investment and cruelty:
“I had the good fortune to please my master in every department in which he employed me, and there was scarcely any part of his business or household affairs in which I was not occasionally engaged. … By these means I became very useful to my master, and save him, as he used to acknowledge, above a hundred pounds a year.” (p. 164)
Near the end of the issue the full essay Tools Of The Trade by Peter Stothard alleviated the slightly less noted slave lines of work with discourse on slavery in Roman times:
“The ownership of Greek slaves extended and developed the dominance that Rome exerted over the Greek world.” (p. 202)
“Color of skin was of little consequence… Black slaves were traded from south of the Sahara… but were never a major part of any Roman street scene.” (p. 203)
“…a slave revolt was the terror threat of the ancient mind…. Why had not more slaves risen against their masters…”
“All of them had status as part of a household, and food on their plates that the merely free might lack.” (p. 204)
The bulk of the issue largely dwells on work from a western civilization perspective, with a few nods to oriental/asian or middle eastern environs.
The three sections of the main body Voices in Time are Task At Hand, Job Market, and Gainfully Employed.
As well as work, its counterpart idleness is addressed. Writing in 1621, Robert Burton (p. 26) receives my first double-asterisk mark, for his writing, not necessarily his opinion:
“As in a standing pool, worms and filthy creepers increase… so do evil and corrupt thoughts in an idle person…”
“…idleness is an appendix to nobility: they count it a disgrace to work…”
“When the children of Israel murmured against Pharaoh in Egypt, he commanded his officers to double their task and let them get straw themselves and yet make their full number of bricks, for the sole cause why they mutiny and are evil at ease is, “They are idle.””
That will teach them. (Available online as The Devil’s Tools.)
Burton is immediately followed by Norman Maclean (author of A River Runs Through It) expounding on two-man sawing teams in summer logging camps, followed by an extract from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities. All double-asterisked, three in a row. Homer and The Odyssey get a single, then a double for Theodore Dreiser’s piece on a Kansas City bellhop in 1925.
Lydia Davis is sadly amusing in a letter to a funeral director:
“I am writing to you to object to the world cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father’s death.”
“We noticed that before the death of my father, you and your representative use the words love one to refer to him.”
Then we were sitting there in our chairs in the living room trying not to weep in front of your representative … and your representative referred to him as “the cremains.””
“Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate.”
There is nothing wrong with inventing words, … But a grieving family is not prepared for this one. … You could very well continue to employ the term ashes. … We would know that these ashes are not like the ashes in a fireplace.” (p. 50)
Gloria Steinem is amusing, and sad, in her expose’ stint as a Playboy Bunny coatcheck girl in 1963. Not a classy job, in hindsight. No pun intended.
Ralph Ellison is insightful as always, his black perspective this time describing his 1930 employment in a paint business in barely desegregated Long Island. I’m convinced his book Invisible Man would be a very worthwhile read.
Mary Shelley with an extract from Frankenstein, Eleanor Coppola writing about the filming of Apocalypse Now. Charlie Mingus, one of my favorite jazz bassists, with the black ‘perspective’ again on getting and losing gigs in 1953 barely, almost but not quite, desegregated U.S.A.
See what I mean about western civilization oriented? (I’m too often reluctant to use the ‘civ’ word these days. I’m not seein’ it or feelin’ it.)
I’ve only mentioned the first third of the issue so far.
Westerners should find a smirk in the brief extract Quality Control, available online, with it’s dress code for female grooming in a big-box store.
Always Be Closing is online too, from the Mamet play and movie Glengarry Glen Ross. A fair bit of the f-word here, forewarning, but it is superb. Sales. I’d starve in half a day.
Ed Dante writes essays and papers for university students. (Did I double-asterisk everything?)
“I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.” (p. 90)
Karl Marx puts forth his basic tenets on labor and production in a brief one-pager. I just disagree with him and I don’t understand how communism ever took hold. I won’t get into it but What Is Human Becomes Animal is available online.
Though it is in your best interest to read great works by subscribing, Lapham’s Quarterly is quite generous in provided a fair bit for free at laphamsquarterly.org. Seek and ye shall find.
Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class, coined ‘conspicuous consumption’) expounds on Spending Time:
“The term “leisure”, as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time.”
