1. So I have some thoughts on Jonathan Franzen, climate change, The New Yorker, the Protestant and transcendentalist roots of American individualism, Fredric Jameson, E.B. White, and a few other things. Maybe Jack Kirby.
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6. That Emersonian/Thoreauvian individualism has always been a big part of The New Yorker's DNA, thanks to the huge influence of EB White on the magazine but showing up in many writers (there are echos in Salinger & Updike). That's why the magazine is so susceptible to Franzen.
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7. That individualism has a lot to recommend to it (and has strong affinities with the, gasp, the bourgeois mimetic novel) but it also stunts Franzen's political imagination and limits his ability to even conceive of collective solutions to climate.
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8. In The Corrections, Franzen has a funny bit where a character sells his Fredric Jameson books in order to go on spending spree with his girlfriend: "Fred Jameson didn't have Julia’s artful tongue." But Jameson has a pertinent critique of Franzen's failure of imagination.
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9. Jameson: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." That's exactly Frazen's condition. His current New Yorker piece ends with a fantasy that falls squarely in the genre of the cozy catastrophe, where apocalypse revives small town life.pic.twitter.com/3vyqEymU6v
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10. "Cozy catastrophe" is a term Brian Aldiss coined to describe John Wyndham novels: "The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off."
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11. We really don't have the luxury for fantasies of a cozy catastrophe, where global ecological collapse will return us to the comforts of small farm life and local democracy and Thoreauvian reveries over warblers. There's a world to save.
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12. I have some more thoughts here on where Jonathan Franzen is coming from and why he's wrong. https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-jonathan-franzen/ …
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End of conversation
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incidentally, since Thoreau came up here it's apropos to mention that Thoreau's individualism was dependent on family charity add thus sold with erasurehttps://twitter.com/zoewhittall/status/1166755931847311361?s=21 …
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