By Zadie Smith

Life just happens. Some people put a lot of thought and effort into trying to manage life, but they never really can. Sure, they manipulate their own actions, they sort of create their own path, but somehow Life keeps moving relentlessly along ignorant of their efforts.

Zadie Smith writes life, honestly and true. Her characters are imperfect, indecisive, and engrossing. They are real. They do real things, stupid things, often thoughtless things and they just keep mucking along trying to do their best.

The book did not thrill me, it wasn’t written to do that; it showed people trying to make the best of the life they had. Zadie took three disparate families, stirred them up so they interacted and let them go where they wanted.

I am looking forward to her next book, The Autograph Man, and hope it is as subtle and enticing as this one.

Link to Author information; http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth257

Link to Publisher site; http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400075508

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The above article is an opinion of the Authors.

© alias Hubbaloo and www.Hubbaloo.wordpress.com, October 2009, to Date. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to alias Hubbaloo and www.Hubbaloo.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Bored? Check out new(ish) WordPress blog Bored Bookseller Musings. Good writing on books, bookstores, rude customers, and other literary(ish) matters. In a recent(ish) post, the Bored Bookseller pointed our direction to a new(ish) essay by Zadie Smith, where the White Teeth author discusses “novel-nausea.” (Smith’s essay is really just a ploy to promote her new book of essays, Changing My Mind).

My recent post on Zadie Smith’s essay on essays highlighted the strange tension between fiction, and what it does and doesn’t seem to be doing for us – denizens as we are of a restless, confused age. Well, there is clearly something in the air, because here is proof that the novel is not quite dead – despite what the CEO of Borders might think – yet:

Noveller, the online macroblogging service that lets users post their impromptu narrative ruminations on modern life, society, and the nature of existence itself, celebrated its millionth post late last week, officially making it the world’s most popular prose-sharing tool…

“You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them,” cofounder Chuck Gregory said. “To be honest, we were stunned there wasn’t already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious.”…

At 10 a.m. Pacific time on Mar. 13, Gregory and his team of programmers launched Noveller. By 10:03 a.m., the first-ever Noveller post—a primitive but vigorous account of an insurance salesman who becomes obsessed with his father’s boyhood on a Philippines naval base—was put up by user johnnyK_67.

Within an hour, more than 300 user-generated “Novels” had been posted.

“I love it,” said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. “If I’m ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people.”

But according to the Onion, not everyone is so sure…

“Nobody wants to go to their computer and read about what you had for breakfast and how it called to mind your boyhood, which morphed into a meditation on the relationship between life and art and, by extension, a metaphor for all social interaction,” said Sam Alger, 24, who claimed to be “disgusted” by his friends’ constant Novelling. “But some of them, it’s all they do. It’s like no one just talks to you for hours and hours on end any more.”

Watch this space, novel-lovers! (Coming soon: more on Borders. And Cyril Connolly.)

I already blogged about Zadie Smith’s response to David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and I noted my admiration for her courage and insight in criticizing what she saw in Shields’ adherents (many prominent authors have blurbed the book admiringly, including Geoff Dyer, J.M. Coetzee, and Jonathan Lethem) as propping up a defense of what she calls a deficit in imagination among many contemporary novelists (they love that Shields has provided a defense or excuse for not bothering with characters and plot) and a lack of proper historical understanding of the novel and its inherent messiness. She seemed to think that the problem with Shields’ discrediting of the proper well-made novel in favor of a novel that does not resemble a novel, or writing that anxiously blurs the lines between fiction and non-, the problem with Shields’ argument is that he seems to conflate bad writing with the well-made novel or any kind of vaguely traditional novel at all. He seems to say that because too many novels I read are hindered by cardboard characters and stock plots, this must mean that any novel with characters and plots is tired, and we need instead collage-aphorism-genre-less novels, and this is the only meaningful way to respond to our 21st century world. She then says that the problem is bad writing, and that the novel-which-doesn’t-seem-like-a-novel is hardly a fool-proof fix, using J.M. Coetzee’s latest efforts, Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year, both of which blur the fiction/non-fiction line, as examples of failures in this vein (she thoroughly trashes these books, a bold move). She points to various contemporary more-or-less-still-traditional novels (Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels), or at least books with characters and such, as examples to back up her general argument that novel-novels, the ones with characters, are still valuable and viable, and that characters in particular, rather than the author’s self and autobiography variously cannibalized, are still essential in fiction and unique to fiction from non-, and it is these characters that allow the author to explore other people, a potentially very worthwhile pursuit. She says this desire for “more reality” in fiction, for a blurring between genres, for an incorporating of aphorisms and maxims and quotes and collage elements, is really a seeking after the purity of the essay, a form that can be polished until everything sparkles, whereas the novel is a hopelessly flawed endeavor and result, she claims.

