When I went to go see Jonathan Franzen speak at Claremont McKenna College today, I was afraid I would be sniffling throughout the entire talk.
Luckily, my nose seemed to magically stop running, perhaps as awed as I was to be in Franzen’s presence. (Not so much the girl two seats down from me—she was most definitely sleeping.)
I first heard of Jonathan Franzen when Freedom came out. This was right when I was beginning to actively follow contemporary literature, and for obvious reasons (read: hype), Freedom and Franzen went immediately on my to-read list. However, I never had the money to buy a hardcover, and by the time the paperback came out, I was more interested in other writers—and had heard that The Corrections was way better anyway. Two summers ago, I finally found a two dollar copy of The Corrections at the downtown Hennepin County Library and devoured it. By then, I had a better idea of who Franzen was and could legitimately appreciate the Tumblr and Twitter jokes about his hatred of technology. As with Jonathan Lethem, I became in awe of him though I barely knew his writing, simply because I knew he was a famous contemporary writer.
So I freaked the eff out when I found out he was speaking at CMC. I honestly can’t think of someone else I’d be more excited to see, except for maybe Justin Timberlake. (Sorry, Franz.)
Franzen looks just like my dad: gray curly hair, black plastic glasses. He started off soft-spoken—his voice surprised me—remarking on the very recent death of a CMC student, someone he had actually met when she was only one-year-old, and whose parents he knows.
When Franzen began reading from his forthcoming book on Karl Kraus, however, his voice grew louder into a strong reading voice, that kind of voice which deepens and booms at the beginning of words and slowly dies off at the end, leaving them hanging in the air.
The book—or, at least, the parts he read—is basically a lot of footnotes which ultimately compare Karl Kraus’ views on newspaper and media in his time to Franzen’s views on the internet. (He later said in the Q&A that reading Kraus and realizing how he basically could just substitute “internet” in for “newspapers “ and that it would express his own views “was like, ‘oh my god!’”)
The first half of his reading was a combination of Kraus’ own work, and essentially a quasi-rant on social media, Apple, smartphones, and all the other forms of technology he finds harrowing. He was cynical, sarcastic, hilarious, and did it all in beautiful, amazing prose. As a PC user, I especially found entertaining the parts in which he talked about the “coolness” of Macs. On the “I’m a Mac” ads in which the Mac is a hip, young 20-something and the PC is a middle-aged suit-and-tie dweeb, Franzen remarked that they made him want to buy a PC, because the PC suffers “like a real human being.”
It was hard to tell when the book stopped and Franzen’s own talk began, or even when Kraus stopped and Franzen’s footnotes began (at times—clearly Kraus didn’t write the parts about Macs) since I’m not familiar with Kraus or (obviously) Franzen’s forthcoming book. Eventually, Franzen moved on to his personal story of “how [he] became so angry.” Apparently, Franzen first felt real, all-encompassing anger at the world when he was 22 on a Fulbright in Berlin, after deciding not to sleep with a beautiful girl. He also happened to be taking a class on Kraus at the time, and everything just kind of clicked. His story about discovering Kraus was funny yet still insightful and, although clearly this is something he is comfortable sharing with the world, there was a hint of vulnerability and openness as he talked about such a raw feeling—anger—to a few hundred strangers. I had been, and was (and still do), regarding Franzen as a kind of literary god, and this personal story made him feel slightly more human.
In the 1990s, Franzen finally moved away from Kraus. He explained to us how, as he got older, the anger he felt as a 22-year-old became increasingly foreign to him. Especially as he worked more and more as a novelist, Franzen found it easier to empathize with others, and felt that it was “dishonest” to be so angry.
However, he is beginning to see the apocalypse on the horizon yet again. Besides Twitter and Facebook, Franzen also went on the most delicious, well-articulated rant against Amazon (he used the term “Amazonian hegemony” at one point, which I thought was yummy), as well as a rant about destruction of our environment.
(As much as I was pleased about his anti-Amazon comments, I did find this part a little depressing. I was like, well, fml, thanks for pointing out how bleak our future is.)
Franzen did draw back a bit near the end, recognizing how older generations have always disparaged about the following generation. He admitted he is very much a child of the 1960s and 1970s, and that our world, while he does pay attention to it, is simply very weird to him. Franzen also admitted that simply the addictive nature of social media and smartphones makes him intuitively suspicious. One of my favorite moments of the whole night was during this part of his talk; he suddenly dropped his tone a bit, and said, quietly and sadly, “Why is no one worrying?”
Other notes:
- He does not seem as close-minded and grumpy as the internet world makes him out to be. He actually seems kind of fun.
- He claims he is not living under a rock.
- I kind of wanted to give him a hug.
- He makes the most amusing perplexed facial expressions while people ask questions. Half of the time, he was definitely like, wtf. To be fair, some of those questioners just rambled on and on, and no one knew what they were asking.
- In response to the (typical) question about his writing process, he said “I like darkness, cold, and silence.”
- He probably wouldn’t appreciate the fact that the first thing I did after the talk was tweet about it. And that I call him “JFranz” on a regular basis.
- He claims he is not actually apocalyptic, just “melancholy.”
- He watched one episode of CSI and hated it.
- He mispronounced “Beyonce.”