“The lasting evidence of productive labor is its material product–commonly some article of consumption.” What’s wrong with producing and consuming Karl? Laborers are consumers too, certainly more so nowadays than in the 19th century.
Edwin Lefevre advises on Trading Commodities. It is brief and online.
“I mean that after a man makes money in the stock market, he very quickly loses the habit of not spending. But after he loses his money it takes him a long time to lose the habit of spending.” (p. 117)
Alan Greenspan called Lefevre’s book “a font of investing wisdom”. (p. 118)
Mark Twain, Grinding The Axe:
“The coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an axe on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone. Or, it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to each other. For we are all beggars. Each in his own way.” (p. 128) It’s online, lucky people. No running in the halls on the way to the computer room please. You thinkers, you know who you are, better be getting some of this.
Woody Guthrie about the miner strike Ludlow Massacre. Serfs Up (online) about the 1525 peasant’s revolt. The footnote is revealing:
“From The Twelve Articles of the Peasants. Some fifty representatives of Swabian peasant groups met in March 1525 and drafted this series of economic and religious demands. In the following months, 25,000 copies were printed. Europe’s largest uprising until the French Revolution, the German Peasants’ War ended in 1526 with the landowners suppressing the revolt. 100,000 peasants were killed.”
Getting freedom isn’t easy. Where is the Arab Spring getting anyone? Far too many dead will never know and in early April 2017 the horror continues.
Dongguan and Leslie T. Chang appear, with comments on modern-day China factory cities and lives. You can also find her in L.Q. The City: Fall 2010, p. 21.
Ah, the full essays in Further Remarks at last. After all this work there is finally a lot of talk about leisure and idleness. Is it good for you? Calming, reflective, introspectively creative? L.Q. in its magnanimous generosity has put them all online for you. Don’t subscribe while there is so much free. We all have too much to read. How do you choose? I know you think I’m referring to YOU, but I’m not.
Wikipedia says the first essay author Sven Birkerts “is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the “electronic culture.”” Maybe so, but in my interaction with WordPress and Goodreads I find there are many voracious readers and writers out there, even a few bookfayries in certain magical kingdoms I suspect.
Birkerts ponders idleness. Is it a luxury of the rich? Is it good for us?
“Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary that we keep a calendar at all? Encumbered because the word has never not carried the taint of its associations. Idle hands, the idle rich, the downturns that idle workers. Idleness has been branded the obverse of industry, a slap in the face to all healthy ambition. So-and-so is a layabout, a ne’er-do-well, an idler. ” (p. 177)
He writes well and explores the topic through many historical references up to the modern day.
“Things are different now. New variables have been thrust into our midst—or, more likely, we have evolved our way into them. The old definitions of activity, the sturdy distinctions between work and leisure, have been broken down by the encompassing currents of digitized living. Obviously industry has not vanished, nor industriousness, but it has widened and blurred its spectrum to include the myriad tasks we accomplish with our fingertips. The spaces and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more sedentary and cognitive than ever before.” (p. 184)
I bracketed quite a bit of this essay. Read it.
I say many more of us have time for idleness now than even a hundred years ago, let alone 500 or a thousand. What a luxury. Are we better for all that idle time or are we deteriorating? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler…
To think that many of us can ‘retire’ from work. We take it for granted now, an inalienable right of sorts. I like to say I’m one less person taking a job someone else can have.
One of my favorites of these essays is Philip Connors’ A Talent For Sloth in which he eloquently, almost poetically, describes his ‘work’ of isolation as a fire-spotter in a desert national forest. It earned my rare triple-asterisk mark. Solitude at its finest.
“It is a world of extremes. Having spent each fire season for nearly a decade in my little glass-walled perch, I’ve become acquainted with the look and feel of the border highlands each week of each month, from April through August: the brutal gales of spring, when a roar off the desert gusts over seventy miles an hour and the occasional snow squall turns my peak white; the dawning of summer in late May, when the wind abates and the aphids hatch and ladybugs emerge in great clouds from their hibernation; the fires of June, when dry lightning connects with the hills, sparking smokes that fill the air with the sweet smell of burning pine; the tremendous storms of July, when the thunder makes me flinch as if from the threat of a punch; and the blessed indolence of August, when the meadows bloom with wildflowers and the creeks run again, the rains having turned my world a dozen different shades of green. I’ve seen fires burn so hot they made their own weather; I’ve watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there’s a better job anywhere on the planet, I’d like to know about it.” (p. 193)
Read it.
