Terry Gross with Jonathan Franzen

TERRY GROSS: A lot of people think we look very similar, would you care to comment on that?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, you do sort of look like a man; no offense, and I’m dating a feminist, so we’re on the same team here. Most women have long hair and softer features, which is where the problem is. I just think Americans really need to step back and realize it’s not all about capitalism and gender. My new novel Freedom aims to expose the underbelly and subconscious of the American pathos.

TERRY GROSS: Thanks, that was really touching — speaking of which, what am I hearing under the table?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, I’m under contractual agreement with my publishers to “pound away at [my] future,” and this moment I’m focusing on DNA.

TERRY GROSS: Gross.

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Franzen.

Harold Bloom on Charlie Rose

The top ten list just released [left] is almost identical as last year’s [right], except University of Massachusetts Amherst was dropped, replaced by Syracuse University. If you care about your future, the drive will take you approximately 4 hours and 23 minutes. If you have to cry in the car, please roll down the windows, as your tears will evaporate quicker. A good place to hide acid tabs should you be pulled over is under your eyelids. A good place to blow someone is America. The best way to get there:

University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003

1.	Head west		492 ft
2.	Turn right toward Commonwealth Ave		226 ft
3.	Turn right toward Commonwealth Ave		492 ft
4.	Turn left at Commonwealth Ave		0.3 mi
5.	Take the 1st right onto Massachusetts Ave		0.1 mi
6.	Continue onto N032		0.1 mi
7.	Continue onto N Hadley Rd		0.3 mi
8.	Merge onto MA-116 S via the ramp to I-91		1.9 mi
9.	Turn right at MA-9 W/Russell St		4.7 mi
10.	Turn left to merge onto I-91 S		12.9 mi
11.	Take exit 14 toward I-90/Mass Pike/Boston/Albany Ny		0.5 mi
12.	Merge onto W Springfield		0.4 mi
13.	Take the I-90/Mass. Pike ramp to Boston/Albany Ny		0.2 mi
14.	Keep right at the fork, follow signs for I-90 W/Albany and merge onto I-90 W Entering New York		63.2 mi
15.	Continue onto Ny St Thruway Berkshire Extd		5.9 mi
16.	Continue onto Berkshire Ext Ny Thruway		0.8 mi
17.	Take exit 22-61 to merge onto I-87 N toward I-90/Albany/Buffalo		14.1 mi
18.	Continue onto Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway/New York State Thruway		1.3 mi
19.	Merge onto I-90 W		127 mi
20.	Take exit 34A to merge onto I-481 S toward Syracuse		3.6 mi
21.	Take the exit onto I-690 W		4.8 mi
22.	Take exit 13 for Townsend St toward Downtown		0.2 mi
23.	Merge onto Browa St		30 ft
24.	Turn left at N Townsend St		0.3 mi
25.	Turn left at E Genesee St		0.4 mi
26.	Turn right at Irving Ave		0.4 mi
27.	Turn left at Waverly Ave		312 ft
28.	Take the 1st right onto S Crouse Ave		266 ft

Syracuse University 900 S Crouse Ave Syracuse, New York 13210

Interstate 90 will take you 127 miles west. Go ahead, play some Sufjan Stevens, we understand. For those of your short on time and medium on cash, here are some flight options:

Don’t spend too much on this MFA, is what Expedia might have said. The closest airport leaving Amherst is in Connecticut because life is complicated that way. Flights are leaving this Friday. There is little time to pack — just put your extra baggage in some larger baggage. Tentatively store all shoulder chips in a sock. Get rid of Against the Day, time to buy a real ottoman when you get to Syracuse. Before you arrive, you’ll need to slow the fuck down, dress like a lifeguard not prepared to enter water, and talk like this guy:

That was Seth Abramson, he came up with the list two years in a row. Expect this to happen every year until we outsource English to India (ironic, no?).

