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Directors Notes: 185 - Fair
🕑 Added 2021-04-01 14:00:06 +0000 UTCTo be honest, I think there's a good chance Jonathan Franzen doesn't own any music. It was probably a little presumptuous of us to write that he's against the concept of it entirely.
I don't know Jonathan Franzen. There's a better than zero chance that he's a perfectly nice fellow who just happens to have a "Get Off My Literary Lawn" public persona. So I try to be careful with him or any other real public figure that I prod in Night Vale.
There's the risk of being too satirical to the point of being hackneyed. Like, there's a reason why Night Vale episodes never made reference to the previous president, nor the pandemic. But in this episode, there are three celebrity authors that get poked, and I wanted to keep these jabs subtle, sharp, and brief.
First is Franzen. Like I said, he's an intellectual blowhard when he speaks publicly, and I always feel fine driving hard on him in the paint. The second is Bret Easton Ellis, another hothead crow-eater. Ellis loves to write misogyny as humor and then call it satire. (He's the #1 reason I am extra careful with irony.) His most famous book, American Psycho, loves to spend page after agonizing page detailing the torture and murder of women. It's maybe the only book that ever made me physically ill.
All that being said, Ellis used to be pretty easily drawn off sides by jackasses like me on Twitter. I don't know who started it, but somewhere in the mid-2010s there was a running gag that Ellis (not Chuck Palahniuk) wrote Fight Club. It would have gone no where but this mistake apparently annoyed Ellis so much that everyone continued to credit him with a book he didn't write. I thought I'd have a fun throwback to 2014 here with this one.
Finally, there's JK Rowling, who is terrible. Just terrible. I can't even satirize that. There's no foul hard enough that could knock her out of her transphobic defensive stance. But whatever, why not play anyway.
Writing about these rude little barbs now, I'm starting to think a more productive and positive use of our time here would have been to tell you to check out the other authors that got name-dropped in this episode. So I'll close out with that list. Def go check these fine folks out:
Alyssa Cole
Emily St. John Mandel
Salena Godden
Pablo Neruda
Isabel Allende
Michael Chabon
Catherine Lacey
Carmen Maria Machado
Comments
Robot Inside
I love this episode. ⚡
Kellie Linda
Great episode! Thank you for writing.
Christine Havens
Also, thank you so much for Night Vale!
Christine Havens
I met Franzen when I worked events at BookPeople. Intellectual blowhardiness aside, I found him an awkward introvert. He was enough of a sport to sign his book, “I do not fight like Anne Rice,” for me. Michael Chabon, who is awesome and not a blowhard, was surprised I’d gotten him to do that.
