Description
Book SynopsisAimlessness 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.
Trade ReviewA breeze to read, the book is a treat for anyone who has ever taken a mindless or mindful walk. -- Anandi Mishra * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Lovely little book. * Mindful *
In
Aimlessness, Lutz’s discussion of literature and philosophy is widespread and masterful in many ways. -- Akim Reinhardt * 3 Quarks Daily *
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, poet and author of
So Recently Rent a WorldTom Lutz is an explorer, a tinkerer, a connoisseur, a peripatetic scholar, a prodigious reader, and a beguiling writer. His
Aimlessness invites us to ask how, when, and above all why we set goals for ourselves and why perhaps we sometimes ought not to. -- David Wittenberg, author of
Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of NarrativeTable of ContentsAimlessness: 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
