August 13th, 2010 / 1:34 pm
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Jonathan Franzen: Discuss.
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Meta
“A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif.”
Lev Grossman’s lead sucks. Gonna go read the rest now.
“A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif.”
Lev Grossman’s lead sucks. Gonna go read the rest now.
The title to the article bugs me. He’s not the only novelist and he’s not a great american novelist. Those quibbles aside, I really like Franzen’s writing. I loved The Corrections and i don’t know why.
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY is still a pretty amazing feat as far as debut novels go. STRONG MOTION has its moments, but seems, in retrospect, way too cutesy (not the same as “cute,” which need not be inevitably problematic.) Have never read THE CORRECTIONS.
That he needs to shit on other writers to assuage the guilt he seems to have regarding his success, that’s lacking in grace, I suppose. Still, I can’t begrudge him his book sales.
Grossman’s synopsis of the last 20 years of the American novel is (“specialization”?), of course, ridiculously simplistic. But this is TIME Magazine, after all… If Franzen is Brubeck, that means they’ll eventually get around to Monk.
The title to the article bugs me. He’s not the only novelist and he’s not a great american novelist. Those quibbles aside, I really like Franzen’s writing. I loved The Corrections and i don’t know why.
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY is still a pretty amazing feat as far as debut novels go. STRONG MOTION has its moments, but seems, in retrospect, way too cutesy (not the same as “cute,” which need not be inevitably problematic.) Have never read THE CORRECTIONS.
That he needs to shit on other writers to assuage the guilt he seems to have regarding his success, that’s lacking in grace, I suppose. Still, I can’t begrudge him his book sales.
Grossman’s synopsis of the last 20 years of the American novel is (“specialization”?), of course, ridiculously simplistic. But this is TIME Magazine, after all… If Franzen is Brubeck, that means they’ll eventually get around to Monk.
“If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up…”?
Really, Lev?
“If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up…”?
Really, Lev?
whoa, he’s 50? he should launch a skincare line.
whoa, he’s 50? he should launch a skincare line.
I know a lot of people complain they couldn’t get through THE CORRECTIONS, but I thought it was a lovely beach/BoltBus read. I don’t know–I’ve never taken him very seriously. The bits of FREEDOM I’ve read haven’t knocked me down. Have been a bit baffled at the tizzys he can kick up.
More excited about McCarthy’s C than anything else in the immediate future.
yawn
I know a lot of people complain they couldn’t get through THE CORRECTIONS, but I thought it was a lovely beach/BoltBus read. I don’t know–I’ve never taken him very seriously. The bits of FREEDOM I’ve read haven’t knocked me down. Have been a bit baffled at the tizzys he can kick up.
More excited about McCarthy’s C than anything else in the immediate future.
yawn
Neither as bad, nor as important, as his detractors claim. Solid craftsman with a highbrow conscience and a middlebrow gift.
Neither as bad, nor as important, as his detractors claim. Solid craftsman with a highbrow conscience and a middlebrow gift.
Overwriter. Metaphor torturer. Self-serving whiner who’s obsessed with setting the conditions under which his bloated novels are greeted. Has never had an original thought or idea. Another faux-self deprecator who wants nothing more than to take his dick out of his shorts and wave it in yr face. Still needs to be punched in the neck for corpse-raping Gaddis.
Overwriter. Metaphor torturer. Self-serving whiner who’s obsessed with setting the conditions under which his bloated novels are greeted. Has never had an original thought or idea. Another faux-self deprecator who wants nothing more than to take his dick out of his shorts and wave it in yr face. Still needs to be punched in the neck for corpse-raping Gaddis.
Indifferent. Is he even relevant today? Just another mid-list writer I’ll never have enough time to read.
Indifferent. Is he even relevant today? Just another mid-list writer I’ll never have enough time to read.
Still can’t shake the image of Neal Pollack wiping his ass during a reading/concert with pages from “The Corrections.” I thought the book was okay.
Still can’t shake the image of Neal Pollack wiping his ass during a reading/concert with pages from “The Corrections.” I thought the book was okay.
I believe Ben Marcus has said a few poignant words about Franzen.
It was published in Harper’s, a few years ago.
I suppose Franzen felt he was safe, in that particular publication, when he made his angry attack upon the horrifying, horrible, literature-killing, reader-killing William Gaddis, and other “experimental” (there’s that word again — might as well call us Punks) writers.
I don’t remember the dates, but Marcus’ awesome response appeared under the title “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It”.
I believe Ben Marcus has said a few poignant words about Franzen.
It was published in Harper’s, a few years ago.
I suppose Franzen felt he was safe, in that particular publication, when he made his angry attack upon the horrifying, horrible, literature-killing, reader-killing William Gaddis, and other “experimental” (there’s that word again — might as well call us Punks) writers.
I don’t remember the dates, but Marcus’ awesome response appeared under the title “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It”.
I’m so sick of reading about Franzen, and him explaining how he’s a great ‘lit-e-rary’ novelist, and him complaining about how unappreciated he is, when clearly, he’s one of our most overrated novelists. You can almost see the constipated look on his face as he struggles to inject a sense of import to his benign little domestic tales. (From Strong Motion, describing a street: “blah, blah, blah…there blew the smell of fat.” From The Corrections: a tortured, tortured, metaphor linking porn to capitalism: the woman as meat product, processed by a man’s “tool”)…
I mean…really?
It’s all made worse by his extremely Photoshopped photos. Wah, capitalism sucks — now make me into a male model to hock my wares!
In summary: Boooooo!
I’m so sick of reading about Franzen, and him explaining how he’s a great ‘lit-e-rary’ novelist, and him complaining about how unappreciated he is, when clearly, he’s one of our most overrated novelists. You can almost see the constipated look on his face as he struggles to inject a sense of import to his benign little domestic tales. (From Strong Motion, describing a street: “blah, blah, blah…there blew the smell of fat.” From The Corrections: a tortured, tortured, metaphor linking porn to capitalism: the woman as meat product, processed by a man’s “tool”)…
I mean…really?
It’s all made worse by his extremely Photoshopped photos. Wah, capitalism sucks — now make me into a male model to hock my wares!
In summary: Boooooo!
My two cents is here:
http://www.blackbookmag.com/article/jonathan-franzen/21424
My two cents is here:
http://www.blackbookmag.com/article/jonathan-franzen/21424
I have a bunch of theories of why he is so enthusiastically loved and hated.
I have a bunch of theories of why he is so enthusiastically loved and hated.
The only Franzen I’ve read: a few essays from How to be Alone. I appreciated some of his viewpoints but wasn’t especially impressed with his writing itself.
Lev Grossman’s article, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. Is this really what makes it as cover-worthy material in Time?
The only Franzen I’ve read: a few essays from How to be Alone. I appreciated some of his viewpoints but wasn’t especially impressed with his writing itself.
Lev Grossman’s article, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. Is this really what makes it as cover-worthy material in Time?
Our next topic: Rick Moody.
Our next topic: Rick Moody.
yeah, that article is notably bad. It’s almost like he hasn’t even read Freedom, just the flap copy.
yeah, that article is notably bad. It’s almost like he hasn’t even read Freedom, just the flap copy.
New Steinbeck?
I actually think that essays are a better fit for him. There’s something about his sentences; they can be beautiful, but at the same time, unimaginative, they have a textbook feel. If he’d just ditch the ‘tude, he’d be a stellar magazine writer.
New Steinbeck?
I actually think that essays are a better fit for him. There’s something about his sentences; they can be beautiful, but at the same time, unimaginative, they have a textbook feel. If he’d just ditch the ‘tude, he’d be a stellar magazine writer.
here’s the article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775
here’s the article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775
My favorite was when he was on Morning Joe the other day to discuss the book. No one had read the book (except him, maybe?) and the only thing everyone could wrap their head around was how LARGE it was. How BRAVE it was to write such a LONG, LARGE book in an age of Twitter and Facebook.
My favorite was when he was on Morning Joe the other day to discuss the book. No one had read the book (except him, maybe?) and the only thing everyone could wrap their head around was how LARGE it was. How BRAVE it was to write such a LONG, LARGE book in an age of Twitter and Facebook.
Lev Grossman has an active imagination
I think that’s actually a fantastic comparison. (And I really like Steinbeck, despite myself. Just like Franzen, actually.)
Lev Grossman has an active imagination
I think that’s actually a fantastic comparison. (And I really like Steinbeck, despite myself. Just like Franzen, actually.)
I’m pretty sure I put down Rev Casey as the fictional character I most identified with on one of my college applications my senior year of high school.
Good Lord I was an earnest little idealistic fucktard.
I’m pretty sure I put down Rev Casey as the fictional character I most identified with on one of my college applications my senior year of high school.
Good Lord I was an earnest little idealistic fucktard.
That’s the one: thanks, Tim.
That’s the one: thanks, Tim.
Tim, for some reason that just made my day.
I became an idealistic little fucktard because of Steinbeck–I went to college armed with my new Democratic Socialism membership card. Er. I’m not a member any more, but some deity or other bless Steinbeck just the same.
