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
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Table of 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
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