On the shelf

The Allure of Idleness

Now, here’s a title we can all do with at this time of the year: The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations by Al Gini (Routledge). Though the inquiry is mainly confined to America and its time-obsessed people, his advocacy of “time given to contemplation, wonder, awe, and the development of ideas” holds good in any part of the world. Indeed, he asks Americans, and anyone else who’d care to heed his word, to look to the rest of the world for inspiration: “We fail to understand and often scoff at the tradition of the siesta in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. We smirk at the French practice of closing down in August and Sweden’s mandated five-week minimum vacation policy. We have never been comfortable with the abstract notion of free time. It is not in our nature to just let time pass. Unstructured time, dead time, downtime, wasted time makes us ill at ease.” Ahem, non-Americans too can recognise themselves in those lines.

After the Tantrums

The Grand Slam season has begun in right earnest, but amidst the superb smashes and looping lobs, it’s becoming more and more difficulty to spot that endangered species on the tennis court: a Personality. Some have it, most don’t, and John McEnroe most definitely did. Tim Adams, a former literary editor, dwells on the enigma in On Being John McEnroe. Adams traces his fascination back to his teenage years, when under the spell of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, he saw traces of Holden Caulfield in the American brat. From that starting point, he drifts on to McEnroe’s tennis, his rivals, the sport and the times.