AS I NOT ONLY LIVE in a federal prison but am also currently being held once again in a 23-hour-a-day lockdown punishment cell due to my incorrigible behavior, I haven’t been in a position to directly follow what I gather has been a very edifying net-driven controversy over Jonathan Franzen and his latest work, which really feels like another punishment in and of itself. Thankfully, though, I’ve received a couple of representative clippings in the mail, along with a copy of the book in question, Purity, which I’ve been asked to review.
Two things bear noting in the interest of full disclosure. First, this book revolves in part around the amoral antics of a character based rather closely on Julian Assange, while separately including references to Assange himself, most of them critical. I happen to have been an early and rabid partisan of Assange, and the two of us sometimes say nice things about each other in the press. Meanwhile, the criminal charges on which I’ve been imprisoned center on my fairly peripheral involvement in a 2011 raid by certain anarchist hackers of my acquaintance on the State Department-linked corporate espionage firm Stratfor, the stolen emails from which were provided to WikiLeaks. Second, and more to the point, I despise contemporary fiction almost as much as Jonathan Franzen despises women. In my view, the novel peaked with Dostoyevsky, and although I do admire, for instance, Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and Burgess’ Earthly Powers, you’ll note that the most recent of these was published almost 30 years ago. Now, I don’t doubt that some worthwhile works of “serious” fiction are still being put out now and again, but I wouldn’t know how to go about finding them, as many of our nation’s respectable outlets have apparently resorted to just hiring crazy people off the street to do their book reviews.
I have here, for instance, a copy of Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin’s recent review of Purity. This is just as well, as I needed a refresher on my Franzen lore, and Ulin opens with that very thing before promptly descending into some sort of fugue state. Naturally I was aware of the existence of The Corrections, which, Ulin reminds us, was “his masterful 2001 portrait of a Midwestern family,” but I seem to have entirely missed the more recent Freedom, “a moving meditation on marriage and friendship.” Nor was I aware that the author himself had reached the dual status of “both avatar and scapegoat.” As Ulin explains, “By now, Franzen is often regarded less as writer than as cultural signifier, emblem of white male hegemony. That this has little if anything to do with the substance of his novels is (perhaps) the point and the tragedy; when it comes to Franzen, the writing is where we go last.”
“Tragedy” may be a bit melodramatic in this instance (although it is indeed distressing to learn that the venerable old White Male Hegemony is now being fronted by Jonathan Franzen; we seem to have taken something of a plunge since Winston Churchill). After all, Ulin himself here admits that “that depth, that texture,” which is said to mark the characterization in The Corrections, “can be elusive in Purity, which is a more plotted novel, sometimes to its detriment.” And plotting, he concedes, “has never been the author’s strong suit.” Perhaps there’s a good reason why the writing is where we go last? But no — Ulin still maintains that our timely reading of this poorly plotted novel filled with low-resolution automatons is our only chance of averting tragedy, because the writing itself is just that good. As proof, he actually cites the following snippet of monologue as delivered by a character named Tom:
“Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married,” he tells us in the book’s one extended first-person sequence. “Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is your capacity to be hurt by her.”
That’s fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we must all come to terms.
Setting aside this sprinkling of third-tier lit-crit commonplaces that I blush even to reproduce, it’s unclear to me exactly what “fierce” is supposed to mean in this context, although I can tell that the term is here being misapplied since it appears to be intended as a compliment. And though the passage itself isn’t especially awful, it’s alarming to be tasked with reading a 500-page tome in which that sort of overwrought prose is supposed to make up for bad plotting and notso-hotso characterization. It’s also quite telling that Ulin manages to get his favorite passage wrong; the end of the selection actually reads, “her capacity to be hurt by you,” not “your capacity to be hurt by her,” and directly follows a key plot point that makes the distinction quite clear. But then, as the fellow said himself, the writing is where we go last. Shed we a tear for Franzen? Nay — shed we a tear for us all!
WHEN I FINALLY DID get around to going to the writing last, I was relieved to find that Purity isn’t a terrible book or even a very bad one. There is some clever use of language once in a while, yet Franzen resists the temptation to dip into the self-conscious attempts at “literary” phrasing that mark so much of his competition (our friend Ulin mentions that Franzen penned a 1996 Harper’s essay on the state of fiction, inevitably titled “Perchance to Dream”; one might be better served in reading a piece The Atlantic ran a few years later, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” in which someone named B. R. Myers points out that a great portion of modern prose styling is conceptually fraudulent garbage). Characters will sometimes think clever thoughts or even say them out loud, but not so often that this becomes unseemly. Now and again we are even presented with snippets of real insight. One can see how Franzen could have written a much better book 15 years ago.