All fine points. But, having read this excerpt from the book in question, it’s clear to me that Shields raises very important points about the vitality of fiction and addresses the hunger that has been very clear in our current cultural climate, for, to name a few: the real, “reality TV,” the news, monologues, autobiographical stand-up comedy, comedy news, actors whose off-screen personas are indistinguishable from their on-screen characters (which may or may not be completely dissimilar from who they “actually” are), pseudo-memoirs (Dave Eggers has written at least two), extremely meta and/or improvised TV shows (Curb Your Enthusiasm is the primary, but not only example), mumblecore movies (improvised, more-or-less realistic events and dialogue, some featuring actual unsimulated sexual acts), pseudo-documentaries (the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest as well as Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Bruno)… The list goes on, but the point is, people want to know that something might have, in a sense, “actually happened” to an “actual person” in a way that is not predictable, in an environment in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred. There really is a hunger for this in the culture, and it has only gotten more pronounced as each new wave of multimedia hits us. There are roots for all these things in bygone eras (the 60s and 70s, predominantly, with New Journalism, and cinema verite documentaries, and Hunter S. Thompson, post-modernist fiction, et al.), and of course people still go to see proper dramatic films, and read proper literary novels, and romantic comedies that follow strict conventions, but it cannot be ignored that many people today, perhaps the majority of people today question the surface of any art object, people regard everything with an arch lens, with doubt or with irony, or with earnestness, an earnestness whose motives and origins and agendas may be quite earnestly questioned and examined by someone else. There is a spiral of reflexivity and meta-ness and detachment in our culture that is nearly matched by an insatiable hunger for anything that verifies the reality of some other person in some other life, out there, living how I live or completely different from how I live, but out there, and I want to eavesdrop, to wonder about them, to follow him or her into the realm of the unknown, where I can’t predict the plot, but where I know, even as I know that I can’t possibly know, that all that is going on is “real,” is really happening, and what will happen, whatever it is, feels more palpable or at least more interesting to me because it is a temporarily new frontier. This uncertain zone of semi-reality has not yet been exhausted, even as certain specific genre manifestations, say, the documentary-style single-camera sitcom, have been pretty much done to death, and with diminishing returns (the U.K. Office begets the U.S. Office; Arrested Development begets Modern Family). Any tactic in any art form or genre can be done to death, can be co-opted. And that’s fine, or at least natural. But Reality Hunger seems to be after a wake-up call for novelists, a call-to-arms for greater bravery, more introspection regarding one’s form, one’s approach, one’s viewpoint on what is this thing we call, lest we forget, the novel.

And Shields, excitingly, seems to justify all this blending and blurring and borrowing and various forms of reality by affirming the search for wisdom. He sees his manifesto as advocating a move toward a more thorough and unblinking processing of life and whatever lessons and salvation or just drops of joy may be squeezed from it. He seems to want novels that don’t waste their or our time chasing after plot lines and conforming to conventional expectations when they could be seeking that thing closest to wisdom, that thing closest to reality, that thing that does not completely satisfy (what is it to be satisfied?) but which nonetheless redeems our waking moments, the span of our life, the archives of all our striving. Shields regards Bill Murray as a personal hero, a man whose on-and-offscreen persona never denies the sometimes glum or dour or aching qualities of being alive, but who has so much joy, has so much fun in him, even in his darkest movies, that one can’t help but like him and want to follow wherever he goes. Perhaps the kind of joy Murray gives the audience is the joy Shields’ manifesto is after, and the kind of joy he wishes more writers would provide, the unexpected, unapologetic pleasures of just being human, of thinking and trying and enjoying a fragile grace. Therein lies some kind of zeitgeist.

