Poured Over: Jenny Odell on Saving Time

By Miwa Messer / March 9, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I’m also trying to make use of how innate I think curiosity is for people, because curiosity is kind of a way towards hope… it’s in that direction.”

Saving Time by Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing, asks readers to look at the concept of time, how it relates to the structure of our society and how it can change the way we live our lives. Odell joins us to talk about commodifying time and leisure, the language we use to describe time, the authors and artists that have influenced her and more with Poured Over host Miwa Messer. Listen after the episode for a TBR Topoff from Marc and Madyson.

Featured Books (Episode)
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Grapefruit by Yoko Ono

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee
Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays)

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Jenny Odell, well, let’s put it this way—I’m just one of Jenny Odell’s many, many fans. If you have read How to Do Nothing, and there were a lot of us that did and a lot of us who took a lot of what she said to heart, although some people were looking for prescriptive outlines, and we are going to cover a little bit of that, because that’s not what this book is. Saving Time is the new book and Jenny’s asking us to reimagine how we look at time, reinvent how we look at time, you might even be asking us to rethink time altogether. And it’s really great to see you and I cannot wait for this conversation. So can I ask you, I’m going to steal something from chapter three, actually, I’m going to steal the title of the third chapter of saving time. Can there be leisure?

Jenny Odell
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny that you mention that it’s the title because I changed the title partway through writing it, I think it was something else. And then as I was researching it, I kind of just like ran into this conceptual, like quandary and I’m like, can there be leisure? So that’s why the title is, “can there be leisure?” I think like, I had to go through several versions of no, to get to like a provisional, yes. So, one way that there can’t be leisure is that everything that sort of looks like leisure, or feels like leisure is so easily packaged and sold to us. And that’s like, not a coincidence, as I was looking into the history of how American leisure in particular has been conceived of, it’s always had a relationship to consumerism, you work at your job for a wage, and you pay your wage for the experience of leisure, and that keeps the wheels turning. Now, I think you can see a really maybe, elaborated version of that, on things like Instagram where, the image of something or the idea of something can so quickly, be turned into something that can be sold. I mean, it’s like someone had an idea one day, a meaningful, you know, authentic idea of human connection. And the next day, it’s for sale, you know, that’s definitely happening. And I talk in that part of the book about working at Great America, Paramount’s Great America, which is a theme park when I was 18 and 19, doing caricatures, that and growing up in a sort of pretty soulless suburb, really kind of oriented me against this idea of commodified leisure, almost like Daria-esque attitude towards, like, that’s so fake. I grew up with that and I’m still like that. So that’s one trap you can fall into. And then the other, it’s not so much a trap, but it’s just like a complication is that even noncommercial leisure, which I really, in How to Do Nothing, like I talk about the rose garden, I was really kind of pointing to those kinds of leisure spaces as being sort of utopian, like, it’s a place where you can go to be not a customer and not a worker, you can just exist. And I think I still find that ideal, very beautiful. But in the history, again, in the US of these kinds of spaces, the rose garden, for example, was in an area that would have been de facto white, because of redlining, there were a lot of things happening in society that were just also in, in leisure, right, or they were, reproduced inside leisure, forms of social hierarchy and exclusion were also happening in those spaces. And then there was this other sort of idea, especially I think, in the maybe early 20th century that leisure would make them more productive citizen or prepare men for the army, recreation was this kind of thing that was a value add to people to the citizenry. I think that’s the point at which I was like, can there be leisure? Even now, it’s like trying to go on vacation, or just have a leisurely moment and at a time when you’re so aware of what’s happening around that space and in that space. Birding, for example, it’s impossible to go birding without thinking about climate change. You just, you just can’t. And so, I think what I ended up with at the end of that exploration was maybe leisure isn’t this static category, but rather a little interruption in the kind of, work and refreshment for work, like an interruption in that, that allows you to see outside of that plane of existence. And maybe it’s still refreshing, but I think of it as almost more spiritually refreshing than being able to go to work energetically on Monday, kind of refreshing, which I think, you know, we also need that, but I think that’s a different thing.