But one can also see how that book might have been a fluke. In Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating 50-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.
It’s worth reiterating, though, that this sort of subject matter is not my cup of tea to begin with, and I certainly don’t want anyone to refrain from reading a novel that might interest them simply because I said mean things about it. If you’re up for a “moving meditation on marriage and friendship,” then you should probably read Freedom over and over again until your eyes bleed. If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing, then you’d better get your ass over to the nearest book store and pick up a copy of Purity. You need not worry about what I think. But if you’re curious anyway, what I think is that I hate you.
JUST KIDDING. Ah, but there is indeed a major plot element interwoven into Purity that should be of interest to someone like me — that of Franzen’s ersatz Assange, Andreas Wolf, and his leak-driven Sunshine Project. Let me put it this way. I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.
There are big ideas here, but none worth having, much less writing down. One big idea seems to be that Julian Assange has blood on his hands. Not even the Pentagon makes this charge anymore, but it’s nonetheless raised almost in passing in an Oakland anarchist squat, of all places, by a transient Occupy activist, of all people, who proclaims: “But Wiki was dirty — people died because of Wiki,” an assertion that goes unchallenged. To be sure, this is a bit character talking, rather than one of a handful of main characters whom we can be certain are speaking for Franzen when they start denouncing the Internet or women, but again, it sounds about as natural coming from a slum-dwelling anarcho-what-have-you as a declaration to the effect that the Multinational Imperialist State of Amerikkka must be brought to its knees by a re-energized Situationist International movement would sound coming from Mike Rogers. This, then, is the author speaking.
Not content to present discredited five-year-old anti-Assange Department of Defense talking points as if they were accepted facts even among Assange’s own ideological constituents, Franzen has, again, also created this Andreas Wolf figure, unmistakably modeled on Assange — he’s even escaped to a friendly South American country, as the real Assange is trying to do, and like Assange, he’s in the habit of deploying a rather striking female emissary on secret missions around the world. And naturally, Franzen has made Wolf a near-sociopathic fraud, murderer, and cover-up artist who also has weird sexual hang-ups (although it’s worth noting that most everyone in Purity has weird sexual hang-ups; one young lady can only achieve climax during a full moon, but then you know how feminists are). What’s particularly interesting is the sort of cluttered presence of both the model of the real figure and the real figure himself, whereas generally a writer will content himself with one of the two. Do the inhabitants of this fictional world ever get suspicious, I wonder, concluding as they must that one of the two global celebrity leakers is clearly an unfair literary depiction of the other? Do they also notice that all of their mothers are psychotic and that their marriages tend to slowly collapse in the course of long, grueling flashbacks, and do they conclude that they’re living in a Jonathan Franzen novel? This raises all manner of ethical questions that I will leave to others.
Rather than any measured objections to online activism as currently practiced or the social networking culture, we’re treated instead to a moving meditation on how the Internet is a totalitarian system comparable to East Germany under the Stasi or the Soviets under Stalin. The gurus of the information technology field — the “New Regime,” as Franzen calls them — are very much the natural heirs to the politburo. Oh, there are a few differences here and there, of course: “But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking — a relative term in my case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, or worse of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged — the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example.”
So, at least in the sense that these wacky Internet people lack the moral authority conferred upon the Bolsheviks by virtue of risk, this, uh, otherwise useful comparison between the start-up crowd and the Stalinists does perhaps break down a little. But! But! It gathers new strength insomuch that “the most successful of them” often have recourse to terror, in this case the “terrors of technocracy,” which consist of “the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.” So, there you go.
JUST A PAGE LATER, Franzen inexplicably switches gears and decides that the terrors of technology instead consist of “the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA — it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them.” Setting aside the demonstrably false and frankly bizarre claim that recent concerns over the intelligence community’s unprecedented capabilities stem merely from some sort of clever gambit by tech firm CEOs who must resort to falsely “imputing” such things rather than, say, from documented and ongoing revelations about those agencies, it’s hard to see how Franzen can actually believe that the misuse of personal information by powerful corporations should logically preclude “smart people” from also fearing the NSA, as their “less-smart” counterparts have been “persuaded” to do. It’s likewise difficult to see how Franzen can be entirely unaware of the contention that’s been put forth over and over again by many of the very people who have made sacrifices to bring these matters to attention — that we are concerned with the combination of state and corporate power exercised in secret, drawing upon advanced and little-known information technology, wielded in such a way as to narrow further and further the potential for truly private life while also contaminating the very information flow that a citizenry requires if it is to survive above the level of a subject population, defended by an opaque protocol of deception and retaliation, and aided and abetted by a dysfunctional establishment culture that was unequipped to even discover the problem without a great deal of help from outside that establishment, which has nonetheless studiously refrained from learning any lessons from all of this.
