A01=James Currie
Academia
apocalypse
attachment
Author_James Currie
autobiography
Category=AFKP
Category=DNB
Category=JM
childhood
choice
cosmos
COVID
disability
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
existential reality
human agency
Lars Van Trier
mental illness
modernity
pessimism
political dissent
political limitations
teenagers
visibility
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033059
- Weight: 91g
- Dimensions: 178 x 127mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. 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—reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of queer states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.
James Currie is a multi-arts practitioner and Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Music and the Politics of Negation.