When you arrive Syracuse, you will then be greeted by George Saunders, the brave face of their faculty page. You may notice a blurriness in your peripheral vision; that is called “Looking at Guy Published in The New Yorker Envy.” It’s okay, ENVY+ EGO are the two ‘E’s in SUCCEED. You sorta subconsciously went to graduate school to escape ennui, and to meet more interesting and type-A personality people. Real life is the best dating website. This will be your boyfriend in three weeks:

He’s into capital-R Realism, except when it’s time to do laundry. You two exchange drafts, each opening a window on opposite ends of the house. He breaks up with you in 1.5 years, citing artistic differences. He writes a novella about you and you’re insulted it’s not longer (he never could commit). You finally get a cat, the MFA, move to [insert nearest metropolitan city], and send out CVs for the next two months until your savings run out. Borders is hiring. You join the “Inventory Process Team,” as what you presume to be an “Inventory Processor,” spending all day fingering the spines of books that your book should really be. It’s okay, really, there is a point to everything, like the tip of a shiny pristine sword →

Using the clone stamp in Photoshop, artist Paul Pheiffer, in his digital print and video work, meticulously erases — or more accurately, imposes background space onto — surrounding areas, leaving one sole basketball player suspended in air without any context of ball, net, or other players. The result is uncanny and stunning, and initially brought to mind the Crucifixion, whose main character is also abstracted in front of a spectacle. The jersey design and player number have been removed, perhaps in wishful allegiance to John Lennon’s imagining that there were no teams or corporate sponsors. Galleries and sports stadiums function as modern churches, a place of worship [see related post]. Last night looking over this series entitled “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (ongoing, which began ten years ago), I was suddenly reminded of the lynchings against blacks, like a rope photoshopped out of our minds.

To make this simply about race would be too easy — and unfair to Pheiffer, who I think was more interested in the choreography and “frozen” aesthetics of basketball, among other sports (he also works with boxing) — but I can’t help thinking about the mythologies surrounding blacks in America, a kind of subversive one-way obsession whites have been having with “them,” from slavery onwards to ostensibly “freer” vocations like sports or rap, a more oblique slavery of economics and perceived opportunity.

In the Bible, “The Four Horsemen” are harbingers of the Last Judgment (and I shall add that the white horse is Conquest; the black horse Famine). The whole point is God is judge, not man — though our friends seen in the crowd have taken on such burden. Modern Christians have a knack for completely shitting on their book.

In Photoshop, there is an action “Erase to History,” in which the eraser, constrained from erasing the unified image, only exposes the layer underneath. With commands undo vs. step backwards and delete vs. delete permanently, our actions, impulsive or not, are chronically penultimate, always given another chance, never truly trusted to commit. Perhaps we made some bad decisions in the past, and our collective subconsciousness has us safely on a leash: tied, not hanging, to a tree. To “flatten” an image in Photoshop is to consolidate all the layers into its ultimate image. One can never go back. Most of the lynchings took place from after the Civil War to 1890, though the picture before us was taken as late as 1920. It’s too bad we don’t have an “Erase History” option. Some photos would look a lot nicer.

[More Phieffer images: here, here, and here]

This morning I was listening to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” on my headphones sitting outside drinking coffee, a 56-minute commitment to listen to in its entirety. The score is recorded live in one take; the instruments played so uncharacteristically that they sound put through a sequencer. Much of Reich’s music is about timbre, acoustic capacities, and the melodic “negative space” between syncopated notes. When some bass clarinets came in pulsing thick and strong, I felt deep droning reverberations in my chest cavity, so visceral it was, so moved by the spiritual score  — until I realized a large truck approaching behind me, shaking the ground, its driver the 19th musician.

II.

Once in college, flipping through an Agnes Martin monograph, I noticed the faintest “blur” emitting from within a painting; so subtle, its boundaries unperceptible, only felt. Martin, in my mind, is a mathematical abstract expressionist, her work evoking the palpable presence of the forms through a system of grids made by either monochrome tonal shifts or by a methodical invented syntax of tiny marks. Her work is about harmony through human imperfection, of things seen vs. felt.  The blur — or, more great, the evocation of a blur — was a complete success, an epiphany, until I flipped to the next page and realized that the blur was simply a darker painting on the other side of the page.

