Niklas' blog

HBO has a newish TV-series out called “Girls“.

Even the soundtrack – the latest episode sported tracks by The Knife and Belle and Sebastian – is radiant when it comes to this show. There are some jaw-dropping one-liners in there as well, but trust me, you should get coherence by seeing the entire thing. Every line is pulled from different parts of the series:

Hannah to her boss: I just tried to fuck you, sue you, and extort you. I’m fucking nuts! Why would you want me in your office?

Hannah: OK, I think I got everything: testicles, spectacles, wallet and watch.

Adam: I don’t know what it is about me but girls never ask me to use condoms.

Hannah: You know what I’m gonna do from now on? I’m gonna ask people if they’re gay before I have sex with them.

Hannah: It’s like, “Sorry I passed you an STD but I really enjoy your quirky web presence.”

The below are quotes from his latest collection of essays, “Farther Away: Essays“:

A bit of a luddite? No, it’s

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word sexy is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets—like impelling them to action by speaking incantations, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger—would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic. Let me toss out the idea that, according to the logic of technoconsumerism, in which markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all-powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer: that (to speak more generally) the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes—a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts; a world of resistance—with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of technoconsumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn. Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

Consumer-technology products, of course, would never do anything this unattractive, because they’re not people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability, the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media dissed by cranky fifty-one-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person: Does this person love me? There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the technoconsumerist order: it exposes the lie.

On his friend and colleague David Foster Wallace:

On the eve of my departure for Santiago, I visited my friend Karen, the widow of the writer David Foster Wallace. As I was getting ready to leave her house, she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera. I said I would, and she found an antique wooden matchbox, a tiny book with a sliding drawer, and put some ashes in it, saying that she liked the thought of part of David coming to rest on a remote and uninhabited island. It was only later, after I’d driven away from her house, that I realized that she’d given me the ashes as much for my sake as for hers or David’s. She knew, because I had told her, that my current state of flight from myself had begun soon after David’s death, two years earlier. At the time, I’d made a decision not to deal with the hideous suicide of someone I’d loved so much but instead to take refuge in anger and work. Now that the work was done, though, it was harder to ignore the circumstance that, arguably, in one interpretation of his suicide, David had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels. The desperate edge to my own recent boredom: might this be related to my having broken a promise to myself? The promise that, after I’d finished my book project, I would allow myself to feel more than fleeting grief and enduring anger at David’s death?

Henry Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, referred to his characters as “species”—as something more than individual, less than universal. But, as the novel has transformed the cultural environment, species of humanity have given way to a universal crowd of individuals whose most salient characteristic is their being identically entertained. This was the monocultural specter that David had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic Infinite Jest. And the mode of his resistance in that novel—annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage—anticipated the even more virulent and even more radically individualistic invader that is now displacing the novel and its offspring. The blackberry on Robinson Crusoe Island was like the conquering novel, yes, but it seemed to me no less like the Internet, that BlackBerry-borne invasive, which, instead of mapping the self onto a narrative, maps the self onto the world. Instead of the news, my news. Instead of a single football game, the splintering of fifteen different games into personalized fantasy-league statistics. Instead of The Godfather, “My Cat’s Funny Trick.” The individual run amok, Everyman a Charlie Sheen. With Robinson Crusoe, the self had become an island; and now, it seemed, the island was becoming the world.

David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn’t interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.” In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was learning the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not. He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took him away from us and made the person into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t “belong” to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him. The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent—the cranial-fluid-dripping wife in Infinite Jest, the psychopath in the last of the interviews with hideous men. David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wisdom at face value. The curious thing about David’s fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it. To the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island—and I think it’s approximately correct to say that his most susceptible readers are ones familiar with the socially and spiritually isolating effects of addiction or compulsion or depression—we gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island which was David. At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness. At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not! And yet one of the lessons of David’s work (and, for me, of being his friend) is that the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind.

Again, on technology:

No matter how carefully we defend our selves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. Even Facebook, whose users collectively spend billions of hours renovating their self-regarding projections, contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phrase “It’s complicated.” This may be a euphemism for “on my way out,” but it’s also a description of all the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?

