Bigthink - User Ideas Feed

Jonathan Franzen Reads

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:50:22 +0100

From an essay on bird-watching.

Transcript:

In Florida at the Estero Lagoon at Fort Meyers beach where according to my guide book, I was likely to see hundreds of red knots and Wilsons plovers, I instead found a Jimmy Buffet song playing on the holiday and beach front sound system and a flock of gulls loitering on the white sand behind the hotel; it was happy hour. As I was scanning the flock, making sure that it consisted entirely of ring billed gulls and laughing gulls, a tourist came over to take pictures. She kept moving closer, absorbed in her snapshots and the flock amebically distanced itself from her, some of the gulls hopping a little in their haste. The group murmuring uneasily and finally breaking into alarm cries as the woman bore down with her pocket digital camera. How I wondered could she not see that the gulls only wanted to be left alone, then again the gulls didn’t seem to mind the Jimmy Buffet. The animal who most clearly wanted to be left alone was me. Farther down the beach, still looking for the promised throngs of red knots and Wilsons plovers, I came upon a particularly charmless stretch of muddy sand on which there was a handful of more common shore birds, Dunlins and semi pelmated plovers and leased sand pipers in their brownish gray winter plumage, camped out amid high rise condos and hotels, surveying the beach in postures of sleeping disgruntlement, with their heads scrunched down and their eyes half shut, they looked like a little band of misfits. Like a premonition of a future in which all birds will either collaborate with modernity or go off to die someplace quietly. What I felt for them went beyond love, I felt outright identification, the well adjusted throngs of collaborator birds in South Florida, with the trash pigeons and trash grackles and the more stately but equally tame pelicans and cormorants, all struck me now as traitors. It was the motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach who reminded me of the human beings I loved best, the ones who didn’t fit in. These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked beleaguered there, few in number, my outcast friends was how I felt. I’ve been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize but I could no longer remember why. It was in any case anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself, to be hungry all the time, to be mad for ex, to not believe in global warming, to be short sighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren. To spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind, these were all ways of being like a bird. Later in the evening in posh necropolitan Naples on a sidewalk outside a hotel whose elevator doors were decorated with huge blow ups of cute children and the monosyllabic injunction, smile. I spotted two disaffected teenagers, two little chicks in full Goth plumage and I wished that I could introduce them to the brownish gray misfits on the beach.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: Do you regret your run-in with Oprah?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:50:16 +0100

Given the chance to do it over, would Franzen have wanted The Corrections to be part of Oprah's book club?

Transcript:

Do I regret any part of that experience, all these years later, you know, it’s hard for-- yeah sure as a writer you regret how long it takes to you fully figure out what the real situation was and I wanna rewrite it in my head and know the whole thing, rather than only part of it. So I think it’s hard to find fault though, I mean regret really means, what does regret mean, it’s not like I wasn’t trying to very hard to do my best. Some of these things just have to play out the way they play out.

Yeah, I never really had any problem with that, it was probably not a great fit, you know, the world kind of divides it into people that one opinion of Oprah Winfrey and people who have kind of the diametrically opposite opinion. That’s a remarkable thing to achieve, to divide the world in two, you’re sort of parting the seas. I think I feel some confidence, she’d be comfortable with the magnitude of that image.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: Why do you find ignorance interesting?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:50:06 +0100

Endless stuff of comedy.

Transcript:

