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Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
Books: Travel: America: Item 6
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Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in Americaby Tom Lutz
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: Much amusing ado about something. Or nothing., July 11, 2006 Reviewer:E. Heinzman - Anyone who's ever questioned the actual industriousness of Ben Franklin, envied the sylvan sloth of Henry David Thoreau, or felt indignant over the perceived indolence of Douglas Coupland will find (most of) the real story in Tom Lutz's entertaining survey of American productivity and slackerdom. Lutz begins on the couch, where his teenage son, Cody, has parked his lethargic, jobless self, leading Lutz to meditate on his own lack of motivation as a youth and throughout his life. From there, he journeys through the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions through to the dot-com explosion, chronicling the lives, philosophic musings, and artistic output of lazybones and workaholics alike. I understand how Lutz may have wanted to just focus on white American males--following the author's adage of "writing what you know"--but there are definitely other illuminating slacker narratives created by, for, and about people of color, such as the Cheech and Chong films and Ice Cube's "Friday" film trilogy. In a section on the Greed is Good 1980s, Lutz mentions the GOP's criticisms of welfare queens during that decade, but gives no nods to any black's, Latino's, or Asian-American's takes on their own ethnic groups' laziness. (Doing Nothing includes a funny description of slackers in Japan--with that country's obvious parallels to ours in terms of work ethic, job dedication, and overwork--but that's about all the non-white ethnic representation.) May political correctness have kept him from writing about America's "brown loafers?" In a note that will likely reveal my age, my favorite chapters talk about the Beats, hippies, punks, and dot-commers. Lutz addresses the child-like dot-com work ethic and web sites dedicated to all things slothful. If the book is ever updated, he'll have to talk about blogs and social networking sites--the NEWEST kind of self-branding and self-identifying that requires a lot of time and energy, but not a whole lot of real brainpower or sweat.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lutz eases readers into this sparkling cultural history of stylish American torpor with an anecdote about his 18-year-old son, Cody, moving into his house and bivouacking on the couch—perhaps indefinitely. Lutz himself spent a decade before college "wandering here and abroad," so his intense anger at Cody surprised him—and inspired him to write this book about the crashing fault lines between Anglo-America's vaunted Calvinist work ethic and its skulking, shrugging love of idling. An English professor who admits to being personally caught between these warring impulses, Lutz (Crying) has a gimlet eye for the ironies of modern loafing: that the "flaming youth" of the 1920s were intensely industrious; that our most celebrated slackers (Jack Kerouac, Richard Linklater) have been closet workaholics; that our most outspoken Puritans (Benjamin Franklin, George W. Bush) have been notorious layabouts. Lutz's diligent research on a range of lazy and slovenly subjects, from French flâneurs to New York bohos, ultimately leads him to side with the bums. Flying in the face of yuppie values and critics of the welfare state, his "slacker ethic" emerges over the course of this history as both a necessary corrective to—and an inevitable outgrowth of—the 80-hour work week. (May)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Samuel Johnson identified literary loafers in his periodicalIdler (1758-60), and here Lutz lays sharp-eyed analysis on society's reaction toward those who repudiate regular work. Productively informing his appraisals of the Thoreaus and Kerouacs with his own youthful experiment in communal^B living, Lutz weaves no grand theory of the slacker because he finds that wastrels have been different in every generation. In the late 1700s, a disinclination to work was an aristocratic affectation. In reaction to industrialism, the back-to-nature primitivist appeared, embodied by Thoreau, while cultural vulgarity made the Gilded Age vulnerable to the effete cynicism of an Oscar Wilde. In Wilde and others, Lutz nails, with concise sophistication, the mix of anger and amusement such nonconformists provoked. Though a serious study of spongers, this wry book is fun to read. With layabouts such as Theodore Dreiser, the Beats, and our epoch's own Anna Nicole Simpson on offer, cultural-history mavens won't be able to pass Lutz up. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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