Category: Books

How to Do Nothing

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell book cover.

My attention is important to me, and I’ve been writing and reading a lot this year about ways to navigate a world that is increasingly filled with traps designed to capture, monetize, and waste my curiosity. Earlier this spring, I came across Jenny Odell’s artist talk “How to Do Nothing”, given at EYEO in 2017, and I have been eagerly anticipating her full-length book expanding some of the ideas she shared in her talk. It’s here, and I finished it this week.

How to Do Nothing is anchored by the ideas Odell shares in her artist talk: that grounding oneself in specific real places and paying attention to their physical, geographic, ecological, historical, and social characteristics is an act of anti-capitalist refusal against the various social media and big data businesses who monetize our attention and behaviors. In her book, she expands her scope to consider other questions: How much of a real possibility is it to opt-out of digital connectedness, and would that be a good thing anyway? Does the act of refusing to follow directions have any power or meaning beyond our individual choice? How, specifically, does one “grounding oneself”? How are the attention economy and the fiction of independence linked? Can we change how we think about production to include not just making something that wasn’t there before, but maintaining something that was there before, or even removing something to make room for something else that hasn’t had any room to develop?

These are wonderful, rich questions, and one of the real pleasures of this book is that Odell draws on so many different ways to contextualize these questions. Odell draws on sociology and economics to explain shifts in how jobs are structured, and history and journalism to bring context to the history of the East Bay places that she spends time in. There’s a little smattering of philosophy and theory, which I am a little allergic to so I was happy there wasn’t too much of it. But where Odell really shines for me are in her close readings (and connecting to the other ideas in her book) of conceptual art pieces, the life of Diogenes the Cynic, John Cage’s sound pieces, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and David Hockney’s polaroid collage pieces.

Maybe these are ideas that you could find in other books, off the top of my head I’m thinking of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, or Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. One thing that sets this book apart is Odell’s fierce resistance to framing her argument around “productivity.” This is not a book that argues that changing your frame of attention is going to make you better at your job, or faster at creating career ideas, or anything of the sort—in that respect, she is the anti-Cal Newport (who I respect a lot also, but I think his idea that we can all just be “winners” by becoming more productive is a bit shallow by ducking systemic questions). The other thing that sets her apart is a fierce, humanistic commitment to encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems and social systems in which no individual is completely apart. I look forward to some of these most delicate and precious ideas continuing to move through my brain.

I loved this book. Read it and try something different.

Other perspectives I liked

  • Cory Doctorow, praises the book but thinks her central argument will continue to get sharper over time.
  • Terri Windling: an artist’s perspective.
  • Haley Haltom: a perspective from someone who spent a year sailing around the world.

january book roundup

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All We Can Do is Wait ⪼ Richard Lawson

What a sweet little book! I picked it up because I follow Richard Lawson on Twitter, but I guess I wasn’t following him when it was released. Although the novel starts with a dramatic bridge collapse, most of what unfolds are the quotidian dramas of being alive: insights into the self that you try and shove down into the unconscious, trying to be brave enough to make a leap into what you know you have to do, the loneliness and despair of trying to stay connected to someone who is trying like hell to run away.

All We Can Do Is Wait by Richard Lawson book cover.

Now, maybe you watch a lot of Netflix crime shows and the only thing that seems dramatic now is a race to decode cryptic clues before a baby rapist detonates explosives underneath the final match of the world cup. Compared to that, this book may very well seem plotless and boring to you. I cannot help you there.

I give it a few extra points for incorporating some teen characters that are neither the bland upper-middle class that usually peoples YA nor are they only in the book to edify the white characters. A few points knocked off for still centering bland upper-middle class teens.

The only reservation to my recommendation is that it never answers why we were looking at these characters. They were all compelling, but they never quite cohered together or interact with each other dramatically because the present-day narrative is packed into a single day. Second, although it has a beautiful message about dealing with uncertainty and taking each day as it comes, it doesn’t quite allows the reader to take it away for their own life, unless your loved one has been trapped in a bridge collapse.

