I don’t know what that means, but probably that I’m a prize-whisperer, and that you should all send me more books. The day I acquired it, it won the Pulitzer. Instead of a total withdrawal, Odell proposes a heightened awareness of what the attention economy is doing to us and suggests that we all find our own individual modes of resistance to it.Īfter spending some days this month putting together our 365 book-strong Climate Change Library, I decided that I’d better read The Overstory.
This isn’t a book that tells you to quit Facebook (though, I’ll say it, maybe we should do that because it’s killing us!!!). The book moves from philosophy-from Diogenes of fourth-century Greece to the attempted utopian communities of the 1960s and 1970s-to environmental history, the history of protest, and what our lives could look like with less of our attention monetized on a moment-to-moment basis. Odell’s book argues for looking at maintenance and care as a form of productivity, for the kind of mental wandering that may or may not create a tangible, dollar-valued “result,” and for valuing the physical spaces in which we make our lives-an assignment I’ve tackled, in part, by spending time on those names. Here is a list of the plant names I have learned since reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: littleleaf linden, eastern hemlock, mountain laurel, black huckleberry, dawn redwood. Perhaps the most hopelessly sad book I’ve read in years, it’s also one of the most beautiful, a gorgeous meditation on grief, home, and the American Dream. Playful, angry, metallic, it captures the spirit of our robotic, permanently present modern existence in the panopticon of capitalism and the Internet with such lines as “ I hope no one comes to my party,” and “Everyone Knows that Line About Ogres and Onions, But Nobody Asks the Beast Why Undressing Makes Her Cry.” To make no attempt at a segue, Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel, The Unpassing, follows a Taiwanese American family in Alaska as they struggle to cope with the sudden death of the youngest daughter. This weekend I picked up Franny Choi’s new queer cyborg poetry collection, Soft Science.
0 kommentar(er)
