Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

A Junky's Christmas

that Paul Auster short story from the middle of Smoke "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story"
http://www.christmasmagazine.com/en/s...

Holidays on Ice (also good in audio)

Fairytale of New York by the Pogues (not really a book but it may be the coolest christmas song ever)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash

Child's Christmas in Wales

The Gift of the Magi and other Stories

Olive, the Other Reindeer

and of course Naked Lunch

Tropic of Cancer

anyone have any copies of all those glorious posts we made?

MYSPACE may be about to kill the old files....

I agree with the article's authors on white noise and the road

strongly disagree over the Dos Passos however

they seem to pick on just the admittedly annoying but only occasional imagistic device and miss most of the trilogy's strengths - and the fact is that even the imagistic bs develops a rhythm and serves a purpose in the structure of the work

ah, that old saw

but you dont want it to end

I find the second section - Patty's 3rd person diary entries - problematic

in this me and ol' B.R. agree and for many of the same reasons

eh

it could be a drinking game - shots on 'lapidary'!

and of course one of the most prominent 'white male taste makers' of our times is an asian woman:

from NYT

"...Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy (what happens to Joey after he accidentally swallows his wedding ring right before a vacation with his dream girl) as he is at grown-up tragedy (what happens to Walter’s assistant and new beloved when she sets off alone on a trip to West Virginia coal country); as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives.

In the past, Mr. Franzen tended to impose a seemingly cynical, mechanistic view of the world on his characters, threatening to turn them into authorial pawns subject to simple Freudian-Darwinian imperatives. This time, in creating conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/boo...

(ha ha in just two paragraphs she said 'lapidary','limning'(sweet!) 'deeply felt' and 'an indelible portrait of our times')

Why Jonathan Franzen is the wrong face for "Franzenfreude"
Yes, white male writers are too dominant in highbrow literature, but the "Freedom" author is one of the good guys
By Ester Bloom This originally appeared on Ester Bloom's Open Salon blog.
Having finally released three books back into the wild of the Brooklyn Public Library system -- "Freedom," "Catching Fire" and "The Passage" -- I feel the time is right to weigh in on the literary meme of the moment, "Franzenfreude," a term that, loosely defined, indicates that author Jonathan Franzen represents all that is wrong with the contemporary highbrow book world.

Is that stupid? Quite! Except there's a caveat. The phenomenon referred to by "Franzenfreude" -- the idea that the highbrow book world reserves its highest praise and most fawning attention for the works of men -- is absolutely true. It just happens that Jonathan Franzen is a terrible poster boy for that problem.

Franzen writes gorgeous women. Fleshed-out, interesting, three-dimensional, vivid women, women with brains. He writes for them, too, and perhaps most important of all, he reads them. When, at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel, someone asked him what he was reading, he replied, "Edith Wharton." To the follow-up question of what should we, his audience, be reading, he listed several books, all by female authors, including the "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," of which, up to that point, I hadn't even heard. (Then I read it. It was good!)

A friend and I cornered him after the panel to ask whether he'd realized he'd been promoting work by ladies. He blinked for a moment, then laughed and said it honestly hadn't occurred to him.

Thus, "Franzenfreude" is the wrong label for this particular can of worms. (As a language nerd points out, it's also stupid for other reasons.)

That said, let's address the can of worms itself. Yes! Fiction by women is customarily and routinely dismissed by the intelligentsia in favor of fiction by men. Because why should fiction be any different than anything else? The most exalted spaces in any pantheon are reserved for men. So it has been, so it will be. This is because women can have babies, whereas men can only have egos, and also testicles, or something.

...

http://www.salon.com/books/salon_read...

leave it be said: the above was stated in exuberant ambivalence

I think the euros are being reactionary to the fact that American culture is seaping into every molecule of their existence (and has been for some time)

American culture is like a vast sweeping plague upon the land, a plague of fast food and car culture and john wayne and hollywood motion pictures and cowboys and indians and cops and robbers and Michael Jordan and Kobe and Lebron (and yes Yao Ming) and Rock'n'Roll and assembly lines and language language language (what's the Japanese word for T-Shirt? you bet your ass it is) and attitudes and assumptions and Rocky Balboa and Miles and Frank and and and

they say that we arent attuned to other countries and other cultures? fuck that (for better or worse) we are the tuning fork

they say we dont hear the voices of your Ananta Toers or Herta Mullers? How could we? we're standing next to Mother of all Marshall stacks at a van halen concert

we are both the great devouring Maw and the vomitous that spews forth from it

we are hated, despised, feared, loathed and loved - the great satan and the aspirational white city on the hill

which is neither a good thing or bad thing but these Nobel ninnies are kind of glossing over the big fucking elephant in the room by not acknowledging it

a few random thoughts

1) I've just started reading Freedom (my first Franzen) and it's big and ambitious (in an old fashioned breadth of scope kind of way) and deftly textured - it's a novel of the old school it seems to me

2)huffpost: Why do you feel that commercial fiction, or more specifically popular fiction written by women, tends to be critically overlooked?

Jennifer Weiner: I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.


me: Jennifer it's not the subject matter that makes it literature, it's the way the author handles the subject matter - doesnt matter if it's Edith Wharton or Henry James

3) Jodi's responses actually sound more reasoned and sane - she seems to be grappling with 'commercial' vs 'literary' not (or not just) gender v gender

4) no one, man or woman, has gotten the amount of attention Franzen has gotten with this book - it's silly to use him and his book as exemplary of anything

5) Room,Donoghue - check out the raves, look at the coverage - it's by a chick, nominated for the Booker - breaking out all over the place - just as much coverage as your Foer's or you Shteyngart's - point being how many people of either gender occupy that sphere? is it equitable? need it be?

in all seriousness CEES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (the day)

Adrian wrote: "Who can predict what those goofy Swedes will do? They'll most likely give the prize to some elderly Lithuanian "meter maid" who spent the last five decades scribbling incoherent (yet anti-capitalis..."

no no no - that's far too insular and blah blah blah - snork!

eat my culture you euro bastards! eat up all that mmm mmm mmm greasy goodness and wipe your pimply little faces with my brightly colored paper product napkins! suck it euros and take my mighty carbon footprint with you on your fanny pack wearing backsides!


and dont forget! enjoy the jazz.... (and the elvis and the jerry lewis and the hoff(? wait really?) and the...)

Oh when will Adonis get his (or her) just dues?! is this the year!?

prolific output may not be grounds for literary criticism but neither is prolific output unrefined and un-edited in and of itself worthy of praise

alot of words doing the work of a lot less words just isnt my cup of tea

Kerry wrote: "Shel wrote: "That sounds like a pretty cool place to work, Patty. I think the recommended reading for my workplace is probably something like this, which was required reading when I worked at Fanni..."

tellingly Collins next book was titled: How the Mighty Fall