Overall I thought it was a strong debut novel and I’d love for Lawson to get the chance to write another one.

Radical Acceptance ⪼ Tara Brach

This is, like, a very important and beautiful book to me. Tara Brach takes clear aim at the voices in our heads that tell us that we don’t deserve happiness, that keep us stuck in our wounds, and try and keep us disconnected from our true feelings because we worry that if we open ourselves up to them they might drown us, like one more passenger on a lifeboat that’s barely above water.

Writing about self-help is vulnerable to me because it’s like shouting Hi! I have all these problems. And they are also easy to make fun of, and not even in a mean-spirited way. There is something a little goofy about looking to Buddhism for answers (as an American, given the cultural history of “looking to the East” for enlightenment) or taking in meditations with exercises like saying hello to your pain. There’s a real and sad truth to texts like these: I turn to them when I need to hear them. I allow them in when trying to muddle through endless grey days without compassion for myself is worse than trying to do something about it.

Self-help/growth books are one of those things where some work for some folks and others work for other folks, so I wouldn’t just blanket recommend it to everyone. The most I can say is that if it seems like it might contain something you’re trying to find, you owe it to yourself to open it up and see if it is.

My Sister, the Serial Killer ⪼ Oyinkan Braithwaite

I did not love this book. I appreciated its unabashed pulpiness, but the premise is stated in the title and it doesn’t develop much beyond that.

What really worked for me is that the story is set in Lagos, and Braithwaite doesn’t waste much time explaining details in the setting for a reader like me that is not that familiar with Nigerian culture. Food, clothing, common phrases are incorporated and the onus on the reader is to learn or keep up. I really appreciate that because if Ezra Pound can drop in untranslated Italian, German, French and Sanskrit into poems that high school students are supposed to give a shit about, I think US reading audiences can grow up when it comes to non-European settings. I also loved the grotesquerie of the main character, there’s a slow inversion in the plot where we realize that a binary that we’ve been presented with is maybe not all as it seems, and I thought that was great.

What did not work for me is that the sharpness of the satire of beauty culture and social media culture kind of trails off, and I did not find it as clever as folks who loved it. I also think there wasn’t quite enough conflict, either external conflict in plot or in the internal conflict of the main character.

Don’t let me turn you off from the book, though. It’s a strong first book, and my rating is way more “this was not for me” rather than “this was bad.”

Cover Her Face ⪼ P.D. James

Read a whole post about it.

The Sandcastle Empire ⪼ Kayla Olson

This was, and I am not exaggerating, a terrible book.

What If This Were Enough ⪼ Heather Havrilesky

I am a huuuge fan of the Ask Polly advice column in The Cut. I come back again and again because I feel some kinship with her. She’s got sharper edges than a Dear Sugar, but like Sugar is deeply compassionate. Polly is funny, but not flippant or sarcastic like Choire Sicha’s NYT Styles section advice column.

I guess what I love the most is that she has become the person that people like me—millennial weirdos who feel stuck because all we seem capable of doing is looking around in shock and disappointment asking “oh my god, is this really it?”—send their deepest questions. And we have changed her in turn.

Like any book of essays, there are some that speak right to me, some that don’t speak to me at all, and some that I hope to god speak to some future, more courageous and secure form of myself.

IRL ⪼ Tommy Pico

Tommy Pico is incredible, and if you haven’t read him you should run not walk to one of his poetry collections. He writes directly to my sensibility–insecure, introspective, and horny–and the beautiful experience of reading something written for you is like drinking deeply of spring water or breathing in the air after a rain.

lost in the cosmos pt.2

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Yesterday I finished with Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy. Finished with, not finished.

It was so easy to nod along with his argument. I get this way with particularly nerdy hard sci-fi—particularly Neal Stephenson books—, I am not so good at knowing when the science ends and the fiction begins and it can be so disappointing to learn that, no, it couldn’t actually happen like that.

