The Face Knife

…is in the process of moving/changing jobs. Regular service to resume as soon as this weekend.

As I mentioned in the comments below, after I published my attack against Franzen’s New Yorker essay, one of my friends gave me a copy of The Corrections, which I’ve been furtively reading on the subway. I’m about halfway through - it’s a quick read - and I’m actually enjoying the experience, not because Franzen is a good writer but because his fiction is so much worse than his essays. In this spirit, I present to you my favorite selections from The Corrections, thus far. Regular service will resume next week with a story about The Conformist and the aestheticization of politics. Have a lovely weekend, and if the passages below dishearten you, remember, at least Franzen isn’t writing about music (that I’m aware of) like his peer, “I’m Rick Moody, Bitch!”

Jonathan Franzen, Douchetard - A Master Class in Metaphor, Session 1

An irony of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered - possibly as soon as he confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were) - he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

Jonathan Franzen, Douchetard - On Social Justice

Sunday morning, after he’d stood at a window counting squirrels and assessing the damage to his oak trees and zoysia the way white men in marginal neighborhoods took stock of how many houses had been lost to “the blacks,” Alfred had performed an experiment in genocide. Incensed that the squirrels in his not-large front yard lacked the discipline to stop reproducing or pick up after themselves, he went to the basement and found a rat trap…[...] He baited the trap with a piece of the same whole wheat bread that Chip had eaten, toasted, for breakfast. Then all five Lamberts went to church, and between the Gloria Patri and the Doxology a young male squirrel, engaging in the high-risk behavior of the economically desparate, helped itself to the bread and had its skull crushed.

Jonathan Franzen, Douchetard - Theory Bitch in Decline

It was pathetically obvious that he’d believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jurgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool pear-tree limbs; Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability; Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue.

Jonathan Franzen, Douchetard - Wants to Sex U Up

From his station by the metal detectors he watched an azure-haired girl overtake his parents, an azure-haired girl of college age, a very wantable stranger with pierced lips and eyebrows. It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

Enjoy!

I was meant to be writing about The Conformist today, but I showed up to the theater and it was sold out. Readers who don’t live here might think that New York City cinephiles have it made - tons of theaters showing a diverse line-up of foreign, indie, repertory and mainstream cinema, but let me tell you something: going to the movies in Manhattan is shit. The last half-dozen films I’ve meant to go see have either been sold out or sold out right after I got my tickets. The sole recent exception was Happy Endings, and that’s because the Sunshine’s air conditioning was broken. I didn’t end up seeing the film. I’m not connected enough to get invited to screenings, so I pay for the majority of films I see. Buy tickets online beforehand? In addition to the rip off service charges, buying tickets in advance over the net is like having to run out and buy condoms right before you have sex.

Since I live in Brooklyn, I wasted about an hour and a half of time trying to get to theater well in advance of the film, and then retreating in anger. It’s so humid here that I can’t even spell, and sweat makes me ornery. Thankfully, my rage has found focus on a more deserving target than the film palaces and flop houses of New York City.

The most recent issue of The New Yorker features, like a giant goiter on its neck, what must be a 20,000 word essay by Jonathan Franzen. Fine; dude is a successful writer, his novel received all sorts of accolades, and I’ve even been tempted to read it. Previous exposure to Franzen in the same magazine (I think) has hinted that he’s not for me; I went out and bought William Gaddis’s J R (loved it) more or less because I didn’t like how Franzen wrote about it. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten into a writer out of spite.

Franzen will forever be saddled with the his infamous Oprah semi-refusal, and he more or less deserves it. Although this occurred in 2001, it really was indicative of the way the Indie-Writ-Large culture of the 90s had petered out. It’s the lame, milquetoast version of Kurt Cobain’s great big no. Maybe dissing Oprah and then apologizing for it was Franzen’s equivalent to wearing a homemade “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone; maybe Franzen ought to grow up and least have the courage of his convictions.

Sadly, or thankfully, for the purposes of this essay, Franzen still hasn’t grown out of asserting how much cooler he is than everyone else, though in the New Yorker essay the context has shifted from the realm of Indie vs. Corporate to the world of….birding. Not “birdwatching”….birding.

I guess the worlds of obsessive collectors are pretty much isomorphic across the board, but it’s funny to see Franzen’s indie snob mentality transposed to the world of birdwatching. He gets incredibly embarrassed (and more on the nature of Franzen’s embarrassment below) when he mis-identifies a bird to a “pretty” fellow birdwatcher (wigeon vs. green-winged teal, for those of you keeping score. not that I have any experience in birdwatching, but I feel pretty certain that people who get really into it use the scientific nomenclature for species…but anyway). He feels a smug superiority to the birdwatching daytrippers who go apeshit over relatively common species. In the more or less only textual evidence of the link between underground/indie culture, Franzen is birdwatching in South Florida, and:

“…spotted two disaffected teen-agers, two little chicks, in full Goth plumage, and I wished I could introduce them to the brownish-gray misfits on the beach.”

