"In 2009, Christopher Frizzelle... pioneered the first 'silent reading party' at the city’s Hotel Sorrento."

"Accompanied by live piano music, the in-person and virtual reading series fosters 'healthy peer pressure' and a sense of community, according to the Silent Reading Party website. Silent Reading Party offshoots are proliferating worldwide.... The $20 events take place at night and typically sell out weeks ahead of time. Curious to explore the power of healthy peer pressure, I paid $10 to attend a recent late-night Silent Reading Party on Zoom.... For two hours, a pianist accompanied readers with dreamy New Age music, occasionally interrupted by the icy clink of a bartender’s cocktail shaker. I read my book, occasionally forgetting I was not alone. Then I’d peer at the hotel scene, where participants read in silence, took notes and sipped their drinks...."

Writes Stephanie Shapiro, in "I’m retired, and I still won’t let myself read in the daytime. Why not?" (WaPo, free access link).

You'll notice that the bit I quoted has nothing to do with what's in the headline. But it's a sidetrack that caught my interest. When I'd first read about the idea of a "silent reading party," I thought it was a pleasant idea. I thought the website was used to let people know where the group reading would take place. I was surprised that you had to buy tickets (and that some clown would be tickling the ivories). If you want to read with other people around you, go to a café. Or — here's an outlandish idea — a library.

"Perhaps the portrayal of Black idleness will always be, if not haunted, then framed by a broader context that makes it seem like an act of resistance rather than a simple fact of life."

"'When we talk about Black people and time,' [one curator] says, 'we’re talking about stolen labor, stolen time—and each of these images steals it back.'... [The curators] show that Black people around the world have been reposing, alone and in each other’s arms, for a long time...."

Writes Emily Lordi, in "The Visual Power of Black Rest/Black people are generally pictured as doing anything but relaxing—as being attacked, or agitating, or performing. The Black Rest Project aims to widen the lens" (The New Yorker).

"The show is part of a broader initiative called the Black Rest Project... [which] will explore the complexities of rest for Black people, and challenge the binary assumption that one can either slow down or make a living, can either struggle or sleep (a myth encoded in the activist mandate to 'stay woke')."

"We grow weary when idle"/"That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one another."

An old conversation — between Boswell and Johnson — that's quoted in a 2016 post of mind called "Shhhh!"

That quote begins one of my favorite books, "An Apology for Idlers" by Robert Louis Stevenson. I've called it to your attention a few times, and I think that whenever I do, I flag 2 other books I like about idleness: "Essays in Idleness" by the Buddhist monk Kenko and "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell.

Idleness is an important topic! And I wasn't even thinking — until I got to this sentence — about it's special applicability to our predicament in the time of coronavirus.

Here are 3 recent items about idleness:

1. "How Idleness Was an Early Form of Meditation for Ancient Humans" (Great Courses Daily): "Many researchers believe that people have historically spent a lot of time meditating, even if they didn’t call it meditation per se. We think of modern life as being much easier and more convenient than what’s historically been typical, but that’s a myth....  When food was plentiful [in ancient times], it’s estimated that people could find what they needed to sustain themselves—to feed themselves and their children—surprisingly quickly.... For most of the time that Homo sapiens has been around, we’ve naturally had a lot of down time.... '[O]ur brains are, and may always have been, built to require—or at least benefit from—a certain amount of meditation just to maintain normal function.... The meditation practice I’m suggesting isn’t about looking for a clever new way to enhance the function of your brain.'"

2. "The Secret Power of Idleness/The brain does some of its best work when we take a break" (Psychology Today): "When we are busiest, our brains are not necessarily doing very much. Conversely, when we take a break and engage in some apparently mindless pursuit like playing solitaire, walking, or shoveling snow, our problem-solving brains kick into overdrive.... Aristotle celebrated the value of leisure as a cornerstone of intellectual enlightenment. He believed that true leisure involves pleasure, happiness, and living blessedly. It is more than mere amusement and is impossible for those who must work most of the time...."