I’m gonna grab a piece of language that you use later in the book, where you’re talking about systems of time. And I’m jumping around a little bit because you have me thinking in so many different directions now because of this book, which I love. But the idea of leisure as a system of time, right? Like not everyone has access necessarily to certain kinds of leisure and that we really do need to redefine and change how we think about what leisure can look like, but also how we access it. And you talk about this one book, and you’ve read so much and put so much research into this book, but yet it flies. It’s from like, 1925. And it sounds very self helpy— dude is just like, don’t look out the window, don’t read on cars, or buses, or trains, and don’t look out the window and just stare at other people and relax. And then you can subtract those minutes you spent relaxing from sleep. And I’m just like, dude, what? I’m doing it all wrong.

That book is incredible. I have to give a shout out to the Prelinger library, which is a small but very powerful community library in San Francisco with amazing volunteer librarians. And one of them knew that I was working on this project, and he pulled that book out for me. And I was just going through it with just utter disgust and delight. Because it’s someone who really admires Taylorism, as many people did at the time and is like, what if you apply this to your entire life? And actually, why haven’t you applied this your entire life? He has a speed-reading section, an actual section where one page is letters and the next one is words, and he’s like, okay, time yourself. Are you thinking efficiently, he’s not talking about factories anymore. That’s obviously a very specific way of thinking about time and it’s seductive, that was what was seductive about Taylorism, the idea of applying it elsewhere was, you could have total control over something, and you could make it run faster and better and more efficiently. And I think, yeah, when I’m talking about these interruptions, it’s interrupting that entire way of thinking about time. It’s not having a little break. It’s a big, even if it’s brief, it feels like a genuine interruption, where time feels different, you feel different, you’re kind of like that speck in the universe or something, it always collapses back in after that.

This show is going to air really close to your pub date so would you take a second and explain what Taylorism is for folks who may not have read the book by the time we air the show?

Yeah, so Taylorism it’s like a system of organizing work that was originated by Frederick Taylor. So that was a bit yeah, very early 20th century innovation. And so if anyone knows the image of Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line, that’s kind of like classic Taylorism in my mind, where you have tasks that are broken up into kind of the smallest bits than they can, or the simplest bits that can be broken up and assigned to different workers. They’ll literally be something that looks like a spreadsheet that shows how much time each little motion should take, as you’re assembling some say, machinery. And that was a very expressly done, in order to make it go faster. It’s to make it go more efficiently and faster, not having people do sort of unnecessary motions that would take longer.

Aristotle, you say, also used work and the concept of work— like leisure doesn’t exist for Aristotle outside of this framework of work. And to think that we go all the way back to sort of classical Greece and we’ve just kept these patterns going for a really long time. And at one point in the book, you’re just like, well, I found leisure while I was cooking, I found leisure not just in, you know birdwatching and other things. But like, I can be folding socks, and I found leisure. And I’ve had similar moments. I mean, mostly just staring out windows, I love staring out of windows in the car, or on a train and not doing anything. And I mean, it’s also time to read but at the same time, like sometimes I just want to stare out a window. So excellent. But where else have you found leisure? I mean, you have really connected with the outdoors in a lot of different ways. You’re also a visual artist, as well as a writer. So, how do you define leisure for you?

