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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
challenging
informative
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slow-paced
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
I love this book. It's such an impressive compilation and extension of philosophy of time. But I feel a bit of reluctance because it's not completely what its subtitle promises. It's really a place-based study of the California Bay area flora and fauna. And a study of climate change and social justice. All very important, and all very relevant to productivity, but I get the feeling that this book is framed wrong.
this book was a complicated read for me - went in thinking it might change my life bc i love jenny so much and bc how to do nothing changed my life. i'm not sure if saving time has changed me.....at least not yet....it definitely felt like a lot of it was rehashing arguments she made in how to do nothing or sort of stating the obvious. like why did she go to the pain of using president to prove that privilege exists?! can that not just be a given?! i feel like she was modulating herself for a very broad and very skeptical audience which was a little disconcerting bc of her whole argument in how to do nothing abt context collapse and the danger of making yourself palatable to a wide unknowable audience on social media. i wanted her to be more radical and inventive and weird! to say what she meant! but re: being changed by this book, i was really struck by the part where she talks about how changing your perception of time is not something that you can just do through reading or being told - because capitalist clock-time is so ingrained in us, it takes a nuanced and intensely personal mental shift to be able to see time differently, physically, ecologically. so i like that jenny is priming me for this change through setting up a framework of another way that time can look and feel. to help w this journey, another wish i had for this book was that it explored more concretely the ways that people in other cultures experiences/embody time radically differently - for ex. i was thinking about shabbat in this book and how resting on a saturday in this rlly culturally specific and historical way dovetails w her arguments, i wish she had gotten into that and other examples instead of continuing to generalize about "Indigenous cultures."
i also love how she puts into words what i've been mulling over for a long time about time and hope and agency: "climate nihilism...comes from an inability to recognize or access that fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, where our agency also lives....a foregone conclusion is self-fulfilling: in any situation, if we believe the battle is over, then it is." ok now i guess i just want to say more things i liked
- her continual metaphor of "becoming less man-shaped in order to not fit in the car [that is built for men/to protect men in a car crash]" and i wanted her to maybe dwell more on how living time differently (becoming less man-shaped) can be/has been a form of resistance/unknowability to the state.
- i LOVE how she advocates for "experimenting with mediocrity" as a remedy for burnout. you don't have to and in fact cannot give your all to everything even if it is what capitalist society asks of us. this is great advice for me in college:)
- one of my favorite of her conceptualizations of time was this one about rocks: "look again at the pebble. make no mistake: they are neither signs nor symbols of time. no - they really ARE two things at once: seafloor from the last ice age, and future sand." this rlly helped me to understand her argument about the physicality of time and the way nature embodies it
- her thoughts on the co-creation of time and the stewardship of a temporal commons was like so epic and i LOVED it. we can manage and live in time in ways we agree upon together! i want to be more intentional about this in my own life (anyone want to do a ritual every 8 days together????). also ties in with her points about chronodiversity (growing a diversity of life rhythms that we can share abundantly) and crip time
- lastly, i loved the resonances with earthseed. god is change: "i'm alive to the extent that i can be moved"
so there was a lot i loved and will be thinking about....hm maybe this book is germinating in me more than i thought. tbh this might need to be a reread in a few months
i also love how she puts into words what i've been mulling over for a long time about time and hope and agency: "climate nihilism...comes from an inability to recognize or access that fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, where our agency also lives....a foregone conclusion is self-fulfilling: in any situation, if we believe the battle is over, then it is." ok now i guess i just want to say more things i liked
- her continual metaphor of "becoming less man-shaped in order to not fit in the car [that is built for men/to protect men in a car crash]" and i wanted her to maybe dwell more on how living time differently (becoming less man-shaped) can be/has been a form of resistance/unknowability to the state.