3. "Celebrating Literature’s Slacker Heroes, Idlers and Liers-In" (NYT): "By 'library of indolence' I mean novels like 'Oblomov,' Ivan Goncharov’s satire about a man who hates to leave his bed, and 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' Herman Melville’s long short story about the clerk whose motto is 'I would prefer not to.' ... The wittiest and most profound [book]... is Tom Hodgkinson’s 2005 classic 'How to Be Idle.'..... He recommends not clicking on news radio upon waking. He nails me entirely when he writes, 'A certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world.'... 'The lie-in — by which I mean lying in bed awake — is not a selfish indulgence but an essential tool for any student of the art of living, which is what the idler really is. Lying in bed doing nothing is noble and right, pleasurable and productive.'"

The Turtle House.

That's The Turtle house by Kurt Völtzke at El Gouna (Red Sea, Egypt), which I'm seeing this morning at the Wikipedia article "Cultural depictions of turtles." I got there because, after blogging about the Green Reaper, I went looking for other government-designed mascots. I'd thought of Smokey the Bear on my own, but that's the one that seems to make us think that the government should be in the mascot-designing business. I found a WaPo article from 2014, "It’s (almost) Smokey Bear’s birthday. Here are some other decidedly less iconic government mascots." There I discovered a Federal Trade Commission atrocity called Dewie the E-Turtle, which was supposed to teach us about protecting our privacy on the internet. That got my attention because I believed the green thing in this photograph was Dewey:



I was wrong about that. The green thing is actually BAC, a creation of the Department of Agriculture. He's a bacterium, which explains the other mascot, which is Thermy, who's there to bully you into overcooking your meat. But I'm only figuring that out now, after I've become entranced by "The Cultural Depiction of Turtles." I love Wikipedia.

Shhhh!

"Study Says Lazy People Are Smarter."

IN THE COMMENTS: rehajm said (efficiently): "Natural efficiency."

Tim Maguire said: "The smart people we've heard of aren't lazy." And by that, I assume he means that the smart and lazy people are being efficient by not drawing attention to themselves. The workplace is often administered by people who want to see that you're hard at work. The stupidest waste of time is looking busy, but it would be stupid to attract the supervision of somebody who will impose the requirement of looking busy when you have worked out ways of getting things done efficiently and want to benefit from your cleverness, not cede all the benefits to your overseer.

I have been in situations where a colleague will go on about how stressed out and terribly busy she is and assert that so are we all. The dead silence in a roomful of professors is ludicrous. You know damned well that many — I hope most — have figured out ways to work very efficiently and enjoy the freedom and flexibility of the job. But no one with an eye on self-protection will stand up and admit to not being a workaholic. And so stressed-out, busy-busyness is the atmosphere that prevails because the ones who talk are the ones who haven't found the lazy-smart path (or they have and want to deny its legitimacy for some sadistic reason).

ADDED: I recommend "Essays in Idleness" by the Buddhist monk Kenko, "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell, and "An Apology for Idlers" by Robert Louis Stevenson (commission earned through those links).

That last of those begins:

BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle.

JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one another.

Just now, when everyone is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself....

Gasconade... There's a word you haven't used in a sentence recently, I'll bet.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"...

... to Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus.

In an interview posted on the press’s website, Ms. Alexievich said her technique of blending journalism and literature was inspired by the Russian tradition of oral storytelling. “I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me,” she said. “Each person offers a text of his or her own.”

“By means of her extraordinary method — a carefully composed collage of human voices — Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy said.

ADDED: What's really interesting here is that the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded for writing  nonfiction, though it's not purely nonfiction. It's a "mix of nonfiction and fiction."

I want to know which purely nonfiction writers have won!

While the Nobel committee has occasionally awarded the prize to nonfiction writers, including Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, it has been decades since a journalist or historian has won. Some prominent writers, among them the New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, have called for the Nobel judges to recognize nonfiction as a worthy art form.

"A lad is good friends with a woman who admitted she has a crush on him. He doesn't feel the same way about her..."

"...but knows she would make a great life partner. Should he suggest a companionate marriage from the get-go?"

