#johngreenftw

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Hank, it all comes down to the fact that the truth resists simplicity.

John Green

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but I am BEYOND ECSTATIC that it is so full of John Green!

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Yes, your teachers may be stupid. So are you. So am I. So is everyone... The whole pleasure of being a human is in being stupid, but learning to be less stupid together.

John Green

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You know what? This just pisses me the fuck off. I wish I could summarize my feelings more eloquently, but this is the simplest way to put in one sentence my opinion of the situation.

Here is why:

For those of you who don't know, John Green's absolutely beautiful novel Looking for Alaska is frequently banned in schools and libraries for being "pornography" (Green's reaction to a similar situation in 2008 is available for your viewing here). The objectionable scene is a graphic description of the narrator Pudge's first sexual encounter when his girlfriend gives him oral sex. Whenever this book, which is truly amazing and inspiring and full of truth far more than pornography, shows up on a reading list in a high school somewhere, somebody's parent shows up at a meeting and reads this scene out loud in a huff. Often, they win, and the book is banned.

I have a lot of problems with this. The first and most important is the one Green gives in his own defense: the scene is not gratuitous but rather a part of a very specific formal necessity of the plot and message of the novel. The oral sex scene is awkward, un-romantic and un-sexy--essentially, it means nothing emotionally to either character involved. A chapter or two later, though, another scene unfolds which, though described in just as much detail, is much less objectionable because it doesn't go as far. Not a single item of clothing is removed, and yet this scene carries the emotional weight of the entire novel. The blow job scene isn't there to be titillating--just the opposite, in fact. It actually demonstrates how much better it is to go not so far with someone you care about than to go as far as possible with someone who's just conveniently situated and willing. But parental audiences hear one word about blow jobs and freak the fuck out without bothering to contextualize.

My second argument in favor of Looking for Alaska comes from my own experience with the novel. The first time I read it was the summer I turned seventeen, the summer between 10th and 11th grade. Technically, I was a little older than the 15-year-old sophomores who saw this book on their reading list in this particular case, but you can balance that out with the fact that in high school I had a bit of a reputation for being a sheltered prude. At the time I first read Alaska I had never so much as kissed a boy, and yet I didn't even bat an eye at the blow job scene. There was nothing in the entire book I hadn't heard before. This partly had to do with TV, partly with things I would hear my classmates talking about, but mostly, it had to do with the immense amount of young adult fiction I had read. Yes, that is right: I knew what a blow job was from reading books. That's really beside the point, though. What's important is that reading Looking for Alaska did not in any way encourage me to go out and suck off the first boy I could find. In fact, it kind of made me never, ever want to perform oral sex on anyone because it just sounded too damn complicated. Alaska had a huge impact on my life. It made me want to do a lot of things--read great literature, live each day to the fullest, tell everyone I know that I love them, fall in all-enveloping, soul-feeding love. It did not make me want to have promiscuous sex. Plenty of my peers have read this book and had similar feelings. Nobody ever reads this entire book and says, "How 'bout that blow job, huh?" No. They get tattoos that say "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." They write songs about Thomas Edison's last words. They paint their toenails electric blue in tribute to the title character. They make beautiful photographic manipulations that say "If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane." Oral sex is not what this book is about, and anyone who's read the whole thing can happily tell you so.

My third and final argument comes from the fact that the characters in Looking for Alaska engage in so many forms of age-inappropriate bad behavior that it baffles me that oral sex is the one parents land on. Pudge, Alaska, Takumi, and the Colonel casually break every one of Culver Creek Prep's rules to pull off elaborate pranks. The Colonel's mother even helps them to do so. Everyone, despite being underage, smokes cigarettes (including Pudge who only does so to make himself look cool) and drinks alcohol. Disrespect for teachers is portrayed as a noble act of self-sacrifice and telling the principle the truth is portrayed as cowardly and bad. I won't go into detail for fear of ruining the story for those of you who haven't read the book, but one particularly irresponsible situation is handled so poorly by every present character that it leads to the devestating crisis of the novel. Yet somehow, parents understand that their children will see these acts as a story and not an instruction manual. This is stupid. Sex does not fall into some weird category of its own. It's a fact of life, and we're only making it more central than it needs to be by putting it up on some taboo pedestal.

