Franzen, Freedom, Corrections

Jonathan Franzen is way overhyped. I thought The Corrections was pretty much the minimum of what a decently-regarded book should be, not an exemplar of the best being written. 
Now I'm reading Freedom and having the same reaction. It's not that the book is uninteresting. I like Franzen's sensitivity to the peculiar turns and tides of people's relationships, especially family. For example, the below, a college-age son's thoughts about his mother:

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself. To make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

What a lot of hurt and hope and tenderness there. But it's always narrated rather than written. (Tired adage about showing, not telling.) The characters are never discovered or revealed by dialog, and too much of the action is explained rather than manifested.
Here I am blogging in the office on a day of light work, and the graphic designer sitting behind me is complaining about always getting simultaneous instant messages from two different people asking him to do the same thing. 
OK, there it is, ha ha, how frustrating. But why not strip the explanation away:

There was the usual hubbub of a meeting breaking up. Lyle immediately received two IMs. 

Pat: "Levering proofs ready yet?" 

Mitch: "Levering ASAP, plz."

Maybe Franzen's gift is for situations, as I've said above. I simply don't believe his characters' longer story lines. One of his protagonists, Patty (that must be where I got Pat, above), models herself to be a perfect Mom figure, but that has nothing to do with the basketball player she was in college or the analysand (therapand?) she becomes later. She doesn't commit adultery in a manner that flows with or against her history, it's just doing something else. Her husband is an exec first for 3M and then at an environmental foundation, but as far as we know she has never been to a function in the role of wife - esp lacking as a reality point, because alcohol is part of her story as their marriage goes on.
Patty's (and here is something of manifesting, not telling - she's always Patty, a tall woman known by her diminutive) therapy journal makes up large sections of the book. There's no doubt but that these are supposed to come straight from her journal, they're not secondhand or narrated - Patty's story is being told by somebody who refers to herself as the autobiographer. Her writing style is in no way differentiated from the novelist's. Same vocabulary, same average length of sentences, same recursive grammar. Why introduce an element like that if you're not going to take advantage of it, and if you can't take advantage of it, why introduce it?


This blog is of no significance. I write it because I would never think these things out in this way except to an imaginary reader, who occasionally is a real person. And I enjoy writing sentences. I'm going to move over to a new blog soon, to consolidate all my little projects (how I used to bristle if somebody asked me if writing was my hobby), and make a fresh start, with less political fulminating.
This blog doesn't matter. Starting a new one doesn't matter either. I'm looking forward to it.

The Frog's Eyebrows

Entries from A Flapper's Dictionary, July 1922. Just fun.
From the blog of The York Emporium used book and curiosity shop in downtown York, PA, via boingboing. A "boob tickler" is not what you might think.

oh yeah, I forgot

> Spent the morning at MoMA, checking out Picasso's guitars.
I noticed that the newspapers collaged into the first couple of constructions had headlines about violence - a murder or such. As best as my eyesight, flexibility and inferior French can make out, almost all of the newspapers were cut up to include violent stories, especially about the conflicts that would lead up to World War I.
This might be more related to the contents of French popular newspapers than to any joke or intuition on Picasso's part. Still, an odd coincidence. Of the clippings that did not refer to violence, as far as I can tell, all or most are collaged in upside down, as if to neutralize the subject matter.
> I'm thinking about changing up and renaming the blog, since it's turned out to be so seldom about my Blurry Books projects or photography. I'd like to feel more free to just post a small item or two on occasion - I've been feeling obliged to write longer and better-shaped posts, essays if you will, and that's not only what I want to be doing for my legion of fan. I also might as well put a Firedoglake newsfeed up, allowing me to turn my indignation upon a broader range of subjects.

"I think I'll go for a walk."

> That backwards-looking paragraph mark that indicates a forward-moving paragraph? It's called a pilcrow. 
> boingboing interior view of a glacier, via http://photoguth.com. I'd post a pic, but I don't seem to be able to work anything more complex than a toothbrush today.
>  No more vuvuzela practice in the Wisconsin State Capitol building.
> "You're not fooling anyone, you know."

different stuff, same bucket?

> Two (at least) interesting developments in the rollout of Obama 2012: the Justice Dept will stop defending DOMA against constitutional challenges (yay, gay people, and lesbian people, and straight people, and bi-people, and trans- and cis-gendered persons of all kinds!), AND is distancing itself from defending the individuals (as opposed to the government) responsible for denying Jose Padilla his rights as a citizen and a person. I'm talking about Rumsfeld, John Yoo, others of that ilk. Firedoglake. If I love Firedoglake that much, I should just go and marry it, and maybe someday I will.
> One of the things that people get wrong about Rumsfeld is that his distinctive patterns of speech produce nonsense. They are actually rigorously logical. The famous "known unknowns" quotation is an accurate and sober elaboration of 19th-century military strategist Helmut von Moltke's dictum, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." What offends me in Rumsfeld's speech is that it is weaponized against his domestic critics, his fellow Americans, either to display an unmatchable complexity of mind ("the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence") or belittle our tiny concerns ("Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war").
They also remind me of the lists of possibilities and their impossibility that Samuel Beckett compiled, esp in his early fictions. No reference on hand, but I'm sure I first saw them singled out by Hugh Kenner.
> It is always a good thing to read anything by Hugh Kenner. Here's a randomly chosen appreciation of his work.
> Oh yeah, I was writing about Ohbama. I imagine his moves away from DOMA and torture (slightly) are intended to make voting for him in 2012 more palatable to much of his former base. And on nothing else.

same stuff, different bucket

Reuters:

Russia blames Google for stirring Egypt unrest: report

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's deputy blamed Google Inc in an interview published on Tuesday for stirring up trouble in the revolution that ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

"Look what they have done in Egypt, those highly-placed managers of Google, what manipulations of the energy of the people took place there," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin told the Wall Street Journal.

For "highly placed managers," read "learned elders."
Via DailyKos, which often has good stuff but ranks lower than Firedoglake and TPM in my esteem because of their incomprehensible, gleeful support of the individual mandate.
Putin&Co. are no doubt preparing lest Russia get as interesting as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain.... Looking way down the road, Tienanmen scenario? No, I think, because the military is hardly better off than it was before perestroika. Hama? Definite possibility with Putin in charge. But that is way down a road not yet paved - one gets the impression the wealthy are happy and entrenched, and the masses are too dispirited to make a real move.

revolting

So why am I going on and on about Egypt, Libya, etc. and playing armchair general?
Because I am fascinated by what it takes to move the donkey-wheel of power. What force and what leverage succeed? How do a people turn around a hostile government? What does it take? Is non-violence enough against a state that will kill? How much can a state, perhaps the one we live in, get away with? What the hell do I do about living in a torture-reliant state? Make no mistake about it, under Bush/Obama doctrine, an American citizen can be seized, subjected to torture, all civil rights denied, without even being prosecuted, and with all prospects for redress denied. If you think you're any better in the eyes of the law than your kindred American citizen, you're kidding yourself.