Aimlessness / / Tom Lutz.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Lutz, Tom,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: No Limits
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Alternative Table of Contents -- Aimlessness -- Aimlessness and Literature I -- Aimlessness and Literature II -- Aimlessness and Collage I -- Aimlessness and the Nomad I -- Aimlessness and Method I -- Aimlessness and the Nomad II -- Aimlessness and Collage II -- Aimlessness and Collage III -- Aimlessness and Travel I -- Aimlessness and Idleness I -- Aimlessness and Life I -- Aimlessness and Literature III -- Aimlessness and Travel II -- Aimlessness and Death -- Aimlessness and Death -- Aimlessness and Method II -- Aimlessness and Life III -- Aimlessness and Travel III -- Aimlessness and Idleness II -- Aimlessness and Attention I -- Aimlessness and the Nomad III -- Aimlessness and Attention II -- Aimlessness and Idleness III -- Aimlessness and Method III -- Aimlessness and Attention III -- Acknowledgments -- Works Cited -- Index