(no subject)
I confess that I have read more about Jonathan Franzen than I've actually read of his work (I read a couple essays from How To Be Alone but have passed up many a discount-rack copy of The Corrections), but it seems like the last few years have seen a couple critics quietly building him up to be this generation's literary whipping boy. Well, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times brought this all out into the open with her scathing review of Franzen's new memoir, The Discomfort Zone. The whole review had me laughing schadenfreudishly.
Excerpts:
...Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed. He tells us that as a child he was “a small glutton for attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself.” He tells us that he felt put upon by public entreaties to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (“Why should I pony up for this particular disaster?”) And he tells us that he used to find it difficult to enjoy nature’s beauty: a hike up to a spectacular summit was never enough; instead he would imagine himself “in a movie with this vista in the background and various girls I’d known in high school and college watching the movie and being impressed with me.”
Indeed the young Mr. Franzen comes across as less of a Snoopy - “the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook” - than as a kind of mean-spirited Lucy on steroids. He describes how he once “dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log.” He describes reasoning that “not having kids freed me altogether” from having to worry about things like global warming: “Not having kids was my last, best line of defense against the likes of Al Gore.” And he describes the judgmental outlook that he and his wife shared for many years: “Deploring other people - their lack of perfection - had always been our sport.”
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Speaking of books, the final batch of books we're doing for the Big S project came in today. I can already tell that the layouts for three of them will prompt a lot of screaming and swearing (on the part of my freelancer) and staying here until 8 PM and eating Triscuits and hummus for dinner (that's me). But another of the books was written by someone named MADELINE SUNSHINE, which is fantastic. And, anyway, in January, all of this will be over, and I'm probably going to miss laying out Arabic picture books.
Speaking of writing, I told Adam to give me a deadline as to when I had to present to him a finished, revised, printed copy of one of the short stories I've been working on for far too long. He tried to tell me "tomorrow!" (this was Monday), but I was able to talk him into a deadline of next Tuesday. This is good, because if there's ever the chance of me failing to prove myself to someone, I work like crazy to prevent it from happening. It really is going to take a lot of my free time from now until Tuesday to finish the story -- my writing process generally involves my creating a big mess of words and then spending a lot of time scrubbing at it until it becomes actual prose. The story as it is right now would look totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not me -- piles of unfinished sentences, notes in parentheses everywhere, a final sentence but no opening sentence. Complete literary(?) chaos.
Inspired by daysprings, I think I'm going to sign up for a creative writing course at Emory University this fall. With something like that, the embarrassment factor comes in again: would I let myself be the only student who came to class without a piece to be critiqued, or the only one to bring something unpolished and very obviously started at 11:30 the night before? No! I think my writing-related behaviors are all at least semi-pathological. Even the good behaviors that allow me to finish something every once in a while don't originate from any healthy plane of my being. Seriously. I'd go into this more, but I'm at work and I've had too much coffee and I don't want to start discussing anything emotional.
Oh! And the other thing I need to do is submit a query letter and the first page of my YA Novel O' Crap to Miss Snark, The Literary Agent tomorrow. Over the next few weeks, she's going to be posting people's queries and first pages on her site along with her comments about them. Public humiliation, yo.
Excerpts:
...Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed. He tells us that as a child he was “a small glutton for attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself.” He tells us that he felt put upon by public entreaties to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (“Why should I pony up for this particular disaster?”) And he tells us that he used to find it difficult to enjoy nature’s beauty: a hike up to a spectacular summit was never enough; instead he would imagine himself “in a movie with this vista in the background and various girls I’d known in high school and college watching the movie and being impressed with me.”
Indeed the young Mr. Franzen comes across as less of a Snoopy - “the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook” - than as a kind of mean-spirited Lucy on steroids. He describes how he once “dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log.” He describes reasoning that “not having kids freed me altogether” from having to worry about things like global warming: “Not having kids was my last, best line of defense against the likes of Al Gore.” And he describes the judgmental outlook that he and his wife shared for many years: “Deploring other people - their lack of perfection - had always been our sport.”
--
Speaking of books, the final batch of books we're doing for the Big S project came in today. I can already tell that the layouts for three of them will prompt a lot of screaming and swearing (on the part of my freelancer) and staying here until 8 PM and eating Triscuits and hummus for dinner (that's me). But another of the books was written by someone named MADELINE SUNSHINE, which is fantastic. And, anyway, in January, all of this will be over, and I'm probably going to miss laying out Arabic picture books.
Speaking of writing, I told Adam to give me a deadline as to when I had to present to him a finished, revised, printed copy of one of the short stories I've been working on for far too long. He tried to tell me "tomorrow!" (this was Monday), but I was able to talk him into a deadline of next Tuesday. This is good, because if there's ever the chance of me failing to prove myself to someone, I work like crazy to prevent it from happening. It really is going to take a lot of my free time from now until Tuesday to finish the story -- my writing process generally involves my creating a big mess of words and then spending a lot of time scrubbing at it until it becomes actual prose. The story as it is right now would look totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not me -- piles of unfinished sentences, notes in parentheses everywhere, a final sentence but no opening sentence. Complete literary(?) chaos.
Inspired by daysprings, I think I'm going to sign up for a creative writing course at Emory University this fall. With something like that, the embarrassment factor comes in again: would I let myself be the only student who came to class without a piece to be critiqued, or the only one to bring something unpolished and very obviously started at 11:30 the night before? No! I think my writing-related behaviors are all at least semi-pathological. Even the good behaviors that allow me to finish something every once in a while don't originate from any healthy plane of my being. Seriously. I'd go into this more, but I'm at work and I've had too much coffee and I don't want to start discussing anything emotional.
Oh! And the other thing I need to do is submit a query letter and the first page of my YA Novel O' Crap to Miss Snark, The Literary Agent tomorrow. Over the next few weeks, she's going to be posting people's queries and first pages on her site along with her comments about them. Public humiliation, yo.