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Episode 151: Jenny Odell—How to Do Nothing
333 Plays6 years ago
"Find something else that is so absorbing to you. That is a place you can go to get away from [social media]," says Jenny Odell.
Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing, came by the show.
Thanks to Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support.
Be sure keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod.
Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for the newsletter.
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Transcript
Introduction to Goucher College's MFA Program
00:00:00
Speaker
A nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher College's MFA program for nonfiction.
00:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, baby. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, partner.
00:00:39
Speaker
What's up, CNFers?
Introduction of the Podcast and Guest Jenny Odell
00:00:41
Speaker
It's CNF, the creative nonfiction podcast where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, radio producers and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. Today's guest is Jenny Odell. It's this, you know, you can't write for everyone.
00:00:58
Speaker
And if you did, it wouldn't be good. Contextual artist, teacher at everyone's safety school, Stanford University, and most recently author of How to Do Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy. This is how I came to know of Jenny. Saw an Instagram post of her with Austin Kleon. I was headed up to Portland to see Austin talk.
Engagement and Subscription Details
00:01:20
Speaker
I saw Jenny had a book. It looked intriguing.
00:01:24
Speaker
AF, I requested the book on NetGalley, I got the book on NetGalley, I then emailed Jenny, and we got to talking. That's how this shit works. You can subscribe to the show, you know that? Of course you do, it's a podcast. I mean, it doesn't cost you anything unless you want it to. I'm planning a Patreon thing so you can become a patron of the show, that's exciting, and help keep the lights on in the studio.
00:01:50
Speaker
In the meantime, I mean, it's always gonna be free. Go get it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, chock full of fun stuff I curate over the course of a month. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:02:17
Speaker
As I await edits on my stupid baseball book, I started writing a children's sports book with a young female protagonist. I feel like this is in my wheelhouse from a maturity perspective. My dad has been hounding me for years that I should write a sports book for kids, or a series of them, specifically girls.
00:02:37
Speaker
And he was something he wished he had done when he was younger, especially when he was coaching my sister and her teams growing up. My sister is 10 years older than I am. I never 100% poo-pooed it, but of course I have my own non-fiction goals or whatever. But I figured I'd come around to it when I had a good enough idea.
Children's Sports Book Discussion
00:02:57
Speaker
So I don't know if I'm writing this book because I want to or because I wanted some paternal validation because when I told the old coach about it, he loved the idea and was more engaged in our conversation than over any other crap that I write, even the crap I win awards for.
00:03:14
Speaker
So I'm sure on some level it's about wanting approval and a validation. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't fun. And so far it's really fun. The girl's name is Molly Rawlings and she's 10 or 11 years old. She plays baseball and is fucking pissed that she's being told that she has to start playing softball. And away we go.
00:03:36
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction Podcast, CNF, is also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction, Discover Your Story. Bay Path is the first and only university offering no residency, fully accredited MFA focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction, attend full or part time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes in a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing,
00:04:06
Speaker
and good writing yes good writing from acclaimed authors and editors learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays
00:04:23
Speaker
Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family history, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency on the Emerald Isle in Ireland. That's my brogue. It's a book.
00:04:40
Speaker
with guest writers including Andre Dubuis III and Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August, January, and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA. Yes.
Connecting with Jenny Odell
00:04:56
Speaker
Yes, Jenny Odell is here at Genitor on Twitter. Just Google it or search it. I don't feel like smelling it right now. She's wicked smart. I totally treat her to an extra large French vanilla iced coffee with extra cream and extra sugar at Dunkin Donuts if we were closer together, like physically closer together.
00:05:15
Speaker
This is a fun one. I hope you enjoy it episode 151 we love palindromes here, and this is a palindrome podcast enjoy my conversation with Jenny O'Dell
Slowing Down and Intentional Living with Jenny Odell
00:05:39
Speaker
I feel like you and people like Austin, the type of work you guys do kind of makes, I think it makes everyone, especially in this day and age where things are so fast, I think the work that you guys are doing has a tendency to make us at least slow down a little bit. And is that something that you're kind of conscious of in your day-to-day actions and your day-to-day production of art that you want to at least
00:06:08
Speaker
build in some time to take those breaths and to slow down a bit. I don't know if I'm as intentional and organized about it as Austin is because I feel like actually I, you know, even like the moment that the book kind of comes out of it wasn't quite planned. It was more like, like, I find myself doing a lot of things like, you know, I'll go for a really long walk, but it's not like, you know, I woke up in the morning and said, like,
00:06:33
Speaker
I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna go for a long walk. It's like I got really overwhelmed and then just was like, I need to go for a walk right now. So I feel like I procrastinate a lot and I sort of like, I have this messy way of going about it, which ultimately ends up with, you know, having lots of time to quote unquote, do nothing, but it's not, it often feels like I'm just sort of doing it out of like survival mode rather than like actually planning to do it.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, like it's kind of an escape hatch for you in the cockpit cockpit of your airplane. It's just like I need to pull this rip cord and get out of here for a while. Yeah, exactly. So and ironically, it's been harder to do lately because the.
00:07:14
Speaker
Turns out that PR for a book is a lot of work. You're right. Right, of course. How are you an advocate of having fairly, for lack of a better term, strict routines, at least something you can sort of hang your day on every day that no matter how crazy things are with book promotion or with your work or whatever, that these are certain things that I will do every day that lets me check in with myself?
00:07:42
Speaker
Basically, I mean I still go to the Rose Garden a lot which I talk about in the book. I kind of do that whenever I can get a chance, but that sort of whenever I can get a chance is getting harder and harder to find right now. But I will say I have kind of an unusual situation because I teach twice a week and my teaching job is basically, I mean it's a full-time job even though I only have to be somewhere twice a week.
00:08:08
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So during the school year, it's honestly just like an ongoing struggle to have any, obviously the teaching part is a routine, but everything else kind of gets smushed to the side. So last summer, while I was writing the book, I had a really amazing routine, which was just to go to basically an art studio that I have on the other side of Oakland. And, you know, I would go pretty much at the same time every day. I would get lunch at the same place.
00:08:36
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around the same time in the afternoon, I would go for the same walk, look at the same birds, and then pretty much finish up around the same time, and then happily, it was right next to a really good beer bar, and so I could usually get somebody to meet me there, just like a friend to get out of that really intense
00:08:58
Speaker
headspace which made it easier for me to just like go home and have dinner and go to sleep. And that routine was so great and sustainable and I am super nostalgic for it right now. I'm very much looking forward to doing something similar this summer. I was just amazed at how much easier it was to work. I don't even know honestly if the book would have been possible to write without that.
