'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness

'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness
By Tom Hodgkinson, reviewed by Jeffrey Steingarten
NYTimes Book Review June 26, 2005

What do idlers do while they idle? A provisional list can be found in these pages. Idlers contemplate, meditate, appreciate, imagine, feel a sense of peace and calm, follow their dreams, go fishing (Izaak Walton is the star of the 7 p.m. chapter), smoke tobacco, stare at the ceiling and gaze at the stars. . . . They may work for themselves or engage in meditative tasks like chopping vegetables for dinner -- but they do not work at jobs. Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution, Hodgkinson writes, relying on E. P. Thompson's pioneering work, ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (1963), and Bertrand Russell's essay ''In Praise of Idleness'' (1932). (If you check it out in the O.E.D., you'll find that things are somewhat more ambiguous. Before the 1920's, the word ''job'' generally meant a small, discrete piece of work, what jazz musicians would call a gig.

Which reminds me of the book Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. Written after the fashion of Studs Terkle's Working, Gig is a contemporary compendium of interviews with working people about their "jobs" and work. Here's a list of job titles included in Gig.

Salon review of Gig