I keep thinking I see Jonathan Franzen on the streets of NYC.
I want to be able to say that I know it's not him but I'm not convinced. It would be more normal to not think I keep seeing him but I don't know what to tell you.
Yesterday I thought I saw him walking his kids to school on 72nd street near West End. Corduroy, plaid, and the black frames; a certain attitude--not impatience or frustration with what he was doing necessarily, but more like he had something better to do or wanted at least to appear that way. Although I will say that Franzen seems to me to be doing a really good job of at least seeming like he doesn't care how he looks to the world outside of at a minimum needing to at least look like a writer.
I wonder why he keeps appearing to me. Assuming he is appearing to me of course and that it's not something I'm imagining. Why me? Why him? Is he aware of it or is he only an unwitting pawn in the drama of my life? I like to think that last part is true. That would explain a lot actually.
I suppose I should start reading his writing. I should really understand him better because you never know how this will all play out. Maybe I'm supposed to meet him or know him somehow. And when that happens won't it be important that I be able to say something about his books or be able to say at least that I've read them? Or maybe he won't care. I suppose it must be very tedious to be spotted all the time and to be talked to about your writing. I would think there might be something especially important about anonymity to a writer, or a certain amount of it. A desire to not have to talk about oneself or to explain what motivates you. To have your art taken for itself, or understood without explanation from you. To have the reader just interact with the voice you used to speak into the ether, like hearing the ocean inside a shell. Or, have you ever seen those things that court reporters sometimes use...like cones they speak into to record their voice? They sit on their chair in the courtroom like an instrument of the justice system letting their ears do listening, passing sounds through their brain, processing the sound and forming it into words that they speak into a hooded microphone. And then the recording machine will take up the banner and translate the sounds into some electronic etchings into tape to be played back later and steno graphed by some other version of the court reporter--a less robotic version.
I wonder if Franzen thinks about these things; questions of muses and instruments. Does Franzen hear God's voice?