Donovan Hohn’s Lost Symbols (Lost Tools online) notes how tools used to make things, now machines make things and tools adjust.
Alain de Botton’s Treasure Hunt ponders work as self-fulfillment, yet another luxury of modern times in my opinion. I marvel, slightly, when I hear people say ‘follow your dream’, ‘never give up’! A worthwhile pursuit I agree, but in the meantime don’t forget to have a boring job by which you can get food and shelter. de Botton:
“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. Our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariably pass through the gate of remunerative employment.” (p. 205)
Read free online, subscribe, enjoy, learn, think, act.
Stop the madness.
[The now-standard notes:
1. Since L.Q.’s inception with the Winter 2008 issue its size is always 7″ x 10″ x 1/2-17/32″. It is white-covered with very high quality paper throughout, richly printed reproductions of fine art from time immemorial, and exactly 221 pages up to the Sources index at the back.
2. As it has noted on its About page:
“Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past. ”
3. For more details see my previous-posts link or Goodreads site for the earliest reviews.]
Having now read all 37 back issues of L.Q. save one (and not counting the 38th issue current), I found this one different from all others. I generally like every issue and have almost always given a 4 or 5 out of 5 rating on Goodreads. Flesh, Fall 2016, is the sole earner of a paltry three.
I lightly annotate when I read. I’ll enclose noteworthy sentences and paragraphs in brackets, mark the same with an asterisk if especially thought-provoking, and perhaps add a word or two in the margin. If I thought the entire extract was notable I’ll put an asterisk by the title. There’s the rub.
As I ploughed through reading, not too fervently because it’s a history journal and not usually a murder mystery, I realized that nearly every extract/essay on this seemingly mundane topic of Work was getting a title asterisk. That is unusual. Nearly every extract piqued my curiosity. Food for thought.
Editor Lewis Lapham’s Preamble: The Servant Problem is insightful as always. Of his starting quotes the one I found more jarring, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor” by Voltaire. How true. In older times a more captive audience of poor was widespread, today it is less but not nonexistent.
Lapham notes the high unemployment rate in America (Spring 2011). That is in the news even as I write in Spring 2017. The better we get at gathering statistics it seems the more we can stretch and skew them to our particular purposes.
“The lines of work… …divide broadly into employments bent to one’s own purpose and those bound to a purpose other than one’s own.” (p. 14) In America’s founding “The newfound land and its newfound independence both were to be cultivated by employments bent to purposes of the individual…”. (p. 15) It wasn’t always so, as most of this issues attests to. Slavery in America was an exception to these lofty constitutional ideals.
Other than a few very literate Greek and Roman freed-men presented I was curious throughout about lesser lines of work regarding slavery. I presumed they had little time or education for writing. Freed-man Olaudah Equiano in 1789 does comment on slave investment and cruelty:
“I had the good fortune to please my master in every department in which he employed me, and there was scarcely any part of his business or household affairs in which I was not occasionally engaged. … By these means I became very useful to my master, and save him, as he used to acknowledge, above a hundred pounds a year.” (p. 164)
Near the end of the issue the full essay Tools Of The Trade by Peter Stothard alleviated the slightly less noted slave lines of work with discourse on slavery in Roman times:
“The ownership of Greek slaves extended and developed the dominance that Rome exerted over the Greek world.” (p. 202)
“Color of skin was of little consequence… Black slaves were traded from south of the Sahara… but were never a major part of any Roman street scene.” (p. 203)
“…a slave revolt was the terror threat of the ancient mind…. Why had not more slaves risen against their masters…”
“All of them had status as part of a household, and food on their plates that the merely free might lack.” (p. 204)
The bulk of the issue largely dwells on work from a western civilization perspective, with a few nods to oriental/asian or middle eastern environs.
The three sections of the main body Voices in Time are Task At Hand, Job Market, and Gainfully Employed.