Tim, for some reason that just made my day.
I became an idealistic little fucktard because of Steinbeck–I went to college armed with my new Democratic Socialism membership card. Er. I’m not a member any more, but some deity or other bless Steinbeck just the same.
Shittiest lead I’ve read in a long time.
Shittiest lead I’ve read in a long time.
I really wanted to dig TWENTY-SEVENTH but found it to be a plot-driven mess. My hopes were high after CORRECTIONS, and I admired him for not taking the classic first-novelist route of autobiographical least resistance, which is what I expected given that it is set in St. Louis. I was into it at first–the sheer weirdness of it, the intricacy of the conspiracy and the notion of Indian politics infiltrating the American midwest. But it quickly felt like it had jettisoned Franzen’s signature strength of psychological exploration. Can you explain what you found the feat to be?
I really wanted to dig TWENTY-SEVENTH but found it to be a plot-driven mess. My hopes were high after CORRECTIONS, and I admired him for not taking the classic first-novelist route of autobiographical least resistance, which is what I expected given that it is set in St. Louis. I was into it at first–the sheer weirdness of it, the intricacy of the conspiracy and the notion of Indian politics infiltrating the American midwest. But it quickly felt like it had jettisoned Franzen’s signature strength of psychological exploration. Can you explain what you found the feat to be?
“A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif.”
Lev Grossman’s lead sucks. Gonna go read the rest now.
The title to the article bugs me. He’s not the only novelist and he’s not a great american novelist. Those quibbles aside, I really like Franzen’s writing. I loved The Corrections and i don’t know why.
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY is still a pretty amazing feat as far as debut novels go. STRONG MOTION has its moments, but seems, in retrospect, way too cutesy (not the same as “cute,” which need not be inevitably problematic.) Have never read THE CORRECTIONS.
That he needs to shit on other writers to assuage the guilt he seems to have regarding his success, that’s lacking in grace, I suppose. Still, I can’t begrudge him his book sales.
Grossman’s synopsis of the last 20 years of the American novel is (“specialization”?), of course, ridiculously simplistic. But this is TIME Magazine, after all… If Franzen is Brubeck, that means they’ll eventually get around to Monk.
Purple America is better than anything Franzen has written.
Purple America is better than anything Franzen has written.
Franzen always struck me as trying too hard on the page. For some reason there’s a disconnect between his work and my reading of it. It could be me, probably me.
There’s a great conversation with Charlie Rose, DFW, Mark Leyner & Franzen:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6191
If you watch the clip it also seems like Franzen is trying too hard in the interview, too. There are a couple of beats where DFW visibly cringes after Franzen pontificates.
Slightly unrelated: Whatever happened to Mark Leyner? He was my hero when I first started reading.
Franzen always struck me as trying too hard on the page. For some reason there’s a disconnect between his work and my reading of it. It could be me, probably me.
There’s a great conversation with Charlie Rose, DFW, Mark Leyner & Franzen:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6191
If you watch the clip it also seems like Franzen is trying too hard in the interview, too. There are a couple of beats where DFW visibly cringes after Franzen pontificates.
Slightly unrelated: Whatever happened to Mark Leyner? He was my hero when I first started reading.
I loved the Corrections as well when I first read it, and while I can see its limitations more starkly now because of much of what I’ve read since, I think it holds up. Franzen’s stance on “difficult writers” was ludicrous, and for that statement he deserved the skewering Marcus gave him (though I feel he bore a bit too much of the brunt of representing the forces that marginalize the experimental, which is another issue). More interesting to me than Franzen’s dismissal of Gaddis is the debt he pays outwardly to Delillo; clearly he thinks about his sentences in a way comparable to how Delillo does, and his and if I poke around into why I liked the novel so much I think that nails it.
I loved the Corrections as well when I first read it, and while I can see its limitations more starkly now because of much of what I’ve read since, I think it holds up. Franzen’s stance on “difficult writers” was ludicrous, and for that statement he deserved the skewering Marcus gave him (though I feel he bore a bit too much of the brunt of representing the forces that marginalize the experimental, which is another issue). More interesting to me than Franzen’s dismissal of Gaddis is the debt he pays outwardly to Delillo; clearly he thinks about his sentences in a way comparable to how Delillo does, and his and if I poke around into why I liked the novel so much I think that nails it.
“If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up…”?
Really, Lev?
whoa, he’s 50? he should launch a skincare line.
Oh yes.
Oh yes.
I know a lot of people complain they couldn’t get through THE CORRECTIONS, but I thought it was a lovely beach/BoltBus read. I don’t know–I’ve never taken him very seriously. The bits of FREEDOM I’ve read haven’t knocked me down. Have been a bit baffled at the tizzys he can kick up.
More excited about McCarthy’s C than anything else in the immediate future.
yawn
Neither as bad, nor as important, as his detractors claim. Solid craftsman with a highbrow conscience and a middlebrow gift.
Great clip
Great clip
DFW smells blood at 11:59 and Franzen trembles
DFW smells blood at 11:59 and Franzen trembles
“compared even to the internet”
“compared even to the internet”
Someone should transcribe this clip and turn it into a play… the sandpaper handjobs and geek innuendo are exhilarating
That’s an interesting clip. Thanks for bringing that up, Ridge.
For all my past criticisms of DFW’s fiction… I can never help but respect this guy’s intelligence.
Now, Mark Leyner (ugh), on the other hand . . . says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction because he’s afraid of influence . . . so he only reads nonfiction and old fiction, in other words material that is by its very nature incapable of informing the sort of writing that he is trying to do (and, judging my his writing, I’m still not entirely sure myself what he’s trying to do, aside from ‘delight his readers’)… and therefore incapable of feeding his writing, of allowing him grow, artistically.
Now, if you wanted to take him and define him by what he reads: he’s not at all writing what interests him . . . unless in fact he masturbates to his own writing, imagining he’s the only writer in the Western World doing anything capable of delighting a modern audience.
Perhaps somewhere in here is the answer to what his problem is.
The only thumbs-up I’ll give to Franzen is pointing out that Mark Leyner doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, feels or thinks about art or what he wants from art.
Someone should transcribe this clip and turn it into a play… the sandpaper handjobs and geek innuendo are exhilarating
That’s an interesting clip. Thanks for bringing that up, Ridge.
For all my past criticisms of DFW’s fiction… I can never help but respect this guy’s intelligence.
Now, Mark Leyner (ugh), on the other hand . . . says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction because he’s afraid of influence . . . so he only reads nonfiction and old fiction, in other words material that is by its very nature incapable of informing the sort of writing that he is trying to do (and, judging my his writing, I’m still not entirely sure myself what he’s trying to do, aside from ‘delight his readers’)… and therefore incapable of feeding his writing, of allowing him grow, artistically.
Now, if you wanted to take him and define him by what he reads: he’s not at all writing what interests him . . . unless in fact he masturbates to his own writing, imagining he’s the only writer in the Western World doing anything capable of delighting a modern audience.
Perhaps somewhere in here is the answer to what his problem is.
The only thumbs-up I’ll give to Franzen is pointing out that Mark Leyner doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, feels or thinks about art or what he wants from art.
“compared even to the internet”
Which got a nice WTF look
“says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction”
…which started as a counter-attack after DFW posited himself as the inevitable post-Leyner/Franzen evolutionary step in fiction (laugh)… but Leyner chickened out. DFW was at full strength; Franzen was tip-toeing around him, too
“compared even to the internet”
Which got a nice WTF look
“says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction”
…which started as a counter-attack after DFW posited himself as the inevitable post-Leyner/Franzen evolutionary step in fiction (laugh)… but Leyner chickened out. DFW was at full strength; Franzen was tip-toeing around him, too
Something’s active, anyway.
Something’s active, anyway.
But where DeLillo towers over Franzen is his ability to let his subconscious work the text; DeLillo doesn’t outline/storyboard the novels and you know that Franzen does. DeLillo is part impressionist, part 60s jazz guy and part Spooky Medium (when he’s not parodying himself as he did in bits of Falling Man or The Body Artist) but Franzen is too “professional” to let his nightmind do its thing. I read The Corrections because I had no choice (trans-Atlantic flight; it was either that or Home Alone 2 or whatever) and I have not once had the urge to re-read. Whereas I’ve gone through Underworld maybe 5 or 6 times, now (hard to calculate because after the first three read-throughs I started doing it almanac style) and I’ll probably do it again. There’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo… and that’s beyond Franzen’s abilities. Franzen’s just a writer.
But where DeLillo towers over Franzen is his ability to let his subconscious work the text; DeLillo doesn’t outline/storyboard the novels and you know that Franzen does. DeLillo is part impressionist, part 60s jazz guy and part Spooky Medium (when he’s not parodying himself as he did in bits of Falling Man or The Body Artist) but Franzen is too “professional” to let his nightmind do its thing. I read The Corrections because I had no choice (trans-Atlantic flight; it was either that or Home Alone 2 or whatever) and I have not once had the urge to re-read. Whereas I’ve gone through Underworld maybe 5 or 6 times, now (hard to calculate because after the first three read-throughs I started doing it almanac style) and I’ll probably do it again. There’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo… and that’s beyond Franzen’s abilities. Franzen’s just a writer.
