Torso by Brian Michael Bendis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The more you learn about your heroes, the worse it is.
I know this probably seems like complete non-sequiter in this space, and it almost is. But it’s just a little bit not.
Now, I know. I know it’s probably not fair to judge our writers on single instances. But it just seems to happen so often. I had a bad thing with Brian Azzarello. It was brief, I’m 100% sure he wouldn’t remember, but it hurt my feelings. There you go.
A friend of mine had the same thing with Jason Aaron. And I don’t want to read his stuff because I feel like that’s not cool.
And while I can read books by people who I SUSPECT aren’t cool, it’s a little harder to read books by people who have actually BEEN not cool to me and/or people I know.
Now, by not cool, I might mean something different than other people.
Basically, the people I’m talking about, they’ve been uncool in a setting where they should fully expect to meet some people. Why would you even do that if you aren’t a person who likes it?
The people I’m not talking about are the people who we’ve sort of decided are uncool.
I think Jonathan Franzen is a good example. I think we’ve decided he’s not cool. Or even a jerk.
Let’s have a huge, long, unnecessary un-takedown of Jonathan Franzen now.
A Flavorwire article gives us 7 reasons why Franzen sucks. One reason is that he doesn’t like social media. Another is that the literary establishment tends to focus more on men, and Jonathan Franzen is a man. Another one is a trumped-up, totally false story about Franzen trying to scam videos from a college library, and the problem Flavorwire had is that Franzen responded to the false claim and showed that it was total bullshit. I’d say, of the 7 reasons, there’s 1 that might have some merit. The Wharton thing. Which we’ll get to.
Gawker had a Franzen article. Which I clicked away from because I didn’t want to watch a 15-second ad for some bullshit in order to read an article that I think probably sucks. What’s the TL:DR for video ads? Because let it be known, I’m not waiting for a video ad to play before I read an article that probably has less actual content than the goddamn video ad, Gawker. And I probably won’t wait for a video to play so I can read an article I agree with either, Gawker.
I find it quite fascinating that Franzen got a boatload of shit for his “Wharton Article Where He Said Edith Wharton Was Ugly.” For starters, Franzen talks a lot about the fact that Wharton came from privilege and money, and that she was quite socially conservative for the time. Which is something that a lot of us seem to be discussing these days. The “P” word isn’t “Peter” anymore, and I’m personally upset by that. Oh, how my star has fallen.
You wanna read the offending passage? Here we go:
[Wharton] did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty. The man she would have most liked to marry, her friend Walter Berry, a noted connoisseur of female beauty, wasn’t the marrying type. After two failed youthful courtships, she settled for an affable dud of modest means, Teddy Wharton. That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance, the blame for which she laid squarely on her mother. As far as anyone knows, Wharton died having had only one other sexual relationship, an affair with an evasive bisexual journalist and serial two-timer, Morton Fullerton. She by then was in her late forties, and the beginner-like idealism and blatancy of her ardor—detailed in a secret diary and in letters preserved by Fullerton—are at once poignant and somewhat embarrassing, as they seem later to have been to Wharton herself.
And later:
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of exceptional beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy.
Last:
I don’t know of another novel more preoccupied with female beauty than “The House of Mirth.” That Wharton, who was fluent in German, chose to saddle her lily-like heroine with a beard—in German, Bart—points toward the gender inversions that the author engaged in to make her difficult life livable and her private life story writable, as well as toward other forms of inversion, such as giving Lily the looks that she didn’t have and denying her the money that she did have. The novel can be read as a sustained effort by Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.
Now, I hadn’t read the famous Wharton Uggo article before this. But I have to say, I think that most online news outlets didn’t actually read this article.
From my interpretation, Franzen is making the point that all writing is, to an extent, autobiography. And it’s telling to him that Wharton’s work had a lot to do with female beauty.
In fact, I think this is an interesting quote, so let’s see it again:
“To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself.”
What I think he’s saying there is that we allow beautiful people to be privileged. We don’t condemn them for their money and their power if they’re beautiful. We don’t resent them because, eh, they’re pretty. Who can hate a pretty face?
I think it’s also interesting that I talked to my partner about this, and she said, “Yeah. Beauty is a big thing for women.” And she said it with an exasperated tone, like I’d said, “Hey, is oxygen like an important thing for women?”