As well as work, its counterpart idleness is addressed. Writing in 1621, Robert Burton (p. 26) receives my first double-asterisk mark, for his writing, not necessarily his opinion:
“As in a standing pool, worms and filthy creepers increase… so do evil and corrupt thoughts in an idle person…”
“…idleness is an appendix to nobility: they count it a disgrace to work…”
“When the children of Israel murmured against Pharaoh in Egypt, he commanded his officers to double their task and let them get straw themselves and yet make their full number of bricks, for the sole cause why they mutiny and are evil at ease is, “They are idle.””
That will teach them. (Available online as The Devil’s Tools.)
Burton is immediately followed by Norman Maclean (author of A River Runs Through It) expounding on two-man sawing teams in summer logging camps, followed by an extract from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities. All double-asterisked, three in a row. Homer and The Odyssey get a single, then a double for Theodore Dreiser’s piece on a Kansas City bellhop in 1925.
Lydia Davis is sadly amusing in a letter to a funeral director:
“I am writing to you to object to the world cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father’s death.”
“We noticed that before the death of my father, you and your representative use the words love one to refer to him.”
Then we were sitting there in our chairs in the living room trying not to weep in front of your representative … and your representative referred to him as “the cremains.””
“Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate.”
There is nothing wrong with inventing words, … But a grieving family is not prepared for this one. … You could very well continue to employ the term ashes. … We would know that these ashes are not like the ashes in a fireplace.” (p. 50)
Gloria Steinem is amusing, and sad, in her expose’ stint as a Playboy Bunny coatcheck girl in 1963. Not a classy job, in hindsight. No pun intended.
Ralph Ellison is insightful as always, his black perspective this time describing his 1930 employment in a paint business in barely desegregated Long Island. I’m convinced his book Invisible Man would be a very worthwhile read.
Mary Shelley with an extract from Frankenstein, Eleanor Coppola writing about the filming of Apocalypse Now. Charlie Mingus, one of my favorite jazz bassists, with the black ‘perspective’ again on getting and losing gigs in 1953 barely, almost but not quite, desegregated U.S.A.
See what I mean about western civilization oriented? (I’m too often reluctant to use the ‘civ’ word these days. I’m not seein’ it or feelin’ it.)
I’ve only mentioned the first third of the issue so far.
Westerners should find a smirk in the brief extract Quality Control, available online, with it’s dress code for female grooming in a big-box store.
Always Be Closing is online too, from the Mamet play and movie Glengarry Glen Ross. A fair bit of the f-word here, forewarning, but it is superb. Sales. I’d starve in half a day.
Ed Dante writes essays and papers for university students. (Did I double-asterisk everything?)
“I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.” (p. 90)
Karl Marx puts forth his basic tenets on labor and production in a brief one-pager. I just disagree with him and I don’t understand how communism ever took hold. I won’t get into it but What Is Human Becomes Animal is available online.
Though it is in your best interest to read great works by subscribing, Lapham’s Quarterly is quite generous in provided a fair bit for free at laphamsquarterly.org. Seek and ye shall find.
Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class, coined ‘conspicuous consumption’) expounds on Spending Time:
“The term “leisure”, as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time.”
“The lasting evidence of productive labor is its material product–commonly some article of consumption.” What’s wrong with producing and consuming Karl? Laborers are consumers too, certainly more so nowadays than in the 19th century.
Edwin Lefevre advises on Trading Commodities. It is brief and online.
“I mean that after a man makes money in the stock market, he very quickly loses the habit of not spending. But after he loses his money it takes him a long time to lose the habit of spending.” (p. 117)
Alan Greenspan called Lefevre’s book “a font of investing wisdom”. (p. 118)
Mark Twain, Grinding The Axe:
“The coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an axe on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone. Or, it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to each other. For we are all beggars. Each in his own way.” (p. 128) It’s online, lucky people. No running in the halls on the way to the computer room please. You thinkers, you know who you are, better be getting some of this.
Woody Guthrie about the miner strike Ludlow Massacre. Serfs Up (online) about the 1525 peasant’s revolt. The footnote is revealing:
“From The Twelve Articles of the Peasants. Some fifty representatives of Swabian peasant groups met in March 1525 and drafted this series of economic and religious demands. In the following months, 25,000 copies were printed. Europe’s largest uprising until the French Revolution, the German Peasants’ War ended in 1526 with the landowners suppressing the revolt. 100,000 peasants were killed.”
