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The Anthropocene Reviewed, Animated

2021-05-25 · reading · John · 15:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing (also: Personal life, Health, Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion, recurring series, heavy topic

Reading the first chapter of The Anthropocene Reviewed over animation by Meitar Almog, John tells how labyrinthitis after the 2017 tour, his Booklist years, Hank's joke name and Sarah's insight that there are no observers, only participants, led him to review the human-centered planet, and resolves to fall in love with the world.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The 58-second trail after the Turtles tour and the sudden labyrinthitis

  • ★★ After a month touring for Turtles All the Way Down, published October 2017, John came home to Indianapolis and blazed a trail from his children's treehouse to the office, or shed, where he and his wife work. — 00:00:00 · Turtles All the Way Down, Indianapolis
  • ★★ John cleared dozens of invasive honeysuckle trees, dug up English ivy and laid wood chips and bricks, working 10 or 12 hours a day for a month, to build a walk that takes 58 seconds. — 00:00:22

  • ★★★ A week later, his balance suddenly failed: the world spun, his eyes shivered, he vomited and was rushed to hospital; diagnosed with labyrinthitis, an inner-ear disease, it was an unambiguously one-star experience. — 00:00:58

    “I was suddenly a very small boat in very high seas.”

  • ★★ Recovery meant weeks in bed unable to read, watch TV or play with his kids, alone with thoughts that drifted or panicked him, his mind roaming through the past. — 00:01:36

00:01:57 — Writing in code: readers and interviewers treating John as his protagonists

  • ★★ John recalls the novelist Allegra Goodman, asked who should write her life story, saying she was writing it herself, but in code; John felt some people thought they knew his code. — 00:02:08
  • ★★★ People assumed John shared his protagonists' worldviews or questioned him as if he were the protagonist; a famous interviewer asked whether he, like the narrator of Turtles All the Way Down, had panic attacks when kissing. — 00:02:29 · Turtles All the Way Down
  • ★★★ Having invited such questions with a public life as a mentally ill person, John told the interviewer he has no anxiety around kissing but does have intensely frightening panic attacks; talking about himself through fiction became exhausting and destabilizing, as if his self were for sale. — 00:02:44

00:03:16 — Chaplaincy, Booklist and the 175-word review versus the five-star scale

  • ★★★ As he recovered from labyrinthitis, John realized he didn't want to write in code anymore. — 00:03:21
  • ★★ In 2000 John worked for a few months as a student chaplain at a children's hospital while at divinity school planning to become an Episcopal minister; the devastation he saw ended those plans, and he still can't handle it. — 00:03:26
  • ★★ John moved to Chicago, typed for temp agencies, then did data entry at Booklist; an editor asked if he liked romance novels, he said he loved them, and got his first review: a novel set in 17th-century London. — 00:03:49 · Chicago (city), London
  • ★★ Over five years John reviewed hundreds of books for Booklist, from picture books about the Buddha to poetry collections, and became fascinated by the format of the review. — 00:04:14
  • ★★ Booklist reviews were limited to 175 words and carry no star ratings, so every sentence did several jobs: introducing and analyzing the book, compliments alongside concerns. — 00:04:28
  • ★★★ In 175 words a review can tell potential readers far more than any single data point such as a star rating could. — 00:04:43
  • ★★ The five-star scale has been used in criticism only for a few decades: occasionally for film as early as the 1950s, for hotels only from 1979, and widely for books only after Amazon introduced user reviews. — 00:04:56 · Amazon
  • ★★★ The five-star scale exists for data aggregation systems, not humans, which is why it became standard only in the internet era: star ratings are ideal for artificial intelligences, 175-word reviews hard for them. — 00:05:17

00:05:41 — Refusing to make labyrinthitis a metaphor; illness lived with; lasting vertigo

  • ★★★ Tempting as it is to make labyrinthitis a metaphor for a life lacking balance, John wrote against such symbolization of disease in his novels: OCD and cancer are illnesses to live with as well as one can, not battles or character flaws. — 00:05:41 · Turtles All the Way Down, The Fault in Our Stars, cancer
  • ★★ The universe didn't give John labyrinthitis to teach him about balance; he was mostly better within six weeks but still has terrifying bouts of vertigo, and now viscerally knows consciousness is temporary and precarious. — 00:06:35

00:07:02 — Not writing; Sarah, New York and Indianapolis; the Anthropocene and Hank's explanation

  • ★★ Getting better, John returned to a weekly Tuesday video and a weekly podcast with Hank but did not write: that fall and winter was his longest stretch without writing for an audience since he was 14. — 00:07:02 · Vlogbrothers, Dear Hank and John, Hank Green
  • ★★ John left Booklist and Chicago in 2005 when Sarah got into graduate school in New York; afterwards they moved to Indianapolis, where Sarah was contemporary art curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. — 00:07:31 · Sarah Urist Green, Chicago (city), New York City, Indianapolis
  • ★ John read so much at Booklist that he can't remember when he first met the word Anthropocene, probably around 2002. (hedged) — 00:07:52
  • ★★ The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet's biodiversity and geology. — 00:08:00
  • ★★★ Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans, but in the 21st century we really are a hugely powerful force on Earth. — 00:08:14
  • ★★ John recalls Hank, a former biochemist, explaining: a person's biggest problem is other people, on whom they are vulnerable and reliant; for a 21st-century river, desert or polar bear, the biggest problem is still humans. — 00:08:22 · Hank Green

