Episode 589
with Dana Schwartz, Jenny Odell, and Black Belt Eagle Scout
Novelist Dana Schwartz unpacks her gothic fantasy duology, Anatomy and Immortality, then dives into her podcast Noble Blood, which explores the bizarre and risqué lives of royals; writer Jenny Odell dismantles the clock in her newest book Saving Time while explaining it's unofficial motto: "time is beans;" and indie rocker Black Belt Eagle Scout performs "Don't Give Up" from her new album The Land, The Water, The Sky, which dreams up the atmosphere of her ancestral land of Swinomish. Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello reveal how our listeners love to "waste" time.
Dana Schwartz
Podcaster & Writer
Dana Schwartz is a writer who can (and does) do it all! She is a television writer and the creator of the number-one charting history podcast Noble Blood which investigates the juicy history of lesser known royals. As a journalist and critic, Dana has written for Entertainment Weekly, Marie Claire, Glamour, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and more. She's also published five books including Choose Your Own Disaster, The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon, and the #1 New York Times and #1 Indie best seller Anatomy: A Love Story which she is following with a highly anticipated sequel Immortality: A Love Story. Website • Instagram • Twitter
Jenny Odell
Multi-disciplinary artist
Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and author whose work utilizes close observation as a driving force. Her first book was the New York Times bestseller, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy which reads like a self-help manual turned political manifesto and was named one the best books of the year by TIME, NPR, and others. Odell returned with another attention-grabbing book titled Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. In dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful ways, Odell shows the reader in her latest book how to think past the ticking time bomb of capitalism. Alongside her booklength projects, she taught digital art at Stanford Unviersity and her visual art has been exhibited around the world. Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and more. Website • Instagram • Twitter
Black Belt Eagle Scout
Singer-Songwriter
This land runs through Katherine Paul’s blood, the singer-songwriter behind the musical project Black Belt Eagle Scout. For Paul, when the land calls, you listen. Paul grew up in a small Indian reservation, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, surrounded by family focused on native drumming, singing, and arts. With the support of her relatives and a handful of bootleg Hole and Nirvana VHS tapes, Paul taught herself how to play guitar and drums as a teenager at the age of seventeen. To make her latest full-length album, The Land, The Water, The Sky, she was inspired by the Skagit River, the cedar trees that stand tall and shrouded in fog, and the Swinomish. Her music is now a love letter to indigenous strength and healing, and a story of hope, as it details the joy of returning. There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. In her songs, Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. Website • Instagram • Listen
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Luke Burbank: Hey there, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How's it going?
Luke Burbank: It's going very well this week. I'm excited to play another round of Station Location Identification with you. Are you ready for that?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. This is where I'm going to quiz Elena on a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio. She's going to try to guess where I am talking about. The name of the city was derived from the Native American term, meaning wild rice. Neil Gaiman has lived in this place and actually maintains a residence there.
Elena Passarello: It's somewhere in Wisconsin.
Luke Burbank: Okay. Yes. Yes.
Elena Passarello: I remember hearing that he lived in Wisconsin and I thought that was very strange.
Luke Burbank: Good, good memory. It's not maybe where I would imagine Neil Gaiman is spending his time, but he is. Also, in 2002, an elephant escaped from the circus in this place and went on a little self-guided tour of the main streets of this city.
Elena Passarello: It's not Milwaukee, is it?
Luke Burbank: No, but it starts with an M. Also, the Muppets sing a song that almost sounds like the name of the city, (Menominee!) Menominee, Wisconsin. Or on WHWC Radio on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Elena Passarello: Well clued, Burbank, well clued.
Luke Burbank: It turns out we may have been working together for a while. All right. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX. It's....LIVE WIRE! This week, author and podcaster Dana Schwartz.
Dana Schwartz: It's weird when random people that are accidents of their birth throughout history are given control of armies. That's a that's a weird thing. And bad things happen a lot of the time.
Elena Passarello: And artist and writer Jenny Odell.
Jenny Odell: I talk about productivity rose, which is my term for like a person who makes a certain type of content online about like crushing your morning and like making smoothie at 3 a.m. or whatever.
Elena Passarello: With music from Black Belt Eagle Scout, and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire: Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much. Elena Passarello Thanks to everyone tuning in all over the country. We have a jam packed show for you this week. Of course, we've asked the Live Wire listeners a question in honor of the topic that Jenny Odell writes about. We've asked listeners, what is your favorite way to "waste time?" We're putting that in air quotes, the waste part. But what is something that you like to do that other people might not see the inherent value in? We're going to hear those answers coming up in a few minutes. First, though, we've got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week this. This is our little reminder that there is good news happening out there in the world. Sometimes you just got to look for it. Elena, what's the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Well, I don't know if you know this. Burbank, but it is Teacher Appreciation Month.
Luke Burbank: Are you just bringing this up because you are yourself a college professor?
