Aug 27, 2021
“Puoi pensare che ti sto pensando.. perché è quello che starò facendo ogni volta che penserai a me.”
— Jonathan Franzen
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“Puoi pensare che ti sto pensando.. perché è quello che starò facendo ogni volta che penserai a me.”
— Jonathan Franzen
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The audience may have collapsed in the last few decades, but cultural vitality has had to reconcile itself with silence, cunning, and exile throughout our technological century. Kafka told Max Brod he wanted his novels burned, Henry Green and Christina Stead fell into obscurity in their own lifetimes, Faulkner and O'Connor hid themselves away in the rural south. The most original and far seeing novelists of our own day not only accept the shadows but actively seek them.
Jonathan Franzen, The Reader In Exile
Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.
Jonathan Franzen, Purity
Literary quote with a powerful message
I cannot wait!!
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What do you think of Jonathan Franzen's translation of Heine and His Consequences?
Concerning the translation itself: Since I do not know German, I can’t comment on the accuracy of the effort. But I am glad it exists, because it is the only full English translation that I can find of ‘Heine and His Consequences’ and the other texts contained in The Kraus Project”
Concerning The Kraus Project itself on a meta level: It is an ego project I mean look at the cover:
What happened to Karl?
One would be forgiven for assuming it’s a novel by Franzen, not a collection of writings by Kraus. This self-absorption is further revealed by examining the worst part of the book: The foot notes.
The footnotes that are taken straight from other people are great. The ones that are written by Franzen himself are a train wreck (though like a train wreck, one simply can’t look away). Some of them go on and on for several pages detailing his frustrated college romantic life, his father issues, and a psychotic breakdown he suffered while studying in Western Berlin. Others are his own trite political opinions and cultural observations, in which vacillates between trifling liberal nihilism (all values are relative, who am I to judge?) and bemoaning what he thinks is the most obvious sign of the apocalyptic in our time, internet shopping (or more narrowly, book shopping on Amazon. Finally, and most embarrassingly to himself, Franzen often writes notes in which he says “I don’t understand this part” as if people read footnotes in order to hear their own confusion repeated back at them. Which is particularly noisome when the passages actually are not that obscure.
The whole combination is perversely fascinating, actually. I was tempted during the summer to write an essay about the relationships between Franzen and Kraus that this books suggested, but dropped it when I concluded that it would involve learning more about the non-entity which is Franzen then I cared to know.
So in conclusion, I would check it out, but be prepared for a sickening amount of very American bathos and narcissism at the bottom of the page that will continuously threaten to pull off a creeping, humanitarian invasion of Kraus’ righteous, acerbic prose.
To bring...
A REAL map. To track our progress as we go. When we get back I plan on tracing our route onto a map of the United States Giles bought me when we first started dating.
Audio Books. Nathan Pickard suggested a book by Johnathan Franzen called The Corrections.
He imagined that the road to being fully hard, to being bad news, would get steeper and more arduous only gradually, with many compensatory pleasures along the way, and that he would have the time to acclimate to each stage of it. But here he was at the very beginning of the road, already feeling as if he might not have the stomach for it.