There’s an old joke which holds that in heaven, the cooks are French, the cops are English, and the engineers are German; whereas in hell, the cooks are English, the cops are German, and the engineers are French. We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one. Franzen’s nightmare — a new regime of technology and information activists that will challenge the senile culture of which he is so perfectly representative — is exactly what is needed.
“Let him who is not come to logic be plagued with continuous and everlasting filth.”
—John of Salisbury
It would seem that BB’s enemies have enemies who have enemies who also have enemies — why else the novel torture methodologies? Even Barrett’s allies don’t seem to be who they make themselves out to be, and that doesn’t seem like anything he can cut off at the switch, given his current relation to the bing.
Not to bring up old articles, but it does make me wonder if Barrett has experimented much with brewing and rating (as opposed to merely obtaining) prison hooch; how else to tolerate Franzen? Not that I’d want to get near those unsanitary pipes, nor would I want to encourage Barrett from writing about the stuff that matters.
Write to us about freedom, BB. The real kind. Please.
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” — With this sentence, Barrett, you have officially Won all of American letters in 2015. …If five years in prison is what it took for you to to produce this sentence instead of the (with all due respect) incoherent and unreadable shit you were writing before you flipped out on a porch, well, maybe it’s been okay, and even, from a certain point of view, worth it. Actually I suppose we should be thanking Candina Heath in our hearts daily for getting your ass put away for a few years so you could learn how to write like a, like an *actual good writer* and not some kind of insane hack.
(Not, I hasten to add, that you weren’t quite right to be doing Project PM and getting in everyone’s face on the internet about it; it’s just that no one could begin to give a shit because your discursive style was best described as “veering close to intelligibility,” especially those last few months.)
Thanks for this article. Disliking Franzen’s books is becoming more socially acceptable. And he always uses infidelity as a plot device, they must teach it at those creative writing classes they all go to.
Dissing Franzen has been the ressentiment crowd’s “new black” since he dared to question the value of prime time TV’s stamp of approval way back when. And the cliche marches on.
He also, and this is equally well-known, deliberately chose not to go to the “creative writing classes they all go to”, so chalk up another one for talking out your nether cavity.
The Intercept might want to undergo a spasm of corporate soul searching to try and determine how you got so popular with the “Art? You call that art? My 7-year-old does better” crowd.
Nice try, Jonathan Franzen
Anyone who reads Purity and comes away with the impression that Franzen has attacked Assange might want to consider taking up macrame or trying to cook every dish in The Moosewood Cookbook over the course of a month of Sundays; reading lit with a modicum of intelligence isn’t for everyone.
And not wishing to kick a hero/victim while she’s down, this article forces me to conjecture that this Brown might just be a cunt.
I’ve never read a word by Franzen, and I’m delighted that reading your brilliant review has not instilled one jot or tittle of remorse for not having done so, nor guilt for never wanting to. I enjoyed every word I read here, and thank you for that, and very much more!
I cannot believe with all you have been deprived of that you maintain a sense of mischievous joy in pointing out the boring flaws in the Franzen work.
Iam a good deal older than you and was subjected to ostracism from the class by dint of having my entire desk moved into the rear of the cloakroom to keep the rest of the class free from my obstreperousness. I could watch through the door and hear the lessons but read what I chose when I could. I learned to disappear in front of people as they watched.
I became an unpublished poet. All expectation of me was dashed. Good.
I found your writing bracing, as witch hazel on a heated, tired face. How I admire you. Egad, I’ve lost the ability for civilized discourse and ended up writing a fan letter. Apologies.
I hope my friend will forward me your essays again.
Cheers,
Virginia
Got to love the graphic at the “head” of the article.
Illustration: Paul Davis
The useful purpose of the novel, reviewed.
Great review of Franzen. So refreshing to see him trashed from a slightly different angle than all the previous much-deserved ones.
Loved this review. Best assessment of a Franzen novel I have read to date! The hype over this writer’s work defies understanding. Commercial propaganda blasted at bored culture consumers. Freedom from Franzen, please!