Elena Passarello: I don't think college professors count in Teacher Appreciation Month. I think it's just K through 12. But in my heart, it's teacher Appreciation month every month. But I especially love celebrating teachers this month, and they have just announced the 2023 Teacher of the year. This is for the whole America Teacher of the Year and it's a math teacher, a high school math teacher from Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Rebecca Peterson. And she's been teaching for over a decade. She actually started teaching college and then kind of decided to go the high school route. And when she did, it was really tough. You know, the first year teaching K through 12 is really difficult, really grinding, huge class sizes. She's a public school teacher. And ten years ago, when Rebecca Peterson was just getting started, she found solace in this collaborative blog, a project called One Good Thing. And it was where teachers from all over the planet, just every day, they would just log in and they would say one good thing that happened to them amidst all of the challenges of a busy teaching day. And she says it saved her career. Flash forward ten years later, not only has she posted to the site 1400 times, but when she became the Oklahoma Teacher of the year in 2022, which is the thing that qualifies her for the national title, she was given a yearlong sabbatical to work on a passion project, and she brought this one good Thing project to all of these teachers all around the state via the blog, via Instagram posts. And she was really just telling the positive stories of all of these different teachers, even in her math classes, where you wouldn't think that there would be a lot of writing she's asked the students to write about one good thing that happens to them in handwritten journals. So she's being recognized as the top teacher in our nation or the most honored teacher of our nation this year, not just because she has this incredible passion for teaching algebra. AP calculus. 11 of her former students are already math teachers, so she's inspiring the next generation of math teachers, but also because she's got this practice of daily joy that is really making a difference in the lives not just of her students and not just of her professionally, but other teachers that are doing the same incredible job that she's doing. And I just I really honestly, the best news I heard this week was just thinking about that legacy that she's living in, that great work that she's doing.
Luke Burbank: That is awesome. Now, you know, the best news that I saw this week also takes us to Oklahoma.
Luke Burbank: It's a real sooner state kind of situation. And the best news this week, I heard about this thing that happened in Enid, Oklahoma. It's like kind of a lazy Monday recently and a resident of the sort of northwest part of Enid, Oklahoma. She sitting on her porch and she's reading a book and she starts hearing cries for help. And it's a very piercing and very kind of troubling to the point where she calls the police and there are these two police officers with the Enid PD who report Neil Storey and David Snead are sent out on this call of these mysterious cries for help. This is all, by the way, recorded on their bodycams because, you know, we've got good documentation of these things now, hopefully. And so they show up in the general area where the screaming has been reported and they're jogging down this dirt road and the screams are getting louder, the screams for help. And they're really bracing themselves because, you know, you never know how one of these calls is going to turn out. And they round a corner and what they see is a farmer standing next to his goat who's screaming for help because the goats best friend has been shacked up in this other barn with the only female goat at the farm for the last hour.
Elena Passarello: So it's a love scream.
Luke Burbank: It's not because the goat apparently was upset that he wasn't getting to be on the date with the female goat. He was bummed that his homie was in there. He was more sad about not being able to hang out with his buddy. This is the as the farmer explained it to the police officer. Oh, these are Nubian goats. And Nubian goats are are prized for their dairy production. I have to be honest with you, I am such a city slicker. Until I read this article, it didn't occur to me that goat's milk needed to come from a goat's body. When I saw like, dairy production, I don't know where I thought.
Elena Passarello: Did you think it was just milk that goats preferred?
Luke Burbank: I just been giving it any concentration in my life. Like when I was like, these Nubian goats are prized for their dairy output. I was like, I guess that's where goat's milk comes from. But they also are very vocal and they're also very herd oriented as every social with each other. And so this goat and his buddy would hang out all the time, and then his buddy went in the barn to guide his hot date and they were separated. And this goat was like, really upset about the whole situation.
Elena Passarello: I've heard those certain goats, when they scream, they sound exactly like humans.
Luke Burbank: Well, that's where the whole Taylor Swift right there was the Taylor Swift meme of the song Trouble, where somebody intercut it with a goat bleating.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Luke Burbank: That's pretty spot on. So the farmer said that the goat is going to be fine. He gave the goat some extra food. It calmed the goat down. Okay. And everything is A-OK in Enid, Oklahoma, this week, which is for me, the best news that I heard all week. All right. Let's welcome our first guest on over to the program. She's a TV writer and the creator of the hit podcast Noble Blood, which investigates the juicy history of lesser known royals. She's also published five books, including The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon and Anatomy A Love Story, which was a huge hit, and she's following it up with the highly anticipated sequel, Immortality A Love Story. This is our chat with Dana Schwartz, recorded at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland. Hello. Hello, Dana. Welcome to the program.
Dana Schwartz: Thank you so much for having me.
