Here’s what I’ve been up to this summer (just kidding, it’s not really everything I’ve done!). Click the image below to see it bigger. Last week I enjoyed a nice holiday but I will be posting more about science fiction, utopia, and beer soon. Well, since I’m on the subject of taking a holiday and utopia, I guess I will just bring up something that I’ve been reading. I bring it up because I’ve recently done some thinking about creating ideal schedules (read about the schedules here and in my other blog here). Read more below:

Excerpts from Henri Lefebvre’s “Work and Leisure in Everyday Life” (1958):

In our era, one of the most recent forms which criticism of everyday life has taken is criticism of the real by the surreal. By abandoning the everyday in order to find the marvellous and the surprising (at one and the same time immanent in the real and transcending it), Surrealism rendered triviality unbearable. This was a good thing, but it had a negative side: transcendental contempt for the real…
[...]
The relation between leisure and the everyday is not a simple one: the two words are at one and the same time united and contradictory (therefore their relation is dialectical). It cannot be reduced to the simple relation in time between ‘Sunday’ and ‘weekdays’, represented as external and merely different. Leisure – to accept the concept uncritically for the moment – cannot be separated from work. After his work is over, when resting ore relaxing or occupying himself in his own particular way, a man is still the same man. Every day, at the same time, the worker leaves the factory, the office worker leaves the office. Every week Saturdays and Sundays are given over to leisure as regularly as day-to-day work. We must therefore imagine a ‘work-leisure’ unity, for this unity exists, and everyone tries to programme the amount of time at his disposal according to what his work is – and what it is not.
[...]
The first obvious thing that the so-called ‘modern’ man around us expects of leisure is that it should stop him from being tired and tense, from being anxious, worried and preoccupied. To use a term which is now very widely used by the public at large, he craves relaxation….Thus the so-called ‘modern’ man expects to find something in leisure which his work and his family or ‘private’ life do not provide. Where is his happiness to be found? He hardly knows, and does not even ask himself. In this way a ‘world of leisure’ tends to come into being entirely outside of the everyday realm, and so purely artificial that it borders on the ideal. But how can this pure artificiality be created without permanent reference to ordinary life, without the constantly renewed contrast that will embody this reference?

That’s all for now. I think I may create a double feature recommendation based off of this text, look for that soon. These topics of labor, work, family, leisure, relaxation, are all fascinating to me.