How To Be Idle: An Interview with Tom Hodgkinson

If you enjoyed listening to the Radio 4 extract from Tom Hodgkinson's new book How to be Free (see previous posting for details) you will find this 2005 interview with Tom in Mother Jones refreshing:

"I started to question this whole idea of jobs because it was taking away my freedom.” He intended to become a freelance writer (both his parents were journalists), but was chronically unable to get out of bed. “I wasn’t doing it with any pleasure, I was feeling really pissed off at myself,” he recalled. In the midst of this guilty inaction he found a series of essays by Samuel Johnson on the virtues of kicking back and the vital link between idleness and creativity. As he told a British interviewer, "I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!"

www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2005/06/how_to_be_idle.html

To read last summer's post on The Idler which is edited by Tom see:
http://booksurfer.blogspot.com/2006/08/idle-thoughts.html