Luke Burbank: All right. Let's talk about immortality and also anatomy. And I just mean as general topic.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah, no, easy. I've mastered them both.
Speaker 3: Okay, good.
Luke Burbank: Now, those are the names of it. I see. It's called a duology.
Dana Schwartz: I duology is what the kids call it.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. Yeah. What kids? Yeah, I. And so it's like these these books are. It's Hazel Sinnett, Hazel.
Dana Schwartz: Sinnett
Luke Burbank: is Kind of the main character.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: What sort of her story. What is she was she doing in the book? Starting. Starting with Anatomy.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. So the 19th century was a wild time for medicine and surgery. If you didn't know it was very gross and people weren't donating bodies to science because that didn't exist. And so there was an underground industry of men who would dig up dead bodies and sell them to doctors to dissect. This is a real thing that happened. And Anatomy: A love story, is a story about a young woman named Hazel who dreams of being a doctor. And because she can't study surgery, she forms this unlikely partnership with a resurrection man. And then, you know, conflicts ensue.
Luke Burbank: Now, these days, if you told your parents, I want to be a surgeon, they would be very excited. Yeah, very proud. That was not the case in those days, right? For surgeons in general, they weren't regarded the same.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. So this was sort of the era of barber surgeons. Surgeons weren't sort of it was considered very physical job because the technology didn't exist for finesse. This was breaking bones and cutting things open. So surgery was not a considered a very intellectual field and it was not considered a very ladylike field. What's kind of interesting is I was actually pre-med in college, and so I had to do the thing of telling my Jewish parents that I didn't want to be a doctor and that instead I was going to move to New York and try to make it as a writer.
Luke Burbank: I was wondering if I had noted that on your bio that you that you started out pre-med, but just medicine in general. Like is that something that you carry around as an interest even though you didn't end up pursuing it as your profession?
Dana Schwartz: Yeah, I think it was just something I always kind of loved. I'm not really grossed out very easily and I find history very fascinating. I find medical history fascinating. And so the great thing about writing a book is you get to choose what to put in it and no one stops you. If you want to put the thing that you're the most interested in in your book. So you get to research it for six months. It's great.
Elena Passarello: That makes me think of a question that I had when I was devouring this book. I don't read a lot of white novels, and this is visceral, Deliciously visceral. (Thank you. Yeah.) Is this an unusual thing to have this level of exciting gross blood guts, or is it? Yeah, actually, we kind of like this dark stuff.
Dana Schwartz: You know, that is a great question because when I started writing Anatomy, I didn't think it was either a young adult or an adult novel. The character is 17 because that was the age that a young woman would be at this point in her life when she has to make these decisions about what is my life going to look like? And it was sort of a decision that I made with my agent, you know, after I had already developed the book where it was like, okay, well, it's a coming of age story. It's a young woman figuring herself out. Young adult readers are so passionate. This might, you know, appeal to younger people, too. And fortunately, we now live in a culture where adults read YA and it's not a clear line. So it was sort of a post development decision to market it as YA. And the first conversation I had when I sold the book and was talking to an editor at a young adult publishing house, I was like, But you can't take out the blood, please. I just, I want it in there. Teenagers are weird and gross. When I was a teenager, I loved I was listening to my Chemical Romance all the time and she was like, No, absolutely. We're keeping it in. So thank you. Wednesday books.
Luke Burbank: I found the books very readable. And also, did I still have to look a few things up? I consider it to be just a adult. What it turns out is the young people of the world are actually very smart and read at a higher level than I do is when it.
Dana Schwartz: Comes down to young adult novels, is young women. And our culture loves to say that things that young women love is frivolous or unimportant and young women have really good taste.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, yeah. These books are extremely popular. Aren't. We've got to take a real quick break here. But when we come back, Dana, I want to talk a little about this Noble Blood podcast that you host that is also really fascinating. We are talking to Dana Schwartz. Her newest book is Immortality A Love Story. This is live Wire Radio from PRX. Stay with us. Back in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon, this week. Look at these wonderful people. We are talking to Dana Schwartz about her new book, Immortality A Love Story, and also your podcast, Noble Blood, which I will say I've only been recently acquainted with and I am loving it. It's a sort of history podcast about nobility and nobles over time. Where is this something that you were always interested in? Were you into like kings and queens and duchesses?
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. I mean, I think from a very young age, children are primed on like Disney movies and fairytales to just be fascinated by kings and queens and princesses. And then I was the type of young adult that did love ghost stories and slightly gory history, and there is plenty of that in royal history. So it was just something that I was always genuinely fascinated by and boring my friends and family about constantly. And so I consider a podcast where I talk into a microphone, sort of a public service for those around me, because I'm not describing gruesome deaths over dinner to my husband.
