Aimlessness

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.

Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 01/26/2021
Pages: 184
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780231199353
ISBN10: 023119935X
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | Essays
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Literary Collections | Essays

About the Author
Tom Lutz is the founding editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California at Riverside. His many books include Born Slippy: A Novel (2020) and Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums (2008), which won the American Book Award.