Only one thing has happened this week: someone asked Jonathan Franzen about me, and he dodged the question.
Franzen! You cannot dodge me forever, old man. I will never get off your lawn; I will make me a willow cabin at thy gate, and call upon my soul within the house; write loyal cantons of contemnèd love, and sing them loud even in the dead of night; hallow your name to the reverberate hills, and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out ‘FRANZEN!’ O, you should not rest between the elements of air and earth but you should answer me.
FRANZEN! I will pound the streets outside your city gates, and I will carry the body of Hector behind me, and I will make you watch as his face drags in the dust of his fathers under my chariot wheels. Franzen! You might say this to me, to induce me to pity:
“Think of your father, O Mallory like unto the gods, who is such even as I am, on the sad threshold of old age. It may be that those who dwell near him harass him, and there is none to keep war and ruin from him. Yet when he hears of you being still alive, he is glad, and his days are full of hope that he shall see his dear son come home to him from Troy; but I, wretched man that I am, had the bravest in all Troy for my sons, and there is not one of them left. I had fifty sons when the Achaeans came here; nineteen of them were from a single womb, and the others were borne to me by the women of my household. The greater part of them has fierce Mars laid low, and Hector, him who was alone left, him who was the guardian of the city and ourselves, him have you lately slain; therefore I am now come to the ships of the Achaeans to ransom his body from you with a great ransom. Fear, O Mallory, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.”
But pity I shall have none! For do not the women and men of this generation text in movies? What covenant can there be between the likes of you and the likes of me? Shall a lion enter into an accord with man? Shall a wolf make a covenant with a lamb? Speak not to me of covenants; pick up your spear and make your peace. I come at you with the force of the peoples of Greece, with Myrmidons and with Achaeans, and what happened to just picking up the phone and calling someone, you know? What happened to the lost art of conversation?
Yield to me, Franzen, or be lost.
Tags: meta, toast points, trolling
“JF:…Am I particularly polarizing? Am I more polarizing than Jennifer Weiner or Philip Roth? I don’t know if I’m particularly polarizing.”
BWAH HA HA HA HA!!! *wipes tear* Oh honey, bless your heart.
omg it’s like he’s just totally given up and is now trying to be as big a dick as possible whoa.
i mean
i don’t know that he’s trying
I’m trying to figure out the physics of how this interview was conducted, given how far Franzen appears to be crammed up his own ass. I hope the interviewer was able to dangle a mic down there or something.
lol you got it!
mallory as achilles = A+++
In case anyone doesn’t have the time or energy to read the whole interview, I’ll sum it up: Jonathan Franzen, Still A Huge Douchebag.
Thanks, I kept pausing to text during the interview and lost the thread.
Mallory, much like Jennifer Weiner, you have no case; you just tweet. And tweeting is in too high a register for (Arguably) Greatest Male Novelists to hear.
“No prophet is welcome in his homeland,” and Franzen is not welcome to dinner at my house.
“In his hometown,” Johnny, his hometown.
Pretty sweet humblebrag using Jesus’s words to describe yourself…
Acceptable responses to references to Mallory Ortberg:
1: Mallory Ortberg is the reason the internet was invented. I want to be Mallory Ortberg when I grow up.
2: See point 1.
Seriously, if you’re going to be a public figure but not be Mallory Ortberg, you have screwed up somewhere.
Two summers ago I saw him at Zoccoli’s Deli in downtown Santa Cruz. My buddy kept saying “OMG I think that’s Jonathan Franzen!!!!” so many times until he went inside to get away from us. But we didn’t talk to him.
A++++ for the Twelfth Night *and* Iliad references.
I had this brief, mad hope that I would scroll down and the entire comments thread would be just … non sequitur pictures of desserts. That’s how you change a conversation. Distract them with desserts!
I want the recipe for that trifle, as well as a trifle bowl to make it in.
It’s just a random internet photo, but I did just eat lunch while thinking about that trifle, or any trifle.