Program for capturing this clip (sometimes the free ware version only records 75% of the artifact): http://www.applian.com/download-videos/
Program for capturing this clip (sometimes the free ware version only records 75% of the artifact): http://www.applian.com/download-videos/
That’s damn good. Marcus destroys him.
That’s damn good. Marcus destroys him.
Ha ha, you watch Morning Joe!
Ha ha, you watch Morning Joe!
Heh….
Franzen, meet Marcus.
Heh….
Franzen, meet Marcus.
Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.
On an island, Franzen would be Diddy and DFW would be Suge.
Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.
On an island, Franzen would be Diddy and DFW would be Suge.
Steven: Nice assessment in your last paragraph, there. You’re right. The other two really did look intimidated by Wallace (with very good reason, of course, as we all know)
I’m still not sure what Leyner was doing on that panel. Well… I take that back. I think I DO know, and I don’t like it. (In other words: I think it has to do with how people who aren’t well-informed on ‘nontraditional’ literary art (as much as I respect Charlie Rose) perceive the ‘world’ of ‘nontraditional’ literary art.)
Steven: Nice assessment in your last paragraph, there. You’re right. The other two really did look intimidated by Wallace (with very good reason, of course, as we all know)
I’m still not sure what Leyner was doing on that panel. Well… I take that back. I think I DO know, and I don’t like it. (In other words: I think it has to do with how people who aren’t well-informed on ‘nontraditional’ literary art (as much as I respect Charlie Rose) perceive the ‘world’ of ‘nontraditional’ literary art.)
“Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.”
Fucking exactly but after I noticed the error I didn’t want to re-post
“Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.”
Fucking exactly but after I noticed the error I didn’t want to re-post
Addendum: I probably shouldn’t be picking particularly on certain writers, but honesty has always been one of my fatal flaws, and to be . . . well . . . to be honest: there really are VERY few writers who get under my skin. Very few. Franzen is NOT one of them. Nor is Rick Moody, of course. I don’t have any especially strong opinions in regard to either one or their work.
But Mark Leyner just happens to be one of those very few people whose name, at its very mention, makes my skin crawl.
So… sorry, don’t mean to be overly critical.
Owen:
Either that or Rose is secretly very hip to it and tossed come Leynerburger to the DFW-shark because he knew it would make good TV. But… nah. I think your assessment is right on (that big solo interview Charlie did with DFW was chock full of awkward WTFisms)
I find Mark Leyner to be absolutely unreadable.
Overwriter. Metaphor torturer. Self-serving whiner who’s obsessed with setting the conditions under which his bloated novels are greeted. Has never had an original thought or idea. Another faux-self deprecator who wants nothing more than to take his dick out of his shorts and wave it in yr face. Still needs to be punched in the neck for corpse-raping Gaddis.
Indifferent. Is he even relevant today? Just another mid-list writer I’ll never have enough time to read.
Still can’t shake the image of Neal Pollack wiping his ass during a reading/concert with pages from “The Corrections.” I thought the book was okay.
I believe Ben Marcus has said a few poignant words about Franzen.
It was published in Harper’s, a few years ago.
I suppose Franzen felt he was safe, in that particular publication, when he made his angry attack upon the horrifying, horrible, literature-killing, reader-killing William Gaddis, and other “experimental” (there’s that word again — might as well call us Punks) writers.
I don’t remember the dates, but Marcus’ awesome response appeared under the title “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It”.
I’m so sick of reading about Franzen, and him explaining how he’s a great ‘lit-e-rary’ novelist, and him complaining about how unappreciated he is, when clearly, he’s one of our most overrated novelists. You can almost see the constipated look on his face as he struggles to inject a sense of import to his benign little domestic tales. (From Strong Motion, describing a street: “blah, blah, blah…there blew the smell of fat.” From The Corrections: a tortured, tortured, metaphor linking porn to capitalism: the woman as meat product, processed by a man’s “tool”)…
I mean…really?
It’s all made worse by his extremely Photoshopped photos. Wah, capitalism sucks — now make me into a male model to hock my wares!
In summary: Boooooo!
Damn I’m glad I read this post.
“Probability-space between every word” is a perfect way of putting it.
This is exactly how I feel about Franzen as a writer. He’s alright, and sometimes his work makes me laugh. But as a person he seems unbearable, and as an Author he has an entirely overblown view of his own “importance.” I will not be buying Freedom.
My two cents is here:
http://www.blackbookmag.com/article/jonathan-franzen/21424
I have a bunch of theories of why he is so enthusiastically loved and hated.
The only Franzen I’ve read: a few essays from How to be Alone. I appreciated some of his viewpoints but wasn’t especially impressed with his writing itself.
Lev Grossman’s article, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. Is this really what makes it as cover-worthy material in Time?
Our next topic: Rick Moody.
yeah, that article is notably bad. It’s almost like he hasn’t even read Freedom, just the flap copy.
New Steinbeck?
I actually think that essays are a better fit for him. There’s something about his sentences; they can be beautiful, but at the same time, unimaginative, they have a textbook feel. If he’d just ditch the ‘tude, he’d be a stellar magazine writer.
here’s the article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775
My favorite was when he was on Morning Joe the other day to discuss the book. No one had read the book (except him, maybe?) and the only thing everyone could wrap their head around was how LARGE it was. How BRAVE it was to write such a LONG, LARGE book in an age of Twitter and Facebook.
Lev Grossman has an active imagination
I think that’s actually a fantastic comparison. (And I really like Steinbeck, despite myself. Just like Franzen, actually.)
I’m pretty sure I put down Rev Casey as the fictional character I most identified with on one of my college applications my senior year of high school.
Good Lord I was an earnest little idealistic fucktard.
Leyner is a great vocab lesson, though.
That’s the one: thanks, Tim.
Tim, for some reason that just made my day.
I became an idealistic little fucktard because of Steinbeck–I went to college armed with my new Democratic Socialism membership card. Er. I’m not a member any more, but some deity or other bless Steinbeck just the same.
I like “probability space between every word” too but am not sure I get what you’re driving at. Here’s what I’d say: Franzen underscores things I already know about human beings, entertainingly and often lyrically. DeLillo (thanks for the corrections on my spelling) raises the bar higher. He reveals the heretofore unknown–sometimes at the expense of the lyrical, or redefining lyricism to suit his needs. There’s a DeLillo sentence in the way that there isn’t a Franzen sentence, taut, unafraid of the full stop. He uses periods better than almost anyone I can think of. To put it in terms of Blake’s post the other day, it’s harder to pin down influence in DeLillo…Franzen seems like a composite, one with groove and verve at times, but DeLillo more sui generis. “The eventual heat-death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city.” Franzen might invoke the same in dialogue but it would be about the suburbs versus the city and familial choices and parental/filial disappointment, not metaphysical as with DeLillo. There’s enough residual of DeLillo in Franzen–not only in the attention to sentences but in the obsession with mind control, mapping out of the phenomenology of space and objects, the love/hate relationship with jargon, etc., that it proves worthwhile for me.
As for their writing processes, I just don’t know. I recall reading that Franzen writes in the dark ensconced in pink noise. Won’t get you white noise but gets you somewhere.
Shittiest lead I’ve read in a long time.
I really wanted to dig TWENTY-SEVENTH but found it to be a plot-driven mess. My hopes were high after CORRECTIONS, and I admired him for not taking the classic first-novelist route of autobiographical least resistance, which is what I expected given that it is set in St. Louis. I was into it at first–the sheer weirdness of it, the intricacy of the conspiracy and the notion of Indian politics infiltrating the American midwest. But it quickly felt like it had jettisoned Franzen’s signature strength of psychological exploration. Can you explain what you found the feat to be?
Purple America is better than anything Franzen has written.
Franzen always struck me as trying too hard on the page. For some reason there’s a disconnect between his work and my reading of it. It could be me, probably me.
There’s a great conversation with Charlie Rose, DFW, Mark Leyner & Franzen:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6191
If you watch the clip it also seems like Franzen is trying too hard in the interview, too. There are a couple of beats where DFW visibly cringes after Franzen pontificates.
Slightly unrelated: Whatever happened to Mark Leyner? He was my hero when I first started reading.
I loved the Corrections as well when I first read it, and while I can see its limitations more starkly now because of much of what I’ve read since, I think it holds up. Franzen’s stance on “difficult writers” was ludicrous, and for that statement he deserved the skewering Marcus gave him (though I feel he bore a bit too much of the brunt of representing the forces that marginalize the experimental, which is another issue). More interesting to me than Franzen’s dismissal of Gaddis is the debt he pays outwardly to Delillo; clearly he thinks about his sentences in a way comparable to how Delillo does, and his and if I poke around into why I liked the novel so much I think that nails it.
