Friday, August 13, 2010

I Promise you that this book will suck

Never heard of "Jonathan Frazen," and I never read Infinite Jest for the same reason I never read anything written by an American: because they SUCK.  Americans cannot write, and they cannot read.  I would compare the country to modern day Abdera (which was noted for the stupidity of its inhabitants.)



'i write quirky and yet profound books for people who dont really read literature and think that reading the new yorker and enrolling in an mfa program at brown/columbia means u r art forward.'

I promise that the book itself will be as tepid and desperate as the beyond jejune article.  I really hate it when journalists, who are more than likely aspiring to be novelists, try to make some "quirky" observation or comparison, and I knew it was lurking around in the article after reading the opening:


A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted. They dive and surface and float around on their backs with their little paws poking up out of the water, munching sea urchins or thinking about munching sea urchins.
The humans admiring them from the shore don't make them self-conscious. Otters are congenitally happy beasts. They don't worry about their future, even though they're legally a threatened species and their little estuary is literally in the shadow of the massive 500-ft. stacks of a power plant.
One of the humans admiring them is Jonathan Franzen.


Fucking sea otters?  You have a world historical genius looking at fucking sea otters?  And therein lies the absurdity of the "modern" "american" "genius."  This poor journalist really wants Frazen to be unique, to have a radically unique take on "the way-we-live-now."  But the sad fact is that he isn't a genius (those occur mostly in Europe and are later translated into English so American Professors have something to talk about to their panting undergraduates [who will forget everything once they are harvested by corporate america for mundane tasks] for the next 40 years while Europeans are already wrestling with the real pressing issues of the epoch), and the "way-we-live-now" is not worth writing a book on, and even more, smacks of a churlish commitment to presentomania.

(can we even call this an article? just call it a hype piece to sell when the actual article comes out.  Tweet this, don't even bother to write more than 160 characters.)  There was more boring writing about a boring person who writes boring books, and then...
It's his instrument, in the musical and also the scientific sense: a delicate, finely calibrated recording device. 
And there it is.  I feel sick after reading such a horrible line, but luckily I had some La Rochefoucauld sitting close at hand, and after enjoying a few of his golden maxims was able to recover.  Frazen's new "literary" sensation will no doubt be filled with quirky "observations" of this kind.  But as with all artists, there is still the possibility that he or she might commit suicide before the "great work" is completed.


Disclaimer: Americans might be able to write Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even those genres seem to be the domain of the british.