February 10, 2022

It's hard having absolutely no claim on anybody's time. Needing attention (Is that a legitimate need?) but facilitating the rejection of that attention. No, I'm just hassling, I'll say because what I'm talking about isn't important. It's just another way of saying, Hey, can I have the light of your attention for a moment? It might be a product of my not doing crucial things. I write. I exercise. I fill a desk at work. People aren't running around needing me, putting things into my hands that - if I don't attend to them - will bog down the whole machine. And I can only scan through images online for so long. I don't even develop para-social relationships with my favorite podcasters. It's not enough to imagine myself in conversation. I myself resent the idea that I would need to attend to someone else at the drop of a hat just because we have the technologies of the internet. Just because we're accessible all the time, doesn't mean I'm available all the time. Other people should not have to be available either. So I reach out while making sure I'm allowed to be ignored. But that of course firms up the idea - in my head and in theirs - that I'm ignorable. When all my small burnings matter at least to me. 

BLog Time! 

Green, John – THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED

Published: 2021

Read: 2/2022

This is a series of essays on particular topics that also function as memoir. Green starts with a topic like “sunsets” and then veers all over the place. At the end, he gives each topic one to five stars. Underlying throughout are themes of nihilism, warranted anxiety, the terrible weight of beauty and connection and also its transience. Green is pretty open about his mental health issues, and although he’s wildly successful, it seems difficult to be him. Many of these essays are episodes of the podcast he did with the same name. So, if you’ve listened to that, you’ve really got the gist. 

I liked his essay on sunsets. He talks about how their beauty is hard to express without sounding trite or uncool. Up until this essay, the most he’d given anything was 4 ½ stars. He calls himself on it, the reluctance to be really won over by anything out of the fear that it would make him look vulnerable, that it would reveal his vulnerabilities, his soft spots for the beak of the world. But he gives in and gives sunsets five stars. After that, he goes ahead and does it for other things as well. It made me cry. I also liked the Lascaux Paintings one. They’re these cave paintings that transfix with their beauty and are super old. Green points out that people at the time certainly didn’t have a surplus of resources and yet they still made art. It’s a thing humans have been doing forever, like we have to. It made me feel a bit better about the frivolousness of my life, of concentrating on writing movies. On the creation of entertainment – and commercial genre entertainment at that. If it’s meaningless, at least it’s imperative. There’s also an essay on Auld Lang Syne that talks about the meaninglessness of everything. In WWI, soldiers sang “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” to the song’s tune, to express the purposelessness of what they were doing. Green leans into that purposelessness, encouraging people to sing with him, no matter where they are and no matter how off tune. I did, with him – or with past, recording-booth him – while I walked home from work. What an extraordinary thing. If also, like he points out, pointless. 

I liked this book. I like how both Green and his brother, Hank, get a real kick out of the stuff of life. Stuff like culture and history and politics and science. The stuff that’s supposed to be boring or at least academic. They both seem to take it into themselves, to read it like tea leaves. What keeps me from going whole hog on this book – this review that I’m reviewing – is Green’s overall soppiness. He tends towards melancholy but in a way that’s tenderness rather than wry. I like my sensitivity cut with humor, otherwise I feel like the author is making me sit outside in the rain without an umbrella and telling me it’s good for me. (I’m into my writing these days, shit. It’s because I’ve been reading rambling lyricists like Eve Babitz and Maggie Nelson. Green is a bit of a rambling lyricist too. People who seem to keep writing and writing wherever it takes them out of a hope that at some point a thesis starts to resolve. Good for them, but I don’t like working with such little plan. I don’t like the giant risk that something turns out vain or boring. Plus, my inner monologue so much of the time is just ouch ouch ouch ouch.) Said in John Green voice: I give The Anthropocene Reviewed three and a half stars. 

Rating: ★★★1/2