#jonathan frazen

[siamo-nati-per-vivere]

La prima cosa che la lettura insegna è come stare da soli.

Jonathan Franzen

[hannahroseweinberger]

“Climate Change Vs. Conservation”; Jonathan Franzen; The New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture

Jonathan Franzen tackles the double-edged sword of climate change activism's popularity. Essentially, the issue is this: Climate change is the divisive, near-universally accepted environmental issue of our time. In the shadows of this ominous call-to-arms for lowered carbon footprints are more imminent issues like bird species conservation, which stall or decay in light of the fact that they directly contradict climate change policies. As Franzen notes, a good example of this is how windmills and solar power plants can help us generate sustainable energy, but end up killing millions of birds annually; even more than that, bird protection efforts that incorporate climate change action aren't necessarily based in science, as many birds might survive in a differently-heated world. But on top of all this, even as we sacrifice these imminent conservation issues for the all-important heading off of climate change, it turns out our devotion to this big issue is pretty nominal—because it's a collective issue, responsibility is diffused among 7 BILLION people. And because it's an issue that doesn't exist in our immediate reality, and might affect our grandchildren's children but not us, it's sometimes easy to rationalize our earth-abusive actions. So in the end, we're ignoring issues that affect animals and people living in our world, at the same time that we live in it, in favor of avoiding a much more severe future issue, but because we haven't had to deal with the real fallout of that issue yet, we can, effectively, do nothing to solve anything because our commitment hasn't been 100% necessitated yet. We're saving our energy for something down the line, and secretly waiting until the 11th hour to do something.

"As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe. Like globalism, climatism alienates. Americans today live far from the ecological damage that their consumption habits cause, and even if future consumers are more enlightened about carbon footprints, and fill their tanks with certified green fuel, they’ll still be alienated. Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” can avert the complete denaturing of the world."

This is why it's important to engage with your community. Develop an appreciation for something in your life, that depends on you to care for it.

So well written, it's a shame it leaves me so unhappy.

[uh-finity]

What I could see was the sudden, mysterious, disastrous sentimentalization of American public discourse. And just as I can’t help blaming cellular technology when people pour parental or filial affection into their phones and rudeness onto every stranger within earshot, I can’t help blaming media technology for the national foregrounding of the personal. Unlike in, say, 1941, when the United States responded to a terrible attack with collective resolve and discipline and sacrifice, in 2001 we had terrific visuals. We had amateur footage and could break it down frame by frame. We had screens to bring the violence raw into every bedroom in the country, and voice mail to record the desperate final calls of the doomed, and late-model psychology to explicate and heal our trauma. But as for what the attacks actually signified, and what a sensible response to them might look like, attitudes varied. This was the wonderful thing about digital technology: No more hurtful censoring of anybody’s feelings! Everybody entitled to express his or her own opinion! Whether or not Saddam Hussein had personally bought plane tickets for the hijackers therefore remained open to lively debate. What everybody agreed to agree on, instead, was that the families of 9/11’s victims had a right to approve or veto plans for the memorial at Ground Zero. And everybody could share in the pain experienced by the families of the fallen cops and firefighters. And everybody agreed that irony was dead. The bad, empty irony of the ’90s was simply “no longer possible” post-9/11; we’d stepped forward into a new age of sincerity.

Jonathan Franzen (Farther Away: I Just Called to Say I Love You)

[uh-finity]

Pain Won't Kill You

"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. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb to like from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products—and none more so than electronic devices and applications—is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature. But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist—a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable. If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. Those people exist to make you feel good about yourself, but how good can your feeling be when it’s provided by people you don’t respect? You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting). 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."

[shelookslikelexxx]

"The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long.  This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair.  And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it." -Jonathan Frazen

[tarajoon]

The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism-- our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, adn behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution-- isn't intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, or ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube.

Jonathan Frazen, My Father's Brain: What Alzheimer's takes away.

[oneannoyingbitch]

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”

Jonathan Frazen

[dance-of-st-vidus]

i googled jonathan frazen and there was a news headline that said "jonathan frazen is the world's most annoying bird-watcher" but it got cut off and just said "jonathan frazen is the world's most annoying bird"