00:09:19
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I know John McPhee, he's the prolific New Yorker writer and author, but pretty much nine months a year he teaches, and then his summertime is kind of like that fallow period where he's able to pursue writing projects, even as he's pushing 90 years old. But that's kind of always been the case with him.
00:09:41
Speaker
he never put a whole lot of pressure on himself to be a very prolific writer he just kind of built in these times to reboot and recharge and then he would be able to year after year sort of attack longer magazine pieces that would ultimately turn in to books and i think that kind of gets to a lot of the points you write about and how to do nothing that you can kind of build in these sort of fallow crops where you let sort of the natural landscape
Philosophy of 'Do Nothing Farming'
00:10:07
Speaker
of your own interiority sort of replenish itself. Does that make any sense to you? Yeah, totally. It's like creating a space instead of trying to determine what's going to be there. Like I think, you know, after a while after, you know, especially after last summer, doing that every day and then, you know, throughout the summer, I also went on a couple of just short trips by myself to stay, you know, in some cabin somewhere. And I have my own routine for that. Like I have a grocery list
00:10:36
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that is exactly optimized for one person for three days with a limited kitchen. So that's like my standard shopping list. But I think after doing both of those things long enough, it's like you kind of learn to like trust yourself and certain processes. And by the end, I was sort of able to say like, okay, if I read this list of books,
00:10:59
Speaker
And I give, you know, I read them with enough time to actually process them. And then I have this, you know, X number of weeks to just sort of like walk around and at the end, like something will come out. I don't know what it'll be, but it's not going to be nothing, you know, like rather than kind of like sitting and trying to actually like very meticulously plan out the whole thing or just like worry about whether anything's going to come out or at all. It's like,
00:11:24
Speaker
I think that's what I love so much about the example of do nothing farming that I talk about in the book where it's like, you know, it's basically similar to permaculture, but it comes so much from like knowledge and trust in the way natural systems work, like knowing that certain things will grow in certain ways. And if you just create the conditions and don't try to kind of over-determine it, it will turn out being better than anything you could sort of come up with.
00:11:51
Speaker
That's a great point you make. That's towards the end of the book, too. And so how did you learn to trust that process to you that maybe you might read an entire book and you only get maybe a sentence worth of information out of it and not panic when that happens? Yeah, I think I learned so much of this. I learned specifically last summer because I haven't even been writing as a
00:12:20
Speaker
Obviously, I've been writing for a long time, but writing actual finished pieces for that long. But on the flip side, sometimes you'll go see a movie or something that you don't think has anything to do with what you're writing about, and then you get a whole, not a chapter out of it. But just as much as you might read a whole book and not get anything out of it, you might experience something that you get a huge amount out of that you weren't planning for.
00:12:46
Speaker
And so I was noticing as I was going along, a lot of stuff in the book was things that I hadn't even experienced yet when I wrote the book proposal. And I kind of started to realize like, oh, you know, there's going to be a lot in this book that I encountered in the process of writing it. And it's, you know, both surprising and humbling, right? Like I have this idea of what the book is going to be. Meanwhile, like life is happening and I'm like encountering things. And obviously some of that is going to make it in there.
00:13:16
Speaker
So I think once I relinquished this idea of control that I'm going to read this list of books and get these things out of it, absolutely. And once I gave up on that, it actually made space for those things that I didn't expect to be part of it to come in. Growing up in Northern California,
00:13:37
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Would you say that your upbringing in a sense groomed you in a particular way to make sense of this sort of digital landscape that we're in that enabled you to write a book of this nature, just given where you came from and your upbringing? I think it probably did. I mean, I think it also has to do with the fact that I'm still here in a way, so I have a lot of investment in a place.
00:14:05
Speaker
You know, I'm not sure, but I have the feeling that when, you know, someone, especially maybe someone who hasn't been here, but even someone who has been here, there's this like idea that Silicon Valley is this, it's like not really a place, like it's just this kind of abstract idea. Like if you think about Silicon Valley, you kind of just conjure up like images of not even the actual technology company campuses, but just like the technology itself, like app icons or something.
00:14:33
Speaker
Um, and I think that maybe growing up here, um, and, and in particular, like, you know, my parents were very into the outdoors. So like, not just being here, but spending a lot of time outdoors. It's like, I, I am easily reminded that this is an actual geographic location that has, you know, it's part of a bioregion, just like any other place. Um, I've also spent some time on the campuses of some of these companies. Um,
00:15:01
Speaker
just as an artist or an artist in residence and kind of been able to observe just like the physical reality. I mean, the Facebook campus is in the weirdest place. Like if you actually go there, it's like next to a salt marsh and just in a very kind of strange part of the city. So there's all these kind of physical aspects to this place that I think I maybe grew up being aware of just because I was here. And then maybe that predisposed me to think about
00:15:31
Speaker
this strange tension between being attentive to physical reality versus the highly abstract world that is created by these technologies.
00:15:41
Speaker
Do you think that staying close to home into your early adulthood here has lent that ethos that you've said that you like finding rather than making, being in your own, like living in kind of where you grew up, has that ethos really helped you just re-familiarize yourself or maybe relearn this place that you've known for three decades?
Influence of Northern California on Digital Awareness
00:16:06
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I mean, nothing is more humbling than finding out that there's something that you've literally seen for your entire life and not knowing what it was. So, you know, I think it would be different. I mean, you would, I think you could still have a similar experience, you know, if you moved to a different city and then after you moved there, you decided that you suddenly were going to get very into identifying plants and birds. And that would still be a really amazing experience. It's a bit more of a surreal experience if you decide to do that in the same place that you've always lived.
00:16:36
Speaker
because you get this sort of uncanny feeling of, you know, for example, like cedar wax wings are a type of bird that are very common here and during part of the year. And they make this really high pitched sound. I learned what they were about two years ago and I can now, you know, very easily identify that sound. But I did have this moment where I was on the Stanford campus and I heard it.
00:17:01
Speaker
And I was like, Oh my God. And sort of buried in my mind, like I remember hearing this sound many times before and it just like barely, it didn't quite surface to consciousness. Like it's sort of familiar but not.