Oh yes.
Great clip
DFW smells blood at 11:59 and Franzen trembles
“compared even to the internet”
Someone should transcribe this clip and turn it into a play… the sandpaper handjobs and geek innuendo are exhilarating
That’s an interesting clip. Thanks for bringing that up, Ridge.
For all my past criticisms of DFW’s fiction… I can never help but respect this guy’s intelligence.
Now, Mark Leyner (ugh), on the other hand . . . says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction because he’s afraid of influence . . . so he only reads nonfiction and old fiction, in other words material that is by its very nature incapable of informing the sort of writing that he is trying to do (and, judging my his writing, I’m still not entirely sure myself what he’s trying to do, aside from ‘delight his readers’)… and therefore incapable of feeding his writing, of allowing him grow, artistically.
Now, if you wanted to take him and define him by what he reads: he’s not at all writing what interests him . . . unless in fact he masturbates to his own writing, imagining he’s the only writer in the Western World doing anything capable of delighting a modern audience.
Perhaps somewhere in here is the answer to what his problem is.
The only thumbs-up I’ll give to Franzen is pointing out that Mark Leyner doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, feels or thinks about art or what he wants from art.
“compared even to the internet”
Which got a nice WTF look
“says he doesn’t read contemporary fiction”
…which started as a counter-attack after DFW posited himself as the inevitable post-Leyner/Franzen evolutionary step in fiction (laugh)… but Leyner chickened out. DFW was at full strength; Franzen was tip-toeing around him, too
Something’s active, anyway.
But where DeLillo towers over Franzen is his ability to let his subconscious work the text; DeLillo doesn’t outline/storyboard the novels and you know that Franzen does. DeLillo is part impressionist, part 60s jazz guy and part Spooky Medium (when he’s not parodying himself as he did in bits of Falling Man or The Body Artist) but Franzen is too “professional” to let his nightmind do its thing. I read The Corrections because I had no choice (trans-Atlantic flight; it was either that or Home Alone 2 or whatever) and I have not once had the urge to re-read. Whereas I’ve gone through Underworld maybe 5 or 6 times, now (hard to calculate because after the first three read-throughs I started doing it almanac style) and I’ll probably do it again. There’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo… and that’s beyond Franzen’s abilities. Franzen’s just a writer.
Program for capturing this clip (sometimes the free ware version only records 75% of the artifact): http://www.applian.com/download-videos/
That’s damn good. Marcus destroys him.
Ha ha, you watch Morning Joe!
Heh….
Franzen, meet Marcus.
Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.
On an island, Franzen would be Diddy and DFW would be Suge.
Steven: Nice assessment in your last paragraph, there. You’re right. The other two really did look intimidated by Wallace (with very good reason, of course, as we all know)
I’m still not sure what Leyner was doing on that panel. Well… I take that back. I think I DO know, and I don’t like it. (In other words: I think it has to do with how people who aren’t well-informed on ‘nontraditional’ literary art (as much as I respect Charlie Rose) perceive the ‘world’ of ‘nontraditional’ literary art.)
“Hmm, I think it’s about 11:49 but indeed he trembles.”
Fucking exactly but after I noticed the error I didn’t want to re-post
Addendum: I probably shouldn’t be picking particularly on certain writers, but honesty has always been one of my fatal flaws, and to be . . . well . . . to be honest: there really are VERY few writers who get under my skin. Very few. Franzen is NOT one of them. Nor is Rick Moody, of course. I don’t have any especially strong opinions in regard to either one or their work.
But Mark Leyner just happens to be one of those very few people whose name, at its very mention, makes my skin crawl.
So… sorry, don’t mean to be overly critical.
Owen:
Either that or Rose is secretly very hip to it and tossed come Leynerburger to the DFW-shark because he knew it would make good TV. But… nah. I think your assessment is right on (that big solo interview Charlie did with DFW was chock full of awkward WTFisms)
I find Mark Leyner to be absolutely unreadable.
RE DeLillo’s processes: I remember reading that he’ll change a word to get the sentence/paragraph/page look he wants, even at the expense of the original word’s intended meaning. Sheet music as art.
Damn I’m glad I read this post.
“Probability-space between every word” is a perfect way of putting it.
This is exactly how I feel about Franzen as a writer. He’s alright, and sometimes his work makes me laugh. But as a person he seems unbearable, and as an Author he has an entirely overblown view of his own “importance.” I will not be buying Freedom.
Leyner is a great vocab lesson, though.
I like “probability space between every word” too but am not sure I get what you’re driving at. Here’s what I’d say: Franzen underscores things I already know about human beings, entertainingly and often lyrically. DeLillo (thanks for the corrections on my spelling) raises the bar higher. He reveals the heretofore unknown–sometimes at the expense of the lyrical, or redefining lyricism to suit his needs. There’s a DeLillo sentence in the way that there isn’t a Franzen sentence, taut, unafraid of the full stop. He uses periods better than almost anyone I can think of. To put it in terms of Blake’s post the other day, it’s harder to pin down influence in DeLillo…Franzen seems like a composite, one with groove and verve at times, but DeLillo more sui generis. “The eventual heat-death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city.” Franzen might invoke the same in dialogue but it would be about the suburbs versus the city and familial choices and parental/filial disappointment, not metaphysical as with DeLillo. There’s enough residual of DeLillo in Franzen–not only in the attention to sentences but in the obsession with mind control, mapping out of the phenomenology of space and objects, the love/hate relationship with jargon, etc., that it proves worthwhile for me.
As for their writing processes, I just don’t know. I recall reading that Franzen writes in the dark ensconced in pink noise. Won’t get you white noise but gets you somewhere.
I remembering reading that somewhere too. But I think it has more to do with the sound of the words, the rhythms created by the syllables and the hard and soft vowels, rather than the visual presentation on the page.
RE DeLillo’s processes: I remember reading that he’ll change a word to get the sentence/paragraph/page look he wants, even at the expense of the original word’s intended meaning. Sheet music as art.
Tim:
“I like “probability space between every word” too but am not sure I get what you’re driving at.”
Well, again, the difference is between an Artist who is good at opening a door to the mysterious forces of the subconscious while he works (DeLillo has gone on record about not plotting-out his novels… he makes them up as he goes along) and a professional writer who is good at story-telling but whose story-telling never really transcends story. I thought “Good Neighbors” (a novel excerpt?), in the New Yorker, was a well-constructed device… I admired the ingenuity of its joints and the spirit of its minimal-design-efficiency (just as I admired a shelving unit I got from Ikea once) but it didn’t open me up to thoughts or associations I’ve never had before or get me hooked on new rhythms in prose: it re-packaged the entirely-familiar using entirely familiar tools and structures. Same with The Corrections. But Underworld removed one of the walls in my head… as did Libra, Mao ll and Cosmopolis. The subconscious will make powerful choices for you, as an Artist (the banal term for it is Improvisation), if you’re open to it and DeLillo profits, I think, from coming along when that voice was in vogue… 50s-and-60s-era jazz showcases the subconscious as a witty, unpredictable Deconstructor of Broadway Show Tunes (see: Coltrane on Favorite Things). Franzen’s talent is too ANALytical and his passages aren’t, therefore, allusive like DeLillo’s, sprouting little novels in their own right, seeding stuff in the reader’s subconscious to keep the infection alive.
I just randomly paged to 227 in Underworld and found Bronzini’s pre-sleep soliloquy on the Challenger explosion… two paragraphs of the most beautiful essay you’ll ever read on that event. The passage wraps up with Bronzini comparing the epic-tragic beauty of the Challenger explosion to the banality of the “moon walk”:
“… and he could never completely dismiss the suspicions of the paranoid elite, the old grizzled gurkhas of the corps, that the whole thing had been staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas.”
And that’s some radical shit from a winking sage who defies you to pin him down. And the book is full of thousands of those. Franzen doesn’t have access to that sort of thing. He’s Chuck Close to DeLillo’s Hieronymus Bosch-via-Chagall.
a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo
Between every pair of words??
—
Steven, for me, decoherence isn’t what I get from DeLillo, but rather mellifluous flurries of impression that are quite – surprisingly – accurate on close interrogation.
(If you ask of a phrase or sentence, “It sounds pregnant with significance – what’s being born from it?”, and you can’t really tell yourself (or get from another ear) a cogent reply — then you’ve got something that sounds ‘good’, which is good . . . writing?)
But the architecture, that you find overly planned in The Corrections, can be its own disclosure of nightmind, its own endopermeable x-ray of reality.
I think writing sometimes has both the paragraphs and sentences and the architecture that (working together) horripilate one towards the razors. (My) Exhibit A: As I Lay Dying.
—
For decoherence – probability-space inside each word – try the Deutsch of Celan’s poetry.
“a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo
Between every pair of words??”
Well, no, Deaders, it wasn’t a scientific assertion so the actual figures involved (between every 3.5 words, even?) are irrelevant. Also, I’d say that finding traces of nightmind in any artifact, even The Corrections, isn’t unusual enough to be telling. You can find traces of nightmind in the phone book. It’s the extent to which DeLillo trusts his subconscious to structure his novels and stock them with dark sentences that puts a vast distance between his work and anal, over-determined, reliably-adequate Jonathan’s.
