Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Revolutionary Wave : Surfing the Storm Swells of History
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'I CAN’T REMEMBER exactly how it started. With a random sighting, perhaps, of a lone surfer carving up a sunlit wave: like entering a cathedral for the first time and seeing all that stained glass. But from that point forward the sight, smell and sound of a storm swell steaming into shore exerted a devastating pull on me. I was a thirteen-year-old provincial boy from Swansea in South Wales, and already a student in the science of Atlantic swells, the way they travel to shore in neat parallel lines, in sets of three – a prime number. Swells have order but it comes from disorder; their source is always chaos. They arrive on shore in graceful step, wearing bridal veils of pale spindrift. What the eye can’t see is their fantastic propensity for violence.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review The Leisure Principle no. 81 1 August 2023 26653628 2023 periodical issue

    'In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. ‘For the first time since creation,’ he predicted, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to occupy the leisure which science…will have won for him.’ 

    'So where did this vision of future past go? Like baco-foil suits and meals of protein pills, it proved to be a concept that withered on the vine. Instead of an excess of free time to be enjoyed at leisure, a radically different regime now dominates the developed nations: the leisure principle. 

    'The leisure principle is one of work hard to play hard, a rigorous pursuit of monetarised hedonism: YOLO, live your best life, have a good time all the time

    'From the ecstasy of the digital to the monied spectacle that is sport, the gamification of everyday life to the flourishing hierarchy of influencers, Griffith Review 81: The Leisure Principle sets out to scrutinise the terms and conditions of this contemporary compact and consider how we came to cede so much just to amuse ourselves to death.' (Publication summary)

    2023
Last amended 9 Aug 2023 10:43:28
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