00:17:15
Speaker
And so I have that experience a lot because I'm here where the things that I'm learning about for the first time are also things that I've probably been pointing my eyes and ears at for my entire life. Those things that have always been in plain sight but you just haven't noticed them yet, like bird noticing is what you like to call bird watching.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, and it's so great that you like it because you oftentimes, anyone who spends any time out in nature, you hear them first most likely, and then you try to set up camp and just kind of wait for them. Were you always into bird noticing even growing up? I mean, definitely not as specifically as I am now, but like I said, my parents were very
00:18:06
Speaker
enthusiastic hikers and then I also spent a lot of time at you know different summer camps in the area and a lot of because of where we are and kind of close to the mountains a lot of those camps tend to be like science camps or like you know things where you learn about different kinds of trees I don't know how much of that really stuck in terms of like information but it definitely cultivated at least like attention to you know that kind of stuff you know I think it might have been different if I had
00:18:35
Speaker
not gone to those if I had grown up somewhere was kind of more in an urban environment all the time and maybe not didn't have as many opportunities to you know specifically like learn about different kinds of leaves or something but I at the same time it does feel like something that kind of didn't resurface for me for a long time until maybe yeah like a couple years ago so I'm not totally sure where it went during that time
Joy of Learning and Childhood Curiosity
00:19:03
Speaker
But, uh, yeah, in the, in the last couple of years, it's really been kind of a learning process for me. Like I feel, um, it's funny, like I've noticed that when, when, when adults learn things about, you know, um, ecology or science or animals or anything like that kind of reminds you of being a kid, which is a really interesting thing where it's like, why, why does that have to, you know, why don't we just keep learning about that?
00:19:27
Speaker
know, why does that have this like connotation of like being in an elementary, you know, school classroom or something? Like I just went on a field trip this past weekend to basically like a house where this woman who has a permit to do so, rehabilitates Corvids, so that's like Ravens, Crows, Scrub Jays, Magpies,
00:19:50
Speaker
Those are all really, really smart birds. Some of them can mimic human speech. They definitely can solve problems. And the tour group was adults. And I was probably the youngest person there. But the woman who runs it normally takes these birds into classrooms and shows them to elementary school children to educate them about how smart these birds are. And I just noticed that the facial expressions of the people in our group or just the kind of things that were being said were so
00:20:19
Speaker
exactly the way, you know, when you're a kid and you go to the zoo or something and you're just like completely in awe. And it's interesting that we have fewer and fewer of those moments as we get older. Isn't it sad that that gets drummed and beaten out of us? Like probably starting in high school is probably when it starts to really get drummed out of you. Isn't that really sad? It's so sad. And it's also just like what I, I don't know. I'm obviously biased, but like,
00:20:47
Speaker
I can't think of a better feeling than that. That is just hands down my favorite feeling is to just, I mean, I wish like I could show you this moment when the woman walked out and she has this giant raven on her arm and like everyone just got really quiet. And it was like, it just felt very much like aliens are among us, you know? This like strange being, you know?
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. It's just it's it's like you completely forget. I mean, I think that's kind of part of what I'm trying to get at. And the book is like you kind of forget yourself in that moment. Like you're not thinking about anything except for the thing that you're looking at because you're just so absorbed and you kind of don't want to miss any detail of it.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, like a few weeks ago, a friend of mine from the East Coast had come out, come out here to Oregon. He was just happened to be passing through and he had some time to kill. And, you know, we just went out into my backyard and we were just like throwing a baseball back and forth like two 10 year olds would do. And it was like the most fun I've had in like ages. It was just like I had this permagrin on my face just from throwing a stupid baseball back and forth. So. Yeah, I think that it's funny, too, right, because it's like
00:21:57
Speaker
those moments, it's something like, it's not quite cerebral. It's like, I have always wondered why whenever I see night herons, which is the other type of bird that I talk a lot about in the book, that happens to me too. I get this goofy smile on my face every time. I don't, and it's like, that's not, I'm not making, I'm not, you know, analyzing like, oh, I am very happy to see these night herons here because, you know, I mean, I could go, like, I'm happy that the species is doing okay, or like,
00:22:26
Speaker
They're very interesting because they're kind of specific to this area. It's like, no, I just have some sort of like instinctual like childlike reaction to seeing this like weird grumpy looking animal.
Emotional Impact of Birds and Local Storytelling
00:22:36
Speaker
I love that you call them grumpy and also that you call them the kernels too because they hang out at KFC. I love, speaking of grumpy looking birds, I love great blue herons because they kind of look like wizards, right? They kind of look like they've got this cloak and they're hunched over. They've been around for like 400 years and they know everything and they're just watching you. I love that look about them.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah and there's so the way they move too is like so circumspect like with those like long kind of like frog like legs. Yeah and what's amazing too when I had an ornithology took an ornithology course back in college it's just based on whatever aspect ratios of wings and whatnot but it's kind of crazy to think that a great blue heron and like a mallard they weigh about the same it's but they're
00:23:28
Speaker
Yeah, like in terms of mass, I mean, you'd have to like Google it or whatever. But I seem to remember my professor saying like, those two birds weigh about the same, but they're just, you know, they just distribute that body mass so differently based on, you know, you know, selective pressures over millions of years, but it's just kind of crazy how to think to think that those two you wouldn't equate them in terms of, you know, balancing each other out on a seesaw. Yeah, no, totally. And I think that's like, it reminds me of
00:23:56
Speaker
I took a diving birds class through Golden Gate Audubon Society, and it was really only about four classes or types of diving birds. But similarly, so much of it was about anatomy. And if you're a bird that spends your entire life on the ocean, you have to have all of these crazy adaptations to keep the water out, to deal with the salt, all kinds of flying, all of these different kind of mechanical challenges, and just
00:24:26
Speaker
like the sheer variation of form but also just like weird just weird stuff like there was one type of bird i can't remember which one it was that just eats feathers and then they turn into this weird feather ball and it helps them like digest things in their stomach and just like very very strange like you don't have to look that far into it before you find something that seems very alien yeah and and i
00:24:50
Speaker
I like watching any documentaries about any birds anywhere, but I feel like we often see things that we think of as exotic on, say, a nature special or something, and it's easy to forget that a mallard duck is really crazy. If you just look into what even is this animal, or even something like a crow, which is one of the smartest birds on the planet, and they're all around us.
00:25:19
Speaker
I don't know that's one one thing that one of the reasons in the book that I'm kind of I think it's important to focus on like spaces interstitial spaces that are around the place where you already are.
