How to Be Alone : Essays - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Jonathan Franzen (ч. notes)

Notes

1

I realize that this is a dismal confession, and that my managing to slip through college without ever taking a course in either American history or American literature is hardly an excuse.

2

Certain novelists now regularly receive calls from movie-industry scouts asking about the progress of their book; when the manuscript is completed, often one copy will go to Manhattan and another to Los Angeles.

3

Tom Wolfe’s manifesto for the “New Social Novel” (Harper’s, November 1989) was probably the high-water mark of sublime incomprehension. What was most striking about Wolfe’s essay — more than his uncannily perfect ignorance of the many excellent socially engaged novels published between 1960 and 1989, more, even, than his colossal self regard — was his failure to explain why his ideal New Social Novelist should not be writing scripts for Hollywood.

4

There is cyber-philosopher Brenda Laurel, speaking to the Times: “In the V.R. field, there’s kind of a naive belief that we’re able to do. . what Tim Leary calls screen each other’s mind, well suddenly get a whole lot better at understanding each other. I know this sounds squishy, but I really believe it.”

5

Last fall the word “literature” appeared twice on the magazine’s cover: “The Roseanne of Literature” (profile of Dorothy Allison) and “Want Literature? Stay tuned!” (“The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel”).

6

The popularity of role-playing m on-line MUDs (multiple-user dialogues) and chat rooms, which enthusiastic theorists extol for their liberating diffractions of selfhood, in fact merely confirms how obsessed we all are with a superficially defined “identity.” Identity as a mystery (the continuity of consciousness from your childhood through the present) or as manners (how kind you are, how direct, how funny, how snobbish, how self-deceptive, how ironic; how you behave) is evidently weightless in comparison to the assertion: “I am a twenty-five-year-old bi female in fishnet stockings.”

7

If the rolls of nineteenth-century literary societies are any indication, women have always done the bulk of fiction reading. But in a society where a majority of women both work and take care of their families, it’s significant that, even today, two out of every three novels purchased are purchased by women. The vastly increased presence of women in serious American writing probably has explanations on both the supply side and the demand side. An expanded pool of readers with unexpected lives inevitably produces an expanded pool of writers. And sometime around 1973, when American women entered the workplace in earnest, they began to demand fiction that wasn’t written from a male perspective. Writers like Jane Smiley and Amy Tan today seem conscious and confident of an attentive audience. Whereas all the male novelists I know, including myself, are clueless as to who could possibly be buying our books.

8

I realize that this is a dismal confession, and that my managing to slip through college without ever taking a course in either American history or American literature is hardly an excuse.