I want to pick up where I left off last week before I move on. A few weeks back, when I sketched out the future trajectory of this writing project, I wrote that I saw Odell and Robin Wall Kimmerer as connected to each other with respect to the power of attention. Elaborating that connection is going to take some time, as the insights in Kimmerer are somewhat diffuse, and I didn’t take particularly good notes as I was reading it. Nevertheless, I think it is important, so I will certainly be taking my time to process Kimmerer’s insights. And of course, it should be noted that Odell explicitly refers to Kimmerer as an inspiration, so I’m confident that teasing this connection out will be fruitful. And I will certainly be coming back to Odell more than just today—I had forgotten how important How to Do Nothing was for me actually, and I think it will be well worth revisiting to summarize chapter by chapter so that I always have the material on hand.
Read moreMore thoughts on the arts of attention
This week, I wanted to write about Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. It is an important book for what I am trying to do here. Perhaps more than any other, it provides the intellectual collective tissue between the individual “arts of attention” that I am interested in and the collective social and political projects that I think these personal practices can contribute to enhancing.
Read moreFeeling more creative, part 1: The role of rest
I wrote recently about different models of the creative process and how remarkably similar they all are. One of the most important similarities among them is the importance of rest in the process. On the surface, it seems obvious: generating novelty, like many other activities, is easiest when well-rested. But at a deeper level, creative insights appear to be born from idleness.
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