Luke Burbank: I was telling you this backstage, but one of the things I think that I was kind of surprised by was the tone of the show, because we live in a day and age where there are a thousand podcasts being created every hour. That's a real fact I looked at up earlier. Yep. And what I've noticed is that so many of those shows are people. They're chat shows, they're people. And you're a funny person. I followed you on social media for years, and I sort of thought, okay, Dana Schwartz is doing a show about Nobles. It's just going to be her and her like two funny comedian friends roasting, you know, like the the the the monarchy or something. And no, it's very historical. It's very serious and it's very informative. What is the research process for putting all these episodes together?
Dana Schwartz: It is a very in-depth research process, but I sort of love it. I feel like a detective. I love finding you would be so surprised by how many sources repeat wrong information, like casual sources, like internet websites, you know, like pop news websites. But once you go back to the original, source says you just feel like such a detective. So I, I mean, it's a it's a fully researched, scripted podcast because these are all subjects that I'm fascinated. And so it's like you find an individual character, like in immortality. I woven a few of the figures I've researched, like the Mad King George, the third, his son who became George the fourth, and George's granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. And these are figures who are sort of forgotten in pop culture. I mean, we know like maybe a sentence about each one at large, but once you dig into these stories, it's like the juiciest gossip you've ever heard. It's unbelievable. And so I it it takes a little bit of time to to, you know, read through everything I can and to try to understand it as best I can and then to put it back out into a form that hopefully entertaining.
Luke Burbank: Do you think we should get rid of the monarchy and like, nobility? It's such a seems like such a anachronistic. Yeah. Hurtful and totally made up B.S. thing.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. I mean, it's sort of weird. I mean, people sometimes people think I'm a monarchist because I have a podcast talking about historical monarchy. Mostly it's just because I find it very interesting. And it's it's weird when random people, through accidents of their birth throughout history are given control of armies. That's a that's a weird thing. And bad things happen a lot of the time. So as a as a someone who loves researching in the history, it's just it's fascinating. I don't know if we should have a monarchy. I'm glad I'm not in charge of that decision. I think now it's sort of a mascot. You know, they're selling like plates. I don't think they should be making decisions. If they did put me in charge and they asked me what they should do, and I've gone on the record for saying this, I think they should skip Charles, Skip William, and go straight to the little baby. Go straight to George with the little pink cheeks and he wears shorts.
Elena Passarello: He's darling.
Dana Schwartz: Everyone who would be against the monarchy if it was just a little blond baby with rosy cheeks.
Luke Burbank: You mean. Current age. Go to the current age child, not wait for him to grow up. Make a four year old five.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah, yeah. Make him the king. Put him on. Put him on plates. People would love it. I would love it. I mean. It's kind of There's an amazing author, Hilary Mantel, who's written a brilliant essay on the monarchy that, you know, we'll say all of this much more articulately than I have. But she looks at monarchy and asks, like asking if we should have. The monarchy is like saying like, should we have pandas? Like she's saying we're like keeping these human beings in captivity. Maybe it's not even ethical for them. Right.
Elena Passarello: Right. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Well, speaking of the ones that escaped captivity, one of the episodes of the podcast addressed basically it was the way he was, the very short term king. King George.
Dana Schwartz: No, Prince Edward the eighth.
Luke Burbank: Prince Harry.
Dana Schwartz: Sorry, sir. I was like, Oh, my God, this is I'm getting flashbacks to high school.
Luke Burbank: I have a hard time keeping all these Anglo names straight.
Dana Schwartz: There are a lot of there are a lot of Edwards.
Luke Burbank: He was the one that married Wallis Simpson, the American who is a divorcee. Right. Yeah. And you have this episode of the podcast where talks about him going and kicking it with Hitler.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: And you mention on the show and I think this might be citing some other sources, too, that Hitler was on the record as saying if if he had actually stayed king in England, that Hitler thinks that he would have prevailed in the war.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. I mean, Hitler says a lot of wrong things. (Oh, really? Wow.) But you never.
Luke Burbank: You heard it here first. (wow! Kiss the breeze.)
Dana Schwartz: I didn't know the hot takes would be coming out. Yeah, but it is wild. I mean, looking at all of this history that, you know, that's the wild thing about monarchy and why I love my podcast, Noble Blood, and why I truly will never run out of episodes. Because at the end of the day, these are human beings in positions of enormous pressure and power. And they're just people, they're jealous, they're insecure, they're stupid. Sometimes a lot of the time they fall in love with bad people. They just act like rich people who have never had a job and now they're in charge of everything. Yeah, genuinely. And that's Isn't that just interesting? It's just weird. It is.
Elena Passarello: Shakespeare thought so.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Dana Schwartz about her podcast, Noble Blood, and also her latest book is Immortality A Love Story. When you're not podcasting about nobility or writing about Scottish Body Snatchers, you also write television set in this era or at some era known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You wrote for She-Hulk attorney at law.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Is it hard? Is it hard to, like, switch your brain from like Edinburgh of a certain era to like modern day She-Hulk lawyering?
