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I don't particularly like Jonathan Franzen, as a writer and as a public persona, that is. Freedom was hyped over the top and yes, maybe it is the best social realist novel since The Corrections (which I have yet to read) and by any living American writer in a long time but I really couldn't care much about any of those characters. They were, by and large, pretty boring. And if you ever saw or read an interview with Franzen you might come to the conclusion that the only interesting thing about him was his close friendship to DFW. And this is the only reason why I'm reading his collection of essays and arguments "How To Be Alone" and some random interviews (his Paris Review 'The Art of Fiction' interview from the Winter 2010 issue is now fully available online) and articles like the New Yorker piece about him scattering some of DFWs ashes on an isolate island, Robinson Crusoe and a rare bird (pdf here). A wildly incoherent article, by the way.

But nevertheless, Franzen does have and is able to create a very nice and soothing narratorial voice, making Freedom mostly, despite the characters, a pretty pleasurable read. And also "My Father's Brain", the opening essay from "How To Be Alone" is a very immersive and nicely plotted piece of autobiographical writing that makes want for more. And so, a few essays into the book, I came upon "Lost in the Mail". And this one is also nicely plotted and told, about a 1994 breakdown of the U.S. Postal Service in Chicago where citizens didn't receive mail for weeks and postal workers either hid thousands of letters in their apartments or burnt them - over the course of several years - to obscure the fact that they didn't finish their routes. Some of them drank on duty and stopped in bars to watch sports tv for hours on end to collect overtime payment afterward, etc., etc. One citizen even reports "Mailman harasses us at night, asks for money." As Franzen tells it, this is USPS apocalypse, which makes for a good story (this seems to be his first ever piece for the New Yorker).

But then, at the very end of this essay, when Franzen sums up his nostalgic feelings and thoughts for the US Postal Service in general and the 1994 outrage in particular, he presents the reader with a sudden erratic, out-of-line and out-of-context statement:

"The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests."

WTF?! Really? Yes. I checked it several times. There's no mention of priests or pederasty or the confluence of both anywhere before in the text. And to compare the burning of mail to priest's pederasty is the one really big twist in his going-postal narrative. What was he thinking (and re-thinking while proof-reading) or the editors at The New Yorker? Has this been commented on? I mean this essay is 17 years old and the very first thing that google returns when I type in "franzen priest pederasty" is a facebook group that is called "Father Franzen was the best priest ever. end of story." What's going on?

Two essays further into the book, "Sifting the Ashes": Franzen tells a neat story about the rise of the tobacco industry in the U.S. and about coming to terms with his own habit of smoking. Let's see if he deals another blow to our innocence as with the mail-burning child-fucking thing:

"My mother still speaks of cigarettes with loathing. I secretly started smoking them myself in college, perhaps in part because she hated them, and as the years went by I developed a fear of exposure very similar, I'm convinced, to a gay man's fear of coming out to his parents."

Little Jon, who will tell everybody (those who ask about it + those who don't) about his happy and unspoiled High-School time, becomes a little rebellious and smokes a cigarette or two and believes, honestly, he feels the same (well, very similar) dread of exposure of a gay man of coming out to his parents. This is from 1996. Jon Franzen, who grew up in Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb of 23,000 people. So much about where his sense for social realism comes from. Considering how he built up smoking as a very bad thing indeed before, he seems to say that homosexuality is a) a bad habit, b) something addictive, c) something that makes you sick d) and over the long haul kills you, e) in its function similar to the ending of the world, a personal apocalypse.

I'm really looking forward to read the other pieces in this book.

magnolia

...talking about emotion....

I am still in the nostalgic aftermath that brought me back in time, pretty much exactly 8 years ago, with the help of a bottle of very fine red wine, humming Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" and "One" alternately. These were actually my high school years, or at least that one summer that I definitely think of as my high school years, to get past the embarrassment and humiliation that usually goes well along with the remembrance of high school as such. And it took me back to a homework assignment that I had to do for a film class, where I did something on Magnolia, by Paul Thomas Anderson, which was my favourite movie for years, around that time.

And I YouTubed it. And I got goosebumps. It passed the test of time. It is still a perfect movie.

