For some reason, I find that I have a lengthy page of notes headed "Saving Time, by Jenny Odell," already here in draft form since back in December, though hardly any of this is about her book. Since it's here, and since I was about to write a little something anyway about two related books, The Sirens' Call, by Chris Hayes, and Deep Work, by Cal Newport, I'll go ahead and post it with those brief addenda.
Continually, all of them cite other, better books, and that might be the most valuable thing about them: this pointing towards better ways to use the time we have for reading, having come so far as to realize reading is a good way to spend the time. In the case of Sirens, the Odyssey of Homer, of course, but also William James' Principles of Psychology, "literature" including Shakespeare, Ralph Ellison, and James Joyce in quick succession, Tolkien by way of allusion to "Gollum's ring" as stand-in for smartphone, Plato's Phaedrus, Haidt's Anxious Generation, Cohen's coining of the term "moral panic," Hari's Stolen Focus, and Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary, among sundry articles and papers, are cited within the opening 10 pages.
Other key precursors trotted out slightly later include Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, Lippmann's early 20C studies of communication, McLuhan and Postman, the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and Pope Pius XII. Special attention is drawn to Simon's 1971 essay on "the attention economy," and I found Moray's "identification paradox" especially intriguing in this connection, highlighting the importance of names for drawing our attention. Freud and Phillips, Harari and O'Brien, Pollan, Schull's Addiction by Design and the loot boxes of Call of Duty rub shoulders with Pascal's Pensees, Sahlin's "Original Affluent Society" and others who might well figure into the argument in Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, and Keynes and Veblen's work on modern leisure.
DFW's Infinite Jest and the invention of "infinite scroll" by Raskin make a fascinating parallel, and Kierkegaard's "Crop Rotation" in Either/Or makes a brief appearance before washing into Buddhism by way of Robert Wright. Then comes "Jenny Odell's brilliant book... How to Do Nothing" and a rebuttal to Sartre's "hell is other people." Yet another subject for another book arrives next, in a potted summary of the "Pennsylvania system" and its hellish solitude on the heels of the data point that child neglect is far more prevalent than outright abuse and, ironically, is much less recognized. Name-drops of prison authorities Tocqueville, Dickens, and Mandela, and studies of loneliness (Cacioppo) and gossip (Dunbar) ensue. Fame (The Frenzy of Renown) and obscurity (The Death of a Salesman) flow into Epictetus as representative Stoic and Kojeve as interpreter of Hegel, particularly the dialectic of master and slave, which Hayes renders in modern dress as Star and Fan.
It goes on: Marx again, Wu's Attention Merchants, Polanyi via Sherman on "fictitious commodities," the arrival of the TV in Ferrante's Brilliant Friend. Then Toffler's Third Wave, and full circle to Simon's "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," and bringing this up to the present with AI and "fracking" of attention (Burnett) and "attention and the net" (Goldhaber). Musk v Zelensky; Lincoln-Douglas debates and Chomsky on "attention regimes." Postman again. Saunders' megaphone. Trump and PT Barnum. Trolling, whataboutism, and conspiracism, in short, "the berserk" in American politics, finally give way to suggestions Hayes offers for "Reclaiming Our Minds": against "enshittification" (Doctorow), he proposes that we listen to Circe and lash ourselves to the mast with "commitment mechanisms" and "attentional farmers markets... Newspapers and physical books". Small wonder, when that's the basis of practically his entire book, with a few reflections on working in TV media sprinkled in.
So read some of these other books instead, skim Hayes' book if you like, and listen to his recent conversation with Ezra Klein for a livelier rundown of his argument.
As for Newport, he also has a podcast and more recent publications, but I found Deep Work at the library and have been meaning to give it a look, particularly since it seems like it lines up nicely with "Deeper Learning." For his part, he opens with Jung at Bollingen, via Mason Currey's Daily Rituals. And sure enough, counterpart and precursor Montaigne pops up a page later, alongside Mark Twain, Woody Allen, Higgs, Rowling, Gates, and Stephenson as representative deep workers. Over against this, Newport cites a deluge of studies of shallow work: The Shallows, Hamlet's BlackBerry, The Tyranny of E-mail, The Distraction Addiction. Case studies of further efforts to sidestep or circumvent shallowness and do deep work in academia, business, and the creative arts follow throughout the book.
Rather than marching through all the data, examples, and suggestions Newport marshals, I'll do a little sidestep of my own to note a kind of paradox at the heart of his project. This book might be worth reading for those who are interested in a central problem of modern life, but again, granting its premise that deep work is critical for a good life, who among us would willingly choose to read this rather than Jung, Montaigne, or indeed turning our all-important attention to all the deep work we have yet to do? At best, Newport is a helpful, hopeful voice in an otherwise dismal chorus of commentators; at worst, I can't help but detect his willingness to cash in on the perennial hoping against hope of those who would aspire to Montaigne-level essays of depth.
Newport's measure of success remains conventional, bourgeois even: individual excellence in a professional capacity, recognized by one's peers, seems to be the end of deep work, as far as he is concerned. The question of the value of that work in a moral sense, in terms of its bearing on the well-being of a community, is never really addressed. The telling example here is the lesson he takes from his friend's study of Talmud. The anecdote is passed over in two pages, yielding his takeaway for "Rule #2: Embrace Boredom." The line is zippy, the sentiment copacetic. And yet, I worry he has utterly missed the point. Because the question has to be, "depth for what?" Is scriptural study, meditation, and prayer interchangeable with any other so-called "flow state," serving just to "build my mental muscle"? Or is it the way for us to come into relationship with the truth speaking and breathing from these texts, and with a tradition of questions and dialogue with it that has sustained people through every imaginable struggle?
Just as with Hayes' more recent offering apropos of Odysseus, I was alarmed right away at how quickly Newport dropped the discussion of Jung, Montaigne, et al. to move into his case studies. There is no evidence of sustained attention or deep reading from either of these authors, for all their professed interest in helping readers to cultivate such capacities; there is every indication that their main concern is to sell a lot of books and achieve salience in the market, and more power to them. They seem to have made it--and you can, too! Just do as they do, and not as they say.
If I were to write my own rebuttal and revindication of the art of contemplation, I could generate a list of authorities to cite a mile long, but I would try to limit myself to just one or two. Say, Simone Weil in her essay on the use of school studies, and the curious case of Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. But, to be fair, I could hardly restrain myself from delving into video games while I was at it: EarthBound, Xenogears, and The Legend of Zelda... Let's see. If such a book (or perhaps it had better be a series of books) ever gets written, I for one would buy it, and not only borrow it from the library!
Without further delay, though, let's see what I was going to say about Odell all those months ago:
Escalator, agency passages--Up the Down Staircase?
Kairos in theological, Pauline sense?
Bergson v Einstein
Rent outside the scope of the book
Weil
Dante's structure. encyclopedias, academics and intellectuals - Mazzotta
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