"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.'"

"... but others will be regarded as idlers..."

A phrase from my first post of the day. I needed to break that out for separate discussion. I'd written: "We should respect some of the working-age adults who stay out of the labor market, but others will be regarded as idlers (not to mention criminals)."

That brusque treatment of idlers fit the post, but there's much more to be said about idlers, and some of it I've already said (in this blog's archive). To avoid hypocrisy, I don't think I need to say we should respect idlers. But I do need to reject the seeming implication that we must disrespect them.

2 of my favorite books are about idlers.

First — which I wrote about back in 2006, here and here — is "Essays in Idleness" by the 13th century Buddhist monk Kenko. He wrote:

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

And I said:

How many words in that sentence do you need to change to make it all about the blogger? That's no Zen koan. The answer is too obvious: one! But there is a deep mystery in Kenko's sentence. "Nothing better to do" can be understood to mean not that one has nothing good to do but that this is the very best thing.

How much do you value your free time? Do you use it to rest and recover or do you use it to do work that, because it's done in your own time -- in time you own -- is transformed into pleasure?

The second book is "An Apology for Idlers" by Robert Louis Stevenson. As I blogged a year ago, it 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....

Are you doing a great deal that is not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class? I sure am! And that's no gasconade.

At Queen Anne's Café...

... chatter about anything, as long as you want.

ADDED: "When people get together they are never silent for a moment. They will always talk. When you listen to what they say, a great deal of it is pointless. There is much harm and little good for either party in such worldly gossip and judgement of others. But as they talk, they are unaware how futile for both of them this chatter is." — Kenko, "Essays in Idleness" (c1330).

"The reason I started blogging about anime is because it is utterly inconsequential, and thus won’t attract the attention of readers who are earnest."

Says Steven Den Beste, commenting in a post about the breaking up of the 4 Horsemen of the Ablogalypse. Den Beste, along with Andrew Sullivan, Charles Johnson, and Glenn Reynolds (who linked to that post), was one of the 4.

Den Beste's aphorism is utterly charming. It reminds me of... what aphorist does it remind me of? I could only think of "The reason I started blogging about anime is because it is utterly inconsequential, and thus won’t attract the attention of readers who are earnest." I could only think of Kenko, but I'm not sure that's the right answer.