Re: or De: horripilation: Bronzini’s hair-cutting scene (coincidentally the one superimposed on the space-burial passage I cite: Underworld, 222-227) starts above the neck but swings fairly low by the end.
I remembering reading that somewhere too. But I think it has more to do with the sound of the words, the rhythms created by the syllables and the hard and soft vowels, rather than the visual presentation on the page.
Tim:
“I like “probability space between every word” too but am not sure I get what you’re driving at.”
Well, again, the difference is between an Artist who is good at opening a door to the mysterious forces of the subconscious while he works (DeLillo has gone on record about not plotting-out his novels… he makes them up as he goes along) and a professional writer who is good at story-telling but whose story-telling never really transcends story. I thought “Good Neighbors” (a novel excerpt?), in the New Yorker, was a well-constructed device… I admired the ingenuity of its joints and the spirit of its minimal-design-efficiency (just as I admired a shelving unit I got from Ikea once) but it didn’t open me up to thoughts or associations I’ve never had before or get me hooked on new rhythms in prose: it re-packaged the entirely-familiar using entirely familiar tools and structures. Same with The Corrections. But Underworld removed one of the walls in my head… as did Libra, Mao ll and Cosmopolis. The subconscious will make powerful choices for you, as an Artist (the banal term for it is Improvisation), if you’re open to it and DeLillo profits, I think, from coming along when that voice was in vogue… 50s-and-60s-era jazz showcases the subconscious as a witty, unpredictable Deconstructor of Broadway Show Tunes (see: Coltrane on Favorite Things). Franzen’s talent is too ANALytical and his passages aren’t, therefore, allusive like DeLillo’s, sprouting little novels in their own right, seeding stuff in the reader’s subconscious to keep the infection alive.
I just randomly paged to 227 in Underworld and found Bronzini’s pre-sleep soliloquy on the Challenger explosion… two paragraphs of the most beautiful essay you’ll ever read on that event. The passage wraps up with Bronzini comparing the epic-tragic beauty of the Challenger explosion to the banality of the “moon walk”:
“… and he could never completely dismiss the suspicions of the paranoid elite, the old grizzled gurkhas of the corps, that the whole thing had been staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas.”
And that’s some radical shit from a winking sage who defies you to pin him down. And the book is full of thousands of those. Franzen doesn’t have access to that sort of thing. He’s Chuck Close to DeLillo’s Hieronymus Bosch-via-Chagall.
a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo
Between every pair of words??
—
Steven, for me, decoherence isn’t what I get from DeLillo, but rather mellifluous flurries of impression that are quite – surprisingly – accurate on close interrogation.
(If you ask of a phrase or sentence, “It sounds pregnant with significance – what’s being born from it?”, and you can’t really tell yourself (or get from another ear) a cogent reply — then you’ve got something that sounds ‘good’, which is good . . . writing?)
But the architecture, that you find overly planned in The Corrections, can be its own disclosure of nightmind, its own endopermeable x-ray of reality.
I think writing sometimes has both the paragraphs and sentences and the architecture that (working together) horripilate one towards the razors. (My) Exhibit A: As I Lay Dying.
—
For decoherence – probability-space inside each word – try the Deutsch of Celan’s poetry.
I looked up the word ‘mellifluous’ at dictionary.com because, yep, I had to look it up, and found this list:
Related Searches
Isak Dinesen
How tall is the Eiffel Tower?
Affluent
Superfluous
Sigillography
Confluence
Pusillanimous
Disputatious
Raucous
Cacophonous
Mitigate
What did large mean in 1688?
That last one cracked me up. I linked to it, didn’t actually read what large meant in 1688, but found this list:
Related Topics
Meaning of Large in 1688
Dictionary for 1688
How Many Abortions Were Performed in the United States in 1995?
What Did the Word Bitch Mean in 1675?
What Does a Minaret Look like?
Mellifluous
Songs by Irving Berlin
Names of Operas Written by Mozart
Where Does the Pablo Picasso Painting Woman with Fan Hang?
How Many Homeless People Are There in New York?
Felix Frankfurter
Isak Dinesen
“a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo
Between every pair of words??”
Well, no, Deaders, it wasn’t a scientific assertion so the actual figures involved (between every 3.5 words, even?) are irrelevant. Also, I’d say that finding traces of nightmind in any artifact, even The Corrections, isn’t unusual enough to be telling. You can find traces of nightmind in the phone book. It’s the extent to which DeLillo trusts his subconscious to structure his novels and stock them with dark sentences that puts a vast distance between his work and anal, over-determined, reliably-adequate Jonathan’s.
Re: or De: horripilation: Bronzini’s hair-cutting scene (coincidentally the one superimposed on the space-burial passage I cite: Underworld, 222-227) starts above the neck but swings fairly low by the end.
I feel the same way about Updike and his criticism, which remains far superior to his fiction. I suspect many people think similarly.
All of you realize that DFW and Franzen were besties, right?
You’ve never feared your best friend… ?
You mean like the pitbull in your front yard?
(Yes, think about that a moment. I’ll wait.)
They were the closest of friends. . . compared even to the internet!
In fact, if you take a close look at that Charlie Rose clip, you can see the dynamic of the friendship: at 11:49 (as David E. corrected me, above… actually, it’s 11:39-laugh), DFW gets a little sneer as Franzen makes the mistake of seeming “elitist” about TV and fires a warning shot over Franzen’s head. You don’t think Franzen was afraid of being too-thoroughly corrected by his bud on public television?
“I had to look it up, and found this list:”
Listing Winnie the Pooh would, at least, have made more sense-by-association! laugh
I think one of JU’s novels (Toward the End of Time) was one of the most underrated books of its decade: inventive, beautiful, witty, relevant; great Sci Fi. I think people pick a stance re: a given literary target and stick with it, though the target may go through so many changes. Sometimes he was just a junior Yankee Nabokov but sometimes he was much better than that.
Hmm… while I admit I had this in mind while I was watching: my guess was that they became friends afterward, although I can see that were they NOT friends then DFW would not have been so aggressive toward Franzen. I’ve heard it said that DFW was always a very calm, gentle, friendly person, and in this interview he treated even Leyner with a certain amount of careful respect.
Don’t know if Leyner had any social connection to him.
But… to me, Franzen’s response to Wallace’s challenge was more embarrassment than anything else. “You had to bring that up.” But the cocky “Correct me if I misunderstood” followup was comparatively harsh, it was not like two guys having a conversation, it was like two guys, used to being at odds, sparring. So… I can imagine that if they were friends, then this was the nature of their friendship. Always arguing.
Wallace himself stepped on his own third “I don’t wanna sound pretentious” foot when he started saying, “You put these two guys here in a blender…”.
But… I’m starting to get the impression that we’re in danger of entering Overanalysis Land.
I’ve been there, you know, and… well… not a cute place.
Finally: Ryan: Careful, man, or somebody will compare YOU to the Internet.
“Mark Leyner just happens to be one of those very few people whose name, at its very mention, makes my skin crawl.”
It doesn’t help that he looks like a Miami Vice drug dealer on a mission to seduce Crockett’s GF
Just a bunch of hunks–think they know everything.
Besides, how postmodern is it to talk about the quintessential attributes of The Reader? Didn’t that seem antiquated to any of them? They ate it up. They loved it. That was disheartening to me–how much they went along with it.
Anyway, I enjoyed Franzen dropping “a priori.” I bet DFW–as someone with a background in philosophy who’d be familiar with superfluous Latin terms–wish he had gotten there first. It would have been easy, too, as Leyner was obviously the “persona non grata” at the table.
And Charlie Rose . . . good ol’ Charlie Rose . . . with his head so far up his ass you have to wonder how he doesn’t collapse into himself and implode a parallel universe here and there.
I’ve always found his fiction dull and boring, though I haven’t read Toward the End of Time. And for me, at least, Updike is not at all a “target” — I genuinely enjoy his criticism.
I looked up the word ‘mellifluous’ at dictionary.com because, yep, I had to look it up, and found this list:
Related Searches
Isak Dinesen
How tall is the Eiffel Tower?
Affluent
Superfluous
Sigillography
Confluence
Pusillanimous
Disputatious
Raucous
Cacophonous
Mitigate
What did large mean in 1688?
That last one cracked me up. I linked to it, didn’t actually read what large meant in 1688, but found this list:
Related Topics
Meaning of Large in 1688
Dictionary for 1688
How Many Abortions Were Performed in the United States in 1995?
What Did the Word Bitch Mean in 1675?
What Does a Minaret Look like?
Mellifluous
Songs by Irving Berlin
Names of Operas Written by Mozart
Where Does the Pablo Picasso Painting Woman with Fan Hang?
How Many Homeless People Are There in New York?
Felix Frankfurter
Isak Dinesen
I feel the same way about Updike and his criticism, which remains far superior to his fiction. I suspect many people think similarly.
All of you realize that DFW and Franzen were besties, right?
You’ve never feared your best friend… ?
You mean like the pitbull in your front yard?
(Yes, think about that a moment. I’ll wait.)
Given that 99.99% of the hypno-junk on television consists of medium-morons who are paid to act like super-morons, watching one really smart guy, one fairly smart guy, one sort of smart guy, and a doddery, intermittently-not-too-dumb guy chat about books for nearly 20 minutes is a treat.
They were the closest of friends. . . compared even to the internet!
In fact, if you take a close look at that Charlie Rose clip, you can see the dynamic of the friendship: at 11:49 (as David E. corrected me, above… actually, it’s 11:39-laugh), DFW gets a little sneer as Franzen makes the mistake of seeming “elitist” about TV and fires a warning shot over Franzen’s head. You don’t think Franzen was afraid of being too-thoroughly corrected by his bud on public television?
“I had to look it up, and found this list:”
Listing Winnie the Pooh would, at least, have made more sense-by-association! laugh
I think one of JU’s novels (Toward the End of Time) was one of the most underrated books of its decade: inventive, beautiful, witty, relevant; great Sci Fi. I think people pick a stance re: a given literary target and stick with it, though the target may go through so many changes. Sometimes he was just a junior Yankee Nabokov but sometimes he was much better than that.
As a long-time lurker, I’d just like to say that, on all counts, Steven Augustine strikes me as a smarter, calmer, crazier and more cogent version of Justin Taylor.
Steven, for what it’s worth (not much), I’m really glad that you’re commenting on HTMLGIANT. I hope Blake considers making you ‘official.’ I think you add a lot to the party. I’ve been enjoying your comments, especially on DeLillo.
Hmm… while I admit I had this in mind while I was watching: my guess was that they became friends afterward, although I can see that were they NOT friends then DFW would not have been so aggressive toward Franzen. I’ve heard it said that DFW was always a very calm, gentle, friendly person, and in this interview he treated even Leyner with a certain amount of careful respect.
Don’t know if Leyner had any social connection to him.
But… to me, Franzen’s response to Wallace’s challenge was more embarrassment than anything else. “You had to bring that up.” But the cocky “Correct me if I misunderstood” followup was comparatively harsh, it was not like two guys having a conversation, it was like two guys, used to being at odds, sparring. So… I can imagine that if they were friends, then this was the nature of their friendship. Always arguing.
Wallace himself stepped on his own third “I don’t wanna sound pretentious” foot when he started saying, “You put these two guys here in a blender…”.
But… I’m starting to get the impression that we’re in danger of entering Overanalysis Land.
I’ve been there, you know, and… well… not a cute place.
Finally: Ryan: Careful, man, or somebody will compare YOU to the Internet.
“Mark Leyner just happens to be one of those very few people whose name, at its very mention, makes my skin crawl.”
It doesn’t help that he looks like a Miami Vice drug dealer on a mission to seduce Crockett’s GF
Just a bunch of hunks–think they know everything.
Besides, how postmodern is it to talk about the quintessential attributes of The Reader? Didn’t that seem antiquated to any of them? They ate it up. They loved it. That was disheartening to me–how much they went along with it.
Anyway, I enjoyed Franzen dropping “a priori.” I bet DFW–as someone with a background in philosophy who’d be familiar with superfluous Latin terms–wish he had gotten there first. It would have been easy, too, as Leyner was obviously the “persona non grata” at the table.
And Charlie Rose . . . good ol’ Charlie Rose . . . with his head so far up his ass you have to wonder how he doesn’t collapse into himself and implode a parallel universe here and there.
I’ve always found his fiction dull and boring, though I haven’t read Toward the End of Time. And for me, at least, Updike is not at all a “target” — I genuinely enjoy his criticism.
Given that 99.99% of the hypno-junk on television consists of medium-morons who are paid to act like super-morons, watching one really smart guy, one fairly smart guy, one sort of smart guy, and a doddery, intermittently-not-too-dumb guy chat about books for nearly 20 minutes is a treat.
As a long-time lurker, I’d just like to say that, on all counts, Steven Augustine strikes me as a smarter, calmer, crazier and more cogent version of Justin Taylor.
Steven, for what it’s worth (not much), I’m really glad that you’re commenting on HTMLGIANT. I hope Blake considers making you ‘official.’ I think you add a lot to the party. I’ve been enjoying your comments, especially on DeLillo.
it wasn’t a scientific assertion
Not what I was pointing at as I tried (and try) to figure out what “probability-space” means, Steven, but rather its grammaticality. (The preposition “between” taking two (or pairs of) objects.) Like swerving not to slip on my own “, that”.
[metaphor-density alert]
That DeLillo seems to discover long-wave structure as he’s discovering the shape of his sentence-length registrations is fine – like finding the shape and slow movements of plates by mapping local seismic sensations.
Just arguing that a) architecture, whether ironly imposed before a sentence is wrought or ‘found’ almost entirely in the course of and shaped by that wrighting, delivers messages not translatable to or inferrable from a mere listing of those sentences, and b) strongly determinate architecture doesn’t preclude the irruption of “subconscious” sensitivity into the elaboration of those strong shapes.
–
Let me return to the example of As I Lay Dying.
It’s quite controlled – not a mass of sub-Whitman blah-ing ’til the writer got tired of that ‘story’. For example, the characters communicate in unmistakably differentiated language. The (dead) mother ‘speaks’ at just the right moment in the course of the reader’s growing (or developing) understanding of the family’s constitution (the destruction of which is the story of the story). And so on – the novel has a clear, determinate – and brilliant – structure.
But, by the same token, each character ‘speaks’ mysteriously disclosively; the reader is constantly in-formed by statements that are as semantically resistant as they compel interpretation: “My mother is a fish.”
You see what I mean? In this novel, there’s no choosing between structural over-determination of what could be indicated and a barely-edited flow of what the writer feels like saying next. – Which is, I guess, something like the argument you make for Underworld, which I find to be a misoverestimation.
it wasn’t a scientific assertion
Not what I was pointing at as I tried (and try) to figure out what “probability-space” means, Steven, but rather its grammaticality. (The preposition “between” taking two (or pairs of) objects.) Like swerving not to slip on my own “, that”.
[metaphor-density alert]
That DeLillo seems to discover long-wave structure as he’s discovering the shape of his sentence-length registrations is fine – like finding the shape and slow movements of plates by mapping local seismic sensations.
Just arguing that a) architecture, whether ironly imposed before a sentence is wrought or ‘found’ almost entirely in the course of and shaped by that wrighting, delivers messages not translatable to or inferrable from a mere listing of those sentences, and b) strongly determinate architecture doesn’t preclude the irruption of “subconscious” sensitivity into the elaboration of those strong shapes.
–
Let me return to the example of As I Lay Dying.
It’s quite controlled – not a mass of sub-Whitman blah-ing ’til the writer got tired of that ‘story’. For example, the characters communicate in unmistakably differentiated language. The (dead) mother ‘speaks’ at just the right moment in the course of the reader’s growing (or developing) understanding of the family’s constitution (the destruction of which is the story of the story). And so on – the novel has a clear, determinate – and brilliant – structure.
But, by the same token, each character ‘speaks’ mysteriously disclosively; the reader is constantly in-formed by statements that are as semantically resistant as they compel interpretation: “My mother is a fish.”
You see what I mean? In this novel, there’s no choosing between structural over-determination of what could be indicated and a barely-edited flow of what the writer feels like saying next. – Which is, I guess, something like the argument you make for Underworld, which I find to be a misoverestimation.
Aha, now I get it… but if thousands of words, as a group, are under discussion, and I write, “the probability-space between every word”, I think it’s pretty clear that that’s the short version, for the sake of elegance, of a line that would read something like “the probability-space between every word and its nearest sequential neighbor-words.” Which is a DeLillo-esque abbreviation, isn’t it? It’s the triumph of Art over the anal-grammatical and the short version happens to work just as well, as a communicator, as the long version.
I’m not confused/irritated by people starting their sentences with “Truthfully,” “Hopefully,” or “Basically,” either, even though, in 99-out-of-100 cases, a heinous crime against grammar and logic is committed when they do so. Grammar is a guide (like a recipe book), not Mosaic Law. Also: as we know, Don DeLillo, the author/human, doesn’t, literally, contain words… is that disclaimer really necessary?
Re: the meaning of “a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo”: it’s not complicated, Deaders. I think the readers of that line who liked it are the ones who got it. It was a compressed metaphor that imported the notion of far-out physics (I refuse to invoke, explicitly, the over-invoked Heisenberg, however) and wizardry: DeLillo writes in a way that makes the reader feel that anything might happen… on a word-by-word basis. That the templates have been smashed. Destination unknown, and so forth. And he does it so well that this sensation of Thinking Our Way Into The Unknown, in his best work, holds up after an Nth reading of the text. He defies a cluster of expectations with a controlled-riot of rule-breaking. When I say he lets his Nightmind do most of his writing, I don’t mean the results are random or surreal… I mean that his texts are unpredictable at the level of the individual word: there’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo.