To allude to one of the great comedies about unknowing ever written which was Pale Fire, Charles Kinboat and amusement park across the street while he’s tried to concentrate on his own annotation of a thousand line poem. Nabokov’s characters are wonderfully, I mean that’s all-- so much of that is the comedy of not knowing when one of the kids at school passes Kinboat the note that says, “Man you got H-dash-dash-dash-dash-S real bad” and the word is obviously halitosis but he said but of course what Kinboat tells us is “That’s not enough dashes for the word hallucinations, you know, it’s I mean it’s so perfect, you don’t know where to begin with how extraordinary that is because of course Kinboat is having hallucinations and the entire piece is filled with all of these faulty memories and these completely hallucinated scenes. But his response when someone passes him a note about his bad breath is to misread it as accusing him of having hallucinations in order to of course, I mean this is a on hallucinations but of course he knows he is. So that I mean that kind of play I really like for instance but it’s there in a lot of writers. Most comic characters are unknowing, they can’t be funny, I mean bad, unfunny comic characters can, but genuinely comic characters don’t know how funny they are, that is then they would just be witty or something or they’d be stitches. But so it’s impossible to imagine real comic scene without a high degree of unknowing, of hilarious lack of self knowledge, lack of awareness, otherwise, you know, you just get wit or you get slapstick or some less interesting sub genre of comedy. But, you know, somebody who comes out and thinks he’s incredibly important but is not, well that’s very funny, that’s a genuinely comic situation and we’re laughing because we see something that that person doesn’t, to take two examples. I think it has to do with my own taste for comic writing which I think tends to track pretty closely with the presence of real literature because that comedy of not knowing is so close to the tragedy of not knowing and so it’s just yeah, it grows out of my own sense of what literature is and what my taste in it is.

Other good comic writers, well Kafka’s very funny, “Man who loved children” is very funny, Dave Wallace is very funny. Most of these people I’m mentioning are very funny, Rilke not so funny but not entirely unfunny in that novel of Rilke’s there’s this great scene where young Rilke, there’s sort of there’s this family, there’s some family friends that they have to go and visit and it’s like it’s okay except this family is crazy and occasionally it comes because in the middle of a nice social evening, they all fall silent and go (nose sniffing) and they will all kind collectively hallucinate this ghost smell and the entire room will kinda go still and the family, I think they’re called the Schulan’s they all start creeping around sort of smelling, where’s that smell coming from, that’s a funny scene, so even Rilke could be funny.

Gogol yes, although yeah I admit I got a little bogged down when I went back and tried to reread “Dead Souls” not that long ago, I felt like I’d gotten “Dead Souls” on my first half reading and then full reading and it wasn’t quite working for me so much anymore. But yeah, very, very funny, but there’s a real bitter taste to Gogol’s humor I have to say, he was a chilly motherfucker and so even somebody who’s very, very dark and bleak like Kafka, it’s a much more humane and self implicating humor and I’m sure it’s there in Gogol too, it’s chilly stuff and kind of yeah one feels bad for how bad he must have felt to create that kind of humor and that’s not the best reaction to be having to the implied author I don’t think, feeling like whoa he must have been doing some real suffering to write that scene, like that’s not where you want the mind to be as you’re reading the scene. I don’t know, maybe just again a taste thing.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Memory and Memoir

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:49:17 +0100

Franzen discusses fiction, non-fiction, and the need to draw the distinction.

Transcript:

There were some moments when I was writing this personal history I published when it became clear to me that my memory was very unreliable and I’d always thought it was titanically reliable and it was a ice breaker of a memory compared to the flimsy tenuous memories of other people of my family. I could be relied on to know the date, know the place, know the circumstance. But when I was doing this for want of a better word, memoir, I had to fact check it because I could because most of, you know, my friends and family were around and I could fact check this stuff and, you know, it was jaw dropping. Things that I remembered more vividly than my own, you know, high school graduation or first day of college, you know, the stuff that was just like, I had clear crystal memories of these things, never happened, never happened. So that was very humbling but it’s much more fun to make fun of other people’s inability to know than one’s own. So I’ve gone back to doing that.

If you say this is nonfiction, it matters a lot because that’s what nonfiction is, it’s stuff that is verifiable in some way and if it can’t be verified, if you don’t make an effort to verify it, it shouldn’t be called nonfiction. It seems pretty straightforward because nonfiction has all of these advantages, you get this _______________ when you read something and you know, oh this really happened, well but if, you know, and then you have been betrayed if it turns out, no it didn’t really happen, it’s just the way that author remembered it happening. That sense of betrayal comes from the freeloading that one does as a writer when one labels something nonfiction, you’re getting something for free, the reader is giving you a gift of excitement and credulity because it really happened, but you have to hold up your side of the bargain. So yeah it matters a lot I think, I mean you can’t, nothing’s perfect and good storytellers get away with a lot but the only honest way to do that is by leaving stuff out, not by making stuff up.

