Word: owl
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Arriving in Paris in 1924, Hungarian-born Gyula Halász was anything but a photographer. A painter and occasional journalist, he even confessed to despising the art form. But he was a night owl, attracted to a city couched in the [an error occurred while processing this directive] glow of street lamps and dense mist. Nocturnal Paris was, to him, a "world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs ? Paris at its most alive." And best illuminating it called for a camera. The work of Brassaï, as Halász became in 1932 (meaning "from Brass...
Jonathan Franzen is looking for an owl. He got a tip off the Internet about an owl living in a particular tree in this particular park in sunny San Jose, Calif. Now we are staring at the tree with binoculars from a distance of about 20 ft. Is the owl not home? Is it using some owl camouflage power on us? Is this even the right tree? In the past hour Franzen, 47, who's a pretty hard-core bird watcher, has already spotted California quail, some towhees, a scrub jay, a flicker and a few acorn woodpeckers...
...this cheerful, good-natured, owl-spotting nature boy? And what has he done with Jonathan Franzen? He's not the same tortured genius who wrote The Corrections. Success has changed him. He's a slightly different kind of genius now. His wonderful and supremely personal new memoir The Discomfort Zone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 195 pages) offers a few clues...
...rims. He asks several times if he's being interesting. He can't resist throwing out weird little factoids that have adhered to his sticky, hyper-retentive mind (according to Franzen, 43% of Subaru owners are Republicans; every person in the continental U.S. lives within one mile of an owl; scrub jays kill an estimated 100 million songbirds a year in California alone). And writing is still a struggle. He works in a darkened room, with earplugs, noise-canceling headphones and something called pink noise (it's like white noise but with more bass) playing in the background. "You think...
...down on fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success...