I mean, I think I’ve really adopted the kind of the idea from that book that I cite, Leisure: The Basis of Culture whereit’s really more state of mind, then as I was saying, a category of time, or like you could say it’s like an attitude towards the world. One thing that’s been sort of helpful for me in thinking about it is like almost as a posture, right? It’s like, there’s a posture that it’s a real one. I know because I’ve had problems like you know, like where you’re like, you’re so focused on this thing that you need to finish or you want to do faster or your world is kind of small, and it’s focused around this thing. And anything else that happens around that is either going to help you do that thing, or it’s an interruption and it’s a nuisance. I find that in that stance, other people feel very far away, everything feels very instrumental and far away. And that’s kind of like leaning forward and then I think of leaning back, like sitting back in the chair, you know, I described you know, much later in the book, this idea of tiredness. Like a tired, Peter Handke the poet— tiredness that trusts in the world, where you kind of let go of that thing that you’re grasping onto so hard. And as a result of letting go, everything else floods back in, like the rest of the world comes back into your, your consciousness. And I find that that’s often like a very surprising, surprising experience, because it’s, it’s you’re letting in what is outside of what you were thinking about a moment before. And so that to me, is leisure.

I totally get that. And also, a lack of letting go brings us to nostalgia, right? Like nostalgia in a lot of ways can actually be not great, right? Like, it can be a bad, bad thing when you’re nostalgic for stuff that either didn’t exist, or is somehow warped in its ideal, or what have you. You talk about how nostalgia can be atemporal, and you can lose all sense of time and life and everything else. And it’s like that letting go, you need to find those spaces in order to be in the world. And I love that idea, that makes me so happy because it’s a very simple idea. And I think it has broken some people’s brains, because it seems to me so many people have asked you like, how do I do this? Literally wanting a script? Wanting bullet points, wanting like a numbered outline?

Yeah, right. And it’s like, I don’t know, there’s no recipe for that. I think part of it, though, to cut people some slack, there are like languages for the ways that we talk about things like time. In this book I’m relying on language a lot as a metaphor, we talk about clock time and we think clock time, because we have to live in clock time. With that comes all these ideas like time being standardized, and interchangeable, and kind of empty, like it gets filled with work, or it gets squeezed for value, what have you. And even though that’s not true, our psychological experience of time, like anyone knows that, it’s still the way that we think about time, a lot of the time, and so you get, other ideas too like that there’s work time and leisure time, and that those are like quantifiable categories. And I think it’s harder to think about, but also, I think, more accurate, to think of leisure as being something like your state of mind. And also the issue not necessarily being numerically, how many hours does someone have in a day? Right? Like, we all have 24 hours in a day. Like, it’s like something that you have, like a resource that you have, and everyone has 24 equal hours, it’s a little bit harder and more complicated to acknowledge that anyone’s experience of time reflects so many things about their life, right? Like where you are in relationship to various systems of power, how much your time is valued, personally or at work? How far away you live from work, Is there good public transportation? Do you have children, like all of these really important factors? I think in both those cases, you see something where it’s like, you want it to be something with categories, or numbers or something like that, that you can grasp onto but it’s just, it just isn’t, and that’s part of why I can’t make recommendations on that plane. Because like, I think that it’s like fundamentally misguided.

I love the language metaphor. I mean, it’s, it’s throughout the book, but I really love this idea that talking about any kind of system of time is talking about shared experience and a shared world. And I think it’s really easy to forget, I mean, it’s not as simple as just getting off of social media, right? When you’re in the book business, a very lucky few can be off of social media, that’s the example I’m gonna use. Certainly, for some people, it is a way to stay connected for, you know, if you’re away from family, or it has its purpose. But if it’s the only thing that’s driving your interaction with the world, then you become part of the algorithm, is essentially what happens. But we have so many different ways to talk about time that aren’t just pieces of a clock or days of the week, or, you know, work life, home life. Everything’s sort of kind of mushed together at this point. When you’re thinking about time for you, just Jenny, on a you know, any given moment. I mean, what does that represent? For you? I mean, do you connect with the idea of sort of being free of obligation or is it just life? Or is it community? I mean, does it have sort of a back patter for you?