Franzen describes his birdwatching in terms of addiction and compulsion (reminiscent of that awkward moment in his Gaddis essay about leaving his squalid NYC apartment to pick up The Recognitions in the mindset of “someone who was about to score hard drugs”.), but he’s not ashamed of his embarrassment. He’s proud of it, and he wants the reader to be proud of him for being proud of it. When one of his friends braces him on his incipient metamorphosis into full-time bra-wearing ‘twitcher’ (that’s the lingo), he claims that because he’s doing it, it must be cool. Well, as anyone who’s heard the lyrics to “We Love Life” can testify, there are probably some very, very cool people out there who are birdwatchers, but Franzen, he isn’t one of them. He’s trying to be cool by calling attention to the uncoolness of what he’s doing. It’s like his personality is an ironic trucker cap he can’ never, ever take off..

Of course, we should expect this joyful shame from someone who relates that he more or less got married because of some point of Hegelian philosophy, and although he thinks this viewpoint is now charming because it’s evidence of youthful enthusiasm and vitality, he really doesn’t own the reason why it’s so fucked up. He describes in excruciating detail the co-dependence of his marriage, and then when he is liberated rhapsodizes about having fun with a “a beautiful and very young woman,” who he later neurotically assures us is twenty-seven. He’s not exactly Mick Jagger or R. Kelly. Sex is the kitchen is not his speed; sex on Prozac is, as he alludes to in a horrifying metaphor.

Why do I care? Well, Franzen cheapens the idea of sincerity because he’s not self-aware enough to talk about any sort of emotion without the reader suspecting he’s full of shit. One of the poster boys of the “new sincerity” is hung-up on the type of authenticity fetishism that more or less guarantees a life and art in bad faith. It’s the Cobain problem for guys with degrees from Brown and a pair of hornrims.

I think about being sincere a lot because I’m really bad at getting away with lying. I think about authenticity because I’m afraid I’m a fraud. That’s my neurosis, and it pisses me off when someone like Franzen claims the epiphenomena of that neurosis without having the decency to at least offer some photographic evidence that’s he’s had a busman’s holiday in Self-Awaria. The personal essayist of Franzen’s mode is more or less despicable because he’s convinced of the rectitude of all his aesthetic and moral judgments, and with that sentence I cut the legs out from under myself.

There’s another article in the same issue of the New Yorker, about the poets Theodore Roethke and James Wright, who were apparently more or less anti-modernists and a past iteration of the “New Sincerity.” Although I will never read their work, the article was about sincerity and authenticity so I read it. And I was bored on the train. Anyway, the writer of the article offers the following couplet from one of Wright’s poems, which I will leave you with:

“A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home/I have wasted my life”

I think part of the reason stand-up comics like “The Aristocrats” joke so much is because the titular “family act” is pretty much a metaphor for the community of stand-up comics: It’s an incestuous pool of talent, and they’re constantly kissing ass or giving each other (verbal) blow-jobs, but nothing is so funny to them as when one of their peers shits (bombs) all over the stage. The only person in the film who came close to making this point was the universally beloved shill CarrotTop, whose version of the joke cut off with “wait, this isn’t a fucking prop act, is it?” a remarkably self-aware comment in a movie filled with banal observations about the motivations behind the persistance of the joke.

The best the irrelevant George Carlin, who is apparently someone’s idea of an intellectual could do to venture a justification of the fascination with the joke is that it allows an excuse for the comedians to “play”, and one of the other (nearly all middle-aged, nearly all male, and nearly all white) talking heads postulated that you can tell a lot about a comedian’s personality by which “taboos” (shit, incest, whatever) they include in their variant of the joke. But psycholanalyzing individual comics is a child’s game.

The Aristocrats the film (if you can call it that, because the filmmaking craft is strictly amateur) purports itself to be a deconstruction of the comedic process - a seminar on craft - but you’re not going to learn how to tell jokes from it. The funniest bits are sublimely weird stuff, like Whoopi Goldberg’s peek-a-boo foreskin dance version, or, going the other way, entirely a matter of delivery, as in the funny Gilbert Gottfried. There’s not really a replicable process that can be extracted from this film, unless you want to be a frat-hack comic telling jokes about runny poop.

In the end, where The Aristocrats fails is a lack of self-knowledge, something odd coming from these supposed far-seeing demystifiers like Carlin and Penn Jilette. The film doesn’t know what it’s about. Is it a history, is it a showcase, is it about the creative process? What the film should have focused on was the subculture of the professional comic, what they’re like when they’re not onstage. Michael McKean mentions these private comedian parties Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donohue used to throw centered around the joke, and the thought of what goes on their is a hell of a lot more interesting that anything shown in the film. Stand-up comics are odd people, functioning in a very odd, very ritualized society, and a documentary about THAT could be riveting. The Aristocrats is not, and the level of filmmaking makes it barely watchable.