Dana Schwartz: Yeah, I think I definitely read a lot of comic books in that time just to get in the rhythm and the mode. But yeah, I do sort of get that strange thing where I do divide my days where it's like in the morning I'll be writing a novel or writing a TV show, and then in the afternoon I'm reading these letters from 1700s from the horniest people you've ever met.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire. We're talking to writer and podcaster. We call that in the business. We call that a reset. We're talking to Dana Schwartz. Okay, Dana, as we have been discussing, you are very familiar with some more obscure sort of lesser known nobility and royals throughout history. But we were also wondering how up to speed you are on the sort of current crop of royals, the obscenely famous ones that we have here in the modern day. So we want to do a little exercise here. I wanted to read you a headline about the royal family, and we'd like you to tell us if you think this is something that was actually ripped from the headlines or is it something we made up? We're calling this game Palacy or Fallacy. Oh. Yes. All right. This is a headline. Tell me, Dana, if it's a Palacy or a Fallacy. Ed Sheeran, mistaken for Prince Harry by the royal family. [00:30:25][63.0]
Dana Schwartz: I hope that one's made up.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely real. Oh, my God. It's from the website of the UK's number one hit music station Capital. How about Headline Palacy or fallacy? Do letters prove member of the Royal family was Jack the Ripper?
Dana Schwartz: That one's true.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely real From the Mirror in 2016. Do you know about that? Is that been part of your research yet?
Dana Schwartz: It's not. If anyone's read from Hell, which is an amazing graphic novel that explored sort of this theory that it was Queen Victoria's son who was Jack the Ripper. But I mean, it's interesting how this to think.
Luke Burbank: It's funny how disappointed you are that he's not from the royal family. You're like, spoiler alert. He's not.
Dana Schwartz: He's not. Wouldn't how interesting would that be, though? Wouldn't that be amazing?
Luke Burbank: Just the managing your schedule, it seems, being like in the royal family and then also doing all that killing.
Dana Schwartz: You would be surprised being the son, like not being in charge. It's a lot of waiting around.
Luke Burbank: Most of the time. Yeah. How about this palacy or fallacy? Prince William hints at jealousy over Harry's friendship with Tyler Perry, claims to be, quote, big fan.
Elena Passarello: Is that real?
Luke Burbank: We made that one up. Oh.
Dana Schwartz: I would like to believe Prince William's a big fan of Tyler Perry.
Luke Burbank: All right. Real or made up a headline. The woman who took Prince Harry's virginity in a field as a teenager is auctioning the Miss Piggy toy that he gave her for charity.
Dana Schwartz: Okay. I'm going to say made up.
Luke Burbank: That's absolutely real. No. That's and that's recent. That's from The Sun, February 26.
Dana Schwartz: This is that panda thing where you're like these poor people. He shouldn't have to. He should just be like, he should. He should never should have been a prince. He should have, like, owned a surf shop. Yes. Always like this, that this isn't the life you should ever have.
Luke Burbank: How about this one? Camilla Parker Bowles can't stop talking about Joe Biden's long fart.
Dana Schwartz: That one's true.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely real.
Dana Schwartz: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: New York Post 2021. Well, Dana Schwartz, you really know your palacy or fallacy. Yeah.
Dana Schwartz: Maybe I need to read less Daily Mail.
Luke Burbank: Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congrats on the book. In the podcast. Dana Schwartz, everyone. That was Dana Schwartz right here on Live Wire. Her new book, Immortality A Love Story, is available now, and you can listen to her hit podcast, Noble Blood, wherever you get your podcasts. Live wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco. And as a member of the OneWorld alliance, Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com. This is Live Wire. Each week on the show, we ask our listeners a question this week because we're talking about time with Jenny Odell. We asked our listeners what is your favorite way to quote unquote waste time? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What do you see in.
Elena Passarello: This one from Ellen. Ellen loves to look at house listings in cities I could never afford to live in.
Luke Burbank: [00:34:08] I so identify with that. I can't even tell you because I tend to travel a lot for my various media jobs. And when I drop into a city, I've got that Redfin app out like it's my version of Tinder. I'm just like, What's happening here in Fort Worth, Texas? How much could we get for a couple of hundred thousand, right? What's another time waster that one of our listeners enjoys?
Elena Passarello: Here's a great one from Amanda. Amanda loves singing songs about my cats to my cats, because really, if you write a song about your cat, no one else wants to hear it.
Luke Burbank: I just wrote a new one this week that I think is really going to top the charts. My cat's name Bubbles, and I pick her up and I sing a song called Bubbles Baby, but it's to the tune of the Muppet Babies theme.
Elena Passarello: Bubbles, baby, We make our.
Luke Burbank: Dreams come true. I mean, that's about the extent of the song. It's just bubbles, babies. We make our dreams come true, but it seems to be working out pretty well around here.