00:25:30
Speaker
versus like having to make a big trip to Yosemite or something like that. Like I think you can find this kind of feeling actually a lot closer than you think. I think 100% because I think even journalists get into this idea especially maybe younger writers who think that you have to like go to Borneo to find like a great story but the fact is like they're a great
00:25:56
Speaker
dozens if not hundreds of really compelling narratives that are just in your own backyard. And similarly, you can find just based on the sort of your core ethos as an artist, like you can find wonderful things that are really under your nose if you're just willing enough to sit still enough to notice them. Yeah, totally. Everything has a crazy story behind it. I mean, when I was an artist in residence at the dump,
00:26:24
Speaker
which I also talk about in the book. I love that by the way. What's the best artist residency ever? Yeah, I mean, I think it's very telling that, you know, typically an artist there would make something out of the trash. And my project was just, I didn't actually make anything out of it. I just basically created like an archive of 200 objects.
00:26:50
Speaker
where I tried to kind of monomaniacally research their manufacturing origins, and then that turned into, you know, wanting to know why they were made, how they were made, what they were worth, like, you know, the entire life story of this object, including its often strange corporate history, you know, like, who owns that company now? What do they do? And
00:27:13
Speaker
whenever I would present that work, I would often get this question, which is like, how did I choose the objects that went into that archive? Like there's this assumption that I did choose them. And I have sort of an unsatisfying answer, which is that I obviously I had to make some selection, but I really was just trying to get like a good range of objects so that if an alien came down to earth, they would get a good idea of human stuff. So it's like old stuff and new stuff.
00:27:42
Speaker
But, you know, things that we would consider like vintage and fancy and then things like, you know, my little pony toy from 2005. And that was partially, you know, a decision that I made. But it also was just what I was finding was that I think you could go into the dump blindfolded and just pick something out. And there's going to be something very strange about it somewhere in its history is like something surprising and weird and surreal.
00:28:08
Speaker
And it kind of almost became funny by the end when I was driving myself crazy with all this research, where I was like, yeah, it doesn't matter. You can just pick up anything. It doesn't have to even be in the dump. You can just pick up anything off the ground. And assuming you have enough traction to find out something about it, it's probably going to be something kind of weird. What was the most illuminating aspect of that project?
00:28:35
Speaker
You know, I talk a lot about context in my artwork, and that was really a crash course in context. I think I might have kind of abstractly thought this before, but I really felt it afterwards, that there's no such thing as trash. But if you look at the stuff that's in the dump, and I should mention, you know, this is the public disposal area. So this is where people are kind of
00:28:57
Speaker
driving in new halls and unloading, decluttering their homes or businesses. So there's a lot of identifiable objects in there versus the trash that you would throw in a trash bag. But it really drove home for me the fact that trash is a decision. At some point, someone looks at something and they see trash, and that could be for any number of reasons. It's often because a newer version came out. It could be because the person was given it as a gift and they never wanted it in the first place.
00:29:23
Speaker
there's all these kind of like circumstances around the object that have nothing to do with its physical materiality, just as easily it could become not trash, which is like when someone comes along and says like, oh, hey, actually I want that, or I see some value in that. So it really, I did some projects after that, kind of about that, where I was collecting pre trash from people, which is stuff that you haven't gotten rid of yet, but you plan to, so you basically think it's trash.
00:29:50
Speaker
of collecting that from people and then researching it. And at the opening of that show, the visitors to that show were able to claim one of the items for themselves with the red dot that you would use in a gallery.
00:30:05
Speaker
Um, and you could, so you could see it in action. Like you can see this person gets rid of this stuffed animal because they hate it. And it's the subject of a long running argument between them and their husband. And then, you know, a couple of days later you have someone else come in there like, Oh, I want that immediately. And they have all their reasons for wanting that thing. Um, there are people who got rid of things that where they just didn't know what it was. And then someone come in does know what it is. So they want it, you know, it's like all of these kinds of layers of associations and knowledge and
Understanding Object History and Context
00:30:34
Speaker
life circumstances that are all playing out around this object that the whole time hasn't changed as an actual object. So I think that that was kind of the biggest
00:30:45
Speaker
most like profound takeaway for me from the dump. And you've mentioned that Eleanor Coppola is an artistic inspiration for you. And I wonder if you could maybe just share as though why her work resonates with you so much and how she's inspired you to do your own thing.
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm really, I mean, she's a documentary filmmaker, but the piece that I talk about in the book is one of the only public art installations I know of that she did. And it was basically a map of different store, like shop windows in San Francisco. And the actual piece itself was that on a specific day at a specific time, the viewer or the person who had the map was invited to go
00:31:36
Speaker
to any of these locations and just observe what was happening inside the window, which is like, you know, if you're a documentary filmmaker, that is totally the kind of art that you would make, right? It's like basically inviting someone into the documentary filmmaker mindset. But I also really like it because, you know, usually public art, I mean, the average public art piece is like a giant, you know, metal sculpture in a corporate plaza that's very like, you know, here it is, here's the art, you look at the art, you either understand it or you don't.
00:32:05
Speaker
And then you're done. And this, you know, the Eleanor Coppola piece is very much kind of saying, you know, I'm not going to put art here, I'm just going to highlight something that could be art already, that's already here if you just kind of look at it in a certain way. I feel like it's a bit similar to the James Turrell pieces where you go into a room and there's a
00:32:29
Speaker
square-shaped hole in the ceiling and it allows you to watch clouds go by. Of course, the clouds are always going by. Similarly, in the Eleanor Coppola piece, there is always stuff going on in every window. But the artistic act of framing that for someone, it actually does render things visible in a way that they wouldn't be otherwise. So if you've ever sat in one of those James Turrell rooms,
00:32:55
Speaker
you can actually kind of see the speed and the form of the clouds just a lot more easily than you would be able to otherwise. And then ultimately, the thing I like about both of those is that even though you have this kind of apparatus that lets you see this stuff afterwards, I have never really looked at clouds the same way. I probably look at shop windows differently, all shop windows.
00:33:21
Speaker
It's both about the experience that you have in the moment, but then it also probably affects the way you look at everything afterward. When you were, say, researching the talk that would eventually become the book, what were you reading at
Inspirational Books Post-2016 Election
00:33:35
Speaker
the time? And what was inspiring you post the 2016 election that really made you want to grab hold of this particular subject and run with it? So there were two books that were really big for me. One of them was The Genius of Birds.
00:33:51
Speaker
by Jennifer Ackerman. And that is, you know, it's just a really good science book. It's about this kind of sums up a lot of studies that have been done on intelligence in birds, which, you know, for a long time were not thought of as being particularly intelligent. And now we know that crows, you know, are some of the only animals to be documented making and using what are technically tools.
