Winner of the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, (2003)

 

This book is an argument for subtle, graceful and lively time: the diverse cycles of nature or carnival, the rich, wise times of indigenous peoples. The book explores the way time is highly political and used as a tool to power, the imposition of Western time and time-values being an act of invisible imperialism, the coca-colarization of the calendar. Time has been enclosed as surely as land, enclosed by clocks and calendars and privatized for profit.

 

The book explores indigenous peoples’ attitudes to the past and present, women’s experience of time and how time has been disembedded from nature. The book ends with a chapter on ‘Wild Time’ – how time could be conceived – using the example of wilderness as the setting: wild place to illustrate wild time.

 

 

- If you suspect there’s more to time than clocks...
- If you do not think that time is money...
- If you dislike hearing the word ‘Time’ closely followed by the words ‘at the bar now, please’...
- If you would have laughed overhearing a child say ‘I’ll do it in five minutes....Is that today?’...
- If you have a sneaky feeling that other cultures might have wise, rich and elegant ideas of time...
- If you have ever wondered whether linear time and cyclical time could conceivably be to do with gender...
- If you have ever felt that Western modernity’s time is coercive, crushing and overwound...
- If you think an analysis of time could, or indeed should, include art, adverts, philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, sociology, music and myth...

Then please read on.

 

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Reviews and Endorsements:

 

“Jay Griffiths has produced nothing short of an original opening of the human mind, a study of what makes us tick. Her book touches nature and language and us with an enlightening spirit, and it demonstrates that we have been in the thrall of a concept of our own invention, one that we have barely acknowledged, much less understood. Her book is cleverness in the service of genius.”

- Citation on winning the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, 2003

 

“An exercise indeed in Dharma, poetry and philosophy.”

– Gary Snyder

 

“This is smart, edgy work, from an original and exciting mind. Jay Griffiths’ voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first century debate.”

- Barry Lopez

 

“Thoughtful, original and intuitive... amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited. Bravo!” - Peter Reading,

- The Times Literary Supplement

 

“A wonderful, delightfully humourous polemic against everything that’s wrong with the way we deal with time today”

- The Independent, Books of the Year

 

“An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time... Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution.”

- Iain Finlayson, The Times, Books of the Year

 

“Like the seminal socialist, feminist and ecological works, Pip Pip articulates what thousands have felt but no-one has been able to put into words. Suddenly, shapeless concerns are brought into focus. Outrage takes the place of confusion, fascination displaces complacency. Cheeky, intelligent, always gripping, Pip Pip re-introduces us to a dimension we’ve utterly neglected. It will be the opening salvo in a new battle over the human spirit.”

- George Monbiot

 

“Jay Griffiths, like the Elephant’s Child, has the gift of insatiable curiosity. She is intensely aware of the world around her, its wonders, its horrors and its absurdities. She questions and protests and celebrates – all in a language which is constantly alive, often sparkling and deep, like a good river. She is a revealer and a healer - to travel through time in the company of such a magical writer is a delight.”

- Adrian Mitchell, Shadow Poet Laureate.

 

“A fascinating, highly original meditation on time…This is a book which needs to be read slowly.”

- Fritjof Capra

 

“A mine of ideas, of anecdotes, connections, angles”

– Ivan Illich

 

“There are lots of books on time, but none like this lyrical account that proceeds via argument instead of examination... Flowing with ideas, an audacious and exhilarating book.”

– Sydney Morning Herald

 

“A wildly exuberant and exhilarating polemic. Enormously intelligent, fresh and innovative, this is a book unlike any other I have read.”

– The Age

 

“Jay Griffiths is a dazzlingly original writer, a wordsmith of the first order. She writes like an angel: a funny, brave, passionate and sometimes naughty angel. Her book is dynamite. It will change your life and you will never think of Time the same way again. It is highly serious and yet playful; it is wise, wide ranging and radical. If this book were a political party, I'd join it.”

- Anita Roddick

 

“Splendid, extraordinarily wide-ranging… impressive, absorbing and radical, provocative, impassioned, often outrageously witty.”

– The New Internationalist

 

“A compulsively readable book; Griffiths does for time what Robert M Pirsig did for truth-obsessed philosophy in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. It's also a sexual, playful, intensely female book, passionately written and cogently argued” - Pete May, Time Out​