****Apologies for the length and messiness, but the point is, Reality Hunger has got me excited about thinking about novels and about the possibilities of fiction, in 2009 no less, and that’s more than worthwhile in my book.
P.S. the real path forward in fiction may just lie in J.D. Salinger’s late, rambling work (which deepens by adding to the fictionality of its characters and its composition rather than adding to the “reality” of its characters or its composition, a different kind of post-modernism), I’m thinking especially of Seymour: An Introduction. That title is winking at us, and continues to wink at us as Salinger has remained out of sight for so many years (God, I selfishly hope there will be posthumous books!!!)
P.P.S. Latin American fiction, from Machado de Assis to Clarice Lispector to Cortazar to Bolano, has a lot to teach Western literature.
P.P.P.S. Time to get writing!

Novelist Zadie Smith ponders why so many fiction writers have embraced the essay in an extended Guardian article.  Smith spends much of her time discussing and digesting David Shields’ forthcoming Reality Hunger: A Manifesto — my goodness, that book has buzz  — before reclaiming the sanctity of fiction.  A fascinating read, and worth reading a second time.

Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self. “Other people”, that mainstay of what Shields calls the “moribund conventional novel”, have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the “lyrical essay”.

These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion’s fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley’s comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through!

Rebecca Solnit, interviewed at BOMB Magazine

Essays are great.

• The talented Rebecca Solnit (above) discusses “elite panic,” among other things, in an an interview at BOMB Magazine.

• “Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay.“

• The kind of wishy-washy title of Bob Thompson’s piece in The American Scholar, “Writing About Writers,” does not give it due justice. Please read.

Lit.

• Thinking of gifting a newfangled, bougey little reading device called the Nook? Well, you’re outta luck. Yep, you may have to settle for the Kindle, which Amazon has sufficiently stocked for the holidays.

• Penguin Classics made a top 10 list: the classics of their classics, and they made a trailer to go along with it. (And HTMLGIANT’s brief description of it as “dopey” was, truly, an understatement.)

Music stuff.

• Yup, there is indeed a band called Truman Peyote

• 2 videos of Neutral Milk Hotel in 1998? Yes please.

• Blake Butler writes a “dystopian work of genius” (Scorch Atlas), with Wolf Eyes, Swans, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed as his soundtrack.

Etc.

• Drink Napa Cabernets for Thanksgiving this year.

• Seven bulls escaped from the set of Tom Cruise’s latest movie in Spain. Vulture blamed it on the SPs. I’m going to go with the aliens. That’s right.

• The Daily Dish provides a sweet-ass visualization of the decline of empires.

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

…this is what I like.

Essay: Zadie Smith on the essay. (bonus: Joan Didion anno 1967)

Perspective: everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy. (bonus: very funny!)

Philosophy: The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand.

Radio: Weekend Woman’s Hour

Tune #1: Tougher than the Rest with Bruce Springsteen (bonus: fashion anno 1988)

Tune #2: Pata Pata with Miriam Makeba

Poem: “Spellbound” by Emily Brontë:

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

Painting #1: Waterhouse – St Eulalia

Painting #2: Millais – Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind

Painting #3: Friedrich – Winter Landscape

Zadie Smith, who is shaping up to be a truly indispensable essayist, has another brilliant one in the Guardian in which she discusses the rise of the essayistic-aphoristic novel and comes to some thought-provoking and bold conclusions. Not coincidentally, Zadie has a book of essays out now, Changing My Mind.

Maud Newton

It was after discussing Margaret with my mother that I stopped trying to talk about my experiences. Instead, I became obsessed with the notion that I would, eventually, write them down.

Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think Your Family is Crazy.” I shudder to think of it now.

I guess it’s not surprising, in the Oprah era, that so many other people had the same idea. Nowadays bookstores are overrun with narratives that could be sold under exactly the title that so appealed to my adolescent self. It’s hard to dispute writer Ben Yagoda’s assertion that the memoir has become the “central form” of this cultural moment. Whether it has, as he also contends, supplanted fiction remains to be seen.

But I hope he’s wrong.

Mavis Gallant

Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word “essay”, and what an essay is, exactly, these days.

Reif Larson talks about writing and the unfinished work of Nabokov is discussed.

