I read an interview with Jonathan Franzen
from Time magazine—the issue from 2011 where
they put him on the cover
with his big face
and called him Great and American
and a Novelist
and people freaked out because he is
a boring genius who
outlived DFW,
or as they call him,
The Cooler Guy From the 90s—
and he takes the journalist
birdwatching, fucking
birdwatching,
and he says that he wrote
his Big Book on an old laptop
in a little room
with almost nothing in it,
and that he wore blindfolds while writing
and shoved shit in the ethernet port
so he would never see any internet pages,
even the ones like Jezebel that
get mad at him
for his hundreds of thousands of words and
lack of lip-service
to college kids
and the way he doesn’t
perform for the children
of the culture,
and he would be “immersed”
(his word,
not mine)
in his fiction, and so he
would create a world
of the mind
and not of
his fleshly experience
in that room, writing,
exceptionally alone.
Don’t you
get it?
He eliminated the road
that takes brain-view to
paper-words
and entered a coma-type
realm of creation,
his body breathing slow,
heart soft in its pound as he is
all-mind through his
large frames and fat lenses
of the owl.
He does that. He is
the Great American Old Unfazed UnWoke UnBrave
novelist who
is a flash of luddite
brilliance and
he does not say sorry
even when what we do now
is say sorry, a lot.
Franzen’s commitment
to his brand
of Sober & Writerly Seriousness is
second only to that
of the tennis-poet,
the long-dead Unceasing Jester
who went down swinging
(from a beam);
meanwhile, I sit:
I cannot turn off my television
or my Twitter or stop
refreshing the Instagram
of a woman I think I need
or stop eating the fries and
Big Macs and the pills—the ones I’m
assigned by God and the ones
I find in the couch,
and I don’t ever really
have much to say other than
crude Frankenstein-ish strings of
old Lil Wayne lyrics and
my ex-girlfriend’s tweets, anyway.
Forget all the food, then,
I will just
suck down all the Diet Coke that
coats and floods the muddy swath of swamp road
that carries my goopy, sugary bullshit
to the unimpressed, too-pale
blank page
for which no one at Time
will ever want
to take my picture.
R. Jones is a writer who lives in the northeast. Read more of his work in The Daily Drunk Mag now and in The Expat Literary Journal and Misery Tourism this fall. Heckle him on Twitter at @jonestown00.