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Our current “nostalgia problem” fits into this class: Every so often (like right now), people interested in culture become fixated on a soft debate over the merits or dangers of nostalgia—as it applies to all art, but particularly to popular music. The dispute resurfaces every time a new generation attains a social position that’s both dominant and insecure. I suppose if this ever stopped, we’d be nostalgic for the time when it still periodically mattered.
It doesn’t make sense to assume any art we remember from the past is going to automatically improve when we experience it again, solely because it has a relationship to whatever our life used to be like.
nostalgia. The Internet will warehouse what people’s minds do not. (And since the Internet is a curator-based medium, it’s a naturally backward-looking medium.)
It’s uncomfortable to admit this, but technology has made the ability to remember things irrelevant. Intellectually, having a deep memory used to be a real competitive advantage. Now it’s like having the ability to multiply four-digit
digit numbers in your head—impressive, but not essential.
Equally bizarre is the way both groups perceive themselves as the oppressed minority who are fighting against dominant public opinion, although I suppose that has become the way most Americans think about everything.
When a reporter suggested that he mentions God too frequently (and that this repetition is what annoys his critics), Tebow said, “If you’re married, and you really
love your wife, is it good enough to only tell your wife that you love her on the day you get married? Or should you tell her every single day when you wake up and have the opportunity? That’s how I feel about my relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere, and it seems like the kind of thinking that runs this country into the ground.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO TAKE an “anti-faith” position. There’s no pejorative connotation of the word “faithful.” The only time “faith” seems negative is when it’s prefaced by the word “blind.” But blind faith is the only kind of faith there is. In order for someone’s faith to be meaningful, it has to be blind. Anyone can believe a hard fact that everyone already accepts. That’s easy. If you can see something, you don’t need faith. Faith in the seeable is meaningless.
Throughout the twentieth century, there were only two presidents who won reelection with a bad economy and high unemployment: FDR in 1936 and Reagan in 1984.
We are comfortable with the idea that extra-bad people possess something real that helps them win football games.
has the coolest dog in town, but that plays to his disadvantage. He’s an eight-year-old who needs a psychiatrist, and he has to pay the bill himself (only five cents, but still). Charlie Brown knows his life is a contradictory struggle, and sometimes his only option is to lie in a dark room, alone with his thoughts.
Very often, young Americans are simultaneously pessimistic about the world and optimistic about themselves—they assume everyone’s future is bleak, except for their own.
Charlie Brown effortlessly embodies what Peanuts truly is: an introduction to adult problems, explained by children.
The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity.
However—from a fictional, narrative perspective—it ends up making the message a little less meaningful. If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable.
The bookish kids reading Harry Potter novels may not go on to control the world, but they will almost certainly go on to control the media. In fifteen years, they will be publishing books and directing films and writing broad jokes for unfunny situation comedies that will be downloaded directly into our brains. And like all generations of artists, they will traffic in their own nostalgia. They will use their shared knowledge and experiences as the foundation for discourse. So I wonder: Because I don’t understand Harry Potter, am I doomed to misunderstand everything else?
Within any complex scenario, there are three kinds of information. The three types are as follows: Information that you know you know. Information that you know you don’t know. Information that you don’t know you don’t know.
I have “like minds.” You know, I’ve been fortunate to play in Los Angeles, where there are a lot of people like me. Actors. Musicians. Businessmen. Obsessives. People who feel like God put them on earth to do whatever it is that they do. Now, do we have time to build great relationships? Do we have time to build great friendships? No. Do we have time to socialize and to hang out aimlessly? No. Do we want to do that? No. We want to work. I enjoy working.
They love him more, they criticize him more, and they think about him more. They can tell he’s different and they want him to be different. They want that difference to matter. And Franzen understands this, which is both how it happened and why it’s less implausible than it should be.
My favorite line of the piece was that I’m supposed to be ‘spectacularly bad’ at managing my public image. Well, if that’s true, maybe they should look at the cover of their own magazine.”
To suggest that Franzen is some kind of unknowable sphinx would not be accurate; he’s written a memoir, he’s published a lot of personal nonfiction, his girlfriend wrote about the complexity of his success (the 2003 Granta essay “Envy”), and he’s conducted many interviews with many persistent people for more than ten years.
“I’m not talking about the grad students with unwashed hair who might actually stalk Pynchon,” he says. “I’m talking about people who want to have an ongoing relationship with interesting books, and I’ve realized there are more people like that in America than I used to believe, even just ten years ago.
It’s easy to understand why Franzen’s literary characters are so rich and fully realized; he understands himself better than most people I’ve encountered, which is always the first step toward understanding people who aren’t you.
“It’s not my responsibility if some people are tone deaf to irony,” he says. “The lead book reviewer for The New York Times [Pulitzer Prize winner Michiko Kakutani] is utterly tone deaf when it comes to irony. She just can’t hear it. Which you’d think would disqualify her from reviewing books for a blog in Kansas City, let alone The New York Times. But there you go. There’s always going to be a percentage of the populace who doesn’t get irony and will therefore not get seventy-five percent of good literature.”
I don’t read much about myself. I learned my lesson after spending ninety ill-advised minutes googling myself once in the fall of 2001. I think the whole “Franzen is a spoiled elitist” thing was wrong, although not without a kernel of truth. I do lead a privileged life. I do believe some books are better than others. I do think that mere popularity does not indicate greatness. In those respects, I suppose I’m an elitist. But I think what was meant by the term “elitist” at the time was the antithesis of what I’ve tried to do as a writer, which is to reach the largest possible audiences and
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They met in the early ’90s when Wallace wrote Franzen a fan letter about his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City; soon after, Wallace became recognized as the next great American genius with the 1996 publication of Infinite Jest, only to have Franzen shoot past him (at least in terms of recognition and readability) with The Corrections.
ask if he has any recurring dreams, knowing that people talk about their dreams in order to tell secrets about themselves they want other people to know.
“I try not to lie, and I try to interact with others as full people, even if they’re strangers. And I want to write fiction with those two premises.”
