Totally cool interview with writer Jonathan Franzen in “The Onion.”
Agree!:
AVC [The Onion asks about the Internet, et al]: How much do you think about the concept of readership? It’s changed so much, even since your last novel. It appears to be more about interactivity and instantaneous response, and about everyone having an equal voice. Do you think that can be good for literature? Is it changing how people read so much that it’s antiquating the experience of being alone with a novel? Or for your purposes, is it just irrelevant?
FRANZEN RESPONDS: “…I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.
I continue to believe it’s a phony palliative, most of the noise. You have the sense of “Oh yeah, I’m writing in my angry response to your post, and now I’m flaming back the person who flamed me back for my angry response.” All of that stuff, you have the sense, “Yeah, I’m really engaged in something. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.” And yet, I don’t think—maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else. ” [emphasis, mine]
Cool, right?
Turns out, he writes on an old “9-pound Dell laptop”:
[FRANZEN]…”I took the wireless card out immediately, and I plugged up the Ethernet hole with superglue. The biggest struggle was getting Hearts and Solitaire off of it. I did work on a DOS machine until about five years ago. It ran WordPerfect 5.0, which is still the best software ever written for a writer, I think. But now, obviously, I work on a Windows machine, and Windows just will not let you de-install a Solitaire program. It puts it back whenever you try to remove it.”
Don’t agree!
Image, below, from Will Pappenheimer’s blog:
re: Sue Thomas
Jonathan Franzen: reads good books; writes on a defunct tombstone of a laptop.
Totally cool interview with writer Jonathan Franzen in “The Onion.”
Agree!:
AVC [The Onion asks about the Internet, et al]: How much do you think about the concept of readership? It’s changed so much, even since your last novel. It appears to be more about interactivity and instantaneous response, and about everyone having an equal voice. Do you think that can be good for literature? Is it changing how people read so much that it’s antiquating the experience of being alone with a novel? Or for your purposes, is it just irrelevant?
FRANZEN RESPONDS: “…I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.
I continue to believe it’s a phony palliative, most of the noise. You have the sense of “Oh yeah, I’m writing in my angry response to your post, and now I’m flaming back the person who flamed me back for my angry response.” All of that stuff, you have the sense, “Yeah, I’m really engaged in something. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.” And yet, I don’t think—maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else. ” [emphasis, mine]
Cool, right?
Turns out, he writes on an old “9-pound Dell laptop”:
[FRANZEN]…”I took the wireless card out immediately, and I plugged up the Ethernet hole with superglue. The biggest struggle was getting Hearts and Solitaire off of it. I did work on a DOS machine until about five years ago. It ran WordPerfect 5.0, which is still the best software ever written for a writer, I think. But now, obviously, I work on a Windows machine, and Windows just will not let you de-install a Solitaire program. It puts it back whenever you try to remove it.”
Don’t agree!
Image, below, from Will Pappenheimer’s blog:
re: Sue Thomas