Javier Marias

Zadie Smith’s passion for writing and film shines through in this sparkling collection of criticism, says an admiring Peter Conrad

Zadie Smith: ‘Her enthusiasm is almost shocking.’ Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/ Getty Images

For Zadie Smith, criticism is a bodily pleasure, not an abstracted mental operation. Reading, like eating, caters to her ravenous but discriminating appetite: she finds the essence of Kafka in a sliver of words from his diary, carved, she says, as thin as Parma ham and containing the creator’s “marbled mark”. She doesn’t need a snack when watching a film, because her eyes are feeding on the images: Brief Encounter is, for her, a chunk of Wensleydale cheese, inimitably English. The critical arguments in which Smith engages are as vital and as potentially violent as sexual wrestling matches, and in an essay on Katharine Hepburn she recalls that she ejected two lovers from her bed – on separate occasions, I should explain – because they disagreed with her about the relationship between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib.

Smith consumes books and films, by which I mean that she absorbs them, seizing on them with all her acute, avid senses. When she was 14, her mother gave her Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to read. The aim was to raise Zadie’s biracial consciousness, though the result, vividly described in the first essay in this volume, was more intense and more transformative. “I inhaled that book,” Smith recalls (like an oenophile, she reads through her nostrils). It took her three hours to finish the volume and she expressed her critical judgment on it in a fit of grateful, ecstatic tears. When her mother called her to dinner, she took the book to the table, not because she intended to discuss it but because it was in itself a meal, offering her communion with the nutritious blood and body of its author.

This is not the way critics are supposed to comport themselves. Smith’s enthusiasm is almost shocking; she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned, gruel-blooded nerds in universities who murder books by dissecting them, reduce poems and novels to texts which are no more than snarled networks of verbal signals and revenge themselves on the literature they secretly hate by writing badly about it.

Read more at:

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

Zadie SmithWhy do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word “essay”, and what an essay is, exactly, these days. The noun has an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED.

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.” Which is it, though, that attracts novelists – the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity?

Today, the very lovely (and funny) Allison Janney is 50. I can only hope she’ll do many more movies & that she’ll be part of whatever it is that will mark Mr. Sorkin’s return to TV (I read about it this morning, I can honestly say I was super excited. I do miss the walk & talk ).

Right then….about White Teeth…it turned out to be exactly my kind of story. Maybe a little too much so – like all the ingredients were there (murky family histories, immigrant families and their expectations, adjustment issues, political & relational differences etc) but a spark was missing. Hard to explain really – I had a good time reading it, it was fun, but perhaps not particularly memorable. Maybe Times listed it in the Top 100 books from 1923 to 2005, but I have a feeling it won’t be in a similar top 50 years from now. Still, the amazing thing is Ms Smith wrote it when she was only 24 (!!). 24 – that’s how old I am now, and nowhere near capable of such imagination…

At the center of the story there’s Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal, WWII comrades. After his divorce, Archie tries to kill himself but is saved by sheer chance; feeling he has been given a new lease on life, he spontaneously stumbles into a party where he meets Clara Bowden. Three weeks later, the white, 40something Archie will marry the black, toothless 19-year-old Clara. Through the seemingly unbreakable friendship of the 2 men, the destinies of the Joneses and Iqbals will forever be entwined. Samad (himself also married to a much younger woman – Alsana) is born in Bangladesh and emigrates to the UK long after the war (in which he fought in the imperial forces) was over. Not knowing anyone else there, he looks up Archie and rekindles their relation. The 2 men share everything – much more than they do with their respective wives. Archie is always ready to admire Sam, always ready to listen to his neverending stories about his ancestor, Mangal Pande (who may have fired the first shot in the Indian mutiny against the British forces) – and Sam is always in need of such a sympathetic ear.

Then comes the second generation – Irie Jones and the twins Millat and Magid Iqbal. The boys’ destinies are heavily affected by their father’s inner turmoil and inadequacies as a Muslim: where he feels he is a failure, too heavily influenced by the lenient Anglican morals, he expects his sons to be entrenched in tradition. Unable to lead by example, ultimately unsure of what he really wants from them; Samad ends up being eternally disappointed, culminating with the decision to separate the 2 brothers: Millat will stay in London, while Magid will be sent off back to Bangladesh. Alsana is never involved or aware of the decision until after the fact – which only splits the household even further. Thus, Millat’s evolution to a teen thug and later to a Muslim fundamentalist (not pushed by higher ideals, but looking to belong to a group, like in the American mafia movies he so fervently loves) is no surprise to anyone (just as Irie’s hopeless passion for him).