Compare DeLillo’s Zen riots to Franzen’s bedenimed-but-law-abiding sermons. That’s all I meant (by the line under discussion) in the context of this conversation.
this is the easily the worst lede (and the worst writing, actually) that i’ve seen in a long time from a feature-length article published in what’s meant to be a decent and storied place to find good writing: http://www.esquire.com/features/impossible/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810
sad thing is, there’s actually an interesting story in there, it’s just buried under a landfill of knotted prose and dumbfounding editing.
“Terry Kniess has prepared.”
seriously… wtf?
Aha, now I get it… but if thousands of words, as a group, are under discussion, and I write, “the probability-space between every word”, I think it’s pretty clear that that’s the short version, for the sake of elegance, of a line that would read something like “the probability-space between every word and its nearest sequential neighbor-words.” Which is a DeLillo-esque abbreviation, isn’t it? It’s the triumph of Art over the anal-grammatical and the short version happens to work just as well, as a communicator, as the long version.
I’m not confused/irritated by people starting their sentences with “Truthfully,” “Hopefully,” or “Basically,” either, even though, in 99-out-of-100 cases, a heinous crime against grammar and logic is committed when they do so. Grammar is a guide (like a recipe book), not Mosaic Law. Also: as we know, Don DeLillo, the author/human, doesn’t, literally, contain words… is that disclaimer really necessary?
Re: the meaning of “a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo”: it’s not complicated, Deaders. I think the readers of that line who liked it are the ones who got it. It was a compressed metaphor that imported the notion of far-out physics (I refuse to invoke, explicitly, the over-invoked Heisenberg, however) and wizardry: DeLillo writes in a way that makes the reader feel that anything might happen… on a word-by-word basis. That the templates have been smashed. Destination unknown, and so forth. And he does it so well that this sensation of Thinking Our Way Into The Unknown, in his best work, holds up after an Nth reading of the text. He defies a cluster of expectations with a controlled-riot of rule-breaking. When I say he lets his Nightmind do most of his writing, I don’t mean the results are random or surreal… I mean that his texts are unpredictable at the level of the individual word: there’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo.
Compare DeLillo’s Zen riots to Franzen’s bedenimed-but-law-abiding sermons. That’s all I meant (by the line under discussion) in the context of this conversation.
i ditto this. it’s damn hard to come across as a human being via the not-meatspace of online discourse, and S.A. is nothing short of a pleasure to interact with, despite me having never even met the guy, let alone know what the hell he even looks like, smells like or sounds like when he’s using his vocal chords. so, yes. ditto to this.
Ano, Zus: WTF?
(laugh)
(ps I smell damn good)
SOMETIMES ZZZZIPP GETS CONFUSED AND HAS TO CHECK THE “ABOUT” PAGE TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT ON IT.
I carry my ABOUT PAGE within me, ZZZIPP… to read it, you’ll need a knife…
(erm… this being the Internet, I take that back… )
First-ever Winnie-the-Pooh tie-in on HTMLGIANT.
Zu-Zu I am agreeing with you again! (and, Anon) SA yours are the only tl;dr comments on HTMLGIANT that I actually read. And here’s another wtf? I went to high school with a Steve Augustine and for a while I wondered are you him? but now I know that you aren’t him.
mimi-
If it *had* been me I’d definitely recognize you
Ano, Zus: WTF?
(laugh)
(ps I smell damn good)
SOMETIMES ZZZZIPP GETS CONFUSED AND HAS TO CHECK THE “ABOUT” PAGE TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT ON IT.
I carry my ABOUT PAGE within me, ZZZIPP… to read it, you’ll need a knife…
(erm… this being the Internet, I take that back… )
it’s pretty clear
Yes, Steven, it was “clear” enough to get a slight re-phrasing – that is, not so mistaken as not to admit of useful response. As was this infelicity in my response: “, that”.
I see that that one-question re-phrase was so un“clear” in intention as to get this much – [one hand]————[other hand] – taut reaction. ?
heinous crime against grammar
‘[T]he probability-space between every pair of words’ – not only those pairs next to each other – would also be a DeLillo-esque “short version”, albeit neither “abbreviated” nor “anal-grammatical” – well, not more “anal-grammatical” than all of DeLillo’s sentences – and yours and mine – that are just . . . grammatical.
I think the readers of the line that liked it are the ones who got it.
That’s the spirit!
the reader feels that anything might happen… on a word-by-word basis [. . .] unpredictable at the level of the individual word
Yes, the “far-out physics” metaphor of decoherence was what I was saying I thought you meant.
Each sentence is a superposition of those sentences in which its words mean (semantically) different things, because (?) each sentence is a series of ‘quantum’ interferences of its words with those words in other sentences.
This metaphor – namely, that understanding what one reads is like resolving a quantum foam into a most-likely classicality – is great. It’s also a great idea that “Art” involves constituting this happening-everywhere-in-language at a greater, and a beautiful, intensity – especially when calling settled meaning into question is a cardinal effect of the work’s catalysis.
Agreed, DeLillo is unusually good at establishing a hum of resolution and what’s irresolvable – in language and in (human) life (the calumny that DeLillo is icily uninterested in feeling and thought that people actually have is simply false).
For me, there’s better [audible shrug?].
That using between to mean ‘in the middle of’ is artfully appealing to a decohering already in the word “between” — ok.
First-ever Winnie-the-Pooh tie-in on HTMLGIANT.
Zu-Zu I am agreeing with you again! (and, Anon) SA yours are the only tl;dr comments on HTMLGIANT that I actually read. And here’s another wtf? I went to high school with a Steve Augustine and for a while I wondered are you him? but now I know that you aren’t him.
“…there’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo.”
-Steven A
“Not what I was pointing at as I tried (and try) to figure out what “probability-space” means, Steven, but rather its grammaticality. (The preposition “between” taking two (or pairs of) objects.) Like swerving not to slip on my own “, that”.
-Deaders
Examples of Steven A-type usage:
1. “The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey’s; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe *between every word* or two.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (emphasis mine)
2. “Insert ‘word’ – in this drill you add a word (like “a” or “wow”) *between every word* on the page while reading as fast as you can.”
-From the Princeton Debate Page (“Speaking Drills”)-(emphasis mine)
3. “…Euclidean Distance *between every word* in these sets.”
-from “Finding Terminology Translations from Non-parallel Corpora” (emphasis etc.)
4. “…compendium of workers’ misery and capitalist callousness marshaled with apparent dispassion but with a suppressed indignation visible *between every word*.”
-W.F. Carlton, The West Indies in Review: Recent Developments in the Caribbean Colonies (June 1943)
5. “For example in the two lines “Deals… Soul”, the first line has a dash *between every word*, to build up to the climax, and in the second line, the dashes disappear for the final action.”
-Was Emily Dickinson a religious poet?
6. “…true only if there exists a lexical chain *between every word* in the word alternative and at least one transcription word.”
-“Automatic Generation of Statistical Language Models for …”
7. “The letters in Bacon’s abbreviated alphabet key correspond to those used by ancient Romans, whose inscriptions were written using only capital letters, with periods *between every word*.”
8. “…the mistaken impression that the prosecutor was pausing so frequently because he needed to think afresh between every word.”
-Kenya’s slow path to justice-BBC
(as in the BBfuckingC)
Wait, I like this one, too:
“Wiping his eyes and sobbing *between every word*, with much ado, he got out this answer:’on — j’aurai des maitlesses.’ ”
-Victoria, Queen of England, by James Parton, 1868
mimi-
If it *had* been me I’d definitely recognize you
Tim — I can try, though its been years since I cracked the spine on that book. Maybe its a case of it being something easier to look on fondly the more it recedes in the rearview mirror…
TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY, whatever its failings (too heavily indebted to V., for one thing… though there are passages in it that I do find possess real psychological, if that’s the word, acuity), has an audacity to it that I have found lacking in everything else I’ve read by him. It also offers original insights into what it was really like under Reaganism. Finally, the novel seemed to announce a writer who was going to lead us past / out of post-modernism. But here we are, still hashing out all things po-mo, in part becuase of public stances Franzen has made on “the state of the novel.”
it’s pretty clear
Yes, Steven, it was “clear” enough to get a slight re-phrasing – that is, not so mistaken as not to admit of useful response. As was this infelicity in my response: “, that”.
I see that that one-question re-phrase was so un“clear” in intention as to get this much – [one hand]————[other hand] – taut reaction. ?
heinous crime against grammar
‘[T]he probability-space between every pair of words’ – not only those pairs next to each other – would also be a DeLillo-esque “short version”, albeit neither “abbreviated” nor “anal-grammatical” – well, not more “anal-grammatical” than all of DeLillo’s sentences – and yours and mine – that are just . . . grammatical.
I think the readers of the line that liked it are the ones who got it.
