Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins
| Date: 15 April 2011, 13:46
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Sloth, ah yes, sloth. (By the way, both pronunciations, sloth with a long "o" to rhyme with "both," and sloth with a short "o" to rhyme with "moth" are correct.) It's one of the seven deadly sins and this is one of seven books on them commissioned by the Oxford University Press and the New York Public Library. The books are all short and neat and beautifully presented. Each grew out of lectures sponsored by Oxford and the library.
Here we have Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein championing the cause of sloth as she parodies self-help tomes (she has apparently read a few) while satirizing the mass culture (and of course herself) to the reader's delight.
Wasserstein is not so much knockdown funny as she is entertaining. There are a few belly laughs and a number of chuckles, but mostly there is the sense that she is actually saying something of value about who we are and where we're going.
Clearly Wasserstein knows human foibles and she knows the seduction of the mass culture and especially that nasty admonition from others (especially your parents) to "make something of yourself." Ironically, while Wasserstein has indeed made something of herself, here--tongue only partially in cheek--she strongly advises you to just hang out on the couch. She has an "Activity Gram Counter" that limits you to 50 grams of activity a day. Eating a Krispy Kreme donut along with Sleepytime tea costs you 5 grams, the same as watching the Cartoon Network on TV, while reading the New York Times will set you back 30 grams. Not to worry, reading People Magazine rates a minus 5 grams, but watch out for those "Great turn-of-the-century Russian novels," the reading of which costs you a whopping 100 grams a session. In essence this is a celebration of sloth as the way to health and happiness, a stress-free life, a better world, and most importantly, a better YOU.
I think the book was mostly successful and I enjoyed reading it. However Wendy's assumption of a male self-help guru persona was not consistently maintained and should never have been employed since (1) it added nothing; (2) could not in any way disguise Wasserstein's unique voice; and (3) made for some confusion since it was obvious that the most telling observations came from a femme point of view. And this despite the fact that some of the humor revolves around an ambiguous sexual orientation; e.g., her persona claims that in high school he dated both men and women and believed that he "was going to be a father and a mother" and as president of the US "would have a charming First Lady" by his side "and be escorted by a poet laureate husband." (Random thought: if either Hillary Clinton or Condi Rice becomes the first woman president of the United States, will either's husband be the "First Gentleman"?)
Accompanying the text is some charming artwork by Serge Bloch, most of it line drawings, one of which appears on the cover, that of an amazingly relaxed and blissful stick-figure man in a hammock.
Wasserstein claims that reading this book only costs two activity grams and that rereading it is a "Sloth Zone Activity" resulting in a negative 25 grams. I hate to tell her but I read it while peddling my exercise bike.
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