While the Irie & Millat are in school, a third family will enter their lives – the Chalfens, intellectuals, British to the bone and set on straightening the two misguided kids. Going through the whole plot would take a while – and it wouldn’t be fair, because a lot of the fun comes from discovering what will go wrong next in these people’s lives. Suffice to say that, eventually, all 3 families and the various groups their members are affiliated to will finally converge to one place: new year, 1992, at the unveiling of Marcus Chalfen’s controversial genetic project. From then on, I felt the book had a very anticlimactic ending – almost like Ms Smith got bored and sent all her characters walking off into the sunset.

Although events take place in the span of about 20 years (mid 70s to early 90s) and capture a few historically significant moments, the narrative is neither linear, nor does it take on a serious tone (and I quite enjoyed the humor in it). Ms Smith plays jump rope with the timelines, skipping from present to past, exploring the roots and stories of Mangal Pande, of the WWII adventures of Archie & Sam, of the Bowden clan, their Jamaican heritage and their unyielding attachment to the Jehovah’s witnesses. And through it all, characters are constructed – some shallower (like Clara) some more rounded (like Samad who, though thoroughly unlikable, feels real in his dilemmas, contradictions, mistakes & punishments, ultimately embodying displacement), but all finding a niche in this sometimes dizzying book.

Yesterday’s Metro praised Zadie Smith for having the “deadly precision of a ballerina”. (Original article not online.)

That’ll be one of those specialist ninja ballerinas with blades in her pointe shoes, then.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Photo by Gabriela Camerotti, used under Creative Commons.

SF Chronicle and L.A. Times both review Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind.  The Millions comment on the reviews “non-committal, guarded praise” and go on to call it “wunderkind jealousy”.

The Guardian says of Smith, “criticism is a bodily pleasure“.

Time Out New York weighs in on Changing, name drops a bunch of other great writers while doing so.  End up liking the book.

Lit.

• The FBI kept an eye on Studs Terkel, considering him a “suspected communist”.  Surprised?  Saul Bellow wouldn’t have been, he though Terkel was a “Stalinist”.

• Over at HTML Giant, a video of author Mike Heppner.  The man has great concentration while driving and talking, this impressed a great deal. He also says that a Dan Brown book isn’t publishing, it’s a “buisness transaction”.  I like this guy.
  

• The Faster Times interview Palestinian author Ghada Karmi.

• Lit Kicks continues to “Ponder Proust“.

• “Our Man in Boston” tackles Boston Noir.

O-bow-ma

• A rabbi weighs in on our president bowing to a head of state.  Pulls out the Megillah.

• Conservatives expose Obama for the pinko he is.  Bowing =’s Stalinism.  Proof that when we are all in the work camps, we will probably be forced to be courteous to each other.

• Of course stupid liberal media goes ahead and tries to play clean up crew.

• Our favorite conservative pundit, Stephen Colbert weighs in, “that bow makes Obama look weaker than Rove’s chin!“

• Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. bowed.  But of course, I’m sure it was a different kind of bow.  One with authority and stuff.  Not some liberal/commie sorta gesture.

Playlists, top 10’s, etc.

• Author David Henry Sterry (Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys) gives us a playlist of the top 25 songs about sex workers.

• The Strokes vs. The Libertines in a battle for the decades #1 at NME.  Who wins?

• NPR picks the best recordings of the decade.  Awkward picture of Sam Beam (Iron and Wine), Norah Jones, Wilco, and Kelly Clarkson sorta sums up the decade where the line between “indie rock” and “mainstream” was totally blown up.  Thanks.

Okay, we are a teeny bit excited about the new Twilight film.  So what?

• Lev Grossman weighs in on the phenomenon.

• How New Moon is gonna save Hollywood.

• Meanwhile, we are a little bit more excited about the prospect of Lorelai and Rory Gimore making a movie full of snappy dialogue and L.L. Bean influenced styles.