The link goes to a podcast, and this part begins at 13:36. Unfortunately, there's no transcript. Also, the question-answerer is Dan Savage, and I already know some of you resist the charms of Dan Savage. Let's not get distracted by the difficulty of sitting through audio. (I recommend listening to podcasts when doing things — like putting on your makeup and making your coffee.) And let's not bother with the usual taking shots at Dan Savage. (We know about Dan Savage and the doorknobs, and I could lick a doorknob at night.) Let's get right onto the topic, which I will summarize for your convenience.

A heterosexual man and woman are true friends and get along great, and he's in his 30s and thinking he'd like someone to settle down and grow old with, but he has no sexual interest in her. He's had plenty of women sexually, but none of them are suitable life partners, and he doesn't think he'll ever meet another woman who'll feel like such a great wife. He thinks this woman might be up for any sort of proposal he'll make to her, so could/should he offer to marry her in a "companionate marriage," meaning he has no sexual interest in her and she should never expect to have sex with him, but he's committed to everything else about the life partnership?

You might want to know how much does she desire sex from him? Maybe there's some way he could first find out how interested in sex she is. Would a sex-free marriage in fact be a positive thing for her too? It seems unlikely, but that's a moving part in the analysis that he could try to pin down first. Also, would he give up sex for rest of his life? I think this particular man wanted to propose a marriage where he had freedom to seek out sex with other women, so the idea would be that she'd be agreeing to this arrangement, which would include his conducting these outside liaisons with discretion and respect and disease-prevention precautions. He'd grant her corresponding freedoms if that's what she wanted.

Note that this model for a marriage would enable gay people to marry someone of the opposite sex. It would also enable sexually unappealing persons to form life partnerships.

Savage's actual answer has a lot to do with the age of the man asking the question. He's in his 30s, but he contemplates the value of having this woman keeping him company when he's in his 80s and he imagines sex won't matter at all in half a century.

The term "companionate marriage" has been used to mean different things over the years. Searching the term in the NYT archive, I see that it was a big topic in the 1920s, and Bertrand Russell's name keeps coming up. Here's his 1928 article, "Is Companionate Marriage Moral?"

Russell defines the term to include a 3-fold legal aspect: 1. Recognition of unions in which the production of children will be avoided (at least at first) by using birth control, 2. Allowing divorce by mutual consent as long as there are no children, and 3. No alimony upon divorce where there are no children. The idea is obviously avoiding children, not avoiding sex.

In addition to the legal aspect, there is, Russell says, a "social" aspect. Conventionally, a married man and woman are expected to live together, with the man providing her economic support. But that's because children are supposed to arrive. If children are avoided, these expectations are not present, he says.

[T]here is no reason why the wife should not earn her living, and every reason why she should. There will be no interference with each other's work, none of the fuss and flummery which at present make marriage disgusting to young people of spirit, none of the foolish pretense of protection by the male and dependence on the part of the female. 

The moral topic here is whether a man without the means to start a family should be allowed to marry a woman so he can have sex. The "sexual instinct does not wait" until the man is economically ready to support a wife and children. Yes, a man could go to prostitutes, but:

Nowadays, young women, for the most part, no longer feel bound to abstain from extramarital intercourse, with the result that unmarried men can have decent relations with women with whom they have much in common mentally — relations not founded on a cash nexus, but upon mutual affection.

Companionate marriage, then, was a way for a young couple, sexually attracted to each other, to live together openly. This was recommended over the alternative, which was "surreptitious," and tended to be "frivolous, promiscuous, and unduly exciting."

But our "lad" in the Dan Savage question wasn't fretting about "unduly exciting" sex. He was talking about no sexual interest at all. And the "fuss and flummery" of marriage seemed not "disgusting" at all, but the best part, desirable without any sex at all.

But that's what the term "companionate marriage" has come to mean these days. These notions evolve, and no one seems to wonder anymore about how to deal with raging sexual passions. Today's problem is lack of passion or lack of passion for anyone you'd want to live with along with a desire for long-term, committed companionship.

"Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue..."

From a 1951 essay by Bertrand Russell:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.,,,

"Liberal" meant something once!