TYRANT FRIDAY - 71 DISCONNECTED THOUGHTS ABOUT JONATHAN FRANZEN'S FREEDOM

In cooperation with "Mean Week" at HTML Giant, Blake Butler and NY Tyrant's GianCarlo DiTrapano have composed this little tone poem about the most important novel of the current century. (shooosh) Listen!

I noticed the other day when I felt like kicking a cat and googled Jonathan Franzen's birthday that he was born the same day as David Koresh. August 17, 1959. Seems like the sooner-to-be-dead brother got all the good parts about talking and J.Franz just got what mommy liked.

Stop giving your books pretentious titles. Like Freedom. Or Everything Is Illuminated. Or Freedom.

I know book covers aren't everything, but when you got a bird and a half sunset on the same page, it's more like a dick pill ad than literature. Thankfully for J.Franz, Oprah has a dick.

The other day at the bookstore, I went and hid all of the copies of Freedom behind all of the other copies of Freedom.

Franzen can't write when there's an internet connection in the room because he always ends up at Land's End's website buying socks.

Dear Writer, please don't write washy and simple prose or else you will sell a million books to people who don't read them and the next thing you know you'll be on the cover of Time looking like you just shit yourself and haven't decided if you like it or not (the shit in your pants).

I listened to The Corrections as a book on CD trying to drive to Baltimore. I ended up at a Macy's down the street from my mom's.

If you bend the spine on Freedom hard enough, you hear the sound of a baby being beaten to death with a rubber hammer. Fortunately, no one's cracking the spine that hard.

Franzen: "You have to love before you can be relentless." It might be time to sign our boy up for eHarmony.

Freedom as Maximalist CliffNotes.

Dear writers who want to be rich like Jonathan Franzen,

Don't you realize that once you get rich your spirit animal dies? Look what money did for Jonathan Franzen (whose spirit animal was himself, sadly).

If the only terror you are espousing in the reader is the same kind of terror one gets when meeting your new date's parents, it might be time to get a job selling houses.

The title of Jonathan Franzen's latest comic book is called Freedom. The title was inspired by him hearing the George Michael song of the same name while on his knees in the backroom of The Cock where no one would let him suck their dicks because they thought he wasn't real enough. (I was there. It was sad.)

The only Strong Motion I am feeling from you, dude, is to gently gesture my face toward the concrete and rub it and write you a letter in my bloodspeck from my unborn child for whom you are killing the will in America to read anything that could make them learn to live.

I didn't like Freedom and I didn't like your previous work, The Notebook either

Cracker Barrel's running a deal where you can get a copy of Freedom or a copy of Janice Dickinson's memoir with any purchase of at least $45 of eggs and bacon. I do feel pretty hungry.

Write with your second self's bloated anus wreath, not your holy limpness.

I do like the line about Xanax in your previous book. You should take more of them.

I will always associate Freedom with the George Michael video, not Nicholas Sparks' new book.

Reading The Corrections is like going on a month-long tour of Madison, Wisconsin but skipping all the bars and zoos and homes where anybody actually lives and really never getting out of the car.

O snap, you wrote a book without ever mentioning one orifice of the human body? What the hell do you type with? Your fingers?

I'm all for wearing your influences on your sleeve at the right time, but I think Ron Howard's about to call his attorney.

Hey! You know when you put the glue into your computer to plug up the internet in there? Wanna try this new lipstick?

Ben Marcus was wrong about your work not being challenging, Jonny. I consider it a challenge not to mail you a hand drawn picture of Aleister Crowley giving buttream to Mary Poppins every time you start working in what I guess you like to call "Dialogue."

Barack Obama can officially blame anything bad that happens to America in the next ten years on Nicholas Sparks latest book Freedom. Or Maya Angelou's last book The Corrections.

I know we're supposed to get over Bataille by the time we turn 21 but it helps to have gotten into him first.

I heard Franzen writes with a blindfold and earplugs. (That is all.)

I tried to read Freedom but every time I opened the book I kept hearing that one song by Crash Test Dummies so loud I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Here's really How To Be Alone: keep writing the same book with the same limpdick makes-Carver-look-edgy homebody characters whose idea of black metal is those louder songs by Beck.

If only you'd won that spelling bee in 4th grade your dad would have loved you and now the world would have another fairly excellent hedge fund manager instead of 1500+ pages of literary fleur-de-lis wallpaper.