III.

Those of you born before ~c. 1980 will remember the Walkman/cassette tape, and how the latter plays when the former is running low on batteries. One night in 1988, so excited to have just bought Van Halen’s “OU812″, I listened to the first half of Side A at around ~20% normal speed, convinced that the ponderous incomprehensible drones caused by the weakening barely moving spindles were the band’s brave venture into the avante-garde. I thought “Jesus, these guys are really pushing the envelope,” slightly annoyed, yet impressed, by the pretentiousness. It occurred to me, about 20 minutes into this avante s l o w n e s s, that my batteries were running out.

IV.

When I was 15 or so, I had a weird growth, the size and feel of a milk dud, in my left nipple. Fearing it was a cancer tumor, my mom took me to the doctor, who simply attributed the growth to puberty. Around two weeks later, my dad, a neurotic who can’t stand traffic jams and pretty much anything else, drove past the jam on the shoulder of the road for half a mile until we were pulled over by a cop. (We were going to Macy’s or something.) My dad, a semi-quick thinker, told the cop he was rushing me to the hospital because I had nipple cancer — placing the entire verity of his case on the growth in my nipple, and invited the cop to see for himself. The cop (looking back, I feel molested), removed his leather gloves, came around to the passenger’s window (which I was instructed to roll down), and leaned over to inspect my nipple using a series of  surprisingly thoughtful pinches. His diagnosis was that I had cancer, and we were set free.

—

Faith is not possible without doubt, however dumb that faith is. I’m glad these things happened, that they continue to happen. I used to wipe my ass pulling the toilet paper and residual fecal matter forward over my balls; until circa 1985 I had “brown balls,” literally. Confusion is the spice of life, ignorance is a muse. Smear your shit everywhere, and best of luck.

How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself.   — Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)

As evasive her “one” pronoun dance is, Murdoch rings clear a concern and problem for many writers (concern for the cognizant, problem for the oblivious), that the writer, at the height of their creation, is not creating, but merely transcribing their experience veiled as character.

Lamont Library, Harvard

Instead of ivy, mold crawls on the walls of my education. Of the eight Ivy League universities’ mottos, Harvard and Yale’s include “truth,” and Brown and Princeton employ “God.” My favorite is Darmouth’s, which speaks of a crying voice in the wilderness (probably referring to freshmen year in the dorms). In addition to Statistics 101, kids returning library books at Harvard are met with a lesson in the highly improbable. Graduating from where I did with the degree I did was my own lesson in the highly improbable, namely, a good career. I masochistically look forward to The Social Network, which partially takes place at Harvard. The first google suggestion for facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, besides his name, is “Mark Zuckerberg Girlfriend” — for success is not just measured at the bank, but by the lady next to you, her breasts and your eyes ideally pointing towards the same bright future.

Do I seem bitter? I keep telling myself less is more (less education, less money, less love, less sex, less furniture, less hair, etc), but all this quasi-zen might be just some defense for an empty life. At the end of the path of least resistance lie excuses, a heap of ‘em. Thank god for my internet — the age of excess morphed into the age of access, wi-fi that is. I had a facebook account once, but couldn’t stand the people from high school — our mutual unactualization, slow swelling of face, and promises left in the towns we’re from, the prison of a zip code.

The thing about walls is that there are always two sides, and the only difference is who’s outside and in. The thing about signs is that they are usually true. Pull. Push. Pull. Push. Until babies are born.

I have a fake alias facebook account with no friends or profile that I use to troll people’s walls and photo albums. People trying to look happy always look so sad; people who look sad always look worse; people who look ugly fair well under low resolution; people who look beautiful always seem cruel. The world is Midvale. For those of you taking Statistics 101 this fall, I guess that means smile.