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I am proud to say that we currently have in stock all of the ones that have been released in the US. (Follow the links to buy from the website or stop in to pick them off the shelf). 

Seriously, I think that’s awesome. 

Do you have any idea how many novels come out in a year? And then we have to guess from little catalog photos with sparse descriptions months in advance whether they might be any good or if anyone will want them.  Maybe I’m the only one who’s impressed but I am patting myself on the back.

I’m betting C wins.

Here’s us. (I swear this is the smallest I could make it. And my head is really freakishly little in real life.)

And there’s a cameo by Vintage Vinyl’s own Joe Steinman.

And here’s the channel link with everyone’s videos.

New list here.

A: Ah, revolution, wow. It’s great to hear the word ‘revolution’ again.’ -aging hipster doofus, Richard Katz, in Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom

Like my high school English teacher who smoked off brand cigarettes so no one would ever ask him for one (and called my AP English Class at Clayton High school ‘un American’ for never having worked in fast food . . .he’s always right!), I’ll leave the traditional reviews to La Michiko et al. and focus on what I think is the underlying philosophy of Freedom. The joke passed around on our store email (that you should be so lucky as to read) was that the Glenn Becks would use all the uproar surrounding the President getting an advanced copy of Freedom on his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard to prove that Obama is a Muslim socialist. But did anyone ever stop to j’accuse Jonathan Franzen of being a socialist?

‘Mainstream economic theory, both Marxist and free-market . . . took for granted that economic growth was always a positive thing’ – Walter Berglund, environmental lawyer, all around sweetie pie and college roommate of Richard (played by William H. Macy in my head)

As I’ve said a thousand times in the last week, Freedom doesn’t come out til August 31st (the book, not the concept, har har). I read Freedom in June . . . and compared to the legions of J-Franz fans, I totally didn’t deserve the advanced copy. I skipped the much-lauded Corrections, read 1/4 of Twenty-Seventh City mostly because Kurt Cobain killed himself at age 27, but loved loved loved How To Be Alone, Franzen’s essay collection, given to me as a birthday gift by a friend, later prompting his ex-boyfriend to comment: ‘What kind of person gives out books about like, how to be alone . . .as birthday gifts?!’

As a half-breed, I’ve always been interested in white people (what kind of person reads like, David Brooks in middle school. . .as a how-to guide?!). I mean, I’m interested in people in general, but at universities across the land, W-Word People Studies have been historically underfunded. Webster Groves’ prodigal bashful son, Jonathan Franzen writes about the kind of people impaled/sublimed by Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like with such Merlin-like perception, ease and generosity that you would swear he’s Dave Chappelle. When we got our advanced copy of Freedom I felt like Julia Child getting her first stick of butter.

The #2 complaint about Berkeley High kids (after ‘they’re all stuck up cus they think they’re goodlooking cus they’re all mixed’) was best uttered by an acquaintance of mine as he regarded them in all their nü-raved, drugged out, pierced, biracial glory. . .’too much freedom.’ According to Franzen, we turn too much freedom into a weird interesting kind of rage (Patty Berglund, Walter’s repressed tomboy housewife), proto-hipster melancholy (Richard), or liberal guilt (Walter), and all at the hands of Franzen are wrought as beautifully and elaborately as black iron old style gates always being put around rehabbed brick townhomes by people like the Berglunds, from St. Paul to D.C.  Franzen describes Patty’s sisters, as, (much like Hannah‘s) ’now in their early forties and living alone in New York, too eccentric and/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long term relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny.’

The quandry brought up by Franzen’s work was best packaged by Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek: ‘People in the third world dream of America, what do Americans, tucked away in their warm beds, dream about?’ or the Mexican fisherman story MEChA kids in college had in the facebook ‘about me’: While on vacation in Mexico, an American businessman vacationing with his family meets a fisherman and tries to give him tips on how to expand his business explaining that he could be rich and go on beach vacations with his family, to which the fisherman replies, I already live on the beach with my family, why would I want to go through all the hassle? The ultimate STFU/CTM, to which I say, yes, but have you ever enjoyed a lifetime of knowing you can screw people over and get away with it [cue Scarface quote]? It’s like being R. Kelly and never going to trial (Q: ‘Robert, did you have sexual relations with teenage girls?’ A: ‘. . . Define teenage.’)

‘You can watch Survivor: Indonesia til there’s no more Indonesia!’ an indignant Walter screeches at his Alex P. Keaton-esque son. In their own way, each of Franzen’s characters answer the question that defined a generation: Q: C’mon, you’ve totally thought about killing yourself before? (A: No, why should I? I’m not the one screwing everything up.)

At the end of Franzen’s infinite best, you know as much as you should, or actually as much as you can know about the characters. Who knows exactly why Richard has a ferocious sexual appetite or why Patty is a scornful b-word (ok, it seems that Westchester County has something to do with this). Freedom is not limitless knowledge.  Franzen’s attitude towards humanity reminds me of the scene in Philip K. Dick (also a stuck up Berkeley High alumnus although before the interracial sexual revolution)’s 1962 Hugo award winning ‘Man In The High Castle’ when a woman describes a man as an idealist who therefore always disappointed whereas she is a pessimist who is always pleasantly surprised (sentiments pre-echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.’ )

Freedom and other great books nudge us into believing that we can never know what makes people awful but somewhere there is a narrative about how they become redeemable. A New Testament stirs inside all of us, I suppose; symptoms commonly mistaken for nausea. ‘A universe that permits her to do [what she loves], at this relative late point in her life, in spite of her not having been the best person, cannot be a wholly cruel one,’ Franzen writes.

So, class, it turns out moneyed liberal Midwestern white folks want the same things as the Oregon State Association of Parapalegic Blasian Lesbians before them. . .the freedom to be selfish in new and unique ways but also ’the really important kind of freedom’ David Foster Wallace wrote about in This Is Water, that ’involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.’  A universal freedom linked to no numbered world. If the Mayans aren’t right, although I’m pretty much hoping they are cus I totally already bedazzled my post-apocalyptic eyepatch, Freedom is a real contender for best book of the whatever this decade’s name is.