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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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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Thinking that the future will be like the past is also a failure of imagination.
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I love these threads but can you do one on defining the "bourgeois mimetic novel" ? I feel like I need examples or something to grasp what you mean by that
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Same, would love a definition
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