I think in common parlance when something says memoir on the cover, people assume it’s nonfiction, so if you put a disclaimer up front and say this is just how I remember it, there’s probably a lot here that didn’t happen this way but this is the memories I have, which would be true to the actual word memoir. I think that would be different; that would be a useful disclaimer to see but no I think now when you see memoir, you assume it’s what happened.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

On Privacy

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:49:11 +0100

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Transcript:

I was not worried about a loss of privacy, I was worried about a loss of a public space where people’s private lives weren’t always being shoved in your face and technology has made that a lot worse as far as I can tell. I’m assaulted by other people’s private lives in a whole new set of ways, I cannot shop for groceries without getting their private conversations, but that’s not what people mean when they talk about a loss of privacy. So I had a very clear notion of here’s a public space, wouldn’t it be nice to only get a composed, polite or even rude but some sort of like acknowledgement that we’re in a public place that we’re not just having our own private lives and there’s some other people having their private lives floating around but there’s some collective notion of like put yourself together a little bit, show that tiny bit of respect for the other human beings around you and not broadcast your private life. So it was really in that respect, if you look at privacy which I felt was the problem, I felt like this obsession with privacy, I thought just, you know, we live in the growth of the private sector and the shrinkage of the public sector even to make a little pun like that, you know, this is a privatized world. All of that has gotten a little worse and at a certain point I realized, you know, I wrote that thing during the Clinton/Lewinski misery and felt like all of the commentators had it dead wrong, it was not about Ken Starr’s exposing, you know, Bill and Monica’s private life. I thought well for god sake he’s the President, I mean what expectation of privacy. What I was offended by was I don’t wanna hear about these guys, you know, I don’t wanna hear about semen on a dress, it’s like, you know, for god sake, just, you know, excuse me please, I mean there are plenty of places I’d love to hear about semen on dresses but not really, you know, coming out of the White House. So that inversion where the privacy laws had to do with something being made public rather than being inflicted on me rather than my private stuff being, I don’t care, you know, I really don’t care if people poke around in my stuff, if I never know about it. I’m a writer, I have an exhibitionist’s streak, I betray my own privacy all the time, I publish all sorts of private facts about myself and not just myself but my friends and my family. So I’m not worried about that but at a certain point that sense of assault by other people’s, you know, stained underwear when you’re just trying to like walk down a sidewalk or sit in a theater or something. I realized the best way to manage that was to take out my own cell phone and start talking so, you know, if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: How do you write?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:49:06 +0100

The importance of tone.

Transcript:

It’s such a huge question, I mean I really literally could talk all day and barely scratch the surface and I think it would interest as many as four or five other people, how that works. I will say that it’s always about tone and if the tone is not there, then there is no writing and so to get anything done I need a tone and I need some sense of outline and the outline is usually much easier to get than the tone. I don’t have the heart to try to make an outline until I believe that there is a piece of writing to be done and the piece of writing will exist as soon as I believe that there’s a tone to write it in. So I made the mistake this fall of spending a lot of time trying to outline a piece I wrote about New York State and I did not-- I thought I’d come up with the tone but I hadn’t looked at those pages when I went ahead and spent a lot of time not only making an outline but doing research based on that outline and then went back and the pages were horrid, just terrible and I hated them and I hated the person who wrote them.

I think for me, I mean I’m in a relatively luxurious position at this point in my writing life where I don’t have to do things that aren’t interesting and something, a piece of writing’s not interesting or worth doing if there’s not some personal risk, if it’s not dangerous in some fashion, whether you’re exposing some part of yourself you’d rather not talk about or whether you’re being-- trying to be sincere about something that would be much more comfortable to be ironic about or vice versa, if you’re being sarcastic or ironic about something that people take seriously. To name just some of the obvious ways in which writing can have an element of risk in it, there can also be some kind of content risks, you don’t want to be seen writing such and such a thing, you don’t-- or it might even be literally somewhat dangerous to do for a journalist. But particularly when there’s some element of psychological risk there’s a discomfort, the first thing you have to know is can I find a way to write about this uncomfortable thing that will not make people uncomfortable when they read it and that distance is always navigated by way of the piece’s tone. Do you like how you sound as you write about it or do you sound like a pompous asshole or do you, yeah and then you can’t immediately know that but as soon as you start hearing “Oh this I could read aloud and it would not kill me” and yet people might simultaneously enjoy it but also be made slightly uncomfortable about it. Well that’s where I wanna be and that, you know, when you start hearing that and you have some paragraphs that work like that, well you can see okay well I can write the whole thing in that voice and it will be okay at which point it’s safe to create an outline and go on, so that’s my process answer.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Overrated Books

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:48:12 +0100

What's all the fuss about?

