19: Bright light

by

A bunch of things I loved in 2019

Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri: Fred Lehman (South Florida Dark Sky Observers)

This is the time of year when we are all getting a little list fatigued or at least I am. This year, with the end of the decade in particular, I find myself unmoved by gauzy or melodramatic retrospectives because it feels like in the 2010s we slipped from the gears of how we typically experience the passage of time. Or maybe that things have gone so haywire that it feels a little silly to look back and think gee whiz another decade in the history books what a ride this human experience is! I know people have always felt this way to some extent but I don’t know I’ve been on the planet for four decades now and never felt quite this way. I liked this one essay about how time is broken that validated this sensation:

The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.

If climate anxiety went somewhat mainstream this year, that has a similarly time-warping effect, in that we normally gauge time on human scales and pretend geological scales don’t exist because they are so much bigger than us so as to be imperceptible. But engaging with climate change plunges the personal passage of time into the planetary passage of time, which can be a disorienting and not super fun experience.

It’s what Eugene Thacker describes in his Horror of Philosophy books as the conflict in our awareness of the world-for-us, the world-in-itself, and the world-without-us.

Indeed, the core problematic in the climate change discourse is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.

Meanwhile, “the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”

So you know rough stuff out there. But I’m getting off on one of my things and this special end of year issue was going to be all recommendations. Because I do love the year end list as a way to see what moved other people and find out about things I may have missed. But because of our shared list fatigue let’s keep things real loose here and it’s not even going to be things released this year, just things that I loved during 2019 that I think you might love too. (And if you are still looking to make a year end donation, here are my recommendations because I know you are probably not hearing from very many people about making year end donations right now.)

Climate Voices I Loved

Books I Loved

  • Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
  • Private Government, by Elizabeth Anderson
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
  • A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan – This was a great book about the passage of time AND it’s a low-key climate change book.
  • There There, by Tommy Orange
  • Just Giving, by Rob Reich – If you’re going to read one book about philanthropy and its problematic role in democracy, make it this one.
  • Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • The Power, by Naomi Alderman

Comics I Loved

  • Usagi Yojimbo, by Stan Sakai – I read the first couple of volumes as part of a dive into B/W 80s indie comics.
  • Bacchus, by Eddie Campbell – the whole run, part of the same dive
  • Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore – Read some of this when I was younger but I’ve been going through the whole run this year was volume 5.
  • Pretty Deadly, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Rios
  • Good-bye, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
  • Maids, by Katie Skelly
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Robert Hack

Music I Loved

  • Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings
  • Palehound, Black Friday
  • Thom Yorke, Anima
  • Solange, When I Get Home
  • billy woods, Kenny Segal, Hiding Places
  • Big Thief, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands
  • Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom
  • Tinariwen, Elwan
  • Tacocat, This Mess is a Place
  • The National, I Am Easy to Find
  • Svalbard, It’s Hard to Have Hope
  • Skeletonwitch, Devouring Radiant Light

Also enjoy this retro banger by DJ Shadow and De La Soul:

Television I Loved

  • Watchmen 
  • Barry
  • The Good Place
  • Fleabag
  • The Terror (ssn 1) – I wrote about this one here.
  • I Think You Should Leave – I watched this sketch comedy show twice it made me laugh so much.
  • Killing Eve
  • Mindhunter (The Murder Boys)
  • Pen15

Podcasts I Loved

  • Mothers of Invention
  • Ezra Klein Show
  • Climate One
  • Longform Podcast
  • Call Your Girlfriend
  • Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Articles I Loved

The liberals who hate the left, the awful guys who worship logic, Boston’s traffic crisis, Democrats won’t challenge the almighty car, climate change is about how we treat each other, give every bus in the country its own dedicated lane, a feminist version of the tango, we’re violating the rights of our descendants, the end of climate change requires the end of capitalism, Joe Rogan’s moronic free thinking, the wealthy who contribute nothing and take everything, the feminist history of the newsletter (and its commodification), cars are killing more pedestrians, the history of anti-car protest, the sob story of racist comedians, “they stand there with their drinks and their phones and their glasses and they just pee,” Black Americans have fought to make America a true democracy (the entire 1619 project), the New York Times doesn’t have the tools to make sense of the world, how YouTube radicalized Brazil, it was never about busing, the Green New Deal has already won, Negroni Season (this article is 10 years old but I just read the classic Awl series this year), the World’s Most Annoying Man, men have no friends, Michelle Wu, Boston’s next mayor, Democratic centrism is a lost cause, Jay Inslee was the only candidate serious about short-term climate action.

Other Things I Loved

And those are some things from 2019.

I hope you all had or still are having a nice holiday. In our household we at least nominally celebrate Christmas although that basically means eating cheese, drinking hot wine, and watching Gremlins.

Bright light bright light!

And the day after we’ll go see a Star Wars movie if there is one which there was this year. It wasn’t a very good movie but I also thoroughly enjoyed it, something Disney/Marvel/StarWars has pretty much cornered the market on at this point. The series became weirdly obsessed with genealogy, but it also has some touching messages about friendship and looking out for each other. Jamie pointed out this nice moment when Poe becomes a general but then he tells Finn, his non-canonical life partner, “I can’t do this alone I need you in command with me” and how that is very anti-toxic masculinity and also a reminder that nobody can save the galaxy alone.

So next year as we take on seemingly insurmountable challenges, we can all take a lesson from Poe and Rey and Finn and BB8 and Babu Frik, and that new little robot, and Chewbacca, and Adam Driver, and those people on the horses, and the lady with the shiny helmet and that other lady with the shiny helmet, and Rose Tico who JJ Abrams basically cut from the series which is messed up, and Baby Yoda and the tiny orange lady, and the two unnamed women who kiss, and the Porgs, and Princess Leia and Laura Dern and I think Charlie from Lost, and C3PO and R2D2. We may not know what we’re doing out here, but we have each other.

Tate

PS. This is the last Crisis Palace for a few weeks while I’m on vacation don’t be sad I’ll be back before you know it.