Publisher's Synopsis
Before there was a canon of literature celebrating sloth, including "The Underachiever's Manifesto" and "The Abide Guide: Living Like Lebowski," there was "7 Rabbits of Highly Pathetic People." Because the author so absolutely embraced the principles contained in his guide, it would take 20 years for all 3200 of its words to be arduously retyped from a crumpled manuscript stained by Krispy Kreme donuts. Further tribute to the author as originator of the genre, this delay would culminate in his failing to directly inspire would-be disciples like Tom Hodgkinson of "How to be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto" fame. Irregardless, Buzz Avram's teachings are as prescient today as they were in 1996. Sure, we can look back now and appreciate what Stephen Colbert would call the "truthiness" of such "Rabbits" maxims as "begin with the end in mind and forget it quickly" and "think lose/lose." But mind you, Avram was very much challenging the status quo in his day, albeit very unassertively. "7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which has since sold more than 25 million copies, was already seven years in print. The man in the White House was sleeping 4-6 hours a night, yet still habitually jogging in the morning. Computer scientists were programming a computer to beat a champion chess player. It was a time of unprecedented "overachievement." Needless to say, Avram was a thinker at odds with the zeitgeist, not to mention a longstanding American ethos that values hard work. This is not to say, however, Avram's discursive on achieving pitifulness, was oblivious to history, literature, or pop culture. Au contraire. Avram draws original conclusions from passages about the March Hare in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" as readily as he waxes poetic about the Energizer Bunny. Peter Rabbit, Br'er Rabbit, and the Easter Bunny all also loom large in this volume, as illustrations of points surely never intended by their creators. Speaking of illustrations, the original Word Perfect clip art in Avram's manuscript adorns the pages herein. To communicate a central point that "soft and furry on the outside, there's nothing much inside" of the rabbit, the illustrations are stark. It was also easier and cheaper-as Avram would surely argue if he had the energy-to distort, contort, and manipulate the same .gif to fill white space between his astoundingly short chapters. And lest we paint Avram's artwork with too broad a brush, readers will surely be haunted by the author's approximation of a Rorschach test in the overview for those aspiring to be "highly pathetic." It is here that Avram went to the trouble of coloring the eyes and ears of his muse. True, Avram encourages his readers to be "militantly inactive," "resume the business of doing nothing in particular," and to "keep that mind closed," which may argue for putting his book-and any other, frankly-down prior to completion. But again, this is what makes Avram unique or, perhaps, unintendedly ironic. He is too "sedentary" and "semipathetic," in his words, to be concerned about "page-turning" and number of copies sold. Nonetheless, for those who do make it to "Rabbit 7" there is the "highest level of patheticness" to be ascertained...as well as a mantra to recite that is utterly unpronounceable. -Buzz Avram, Jr.