Stranger Cover Makes Waves Among NYC Blog/Lit Crowd
If you've noticed the cover of last week's Stranger looks an awful lot like last month's Time magazine ode to Jonathan Franzen, well, good for you for consuming a solid amount of print media.
These twin covers have spawned a bit of a blog battle over in Neeeew York City. A small subset of people who ardently consume both blogs and capital "L" literature have their hackles up. And the rest of us? Let's try to follow along...
On August 13, Time stuck Franzen on the cover--the first living American writer to inhabit it since Stephen King in 2000--along with a headline proclaiming him "Great American Novelist."
The profile itself is a breathless account of Franzen watching birds, ruminating on otters and, oh yeah, pondering The Writing Process and a few other things. Writing about a writer of Franzen's stature is obviously an intimidating undertaking, but the piece is so self-consciously literary that it reads like something from The Onion.
Our local alt-weekly took that idea and ran with it. Last week's Stranger cover featured New York-based writer Tao Lin sporting the same chunky glasses, gray shirt and studied stare as Franzen. The Stranger let Lin (whose latest novel, Richard Yates, was published a week after Franzen's new book Freedom) pen his own profile. It's a clever and closely mimicked takedown of Time's. Almost line by line.
Here's where it gets tricky. So The Stranger runs this issue that basically mocks the pomp and circumstance treatment Time gives Franzen. Gawker gives the article a skim and runs a post (full of lazy insults about Seattle-dwellers being "rain-soaked latte zombies" and such) decrying The Stranger for having "the dumb audacity to do a cover story on stunt-novelist Tao Lin. Bad enough! Worse still? They let him write the damn story."
Gawker, by the way, has its own stormy past with Lin.
This spawned a flurry of posts by other media folk (and The Stranger) making fun of Gawker for not "getting it."
Thought Catalog has a great post highlighting the parallel structure of the two articles. Some excerpts:
Time Says:
A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted.
The Stranger Says:
A mound of hamsters are asleep in a 20-gallon fish tank at Petco in Manhattan’s Union Square. There are seven of them, says a nonexistent woman in a baseball cap. She counted.
Time Says:
It’s hard to say exactly what makes Franzen so uncomfortable. It could be me, or it could be the prospect of being on the cover of Time (a legitimately unsettling prospect that puts him in the company of Salinger, Nabokov, Morrison and, twice each, Joyce and Updike) [...] it could be the much fretted-over standing of the novel in America’s cultural-entertainment complex. Or it could be the permanently unsettling nature of the human predicament.
The Stranger Says:
It’s hard to say exactly what makes Lin so uncomfortable. It could be me, or it could be the prospect of being on the cover of The Stranger (a legitimately unsettling prospect that puts him in the company of three-eyed kittens, promotional photos of breakfast sandwiches, a woman in a bikini holding a river bass, and, twice each, scaffolding and Dumpsters). It could be the much fretted-over standing of hamsters in America’s cultural-entertainment complex, or it could be the temporarily unsettling nature of The Human Centipede
For the record, the dude who posted the Gawker piece replied in the comments, "I got the Franzen reference because it was glaring. That they gave a hack like Lin any attention at all was the point. Give us some credit, please."