- i LOVE how she advocates for "experimenting with mediocrity" as a remedy for burnout. you don't have to and in fact cannot give your all to everything even if it is what capitalist society asks of us. this is great advice for me in college:)
- one of my favorite of her conceptualizations of time was this one about rocks: "look again at the pebble. make no mistake: they are neither signs nor symbols of time. no - they really ARE two things at once: seafloor from the last ice age, and future sand." this rlly helped me to understand her argument about the physicality of time and the way nature embodies it
- her thoughts on the co-creation of time and the stewardship of a temporal commons was like so epic and i LOVED it. we can manage and live in time in ways we agree upon together! i want to be more intentional about this in my own life (anyone want to do a ritual every 8 days together????). also ties in with her points about chronodiversity (growing a diversity of life rhythms that we can share abundantly) and crip time
- lastly, i loved the resonances with earthseed. god is change: "i'm alive to the extent that i can be moved"
so there was a lot i loved and will be thinking about....hm maybe this book is germinating in me more than i thought. tbh this might need to be a reread in a few months
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I want to get something out of the way at the start: Jenny Odell is clearly intelligent, sensitive, and a very capable writer. That said, a book is a collaboration between authors and so many other people, and I feel that an editor's helping hand is sorely missing here. Perhaps they felt they were taking a light touch, or they focused on the sentences and not the structure... I don't know. But it's not really a finished book.
Saving Time is a digressive, wandering set of loosely connected anecdotes and research snippets placed in conversation with one another. Interspersed between sections of narrative description that Odell uses to situate her bodily experiences are explorations of various concepts that seem organized by general themes and key phrases - "time is / is not money", etc - that never really build to a greater sense of purpose. There is a lot of pinball bouncing among the readings and cultural artefacts that Odell has encountered. But there are also more than a few instances of promises made and then not kept - a mention of a significant moment or person in a story that Odell is telling which is then never revealed as she instead veers away into a moment of intersectional reflection or theoretical rabbit hole.
There have been and are many other studies of productivity under capitalism that are more concise, more accessible, and more closely connected to fields of policy or philosophy. That is to say, there is a rich history of books in this vein. For example, take degrowth philosophers, or policy writers tackling the conception of gross domestic production and the metric of production full stop. Or take writers who have challenged and thought around consumerism. Kate Soper's Post-Growth Living wraps up some of these threads, for instance. My frank assessment is that Odell's book contributes very little to the conversation started by these books, other than directing it toward the markers of millennial life: influencer accounts on Instagram, a dominant flavour of ecological disease, and constant self-critique.
In the end, Saving Time reminded me a lot about my own dissertation's bad habits, most prominently an incessant desire to string multiple quotations together and seek to have them speak for themselves. Pluri-vocal, shared authority, etc... but it doesn't work outside of academia, it just feels like endless bricolage for its own sake.
For those interested in the topic, I'd recommend instead Soper's brief extract for a taste of the discourse, and especially on the diagnosis of the issue: Why Alternative Hedonism.
Saving Time is a digressive, wandering set of loosely connected anecdotes and research snippets placed in conversation with one another. Interspersed between sections of narrative description that Odell uses to situate her bodily experiences are explorations of various concepts that seem organized by general themes and key phrases - "time is / is not money", etc - that never really build to a greater sense of purpose. There is a lot of pinball bouncing among the readings and cultural artefacts that Odell has encountered. But there are also more than a few instances of promises made and then not kept - a mention of a significant moment or person in a story that Odell is telling which is then never revealed as she instead veers away into a moment of intersectional reflection or theoretical rabbit hole.
There have been and are many other studies of productivity under capitalism that are more concise, more accessible, and more closely connected to fields of policy or philosophy. That is to say, there is a rich history of books in this vein. For example, take degrowth philosophers, or policy writers tackling the conception of gross domestic production and the metric of production full stop. Or take writers who have challenged and thought around consumerism. Kate Soper's Post-Growth Living wraps up some of these threads, for instance. My frank assessment is that Odell's book contributes very little to the conversation started by these books, other than directing it toward the markers of millennial life: influencer accounts on Instagram, a dominant flavour of ecological disease, and constant self-critique.
In the end, Saving Time reminded me a lot about my own dissertation's bad habits, most prominently an incessant desire to string multiple quotations together and seek to have them speak for themselves. Pluri-vocal, shared authority, etc... but it doesn't work outside of academia, it just feels like endless bricolage for its own sake.
For those interested in the topic, I'd recommend instead Soper's brief extract for a taste of the discourse, and especially on the diagnosis of the issue: Why Alternative Hedonism.