Elena Passarello: Does she like it?
Luke Burbank: She doesn't like it because I'm also holding her in my arms like a baby while I do it, which is very disorienting for her.
Elena Passarello: They don't like that, no.
Luke Burbank: But I'm I'm hoping that, you know, in year two of us living together, we can have a breakthrough that I'm allowed to rock her like a baby for at least 20 minutes a day. All right. One more time waster that one of our listeners loves.
Elena Passarello: Ron loves to waste time by not reading all of the books that he keeps borrowing from the library. Guilty. When I go to the library because it's free and because it's books I like, it's like the super toy run. And I come home with like a bedside table's worth of books in that I could stack them to be the bedside table, and then I just wait for them to be overdue and I just schlep them back to the library.
Luke Burbank: Let's see. My problem with Ron's premise is that if Ron doesn't finish the book, then there was nothing of value that happened. I mean, what about the 80 pages that Ron did read? I mean, that was something.
Elena Passarello: I don't even open mine. I guess I was I was sad when might not finishing is not reading at all.
Luke Burbank: All right. Thanks to everyone who sent in a response to our listener question. We've got another one coming up for next week's show, which we will reveal at the end of today's program. In the meantime, speaking of time, our next guest is a writer and artist. Her first book, How to Do Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy, became a New York Times best seller and was named one of the best books of the year. By TIME, NPR and others. The New York Times calls her latest book, Saving Time Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Paradigm Destroying. Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Jenny Odell, recorded at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland here on Live Wire. Jenny, welcome to the show.
Jenny Odell: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Luke Burbank: I heard you say that you wrote this book because you needed it or you needed to. What was going on for you that you needed to write this book?
Jenny Odell: So, amazingly, this was before the pandemic. I was just noticing that all of my thoughts about time felt very pained or painful. Like, time was either running out. I didn't have enough of it. I was at the same time very concerned about the climate. And then, just like the fact of my mortality, I only have so much time in my life. And so I just felt like that was an unsustainable attitude towards time. And I wanted to find something that felt more hopeful. And also just more generally, I think I was just trying to recover my appetite for the future. So I think it's really hard to think about the future right now.
Luke Burbank: You start the book talking about moths that was growing in your apartment. What did that teach you about time?
Jenny Odell: Yeah, so there's a very damp corner of my apartment and essentially some moss spores came in through the window at some point in the last handful of years, and the moss started growing in a little planter on the windowsill. And I happened to be reading Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And so I had just yeah, I mean.
Luke Burbank:That's an intense flex. I happened to be reading a book about moss. When I noticed this moss also growing, which taught me about abstract time.
Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, I think reading that book really gave me an appreciation for the fact that moss is I mean, it's alive. It's also responsive. So, you know, having it in my apartment, I think it made me pay more attention to moths outside and just seeing, you know, minutes after it rains, everything turns more green. And the fact that moths can go dormant for, you know, many years and then come back in the presence of water, that's just a notion of time that feels kind of more stretchy and less linear than obviously something like clock time.
Luke Burbank: But what are the you write about in the book? What are the sort of different times that you talk about in the book.
Jenny Odell: With moss or just in general.
Luke Burbank: Throughout the book? Yeah, I think we've covered the moss topic.
Jenny Odell: So yeah, I mean, I was trying to I was kind of trying to think of like different languages of time, different ways of thinking about time. So like, the most obvious one is time is money, which because it's so common and it's something that we take for granted, I think it's actually really helpful to just look at the history of how time came to be conceived of as money and also just kind of make the point that that's one language about time of money. So the rest of the book is thinking about ecological time, geological time, communal time, Crip time, which is a term from disability studies about, you know, the fact that someone with a disability kind of runs up against industrialized clock time, but also points to the ways in which that's inhumane for everyone, not just people who are disabled. So yeah, it kind of starts with the time as money concept and then tries to zoom out from that and find these other languages of thinking about time.
Luke Burbank: Was it you and your friends are saying like beans is money? That's your thing? Jenny Odell: Oh, time is beans.
Luke Burbank: What is that? What does that mean?
Jenny Odell: So that is like the unofficial motto of my book, Time is Beans, because I mentioned this story about this friend of mine who's in her seventies. She basically bought some beans from somewhere 20 years ago, doesn't remember where she got them. She grew them. They're very delicious. She also gave them to her friends. Those friends thought they were also delicious. Now she doesn't know where to get them, but luckily those friends had grown some of them to maturity and gave them back to her. And now, she speculates this this lineage of beans has spread across the entire country. And when I was talking to her about it, we were kind of discussing the fact that that that's a very non transactional exchange, like something that was given back to her, but it's not exactly what she was giving. And it's a sort of non-zero-sum way of thinking about giving and taking that I wanted to use as a metaphor for a time where it's something different than me having my time units in my time bank and you having yours. And all we can do is exchange them in a transactional way.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Jenny Odell. Her new book is Saving Time Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Do you think that we approach the idea of time differently here in the U.S. than than other places? I think a lot of us think of like Italy and France, where it's supposedly everyone's having like a three hour lunch and that having wine at like one in the afternoon. That just seems great. I mean, is this is there anything uniquely American about how Americans sort of think about time?