00:34:18
Speaker
Um, so that, you know, that kind of, that's what got me more into bird watching. And that obviously had a really big effect on, on the main point of that talk. Um, and then the other book was called, um, spell of the sensuous. I think the subtitles, um, language and perception in a more than human world, uh, by David Abraham. Um, and that book, you know, is more sort of, uh,
00:34:46
Speaker
not not as like straightforwardly like a science book as the other one but had a similar effect on me which was kind of um you know it's it's actually good those are two good books to read at the same time because one is about how this entire group of animals that you may have written off are actually very intelligent and have things like language and then you have this other book you know reminding you that all you know living things have a way of expressing themselves and there is a type of language um that we've been sort of cut off from and so
Physical vs Digital Spaces
00:35:14
Speaker
It's this kind of reminder to be that, you know, you live in an animate world and that there is agency and other living things. And so kind of just like waking up to that. And so that was really, really crucial for that talk.
00:35:29
Speaker
And as you were progressing through this, what did you find that was most discomforting about the current sort of digital landscape that has made you want to retreat to the Rose Garden to engage in more bird noticing and detach without becoming totally disconnected? I think it was just this kind of, you know, sitting there is a reminder of
00:35:58
Speaker
how different a physical space is from, you know, the way we consume information online. And so that doesn't just have to do with the space. It also has to do with me as a body and an animal. Like, that was kind of the most surprising thing to me, reading, you know, both the Jeans of Birds and Spell of Essentials is like,
00:36:20
Speaker
Like, you know, it's not just a reminder, like, oh, I live in an animate world, but like, I am also a part of that animate world. I'm kind of made of the same stuff as everything else in this animate world. And so I think while, you know, while I was spending time there, I was kind of able to look back and see that, oh, like the thing that so horrifies me about the way I am expressing myself and seeing other people expressing themselves online in this moment of kind of collective rage and paralysis is that
00:36:49
Speaker
the ways that we're communicating and the kind of rate of information that we have come to expect doesn't really seem to have any respect for things like temporal and spatial context or just the kind of lived reality of a body that lives in physical time and space. Like that was a thing that was just kind of really missing for me from that environment.
00:37:13
Speaker
I suspect that some people that when they pick up this book, they're like, all right, I'm going to receive a series of checklists or boxes that I can check to completely dissociate from social media specifically, something that is algorithmically designed to hijack my attention and keep me there for as long as possible.
Redirecting Attention from Digital Distractions
00:37:39
Speaker
that said that this book isn't necessarily a it's not a roadmap to that but it is it is a very it's a brilliant think piece about trying to reclaim some of your some of your most your valuable attention so I wonder like how what would you tell somebody who might want to disengage disengage is the wrong word but to maybe
00:38:02
Speaker
Reclaim some of their attention back from these from these social media companies where we are in fact the product that they are trying to sell.
00:38:14
Speaker
before I even get to that is, you know, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening right now with trying to actually regulate the design of addictive technology, which I think is really interesting. So I mean, I think there are actually, you know, like concrete things to be done. The kind of stuff that I'm suggesting in the book is almost like things to do in the meantime, while we wait for some kind of, you know, like utopian, non-commercial, decentralized social network, which I don't know if we'll ever see, but
00:38:43
Speaker
Um, so it has a very kind of in the meantime kind of feeling to it, but, um, I think, um, you know, I think it's sort of unreasonable to ask somebody to stop paying attention to one thing and not suggest, you know, at least the direction of something else to be interested in. I think, um, something that I kind of came to terms with while writing this and, you know, I still think about all the time is like,
00:39:09
Speaker
Okay, I'm a person who gets absorbed in things very easily. That can be a really bad or a really good thing. Like it's a really good thing when I, you know, I get, I go kind of down a rabbit hole researching something that's really fascinating to me where I really genuinely learned something at the end and maybe I got kind of lost in that for a while and that can be a really pleasurable sensation. Or even things like, you know, you are having a really
00:39:33
Speaker
um, you know, great conversation with a close friend, like time goes by, like you're really absorbed in that. So I don't think there's anything, you know, wrong with that. But then I think, you know, unfortunately that, that, that, uh, capacity for absorption gets hijacked by these platforms. So for me, it's sort of like, I'm thinking about it in this do nothing farming way where, you know, in, in do nothing farming, they didn't use pesticides. They just would try to kind of adjust to the balance of organisms.
00:40:02
Speaker
on the farm, like if you have too little of this, maybe you need more of this and that kind of thing. So I guess I'm just sort of suggesting, you know, pay attention, not just like, don't pay attention to your phone. It's like, pay attention to something else. Like find the something else that is so absorbing to you that, that it's a place that you can go to get away from that. And for me, that just happens to be, you know, the Rose Garden literally, but just also like, you know, ideas about ecology,
00:40:32
Speaker
I found that just looking at other forms of life is so absolutely fascinating and distracting in a good way to me, that in the sort of meantime, it's become like my life raft. Like it's something that, again, maybe because it goes back to that kind of childlike wonder that has always been there all along, it's pretty reliable as something to kind of
00:41:01
Speaker
walk away towards. And so I think, you know, I think it's probably a good thing that you're seeing so much writing and so many books about, you know, breaking up with your phone and reclaiming your attention. And I don't disagree with any of that. But I also feel like, you know, you might do some of those things. And then you might be left wondering, like, okay, well, what else? Where does my attention go now? And I think having somewhere else for it to go and make doing a lot of that stuff a lot easier.
00:41:30
Speaker
What would you say is your current relationship with your phone and social media? It's definitely not ideal still. One thing I really don't like about self-help books, and I think there's a range of self-help books. There's some that are more subtle than others, but they're really hyper-capitalistic. Do this one thing and your life will be changed forever. The thing that I really don't like about those is that they
00:42:01
Speaker
they're selling you a quick fix and they're also sort of suggesting that if this doesn't work for you, it's your fault. It's almost like a diet. Like if here's a diet, if you follow this diet, these things will happen. And if it doesn't work for you, it's like, well, you weren't doing the diet well enough. And so I think it's important to allow yourself to just the reality that technology is anything from your phone to a pair of binoculars.
00:42:29
Speaker
this kind of idea that like, oh, we're like an, uh, unsubtle anti-technology stance where you're just constantly trying to rid yourself of this like category of things called technology, um, is like not realistic and also not super helpful, but, but in order to admit any kind of, um, subtle understanding of like helpful and unhelpful uses of technology, it also means that you're going to have to have the patience to kind of parse through that day by day.