Getting freedom isn’t easy. Where is the Arab Spring getting anyone? Far too many dead will never know and in early April 2017 the horror continues.
Dongguan and Leslie T. Chang appear, with comments on modern-day China factory cities and lives. You can also find her in L.Q. The City: Fall 2010, p. 21.
Ah, the full essays in Further Remarks at last. After all this work there is finally a lot of talk about leisure and idleness. Is it good for you? Calming, reflective, introspectively creative? L.Q. in its magnanimous generosity has put them all online for you. Don’t subscribe while there is so much free. We all have too much to read. How do you choose? I know you think I’m referring to YOU, but I’m not.
Wikipedia says the first essay author Sven Birkerts “is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the “electronic culture.”” Maybe so, but in my interaction with WordPress and Goodreads I find there are many voracious readers and writers out there, even a few bookfayries in certain magical kingdoms I suspect.
Birkerts ponders idleness. Is it a luxury of the rich? Is it good for us?
“Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary that we keep a calendar at all? Encumbered because the word has never not carried the taint of its associations. Idle hands, the idle rich, the downturns that idle workers. Idleness has been branded the obverse of industry, a slap in the face to all healthy ambition. So-and-so is a layabout, a ne’er-do-well, an idler. ” (p. 177)
He writes well and explores the topic through many historical references up to the modern day.
“Things are different now. New variables have been thrust into our midst—or, more likely, we have evolved our way into them. The old definitions of activity, the sturdy distinctions between work and leisure, have been broken down by the encompassing currents of digitized living. Obviously industry has not vanished, nor industriousness, but it has widened and blurred its spectrum to include the myriad tasks we accomplish with our fingertips. The spaces and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more sedentary and cognitive than ever before.” (p. 184)
I bracketed quite a bit of this essay. Read it.
I say many more of us have time for idleness now than even a hundred years ago, let alone 500 or a thousand. What a luxury. Are we better for all that idle time or are we deteriorating? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler…
To think that many of us can ‘retire’ from work. We take it for granted now, an inalienable right of sorts. I like to say I’m one less person taking a job someone else can have.
One of my favorites of these essays is Philip Connors’ A Talent For Sloth in which he eloquently, almost poetically, describes his ‘work’ of isolation as a fire-spotter in a desert national forest. It earned my rare triple-asterisk mark. Solitude at its finest.
“It is a world of extremes. Having spent each fire season for nearly a decade in my little glass-walled perch, I’ve become acquainted with the look and feel of the border highlands each week of each month, from April through August: the brutal gales of spring, when a roar off the desert gusts over seventy miles an hour and the occasional snow squall turns my peak white; the dawning of summer in late May, when the wind abates and the aphids hatch and ladybugs emerge in great clouds from their hibernation; the fires of June, when dry lightning connects with the hills, sparking smokes that fill the air with the sweet smell of burning pine; the tremendous storms of July, when the thunder makes me flinch as if from the threat of a punch; and the blessed indolence of August, when the meadows bloom with wildflowers and the creeks run again, the rains having turned my world a dozen different shades of green. I’ve seen fires burn so hot they made their own weather; I’ve watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there’s a better job anywhere on the planet, I’d like to know about it.” (p. 193)
Read it.
Donovan Hohn’s Lost Symbols (Lost Tools online) notes how tools used to make things, now machines make things and tools adjust.
Alain de Botton’s Treasure Hunt ponders work as self-fulfillment, yet another luxury of modern times in my opinion. I marvel, slightly, when I hear people say ‘follow your dream’, ‘never give up’! A worthwhile pursuit I agree, but in the meantime don’t forget to have a boring job by which you can get food and shelter. de Botton:
“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. Our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariably pass through the gate of remunerative employment.” (p. 205)
Read free online, subscribe, enjoy, learn, think, act.
Stop the madness.
[The now-standard notes:
1. Since L.Q.’s inception with the Winter 2008 issue its size is always 7″ x 10″ x 1/2-17/32″. It is white-covered with very high quality paper throughout, richly printed reproductions of fine art from time immemorial, and exactly 221 pages up to the Sources index at the back.
2. As it has noted on its About page:
“Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past. ”
3. For more details see my previous-posts link or Goodreads site for the earliest reviews.]
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