I think that the way that I think about time now is closer to something that I describe in the bit in the middle of the book. There’s a Buckeye, California Buckeye tree that I walked past very often. And it has a very particular schedule. Around this time of year, all the leaves are opening up. Soon, there’s going to be amazing smelling flowers, because I’m going to be doing book stuff, though, like I have been invited to travel and there was like, there’s been at least one trip where I’m like, I can’t miss the Buckeye flowers smell, it’s only once a year so I’ve got to stay here for that— it’s my favorite smell. So, you know, flowers, and then it goes dormant in the summer and stays that way. And so I remember actually, before I knew much about them, I used to think they were dead trees. Because I would see them among a lot of other trees that still have leaves anyway, so they’re dormant, then they just have these little buds and the buds kind of stay there for a very long time until this time again next year. And one of the things that I mentioned in the description of that, you know, so called clock is that the way time proceeds through that tree or that grove of trees is very uneven by linear standards, right? One tree could be flowering, and the tree next to it is maybe just starting to flower. And then even within one tree, when the leaves start turning yellow. It’s uneven, even on one leaf, but it is happening like it is proceeding forward. You know next year it’s going to come back, when you look at that yellow, moving across the leaf, you just what you really see is like things pushing on other things, right things, setting other things off, kind of like cascade, an uneven cascade, sometimes nothing appears to be happening, but it kind of is and another way— it’s just not visible. I guess time feels less like a series of empty boxes to me and more like this kind of things pushing on other things like what people do, affecting what I do and how our time is related in that way.

So it sounds like it makes you feel more connected to your actual everyday life than maybe you were before.

Yeah, it does. And I think it also, I feel more like every day is different from the last one. Because I think the opposite of this view of time, the sort of really deterministic sense of many calendar pages filled with the boxes of time, something about that standardization kind of creeps into your sense of time. It can make you lose touch with the fact that every second is different from the last one and every second is reacting on the things that happened in the second before. I think there are times when we’re all kind of reminded like when the seasons change, it’s kind of a reminder that oh, right, this is happening. But as I mentioned, in the book, I think depending on what you were doing during the pandemic there was that kind of creeping sense of all time being the same.

Yeah, I think that was true for a lot of people. I did not however, take up baking bread. I had other stuff on my plate, pardon the dad pun. Watching people sort of figure out how to structure time, and also figuring it out for myself and whatnot while you’re also working, everything got really squishy. My sense of time got really squirrely for a while. And now it’s you know, I like going to the office, but also, I have cute boots, I like to wear them, and I don’t wear shoes in the house, so I may as well go to the office. But I mean, for instance, I walked to work and so I have this lovely, like 20 minutes, every single day, if the weather’s really crazy I take the subway, and I’ve done this walk for forever, and I love it. And it just makes me really happy and like going home, same thing. And it’s like, I pretty much walk the same path, but you know, I walk through some buildings, and I walk through some parks and it’s just you know, the city smells different all the time. Sometimes it smells great and sometimes you’re like, oh, I’m in the city. Yeah, it makes me love where I am, and I get to do it every day. And it’s never this like I don’t see the same people, even when I’m walking like basically at the same time every day. I don’t see the same people.

Or even if you do, there’s like this guy. I notice he always walks, I always see him when I go for a walk. We just always go for walks at the same the time, and I’ve seen him for years. I live on a really steep hill, and he walks down the hill, and he always wears flip flops so it’s like really loud. And the other day, like I said years of always wearing flip flops, and I saw him last week— he was wearing sneakers. What happened? Part of the book is like, I do mention that if you want to grab a hold of time, it’s like dynamic sense of time is like, just pick one thing and pay attention to it over time. Like for me, that’s the Buckeye tree or this flip flop guy, you know, but if you pick sort of a constant, I didn’t, I didn’t actually end up using this in the book. But I learned about this concept “quadrat”, which is like, in like, environmental science, like you mark, I don’t know what the what the area is, but you mark off with string like a square on the ground of a study area. And that just becomes your study area. So, you’re only sort of observing things happening in that square.