00:42:57
Speaker
Um, and also just like allowing yourself to, you know, like you, you may find yourself having to come back over and over again to this, this goal that you're holding in your mind and it's not always going to be perfect. Um, but it's like, I'd rather sort of have that as my, my North star than like beat myself up over like number of minutes and looking at my screen.
00:43:20
Speaker
Right. And I think one of my favorite tenets in the book, it actually comes in the conclusion, or the epilogue, is when you talk about manifest dismantling. And I love that idea that it's sort of like progress by reduction, addition by subtraction, so to
Progress Through Reduction
00:43:39
Speaker
speak.
00:43:39
Speaker
And I think you can easily apply that sort of ethos to how you even approach maybe your time online or on your phone. It's like the dam you reference in manifest dismantling. It took something like three years to break down, whereas maybe we want like the bomb to go off and boom, it's done. But it actually was like a very incremental process, so maybe it's kind of like
00:44:03
Speaker
you need to kind of wean your way off of these things until you find a new balance, until you've revealed a new and more comfortable landscape that seemed every bit as natural as it was before the thing was even erected. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that just sounds more reasonable to me. And I think also the other reason to kind of keep some amount of nuance around the whole thing is that I'm also like, you know, a little bit suspicious of the amount of
00:44:32
Speaker
Again, like the sort of like the onus on the individual to kind of police their own habits. It's like it doesn't really acknowledge the factors around all of that, which is like what I'm really trying to do in the book is like, you know, talk about the fact that we have things like the gig economy now where a lot of people have to be online. You know, they have very real reasons to believe that their their livelihoods will be affected if they're not online all the time.
00:45:01
Speaker
Um, and so like, that's, you know, I talk about this meantime, it's like, that's all stuff that would need to also be resisted to really like holistically address the problem. Um, and I think all of that stuff is also gonna take a lot of time.
00:45:15
Speaker
in your talk when you put that picture up of that Fiverr ad, I almost threw up on my computer when I saw that. That was actually something to be lauded. That to me sounded like the warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes, but this was actually the actual, these are your badges of honor.
00:45:38
Speaker
Yeah. It's amazing. And you would think it was a joke almost, but I mean, having, you know, having lived here, um, you know, I, uh, I've seen it very like, um, close up this kind of, um, I call it like the extreme bottom line mentality. It's like, there's this kind of, uh, ambient like sharkiness, um, where it's like you, if there's even like one or two people who do this, it affects it for everyone. Right. Where it's like,
00:46:08
Speaker
okay, well, everyone like, it's sort of like, okay, what can I disrupt? Right? Like, well, if everyone needs sleep, I'm going to just going to go without sleep. And like, that's going to be the way that I get ahead. Um, and then, you know, that happens enough and it becomes then like a prevailing kind of lifestyle where, you know, I have students at Stanford who, you know, know that they would like to take better care of themselves, but, um, you know, they're, they're competing in an environment where,
00:46:35
Speaker
Um, something like that is seen as like a luxury or optional. Yeah. And for people who might not be familiar with this ad, it's basically, uh, I'm going to butcher the exact wording, but one was like, you had, you had a coffee for lunch. Sleep deprivation is your friend and blah, blah, blah. They're like, if this sounds good to you, then, then you're a doer. And it's just like, God, what's wrong with this picture? Yeah. Well, and it's so hard, right? Cause it's like, you know, it's also hard to disentangle, like,
00:47:05
Speaker
Some of that, like in the situation I just described, some of it is like a fetishized mentality. And then on the other hand, it's like an economic reality for a lot of people. If you have fewer jobs with benefits and protections, then you're going to have more people with three side hustles.
00:47:25
Speaker
Um, and I, you know, it's important for me to talk about that in the book because I'm certainly not, um, you, you kind of can't talk about something like doing nothing or changing your attention without acknowledging that like those are increasingly the circumstances in which people work. And so it becomes even harder to separate, you know, like working time from non-working time. Like basically all time is working time now, not because anyone wanted it to be, but, but like because of very real material conditions.
00:47:53
Speaker
And you make a really good point too in the book and in your talk that doing nothing in itself has a certain amount of privilege baked into it. Having access to parks tends to fall to the few and having that access. I wonder maybe you can talk to that because that's a really good point you make in the book and also in your talk. Yeah. In the conclusion, may I talk a little bit about this?
00:48:19
Speaker
potential for gated communities of attention, which is something I get really worried about.
Exclusive Access to Contemplative Spaces
00:48:25
Speaker
Because, you know, I, because at that point, I've drawn this connection between the importance of things like public space and parks and libraries and things like that, to the kind of contemplation we're being able to reflect that I'm talking about, then you just, you know, look at simply like the way you look at how a city is organized, and you notice like, hey, there's a lot
00:48:48
Speaker
fewer parks in this neighborhood over here and you have like usually wealthier neighborhoods are in the hills where things are really well capped up. There's lots of kind of spaces to wander around in. My, you know, another funny example is like the roof of the Facebook campus and their newest building is like, it's almost exactly what I'm describing in the book. It's like wandering paths with, you know, native species of plants everywhere, you know, and it's like specifically designed for wandering because they
00:49:18
Speaker
uh, you know, are they're wanting their employees to go up there and contemplate and ultimately come up with like new products. Um, so, um, so yeah, it's kind of, these things are very entangled. Um, and I see it as kind of like, I think I describe it as a knot at one point where it's almost like a chicken and the egg issue where you have, um, you know, if you're, if you have less access to these spaces, then I think you're not going, you know, not going to be able to have,
00:49:47
Speaker
that time to kind of like disengage from the productivity mindset and kind of be able to inhabit this other type of self. And then if you're not able to do that, then, you know, you're maybe more subject to things like the attention economy, which are very seductive, especially for someone who is in a state of discomfort. And then that kind of drives that machine even more. And so there's a sort of weird circular thing that happens between those two. And I don't, you know, I feel like
00:50:18
Speaker
the more time has passed after writing the book like that's probably the part that I'm the least satisfied with is like is not necessarily my description of that but I kind of wish I had a better kind of response to that situation but I kind of end up saying that you know from my perspective like one maybe possible place to kind of pry that cycle apart is is just on the level of
00:50:43
Speaker
willful direction of attention within the individual. But again, that just comes right back to the issue of privilege. So it's a difficult question. In that great Eric Ducker piece on the ringer about you and your book and subsequently Cal Newport's in there with digital minimalism and basically a profile on trying to do nothing and detach a little bit and reclaim attention on our own terms.