While reviewing, Franzen’s eye is quite focused:

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read The Man Who Loved Children. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?

On birding in Italy:

I wanted to say to the wood warbler what Saint Francis of Assisi is said to have said when he saw a captured wild animal: “Why did you let yourself be caught?”

Although habitat loss is the biggest reason that European bird populations are collapsing, Italian-style hunting (caccia selvaggia, “wild hunting,” its detractors call it) adds particular insult to the injury. When I asked Fulco Pratesi, a former big-game hunter who founded WWF Italy and who now considers hunting “a mania,” why Italian hunters are so wild to kill birds, he cited his countrymen’s love of weapons, their attachment to an “attitude of virility,” their delight in breaking laws, and, strangely, their love of being in nature. “It’s like a rapist who loves women but expresses it in a violent and perverse way,” Pratesi said. “Birds that weigh twenty-two grams are being shot with thirty-two-gram ammunition.” Italians, he added, more easily feel affection for “symbolic” animals like wolves and bears, and have actually done a better job of protecting them than the rest of Europe has.

At Giordano’s center, on a hill behind Messina, I watched her feed scraps of raw turkey to a small eagle that had been blinded by a shotgun pellet. She grasped the eagle’s taloned legs in one hand and cradled the bird against her belly. Its tail feathers sadly bedraggled, its gaze stern but impotent, it suffered her to open its bill and stuff in meat until its gullet bulged. The bird seemed to me at once all eagle and no longer an eagle at all. I didn’t know what it was.

Dismayingly soon, the proprietor returned with a plate. In the room’s harsh light, the ambelopoulia looked like a dozen little gleaming yellowish-gray turds. “You’re the first American I’ve ever served,” the proprietor said. “I’ve had lots of Russians, but never an American.” I put one on my plate, and the proprietor told me that eating it was the same as taking two Viagras.

Adressing people in speech, about being an author:

I’m going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked at an event like this. These questions are apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public. They’re maddening not just because we’re asked them so often but also because, with one exception, they’re difficult to answer and, therefore, very much worth asking. The first of these perennial questions is: Who are your influences? Sometimes the person asking this question merely wants some book recommendations, but all too often the question seems to be intended seriously. And part of what annoys me about it is that it’s always asked in the present tense: Who are my influences? The fact is, at this point in my life, I’m mostly influenced by my own past writing. If I were still laboring in the shadow of, say, E. M. Forster, I would certainly be at pains to pretend that I wasn’t. According to Mr. Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing “weak” writers from “strong” writers, I wouldn’t even be conscious of the degree to which I was still laboring in E. M. Forster’s shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that.

For a while, in my early twenties, I put a lot of effort into copying the sentence rhythms and comic dialogue of Don DeLillo; I was also very taken with the strenuously vivid and all-knowing prose of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. And the plots of my first two novels were substantially borrowed from two movies, The American Friend (by Wim Wenders) and Cutter’s Way (by Ivan Passer). But to me these various “influences” seem not much more meaningful than the fact that, when I was fifteen, my favorite music group was the Moody Blues. A writer has to begin somewhere, but where exactly he or she begins is almost random.

When I write, I don’t feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living.

Indeed—and I’ll say more about this later—it’s impossible for me to write a new novel without first finding new friends and enemies. To start writing The Corrections, I befriended Kenzaburo Oe, Paula Fox, Halldór Laxness, and Jane Smiley. With Freedom, I found new allies in Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Alice Munro. For a while, Philip Roth was my new bitter enemy, but lately, unexpectedly, he has become a friend as well.

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.

Question No. 3 is: I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too? This one always raises my blood pressure. Nobody ever answered it better than Nabokov did in his Paris Review interview, where he fingered E. M. Forster as the source of the myth about a novelist’s characters “taking over,” and claimed that, unlike Forster, who let his characters sail away on their passage to India, he himself worked his characters “like galley slaves.” The question obviously raised Nabokov’s blood pressure, too.

