Odell's central argument is simple: that we must reclaim our attention from the many manifestations of neoliberalism and late capitalism that are actively seeking to occupy and commodify it - hence the book's subtitle, 'Resisting the Attention Economy'.
And the way she develops it is supple and nuanced; she works with recurring ideas like the importance of resistance (or refusal) without disengagement, of attentiveness to context, place, communities and ecologies, of historical awareness and physical space, and the political possibilities that such an orientation opens up, developing and illustrating them through a series of hermeneutic readings of artistic works, historical figures and events, local initiatives, contemporary trends, and, of course, specific places, often in her home state of California, including her own experience of them.
I've been at How to Do Nothing for a few months now, and reading it has been equal parts consoling and energising; it's also been a little bit inspiring, in that way of books that give us language as a tool to make sense of what's happening all around and how it's possible to be different and better.
More or less as an aside: the chapter on 'Ecology of Strangers' is introduced by a quotation from Gary Snyder - who's been described as the 'poet laureate of Deep Ecology' according to wikipedia - which sheds light, whether via direct connection or more obliquely (but very appositely), on one of my icons:
There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than "you" can keep track of - thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.