HA HA this guy is so good. I truly hope they dont manage to break him and that maybe even he comes out stronger than when he went in.
Thanx Barrett! Hang in there!!!
like unto a steppin’ razor
By the way, I have to disagree about the value of Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto.” I don’t think it’s a very good essay.
Spoiler alert: essay claiming to come from far, far outside of mainstream opinion was so radically challenging it could only be published in The Atlantic.
Some good takedowns of the prose in individual passages – the arguments against them as prose tend towards the pedantic, but are still pretty good.
The overall argument, though, is crank city, and Myers’ voice in the wilderness routine is unconvincing. Maybe Myers should meet (er, should have met, given this was from 2001) more of his fellow readers and found out that his ideas were not exactly shocking? Or maybe the people at the Atlantic actually were shocked and thought they were dropping this bombshell manifesto on an unsuspecting world.
I’m sure you’re a sincere guy with a lot of integrity. However, when you write that you stopped reading literature after the Brothers Karamazov, I stopped reading you. That’s liberal-left cultural conservatism, the kind that keeps the New York Times Book Review in the dark ages. You might as well announce that you’re a staunch believer in good ole’ fashioned socialist realism. You lost all credibility with me there, and I don’t even think Franzen is such a great writer.
One of the commenters managed to grasp this–that there’s a difference between fact and fiction and Franzen doesn’t owe you anything. I haven’t read the book, but your review made me want to.
Loved this article, and I’ve been telling my friends to read anything by Brown that appears. I had to read The Corrections for a class five years ago, but was surprised to end up admiring and even enjoying it. No way was I going to read long novels entitled Freedom or Purity though. It takes a megalomaniac to choose titles like that, and Franzen has become an insufferable public presence. When he talks about David Foster Wallace, he is starting to sound more and more like when Paul talks about John — only it’s happening faster.
I was disturbed even when reading The Corrections by a minor unnecessary detail about a violent anarchist from North Philly who had murdered a woman – I think he was the brother of a secondary character. Not only was it a gratuitous insertion, it just had something off about it.
As a one time thing of course, it’s fiction, and I suppose there is no reason why such a murder couldn’t happen. In connection with what is described in Purity, though? Is it that Franzen fears anarchists under his bed, or is he doing an homage to Joseph Conrad and G. K. Chesterton, who wrote back when anarchists were actually scary?
I don’t know of any politically motivated anarchist-caused murders in the USA since the 70s, while there have been scores of right wing politically motivated murders including plenty in the 90s when the novel is set. So with the pattern described in Purity, this little thing in The Corrections looks less random, more ideological, and quite suspicious. I can just read the New York Times if I want this kind of clueless social commentary.
I’m usually a big fan of Barrett Brown’s prison letters, but honestly, I had no idea what the hell he was talking about for most of this one. I prefer the stories about the sweat lodge, general disruptive behavior and his crazy ass cellmates.
The Barrett of Federal Gaol.
Thanks.
It would have been good if he reviewed the book.
What a waste of writing talent BB’s aborted career is, all because of too much arrogance. This is what can happen when you spend too much time either alone or being the smartest person in the room.
Um, no. And you are a wingnut authoritarian who actually defended George W. Bush back in the day. That is, you are a fuckwit.
BB’s career isn’t over, I don’t think; anyway, prison time may even have benefited his writing and / or career in some unforeseeable way(s). He *is* terribly arrogant, but even that may change.
He is wonderfully arrogant, and (regrettably) that may change.
A fine intelligence, plus exquisite observation, plus thorough-going analytical habits of mind equals genuine superiority, not arrogance.
Hate him for it if you must, but Brown’s critical ability so far exceeds what is necessary to have great fun excoriating idiots that I doubt he will ever be let out.
Who said anything about hating him for anything? I feel that arrogance is a fault, especially as one grows older, but not the worst one by far. If he dials that back after he gets to be 40 or so, he’ll be fine, and in no danger of becoming some new-model belletrist King of the Honkies himself.
See, Barrett, I told you history was the Nobel bomb! Never lets me down when I need to feel the rage in a cage with someone who got theirs before me. Cornstalk, he’s family!! I find more amazing facets of history just asking Watson who’s his daddy…GCHQ, like you didn’t give that little start up his big baddabbing…way to play Rothman like a real stein!
Forgive the constant mob references but I got real family mixed in to this mash, distiller. What are you holding, pocket rocket? I know it’s explosive.
I see we haven’t moved into the IP blocking phaseshift, picky beaters. So you approve of all these imposterposters, TI? Lame excuse for a breachworks, boys. You gotta get a Whinechester. Stop them before they cross the branch, sheriff. Might be a reale bandito in the bunch, Bonannos.
