Second Thoughts

I. Franzen and Frazier

Since picking up Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone at St. Mark’s book shop last week, I’ve been cultivating solitude. He is a joy to read: careful but insightful, the sort of writer that brings clarity to a subject and abhors pretension, who invites you along to discover, rather than speaking from an established position. He is very frank. He writes about the erosion of individuality and privacy, of dignity and civil life while at the same time bravely facing a technologically advanced mass culture which has begun, for example, to read less and less novels.

His writing suggests the loneliness that characterizes modern life while refusing to retreat from it; one of his well-known essays written in 1996, which has become known not by its title, but as “The Harper’s essay,” discusses the importance of the “social novel” which engages the public on a large scale. Perhaps this ability for the novel to impact a wider culture is lost, since we now have other ways, faster ways, of apprehending culture-wide information. I’ve heard it theorized that films are the new storytellers, and sometime in the 70s Philip Roth declared that American culture was too stupefying and/or disturbing to sustain a readable “social novel” that could be accurate and aesthetically coherent in any way.

I like the way Franzen ends the essay, with a quote by Don DeLillo, who declares that novelists are simply writing one way at a certain time, and that is our definition of what a novel is. “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write…mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Back to individuality, and perhaps, to loneliness.

In an unimaginative but logical mix-up, my mind had collapsed the writers Jonathan Franzen and Ian Frazier into one generally similar last name, though I’d read neither writer. Out of the blue I also received a collection of Frazier’s essays for Christmas, titled Gone to New York. Through various New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces from Frazier’s early career in the 70s, as well as full-length essays, a disparate portrait of New York is painted, written with a kind of straight-faced, serious whimsy--that's kind of a nice larger metaphor for New York. Since Frazier moved here out of the Midwest (Ohio) in his 20s, I feel akin. Except for the part about landing a job writing for the New Yorker, after he turned down an offer to be a fact-checker. I suppose I never did apply.

II. What to read next

This fun website is worth spending 10 minutes at: you enter in a list of your favorite books, as long as you’d like or have time for, and through a simple algorithm your list is compared to others’ and suggestions for what to read next are produced. It’s a simple and effective idea, an unbiased, pretty obvious, and surprisingly helpful formula of recommendation. All of the books are linked to Amazon.com and there you can find out more. You can also select only a portion of your list to base recommendations on—perhaps post-punk British writers, or beat poets. So now you can’t ever wonder what to read next (as if that were some problem—as my bookshelf fills up with books I haven’t had time to read, do I really need to keep looking for more? Yes, of course.)

III. Intelligent Hip-Hop

If, like me, you were a little disappointed by the hip-hop selections from Pitchfork’s Year-end Singles and Albums list (and sort of the list in general—where is Broken Social Scene, Stephen Malkmus, Bright Eyes, Andrew Bird?) then you should see this post by an excellent friend-of-a-friend music blogger with some suggestions. I’ve heard the Cyne album, and it’s refreshingly good. Also, I think that the top 50 list by Stylus Magazine is more interesting and well-argued than Pitchfork’s, and does a better job of both confirming personal choices while suggesting new music. They seem to have a larger scope, and don’t suffer much for it.

IV. One-track mind

I have been abusing the Junior Senior song “Take My Time” incessantly since I downloaded it twelve days ago; it has already reached my top 25 most-played. How did I miss this album? It began as a guilty pleasure, but I don’t feel so guilty anymore. I can’t stop.

V. Periodical Insanity

With both roommates home for the holiday, the apartment is empty, and I am savoring that fact. I think I’ve gotten past the loneliness so that it has turned into solitude, two different things. I am also catching up on weeks of the New Yorker. It is a relentless magazine. This is exactly how I feel. And, in case you're interested, I've never seen it cheaper than 90% off the cover price.