Okay, so like, the bugs that walk in, or the bugs that walk out, or like that’s something sprouts up through cracks in the sidewalk?

I think that, for me, has been like another sort of helpful image, it’s just the kind of like, the mental framing device, where then you start to notice, oh, that thing is alive. And it’s changing or it’s being reacted upon by the world, it’s eroding. Things are happening, it kind of requires you to put that stake in it first.

Do you have a favorite liminal space, like, I love being on planes, because you know, you’re in movement, and like, you know, it’s also like, suspended in time, and I might be the last person who in the world who likes flying, you know, I started flying when I was a tiny person. So, like, I am very used to being on planes, like, I can fall asleep like this and the whole, but I love that space, because you know, you’re going from one place to another, but you don’t really have to do anything.

I used to take public transportation to Stanford from Oakland, which anyone who’s in the Bay Area knows that sounds ridiculous. I also tried driving and that was faster. But not only did I not want to drive, if I’m driving the car, then like, in any particular moment, like I could be trying to go faster, like it’s on me, you know, and there’s a reason why, in the book, I set the chapters in different locations, and the chapter on personal time management and trying to be more efficient is set in a traffic jam on 880. Because it’s like that image of like, this is a zero-sum game, if you go ahead, I am not going to get there as quickly. We are not in this together, you know, versus like, when you’re sitting on the Caltrain. It’s like, yeah, I’m not driving this train, we’re all here on this journey together, we all have an interest in getting there on time. And in the meantime, I can just look at the hills or, you know, try to like pick out different things I haven’t noticed before. Like, I’m not on the hook to try to make things go faster.

Well, not on the hook to make things go faster. But also you can actually look at what’s around you like, obviously, when you’re driving, you’re driving, you can’t just be like, hey, what’s in that window? Or wait, did what color was that? Like, you just can’t, or shouldn’t— you really shouldn’t. If you do that while you drive, please stop. But I mean, in terms of like being present, and being delighted and being surprised in the sense of serendipity, right? Like, for some people, social media has sort of become that serendipity, that sense of discovery. And I mean, I know I’m part of the algorithm, I’ve carefully curated my experience online, depending on the platform and whatnot, do I block with abandon on certain platforms? Oh, yes, I do and I’m fine with that, you know, my life is too short, I don’t need to see you and your terrible ideas, like go away. But then there’s other stuff where I’m like, okay, show me all of your cute, whatever. But it’s still essentially, it’s a machine connecting with what it thinks about me. And it’s not all that serendipitous, there’s a little bit of novelty to it, but it’s still ones and zeros and ones and zeros and ones and zeros when you get to the back end. So I mean, how do you make sure that you’re cultivating that sense of delight and surprise and serendipity and, and fun.

I want to say it’s an attitude, but also, you know, with the caveat that is informed by other structural things, right? Like the same way that if you’re driving the car, you can’t look around, right? Like if something is taking up a lot of space in your life, or you’re in a certain situation, it’s a lot harder to do this, I think just acknowledging that you could be surprised at all, versus going into a situation like you know what everything is. In How to Do Nothing I talked about Martin Buber, the philosopher, like the concept of I Thou versus I It. And I think there’s a lot of that also, in Saving Time, there’s a view of the world, in which everything is a product, or something that could be consumed or it’s irrelevant, right? And it’s one or the other, like the idea of a person who, is really network-y and when they talk to you, you can tell that they’re already trying to figure out what you can do for them like that but applied to the whole world. You know, you’re looking at the whole world and you’re like, what can you do for me, that is not a mindset that is willing to be surprised versus the I thou kind of okay, other people’s realities are, as, you know, deep and complicated as mine. We’re all cohabiting and its space. I don’t know what that person’s memories or experiences are, or ideas, or what ideas could come out of our conversation. Like, I don’t know what those are. And I should be excited by that. There’s so much about our culture that encourages being in the first mindset. And so, I think it can be hard to maintain that or sort of keep reminding yourself, but it just like, there is no greater reward to me. Just before this, actually, I was going on like a very quick walk around the block and there are these birds that I talked about in Saving Time, cedar waxwings, that were my like gateway bird that I saw in 2013, I didn’t find out what they were until like six years later or something. They’re loosely migratory, they move around, they’re only in my neighborhood during this part of the year. And they’re usually in these big flocks. And they make this sound that’s like, almost like, it sounds like it’s like on the edge, upper edge of your auditory range. And I usually see them like, you know, pretty far, like they’re up in a tree and they’re all together. And I was walking down the sidewalk and I was thinking about something else; I don’t know. And I saw were these cedar waxwings in a small tree, so like closer to the ground, right in front of me. I was like, shocked and then I just couldn’t move. I was like there until they left that felt so unrelated to like, anything that I was thinking about before that and I find that those kinds of encounters like, they kind of throw you back on yourself in a way. But they’re also, to me reminders of this kind of understanding of time, like, there are these birds that are following the berries that are fruiting in this pattern, you know, and it’s like, that has all been going on this whole time. And I was in my little, you know, whatever.