Yeah, American military. Remember: if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
I read “Freedom” and did a political review of it on the Mayday Books blog. But then, you’re in isolation, so…
Franzen is the mainstream psychological / cultural writer of the day. As Brown hilariously points out, ‘If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing,’ then run out and read Purity.
What is odd is that his hostility to some internet practices (a mostly visual culture where people look at pictures) he now extends it to attacking Assange? I think he can’t face that anything can be done right by anyone on the internet like Wikileaks. His problem.
You do know that Jonathan Franzen and Aaron Sorkin are the same people, don’t you?
No way!
cheer up. At least it’s not the latest Ian McEwan.
I think you would like George Saunders: Tenth of December, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, In Persuasion Nation.
Wonderful review! Have you got your hands on Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers yet? http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/the-book-of-numbers/9781846558658
Is the intention of your book selection to torture and torment Barrett Brown while he’s in the bing? Or to increase Cohen’s sales by getting Mr. Brown to write a scathing review thus producing the all-coveted ‘buzz’? Or did you actually enjoy that book?
“Conceptually fraudulent garbage” is a very polite way of saying “masturbation.” Because that’s what today’s leading lights of literary fiction do: they masturbate onto the page. “Oh what a delightfully clever sentence this will be!” they cry, as they toss another one off into the word processor.
Yes! Fine arts also.
This review absolutely made my fucking day. Thank you so much for writing it.
I’m sure he’d love this book even more!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016605O6C
Franzen is a hack though.
“[A] near-sociopathic fraud, murderer, and cover-up artist who also has weird sexual hang-ups” sounds like the potential to make an interesting character though… :)
I think I read “The Corrections”, I suppose I finished it, and I vaguely recall concluding, “I just don’t care about any of these characters”.
I try not to read reviews until after I’ve read the book, and after reading Purity, I found no solace in the reviews I read. Not till this one. Well done, well done.
Never even heard of Franzen before this. But it appears many of the positive reviews of this book also note that the story is bloated and inconsistent. The current event themes are not well researched. That the author is all about character development, but then that the characters are mostly deeply flawed and caustic. It reminds me of reality TV, Where the shows really are not very good. But people love horrible melodramatic stuff happening to other people so their lives glow in comparison. The human condition is that we love to see other people fail and fall apart.
Thank you for the succinct review. Now I can save myself from ever reading any of this guys nonsense. Though I hope the next bit from you is more constructive for your situation. Enough with the distractions. Cheers.
Not having read them, I can’t speak to the others, but “The Corrections” is excellent. Try it.
Brown’s bashing Purity, not the writer’s entire oeuvre.
I agree. He may be grumpy, waffling and massively inconsistent, but somehow The Corrections still manages to be a fantastic novel.
You forgot “brilliant.” Some of these comments. Jesus fucking Christ.
‘Freedom’ is not bad either, shooting fish in the barrel of the BushCo years. I agree with this review though, now I know why I didn’t like ‘Purity’! Franzen sets up a spurious conflict between leaking information and real investigative journalism when the crucial difference is between real journalism (unearthing and analyzing information discomfiting to the powers that be) and the PR which the MSM hacks regurgitate incessantly.
Jonathan Franzen is the literary avatar of our time. The United States is on a downward trajectory brought about by its own arrogance, its lust for world dominance, its corrupt oligarchy. How does Franzen reflect its society? His characters are nondescript individuals (The Corrections) delegated to the backwaters of life. These characters have no anger, hatred, passion, they are incapable of love, courage, dignity. They are trapped in a bitter, impotent world of tedious exchanges. We do not love them.
Unlike the Weimar Republic of twenties’ Germany, which in similar circumstances as ours, threw a big decadent party that lasted a few years, we are the children of Puritans, our Christian morality will not abide it.
As a writer, when I see the face of Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time Magazine my heart sinks. This is supposed to be the
Writer of our times. Where is the passion, the risk taking, where is the story that will move me, will touch my heart at its deepest level?
It’s called “The Da Vinci Code,” and it was written by a guy named Dan Brown.
Enjoy:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vinci-Code-Dan-Brown/dp/0307474275
:D
Barrett, your assessment of Franzen has made my fucking day. I renew my insistence that you marry me. BTW I’m literally picking out names for our future children; how do “Natasha” and “Alexander” strike you?