Transcript:

Oh overrated, I always felt yeah, E.M. Forster was overrated frankly, to take an obvious example, never really got it. When people go on and on about Graham Green, especially his important books like “End of the Affair” I get puzzled, but I shouldn’t be, I mean there’s nothing wrong with Green and there’s nothing wrong with Forster either, I just feel like what’s all the fuss about.

What is all the fuss about, damned if I know frankly, I think there must be American writers, Dave Wallace, I think is one of them and probably George Saunders is another who I don’t think the Brits get at all, I think they’re just like why do people-- this is so puerile, it’s so easy, it’s so-- I don’t know what they’re thinking or this is so bratty, it’s so annoying or it’s so broad or whatever they’re saying. I think there’s a category of American fiction that just doesn’t cross the ocean so well and I think that I’m talking about a strain of British fiction writing, a not inconsiderable strain of British fiction writing that some people-- to some people this is what a novel is, it’s an E.M. Forrester novel or a Graham Green novel, they’re living practitioners in England producing novels that also today seem like well this is what a real novelist is and this is what a real novel is and for some of us in America you just like say “That’s not even a novelist hardly,” that’s sort of a near perfect replica of a novel, it’s so it’s a taste thing. I think there’s a kind of well made product that Forster pioneered and represents that engendered a great many very well made novels in England in the 20th century that you either think is like what a novel should be or else you just throw up your hands.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Underrated Books

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:48:09 +0100

Jane Smiley's Greenlanders, among others.

Transcript:

You can’t count people who’ve gotten the Nobel Prize right because they’ve gotten the Nobel Prize. A book I’m surprised no one ever talks about, I’m not surprised, a book I’m disappointed no one ever talks about because I don’t really know of a better American novel from the last 20 years is Jane Smiley’s book “The Greenlanders” it’s her finest work to my knowledge, so I would mention that and while we’re talking about fine novels from the last 20 years, I would have to throw out “Infinite Jest” I know that it is much more spoken of but I still don’t think it got as much attention as it deserved, it’s a giant book, it’s a wonderful book. So these things are relative, David Wallace, nor Jane Smiley, they’re not exactly unknown writers. A little bit more in that category would be Christina Stead with “The Man Who Loved Children” which I’m on a bit of a personal crusade to call people’s attention to a genuine family novel masterpiece unlike any other book ever written, came out of America by an Australian ex-pat genius named Christina Stead and I’ll plug that too.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: Which writers inform your work?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:48:06 +0100

Franzen's literary touchstones, decades in, decades out.

Transcript:

Reference points for me decade in, decade out, Shakespeare and Kafka, decade in and decade out, it’s so much depends on like what you happen to read when you’re 19 or 20 and your eyes are open to literature and then I don’t know if Rilke’s novel, his only novel is a great book or not but it was one of the touch tone texts for me. I learned how to read literarily in part by reading that book and part by reading Kafka and in part by reading Shakespeare, Ibsen another, I mean if one can mention two playwrights in a list of five books. Because they were where I learned how to read, they remain the examples that come to mind when I’m trying to say something about literature. So we have Ibsen and we have the Rilke novel, we all of Kafka, we have all of Shakespeare and I think probably I’d wanna say somebody like, I’d probably wanna say “The Great Gatsby” just to make sure there’s an American on the list.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: What's on your desert island reading list?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:47:18 +0100

Why not take the opportunity to learn a language?