Walker Percy starts in such a lost and lonely place:

With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of [religion]… the self becomes dislocated… imprisoned by its own freedom… so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland… Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it [scientifically] understands perfectly.

Who could not be sucked into that? A space-bound ghost is how I feel a lot of the time. It was thrilling to read such a witty deconstruction of the modern condition (this was published in 1983 but Percy so perfectly anticipates the nihilistic and cheery tone of internet humor like McSweeny’s or The Toast it really wouldn’t be very hard to do an update by making the language less sexist and reformatting it into a Buzzfeed quiz). I felt seen (ghosts feel invisible).

Next followed a very funny section of mock self-help exercises deconstructing this modern alienation. For example, the situation of walking into a party a dreading starting a conversation with a stranger. Percy presents several plausible and blackly funny reasons one might be feeling that. This is followed by a section which teaches basic semiotics and sets up his big idea for the second half of the book:

The self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else… no signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

[…]

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as the other. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the cosmos.

which feels like many many conversations I’ve had in therapy. It’s why I cannot hear my own accent. It’s why I have trouble unpacking my own privileges—when others encounter me, which of the advantaged or disadvantaged identities do they think is most important?

At this point I’m eating out of Walker Percy’s hand. I follow him through a meandering and mostly coherent rundown of some strategies for placing the self in one’s own world of meaning, and I end up following him right off the rails. Because it goes then to some bizarre places. My red flags go up when he describes Southern (American) writers as the most strange and disconnected of all people—Percy was a Southern writer. It goes in some reactionary places about sexuality and violence being worse in modernity (not that he was all reactionary, but open-mindedness to the early 80’s still looks like something different today). He starts describing alcohol as a coping mechanism for reconciling the escape of the self from itself through art (although Percy links this alienation and coping mechanism to 20th-century phenomenon like media, mass production and mechanized warfare, he is basically writing like a sadder E.T.A. Hoffman) and I gradually realizing that he’s just writing about his self.

And then I couldn’t read any more. Because it made me too sad.

There are still like 5 or 6 things in this book that fascinated me, that I may want to pick apart, but the first most honest thing that I should say is that I quit reading it because I was a coward. I want to believe that self-awareness means that you don’t make the same mistakes again, and Percy’s bleak outlook is that true self-awareness is categorically out of our grasp. I realized he was trapped in the same problem he was showing me, and all of the sudden my relationship to the text turned and it was like being at a party after it has peaked and you’re too drunk to get home and there’s nothing to do but sit with the host, drinking water, starting a conversation, realizing that neither of you have the energy to have it, and letting it drop.

cover her face

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

If you dream like I dream you know that dreams are heavy, and they make you sensitive to other people’s dreams. It’s like walking around with a bellyful of strong magnets, and getting close to other’s success and failures pulls at you like an electromagnetic field. I want to be a person that has the confidence to stay in my own body and my own dream, but I am not that person yet. The more I see a likeness of myself in another, the more I sense that kinship, the more jealous I get of their success. It’s small-minded.

That’s why it’s nice from time to time to be reminded that even—or especially!—good creators had their own growth process.

First edition of P.D. James’ Cover Her Face

I just finished listening to Cover Her Face, the first Adam Dalgleish novel by mystery writer P.D. James (1920-2014). I was a mystery-novel addict for a couple years at the end of middle school and end of high school. In that way where small stretches of time leave deep impressions when they come during periods of identity formation and reformation, it was only a couple years and maybe 200 books read, but I was a Mystery Reader™️ and I considered myself a connoisseur. I loved P.D. James’ novels because her police inspector hero Dalgleish was a former Anglican seminarian and sometimes poet who often got lost in introspective musings about good and evil as he investigated crimes. As I reflect with a little more knowing eye, I think there was probably something attractive to me about Dalgleish’s non-threatening attractive sexlessness (the characters that he encounters often note his blond English handsomeness, decency of character, and perfect manners).