Barrett, you could really use a cellmate that happens to be an editor. Considering you are locked up in seg for 23 hours and have all the the time in the world, this sure is a great big rambling and boring mess.
I feel bad for the COs that had to read this in its entirety before it went out the door. Also, is your residence in “the hole” punitive or for your protective custody? Since you are trying to make the most of your stay to remain relevant, I’d suggest you stay in gen pop. Yuck it up in the day room and the yard; that’s what interesting! not your poor man’s kirkus reviews (no offense to Kirkus).
Said the envious and small-minded ankle-biter. Most people here seem to find Mr. Brown’s writing amusing, witty, and best of all, original. I’m sure he will be deeply hurt by your brilliant take-down though.
Envious!?
Are you for real. I sure wish I was in Federal Prison making toilet hooch!!
He’ll never hear about my take down unless somebody prints it out and sends it to him.
You mean all 20 something people who commented? most Fox News viewers consider their news source “fair and balanced.” Homogeneity can easily turn into groupthink. But nooooo, surely not on TI!!
Wow, you are one tough opponent. I am so impressed by your awesome spewage. Actually, I think I was right the first time… you are a classic ankle-biter. A no-substance critique, a petty smear of one who is braver and more intelligent than yourself, and done! Good job. Keep on biting those ankles… of fucking those chickens, whatever.
If being a prisoner makes somebody brave, I guess that makes us the bravest country in the world!! Also, how do you assess that one party is braver or more intelligent than another party when you don’t even know either person you are saying this to? I must have forgotten us meeting and you running some IQ tests and “bravery tests.” LOL.
If you want to make an argument about how brave Brown is, then explain. The way I see it, making threats to an FBI agent and then whining to the judge that such behavior was due to drug withdrawal does not strike me as brave. Nor do I consider obstruction of justice “brave” or “intelligent.” Nor are his actions in prison brave or intelligent: making homemade alcohol is the epitome of stupid. It is considered a “Greatest Severity Level Prohibited Act.” How do I know this, because it spells it out in the facility handbook
(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCQQFjABahUKEwi2t5OW9LPIAhVEjA0KHe5zCRI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bop.gov%2Flocations%2Finstitutions%2Ftrv%2FTRV_aohandbook.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHpeTIdivqSIZkZ3ckyb416uoRhPQ&sig2=0vpdNukqI5UxiQZjou8WVg&cad=rja)
As smart as he supposedly is, he clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to read that handbook. Otherwise he’d know that it could result in time in segregation, loss of personal property, or affect his actual parole. This is literally the type of infraction that can get you thrown in the hole and delay your eventual release. What…An…Utter…Moron!!
But then again, maybe it was his intention to get thrown in segregation. After all, what better way to fill up the pages of a TI article.
Ahhh! A failed try at substance. But, kudos. This human being (Mr. Brown) has decency and humanity, two things you are obviously in short supply of. He cares a great deal about stopping Fascism and has tried to do something about it. You, on the other hand, are an ankle biter, a smear merchant, and most probably a Fascist… you are certainly doing the work of a Fascist, attacking a great activist (with self-identified flaws) and supporting the in humane for-profit incarceration state and its Fascist corporate partners at Stratfor.
Yes, “OBVIOUSLY!” Since you know me so well. Do you ever read what you type after you hit “submit”? At what point were we assessing Brown’s decency and humanity? Let me lend you some twine to piece together this straw man you’re constructing. This type of approach to argument is so pitiful. Let me throw it back at you, maybe you’ll have an epiphany: “Give Barrett Brown a break! He is a nice guy who loves kittens, helps the elderly cross the street, and has a net positive impact on the world. Unlike John Kelly who OBVIOUSLY hates kitties, trips the infirm, and is an overall skid-mark on society. ” Pretty absurd right? That’s how you sound.
Christ, utterly predictable. “Fascism” is the ultimate over-utilized, cliched, mean-anything type of word best suited for the woefully uniformed and those that cannot string words together into a logical and comprehensible sentence. Don’t let that be you. It’s almost as mind numbing as people whose argument consists of merely name-dropping the Constitution (“why do I oppose NSA bulk collection!? This thing called *using air-quotes* “The Constitution!” If you want to salvage your comment, I challenge you to articulate who the “Fascists” are and what makes them such. To do so would first require you identify one of the many definitions of the word.