Transcript:

Desert Island, well for a desert island you’d wanna take hard books, you know, you’d wanna take-- desert island is not a literary cannon, desert island is a wish list. What I wish I’d had sustained reading time to actually figure out. So and frankly I don’t see why one wouldn’t take advantage of being on a desert island to learn a new language, so like three three really good books of Russian grammar and a Russian dictionary and then War and Peace or something, might be what I would take to a desert island, just make good use of the time. That’s a Midwestern thing, but I can’t tell if it’s a Midwestern thing always or maybe just a Midwestern thing from my childhood, a wish to make good use of one’s leisure time, not just piss it away, try to read books that are not only fun but have some substance to them. It feels like a Midwestern prejudice that I ought to be improving myself on the desert island; it’s not enough that I’m on a desert island. Frankly a desert island sounds kinda great, so I think I would probably try to learn Russian, although at this point maybe not, I might try to learn Chinese but I might need more than five books for that. So one could look at the question as well five books that I think are underappreciated and deserve a plug in a situation like this.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: Is there a Malthusian limit to China's growth?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:47:12 +0100

Description: Predicting China's economic collapse.

Transcript:

Yeah oh god, I mean it’s just the same, I mean just as environmentally and in terms of social unrest and eight other ways. They’re this close to everything, just kind of the wheel’s coming off, right now the central government is desperately trying to get industry moving inland because bringing a hundred million, before long, two hundred million workers on a migrant basis to the coastal factories is, you know, it’s a logistical nightmare and an humanitarian disaster too. So there’s a huge ongoing effort to try to get all that industry inland but it may not happen in time and they’re racing against these impatient western companies that, you know, don’t wanna raise the cost of, you know, a lawn chair set at Wal-Mart, if you raise that $6 well then they’re all gonna go to Costco and everybody at Costco’s thinking the same thing. So there’s no price flexibility over here so there’s, you know, all the American buyers are, you know, this far away from taking it all to India or to Vietnam or try again in South America or something like that. I mean China has huge structural advantages and it’s not gonna-- I don’t think the economy’s entirely gonna tank. But there, I don’t know about Malthusian, it just, it doesn’t-- no great labor situation, no great economic situation lasts forever and there is-- and I think probably the first thing to give will be the environment here, more than anything else and I think the Chinese government knows that and is hoping, you know, if you staple on enough environmental reform, maybe it’ll be enough to get us down the next mile.

In Shanghai, it will look like not having any water to drink, it will look like they’re source of drinking water for a city that’s already at 20 million and should shoot up to 30 million in any month now. That suddenly what you got coming out of the tap is salt water, salt water filled with cadmium and mercury from, you know, 14,000 polluting factories up the Yanksee. It’s a real bad problem when you run out of water and they have just disastrous water problems right now, water tables are collapsing everywhere, the climate of course is changing, it’s changing for the much drier. They were worried about floods just ten years ago, they did all of this massive, you know, social engineering stuff to deal with the floods and now, you know, it’s like it’s all blowing away, it’s the problem of sandstorms and no water table. So water, that’s a good one, you’re really-- you’re kinda screwed when you don’t have any water and I could go on but maybe we.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: What accounts for China's disregard of nature?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:47:06 +0100

Hunger.

Transcript:

Hunger, chiefly, I mean China was a hungry place, literally a starving country for parts of the year in large parts of the country, well into the ‘80s, you know, conservative estimates of the number dead of starvation and the great leap forward in the late ‘50s is 35 million. I mean those are some pretty significant numbers, the upper estimate is more like 50 million, you know, well that’s just take California and throw in a few other pretty good sized states and you let the entire population starve to death that’s kind of what you’re looking at. I guess on a percentage basis it would be like if everyone in Florida had starved to death. But just in enormous numbers and people don’t, you know, if you haven’t had protein for 6 weeks and a pigeon goes by, you’re not thinking “Oh what a pretty bird” you know, or even if it’s a bald eagle, you’re thinking protein on wing, you know. So a lot of it is purely economic and I think George Packer, I think his best insight about Iraq when he went there immediately after the invasion was that the American planners among all the many things they were not taking into account, were not taking into account the psychological damage that decades under Saddam had inflicted that never mind political structure, never mind, you know, are there theaters where people could express their political views, never mind economic infrastructure, if people have been-- if you have an entire generation that has gone through the miseries of that dictatorship and has never really known what it’s like to have political rights and is living in a police state and everybody had a brother who died fighting Iran and all of that stuff, it doesn’t matter what you give them because they’re so shell shocked by the experience of those decades and China is not as extreme because it was not-- China is such a big place and there’s so much going on in it and there’s always pockets where there’s a direct contradiction to the last thing you just said. But still broadly speaking it wasn’t like the first half of the 20th century was so great for them and then there was a great leap forward and then there was a cultural revolution and then there was the gang of four period. It was basically just a miserable, miserable place and there’s this sense of rebound which is, you know, like all I want is not to be miserable the my parents were, all the parents want is for their children and their grandchildren not to be miserable the way they were and the misery was so deep and so endemic and so thorough going on so many levels that you have the sense that people just like don’t talk to me about that right now. The watch word in the late ‘80s it was actually given an official national watchword, which was “Development first, then environment.” And part of that is the theory that, you know, as people have a little more money, then they can afford, they have the leisure and the means to worry about these things, but there was a very deliberate decision made, you know, stop forcing people to eat ideology and let them have, you know, iPhones and it’s very hard when you actually go to China and talk to people there, it’s very hard to want to deny them their iPhones, frankly because it’s a tough place.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