And it even looks like it might be perhaps a mini trifle bowl which makes it even better? Now I want mini trifle bowls for everything.
Now that is a consequential trifle.
Well, this is the best Toast Points ever
Whenever I hear “Jonathan Franzen,” I think of this (it’s at the very end)… http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/maya…
Yessssssss! Me too!
“My name is Jonathan Franzen. I’d like to order fifty pizzas.”
yes yes yes me too!
I’ve only read the first two paragraphs of this but already it makes me SO HAPPY.
FRANZEN!
I have forgotten every emotion that is not glee.
Also…. “JF: I don’t know if there’s such a thing as an emotional truth. It’s kind of an oxymoron, don’t you think? Better to call it hot material. Hot material, absolutely”
I…. I. what.
Like Plutonium at 300 degrees.
are you shitting me did he seriously call it hot material. HOT MATERIAL. For a man who would not DEIGN to brush his sleeve against social media, that sure does sound like a shitty YouTube comment.
THIS RIGHT HERE
Hot Material: The name of my 1980s Madonna tribute band.
“Hot Material”: the other, even worse webpage editing software from 1999.
Did he really in fact say that??? I mean, I can’t bring myself to actually you know read the thing, but HOT MATERIAL indeed. No mere ’emotional truths’ for the Franz, no sir.
SL: Have you read any of her (Jennifer Weiner’s) books?
JF: No!
But don’t worry, she’s definitely a bad writer and she’s asking for respect she doesn’t deserve.
I love the exclamation point! Like, what a ridiculous question from another ridiculous woman!
“OBVIOUSLY she is a bad writer unworthy of consideration, respect, or merit, because my FRIENDS who have ONLY THE BEST OF TASTE told me so, and I ONLY listen to my VERY TASTEFUL FRIENDS.”
Something of a selection bias, that. Or circular logic – “I’ve never read Jennifer Weiner because I only read things worth reading, so if I haven’t read anything by her, she must not be worth reading.” He is just all kinds of tortured, poor little buddy.
I want to cover a Jennifer Weiner novel in plain brown paper, write “Great American Novel, by, A Very Serious Man” on the cover, and watch him enjoy the heck out of it.
“I have yet to hear one person say, “Oh, she’s really good, you should read her.”
So now we know. Jonathan Franzen only reads what other people tell him to read. Sounds dangerously like the man has no mind of his own.
Just gonna leave this here.
THIS IS THE MOST PERFECT THING. THANK YOU.
Franzen should have known he had no chance. He’s using the phrase “phenomenology of technology” with a straight face, and Mallory’s here for her goddamn /aristeia/.
a+++ for using “aristeia” in a sentence
I mean, it’s not entirely his fault. He’s starting at a distinct disadvantage, namely that she’s Mallory and he’s A Man.
Mallory, I would follow you anywhere.
You know, I went to college with JF and we were in a few seminars together, and at a place as small as Swarthmore you pretty much know everyone even if you aren’t particularly friends, and while he was a pretty run-of-the-mill pretentious Swatty (unofficial motto: 1200 Teenagers with Big Brains and No Social Skills), I truly never imagined him achieving this level of curmudgeondom.
Oh my Godddddd, “Swathmore.” I just went to a tea there this weekend, and it was like The Witches of Eastwick – everyone knew everyone and all their business, literally down to addresses and insurance claims, and it was so shocking that a Philadelphia suburb could be SO small-town.
You know, there are good things and bad things about the place. The one thing I most appreciate is that nobody ever, ever, ever asks “will this be on the test?” You’re expected to figure out what’s important enough to be on the test yourself. Having gone on from Swarthmore to grad school at UCLA (unofficial motto: We Are So Huge and Soulless We Can’t Even), I’d take Swarthmore any day. But the Franzenesque side of it just makes me laugh these days.
“Will this be on the test?” is the “Can we have class outside?” of college students.
I always answered Yes when asked “Will this be on the test?” It cut down the frequency of the question after I told my students I would always answer Yes. Then I made sure they observed me jotting down that very item “to add to the test”. They started hushing each other when someone forgot and asked again.