You use the word “Fascist” like right-wing blowhards use the word “terrorist.” (i.e. “Boy, you sound like you support the turrorists!!” )
And your description of Brown as “A great activist” — How do you quantify that? His proclaimed past ties to Anonymous? His threats against the FBI agent (“I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids … How do you like them apples?). His blaming his conduct on being a strung out Heroin addict? The length of his prison term? His ability to write a rambling article about a book? Be more specific!! And keep in mind that he cannot claim credit for the Stratfor hack because as his Defense team pointed out – all Brown did was post a link. He is not some skilled hacker, he just reported on the hack. Outside of this echo chamber, do people really see Brown as the martyr you make him out to be? Just glancing at his Wikipedia page, his legacy is better defined by his arrest and incarceration than his accomplishments as an activist. Groups like EFF don’t support his antics but merely disagree with the government’s aggressive pursuit. In other words, there is less championing of his actions than there is criticism of the Government’s approach, and legitimate concern that he is facing an amount of time not commensurate to his crimes. Fair enough, but that doesn’t make him some great activist.
I must have missed this part. When did I support the “for-profit incarceration state” or Stratfor? Do tell Mr. Kelly. The implication is that because I don’t see Barrett Brown in a positive light, I automatically endorse the Institutions that he opposes. Perhaps you are typing your knee-jerk reactions instead of actually utilizing that melon that sits on your shoulders?
Lastly, you do realize he is in a federal penitentiary (paid with your tax dollars and operated by federal employees) and not at a for-profit institution operated by a private prison contractor? That’s a verifiable fact.
No, please, you be more specific. What exactly is wrong with this article? If you would like to be thought of as something other than an ankle-biter and smear-merchant , that is. I use the word Fascist a lot, because, wait for it… there are a lot of Fascists, and we have been persuaded not to use the word by our corrupt and stupid media and the barking-head political class. You may pick which meaning of the word you like, or you can infer it from what I say… up to you. I assumed that you were supporting Mr. Brown’s enemies by your content-less smears of a perfectly wonderful article. I could be wrong about that , but I doubt it. Anyway, carry on.
Ummmmm….. Nate. You totally give yourself away here with your BOP lingo — “feel bad for the COs” “protective custody” “gen pop”. Someone like Barrett Brown finally exposes all your violations over the past few months and you can’t take it, bro? At least when he gets out he’ll have a fantastic career as a writer and you’ll still be a — whatever you are.
LOL, you confused being well informed with actually working for the BOP. What a pitiful logical leap you made. You know who would also know the prison lingo: ex cons, lawyers, advocates (ACLU), investigators, readers of news.
Maybe I am one of those!!!
The first part of it doesn’t need editing at all…
What about the second part!?
Barrett, do what I always do except to alert people about Nate: Ignore him, for he is a fuckwit.
Mona, I had to respond to this because the notion that YOU are ignoring me is just hilarious. You are incapable of ignoring me. Anybody with half a brain can see that you follow me around like a lost puppy dog.
But I’ll give you this, you do have the loyalty of a dog. Now get back to the foot of Glenn’s bed where you belong, and try not to piss and shit on the carpet when you get all worked up!!
Nothing like an isolation tank to bring out the real you, Barrett. I appreciate none of this off the shelf stuff suits your needs as in feeding your soul. It’s all a riff off of your own brutal reality. Sorta like selling the blues to share croppers who can’t afford the battery. But thanks for the show, booker picker!
How nice of you
OMG, Barrett, how did you know it would be a jammin’ book, mon? Note it is historical, too? That’s a trifecta, bro. You can take that to the tank.
Wonderful!
Thank you Barrett Brown, and may you soon be free!
Absolutely delightful wordsmithing, Mr. Brown. You sometimes rise to the level of Mencken.
As for Purity and Franzen, an elderly, dear friend of mine — she is of liberal sensibilities but not the sort to know much about Wikileaks or be comfortable with that sort of activism — didn’t finish it because she found these characters all whiny about not being able to find work and searching for the meaning of life etc. That didn’t float her boat.
It’s often my habit too read books she has strong feeling about, good or bad, so we can discuss it. And now, upon reading your delightful review, I am even more inclined to do so.
But I won’t pay money for it — just place a hold on it at the local elibrary.
Good luck to you as the oppression and petty tyranny continues, and thank you for terribly well-written and thus entertaining prose.
Thanks for the latest column, glad you are ok, Barrett!
Thanks for this, as ever. I check The Intercept every single solitary day just to see if there will be anything posted from Barrett Brown.
Test
I check to see if there’s anything posted by BB, not a reply to my crap.