As Flannery O’Connor famously said, the fiction writer does whatever she can get away with—“and nobody ever got away with much.”

Which brings me to perennial question No. 4: Is your fiction autobiographical? I’m suspicious of any novelist who would honestly answer no to this question, and yet my strong temptation, when I’m asked it myself, is to answer no. Of the four perennial questions, this is the one that always feels the most hostile. Maybe I’m just projecting that hostility, but I feel as if my powers of imagination are being challenged. As in: “Is this a true work of fiction, or just a thinly disguised account of your own life? And since there are only so many things that can happen to you in your life, you’re surely going to use up all of your autobiographical material soon—if, indeed, you haven’t used it up already!—and so you probably won’t be writing any more good books, will you? In fact, if your books are just thinly disguised autobiography, maybe they weren’t as interesting as we thought they were? Because, after all, what makes your life so much more interesting than anybody else’s? It’s not as interesting as Barack Obama’s life, is it? And also, for that matter, if your work is autobiographical, why didn’t you do the honest thing and write a nonfiction account of it? Why dress it up in lies? What kind of bad person are you, telling us lies to try to make your life seem more interesting and dramatic?” I hear all of these other questions in the question, and before long the very word autobiographical feels shameful to me.

so I ought to be able to answer the perennial autobiography question with a resounding, unashamed NO. Or at least to answer, as my friend Elisabeth Robinson does, “Yes, seventeen percent. Next question, please?”

David is a true artist, and his most insightful comments tend also to be his most opaque and mysterious. He said to me, on the subject of shame: “You don’t write through shame, you write around it.”

I still couldn’t tell you exactly what he meant by these contrasting prepositions, but it was immediately clear to me that those two early McEwan novels were examples of somebody writing through shame, and that my task, with Chip Lambert, was to find some way to include shame in the narrative without being overcome by it: some way to isolate and quarantine shame as an object, ideally as an object of comedy, rather than letting it permeate and poison every sentence. From here it was a short step to imagining that Chip Lambert, while having his dalliance with his student, takes an illegal drug whose primary effect is to eliminate shame. Once I had that idea, and could finally begin to laugh at shame, I wrote the rest of the Chip section in a few weeks and the rest of the novel in a year.

The biggest remaining problem during that year was loyalty. It arose particularly in the writing of the chapter about Gary Lambert, who bore a certain superficial resemblance to my oldest brother. There was, for example, Gary’s project of assembling an album of his favorite family photographs: my brother was involved with a project like that himself. And since my brother is the most sensitive and sentimental person in my family, I didn’t see how I could use details from his life without hurting him and jeopardizing our good relations. I felt afraid of his anger, guilty about laughing at real-life details that weren’t funny to him, disloyal to be airing private family matters in a public narrative, and all-around morally dubious to be appropriating, for my own professional purposes, the private life of a nonwriter. These were all reasons I’d resisted “autobiographical” fiction in the past. And yet the details were too meaningful not to use, and it wasn’t as if I’d ever concealed from my family that I was a writer listening carefully to everything they said. So I went around and around and finally ended up discussing the matter with a wise older friend of mine. To my surprise, she became angry with me and reproached me for my narcissism. What she said was akin to my mother’s message on our last afternoon together. She said, “Do you think your brother’s life revolves around you? Do you think he’s not an adult with a life of his own, full of things more important than you are? Do you think you’re so powerful that something you write in a novel is going to harm him?”

I’m happy to report, in closing, that my brother and I are now on better terms than ever. When I was about to send him an advance copy of The Corrections, I told him, on the phone, that he might hate the book and might even hate me. His reply, for which I remain deeply grateful, was “Hating you is not an option.” The next time I heard from him, after he’d read the book, he began by saying, “Hello, Jon. It’s your brother—Gary.” He has since gone on, when talking to his friends about the book, to make no secret of the resemblance. He has his own life, with its own trials and satisfactions, and having a writer for a brother is just another piece of his own story.

More on being a luddite-of-sorts:

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.

I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs.