That’s the spirit!
the reader feels that anything might happen… on a word-by-word basis [. . .] unpredictable at the level of the individual word
Yes, the “far-out physics” metaphor of decoherence was what I was saying I thought you meant.
Each sentence is a superposition of those sentences in which its words mean (semantically) different things, because (?) each sentence is a series of ‘quantum’ interferences of its words with those words in other sentences.
This metaphor – namely, that understanding what one reads is like resolving a quantum foam into a most-likely classicality – is great. It’s also a great idea that “Art” involves constituting this happening-everywhere-in-language at a greater, and a beautiful, intensity – especially when calling settled meaning into question is a cardinal effect of the work’s catalysis.
Agreed, DeLillo is unusually good at establishing a hum of resolution and what’s irresolvable – in language and in (human) life (the calumny that DeLillo is icily uninterested in feeling and thought that people actually have is simply false).
For me, there’s better [audible shrug?].
That using between to mean ‘in the middle of’ is artfully appealing to a decohering already in the word “between” — ok.
“…there’s a lot of probability-space between every word in DeLillo.”
-Steven A
“Not what I was pointing at as I tried (and try) to figure out what “probability-space” means, Steven, but rather its grammaticality. (The preposition “between” taking two (or pairs of) objects.) Like swerving not to slip on my own “, that”.
-Deaders
Examples of Steven A-type usage:
1. “The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey’s; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe *between every word* or two.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (emphasis mine)
2. “Insert ‘word’ – in this drill you add a word (like “a” or “wow”) *between every word* on the page while reading as fast as you can.”
-From the Princeton Debate Page (“Speaking Drills”)-(emphasis mine)
3. “…Euclidean Distance *between every word* in these sets.”
-from “Finding Terminology Translations from Non-parallel Corpora” (emphasis etc.)
4. “…compendium of workers’ misery and capitalist callousness marshaled with apparent dispassion but with a suppressed indignation visible *between every word*.”
-W.F. Carlton, The West Indies in Review: Recent Developments in the Caribbean Colonies (June 1943)
5. “For example in the two lines “Deals… Soul”, the first line has a dash *between every word*, to build up to the climax, and in the second line, the dashes disappear for the final action.”
-Was Emily Dickinson a religious poet?
6. “…true only if there exists a lexical chain *between every word* in the word alternative and at least one transcription word.”
-“Automatic Generation of Statistical Language Models for …”
7. “The letters in Bacon’s abbreviated alphabet key correspond to those used by ancient Romans, whose inscriptions were written using only capital letters, with periods *between every word*.”
8. “…the mistaken impression that the prosecutor was pausing so frequently because he needed to think afresh between every word.”
-Kenya’s slow path to justice-BBC
(as in the BBfuckingC)
Wait, I like this one, too:
“Wiping his eyes and sobbing *between every word*, with much ado, he got out this answer:’on — j’aurai des maitlesses.’ ”
-Victoria, Queen of England, by James Parton, 1868
In every video I’ve ever seen of DFW, he seems always to be cringing.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Oprah. Remember that wonderous flap?
Oprah the all-wise read “The Corrections,” correctly decided it a perfect example of the kind of book her audience would enjoy, and nominated Franzen to her own private Valhalla. Franzen freaked and posed artiste, made a big ol’ scene about not wanting a commercial label put on the cover of his novel (somehow forgetting that all kinds of commerical labels and stickers already got pasted onto his books). Always on top, Oprah withrew the invitation. Franzen is disliked, but hey, he’s artistically pure.
And now the irony: Franzen churns out yet another midcult family epic, a pre-approved bestseller (no doubt with a hefty advance). The know-nothings hail the “Great American Author.” His face appears in Time magazine (the magazine that non-readers read), with a write-up by Grossman, shallowest of ‘book reviewers.’ And you just know there’s no way Grossman got that write up without Franzen’s cooperation. Now how many stickers saying ‘Time Magazine!’ will be pasted onto the cover of “Freedom”?
Tim — I can try, though its been years since I cracked the spine on that book. Maybe its a case of it being something easier to look on fondly the more it recedes in the rearview mirror…
TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY, whatever its failings (too heavily indebted to V., for one thing… though there are passages in it that I do find possess real psychological, if that’s the word, acuity), has an audacity to it that I have found lacking in everything else I’ve read by him. It also offers original insights into what it was really like under Reaganism. Finally, the novel seemed to announce a writer who was going to lead us past / out of post-modernism. But here we are, still hashing out all things po-mo, in part becuase of public stances Franzen has made on “the state of the novel.”
When clicked to search for “between every word”, Google returned “about 68,700,000 results” (in 0.23 seconds, when I tried it).
When clicked to search for “among two”, Google returned “about 294,000,000 results” (in 0.21 seconds).
When clicked to search for “between you and I”, Google returned “about 1,150,000,000 results” (in 0.32 seconds – there’s a nanopause for breath after a billion “results”).
NB: Just because the BBfuckingC employs a solecism is no compelling reason not to avoid not using it.
—
WARNING: The “between every word” results did not include those words in that order only. For example, searching for the Dickinson essayist’s (?) use of the solecism will take you more than 20 pages (my impatience-dictated terminus ad quem) into the search. To get Google to search for the three words in that order, you’ll have to ask a younger relative for the trick (if you’re a tech-wheel-re-inventor, like I am).
BONUS FACT: There’s a facebook site called When.Someone.Types.Like.This.I.Have.2.Pause.Between.Every.Word.
BONUS OPINION: That facebook site is unworthy of social-network cyberstalking (trolling there might be entertaining).
In every video I’ve ever seen of DFW, he seems always to be cringing.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Oprah. Remember that wonderous flap?
Oprah the all-wise read “The Corrections,” correctly decided it a perfect example of the kind of book her audience would enjoy, and nominated Franzen to her own private Valhalla. Franzen freaked and posed artiste, made a big ol’ scene about not wanting a commercial label put on the cover of his novel (somehow forgetting that all kinds of commerical labels and stickers already got pasted onto his books). Always on top, Oprah withrew the invitation. Franzen is disliked, but hey, he’s artistically pure.
And now the irony: Franzen churns out yet another midcult family epic, a pre-approved bestseller (no doubt with a hefty advance). The know-nothings hail the “Great American Author.” His face appears in Time magazine (the magazine that non-readers read), with a write-up by Grossman, shallowest of ‘book reviewers.’ And you just know there’s no way Grossman got that write up without Franzen’s cooperation. Now how many stickers saying ‘Time Magazine!’ will be pasted onto the cover of “Freedom”?
When clicked to search for “between every word”, Google returned “about 68,700,000 results” (in 0.23 seconds, when I tried it).
When clicked to search for “among two”, Google returned “about 294,000,000 results” (in 0.21 seconds).
When clicked to search for “between you and I”, Google returned “about 1,150,000,000 results” (in 0.32 seconds – there’s a nanopause for breath after a billion “results”).
NB: Just because the BBfuckingC employs a solecism is no compelling reason not to avoid not using it.
—
WARNING: The “between every word” results did not include those words in that order only. For example, searching for the Dickinson essayist’s (?) use of the solecism will take you more than 20 pages (my impatience-dictated terminus ad quem) into the search. To get Google to search for the three words in that order, you’ll have to ask a younger relative for the trick (if you’re a tech-wheel-re-inventor, like I am).
BONUS FACT: There’s a facebook site called When.Someone.Types.Like.This.I.Have.2.Pause.Between.Every.Word.
BONUS OPINION: That facebook site is unworthy of social-network cyberstalking (trolling there might be entertaining).
Deaders, you’ve got to learn to read between the lines. Your argument is falling between the cracks. Do you brush between every meal, btw? Remember to floss between every…
PS If you’re between jobs, read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/fashion/thursdaystyles/08vaca.html
Deaders, you’ve got to learn to read between the lines. Your argument is falling between the cracks. Do you brush between every meal, btw? Remember to floss between every…
PS If you’re between jobs, read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/fashion/thursdaystyles/08vaca.html
Perhaps (a strong perhaps) we are all mistaken in thinking Grossman’s piece is actually journalism when it is, in fact, just a long advertisement for Franzen’s new book.
Perhaps (a strong perhaps) we are all mistaken in thinking Grossman’s piece is actually journalism when it is, in fact, just a long advertisement for Franzen’s new book.
[…] Time magazine. His new novel, Freedom is out late Sept and there’s a good discussion going on here about Franzen finding his place as the Great White Narcissist Writer of his post Roth/Bellow/Updike […]
Steven, it’s hard enough (for me) to read lines. (I skip the spaces between letter, too.) I wish all my arguments flourished between crack.
Between you, I think that guy isn’t going ‘to see’ much if he cruises, what, five thousand miles in 3 1/2 weeks, between job or not. If I’m not being too between literal.
Steven, it’s hard enough (for me) to read lines. (I skip the spaces between letter, too.) I wish all my arguments flourished between crack.
Between you, I think that guy isn’t going ‘to see’ much if he cruises, what, five thousand miles in 3 1/2 weeks, between job or not. If I’m not being too between literal.