May 21, 2008

What is the Best Procrastination Lit?

 

altimage Good piece in Slate called Procrastination Lit: Great Novels about Wasting Time by Jessica Winter who uses the work of Thomas Bernhard and William Gaddis as her subjects:

“But there is also a small and unnerving category of literature that is not only about procrastination but that, in form and style, enacts the frenetic paralysis of irrational delay. The reader who procrastinates may discover the sharpest pleasures and horrors of recognition within the tangled, meandering sentences in these slender volumes—detour-clogged journeys that go around and around in crooked, tortured circles as they strenuously avoid their destinations.”

Concluding:

“Indeed, the most bracing revelation of procrastination lit is the terrible possibility that years of delay and deferral are tantamount to a refusal of life as it is or a self-willed limbo—even a living death.”

This is one of those pieces that opens more questions or possibilities than conclusions. My pick for best “procrastination lit” is Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds”, which is not only one of my favorite novels, but one of the best comic novels ever written and in that enduring manner of the classic (ala Calvino’s definition) a book which begs re-reading. It begins:

“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

Which vaguely reminds me, speaking of Calvino, of another favorite that could be called “procrastination lit”: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Comments

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Disappointing to see your erudite blog on literature marred by the spelling of ‘waisted’ when you wasted a vowel for no good purpose.

No doubt you have heard from the spelling police already!

    – Stephanie Chilcott (06/16 03:48 AM)



You got me there. Hope that’s just a misdemeanor, but thank you and thanks for saying my blog is erudite.

    – Bud Parr (06/16 09:18 PM)


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"What is the Best Procrastination Lit?" was posted May 21, 2008 and written by Bud Parr.

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