Geez, I get it, stop repeating! 
Sorry for the misattribution.
Right, I understand, and I wasn’t addressing you specifically.
If you’re gonna eat off the floor, eat off the floor.
Oh, of course. Hence I haven’t read a novel in years.
On the other hand, this argument is hopelessly out of context to the point of absurdity.
I think I agree with you here. I just don’t think his hypocrisy is necessarily premeditated, just foolish and certainly weak. That is the only distinction I am trying to make.
And here I thought you liked my sense of humor.
MR
See, I think that’s why everyone dogs on Franzen. It’s not about Oprah, it’s because he categorized himself as high culture. Which is pretty arrogant. Oprah’s endorsement, reviews, awards, interviews, and academia all come after he has finished writing the book. He has no control over any of it - his work is done once he is finished writing. He is also ignoring the fact that many of the supposed “great” novels that have come down to us were quite the mass culture dishes in their day.
Jodi - Oprah is not giving Franzen any money. Yes, by turning his book into “New Improved Oprah Brand Books” he stands to gain quite a lot. And if he felt so strongly about her he should have turned down the endorsement in the first place. But I really think his interview comments have been blown WAY out of proportion. Her endorsement does not require that he publicly kiss her ass, crawl on bended knee, and thank her eternally for liking his book. Not even the cash received as a result of his endorsement requires that of him. She happened to pick it, he didn’t lobby or campaign to have it picked. I’m sure the deal was mostly worked out with the publisher anyway. He should have kept his mouth shut, he blundered, but he was talking to people he considers his core audience with no idea of the consequences.
Next week on Tempest in a Teapot theater: Reviewers Who Only Like Subtitled Films Paid To Review Mainstream Fare
I agree with everything Magdalene just said. Basically, if an interviewer asks you point blank about the flipside of being Oprah’s Choice, then you have every right to answer honestly, which he did. I don’t think anything he said was quite the snub to Oprah that it’s being made out to be, which it only is if you read it out of the interview’s context. Yet, read within that context, we can see that he obviously was not setting out to trash “low” culture.
Okay, lunchtime. Be back in an hour. 
Sign me up for this ancient literary tradition! I thought they were all dusty bores!
-fh
MAEGLIN –
Well, heck, I’ll agree with that. I don’t think the man was malicious; I just think he’s pretentious and was not smart enough (sophisticated enough? artificial enough?) to keep his pretentiousness under wraps.
And I love your sense of humor, in part because my own sometimes fails me. 
MAGDALENE –
In my case, this is not why I’m dogging him. I find the whole “high art versus low art” idea to be largely just so much pseudo-intellectual pretentious crap. Of course, it’s only those who consider themselves “high artists” (or should I say “artistes”) who even bother to make the distinction within the realms of, say, novels or popular music. I could give a rat’s ass if he wants to consider himself in such a class – except to the extent he must bad-mouth others (not in his opinion in his own august league) in order to draw that distinction. That is the arrogance I object to – not the “I’m great” but the “they’re not.” That and the hypocrisy.
While this is literally true, of course, I nevertheless think it is oversimplistic for reasons already stated. In a real-world sense, she is giving him money, and quite a lot of it. That is why her endorsement on a book is so valuable. Not just valuable in terms of prestige – which this whole issue highlights it really may not be – but valuable in terms of cold, hard, countable cash.
Then we agree on what is for me the major point.
But see, I don’t think anyone has said that her endorsement required any of that. What it IMO required is that he refrain from implicitly disparaging her (or the other authors she has picked) in his unseemly haste to distance himself from her (and them). This to me is not a matter of business or contract, but of manners. You don’t accept a favor from someone and then piss on them for it.
Which does not change the fact that it would not be included without his – the author’s – consent.
I agree with all this as well.
TARMAC –
And I disagree, if only from the perspective of manners. See above, re: refraining from pissing on favor-givers.
I have read all of the linked articles in context, as well as the New York Times’ take on it. I assure you that it is my firmly-held and informed opinion that what he was obviously setting out to do was to point out that while other Oprah books are “low” (“one-dimensional, scmaltzy” books subject to “corporate ownership”), his is “high” and therefore far, far different. Unfortunately for him, there really is no way to draw a distinction between “low” and “high” and claim to be “high” without trashing the “low.” Or, if there is, Franzen obviously isn’t capable of making such a fine and diplomatic distinction. eek on Tempest in a Teapot theater: Reviewers Who Only Like Subtitled Films Paid To Review Mainstream Fare
Franzen’s comments hardly seem to be pooh-poohing “low” culture. Rather, he is fielding a question regarding his inclusion into Oprah’s Literary Canon. Any author who is asked the question as phrased by the Powell’s interviewer I would like to think would answer the same way: honestly. Yes, he’s a hypocrite, but he wasn’t bashing “low” culture, he was saying what he does and doesn’t like. Later in the interview he talks about how he likes Dave Barry and Silence of the Lambs. I think people are prematurely jumping down his throat for his cheesy “high art” comment, which he definately could have said better–like, “literary fiction” or something along those lines. But the sentiment he’s describing is the same one that indie label music fans have when they find out their favorite band is “selling out”. Yeah, it’s a little silly (and Franzen admitted that) but there’s nothing terribly offensive about admitting that you, whether justified or not, harbor the sentiment.
Well shoot, I guess you haven’t read The Golden Ass by Apuleius. Boy meets girl. Boy wants to have sex with girl. Boy takes drugs and turns into a donkey. Adventures begin.
It’s a great story.
And thanks, Jodi, flattery and agreement are always appreciated.
