Contests
ToBS R1: hating on Jonathan Franzen vs. hating on Jonathan Safran Foer
[Matchup #16 in Tournament of Bookshit]
You meet a woman and wake up to her bookshelf:
• 30-50 copies of Elle
• 1984
• [something by Chuck Klosterman]
• Everything Is Illuminated
You say, “Okay,” to her while she sleeps.
You work in a cubicle for 10 hours. You drive home and open Facebook. She Facebook chats you a link. You click to a New York Times story on Jonathan Safran Foer. You think, “Played” and stare at his mole.
Your eyes move between excerpts of “Eating Animals” and a video ad for Transformers 2. You watch a Transformer destroy an aircraft carrier. You read, “…my writing teacher at Princeton was Joyce Carol Oates.” You close the Firefox tab and think “Dick” and “Maybe that’s unfair.”
You take “Everything Is Illuminated” and she says, “It’s really good, I promise.” You look at her and say, “Okay.” You open a beer and begin to read. You stop reading and pick up your dictionary. You try to look up “shtetl” and become distracted by other words. You finally read the entry for “shtetl” and sense you’re a terrible person. You remember a news story about black teenagers who went on a school trip to see Schindler’s List and screamed things like, “Damn! That’s cold!” whenever a Jew was shot.
You lean out of your car and picture Jonathan Safran Foer’s mole. You say, “Sausage, egg and cheese combo.” You picture his mole and think, “I know the factories are fucked up. What they do to the pigs. I know it.”
You read “Milk Comes From a Grieving Mother” on a bumper sticker. You reflexively make an argument for Fruit Loops. You realize the argument may require you to pronounce “anthropomorphism” at a local event featuring Jonathan Franzen/Lethem/Safran Foer. You imagine stuffing your mouth with Popeye’s and asking Jonathan Safran Foer long-winded, rhetorical questions. You picture a chicken engineered with no feathers, beak, feet or eyes, growing too fat for its cage.
You remember he wrote a book about children and 9/11 or something (you don’t remember). You imagine the book is about how 9/11 was carried out by 4-5 small children who were taught creative writing by Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton.
You put “Everything Is Illuminated” in a box of her things. You wait until she’s gone and leave the box on her doorstep.
– – –
WINNER: hating on Jonathan Safran Foer
Tags: jonathan franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer
“You remember a news story about black teenagers who went on a school
trip to see Schindler’s List and screamed things like, “Damn! That’s
cold!” whenever a Jew was shot.” This reminds me of this story one my colleagues tells about an arts event she went to post-Katrina where a group of black youth from one of our local youth activism/community organizing groups was in the audience, and this performance artists did a piece about Katrina that involved her like shoving sand in her mouth and spitting it out and twirling around and around like a cyclone and spinning and throwing folding chairs and the like and one of the young people yelled, Bitch needs to calm down.
looking at pics of JSF to get “caught up”, I get these real intense buzzing synesthesias, want to close the window but cannot. JSF is looking at me right through the browser window, he is so hungry for my face
this is amazing
TWS does it again.
lol
I was hoping for some Franzen-hating.
this article is hilarious in a low-intensity way. I agree w. concern troll about where is the franzen hating? but maybe that is so obv. to you that it is not even worth mentioning, just like any of the cohesive criticisms that bubble just out of reach in this story.
why is it that hatred generates such good writing? just something on my mind this week.
this is fucking amazing
The photo is a very nice touch
Maybe you could have photoshopped a mole on one of them.
That would be my only criticism.
The guy on the left.
Okay, I’m done.
you meet a girl. she went to amherst and keeps a copy of freedom on the coffee table. you kind of really wish you were drunk already. she lives in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood and you say “i guess you are kind of like a character in one of franzen’s novels.” the girl, who is named elizabeth or something, looks at you like she isn’t sure if she’s supposed to graciously take that as a compliment. she gives you some wine. she has a bunch of new yorker magazines stacked up in the bathroom. you remember the time you read that excerpt from ‘freedom’ in the new yorker and thought it was a short story and then said to yourself ‘boy, it’s a good thing he’s a novelist and not a short story writer’ and then realized that actually this is just what his prose looks like. when you’re leaving the girl apologizes for ‘living all the way in the ghetto’
She sees Grove Press for Dummies in your hoodie cross-tummy pocket before you see her black bra-strap, so she takes you to her wingman-but-pays-for-drinks pad and you get the second-string business.