It is not only that I love the narratorial introduction, which frames the movie in a realm of possibilities, or the following exposé (for lack of better words) with Aimee Mann's "One" on the soundtrack setting the tone and mood for the movie while the camera is in a constant move to introduce all the main characters that the film will be circling around, examining every and each one of them in short bursts of congenial revelation, or that I LOVE Julianne Moore in this flick and think she really ought to have gotten the Oscar for her performances ever since (I just checked, she wasn't even nominated, but in general this movie lost all its categories to VERY inferior movies, and it wasn't even nominated in all the right categories, though, which were: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Tom Cruise, which he should have definitely won, because this is his most believable performance that I've ever seen, he is so brilliant! (granted, it is also the least attributable "acting" I've ever seen, because he simply (and genially) plays himself but with such a natural grace that it blows your mind; an award that rather went to Michael Caine for "The Cider House Rules", a movie I always didn't want to see) and Best Music, Original Song for Aimee Mann's "Save Me", which is right here

and lost to Phil Collins's "You'll Be in My Heart" from the "Tarzan" soundtrack (for all American Psycho Fans: This is Collins at his best!) and also it didn't get the award for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, which went to American Beauty (I can't be angry about this one, although Anderson should have won, because American Beauty's Screenplay Award for Alan Ball kicked off the (insert incompatible and most superior adjective) Six Feet Under HBO series). The other Oscars Magnolia should have gotten in 2000 were: Best Picture (American Beauty), Best Director (Sam Mendes, American Beauty), Best Cinematography (American Beauty) and Best Editing (Matrix), that makes 6 Academy Awards total that this very fine and perfect movie was denied. I lost track of all the parentheses here, but think this should be ok.
No, it is also that I first took notice of later Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman and the incredible Willam H. Macy and John C. Reilly and a very fine Luiz Guzmán who plays himself.

Again. This movie is perfect. It needs no exclamation mark. It is its own exclamation mark. And I would really enjoy watching it again. After so many years it's like meeting a long-ago lover you are still in love with. And here is my offer: The first person contacting me (via phone, email or direct verbal exchange) about wanting to watch it with me gets free snacks and beverages of choice (also it will reassure me that I don't write this blog into a mindless cybernetic vacuum) for the whole 188minutes that it lasts, assuming you pay full attention throughout this one dedicated time span (to the movie) or otherwise I'll heimlich you out of my fucking apartment until all of that snacks and beverages that were not thoroughly digested by the time I suspect you of not having payed too much attention to the movie are projectile-vomited out the window, which I will have checked to be open at the designated time, the time you didn't pay enough attention.
Here is the German Trailer. Sorry for all you international guys, but this is actually the best v/a quality I could find on Youtube and it is brilliantly dubbed in German. For all of those considering watching Magnolia with me: I have no problem at all watching it in German, because, as I said, it is perfectly dubbed. First Come, First Serve. Crank Up Your Volume! The screening will be on BluRay. Watch out for all the 8s and 2s.

emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.

Temporal Dynamics II - media and attention

Time is of the essence. Go back two posts or click here if you forgot all about Temporal Dynamics. If not, just read on.

I want to say something about the media. And boredom. And time. And how everything connects, enhancing my theoretic field of Temporal Dynamics.

Go back some more posts and listen to this, again. Really, try it. Take your time. Just click on the song, close your eyes and get into it. Do it.

What you just experienced was 6'32'' of highly structured time. Interesting or boring? Maybe you weren't able to pay enough attention to it since this is the internet and 6 minutes 32 seconds requires an almost excessive attention span in this medium. Meaning also that you decided to not listen to it at all because you already did that when I originally posted this. Or that you stopped listening after a couple minutes, seconds maybe. Right now, writing this and fighting for words, I feel a strong urge to go check my emails again, although I did exactly that a couple minutes ago. Thank God I don't have a facebook profile. Ok, so, on we go. Possible other reasons you were bored or distracted (a problem with or deficit in attention): You don't like that kind of music, probably don't like music at all. That would fall into the category of preference and has to do with seeking out of patterns. Maybe also with a whole lot of other stuff, that is too complicated to go into here (as if I knew). Let's say preference is an inclination to known (and somehow positively attributed) patterns. Those patterns arise, blablabla, socialization, chance events and such. Another reason for you having been bored with the piece of music might have been that you do not generally dislike that kind of music, but that you actually have no frame of reference whatsoever to process it, meaning there's no pattern recognition at all. When I went to see the world premiere of Stockhausen's complete Sonntag aus Licht last month, I was generally interested in music, also of course interested in Stockhausen's music, but since I didn't know shit about or had ever heard anything by him before, I just didn't know what was going on. And this is the highpoint of structural compositioning! So I just didn't have the proper tools to break the music down into recognisable and coherent pieces of information. So what was more interesting to me were the accompanying performances and certain aspects of the presentation. The music as such (which was for sale for about 350,- € on 5 CDs) was rather boring to me. Again, because I couldn't parse it's components and structure due to lack of a frame of reference. But that would hardly ever happen with the Bright Eyes song.