And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

Or, another example, the planned obsolescence of great software and its replacement by bad software. I’m still unable to accept that the best word-processing program ever written, WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, won’t even run on any computer I can buy now. Oh, sure, in theory you can still run it in Windows’ little DOS-emulating window, but the tininess and graphical crudeness of that emulator are like a deliberate insult on Microsoft’s part to those of us who would prefer not to use a feature-heavy behemoth. WordPerfect 5.0 was hopelessly primitive for desktop publishing but unsurpassable for writers who wanted only to write. Elegant, bug-free, negligible in size, it was bludgeoned out of existence by the obese, intrusive, monopolistic, crash-prone Word. If I hadn’t been collecting old cast-off computers in my office closet, I wouldn’t be able to use WordPerfect at all by now. And already I’m down to my last spare computer! And yet people have the nerve to be annoyed with me if I won’t send them texts in a format intelligible to all-powerful Word. We live in a Word world now, Grampaw. Time to take your GOI pill.

There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late nineties, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn’t you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I’d quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother’s hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in off-putting little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.

Socially retarded people don’t suddenly start acting more adult when social critics are peer-pressured into silence. They only get ruder. One currently worsening national plague is the shopper who remains engrossed in a call throughout a transaction with a checkout clerk. The typical combination in my own neighborhood, in Manhattan, involves a young white woman, recently graduated from someplace expensive, and a local black or Hispanic woman of roughly the same age but fewer advantages. It is, of course, a liberal vanity to expect your checkout clerk to interact with you or to appreciate the scrupulousness of your determination to interact with her. Given the repetitive and low-paying nature of her job, she’s allowed to treat you with boredom or indifference; at worst, it’s unprofessional of her. But this does not relieve you of your own moral obligation to acknowledge her existence as a person. And while it’s true that some clerks don’t seem to mind being ignored, a notably large percentage do become visibly irritated or angered or saddened when a customer is unable to tear herself off her phone for even two seconds of direct interaction. Needless to say, the offender herself, like the chatty freeway driver, is blissfully unaware of pissing anybody off. In my experience, the longer the line behind her, the more likely it is she’ll pay for her $1.98 purchase with a credit card. And not the tap-and-go microchip kind of credit card, either, but the wait-for-the-printed-receipt-and-then-(only-then)-with-zombiesh-clumsiness-begin-shifting-the-cell-phone-from-one-ear-to-the-other-and-awkwardly-pin-the-phone-with-ear-to-shoulder-while-signing-the-receipt-and-continuing-to-express-doubt-about-whether-she-really-feels-like-meeting-up-with-that-Morgan-Stanley-guy-Zachary-at-the-Etats-Unis-wine-bar-again-tonight kind of credit card.

On saying “I love you” on the telephone…

To look out your car window and see the steam coming out of another driver’s ears, or to meet the eyes of a pissed-off checkout clerk and to shake your head along with her: it makes you feel a little less alone. Which is why, of all the worsening varieties of bad cell-phone behavior, the one that most deeply irritates me is the one that seems, because it is ostensibly victimless, to irritate nobody else. I’m talking about the habit, uncommon ten years ago, now ubiquitous, of ending cell-phone conversations by braying the words “LOVE YOU!” Or, even more oppressive and grating: “I LOVE YOU!” It makes me want to go and live in China, where I don’t understand the language.

And there is no higher-caliber utterance than “I love you”—nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even “Fuck you, dickhead” is less invasive, since it’s the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.

It’s also possible, however, that too-frequent habitual repetition empties phrases of their meaning. Joni Mitchell, in the last verse of “Both Sides Now,” referenced the solemn amazement of saying I love you “right out loud”: of giving vocal birth to such intensity of feeling. Stevie Wonder, in lyrics written seventeen years later, sings of calling somebody up on an ordinary afternoon simply to say “I love you,” and, being Stevie Wonder (who probably really is a more loving person than I am), he half succeeds in making me believe in his sincerity—at least until the last line of the chorus, where he finds it necessary to add: “And I mean it from the bottom of my heart.” Avowing sincerity is more or less diagnostic of insincerity.