I wish you had been my teacher.
…wait, were you? (Ms. Barker? Is that you?)
Oh my God. I hope at least ten people in the coming week ask him if he saw this response Mallory Ortberg wrote to him on her website. And then try to read it to him. “No, listen, she’s using the Iliad, hear it out –“
Yes but Mallory put the Iliad on the ~internet~ and that doesn’t make it the Iliad, it just makes it a neuron-destroying cultivar of the decline of humanity that looks like the Iliad. Or something.
“To me it seems she’s freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon..”
Something just went white-hot volcanic inside me, because OF COURSE, the WOMAN WRITER must be FREELOADING off the “legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon”, by which he means, “Male Writers Who Have To Acknowledge Successful Female Writers Which Annoys Their Inner (and Outer) Douchebag.”
That must be the problem he’s talking about. In which case, of course she’s contributing. ARGH.
And of course, while male authors (including him) currently are freeloading on the “legitimate problem of gender bias” and have been for centuries, the REAL problem is that he thinks a woman might be doing it too. He will ignore the problem and brush off questions about it until every single woman in the world is only getting attention exactly proportionate to the quality (as defined by him) of their work, only THEN may we talk about the thousands of men getting more than they deserve.
“The quality of their work (as defined by him (which he determines without having read any of it))”
“Look, sexism is a thing, we all know that, but that doesn’t mean we have to listen to women. Don’t get carried away.”
where and why did he say this shitty thing? I have no patience with Male White Novelist Douchebags and don’t want to wade through the interview…maybe I should tho just to re-justify my disgust of them? hmmmm dilemma
I just desperately want someone to force him to read “Male Novelist Jokes” and film his reaction. I’m sure he’d think it was trite newfangled trash, but it would be a beautiful few minutes of video.
YES! I actually read them to a friend who is a budding male novelist (not white which means he’s more on our side?) and he looked like he was having major cognitive dissonance. Like: “This is funny but it’s also offensive to all I hold dear and all those I idolise but it’s funny too but what do I do”. HAH
I have thought it over, and Jonathan Franzen is the worst in direct proportion to Mallory Ortberg being the best.
Jonathan Franzen:the worst::Mallory Ortberg:the best
This is what I saw in my head (it’s a compliment)
http://youtu.be/mTv1Dmu5CYc
The frustrating thing, for me, is that I agree with that statement, more or less, but I don’t think Franzen has any right to make it when he’s not willing to give Jennifer Weiner a try. I don’t respect Jennifer Weiner very much as a writer. She’s talented enough to keep me reading most of the time, but I don’t really feel I’ve gotten anything of value out of any of her books. I don’t approve of any books being classified as “chick lit” because it’s a bullshit category, but it’s a bullshit category that I feel Jennifer Weiner deliberately aims at. I think of her as a lazy, formulaic author who traffics in a very stereotypically gendered form of wish fulfillment, and I wish the author publicly addressing “gender bias in the canon” were someone I respect more – someone like Cathleen Schine, whose talents as a writer really do get overlooked because she gets classified as “chick lit.” But Franzen really needs to learn to do his damn research or keep his mouth shut. He completely torpedoes his argument by refusing to read Weiner, and he also makes the argument irrelevant, because the most important fact here is that Franzen keeps himself miles away from anything rumored to be chick lit, and there’s really no better illustration of the problem of gender bias in the canon.
DEAD ON
.Thanks for saying this better than I did elsewhere.
-I don’t know if there’s such a thing as an emotional truth. It’s kind of an oxymoron, don’t you think? Better to call it hot material. Hot material, absolutely.
-I think that’s a dismally vulgar conception of autobiography.
-Twitter isn’t even trying to be a narrative form. Its structure is antithetical to sustained and carefully considered story-telling.
-If I am indeed a polarizing figure here, it is certainly true that I am not a polarizing figure in Europe.