00:08:55 — Reviews of everything on the 2017 tour; Hank names The Anthropocene Reviewed; Sarah: no observers, only participants

  • ★★ On the fall 2017 book tour, Hank and John passed long drives trying to one-up each other with absurd Google user reviews, like a one-star review of Badlands National Park: not enough mountain. — 00:08:55 · Hank Green, Google
  • ★★ Since John's reviewing days everyone has become a reviewer and everything a subject for review, the five-star scale applied even to public restrooms and wedding photographers. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ The medication John takes for his obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings on Drugs.com, averaging 3.8. — 00:09:30
  • ★★ The Amsterdam bench where a scene of The Fault in Our Stars film was shot now has hundreds of Google reviews; John's favorite, three stars, reads in full: it is a bench. — 00:09:40 · The Fault in Our Stars (film), Amsterdam, Google, The Fault in Our Stars

  • ★★★ Marveling at five-star reviews of everything, John told Hank he had once had an idea to review Canada geese; Hank said: The Anthropocene Reviewed. — 00:10:02 · Hank Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast), The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)

    “Hank said, the Anthropocene reviewed.”

  • ★★ John had written a few such reviews in 2014, of Canada geese and Diet Dr Pepper, and in early 2018 sent them to Sarah for her thoughts. — 00:10:17 · Sarah Urist Green

  • ★★★ Sarah told John, who wrote reviews as a detached observer, that in the Anthropocene there are no disinterested observers, only participants, and that reviews are really a kind of memoir; his 1,500 words on Diet Dr Pepper never mentioned his love for it. — 00:10:40 · Sarah Urist Green

    “in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers. There are only participants.”

00:11:23 — Amy Krouse Rosenthal's pay attention to what you pay attention to; the podcast and the contradiction of human power

  • ★★ Recovering, John reread his friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had died months earlier, who wrote that anyone discerning what to do with their life should pay attention to what they pay attention to. — 00:11:23
  • ★★★ John's attention had become fractured and his world loud, but putting himself into the reviews, as Sarah suggested, he was for the first time in years trying to pay attention to what he pays attention to. — 00:11:45 · Sarah Urist Green, attention economy
  • ★★ The book started as a podcast charting contradictions of human life as John experiences it: how we can be so compassionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair. — 00:12:08 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast), The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)
  • ★★★ Above all John wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: we are powerful enough to reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity but not to choose how, to escape the atmosphere but not to save loved ones from suffering. — 00:12:23 · climate change

00:12:53 — The pandemic, Maurice Sendak, and falling in love with the world

  • ★★ In early 2020, after two years of writing the podcast, a novel coronavirus appeared, and John began to write about the only thing he could write about. — 00:12:53 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★★ Writing in April 2021, still amid the crisis, John finds much to fear and lament but sees humans sharing what they learn and caring for the sick and vulnerable: even separated, we are bound up in each other. — 00:13:16 · COVID-19 pandemic, Sarah Urist Green
  • ★★ At the end of his life Maurice Sendak said on NPR's Fresh Air that he cries a lot because he misses people who die, and that as he ages he is finding he is in love with the world. — 00:13:45
  • ★★★ It has taken John all his life to fall in love with the world, but he has started to feel it in the last couple of years. — 00:14:13
  • ★★★ Falling in love with the world doesn't ignore suffering: it is to feel your mind swim before the beauty and distance of the stars, to hold your crying children, to watch sycamores leaf out in June. — 00:14:20
  • ★★★ When feeling rises, John wants to deflect with irony; we all know how loving ends, but he wants to fall in love with the world anyway, let it crack him open and feel what there is to feel. — 00:14:50
  • ★★ Sendak's last public words were 'Live your life', said three times; the book is John's attempt to do so. — 00:15:17 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Anthropocene · labyrinthitis · Sarah Urist Green · star (classification) · The Anthropocene Reviewed (book) · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

Also: People: Allegra Goodman · Amy Krouse Rosenthal · Maurice Sendak

Projects: Dear Hank and John

Works: Fresh Air · The Fault in Our Stars · The Fault in Our Stars (film) · Turtles All the Way Down

Organizations: Amazon · Booklist · Drugs.com · Episcopal Church · Google · Indianapolis Museum of Art · NPR

Concepts: anxiety disorder · artificial intelligence · attention economy · Canada goose · cancer · climate change · consciousness · contemporary art · criticism · irony · last words · metaphor · obsessive-compulsive disorder · Platanus occidentalis · star · Vertigo

Places: Amsterdam · Badlands National Park · Chicago (city) · Indianapolis · London · New York City · TFiOS Bench

Events: COVID-19 pandemic

Products: Diet Dr Pepper

Only in the description or credits: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing · Meitar Almog · Paper Towns · Rosianna Halse Rojas · theanthropocenereviewed.com · Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Also centred on Anthropocene: John Reviews Kids Movies · The Introducer, My Childhood Dream Job · Nourished by Leaving · I Had a Hallucination This Week

Also centred on labyrinthitis: My Physicalmental Illness · My Next Book · On Balance

Also centred on star (classification): Reviewing Reviews of My Reviews

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