The front of her valentine (which my father likewise saved) shows a pigtailed little girl and a blushing little boy standing beside each other with their eyes bashfully averted and their hands tucked bashfully behind their backs.    I wish I were a little rock, ’Cause then when I grew older, Maybe I would find some day I was a little “boulder.” Inside the card is a drawing of the same two kids, but holding hands now, with my mother’s cursive signature (“Irene”) at the feet of the little girl. A second verse reads: And that would really help a lot It sure would suit me fine, For I’d be “bould” enough to say, “Please be my Valentine.”

Memorial service remarks on David Foster Wallace, from October 23, 2008:

Like a lot of writers, but even more than most, Dave loved to be in control of things. He was easily stressed by chaotic social situations. I only ever saw him twice go to a party without Karen. One of them, hosted by Adam Begley, I almost physically had to drag him to, and as soon as we were through the front door and I took my eye off him for one second, he made a U-turn and went back to my apartment to chew tobacco and read a book. The second party he had no choice but to stay for, because it was celebrating the publication of Infinite Jest. He survived it by saying thank you, again and again, with painfully exaggerated formality.

But that “neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being”: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. “A way out of loneliness” was the formulation we agreed to agree on.

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you’re afraid, and about five years ago, very noticeably, Dave stopped being so afraid. Part of this came of having settled into a good, stable situation at Pomona College. Another really huge part of it was his finally meeting a woman who was right for him and who, for the first time, opened up the possibility of his having a fuller and less rigidly structured life. I noticed, when we spoke on the phone, that he’d begun to tell me he loved me, and I suddenly felt, on my side, that I didn’t have to work so hard to make him laugh or to prove that I was smart. Karen and I managed to get him to Italy for a week, and instead of spending his days in his hotel room, watching TV, as he might have done a few years earlier, he was having lunch on the terrace and eating octopus and trudging along to dinner parties and actually enjoying hanging out with other writers casually. He surprised everyone, and maybe most of all himself. Here was a genuinely fun thing he might well have done again. About a year later, he decided to get himself off the medication that had lent stability to his life for more than twenty years. Again, there are a lot of different stories about why exactly he decided to do this. But one thing he made very clear to me, when we talked about it, was that he wanted a chance at a more ordinary life, with less freakish control and more ordinary pleasure. It was a decision that grew out of his love for Karen, out of his wish to produce a new and more mature kind of writing, and out of having glimpsed a different kind of future. It was an incredibly scary and brave thing for him to try, because Dave was full of love, but he was also full of fear—he had all too ready access to those depths of infinite sadness. So the year was up and down, and he had a crisis in June, and a very hard summer. When I saw him in July he was skinny again, like the late adolescent he’d been during his first big crisis. One of the last times I talked to him after that, in August, on the phone, he asked me to tell him a story of how things would get better. I repeated back to him a lot of what he’d been saying to me in our conversations over the previous year. I said he was in a terrible and dangerous place because he was trying to make real changes as a person and as a writer. I said that the last time he’d been through near-death experiences, he’d emerged and written, very quickly, a book that was light-years beyond what he’d been doing before his collapse. I said he was a stubborn control freak and know-it-all—“So are you!” he shot back at me—and I said that people like us are so afraid to relinquish control that sometimes the only way we can force ourselves to open up and change is to bring ourselves to an access of misery and the brink of self-destruction. I said he’d undertaken his change in medication because he wanted to grow up and have a better life. I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. And he said: “I like that story. Could you do me a favor and call me up every four or five days and tell me another story like it?”

Unfortunately I only had one more chance to tell him the story, and by then he wasn’t hearing it. He was in horrible, minute-by-minute anxiety and pain. The next times I tried to call him, after that, he wasn’t picking up the phone or returning messages. He’d gone down into the well of infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story, and he didn’t make it out. But he had a beautiful, yearning innocence, and he was trying.