Re: What was your experience of China?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:46:16 +0100

China made America feel very old and tired, Franzen says.

Transcript:

It made America feel very old and tired and not like the most happening of places basically. I was sorry it had taken me so long to get to China, I was hanging out with a lot of people who were environmentally concerned and there is no real western style activism, there cannot be any western style activism, environmentally in China. So it gets channeled into these relatively safe and acceptable forms and because of my pre-existing interest in birds, I was hanging out with a lot of people who cared about bird conservation and China has as we all know, somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 billion people and very little good land and what land there is, is pretty much as dense as, you know, Hoboken, New Jersey and you just drive for hours and hours and it never gets any less densely populated than Hoboken, which is pretty densely populated and you keep waiting for, you know, like let’s get to the actual city center and you realize no this is, you know, we’re not on the outskirts, this is what the countryside looks like, it’s very, very densely populated and it takes some getting used to, the fact that it is almost entirely wildlife free. People will grab you by the arm and say “Look, a gull,” you know, a seagull, it’s a seagull like it’s the way we react to a bald eagle or something, you know, there’s an actual gull there. So you drive by these harbors, you take ferries and it’s just, you know, brown water as far as the eye can see because every bit of protein is being extracted and eaten. So in certain ways from a biodiversity or wildlife perspective, I was in eastern China, it’s very bleak and conversely when you find an animal or when you find somebody who cares about a wild animal, it just seems like the most miraculous gift and birdlife does continue to hang on there and there is suddenly increasingly a homegrown community of bird watchers for one thing. People who just like, once people were no longer hungry and there was such a thing as a middle class, almost instantly very much contrary to our notions of Chinese eating, you know, tiger gallbladder and trafficking in rhinoceros horn and basically, you know, skinning cats and eating song birds and all of that. In fact instantly with a certain level of affluence comes an ability and the leisure to appreciate nature. All of which is very heartening until you try to do the math on what it would take to make the entire country affluent enough to care, you basically need to clear cut all of South East Asia, Central Africa and the Amazon in order to bring the Chinese population up to European or American standard of living. So in that brutally paradoxical way raise the possibility that just to the point where there’s nothing left, we will be able to appreciate what we had, which is kind of where we are today. However having said that I think the Chinese are actually coming along more rapidly than we in the west have when it comes to the environment so that was also very heartening to see. But the main thing was just the sort of shock of being in certainly the most Republican place I’ve ever been. It seemed like just a pristine vision of what Bush/Cheneyism leads to, logically which is a money and business-centric society in utter environmental ruin with this basically weak central government that nonetheless is very good at paranoid security and at stirring up patriotism and nationalism and the country basically consisting of some unbelievably rich people and a significant relatively well off group and then a large immiserated under class and the country basically being run by this kind of corrupt commingling of local politicians, regional politicians and business interests who’ve just figured out how to divide up the spoils and maintain social order. And some of that is very exciting, I mean there is-- let’s give Bush/Cheneyism its due, pre Katrina, there was a certain kind of excitement, one felt like wow these people are evil and the world is changing but man they’re so far ahead of what the Democrats can do in terms of political organization, political sophistication and militant eyes on the prize, you got knocked down here, you lose a division, it doesn’t matter, let’s pick up and keep going. That excitement that one felt sort of circa 2003/2004 when Grover Norquist seemed like the most prescient person in America and Tom Delay seemed unstoppable and a titan that excitement is there tenfold in China, it’s like wow they’re just going for it and it’s, you know, everything is getting stapled on behind on an as needed basis, there is no way this thing’s gonna work and yet it's kinda working still and so I just found it really the-- my primary emotion was excitement there and of course a deep undercurrent of sadness as somebody who cares about nature. Recorded On: 4/1/08