So, music is highly structured time and depending on recognized patterns either a) worthwhile and interesting (preferred pattern), b) anathema (aversive pattern, which is also interesting but not worthwhile) or c) boring and indifferent (no pattern recognition or an all too familiar pattern that evokes no attention).
The same with movies (where time is structured down to 1/24th of a second), tv, literature, newspapers, the internet, this very blog that you are reading, all kinds of media that distribute information (and isn't that a defining characteristic of media?).

The Big Question is what are you paying attention to. How do you want to structure your time? I actually wanted to write something about John Cage's 4'33'' (this is actually the most comprehensible version for internet use) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five's famous line "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" but got no more time on my hands right now. (Actually, I got loads of time at my hands, but am now moving into a time-zone that's very differently structured.)

DFW, Federer and Nadal, This Sunday

The French Open. Today. Men's Semifinals. Rafael Nadal vs. Andy Murray and Roger Federer vs. Novak Djokovic. The top 4 in the world. Djokovic has won about every single tournament this year he showed up for and would have climbed the world ranking to #1 if he had beaten Federer today. The match was hard, but he didn't (win, that is). He lost the tie-break in the fourth. Earlier Rafael Nadal had a very hard match against Murray, who had about a hundred break points that Nadal all defended, at least in the end stage of the third set. The second set was "großes Tennis", as we say in Germany. It was Nadal's birthday, too. His 25th. Congratulations!

Why am I telling you about this, you might ask. Tennis is of no interest to me. I thought this blog was about literature (and movies and stuff, too!) Well, it might interest you, because the French Open Final on Sunday at about 2:45pm Middle European (Summer) Time is Rafael Nadal vs. Roger Federer and David Foster Wallace wrote a little piece for the New York Times's (regard Strunk and White!) Play Magazine on Federer back in 2006, mostly about the Wimbledon Final between Nadal and Federer, that is called Federer as Religious Experience, and that might interest you, if you are into tennis or not (DFW would suffice for that matter).

The semifinal between Nadal and Murray was mostly what is known as a "hard-hitter" match. Both most of the time residing at the base line, hitting hard across (or long-line) the court. It is something that DFW describes as "brute force" in his NYT piece. And there is not so much grace in it, I agree. The other semifinal today, between Federer and Djokovic was somehow lighter, much more playful, with a lot more variance in the game. Murray outplayed Nadal with stops a lot, something Nadal apparently couldn't cope with or understand, for that matter. It was 52 minutes into the match that Nadal played his first stop. There were two or three more in the match from him, and they hit Murray as much by surprise as Murray's had disconcerted Nadal. It was a match about every single point. Only two games went straight through. The first by Murray, the second, and final, thus winning the match, by Nadal.

Last year was the first that I watched some tv-tennis due to the interest in the sport that DFW induced through Infinite Jest. The only match I remember now (and only in terms of that I watched it and what general impression it left on me) was a match between Söderling and someone else that left me with the impression that hard-hitting tennis is no game of grace, of which trait (is grace a trait?) I thought modern tennis is robbed, or deprived of (I hadn't seen a tennis match in about 2 decades before that, so that evaluation might have been quite arbitrary). But the Wallace piece mentioned (and linked to) earlier describes exactly that. The change from virtuosic (and also dumb serve and volley) tennis to improved-racket-hard-hitting-top-spin-tennis (devoid of grace, until Federer). So, the Nadal vs. Murray match was mostly hard-hitting, but I attribute this more to Murray's style of play. Federer vs. Djokovic was a bit more virtuosic, it was softer, there was more touch, more feel to every ball, to every point and although The White Stripes sing "the problems hide in your curls" Federer really nailed Djokovic down every time he tried to run off with his incredibly deserved break-points. Also Federer doesn't have any real curls. The fourth and fifth were very fine tennis, indeed.

So, actually this is it. I'm looking forward to the women's finals tomorrow (Li Na vs. Schiavone) and the Nadal-Federer match on Sunday. If anyone wants to join me, you know where I live. If not, I probably don't know you but would nevertheless be pleased to watch the match with you. In the meantime, read the DFW piece and prepare yourself for a classic tennis match. It's like Germany vs. England in football (btw, I feel terribly sorry that Gomez scored twice today against Austria despite of being in the worse team. He should get a new haircut, too!).

