Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, his very liberally annotated translation of Austrian critic Karl Kraus’s essays, has drawn a bit of blowback for Franzen’s cranky and off-topic pronouncements on Jennifer Weiner, Salman Rushdie, and pretty much the entire digital universe (except early Windows and the Lenovo Ultrabook). So far, so predictable: Franzen’s grouchiness isn’t breaking news, and repeatedly denigrating Twitter is a pretty easy way to get attention, even if he may or may not know what “trolling” is. But to his credit, Franzen cops to his own very human (and modern) penchant for hating what the world has come to. And his footnote-diatribe is, after all, a tribute to Kraus, the dyspeptic fin de siècle critic known around Vienna as “the Great Hater.” In honor of Franzen’s self-conscious haterade (and his disdain for Internet listicles), here’s a listicle of virtually everything he...
- 10/8/2013
- by Boris Kachka
- Vulture
The Guardian has published a lengthy excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's upcoming book, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, that uses Kraus's writing about fin-de-siècle Vienna as a lens for examining "our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment," which, the Freedom author writes, is plagued by problems such as Jeff Bezos's ever-expanding empire, the Twitter account of Salman Rushdie (who "ought to have known better"), and people who believe they can "achieve coolness" simply by owning MacBook Airs. Because the piece seems designed to attract Internet hate-reads, we've gone ahead and picked out some of the more obvious bits of trolling below.Franzen is a PC. He repeatedly argues that sleek, shiny Apple products somehow impede one's ability to think as well as he does while typing away on his "new Lenovo ultrabook," though even he admits that the machine has its flaws: "Working on something called an...
- 9/14/2013
- by Caroline Bankoff
- Vulture
Many of us nowadays have the feeling that we're tiptoeing on the edge of an abyss, looking into the jaws of catastrophe, drinking in the Last Chance Saloon, living in what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called, in the title of his most famous work, The Last Days of Mankind. But not too many of us are actually doing more than merely, to quote William Empson's poem, "waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end". In the impressive Take Shelter, however, Michael Shannon, an actor specialising in blue-collar nutters, gives a shattering performance as an Ohio hard-hat who has premonitory dreams about an impending disaster. He visits a doctor and a therapist, reads a tome called Understanding Mental Illness, and visits his mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, to see if he's inherited her symptoms. But the dreams persist, as do the tempests he sees in the skies. He ends up...
- 11/27/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Michael Haneke's Palme D'or winner offers a spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a pre-Great War rural German community, says Philip French
Numerous novelists, dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War to give their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or historical resonance.
Jb Priestley, whose life had been transformed by his experiences on the Western Front, was among the earliest with his 1934 play Eden End, set in 1912 Yorkshire. Isabel Colegate's novel The Shooting Party (filmed by Alan Bridges in 1984) takes place at a grand country house in 1913. István Szabó's movie Colonel Redl cuts straight from its eponymous antihero's death to the Austro-Hungarian army going into battle, though it was as early as 1916 that the Austrian wit Karl Kraus launched one of the last century's greatest cliches by having a newsboy enter a Viennese cafe shouting: "Extra!
Numerous novelists, dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War to give their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or historical resonance.
Jb Priestley, whose life had been transformed by his experiences on the Western Front, was among the earliest with his 1934 play Eden End, set in 1912 Yorkshire. Isabel Colegate's novel The Shooting Party (filmed by Alan Bridges in 1984) takes place at a grand country house in 1913. István Szabó's movie Colonel Redl cuts straight from its eponymous antihero's death to the Austro-Hungarian army going into battle, though it was as early as 1916 that the Austrian wit Karl Kraus launched one of the last century's greatest cliches by having a newsboy enter a Viennese cafe shouting: "Extra!
- 11/15/2009
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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