Gladdened that Foer shook you loose without another restraining-order threat, she reshelves the book on the wet-spot side of the futon.
These are both well written and all, but it does raise the question for me of why we need to use these cipher women as proxies for hating on male authors.
It reminds me of noticing the old guy in a supermarket in Harlem loudly claiming to no one that ‘Thomas Jefferson was right about shipping the blacks back to Africa’.
–and the Little-Ivy envy. Those darn safety schools!
deadgod is totally a new yorker.
this is the only one i got wrong that i feel good about….
Going all Lorrie Moore and shit.
well, for me i was just copying the form of the original//trying to pretend the original was written about the other jonathan. and to deadgod- not little-ivy envy at all, just a distaste for amherst college after having lived in w. mass.
still think the sixth borough is a damn good story. suck my metaballs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_racism
I had to google a picture of JSF to get a bearing on the mole situation. It made me sad to know that I have several more moles on my own face, all of which are more distracting that his little nub. feelsbadman.jpg
Ladies could weigh in… which is worse to find on a guy’s shelf, Chuck Palaniuhk (like more than just one) or Hunter S. Thompson? The most grotesque males I’ve met have had nothing but Hemingway, surely an ominous sign
No one NO ONE is envious of Amherst (except Swarthies)
hemingway usually means the bro is full of himself and terrible in bed. i think the worst is to find maybe 5 or 6 books sandwiched between a ‘shitload’ of dvds.
i am a bro you know
the way people shit talk white people living in big cities i wonder who any of yall are
we’re talking like, multiple copies, right? if i had to break it down:
tom robbins (harmless, maybe a fag)
david sedaris (harmless, terrible in bed, maybe a fag)
chuck palahasldkfnuk (dick, terrible in bed)
stephen king (seems like this could go either way, obnoxious, or sweet nerd)
philip roth (ego, boring, but prolly gives good head)
ayn rand (rapist)
richard ford (boring, vanilla)
bukowski (ego, boring, comes too quickly, won’t go down on you)
auster (see above)
salinger (see above)
What if all he has was Isaac Babel?
THAT’S AN ENERGETIC REFUTATION, SIS/BRO.
What’s the particular beef with Amherstians? Lots of spoiled kids, many of whom are quite smart, many of whom might survive their privilege reasonably–that’s a lot of 20-year-olds in a lot of places in America, no? (I never lived in western Mass., so I ask.)
Fuck yeah! JSF hate wins! The true winner, though, is this sentence: “You imagine the book is about how 9/11 was carried out by 4-5 small children who were taught creative writing by Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton.”
Stuff white people living in big cities like: hating on on other white people living in big cities.
JSF here. I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else – gets mad quim, bro. Eat my dust, smegma-dripping goyim
(BARD MATRICULANT)
Not sure what Diana is calling ‘romantically racist’: to call someone a “new yorker”, or to be reminded by black kids jeering at the Shoah of black kids mocking performance art.
Or is the link an advertisement–out and proud??
Joyce Carol is a dark bitch.
THIS MOLE IS LICKED BY NONE OTHER THAN NICOLE KRAUSS AND PRETTY LITTLE LAMBS THAT APPRECIATE THE GOOD I AM DOING
“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”
“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.” –
THEN HE IS A LION ON THE PAGE AND A LAMB IN REALITY
While you wrote that comment she wrote her 112th novel and it was OK. No one read it but it was good.
“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I
like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories
that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough,
the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the
bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
You are the best thing on the internet.
There’s a great example of OK right there. Add strawberry powdered milk and you might have something a child would hesitantly drink.
