Extremely pompous, incredibly conceited

Our Journalism for the Web class did some blogging for Jonathan Foer’s speech on Tuesday. The blogging was done through Twitter, a place where people can send live updates of what they are doing and follow others around.

Foer addressed his speech to the Commonwealth College Dean’s Book classes at the University of Massachusetts, who read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Here is a summary of his book in case you are in the same position as me and don’t know what it’s about.

His speech mostly addressed how he was going to address the questions about his book and admitted that he is probably going to ignore and dodge plenty of questions on purpose.

UMass journalism teacher Scott Brodeur opened up the hour and a half discussion on Twitter with a post stating, “Jonathan Safran Foer is speaking at UMass on Tuesday. And a group of students will be live-blogging it via Twitter.”

Foer began his address admitting that he did not have his nice clothes with him because three of his buttons mysteriously disappeared. Brodeur commented on the auditorium at the UMass Fine Arts Center being packed.

He guessed that there were likely about 1,500 people there while Scott Feldman, a student for Journalism on the Web estimated that at least 1,000 people were attending the question and answer session.

One of the problems I had in going to the lecture was that I wasn’t aware of the context he was talking about since I didn’t know much about the book. I talked to some people who were actually in Commonwealth College about their thoughts on him.

The students who actually read the book believe that he was clever, witty and brilliant. I feel like most of the class, if not, all of the class didn’t get that perception of him.

For instance, in the beginning where Foer said that he dodges a lot of questions on purpose my friends thought that it represented his wit while many people in the class thought that he was just being foolish.

“Who is this guy, Bill Bellicek? Gave us a warning that it seems like he often dodges questions, supported this with four quotes,” Michael Handley said.

Some of the posts just highlighted good quotes or quotes that seemed interesting. I thought Foer managed to be interesting, but his overall attitude rubbed me the wrong way. My ComCol friends tell me that I would have been more understanding if I read the book.

One thing that Stella quoted that I really liked was when Foer said, “people think art is free… in reality, freedom constrains you.”

It took me some thinking to understand what he truly meant, but I think what he is saying with this quote is the fact that when people have freedom, the expectations of producing something great are a lot higher. In other words, we would have a hard time doing something that we want to do and instead focus on what everyone else expects from us.

In a way, Foer attempts to shatter this dilemma by saying something that is unpredictable. The one quote that really got to me was when he said, “I am a writer, not a journalist.” This quote is supposed to suggest that he doesn’t have to stick to the facts exactly as they are presented. In fact, he doesn’t even have to pay attention to the facts.

After I heard him say that, I wondered if he was taking a cheap shot at journalists. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was because Foer is willing to go after anyone and he speaks his mind.

The bottom line that we got from his questions is that Foer primarily uses the audience to answer their own questions. He does this because he likes to know how the audience interprets his work.

The catch is that for any question he’s asked, he expects that person to know exactly what they’re talking about.

“Ask questions at your own risk. Foer will bring you down a notch if you don’t bring you’re a game,” Handley said.

I noticed that Katelyn and Andrea bought the book. I’m curious to know if their opinions about him changed after reading some of his work.