Jenny Odell: I think so. I mean, definitely the Protestant work ethic is very strong here, like the notion that being busy is something morally good. You know, some of the studies that I read that were comparing the U.S. to Western Europe, for example, Americans responded to surveys valuing like individual responsibility a lot more. So like the sort of notion like the bootstrapper ethos. And that lends itself to a notion that I have my yeah, I have 24 hours, just like everyone else has 24 abstract hours. And my job is to run them through my sort of success factory more and more efficiently versus thinking more collectively about, you know, policies or structures that would liberate more time for more people. I do think that that's an American kind of view.
Luke Burbank: Your previous book, How to Do Nothing, was this huge hit, and it was on Barack Obama's list for that year of books that that he was reading and recommending. How do you get that information, like as the writer of one of those books? Does he call you?
Jenny Odell: Sadly, no. No, I was actually. My boyfriend and I were on our way to a movie, and I just heard him in the next room say, like, I think he said, like, I have some weird news because he had seen it on Twitter.
Elena Passarello: Oh, so you don't even get a personal call. You just find out what the rest of the plebs.
Jenny Odell: Oh, yeah. Why? Oh.
Elena Passarello: There's no crown and scepter in the mail or.
Luke Burbank: No oversize check.
Jenny Odell: No.
Luke Burbank: But I mean, it must be a pretty big honor and must have been a pretty good day for you. Yeah.
Jenny Odell: I mean, it's. It's surreal. I mean, I think like that. I mean, this book as well. But how did you. Nothing was very personal. Like it has a lot. It's it's has a lot of details that are specific to me and it's specific to the Bay Area. And so to just know actually, that anyone has gone on that journey and finds it resonant is amazing to me, even if they're not Obama. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: It feels to me like this latest book, Saving Time, is a sort of natural outgrowth of how to do nothing. Because if you're going to try to focus on doing nothing or at least kind of decoupling from like financial thought's being the primary objective, etc., and spend more time in reflection, which is what you write about in the first book, you got to figure out how to reorient your time so that you can actually do that. But I'm curious for people that don't have that luxury, like the way that their clock is oriented is survival mode, you know, economically, emotionally. What would your advice to those folks or what can you offer to those folks who don't maybe have the luxury of sitting down and thinking, I'm going to spend more time in reflection?
Jenny Odell: I mean, I think the number one thing that I would say is, you know, like I talk about productivity bros, which is my term for like a person who makes a certain type of content online about like crushing your morning and like making a smoothie at 3 a.m. or whatever.
Luke Burbank: Rising and grinding.
Jenny Odell: Yeah. Yes. And I guess I would say that I feel like there's something a little bit punitive about that, like telling someone who doesn't have control over their time that they could if they just worked harder, if they did it better. And so I guess, like the first thing I would say is to not subscribe to that way of thinking and not sort of blame oneself and then also look to, you know, what are ways that you can join up with others to build some sort of collective power because you individually don't have it, whether that's, you know, union organizing or something less formal, but basically just acknowledging that you would need to move beyond the individual because that that type of content is always really addressing the individual in isolation from those other things.
Luke Burbank: I mean, I don't want to boil it down too much, but is the overarching idea of the book really capitalism is sort of the problem like you have basically like time is money. You have. Yeah, you have labor, your value being taken away from people and then accreting to the pockets of super wealthy. And that is, is that basically the main issue?
Jenny Odell: Yeah, it's the same and it's the exact same one is and how to do nothing. So yeah, I mean.
Luke Burbank: Capitalism remains the problem. Yes.
Jenny Odell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, when I was the first whole first chapter is about the history of that concept of time is money. And you find out that like, that time is money. The time in that equation is other people's labor time. Like, that is how that notion came about. Even if now, even if a privileged person is, you know, sort of in control of their own time. There's an internal.
Luke Burbank: Radio show, for instance. Yeah, you know.
Jenny Odell: Yeah. You know, like that that sort of notion of control remains like in the way time is talked about. When you say time is money.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. The book is fascinating. It's Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Jenny, thanks for coming on Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: That was Jenny Odell. Her latest book, Saving Time Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, is available now. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, you're going to hear some amazing music from Black Belt, Eagle Scout. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Livewire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Before we hear our music this week, a little preview of next week's program. We're going to be talking to Isaac Fitzgerald about his New York Times best selling memoir, Dirt Bag Massachusetts. He talks about his unconventional and often difficult childhood in the book, including how he and friends really and deeply misunderstood the point of the movie Fight Club. Then we're gonna hear some stand up comedy from the very funny Carmen Lagala. On how her love of women's basketball led her to break up a teenage romance by way of Internet comments. Then we're going to hear some music from No-No Boy. It's not just music. It's an exploration of the Asian-American experience here in the U.S.. And as always, we are going to be looking to get your answer to our listener question. Elena, what are we asking the listeners for next week's show.