00:51:13
Speaker
And I think Newport says a really, really brilliant thing there. And he's famous for really not having any social media footprint at all and still being a prolific writer and a best-selling author. He says something like, because this technology is so new, but we've been, it's become so insidious that we actually think we need it for everything. And I wonder if maybe extending that question to you, like, have we been fooled that we actually need this?
00:51:44
Speaker
I don't know. I think it's, I'm not sure because I feel like, like, yes, I would say yes to like, sort of, like, you know, literally the forms of social media that we have, which are, you know, not ideal, but, but on another level, I think that something like social media is
Social Media's Community Benefits
00:52:05
Speaker
maybe, I don't know about necessary, but it's certainly useful. So I talk about community memory in the book, which was a bulletin board, like early, one of the earliest electronic bulletin boards in Berkeley, where it was just a kiosk that you would go to, and it was actually installed under a physical bulletin board in a music store. And they, they just, the people who made it wanted it to be like the bulletin board, but better, you know, basically like Craigslist, right. And
00:52:34
Speaker
Um, it's sort of this reminder that, um, sharing information in a way that's like something, you know, a little bit different than like, you know, calling someone or just a one-to-one communication, um, you know, like people sharing information in real time. I think that that, you know, is not only rewarding for people and can be helpful, you know, in a community, but, um, it's really useful. Um, I mean, I think about, um, I'm on an email list for the Golden Gate Audubon Society.
00:53:04
Speaker
And I remember there was an email or I guess a forum post about how this one species of butterfly that everyone had been kind of concerned about, that this person had been seeing more of them. And then all of these responses came in where people had, you know, they're like, oh, I've been seeing them in my backyard. Here's a picture of some that I saw. And it's like kind of this beautiful moment of these people all over the Bay Area monitoring the species and like expressing collective concern for it. And I would imagine that,
00:53:33
Speaker
you know, in a time of increasing climate events, like something like that is only going to be more important where people are going to need to coordinate with information, you know, across large areas, you know, within a sort of bounded area. But so I think that's why I don't I don't in the book end up coming down very hard on the idea of social media itself. It's more kind of commercial social media.
00:54:00
Speaker
that is designed to do other things rather than just kind of share information in a utilitarian way. And over the course of your research for the book, which was quite extensive, were there any sort of kindred spirits you stumbled across in the course of your research from a different era, a different decade, different times of communal areas and even deep history that really just resonated with you?
00:54:28
Speaker
Well, I mean, I spent part of the book talking about Diogenes, who I love. I feel like Diogenes is a pretty popular figure. But I think it's actually very humbling to realize that people have been funny for a really long time.
Historical Influence of Diogenes
00:54:46
Speaker
The Greeks had a really great sense of humor. And so I sort of prized him as a figure who was
00:54:56
Speaker
kind of doing what, as I talk about in the book, people have later described as performance art, just doing exactly the opposite of what anyone would expect. And I think my favorite Diogenes story is the one where everyone was preparing for some sort of battle in the city that he was in. And he, and so they're all kind of going around very industriously. And then he starts, he famously lived inside a barrel
00:55:22
Speaker
So he started rolling his barrel up and down the hill very industriously. And when asked why he was doing it, said, oh, well, you all are looking very busy, so I just wanted to also look busy. But I, you know, he's sort of like, I think he was also described as Socrates gone mad. And so he has a similar thing, you know, Socrates is like,
00:55:45
Speaker
questioning everything, especially things that are kind of taken for granted. And he was also doing that, but he was kind of performing his refusal rather than just arguing it and doing it almost like in a slapstick way. And so it's just nice to see, even with that one example with the barrel, it's like there have always been these moments where everyone was doing something
00:56:08
Speaker
that was expected of them that like no one would question like of course it's a good we do it this way and then you just have this one person he's sort of like off and it's like actually I'm gonna try to do this other weird thing and it's like so deeply disturbing to everyone around them and so I think I enjoy that also because
00:56:27
Speaker
doing nothing can be a little bit like that. If you are in a moment where it's assumed that you should be productive all the time, where you should be kind of freaking out all the time, just the image of someone kind of sitting and doing nothing is like kind of unsettling in that in that
00:56:47
Speaker
And with respect to writing the book and your own writing in particular, what would you say you individually struggle with and just in that generative phase of trying to get your manuscript done? What is something that kind of sticks in your side? That's a good question. I think probably the hardest part
00:57:13
Speaker
for me. I mean, it's funny, I just read a review of my book where they described positively described my chapters as compost piles.
Organizing Ideas for Cohesive Narratives
00:57:25
Speaker
So I think, you know, as someone who was previously basically a collage artist, I, it was both my strength and my weakness is like, I'm really good at amassing piles of stuff. I mean, it's like literally what I did at the dump.
00:57:40
Speaker
Um, and then I can sometimes have a hard time, um, making that pile of stuff make sense to anyone but me. Um, sometimes I'll be like haunted by this feeling that there is like a connection among all of these things and I just can't articulate it. Um, and so I, my method has been, and I think this is pretty common, you know, people write things on no cards, but, um, I'll write, you know, all of the different
00:58:06
Speaker
and there are many elements in the chapter on little cards and then I would just arrange them on the floor and I would find that like I would be moving them around and around for hours until I could like find some order that made sense and even though that is the hardest part for me it might also be the most enjoyable because or maybe not enjoyable but
00:58:30
Speaker
it reminded me a lot of my visual work, which is, if you see it, it's just things cut out from Google Earth that are also arranged in a big pile. So this kind of action of collecting a bunch of stuff and then kind of arduously working to arrange it in a way where something becomes apparent is definitely the hardest part, but also the
00:58:51
Speaker
maybe most indicative of how my brain works. What are some, if any, limiting beliefs that you have? Little speed bumps that you might have put in your own way over your 32 years that sometimes give you headaches as you're trying to get work done. We all have them, but I wonder if you have any, what they are. It's something that I've thought about a lot already as an artist, but maybe it's become more to the fore as a writer.
00:59:21
Speaker
Obviously, you want things to make sense. You want things to make sense to your reader, and then it's sort of an unfortunate stumbling block for me. It's like, I want everyone to agree with me, which is impossible, right? And so I've been having to sort of remind myself that if you fulfilled both of those criteria, you wrote something that absolutely was almost self-evident, and everyone agreed with it, you wouldn't
00:59:49
Speaker
to write that in the first place. It's not a book. In order to have something to articulate, it's like if you're going to make an argument that already implies that somebody is going to disagree with you, or it implies some kind of resistance. You're saying that there's something that hasn't been said this way or hasn't been framed this way and I'm going to frame it this way. It's not really something that I thought about that much while writing. It's something I thought more about after the book came out.
