Franzen: s/d

'the corrections' has moments of persuasive clarity, i still sometimes think abt his description of brooklyn in 2002 as 'just like philadelphia but with manahattan right next door' i think he does a good job of illustrating the way some kinds of people see the world as working, 'freedomland' is so much worse because his way of seeing the world in 2010 was a lot less clear and less insightful, hes way too turned inwards at this point i think, dreaming about 1910 and mistaking advertising for peoples dream lives or w/e

hes a p repulsive person tho

was just going to say how no one mentions the Corrections being v funny, checked, pinefox got there first.

its ok funny. its as funny as a medium to good terry pratchett

i thought this thread revive wd be for THE KRAUS PROJECT, BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

Want to read some Kraus. A Penguin Classic of his writings keeps being pushed back (currently scheduled for Feb 2015, aaargh). Would rather wait for this than one with Franzen blather all over it, plus him taking all the cover credit.

Compare http://cache1.bdcdn.net/assets/images/book/large/9780/1411/9780141180960.jpg
with http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00CCUB9N8.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

If he wrote persuasively about his forebears and loves I might take him seriously as a crank.

xpost otm, i've been wanting to check out kraus, but i think i'll wait for the penguin book.

what would be good is if the franzen version flopped and they decided there was no market for kraus

what's going to be in the penguin? by the looks of it the contents will be pretty different.

and neither seems to have anything that's been available in english (though i haven't cracked the one collection in a while, the one that's got 'last days' and 'in these great times' and who knows what else in it).

the franzen translations are banking pretty hard on franzen's name - a book in english with essays about heine and nestroy (!!!) is the exact opposite of a winning financial proposition

Really crying out for a decent Karl Kraus paperback. Not quite the same thing (or time) but he sounds like he could as fun as Hazlitt.

Really hilarious piece by Franzen on Kraus in The Guardian - a paper that can't stop covering Apple and Twitter and Facebook bullshit all day long. Just invalidated the whole piece, making it even more incoherent than it was.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/karl-kraus-torch-song-vienna/?pagination=false

Excellent piece. Do trust Hofmann's judgement, by and large (he likes what I like). Not that I should be trusting anybody..

Me too, although I don't agree with his almost rage-like hatred of Stefan Zweig

“Just when you’re thinking you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands.”

— Jonathan Franzen

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByfW-6CIYAAFbne.png

uh didn't he already write a book that did that

sure, but now someone else is writing another one

met a nice avian at a party tonite who demurred at pynchon but enthusiastically boosted this chap and his corrections

lol I mean, no

reasonable effort but i challenge u to create the most condescending post

o fuck off

that do

fwiw we bonded over dickens, and I'm wasted, and go fuck yourself, what the fuck happened, u used to be chill but for the last year or so str8 up asshole

wait was that not a joke? i honestly thought it was! but good lord

met a nice avian at a party tonite who demurred at pynchon but enthusiastically boosted this chap and his corrections

lol I mean, no

ffs

ur collectively gonna have to do more than that to win me over to team franzen

only posted here coz someone recommended him to me & by some coincidence the thread was bumped. ignore me, I know nothing and am shitfaced. just seemed to me a weird preference but I've only seen Franzen in extract form so w/e he might be great. don't saddle me with c
condescending tho ffs, it is simply preferences in isolation

lol fair enough as i am also hammered

Kathy Acker got there first:

"Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described “Purity” as a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The story centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who doesn’t know who her father is and sets out to uncover his identity. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and hinges on the mystery of Pip’s family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower."

TIME Magazine cover to come

http://bookriot.com/2015/02/14/jonathan-franzen-parody/

JF: Really. Well, I don’t spend time on those media, and you can see why. Why would I want to go there? To some extent I feel it means I’m doing my job, which is to try to tell the truth. You know, no prophet is welcome in his homeland. If I am indeed a polarizing figure here, it is certainly true that I am not a polarizing figure in Europe.

http://booth.butler.edu/2015/02/13/a-conversation-with-jonathan-franzen/

dude's a prophet.

Bad answer, but the question was kind of crappy to begin with. I don't know what a gracious answer to this would be:

SL: You do seem to be, amongst writers, a polarizing figure. I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems to be that you are the writer other writers love to hate. Why do you think this is?

Best thing probably would have been to not answer.

Jonathan Franzen, arguably the best living American novelist

What's to argue?

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mislaid-an-interview-with-nell-zink/

in case like me you are liable to see franzen blurbs and become suspicious

3:AM: It’s well known than Jonathan Franzen wanted to promote your book, but were there challenges in that?

NZ: There’s the challenge that I’d get lost in the shuffle, but then I was coming from having absolutely no reputation at all, good, bad, or otherwise.

It was certainly very helpful to have this connection with him because he’s sort of click bait. When people write about me they’ll find a way to mention him so they can tag their post with his name.

The net effect has been very positive. I mean it’s not like I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Franzen fan. People who are sceptical about his work might think, “Oh, she sounds so interesting, but if Franzen likes her she must secretly be really square.” I can understand that, I really can.

I think of stuff like Freedom as deeply reactionary work. But I’ve been hammering on his head for a while and I think [Franzen’s next novel] Purity is different. Probably Purity will be a flop or something. But I think in Purity he stretches out a little bit and you see that he does have occasional critical thoughts about how the world works, and he’s not just trying to get families back together. Because family’s much more important than anything in the whole wide world… There’s a little more to him than that.

Pretty suspicious of Nell Zinc, tbh.

The Wallcreeper was really good

really? ok. i might take a look. she comes across like a grumpy teenager in interviews.

his new yorker piece about bird preservation and climate change was very nearly the worst thing I remember reading in that magazine

I liked his short story in the summer fiction issue

Yeah, her interviews would put me off, too, as would the Franzen connection, but fortunately I read The Wallcreeper before I knew about any of that stuff

my hero:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/21/jonathan-franzen-considered-adopting-iraqi-orphan-young-people

didn't think my hatred for this middlebrow bas' could grow any further.

Franzen getting sonned on twitter is not exactly a rare occurrence but I still love this:

But he insisted: “I’m not a sexist. I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior, or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women’s work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It’s like there’s no way to make myself not male.”

Speaking about a character in his forthcoming novel, Purity – a fanatical feminist who, among other things, forces her husband to urinate sitting down on the toilet to atone for his maleness – Franzen predicted that she would enrage his critics; in fact, she already has. “After all these years we finally get to read a man’s take on feminism,” tweeted the Canadian writer Anne Thériault. “Bless you and the hard work you do, Mr Franzen.”

i urinate sitting down on the toilet at night so as not to make too much noise because of an ilx post by roxymuzak

that known man-hater, roxymuzak.

i don't think he was meaning that, although i may be wrong.

oh no, i'm very keen on roxy, it was not a slight on her or flopson, i was just being silly.

apologies.

michiko likes it - http://nyti.ms/1KI5cww

Just glanced at Grantland takedown somebody posted on FB that seems pretty otm