
Jonathan Franzen Is Fine with All of It - platz
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/magazine/jonathan-franzen-is-fine-with-all-of-it.html
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platz
> "the arguments and social criticism he wanted to assert...could live and
> breathe on their own...didn’t have to Trojan-horse them into his novels’
> characters or plot points..."

The best stories do not stealth-educate—they focus on using empathy in
interesting ways.

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> "He was directed to some online reading about avoiding road rage, and he
> found a simple solution: Leave earlier." ... "That’s how you handle anger.
> You avoid the triggers. You know your terrain.

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> On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your
> abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere.

> On the other hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to
> be able to doubt yourself — to entertain the possibility that you’re wrong
> about everything, that you don’t know everything, and to have sympathy with
> people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are very different from
> yours.”

> The internet was supposed to do this for people, but it didn’t.

> “This balancing act” — the confidence that you know everything plus the
> ability to believe that you don’t — “only works, or works best, if you
> reserve a private space for it.”

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cgriswald
> “He was directed to some online reading about avoiding road rage, and he
> found a simple solution: Leave earlier." ... "That’s how you handle anger.
> You avoid the triggers. You know your terrain.

This seems like a misconception people have about road rage rather than good
advice. My frustration comes from the sheer insanity that is out there and the
low bar that either society or government has set for us as to what counts as
competent driving. For example, other drivers often place me in dangerous
situations outside of my control by failing to signal, driving too slowly,
driving to quickly, failing to yield right-of-way, etc.

Now, I’m not particularly rage-y. I just cuss to myself and get away from the
problem as soon as I can. So maybe the advice isn’t meant for me, but “leave
earlier” just seems unempathetic and trite. No matter how much earlier I
leave, it’s not going to make the guy In front of me trying to merge into 70
mph traffic at 20 mph go any faster.

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davidgrenier
Your gripe seems to be with the Gaussian distribution. When you see shitty
driving, what you are looking at is average driving. You also don't look at
your own driving from the outside. I'd probably find just as many
reprehensible things about your driving as you do of others simply because,
statistically, you are an average driver.

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platz
He is the definition of a modern-major-general-driver

BTW this hn post appears to have been shadowbaned

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strayamaaate
I first heard of Franzen through a book review by the Welsh professor Robert
Adams. Adams is a tour de force, who brings an incredible depth and character
to every book he reviews. He retired years ago, but TVO has thankfully
archived some of his best.

[https://tvo.org/video/archive/big-ideas/robert-adams-on-
jona...](https://tvo.org/video/archive/big-ideas/robert-adams-on-jonathan-
franzens-novel-the-corrections)

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flas9sd
thank you for the link, I enjoyed Corrections and am still puzzled by sections
of it that warrant a second reading. Mr.Adams review of the book encourages me
to do this soon.

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pongogogo
Great read.

It's interesting that he starts out by arguing that he's engaging with popular
culture through television and he is not an elitist, but then ends the piece
disengaged from the internet and arguing for the intellectual elites as
cultural gatekeepers, and against the internet as it bypasses that process.

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blueboo
no one cares

his book of essays is interesting, at least