I saw a girl reading Freedom the other day. She had cornrows. And was white. And couldn't read.

I bought ten copies of Freedom. (When you do this, you are relinquished of ever speaking any words ever again except the words "I bought ten copies of Freedom.")

Anagram for Jonathan Franzen: A Nth Fan Jar No Zen

Anagram for Freedom: Do Me Ref

Instead of Freedom why didn't you title it, "I Might Be Gay But I'm Not Enough of a Man Yet to Be Gay"?

I wonder when Judy Blume is finally going to drop the pen name and take her credit for laming out after she wrote Double Fudge.

"A slave is someone who waits for someone else to free him." -Ezra Pound

"Freedom" -Nicholas Sparks

If you wanted to write a book to read at the doctor's office, it could have at least been light enough for my granny to carry. And she's dead.

The film version of Freedom is 300 hours of a repeating loop of a truck backing up to a lake and dumping nothing into it.

Tao Lin couldn't find those type of Franzen glasses because there was only one pair ever made. They were made at Gawker headquarters by the ghost of Alex Balk (who did it as a joke).

Franzen drinking game: take a shot every time you wish you were watching Family Feud instead. I suggest using lite beer and having a grave nearby.

If Franzen had been publishing in the post-Tao Lin's Richard Yates economy, he would have known to use the title Michael J. Fox.

The New Yorker and Harper's should compile all of their best writing and publish it as Jonathan Franzen's next book. (You don't really still read those magazines, do you?)

Franzen finally gave up on experimental literature when Stephen King came out with The Stand.

I'd like to get the Judge from Blood Meridian and Jonathan Franzen in the same room for 15 minutes.

Every time I hear someone say something like "I think it's great that Franzen was on the cover of Time. It's just nice that America cares about literature again." I get the sound of a dog being beaten with a blue dildo all throughout my sternum and then I go pray for god to appear.

If Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem combined into one super hero, they could kill Jonathan Franzen. (This is to illustrate how fucking weak Jonathan Franzen is.)

If Jonathan Franzen was one of the Wonder Twins from Super Friends and held up his fist to the other twin to activate, the other twin would most likely be all, "Man, I don't know."

I can't believe Nintendo finally put out a text-based sequel to Duck Hunt.

What would Salinger say about all of this shit? (Who the fuck cares?)

No, really, some of Franzen's sentences are pretty great. Like the one the lord has in store for him when he dies.

I heard that Jonathan Franzen wants the song "What if God Was One of Us?" played at his funeral. That's the most respectable shit I have ever heard from this guy.

I heard FSG hired Gordon Lish to edit Freedom and he sent back a picture of a snowpea.

Remember when being on the cover of Time and being the most renowned writer in America meant something really strong and beautiful and full of hope? Me neither.

Why does Jonathan Franzen sound like "I'll have the salmon"?

The only way to save American writing is to stop writing about Americans.

Franzen applied to ghostwrite Snooki's novel but she was afraid it would be too vapid.

Franathan Johnzen.

I really don't have anything against Franzen personally. I have something against him ontologically.

You appeal to millions, Jonathan! (So does Taco Bell and sweatpants and Oprah and living in fear and Fox News and Jay Z and living in fear and Wal-Mart and living in fear and living in fear and living in fear.)

All this talk about Freedom has got me wanting to burn a library to save a book.

Franzen said: "Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money." Get to work, you stinky bitch.

Franzen: America's one man Best American Short Story.

Franzen said, "I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself." (liar)

Sure it seems like the novel's dead when you're 400 feet underwater and the water is your only fate.

Irony's so stupid it's not even dead.

Reading Franzen makes me want to read Bukowski, and I fucking hate Bukowski.

The big joke is that all the translated versions of Freedom are just all the words from Maya Angelou books copied over and over until it's fat enough to fill the ugly jacket of the American version of Freedom.

"Reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom helped me deal with the effects of my diabetes." - Bret Michaels

"Reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom made me feel good about wasting my life throwing around a fucking ball all day." - Brett Favre

"Reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom made me want to try my hand at fiction." - Sarah Palin's abortion that survived and resides in Wisconsin in a chamber underground.

"Reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was like going to jail inside of jail." - Phil Spector

This is America. Here, nobody who's real cares about freedom. Or Freedom.

Fuck your novels, fuck your essays, fuck you.

Fuck white people.

GIANCARLO DITRAPANO