On travelling to China, for animal and ecological reasons:

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-size chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

In Jane Smiley’s great novel The Greenlanders, there’s a tale about a Norse farmer who brings a polar bear cub into his house and raises it as his son. Although the bear learns to read, it can’t help remaining a bear, with a bear’s huge appetite, and eventually it begins to eat up all the farmer’s sheep. The farmer knows he has to get rid of the bear, but he can never quite bring himself to do it, because (according to the story’s refrain) the bear has such beautiful soft fur and such beautiful dark eyes. Metaphorically, for Smiley, the bear represents a destructive passion too pleasurable to resist. But the story also works as a straightforward warning about sentimental idolatry.

Late last fall, while the Times was running a series of long articles about the crisis of pollution, water shortages, desertification, species loss, and deforestation in China and I was managing to read no more than fifty words of any of them, a terrific new Jeep commercial was airing during football games. You know: the one where a squirrel, a wolf, two horned larks, and an SUV driver join together in song while rolling down an empty highway through pristine forest. I especially enjoyed the moment when the wolf gulps down one of the larks, receives a disapproving look from the SUV driver, spits the lark back out unharmed, and bursts into song. I knew perfectly well that SUVs were even more hostile to horned larks than wolves were; I knew that my domestic appetites were part of the same beast that was devouring the natural world in China and elsewhere in Asia; and yet I loved the Jeep ad. I loved the worried eyes and soft fur of my golf accessory. I didn’t want to know what I knew. And yet: I couldn’t stand not knowing, either. One afternoon, with a kind of grim foreboding, I went to the bedroom and grabbed the puffin by its wings and stuck it underneath a bright lamp and turned it inside out, and there, sure enough, was the label: HANDMADE IN CHINA.

Language is mostly not a problem, although Steve did have trouble explaining a gray whale’s “barnacles” to the Chinese team, and an employee once came to him with a strange question: “You said you want all the animals to be angry. Why?” Steve replied that, no, to the contrary, he and Jane wanted their animals to look happy and to make people happy to touch them. The word that had been mistranslated as angry was realistic.

One heavy-duty machine stamped sheet steel into hollow driver heads; on either side of a different machine, two men used tweezers to insert and remove driver faces into which the machine pressed horizontal grooves. After stamping, the driver heads were milled in a dimly lit room full of water-cooled grinding machines and well-muscled men in masks; Luo assured me that the water here was recycled and the ventilation much better than it used to be, but the scene was still pretty infernal. Upstairs, in a room filled with shockingly intense paint fumes, tough-looking girls with big hair and extreme boots and stockings were inspecting the finish on driver shafts and buffing away small flaws.

By the front door, as we were leaving, we came upon an enormous golf bag filled with plastic-wrapped clubs. “These are the best clubs we make,” Luo told me. “The top of the line. The president wants you to have them as a gift, because of your interest in golf.” I looked at Xu and at my translator, Miss Wang, but neither was able to give me a clear sign of what to do. As in a dream, I watched the clubs being loaded into the rear of our van. I watched the door being closed. Surely some well-known rule of journalistic ethics applied here? “Oh, I don’t know about this,” I said. “I’m not at all sure about this.” The next thing I knew, Luo was waving goodbye and we were driving off into the late-morning haze. A strong, warm, smoke-laden wind had kicked up; the air was suddenly very bad. I thought I might have accomplished a refusal of the gift if only I’d felt more sure about business etiquette in China. Admittedly, though, I’d been further paralyzed, at the critical moment, by the tastiness of the phrase “top of the line” and by the thought of handling those glossy, sexy, late-model golf clubs; the extended factory tour had given me an appetite for finished product. Only now was it occurring to me that there was a lot of schlepping between Ningbo and New York. Plus: after accepting such a handsome gift, wouldn’t it be rude of me to write about the intense workplace paint fumes? Plus: didn’t I dislike golf?

the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

On the book “The Laughing Policeman” by Sjöwall/Wahlöö, from Sweden:

“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

On Alice Munro’s writing:

But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences.

6. Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer. And with short stories the challenge to reviewers is even more extreme. Is there a short story in all of world literature whose appeal can survive the typical synopsis? (A chance meeting on a boardwalk in Yalta brings together a bored husband and a lady with a little dog . . . A small town’s annual lottery is revealed to serve a rather surprising purpose . . . A middle-aged Dubliner leaves a party and reflects on life and love . . . ) Oprah Winfrey will not touch story collections. Discussing them is so challenging, indeed, that one can almost forgive the Times Book Review’s former editor, Charles McGrath, for his recent comparison of young short-story writers to “people who learn golf by never venturing onto a golf course but instead practicing at a driving range.” The real game being, by this analogy, the novel. McGrath’s prejudice is shared by nearly all commercial publishers, for whom a story collection is, most frequently, the distasteful front-end write-off in a two-book deal whose back end is contractually forbidden to be another story collection. And yet, despite the short story’s Cinderella status, or maybe because of it, a high percentage of the most exciting fiction written in the last twenty-five years—the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me what’s terrific—has been short fiction. There’s the Great One herself, naturally. There’s also Lydia Davis, David Means, George Saunders, Amy Hempel, and the late Raymond Carver—all of them pure or nearly pure short-story writers—and then a larger group of writers who have achievements in multiple genres (John Updike, Joy Williams, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie, William T. Vollmann, Tobias Wolff, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, Tom Drury, the late Andre Dubus) but who seem to me most at home, most undilutedly themselves, in their shorter work. There are also, to be sure, some very fine pure novelists. But when I close my eyes and think about literature in recent decades, I see a twilight landscape in which many of the most inviting lights, the sites that beckon me to return for a visit, are shed by particular short stories I’ve read.

All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again, no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, don’t even try.

“The complexity of things—the things within things—just seems to be endless,” Munro told her interviewer. “I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”

Besides Runaway, the most compelling contemporary fiction I’ve read in recent months has been Wallace’s stories in Oblivion and a stunner of a collection by the British writer Helen Simpson. Simpson’s book, a series of comic shrieks on the subject of modern motherhood, was published originally as Hey Yeah Right Get a Life—a title you would think needed no improvement. But the book’s American packagers set to work improving it, and what did they come up with? Getting a Life. Consider this dismal gerund the next time you hear an American publisher insisting that story collections never sell.

7. Munro’s short stories are even harder to review than other people’s short stories. More than any writer since Chekhov, Munro strives for and achieves, in each of her stories, a gestalt-like completeness in the representation of a life. She always had a genius for developing and unpacking moments of epiphany. But it’s in the three collections since Selected Stories (1996) that she’s taken the really big, world-class leap and become a master of suspense. The moments she’s pursuing now aren’t moments of realization; they’re moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action. And what this means for the reader is you can’t even begin to guess at a story’s meaning until you’ve followed every twist; it’s always the last page or two that switches all the lights on.

Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.

Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I think Franzen’s part

* One of the best authors to arise in the past 20 years
* A grumpy old man
* A fascinating trove of bird-love

this collection of essays focuses on a few things, namely book-reviews, his love for birding, the life, times and death of his friend and brotherly rival David Foster Wallace and a few travels, e.g. to China and Italy.

His genius shines through his grumpiness at times, for instance, when writing about modern technology, which doesn’t just sound grumpy, but is insightful and funny:

Consumer-technology products, of course, would never do anything this unattractive, because they’re not people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability, the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

Franzen’s honesty is at times very striking, both in fiction and also in these essays. While delving into his relationship to his late parents, it is also notable to see his relationship with his current partner – a couple of times referred to as “a Californian” – and his ex-wife.

From a speech on being a writer, where he lists four questions he often is asked during interviews and goes into them on different levels:

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.

He writes on writer’s block, on how birds are treated on Cyprus, collates thoughts on his parents in a quite non-soppy way, which is nice, and goes on to dissect a former marriage. It all ties into “Freedom”, his magnum opus.

Funny near-luddite things:

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.

I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs.

And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

From a trip to China:

the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

On the book “The Laughing Policeman” by Sjöwall/Wahlöö, from Sweden:

“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

His love for Alice Munro’s writing:

But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences.

This is great writing at times, and at its worst, too navel-gazing for my own liking, but then isn’t that how we find ourselves at our most naked or delve into insanity?

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