By the way: I really tried to find that point between Federer and Agassi that DFW first talks about, but couldn't. I actually think it a) does not exist or b) was not televised. You should watch the fourth set of that match nevertheless, since Federer OBLITERATES Agassi 6-1. Federer is at the top of his game and Agassi just a few days before officially announcing that he quits active tennis. So long.

Almost forgot, a quarter-funny (quarter-final?) version of the "Hitler upset with" series.

Boredom, DFW and Temporal Dynamics

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from." - David Foster Wallace "The Pale King"

"Sein [des Menschen] Leben schwingt also, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langeweile, welche in der Tat dessen letzte Bestandteile sind." - Arthur Schopenhauer

I have distracted myself. I think. Or have I?

I came along a post about boredom and The Pale King earlier and a little essay (link is in the comments) about how to go through full boredom to make it more interesting and a rewarding experience. Having been bored at the time and also tired I didn't pay much attention to it. Yes, my boredom hadn't ceased for the time being. Also I think it did not make much sense. But that may solely be linked to the fact that sense-making and clarity are qualities that don't go well with boredom. The point made in the post (if I'm not mistaken) is that voluntarily entering a state of boredom makes the whole thing much more interesting and even rewarding because what follows is a better level of attention. And, well, yes, better attention is on the way, all right, because some form of attention always follows boredom, since lack of attention is one of the things at the dead center of boredom. Hence (symplified): boredom = no attention --> attention = more attention than no attention. But the other thing is quite impossible, to enter a state of boredom voluntarily. There's a twist in it that does not work.

I feel a strong connection to the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile and an inventor I once corresponded with regarding his plans to build one exploiting oceanic maelstroms. There was a point in his theory where he was mixing warm and cold water-masses and thought they would add up and thus provide the extra amount of energy that not only kept his machine running on its own but could also turn the lights on somewhere. But of course the temperatures of a cold and a hot mass of anything do not add up, they even out. Creating a lukewarm mass of something and that is what we call entropy (simplified). And entropy is certain. The only way to heat a lukewarm mass up is to heat it up. From the outside, that is. The water can't heat itself up just by entering a mental state of voluntariness. There is no voluntariness and thus no free will in the water. And we could have lenghty arguments over if there is free will in human beings or any living (or dead, what's that all about anyway?) matter, for that matter.

Now consider boredom a lukewarm mass of indifference, an entropic state of the mind. There is no way to voluntarily enter such a state other than yearlong sensory deprivation. And that is also not possible because our body needs input from the outside (and gives output from the inside) and this serves as massive stimulation if the other senses are shut down for awhile. And even the momentarily giving in to boring activities with the purpose to come up with another level of attention requires a not insignificant amount of attention and thought-provocation that renders the former boring and tedious task indeed very interesting. So what was proposed in the post is not going through boredom to gain better levels of attention but to come up with ways and techniques to instantly turn boredom into something useful, thus interesting, beforehand. It is a prepared stimulus that is supposed to kick in every time your mental state goes boredom. It is a machinery set up to provide you with impulses (from the outside) to prevent boredom. And doing so is a very paranoid form of dealing with boredom and brings us back to the underlying pain in human beings and the quote from The Pale King: "which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."

Let's imagine time as applying to the laws of thermodynamics, since a feeling of slowly passing time is also associated with the concept of boredom.

• First Law of Temporal Dynamics: there is a fixed amount of time. There is no way to produce more time than there is. No new time is added. No past time is lost. The present is the focusing of one's attention on a particular spot of time.
• Second Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time strives toward entropy.
• Third Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time with absolutely no content to focus on is it's dead center. This point of absolute zero can not be reached.

From these Laws of Temporal Dynamics we can further deduce (I never paid much attention in that Poe/Peirce seminar considering the differences between deduction/induction/abduction) some concepts:

• We can work with time. We can accelerate it or slow it down by putting it to use, filling it with various content and actions, structuring it.
• The quality of time's absolute zero is full entropy, an equilibrium of time. It is time that is completely unstructured by the mind.
• Boredom is the approximation of one's mind to time's dead center, approaching a mental state without impulses, without stimulation, without structure, without content.
• The underlying psychic pain that is associated with boredom is the experiencing of time's true nature, which is eternity.

So far for now. Any comments?