You had a great line too, about learning to listen to rocks talk, and I’m still not sure if I fully understand what you’re saying, but I like the idea. Like, I just I liked it, because when you’re out in the woods, like it’s not silent. It’s you know, you’re standing on a hill, like you hear the wind you like, there’s so much happening, and if you’re just paying attention for a second. Like, you can actually catch some cool stuff, like I grew up on the ocean, and like, you know, you can’t really predict what the ocean is going to do. And you shouldn’t always think that you know what the ocean is going to do.

I know the Northern California beach, yeah.

There’s nothing quite like the ocean to keep you really humble. really humble and really in perspective, but like, it’s so mutable and so changeable. And like it’s never the same from minute to minute. And it’s like, you know, I just want to be able to say to people go, go stand on the edge of a body of water anywhere. And again, I fully understand that there are people who can’t do that. So, this idea of leisure as a state of mind, or being able to find serendipity, wherever you can, I think is really delightful. And really, it makes me hopeful for people because we’re living in a really weird moment. Yeah, stressful and hard. And everything’s kind of, you know, not quite what a lot of people expected, no matter what they believe, or where they are. And it’s like, well, why not be hopeful? And you write really hopeful books. I’m not sure everyone necessarily sees that, but I’m just kind of like, oh, yeah, there’s possibly there’s so much possibility, I think is what I’m trying to say.

I think I’m also trying to make use of how innate I think curiosity is for people, because curiosity is kind of a way towards hope. Right? It’s in that direction. And speaking of like, you know, accessibility, I did think that during the pandemic, one of the statistics that I came across that I really loved was the uptick in visits to bird webcams. So like, if you can’t go somewhere. I find that really interesting because the webcam because it’s live, so to me that is very different than even watching a past recording of a webcam. Like I mentioned, looking at the webcam for the pair of ospreys in Richmond, which is not far from here, having it sort of on my laptop with other things going on and looking at the sky on the webcam, and it’s dark gray, right? And then I look out and my went, oh, right, it’s this, that’s the sky right to say sky. But that I was also looking at one of an eagle in Iowa and obviously, there’s a time difference there. So the fact that during that time, which was so difficult for so many people, and in which time felt very stultifying, that people did that, but that was a reaction that, a lot of people got into birding, but also a lot more people were looking at these webcams that had always been there, and being interested in the activities of these birds. Also, the beginning of the pandemic, sort of lined up with spring migration, but also nesting, waiting for the eggs to hatch, it’s very easy to get invested in that.

When did you start working on Saving Time, because I know How to Do Nothing came out of remarks you delivered at a conference, that became the first section of that book. And obviously, we were all at home after How to Do Nothingcame out in hardcover in ‘19. But I do remember feeling like How to Do Nothing was everywhere. And you were still talking too, there was a lot happening for the book. And even though you weren’t traveling, I mean, that takes a lot of energy to get your hands around and do all that stuff. So, when did you conceive of Saving Time? And when did you sort of start putting it all together? Because there’s a ton of research that went into this book.