MR
(Hey Maeglin, you left out Petronius. :))
Jodi: I find the whole “high art versus low art” idea to be largely just so much pseudo-intellectual pretentious crap. Of course, it’s only those who consider themselves “high artists” (or should I say “artistes”) who even bother to make the distinction within the realms of, say, novels or popular music. I could give a rat’s ass if he wants to consider himself in such a class – except to the extent he must bad-mouth others (not in his opinion in his own august league) in order to draw that distinction. That is the arrogance I object to – not the “I’m great” but the “they’re not.”
What’s wrong with stating candidly that you think certain other books are “schmaltzy and one-dimensional” and that you would not like your own book to be associated with them in readers’ minds? I too have difficulty understanding the anger that seems to be generated on this thread by the mere fact that some people consider that there is such a thing as a “high-art literary tradition” and that some authors consider themselves to belong to it. I agree that generalizations about the relative “quality” of different genres are usually oversimplistic and somewhat unfair. But they are still somewhat useful as broad categorizations, and I don’t understand why they should inspire hissy fits about “arrogance” and “pseudo-intellectual pretentious crap”.
Seemed to me that Frantzen wasn’t denigrating certain other Oprah picks because they were popular, but rather because he considered that they were “schmaltzy, one-dimensional”—i.e., bad—books. He’s not saying, “well, if it’s popular, it must be artistically inferior”: in fact, he explicitly called that attitude “perverse, not to say fetishistic” in the quoted interview. He’s merely saying that he thinks that a number of the “Oprah pick” books, popular or not, are artistically inferior. I think any author, or anybody else, is well within his or her rights to disparage books that they don’t think much of.
*In a real-world sense, she is giving him money, and quite a lot of it. That is why her endorsement on a book is so valuable. Not just valuable in terms of prestige – which this whole issue highlights it really may not be – but valuable in terms of cold, hard, countable cash. […]
But see, I don’t think anyone has said that her endorsement required any of that [i.e., servile fawning]. What it IMO required is that he refrain from implicitly disparaging her (or the other authors she has picked) in his unseemly haste to distance himself from her (and them). This to me is not a matter of business or contract, but of manners. You don’t accept a favor from someone and then piss on them for it.*
Favor? Somehow Oprah seems to have landed in the role of the Benevolent Book Club Fairy here, handing out “favors” in the shape of “valuable endorsements” that entitle her in some way to the gratitude of the endorsees. I seriously doubt that Oprah is running a book club out of any altruistic impulse to make more money for authors. She’s doing it for her own purposes, which seem to be a mixture of personal enthusiasm for fiction reading and the desire to interest and attract consumers of her various media products. She chooses what she perceives to be the good and/or popular novels that will achieve that.
I agree that if an author absolutely loathes and despises Oprah’s Book Club (which, judging from Frantzen’s comments, is not how he feels about it), it’s pretty shabby to allow his or her book to be endorsed by it. But I don’t think that accepting such an endorsement should bar an author from honest criticism of the organization or the works of other endorsees. After all, authors are always moaning in print about how painful it is to do book tours and be interviewed by a score of local radio station disk jockeys who’ve never even seen the book; but I don’t hear anybody fuming how unmannerly it is for authors to disparage people who’ve done them the “favor” of helping them promote their work. Book promotion is a business enterprise which all participants, even Oprah, are engaging in for the sake of their own interests, and I see no reason why any participant should be forbidden to criticize any part of the enterprise.
KIMSTU –
(How you been, by the way?)
As I said, it is premised not on how good your own work is, but rather how bad someone else’s is. It strikes me as arrogant and mean-spirited, and I find it annoying. As I have said, I am not much for the idea of “high art.” I think art should be able to (and should be allowed to) stand or fall on its own merits, without regard to how much better (and, implicit, how crappy) other similar works are. (And by “similar” I mean, novel-to-novel, not novel-to-comic-book.) I don’t find such categories to be even “somewhat useful;” I think they’re stupid.
In this case, of course, what’s wrong with it is taking the endorsement previously given to “schmalzy, one-dimensional” books and then questioning the judgment of the person making the endorsement – not regarding your book of course but regardng someone else’s. And this isn’t a hissy fit, by the way; far from it.
He obviously has every right to do so, he just shows himself to be a boor and a hypocrite when he does. He is placed on a reading list and he then proceeds to denigrate the reading list by discussing how bad (your word) the works of others also on the list are, in his opinion. Truthfully, I’m surprised to have to explain why doing so is neither politic nor polite.
Well . . . yeah. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s entitled to it, but it wouldn’t go amiss. If instead you choose to act like an ingrate, then you cannot be surprised to be taken for an ingrate. Which he obviously is. And it seems beyond debate that Oprah is in fact the Benevolent Book Club Fairy. She turns books to gold; no two ways about it.
Obviously, but so what? How does her motivation impact the value of the favor – yes, favor – she’s done to the authors she’s chosen? Is a good deed only worth anything if it’s 100% altruistic? Otherwise, feel free to be as big of a horse’s ass as you choose to the person doing you the favor?
Since you agree with me, may I assume you are throwing a “hissy fit” as well?
If he cannot be even marginally diplomatic about it – as certainly silence would have been, especially regarding the works of other authors – then he should have turned it down.
Actually, I think you’ll hear authors complaining about book tours in general and interviews in general. If they were complaining about certain interviewers in particular, and did so widely, then they could hardly be surprised to find future invitations rescinded, could they?
I don’t believe anyone has said anything about trying to forbid the man from doing anything.