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1. So I have some thoughts on Jonathan Franzen, climate change, The New Yorker, the Protestant and transcendentalist roots of American individualism, Fredric Jameson, E.B. White, and a few other things. Maybe Jack Kirby.
2. So, Jonathan Franzen has an climate change essay out which is getting a lot of criticism (as his earlier piece did) from experts. But there's something to be said about the intellectual roots of Franzen's approach to this issue.
3. Franzen is a liberal individualist, for whom the self is the horizon and nature of value to the extent it gives bliss to that self. : “Even the most ominously degraded landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it.” That "me" is crucial. That's the subject position.
4. American individualism is sometimes portrayed (especially by libertarians) as an exclusively Lockean affair, but is has a richer emotional life than that, fertilized by the inheritance of Protestantism & refashioned by Emerson & Thoreau.
5. It was Emerson & Thoreau that replenished the Whig & Calvinist heritage by making individualism about more than money-grubbing or spiritual preening: individualism was also local democracy and the ecstatic communion with nature.
6. That Emersonian/Thoreauvian individualism has always been a big part of The New Yorker's DNA, thanks to the huge influence of EB White on the magazine but showing up in many writers (there are echos in Salinger & Updike). That's why the magazine is so susceptible to Franzen.
7. That individualism has a lot to recommend to it (and has strong affinities with the, gasp, the bourgeois mimetic novel) but it also stunts Franzen's political imagination and limits his ability to even conceive of collective solutions to climate.
8. In The Corrections, Franzen has a funny bit where a character sells his Fredric Jameson books in order to go on spending spree with his girlfriend: "Fred Jameson didn't have Julia’s artful tongue." But Jameson has a pertinent critique of Franzen's failure of imagination.
9. Jameson: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." That's exactly Frazen's condition. His current New Yorker piece ends with a fantasy that falls squarely in the genre of the cozy catastrophe, where apocalypse revives small town life. 
10. "Cozy catastrophe" is a term Brian Aldiss coined to describe John Wyndham novels: "The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off."
11. We really don't have the luxury for fantasies of a cozy catastrophe, where global ecological collapse will return us to the comforts of small farm life and local democracy and Thoreauvian reveries over warblers. There's a world to save.
12. I have some more thoughts here on where Jonathan Franzen is coming from and why he's wrong. thenation.com/article/climat…