I wanted to find one solitary line from the interview that really painted for us a picture of the Leather Golf Hat* Franzen must have been wearing, but I couldn’t find just one. Although I think the “dismally vulgar” line is pretty good, if I were forced to choose.
*leather golf hats, of course, look deeply foolish with Macbook-using, rectangular-glasses wearing literary exploration, so we must merely bask in the aura of his LGH style. It’s like a fine cologne, if that fine cologne had gotten horribly mixed up with Axe body spray.
These quotes read like Mallory parodying a White Male Novelist’s take on twitter etc.
He is a parody.
its strange how franzen seems to think the novel is the only valid form of art. there are plenty of other forms of canonical literature even? like, yeah, twitter is not like a novel. But it can be like poetry. even within narrow confines of high art, the novel is a tiny tiny subsection. hes a dick basically
I find it highly amusing that he thinks this interview is helping his cause when instead it just confirms that he is a sexist entitled white dude who doesn’t get it at all.
Franzen is a twerp and a scaredy-cat. To compare him to noblest Priam is an insult to Trojan greatness 4ever.
ALSO, Mallory please do not align with the Achaeans, if anyone in this story is an Achaean (NO REDEEMING QUALITIES EXCEPT SUCCESS) it is clearly Franzen.
Pretty much everything that comes out of Franzen’s mouth is so full to bursting with self-satisfaction and a belief in the (solitary) truth of HIS experience of the world. He is like the White Male Novelist stereotype made flesh.
It’s such a shame body-swapping sci-fi style (or Freaky Friday) doesn’t exist: Franzen would be a better person and writer if he were a black woman for the week. Either that or he would feel so ashamed of his past pronouncements he would retire to France and never write again.
(i.e. Win/Win)
he is suuuuuuuuuch a dick.
he is suuuuuuuuuch a dick.
I am no expert on Franzen, novel-writing or social media as a form of art. However, I am mildly more knowledgeable about desserts. I would be willing to lay some money on that being a tiramisu. If so, I can provide you with the recipe, but not a trifle bowl.
XKCD said it in the context of linguistic pedantry, but it applies to most progress the crotchets denigrate. “soon the people who dislike this kind of thing will be dead, and the ones using it will be in control.”
“disgusting,” whispers jonathan franzen at a bluebird in the park. it hovers on a branch, staring down at him, uncomprehending but clearly brimming with hollow self-promotion. it reminds him of twitter, which isn’t even a book. abruptly, franzen can feel tears welling up, but he blinks them back; he comes from the midwest. “there’s no such thing as an emotional truth,” he tells the bluebird, which startles and flies away, its tiny heart unable to cope with such hot material. hot material, absolutely.
franzen, too, will soon fly away. europe will welcome him with open arms, and no one will tweet about it. europe is his favorite of every country. no one reads YA literature in europe, and everyone is desperate.
I accidentally bought a book by Jennifer Weiner because I got sidetracked by a lute concert on my way to the semi-annual library book sale. I didn’t have enough time to browse the vast tables of riches so I followed the advice of the library employee who announced that shoppers should panic and buy the first few books we could pile in our arms because the sale was closing in 5 minutes.
When I had time to examine this Jennifer Weiner book, Good in Bed, I decided that it is precisely the kind of book I would hate and I should never, ever read it in a million years. But now I’m thinking of reading it just so I can do the opposite of what Jonathon Franzen would do. I haven’t read any of his books but I imagine they’re similar to this 1900s “common sense” medical book I purchased at the same sale. It’s primarily the old-timey equivalent of an infomercial (if cod liver oil doesn’t cure your cancer/acne/infertility, come get electrocuted and tortured with water at our health resort – only a 10 cent train ride away from Niagara Falls!), but it also has useful health tips about things like racial inferiority, proven with the Science of phrenology. All of the best doctors in Europe are still using this valuable reference book, especially those who are committed to finding a cure for that most heartbreaking of hysterical diseases, Not Sleeping With Franzen.
Anyway, should I do it? Should I read Good in Bed?