NP Franzen alert

[Doug Millison]

Another Franzen Gaffe: Artless Artist in Need of Art

Everybody's favorite "love-to-hate-'im" writer,
Jonathan Franzen, is
making headlines for yet another social gaffe. This
time the National
Book Award-winning writer has landed on the New York
Post's Page Six
for spending his taxpayer-funded $20,000 grant from
the National
Endowment for the Arts on a pair of paintings.

The grant, which is intended to support
artists-in-need while they
work, was awarded last year, post-Oprah, but before he
won the NBA.
Franzen justified his artistic purchase by saying that
he was doing it
in the spirit of the NEA, which no longer offers
grants to visual
artists.

Franzen was attacked on the Web site
http://www.literaryrevolution.com
by an anonymous group of writers who call themselves
the Underground
Literary Alliance (ULA). The ULA first came to light
in 2000 after
attacking Rick Moody for accepting a $35,000
Guggenheim. It was the
ULA's impression that Moody already had more than
enough money to
survive and should have turned the award down.
Coincidentally, Moody
was among the committee judges who selected Franzen
for the NEA grant.

Nevertheless, should any bookseller choose feel sorry
for Franzen, it
needs to be remembered that he once remarked to Time
Out New York that
he didn't mourn the closing of "badly stocked, weirdly
opinionated,
ickily self-congratulatory independent booksellers
like Books &
Company" and preferred "the ascendance of the chains,
which, whatever
the shortcomings, carry impressive numbers of
interesting titles." So
there.

The full Page Six item is available online at :
http://www.nypost.com/gossip/pagesix.htm.

from:
PW Daily for Booksellers (August 23, 2002)

=====
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<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
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