Elena Passarello: In honor of Isaac Fitzgerald, we want to know what's something you completely misunderstood as a young person?
Luke Burbank: All right. If you have something that you misunderstood as a young person, you want to share it with us. Send it our way via Twitter or Facebook. We are at Livewire Radio pretty much everywhere. This is Live Wire from PRX our musical guest this week. Grew up on the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in La Conner, Washington, where she was influenced by the cultural singing and drumming of her family, as well as bootleg tapes of Hole and Nirvana. Her latest album, The Land, The Water, The Sky, is a love letter to Indigenous strength and healing that Rolling Stone calls fiery and brilliant. Take a listen to Black Belt, Eagle Scout right here on Live Wire. KP, Welcome to the show.
Black Belt Eagle Scout: Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: I'm curious, when you started realizing music was going to be a really big part of your life personally, like how old were you? What did the music do to you, what kind of music was it?
Black Belt Eagle Scout: Yeah, I mean, I'm from Swinomish, and my family are all singers, but we're more so like cultural singers. And then also in Washington, grunge, riot girl, all this really incredible D.I.Y. underground music that just sort of was a part of our everyday life also. And so I don't know, I feel like middle school, high school. I was like, everyday people do music. I could do music too.
Luke Burbank: This album is so beautiful. What were you going for sonically when you when you produced it, when you recorded it? Like it just has such a unique and lush sound.
Black Belt Eagle Scout: I was lucky to work with a really good friend of mine Takiaya Reed from this band called Divide and Dissolve. She's this like metal guitarist and she has this plethora of pedals that just sort of takes up the essence of like the wilderness. And I think we we just jumped off from there having like a really atmospheric sound with a lot of reverb, a lot of like crunchy sort of guitars that I think really, like, set the scene for what could, you know, come from different songwriting parts.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I feel like it's it's really dreamy, but it also has a lot of really great, like, rockin' guitar. Like it's not any one thing. As soon as I think it's being one thing, it sort of shifts a little bit. Where is the cover photo for the album taken? Because in the words of Liz Lemon, I want to go to there. Where's that at?
Black Belt Eagle Scout: That, um, that's in my homelands of Swinomish. It's within one of the bays. And so there's this little bay that's outside of some of the islands there.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, Yeah. It's a pretty magical part of the country. Where are you living these days?
Black Belt Eagle Scout: I live in Swinomish.
Luke Burbank: Was that important for you or has it been important for you to be physically in like the place of your ancestors and to be around that?
Black Belt Eagle Scout: Yeah. I mean, for me, like where I'm from, I always knew I was going to move back home. I didn't know that I would move so soon. And I think that being home in in that in the time of the pandemic, like, there's a lot more space to be outside. There is a lot more space to walk around and and feel, I guess more like connected to where I'm from. And that was really helpful in in the writing process of the record.
Luke Burbank: All right. That's Black Belt Eagle Scout here on Live Wire.
Black Belt Eagle Scout:
Slow, important love
It keeps me alive
You wanted a second chance at life
Well you're alive
You hear your heart beating
You walk under the trees
Engulfed by beauty
I just hold you here with me
I don't give up
I don't give up
I don't give up
I don't give up anymore
I don't give up
You heard it here today
I told you my story
That I found healing in you
Windy leaves are flowing
And in these leaves
They come from people who grow
But we're here to listen, guide us
I want everyone to know
I don't give up
I don't give up
I don't give up
I don't give up anymore
I don't give up anymore
I don't give up
I don't give up anymore
I was only seventeen
I was only seventy
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, the sky
The land, the water, and the sky
Luke Burbank: That was Black Belt Eagle Scout playing "Don't give up." Right here on Live Wire. That's off her latest album, The Land, The Water, The Sky, which is available now. Also, KP is out on tour. So make sure you look for Black Belt Eagle Scout coming to a show near you. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests Dana Schwartz, Jenny Odell and Black Belt, Eagle Scout. Live Wire's brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer. And our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Tre Hester is our assistant editor. Our marketing and production manager is Paige Thomas. Rosa Garcia is our operations associate. Tanvi Kumar is our production fellow and Yasamin Mehdian is our intern. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. [00:58:15][28.3]
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the Marie Lam from Charitable Foundation Livewire, was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff this week. We'd like to thank members Karen and Brian McManus of Seattle, Washington for more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Livewire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire Crew. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week. [00:58:41][25.3]
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