This particular seems to be mostly about hating women.
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Certain members of the animal kingdom make that noise before consuming their mates.
BARD MATRICULANT!!! (chew feast chew)
Chuck palahasldkfnuk is the new accepted spelling.
What here isn’t? What anywhere isn’t?
christ.
because some women have shit taste in books?
this is genius here
Because this seems to be all about white boys using literature as pickup tool and/or as commitment phobia alibi.
But that sounded a bit humorless, so ok it’s because talking smack about a writer by using the metaphor of a “deal breaker” in a relationship is funny.
I recently SMSed a friend saying the person I was hanging out with just professed to being a John Galt fan. She SMS’ed back in 10 seconds, “That’s a dealbreaker. Leave. Now.”
John Fowles (axe murderer, run away)
Gunter Grass (will talk you into climaxing)
Christopher Hitchens (will ignore you & masturbate all night)
Salman Rushdie (will talk about the last supermodels he dated)
Roberto Bolano (regardless of how good he is, he also has bedbugs)
(THAT EXPLAINS THE ENERGY, BUT not THE REFUTATION)
This is the best thing I’ve read on htmlgiant all year, if not since this place “happened”.
I was in fact replying to Tim Jones-Yelvingtong’s insightful point that deserves response from the above commenters and post author.
best comment
more!
fucking this is amazing
(see above)
WAS IT A REFUTATION? (AND I MEANT SIMON’S ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD)
i’m sorry joseph, i’m not sure i understand the point well enough to respond. tim, if you want to elaborate, i will try to respond on my lunch break. otherwise, thanks everyone for reading.
sorry lukas. if it’s any consolation, i think moles can make people look distinguished. im thinking here of obama and morgan freeman. that’s all i got bro.
lol
lol x2
lol re Hitchens (ignores and masturbates ‘all night’?…lol)
damn. just replied to jonathan safran foer…
can you expand on this point?
the comment box says “replying to jonathan safran foer”
CREEP!
Colby Grad
Grolsch bottle tops in yer trainers.
I think the question was, why can’t hatred for male authors from other male authors be spelled out directly without involving a proxy person to hate as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war
But if you don’t see this as a trend, maybe you wouldn’t have much to say
DOES NOT EVEN PHASE ME BECAUSE MY HOUSE IS WORTH $6MM AND MY SHOES ARE MADE OF THE FINEST NATURALLY SOURCED VEGAN RUBBERS
ethnomasochists.
But Grolsch bottle tops in yer trainers would be recycling, in a sense.
“I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.”
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
You are forgiven, my son. Now go have yourself a Nathan’s Famous – extra meat.
You would have me eat DOG? Barker or gentlemooer it’s all the same color, you meeting eating jagoff
That’s just plain wrong. Your kids could be reading this.
honest white boys use rock n roll as pickup tool and/or as commitment phobia alibi
True. They could read at 6 months
i’m sorry, but you’re right, i didn’t notice this as a trend
phlpn.es/829r8s
I used to tuck her … but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins
phlpn.es/829r8s
linkhide.com.ar/47632
phlpn.es/829r8s
Oh. I assumed so. But that’s a little late in a family of geniuses. I’m not criticising you or your kids. Just an observation. I am a fan of your work.
well done timothy. very much enjoyed this. the first line is more than perfect.
phlpn.es/829r8s
ai.vc/uj
What Diana is calling Romantic Racism is the nostalgia with which both the original poster and Tim Jones recall their amusing stories of watching black youths act all “black” and “youth-y.” Sort of the same way a white woman recalls her intimate moments with her black maid, how the maid was so “there” for her when her own 1950’s-era white mother was emotionally absent, or some other shit like that. Get it?
The link is to a Wiki article on Romantic Racism. Diana was kind enough to post a link explaining the term so that you might be able to figure out what, in fact, was romantically racist about this post on your own.
50.gd/2g
liil.cc/chX
50.gd/2g
This you may find useful
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/dec/11/safran-foer-hatred
TWS,
Well done.
Caleb