Peter: I believe it is misleading to say that peasant farmers have more
leisure than we do. Nor do I think this has been established so
impeccably as you suggest. The growth of 'leisure studies' as a
sub-discipline within sociology in the 70s and 80s threw up some useful
descriptions, though mostly they were not historical enough. We could
check out Chris Rojek's surveys, they'd be a good start. Certainly the
prevailing thought is not that leisure is simply free time (which we in
the west might spend in using up our wages), but that it is a quality of
free time determined by commercial provision of ways in which to spend it.
Previously, it was not so much commercial as spiritual provision; James
Beattie's poems exemplify this idea, as do many of the poems written by
gentlemen of relative leisure in the period immediately preceeding the
huge growth of English industrial capacity after the coronation of George
III. Then it was 'sacred leisure', much as you describe in your post,
something we ought to have a good share in. Marx agreed, though dropped
the spiritual element. For him it became more a question of time pure
and simple, since this could be the index of one's exception from the
capitalist relation of dominance. The peasants you describe are uncannily
like those Marx hoped for.

Yes leisure is good. It is also bad. It is a dialectic.

Andrew Duncan was quite right to say The Cambridge Leisure Centre. This
in no way implies that the cerebral graft you talk of didn't happen. It
did, and Andrew benefited from it. But that graft was done _at leisure_.
There IS a difference between this type of literary work, where one's
writing can be one's principle or even one's sole labour, and the type of
literary work which gets done in the breaks between work of a very
different kind. Why do you think that Faber were so stupidly keen to
advertise how Simon Armitage was a probation officer? So that we know
what we're getting, and furthermore so that we can TRUST what we're
getting: poems written between work shifts (which can be READ between
work shifts, without a trace of resentment). Of course, Simon ditched his
job when he got famous.


k

                      




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