Slack & You Shall Succeed, by Jeff Gordinier

(View entire post here)

"At times I pity it, a century lost inside another one like a toy boat / floating in the pump room." - Sarah Manguso

What are you doing? Well, you're reading this, of course.

What are you supposed to be doing? If you're anything like my weary comrades on this morning's commuter train into New York City, you're swamped, you're buried, you're mired deep in the weeds, and new weeds just keep sprouting up wherever you've slashed the old ones back. You're busy, man. You should be meeting deadlines and working the phones and printing out a new cover sheet for your TPS reports. You should be doing, you know...your job.

And yet for whatever unfathomable reason, a series of random clicks has led you here, past that old Whitesnake video on YouTube, past your Facebook page (where you presumably felt compelled to announce that you're a fan of Echo & the Bunnymen and burnt toast), through some wired Borgesian labyrinth of tangents and whims, all the way to the Penguin blog. Howdy!

Most of our respected international experts on productivity and efficiency would refer to this as "procrastination," and, as such, it is surely indefensible. Your employer expects you to focus on your work; that's not unreasonable, especially during a time when 75,000 Americans can get laid off in a single day.

And yet as I write this, riding alongside the Hudson River on the Metro North 8:39, periodically staring out the window to look at the snow flurries on the Spuyten Duyvil swing bridge, checking my BlackBerry to see what's up next in my Netflix queue, reaching into my shoulder bag and finding a book and revisiting that great Sarah Manguso poem from Siste Viator - "Getting Over the Twentieth Century," it's called, aptly enough - I guess I want to offer a few words in defense of procrastination. In defense of drift, really. Because drifting is the way we operate these days, and because drifting is how we get things done.

Maybe I'm just trying to justify my own shameless modes of avoidance. Probably so; it wouldn't be the first time; ask my editors. Maybe I'm just jumping to a conclusion based, solipsistically, on my own line of work. I've been a writer and editor in magazines for 15 years - at Details for the past six - and I know from experience that it's often by drifting and wandering that you stumble upon the best magazine stories. Somebody off-handedly tells you something at a party, and two days later you're on a plane to a polygamist compound in Utah, or a bariatric surgery ward in Kentucky, or a sex-doll repair shop in California. (No, I'm not making that last one up.) Success in magazines depends, to some degree, on being able to exploit your own distractibility. Seeing entropic chatter as a potential goldmine. Learning to find ideas...everywhere.

When I was writing the manuscript for X Saves the World, for instance, my over-susceptibility to the lure of YouTube was a problem, at first, yeah. (Ask my editors.) But then one day when I was (instead of writing) watching some yellowed and luminous footage of Iggy Pop yowling and writhing around on The Dinah Shore Show (no, I'm not making that up, either), it dawned on me that YouTube was like...the Library of Congress! That YouTube was preserving and cataloguing all of these amazing scraps of alternative culture - or just plain strangeness - that would otherwise end up rotting away in some forgotten vault. And that stray observation turned into a section of the book, a section called "YouTube Saves the World," and...

Okay, I'm getting distracted again.

But here's the point I'm trying to slide around to: slacking = growth. Personal growth, sure, but also economic growth.

Ever since 1991 Gen Xers have been reflexively referred to as "slackers," and ever since then Xers have shot back with a reflexive retort: "No, we're not!" ... "Are so!" ... "Are not!" ... Well, whatever, never mind. My feeling is, what's so wrong with being a slacker? A lot of Xers were slacking in the late Eighties and early Nineties simply because the stock market had crashed on October 19th, 1987, and it was hard to find jobs in the ensuing recessionary backwash. (This economic collapse stuff? We're kind of used to it.) But what grew out of the Slacker Era was, in retrospect, something of a cultural and economic renaissance. Drifting and housebound Xers had no choice but to form bands and write screenplays and cook up weird little dot-com ideas down at the coffeeshop.

You could argue that a lot of those coffeeshop brainstorms reflected, yeah, the preoccupations of the slacker headspace: interconnectivity, cultural cross-referencing, the art of the random, an encyclopedic fondness for free-floating arcana, where to find a transcendent cup of joe, the perpetual hatching of Awesome Ideas. After all, you only get your best ideas when you're, you know, hanging out and messing around, so is it any surprise that Xers gave us Wikipedia and Craigslist, Google and MySpace and Netflix, Beck's Odelay! and Cat Power's The Greatest and former video-shop clerk Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction? (And is it an accident that by the mid-Nineties we were in full economic bloom again?)

Either way, the imprint is everywhere now. The coffeehouse is all-encompassing. (In fact, you're wandering through it right now. Please feel free to leave a tip in the jar.) Welcome to the MacroSlack! Our new Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, was born in 1961, the same year that gave us Slacker director Richard Linklater, so who knows, maybe Tim's given some thought to the R&D upside of drift - which could only be a good thing. I'm no economist, but I'm willing to bet it won't be a stimulus package that hoists us out of this gloomy recession and into the next sunshiney stock-market boom. It will be Awesome Ideas dreamed up by people who are right now squandering their workday searching for old Kajagoogoo videos.

So yeah, I guess what I'm doing here is procrastinating by arguing that procrastinating might save us. It's all part of getting over the twentieth century.

Jeff Gordiner, X Saves the World, Penguin, Penguin Books