I could be wrong in my interpretation. But I think that saying Franzen’s essay was about Edith Wharton being unattractive is purposeful simplification and missing of the point for the sake of getting in 500 words and cashing a paycheck at a web site that does shit news. I feel like Franzen’s essay poses a literary theory about writing as the exploration of the self and the other, and about the way in which we value beauty, as a society. I didn’t feel the hand of judgment in Franzen saying that Wharton was unattractive. In order for him to pose this theory, it IS necessary to talk about whether Wharton was conventionally attractive.
However, her attractiveness doesn’t come in to play when he’s evaluating the quality of her work. I guess I’m just an obnoxious asshole because I read the article. Even this part:
“You may be dismayed by the ongoing underrepresentation of women in the American canon, or by the academy’s valorization of overt formal experimentation at the expense of more naturalistic fiction. You may lament that Wharton’s work is still commonly assumed to be as dated as the hats she wore, or that several generations of high-school graduates know her chiefly through her frosty minor novel “Ethan Frome.” You may feel that, alongside the more familiar genealogies of American fiction (Henry James and the modernists, Mark Twain and the vernacularists, Herman Melville and the postmoderns), there is a less noticed line connecting William Dean Howells to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and thence to Jay McInerney and Jane Smiley, and that Wharton is the vital link in it. You may want, as I do, to recelebrate “The House of Mirth,” call much merited attention to “The Custom of the Country,” and reëvaluate “The Age of Innocence”—her three great like-titled novels.”
Anyway, what else does the modern media have to say about Franzen?
Oh, Slate posted an article about how Jonathan Franzen sucks because he was becoming the face of birdwatchers.
Fuck off, Slate.
Do you remember when you used to be an important news site? When people came to you for alternative views on shit? Do you remember what it was like to publish stories about things other than nonsense by someone who dislikes Jonathan Franzen and then dislikes him further for daring to appear in a documentary about bird-watching? Oh my, and Franzen’s so bold as to say he feels like a “dweeb” when he’s birdwatching? What an asshole! What a complete and utter asshole for saying a thing that I would totally say about something like birdwatching.
Birdwatching is totally for dweebs. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve spent about two weeks making things in Google Sketchup that ALREADY EXIST IN THE REAL WORLD. That shit’s for dweebs. Writing book reviews this goddamn long is definitely dweeb behavior.
We love Wil Wheaton because he embraces being a geek, we love Big Bang Theory’s cast of unlikely herodorks, and we can’t get enough of Chris Hardwick’s empire, which is called NERDist. But for Franzen to call himself a dweeb for birdwatching. That, sir, is an insult on the level of classlessness.
If only you could see that your words are as ugly as Edith Wharton’s face, Franzen.
Let’s bring this back around.
I try not to learn anything about my heroes anymore. Because, for the most part, it turns out bad.
Except…damn it, when it turns out good, it turns out SO good.
But I think all we can do is try to move forward and, you know, like the things we like as much as we can, in spite of what we might have heard about the thing’s creators.
We talk about the responsibility of artists an awful lot. Whether creators are responsible for their audiences and the people who love their work, for the things done in their names.
We talk less about our responsibility as consumers.
I think one of our burdens, as consumers of art, is to let ourselves love the art. Which sometimes means fighting what we know about the creators, and even being purposefully ignorant. I’m not talking about ignoring crimes, but just general dickishness. And sometimes, Azzarello, we lose that battle. But that doesn’t mean that anyone who’s mean hasn’t made great art.
In our current world, where we could probably find something dickish that ANYONE has done, it might be our responsibility to either overlook that which isn’t truly heinous, and if we can’t put that stuff aside, to not go digging in the first place.
But I’ll say this, in caution to artists.
Damn. When someone is trying to say something nice or appreciate you, don’t be a dick about it. I know it’s shitty when you feel like you can’t go out and have a cup of coffee without some nerd getting in your face because you write awesome comics. Actually, I don’t KNOW that, but I can imagine it’d suck.
But fuck, man. Be kind. We love what you do. And sometimes we love what you do so much, or what you do was there for us in a time we really needed it, or something you did changed the course of our lives, and we need to say thanks. We can’t keep it in. Maybe we won’t see you again, and we have to take the chance.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to force you to sign autographs and give out hugs. I’m just telling you that when you’re not very nice to someone who I care about, that shit ripples. That person is disappointed, and I’m disappointed, and while I’m reading your pretty good book about real-life mutilation and murder, personal favorite subjects, I can’t help but remember the time you were kind of a dick to my friend.
What I’m saying is, I love your work, and it’s art, and the way you behave for the rest of your life can either help that feeling or tarnish it, just a little.
Let’s make a deal. I’m going to do my best not to type in “Bendis asshole” to Google, and you do your best to be nice to people. Deal?