Aimlessness
by Tom Lutz
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 26 2021 | Archive Date Apr 14 2021
Talking about this book? Use #Aimlessness #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
Advance Praise
"On behalf of the society of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Cioran, Débord, and Luc Sante, I am happy to welcome in our ranks Tom Lutz. Rarely does one encounter such sudden pleasures in ideas, and when one does it is instant, like meeting the eyes of a particular person on a stroll or in a coffee house, and then being in love for the rest of the day or even life. The vagabond reader and the louche essay let each other dream of one another, without censors, without guilt, without the intention or hope of actually meeting. Lutz is a great flaneur, a boulevardier, educated, free to gaze, easy to divert. If a bus stops he'll take it. If he finds a book on the seat of the bus he'll read it. If he wanders into a strange neighborhood he's overjoyed by its strangeness. All his senses are activated by oddity, novelty, curiosity. He has oversized receptors for pleasure. The wanderer en dérive is essential to the city, like an active element in the blood that makes it circulate, quickens it, increases immunity and is yet open to its vices and pleasures, and may be run over by a car like Mihail Sebastian, at the apex of freedom. This intellectual wanderer sees the streets as thoughts, and thoughts as beings that can please the mind, which is the awake body. Lutz is startled by what his mind can do as he pursues his aimless and unambitious dérive in the world. "
--Andrei Codrescu, traveler and poet
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780231199353 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 635870
When I hear that something or someone is aimless, I have an instant negative reaction to that person or thing. Our society, in championing productivity and efficiency, has decreed that the opposite thing, aimlessness, is evil and must be stamped out. Lutz does a great job dispelling the myths around Aimlessness in his book.
The tying of each chapter's theme to a book or other pop culture is a great tactic. The ideas here are sometimes quite abstract, so linking them to the familiar helps ground the reader and illustrate what Lutz is actually saying. I loved the examples Lutz gave of himself reading encyclopedias. As a boy, I too read encyclopedias and almanacs without any real questions in mind to answer. It was seeking knowledge just for the sake of doing it. This is a practice we've lost in today's society, where we're expected to do everything for a stated and concrete purpose.
This is a very good academic volume on a subject that isn't given much attention. I would recommend reading it.
Kriti K, Reviewer
This is one of my favorite reads this year and I cannot thank the publisher enough for giving me an advanced readers copy. Tom Lutz's writing was mesmerizing, as if I was hearing someone talk. His thoughts flowed so well together and I could see the individual points as well as the collage that he built in this work. Lutz's ideas are so distinct and yet form a brilliant picture together. His analysis of the concept of aimlessness, how it manifests in poetry, essays, novels, death, love and how everything builds a collage with so much room for interpretation... I'm blown away by these concepts and this outlook! All I want to do is to learn more.
A full review of the book and the thoughts I had as I read will be published in Armed with A Book on publication date.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