Made you look? Why not fan a unfluttering estimation of one’s self. Hello from Butterthereville! I think you are worthy of a well intentioned interruption of this testy conversation you are having wit yourself. Should we encourage Barrett’s badassness or is he gonna get himself hurt and make us feel guilty about it, later? Tell me later.
What a hilarious, refreshing review. Makes me ashamed I started this book.
Dude sounds like a dick.
Which?
Thank God The Intercept has Barrett Brown writing for it. Sometimes after a morning of reading through Intercept articles about civilians killed by US bombs and corrupt politicians etc, I feel like taking the pipe. It gets depressing. Which is why it’s so nice to read something here that makes me laugh out loud.
Barrett Brown has a new address, you can write to him here:
Barrett Brown #45047-177
FCI Three Rivers
P.O. Box 4200
Three Rivers, TX 78071
BTW, (Brian Reynolds) Myers is an American who teaches at Dongseo University in South Korea, and writes for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. His focus is N. Korean propaganda and his book about N. Korea, The Cleanest Race, is very readable, his thesis is very interesting. I will try to forward a copy.
Thanks for the laugh BB!
Here’s a quote for you:
“Writing is turning life’s worst moments into money.” J.P. Donleavy
This is a good, solid, reasonably interesting column that makes some important points about society, which is to say, one of your worst. Writing about literature will do that to a person.
The Reader’s Manifesto is a great suggestion: I liked it even before it came to the defense of the long sentence. Imagine the temerity of someone who would suggest, at least indirectly, that the newest version of Microsoft Word does not have the divine right to ration an author’s breath or the complexity of his thought!
The insistence on literal truth in writings about Assange comes off as purely petty. There is fact and there is fiction, and no one near to any set of facts feels comfortable with the fiction, and no one near to the cash box is willing to trust his fate to unalloyed truth. The best you can do is to urge people to learn the difference between fact and fiction, a skill that is becoming even more uncommon lately if the gathering international war on /r9k/’s vague prognostications of Beta Uprising is any indication.
What mystifies me is why you expect well-regarded literary works to be good. Is modern art good? Is modern politics good? There was a time when the purpose of a university was to edify, and so the purpose of the professors might have been to look for some great ideal. Today, there is no room for equivocation: the purpose of the university is to promise future jobs for those privileged to afford it. In every endeavor of man, we see networking, which is to say, a collaborative enterprise of corruption.
I think it is an illusion to imagine that literature was written as literature. Shakespeare was a soap writer … just a good one. The Heart of Darkness wasn’t written for literary critics, but in protest against monstrous King Leopold. “Howl”, however lyrical, was mostly a political football for the oddballs who believe in free speech. Give me a recent Stephen King novel (“Revival” is actually pretty good, mostly because it doesn’t involve someone trapped in a small space who can’t think of obvious solutions, partly because he hired a full time employee to do an impressive amount of research on historical lingo, though he still fails to see a clear answer to his theological problem). You can keep the highbrow stuff.
“Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married,” he tells us in the book’s one extended first-person sequence. “Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is your capacity to be hurt by her.”
“It’s also quite telling that Ulin manages to get his favorite passage wrong; the end of the selection actually reads, “her capacity to be hurt by you,” not “your capacity to be hurt by her,”
Suggested compromise: “our capacity to hurt each other.”
Thank you for this. Made my day. Seems a bit unfair as I’ve done nothing for you. But that’s why I’m leaving a nice comment. Still seems like not enough when you are in “the hole” and i am in an office. However there is a sink in my office and it leaks constantly, so I always feel like I have to pee. Not ideal. Thanks again.
Thanks for a most interesting review. Your clarity of thought is refreshing.
As someone who never managed to get a review past an editor without a week long fight, and usually ruining my reputation with them in the process – reading this made my heart sing. Not a totally sweet and pleasant song, but still.. Thanks for a good read. :)
Yes, but to be twice loved and once hated by SHE who “parts the seas” of public opinion is a time-tested testament to his grasp of her grasp of his grasp of social realism. In short, Franzen’s body of work has endured the torturous testis of prime time OPinion by skirting the type of gripping controversy that could make his inkwell run permanently dry.
This made my heart happy.
I feel like you should write about cooking because I’ve never had an interest in that and suddenly I would.
I’d like to see a Cormac McCarthy novel based on Barrett Brown.
I like to see McCarthy write about anything, “carries on without a coma” and can give you that feeling you get when you step on something alive in the dark barefooted, at best a roach at worse a black widow.
I just gagged a little.
That is the beauty of McCarthy he is both intellect and visceral.
Thanks for this beautifully written evisceration of a worthy target.