And, OK, one last closing remark just because I can't let this go unanswered: warnings about pregnancy are irrelevant here because, while I suppose it's possible that the laws of biology may have just up and changed while I wasn't looking, the last time I checked, the only way to get pregnant was by having vaginal sex, which is not even close to the same thing as oral sex and which never happens in Looking for Alaska. Maybe this is something your kids would understand if you stopped teaching them that sex ed is a dirty word.

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A writer’s reading of his/her work ought not be inherently privileged over other readings, and...there are (almost) always better and more beautiful/interesting readings of a novel to be found than the author could have imagined.

John Green

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Will this be on the test? Yeah, about the test. The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools and bars and hospitals and dorm rooms and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that, when taken together, make your life yours. And everything--EVERYTHING--will be on it. I know, right? So pay attention.

John Green

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Want to take part in a project that is actively proving that just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's hopelessly frivolous? Want the power to look your idiotic History of European Music teacher who thinks your hours online are wasted looking at pictures of kittens and copying and pasting your term paper from Wikipedia?

Watch this video. Subscribe to this channel. Learn something you didn't know.

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The Fault In Our Stars: A Pretentious Review(ish thing)

(I don't write about books very often, so bear with me.)

"His sisters were there with their banker husbands and three kids, all boys, who ran up to me and chanted who are you who are you who are you who are you, running circles around the entryway like lung capacity was a renewable resource."

This sentence, inconsequential as it may seem, was the point where John Green's novel The Fault In Our Stars hit me like a ton of bricks. I was sitting at my kitchen table, reading over breakfast like I do almost every morning. I opened my mouth to laugh, jell-covered forkful of pancake halfway to my mouth, and suddenly I was crying like a baby. And I don't mean that as a turn of phrase, I was crying literally like a baby, the kind of crying that is all shaking and squealing and convulsing and wailing where the tears take a good full minute or so to start rolling down your face and time and everything just disappears for a while, the kind of crying that legal adults are only supposed to cry at their parents' or children's funerals, the kind of crying that you never, ever, EVER want anyone to see you cry.

Certainly, some of this comes from the fact that the subject matter hits a vein of my personal experience. But mostly, it's the pure, unadulterated literary magic that John Green weaves so magically.

Yes, the sixteen-year-old narrator of and multiple other characters in The Fault In Our Stars have cancer. And yes, their cancers are enough of a driving force to say that this is a book about cancer. But this is not a Book About Cancer. What makes Stars so beautiful is what has made all of Green's work so wonderful: it is a book about people. I can think of few authors who can put real, true, fascinating characters on the page in real, true, touching interaction quite the way John Green can--and, particularly, young people. Young people whose relationships with their parents, while containing teenage rebellion, are not exclusively made up of slammed doors and shouts of "I HATE YOU!" Young people who fall in love that is not quite the same as older, wiser, adult love but is still true love. Young people who can't quite admit that they don't know everything about life but who still have thoughts and opinions that are interesting and worthwhile. The only thing that makes Green's characters at all unbelievable is their serious book intelligence, but it's just as easy to allow that sixteen-year-old hazel has memorized the entirety of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as it is to allow that fourteen-year-old Juliet uses words like "wherefore" and "apace" (the latter of which, coincidentally, is also a favorite of Hazel's) when talking to herself. 

Green's incessantly witty way with words is, of course, just as present as always. Stars is irreverantly laugh-out-loud funny, exactly what one would expect from the writer who responded to winning an Edgar award by making a video about all the goofy things that can be done with a bust of Edgar Allen Poe (watch it here). But it's also full of some great new quality, some glittering charm I've never quite noticed in Looking For Alaska or And Abundance of Katherines. Stars charms its way right into you so adorably, so subtly that the moments you feel it are not the moments you would expect. This is not a Nicholas Sparks novel. It is not building you up with romantic joy that obviously leads to getting dropped off of the emotional cliff of a barely pre-funeral wedding. This is the closest thing to the real emotional journey of loving someone who is very sick that I have ever come across. Accordingly, the moments that kill are not the moments you'd expect to kill. They are sudden, unexpected bursts of humanity, like the three little boys who dance their circles around Hazel.

Every one of John Green's stories has changed my life a little. And none quite like The Fault In Our Stars.