B is for Big Rock Candy Mountains
By:
February 13, 2012
A series of 26 posts featuring excerpts from Joshua Glenn’s The Idler’s Glossary (Biblioasis, 2008) and The Wage Slave’s Glossary (Biblioasis, 2011). Both books were coauthored by Mark Kingwell, who contributed entertaining philosophical-critical essays on the subjects of idling and wage slavery; and both were wittily illustrated and designed by the cartoonist Seth.
A hobo’s idea of paradise, being an imaginary land “that’s fair and bright,/Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night,” and — most importantly — “where they hung the jerk that invented work.” These lyrics are from a turn-of-the-century hobo ballad recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock and popularized by Dorsey Burnette in the ’60s.
ALSO: Alienation | Big Rock Candy Mountains | Corporation | Dawdle | Employee of the Month | Flazy | Greybearding | Hobo | Inemuri | Jack of All Trades | Knock Off Work | Lazy | Micawberish | Nobbing It | Onboarding | Pink Slip | Quitter | Robot | Stakhanovite | Time and Motion Study | Unemployment | Volupté | Wage Slavery | Xerox Subsidy | Yakuza | Zero Drag