Description
"Doing Nothing begins with the author's confrontation with their own mental illness; autobiographically driven narrative then predominates in the book's first section and remains an important point of reference throughout. Rather than being simply about the author's disability, mental illness is scripted as an optic for understanding the world. It is reimagined as a privileged means for accessing truth and a powerful resource for helping us all as we continue to wrestle with how we are to deport ourselves in increasingly catastrophic times. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic. Written as an essay and proceeding often through a kind of stream of consciousness, it reflects, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, Herman Melville's 1856 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wallstreet," work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing concludes by attempting to place our often-distressing moment within the historical sweep of modernity at large"--