Midwestern Values

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:46:09 +0100

Coming east for college was bound to disillusion.

Transcript:

What was it like growing up in the Midwest in the ‘70s? I think it was probably more like growing up in Hawaii or Washington State or Florida in the ‘70s than it was like growing up in the Midwest of other decades. I think it was mostly the ‘70s and those were same everywhere. Maybe we took it a little bit less ironically, all of that kind of personal growth and self realization stuff of the ‘70s we really bought it. Again maybe just for a critical year or 18 months longer but that’s enough to kinda set the hook and I think it’s about a prolongation of innocence and it’s a prolongation of childhood. That’s how I would describe the Midwest, you are just so far from a border or a coast that the possibility of cynicism takes just a little longer, when it hits, it hits full force because you have to embrace that cynicism and that irony and that rage because you’ve been duped, because you have survived to a greater age with your innocence and you feel so betrayed by the world and that the first reaction is to become unbelievably cynical and hard. But there is that kind of soft caramel center that never goes away and maybe I’m just generalizing for myself but I know that I was an unbelievably innocent 18 year old in every way. But not stupid and not unaware of the world, but just in some-- I somehow still thought it was a nice world.

Oh freshman year at college basically.

I went to Philadelphia, oh it was not Philadelphia’s fault, I love Philly and it wasn’t those other kids’ fault, they come from somewhat tougher east coast schools, a lot of private school kids, I mean wow, the voltage between their jadedness and my innocence was bound to make one of us unhappy and it wasn’t gonna be them.

In some respects it’s never really be ruined. There’s something about this whole narrative that makes me uncomfortable because I really don’t, truly don’t believe in the Midwesternness of the Midwest. I cannot get outside it and account for it, I believe it exists but it’s sort of like the center of the earth, you know, I don’t actually know for sure that we have a molten core, I’m told we do and there’s no reason to doubt and it must be there and the Midwest which is kind of the molten core of the country that must exist too.

Whenever anyone asks me to generalize about the Midwest I wanna come back and say there is no such thing as the Midwest and every once in a while someone says “You know, there’s no such thing as the Midwest” and then I wanna argue with that person and say “That’s not true, have you ever watched a Midwesterner get on the subway in New York City?” It was certainly true in my high school that fashions got there a year or two later than they did on the coast. What we thought was very, very cutting edge was already passé in California and New Jersey as I bitterly discovered when I went east to go to college. So what that time lag represents I’m not sure, Midwestern values, Midwestern values, I don’t think there is such a thing as Midwestern values, I mean it’s kind of the crank capital of North America right now, those wonderful Midwestern plain states. So it’s not like yeah what do you say, it’s no different from anywhere else and yet we all feel that there is something there.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

The Midwestern Writer

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:46:06 +0100

Innocence prolonged, innocence lost.

Transcript:

One can go down the list of American writers who I admire and find a great many of them who come from the Midwest and who were marked by leaving it and I feel as if you look at Mark Twain or Willa Cather or Fitzgerald or George Saunders or Kurt Vonnegut there is something distinctive about their having come from the Midwest, had their innocence prolonged by an extra year or two by coming from there and then lost it at an advanced age in the Eastern Europe and I think their writing is marked by that wound but it’s difficult to do more than gather those examples together and point to them. Maybe one wants to say moral seriousness but that’s of course, you know, it’s not like Falkner and O’Connor are not morally serious people or Kafka who never set foot in the Midwest except imaginatively, the nature theater of Oklahoma. So whenever you actually try to pin down what it might mean to be Midwestern as a writer, you know, you’re trying to pin down a water droplet or something it’s terrible.

Recorded On: 4/1/08