Cover Her Face, however, is a bit of a mess. It seems to belong to a different generation of mystery novels, it’s set in an English country estate with lots of judgmental villagers. Not too much different than Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Marple novels, just without the…uh… charming ethnic stereotypes?* Dalgleish is a bit of a non-entity, there’s none of the depth that comes in into her later novels featuring the character. There’s a lot of judgey slut and victim shaming and maybe that’s an accurate depiction of village morés, but it’s still not that fun to read. And, frankly, the puzzle box plot was not that interesting and I found it extremely tedious to finish.

*It’s a joke, they’re not charming, although they were very confusing to a 12-year old Mexican-American boy in California who had no idea that you were supposed to find Turkish, Greek or Italian characters inherently suspicious.

But here comes the little bit of positivity!: what a remarkable accomplishment to keep growing and changing throughout such a long career! There’s little in this book that couldn’t have been written in the 1940’s, and yet one of my very favorite of her books, Children of Men, is fully contemporary*. Even though it was written in 1992, it anticipated today’s anxieties about the environment, demographic changes, and made some very good predictions about how modern media culture would handle an atmosphere of slow catastrophic decline.

*One of my very favorite phenomena is when a book is very good and it’s movie adaptation is  different but very good too. The book is more interested in the ideas of how a culture responds when it knows it has an ending date. What do you do with the artwork? What’s the point of keeping scholarly work going—or politics? How do you make meaning when none of your choices will outlive you. The movie is more interested in how scarcity creates a zero-sum mentality, and the way that in a civilization under threat, pluralism becomes threatened too. Both very good, and in very different ways. 

That seems to be all I’ve got.

Cover Her Face: I recommend skipping and reading one of her later Dalgleish novels. For completists only.

lost in the cosmos

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

One of the true pleasures of reading something interesting is to take the ideas in it and move them around, sticking them to another idea and seeing what happens. Trial and error. Stick it on this idea and it falls right to the floor, nothing happens. Stick it to this other idea and both completely transform, synthesizing into something new. Stick your new idea to this other idea and it gets ruined completely.

My sister has read Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-help Book. Something I said about my 2019 resolution (“It’s be brave!” I bravely tell everyone I’ve talked to so far this year) has reminder her of it and then she says something about “real life” —something like “…but, like, at some point you have to get back to real life, right?”—and it snaps me out of the conversation and I’m thinking about the way that the whole concept of real life can be weaponized against your state of mind. In love, optimistic, hopeful, these are all moods that can be disrupted by the idea of real life like a drop of dish soap breaking the surface tension of a pool of water.

I am a person who can throw hideous amounts of happiness away like this. One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, the 2007 adaptation of the musical Hairspray belongs to Edna Turnblad. Trying to convince her daughter Tracy that it’s a waste of time to audition for her favorite TV dance show, she shares that she’s a person who once had a dream: “Well, I had a dream that I would own a coin-operated laundromat, but I came down from that cloud real quickly!”

It makes me laugh and laugh and laugh because its so pathetic and because I see myself in it too.

“‘Real life’ is not a phrase I would use, though,” I replied to my sister.

“But you know how like you’re having those deep conversations or high or whatever and it doesn’t all make sense but you’re so open and positive, but then at a certain point…” she responds, because she thinks I’m being obtuse.

“Yeah, but I think a lot of spiritual traditions would say that that is the most heightened way of being. Like, maybe we can’t sustain that for very long, but you widen out what you can do in that state and for how long.”

But it takes me a couple days to figure out what I actually mean. I think what I actually mean is that true enlightenment is living each day like it’s detention in The Breakfast Club.

In The Breakfast Club, the sheer amount of time involved and boredom and insularity (or safety?) leads to social and class barriers collapsing. Violence and conflict still happen, but with total awareness of the subjectivity of victim and perpetrator. A visit to a trophy case connects the teens to an awareness of time, entropy, and the decay of all things. By the end of the movie, enlightenment has been reached with a total death of the ego, the self has dissolved and the students speak with a collective voice:

But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain and an athlete and a basket case a princess and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club.

In both the movie and in the real world, the real question is what happens on Monday.