01:00:19
Speaker
Um, and honestly, one of the most therapeutic things was, uh, I read Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich, um, which is an amazing, amazing book. I love it. Um, and, you know, a lot of people hate that book. Um, you can just see easily, see if you look at it online, like it's very divisive book. And, um, and while, while I was reading it, I know, I know she's like such, you know, she's obviously older. She's a very experienced writer. Um, I love her writing and,
01:00:47
Speaker
It's like I could, every page that I turn, I was like, I could almost like hear people yelling on Twitter. And like, and then, and you just see that she just like doesn't care. And she just like, and she knows, and she just plows ahead and just such a good job. And it's like, it's like, you know, you, it's this, you know, you can't write for everyone. And if you did, it wouldn't be good. And so just as a, as a sort of conflict diverse person who would, you know,
01:01:14
Speaker
To be honest, I want everyone to like me. I have to get over that and be willing to stand behind an argument knowing that necessarily not everyone is going to be down with that. Given that you're a visual artist, did writing this book and becoming an author sneak up on you, something you didn't quite expect? Oh, yeah, definitely.
01:01:44
Speaker
It's both surprising and unsurprising because I was an English major in undergrad and I took a lot of creative writing classes. My thesis was on Emily Dickinson, which is like the most English major thing ever. And I've written for, I mean, I have journals going back to when I was six, like consistently throughout my life. I mean, and it's funny because I have a lot because I have them. I can go back and look at them and you'll often see things like
01:02:14
Speaker
Like I'll be like, oh, I have literally no time and I'm like a total mess and I can't do anything. And like, yeah, I'm like writing about that. Like I'm still, you know, that's like the one thing that has never changed. So in that way, it's not surprising just in that, like I clearly like have, you know, expressed myself that way, at least to myself for a long time. But like career wise, it's very surprising because yeah, you know, my job is teaching visual art,
01:02:42
Speaker
I've been kind of like on that path for a long time. And I think from the outside, it looks like kind of a shift. But like I said, with the kind of arranging the cards, the way that I write is so similar to the way that I make art that at least within my own head, it doesn't feel like that big of a shift in terms of like output. Yeah, it's been sort of surprising.
01:03:06
Speaker
And in the process of writing the spoken, or even just doing your other work, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in the process? It's definitely the, well, I would say mainly it's the researching part.
Joy in Research Phase of Writing
01:03:24
Speaker
I can think of no better way to spend a day than sitting in the Rose Garden and reading. I just finished Natural Causes in the Rose Garden the other day.
01:03:35
Speaker
because I so highly value that feeling of being absorbed. I really just love the feeling of finding out about things I didn't know about. I'm always chasing after that feeling. So that's usually the part where I feel the most excited. I have the most momentum. I usually finish something and I know exactly what I need to read next, which is often something that came out of the previous book. But I also, I really like
01:04:04
Speaker
the writing part of it and I mean it feels different but I noticed last summer I would go into my studio and you know it's pretty much just me in there.
01:04:16
Speaker
And I would write, you know, I have my moments of struggle for sure, but I would write for a pretty long time and then I would leave and sort of feel like I hadn't been there that whole time where I'm sort of like, I look at the pages and I'm like, I don't even know where those came from. And I kind of like, that's kind of a weird and mysterious feeling that I enjoy. How are, how are Crow and Croson doing?
01:04:41
Speaker
They're great, actually. Earlier, when we first started talking, one of them came by and was calling very loudly. It's 11 o'clock. Come on, feed me. Give me my peanut. It's 11 o'clock before. They seem to always wait until I'm having an important phone call or something, and then they do that. They're great.
01:05:05
Speaker
I, uh, they, they have now, they're a little bit less skittish about coming and just like hanging out on the balcony. Um, so the, the background on my phone is an extremely closeup photo of one of them where you can see like every single feather. Um, yeah, they're great. And, and ever since that field trip that I went on to the Corvid rehabilitation center, I mean, I see them even differently since then where I obviously was willing to.
01:05:31
Speaker
recognize that they're very intelligent and that they recognize human faces, including mine. But having been to that place, it was a sort of reminder that any animal that is that intelligent and that social is going to have a personality. And so it really starts to feel like when you see crows flying around, that they're almost like little people or something. They have identities. They're not just like, oh, those are some instances of crows.
01:05:59
Speaker
Those are individuals that know each other, recognize each other, have different personalities. I even have observed that with the crows that come to our balcony. Some of them are more gregarious than others. They have different little ways of behaving. They really have personalities, and it's really a very good way of getting you outside of the just human mindset.
01:06:23
Speaker
One of the funniest coffee mugs I have ever seen is two crows just going in opposite directions from each other and it's just underneath it, it just says attempted murder. It's really funny. Isn't that great? Well Jenny, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work and potentially and hopefully buy the book?
01:06:46
Speaker
Just JennyOdell.com, which I was lucky enough to get. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for the time. Be sure to give Crow and Crowson a peanut for me. And yes, wonderful work. And thanks so much for the time. This is great. And I look forward to doing it again, maybe sometime in the not too distant future, I hope. Sounds great. Thank you so much. You're welcome, Jenny. Take care.
01:07:13
Speaker
Well, how'd you like that? Keep that conversation going on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara, and at cnfpod. Instagram is at cnfpod, and Facebook is at cnfpodcast. Reach out, got questions, concerns, compliments, goodwill, good cheer. You can find it anywhere. You can email the show to creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail.com. I think it's pronounced g-mail.
01:07:42
Speaker
Thanks again to Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction and Baypass MFA in Creative Nonfiction for their support, and of course, you the listener. Share this with a friend, man!
01:07:53
Speaker
It only grows when you endorse it by sharing it with your network. You do things slow around here. Slow is fast in the long term. So you'd like the show, just hand it off. You're like, yo, friend, I think you would like this. Rage against the algorithm. Rage. We're all in this together. If you'd like, I have another podcast called Casualty of Words. It's a micro podcast.
01:08:19
Speaker
where I give out little jolts of creative inspiration daily. When I cut out the intro and the outro, it's only about a minute to 90 seconds long. Every single day, full transcript at brendanomera.com. Casualty of words. Get it? What else? I think that's it. And remember, folks, if you can't do interviews, see ya!