Before moving on to the substance of what Franzen had to say, let's discuss what Portland Arts & Lectures is and isn't. Franzen came onstage at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and said he was supposed to talk for 50 minutes and not read from current work, the standard instructions for a PAL appearance. He was ready. Others haven't been as prepared. Ira Glass (a special event that wasn't part of the series) brought an iPad onstage and did an entertaining version of "This American Life's Greatest Hits." Jeffrey Toobin provided a gossipy, informative overview of Supreme Court politics that didn't go beyond what's in his book but couldn't have been more topical. Barbara Kingsolver, the most requested author in series history, was interviewed onstage and seemed more interested in making sure everyone liked her than saying anything substantive, an approach that had the opposite effect.
Franzen cared about what his audience thought, and said so. He was more worried about whether they might have been expecting something different -- a reading from "Freedom," for instance -- and would be turned off when they realized he really was going to talk at length about Kraus (1874-1936), a big deal in his time and place but little-known in the U.S., then or now. Franzen's next book will be about Kraus and will be, he said, about 80 percent footnotes. Kraus is notoriously hard to translate and Franzen read short passages from two of his essays and riffed on them in some detail.
Kraus was the publisher and for many years the sole author of a newspaper, The Torch, that often consisted of jeremiads against other writers, other papers, and whatever causes or ideas were fashionable at the time. As you probably know, one of Franzen's bete noires is our "passive acceptance of new technology," and it wasn't long before he was off Kraus and onto how insufferable Apple's "Mac vs. PC" ad campaigns were, and how by looking up facts on an iPhone we are in danger of "hand(ing) over memory to a global corporate system of control."
After a particularly articulate rant against the "monotonism of the techno-titans," Franzen paused and looked up.
"They asked for a lecture. What can I say? I'd rather be reading fiction," said Franzen, who was called "the Mitt Romney of American letters" last year for his tendency as a public speaker to come across unsympathetically.
Then he laughed self-consciously ("la la la la la") and explained how he got so intrigued with Kraus and became "an extremely angry person" when he was 22. Franzen was in Berlin, studying through the Fulbright Student Program, and took a seminar on Kraus's play "The Last Days of Mankind." He loved the courage and compulsive honesty in everything Kraus did and admired his attacks on newspapers, the dominant media of the era. When he returned to the U.S., Franzen attempted to translate two Kraus essays, a project he said he had to put aside but hoped to finish one day after he wrote a novel that made him famous and a millionaire.
This last piece of information was followed by a long, ironic pause. Thirty years later, Franzen is famous and a millionaire after writing two big novels and is returning to "The Kraus Project," the title of his forthcoming book. If the parallels between Vienna in 1910 and the U.S. in 2013 weren't entirely clear (hint: both societies were "drifting toward apocalypse"), then Franzen will spell them out in a series of footnotes in his new book. If you want to hear him read his fiction, go to Powell's the next time he's on tour.
-- Jeff Baker, on Twitter
Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2013/01/bookmarks_jonathan_franzen_rip.html
march 30 rimm pauly d project adrienne rich autism cesar chavez day raspberry ketone
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন