brullyant
A fab idea, slightly bastardized from the suggestion of a quasi-colleague, who came wandering into my office not long ago to share the tail-end of a bottle of champagne. I do wish I knew her name... Anyway, we were discussing a novel, and she enquired about my work before noticing the NYTimes displayed on the monitor, and she laughed. She suggested the category of "productive non-work," i.e. developmentally useful readings not directly connected to one's work (including intriguing novels). And it strikes me - my office is a place of binaries: I work, or I fail to work; I deal with university things, or utterly reject and avoid them. So, I'm going to try and work the middle ground here, and give myself permission, nay, insist that if I'm not working, that I pursue productive non-work rather than exclusively non-productive non-work. Hah. Revelate! Deviate! Celebrate. Tomorrow and tomorrow, etc. The petty pace ain't over yet.
Labels: procrastination, sober, Work
posted by itinerarium at 9:30 PM
2 Comments:
If reading the NYT at work is 'productive non-work', then I'd respectfully suggest that the binaries are still very much in place, to wit, that reading the NYT at work is the same as utterly rejecting and avoiding 'university things'.
No, no, no - you've misunderstood. The NYT is precisely non-work, entirely an avoidance of university things. I'm talking about reading lit crit in other fields, theory, philosophy, history, even other literatures as "productive non-work."
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