This is one of those things, it’s almost similar to something that I talked about in the conclusion of Saving Time, which is like, when can something properly be said to have happened or have started? Like those debris flows in LA, like they happen after there’s a summer fire, so when did it really start? You know, is it when the rocks are coming down the hill in the winter or did it start with you know… I feel similarly about my process, like, when did it really start? There’s actually this funny detail that in How to Do Nothing I mentioned being in that cabin with no reception, one of the things I was doing in that cabin was I was trying to write a very early outline, for a proposal for How to Do Nothingand I recently came across my notes from that time and I had it divided into how to do nothing in space and how to do nothing in time. And I obviously ended up kind of going more in the space direction, because of my emphasis on bio regionalism, you know, being more aware of the place that you’re in. But there’s also an implicit argument already in how did you not think that not all times should be money? So, it’s kind of like in there, right. But because of that other column, like sometimes I think of this as like the long-lost twin of How to Do Nothing. Sometimes also, I don’t know that something’s research until later.. So I think I was just paying attention to stuff that was related to that and I think that increased when I was getting, you know, feedback about How to Do Nothing, having to do with time, like people sort of encountering those ideas, and having this objection about time, who has time and so that was just kind of ongoing, the whole time. And the proposal, actually most of it was written before the pandemic started. So, it it’s strange, right? Because it ended up, some of the things that I think I was thinking about a little bit more abstractly, when I wrote the proposal became much more concrete or much more immediate during the pandemic.

Yeah, I can see that, I can totally see that. I am laughing only because when you said long lost twin I was like, oh, I described the book as siblings in my notes. They feel like siblings, like they just they feel like they feed each other in different ways. So, a book is a way of capturing time on the page, like, The novel is, sort of specifically designed to do that. But I love the idea that they sort of, I feel like I can see how Saving Time sort of grew out of How to Do Nothing. But it feels like you’ve been thinking about this stuff for a really long time. Also, when you were the artist in residence at the San Francisco dump. I’m sorry, I’m blanking on the name of the project, but it’s such a great idea.

Oh, the Bureau of Suspended Objects.

Thank you. Can we just get back to that? Because I love this idea. And it just it feels like I can look back at that and sort of see how all of your work connects and I’m just wondering if there’s anything coming after this, that or maybe not a book and maybe we’ll see something more like the Bureau of Suspended Objects again.

Yeah, I mean, I am just as curious because you are about that. I am doing a residency right now where it’s technically three months long, but it’s three months over three years. So, you do like you could do like one month, one year, one month, the following year, like it adds up to three months over three years. So I did three weeks of it already. It’s local. It’s like near the Santa Cruz Mountains. I am very grateful to them for letting it be extremely open ended right now. Because you know, you kind of have to give something space before you know what it is. But I know what I’m interested in, which is kind of pursuing some of the questions around geology, geological history that are in Saving Time. But like, local expressions of that I live very close to the San Andreas Fault and I am old enough that I remember the 1989 earthquake. I remember like feeling it.

I had cousins on the Bay Bridge. Like literally on the Bay Bridge.

Just I’ve been sort of looking into more like, what sort of what made those mountains that I grew up looking at every single day, like they’re just kind of background, you can see them. I don’t know where that will go and I don’t know what even format that will take. I interviewed Miranda July once and so I was looking through, she has kind of like a monograph a book of all her projects. And I was looking through that and somewhere in there, maybe she mentioned it, she said that she would have an idea for a project and she would mark like, somewhere on the page, what it would be like: is it a book? is it a performance? Because she does all those things. Like I also kind of think a little bit like that, where it’s, I think I have the idea first and then I just kind of do whatever I need to do for it to make the most sense. That’s the only way that I have an MFA. Like, I was trained as a visual artist. So, really, it didn’t make sense for me to write a book. But I also felt that for me to get my ideas across in that particular instance, it needed to be a book.

Okay, as a reader, yeah, you needed to write the book. I had quite a good time with both of them. Can we talk about literary influences for a second? Because I knew this would happen, and I knew we’d end up bumping against time, but you talk about Rebecca Solnit. You actually shout out a buddy of mine, Garnette Cadogan.

Oh, love that essay.

Yeah, “Walking While Black” is one of my favorites. I was so delighted when I saw it shouted out in the book. But who else do you read? Who else has sort of shaped you as a writer?

Robin Wall Kimmerer is someone that I really admire, for a lot of reasons, but I mean, it just in terms of like writerly influence, like her form of storytelling. It’s so it’s so easy to read. And it’s such a well-constructed story. That you don’t sort of realize until later, like how profound it was, but so it doesn’t feel difficult. It doesn’t almost feel as difficult as it should for like, what it’s doing. So, it’s like doing, you know, conceptual heavy lifting, but so lyrical, the same time. And that’s something that I really admire. I think actually, a lot of my influences are not writers.

Okay. Let’s talk about them too.

I taught art for many years, and there are some people that I would always come back to like, Yoko Ono, for example. Yeah. Grapefruit, her collection of I don’t really know what to call they’re not— I guess they’re instructions.

Yeah, let’s, I mean, yeah, let’s use that. Because I’m kind of like…

For anyone who hasn’t seen them. They’re like each page has, I think you could also maybe describe them as poems, but they read like sets of instructions. They tell the reader to do something. And the actual, like, art piece is you doing it. So, the art piece is not the text on the page, right? I think there’s one that’s like, take a bag of peas with you and leave a pea wherever you go. I love that so much. But there’s some other ones that are just like, they’re actually, they’re just so beautiful. Like, you should actually do them. Right. Like who’s actually sit and imagine things like in the order that she’s telling you to. And I think one reason that has been so you know, that and other projects by you know, Fluxus, artists in the Fluxus movement around the time have been so influential for me is that those pieces, they sort of don’t call attention to themselves, they feel generous to me, like, almost like I don’t want to use the word disposable, like in regards to those or my work, but it does sometimes come up to me is like, this is the thing to help you achieve something, some kind of way of seeing the world. And it’s about that— it’s not really about this thing that helps you get there. You know what I mean? It’s like, I want someone to get to the end of my book, and then they go outside, the world looks different, feels different. And that’s what it’s actually about, not the book, if that makes sense.

It totally does. As you were talking, I was thinking yeah, the world gets bigger. I mean, if we can change just the way that we interpret time, right? Like this whole time is money, whatever. If you can change the way you interpret time and the way you break out sort of the value of time, you know, we’ve talked about leisure, we’ve talked about experience, we’ve talked about consumerism, but if you can change those and tweak those ideas, you get to have a bigger world. Right? And you get to define it in a new way. And I just I think that’s really groovy. I think that’s what art is for.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of that, like, those are some of my favorite experiences like I write in How to Do Nothing about seeing a John Cage piece performed, and then going outside into the city that I had lived in for many years at that point, and sort of hearing everything for the first time. And it’s like, I cannot really imagine anything more than that, that something could give you so much of art and writing and poetry music does that. But I think like those, I love those Fluxus pieces, because they’re deceptive. They seem very minimal and sometimes they’re like a little jokey, but they’re actually like, deeply profound.

And I think it’s great and that also seems like a pretty good place to wrap up because what you’ve handed us, Jenny Odell, is a lot of possibility. And I’m all for possibility, we all just need a little more possibility right now. Jenny Odell, thank you so much Saving Time is out now and so is How to Do Nothing— and if you haven’t read that one yet, go get them both.

Thank you so much.