And finally.

• McSweeney’s interview with a trapeze artist.

• Andy and Conan reunite via Zach Galifianakis.  Deep secrets are uncovered.

• Those Smurf movie jokes that Conan and Andy Dick make may not be that far fetched.

“I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person… And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.” -Zadie Smith (NPR– Brave, Brainy, Changeable — Zadie Smith Revealed)

Unlike Miss Smith, who gives the above as reason why she only wrote about her father after his death in Changing My mind: Occasional Essays, whenever I’ve felt the need, people close to me have been incorporated in my writing. Some celebrated. Some surreptitiously ranted and lamented about. Some overtly raged against. If this, more particularly the latter, was/is considered a violent act then gladly I bear the onus for every intended casualty and collateral damage that resulted from being honest. Quite frankly, there may never be any remorse. Those in my circle know the creed: I’m a writer. if you’re in my life, you’ll be written about. The context or tone is the sole responsibility of that individual. On the other hand, minor arguments and petty disagreements do not serve as fodder for writing. However, when significant things transpire in and around my life, a deep sense of compulsion to write about it follows. For example, my mother‘s visit in the summer of 09. But in this particular case, my earnest desire is for these words to function as capsules of truth. and respect. I really hope they embody love and are the epitome of non-violence.

After five years we were sharing space under the same roof and I pondered if a mother could truly accept her daughter is a woman. Surely she can recognize glimpses of her own childhood and adolescence bygone and surely she can see the independence, but does she ever really acknowledge the woman her little girl has become?

Over the last few years, my mother and I discussed the mundane to the very important; menopause, career, my first time, my most outrageous, the best to date, and migration hardships, over a phone line. Many times I considered what it would be like to have that kind of open communication face to face. This summer the opportunity presented itself through the most unforeseen circumstance. For those of us who hail from developing cities, towns, villages and islands outside these United States, the difficulty connected with getting a visa is a story we are pretty much aware of. Either a friend, family member or we, know the ordeal. Nevertheless, my mom was sent on a conference to a US territory where they granted her two entrances and a six months stay. As we counted the months, weeks, then days to her visit, my excessive anticipation and euphoria gave way to worry. Would she enjoy staying with me? What can I do to make her stay worthwhile? Would Brooklyn be too much? But most of all, would how I live disappoint her? Would she like my apartment? Would it be too small? Would she demand that I return home?

Why wouldn’t she? Home is a two storey five bedrooms, two full baths, three living rooms, library, dining room, porch and veranda, house sitting on a sprawling landmass of mowed lawns, coconut trees and a sprinkling of other exotic fruit trees that she shares with her husband and my two siblings. Why wouldn’t she say forget this garbage and move home? And in this instance, garbage is not a figure of speech. My apartment is a dump in comparison to the aforementioned. I have an ongoing war with roaches. HELL!!! As I bomb them from my abode, their friends and kinfolk move from the hoarder down the hall and the war wages on. So for the first time, I compared myself with this 48 year old woman I call mom. This woman who has the career of her dreams, a beautiful home, a loving husband in an imperfectly happy marriage [we know perfection is not to be had], and children who are mostly obedient and doing very well in school.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, I came into knowing my mom the individual, the woman when she was in her 30s. By that time I was an early teen and the only child, and now, as my 30s approach I can’t help but draw the lines. She was more than a decade into her career of choice, in love , and passionate about her NGOs, and the list goes on. On the other hand, I am a struggling artist whose moonlighting gig is her real job, living in an apartment that is less than half the size of a storey at home, and love? Well love the way I want it evades me. And children? Non at this point but I am quite happy about that. The lines do not connect horizontally. They have to be drawn diagonally for point mommy to match point me. So I worried. And as much as I didn’t want to fight during our first meeting in what seemed like light years, the willingness to hide insecurities behind resolve was there.

I want to make it on my own. I want to be in New York doing this writing thing that has become my fulcrum. Nevertheless, I was still a daughter- my mother’s daughter- whose mom was coming over to stay. Therefore, I cleaned the apartment which is usually 99% in order on any given day, did laundry and stacked the cupboards with her and my kind of food. The next day her plane arrived early. Traffic to the airport was lousy. She called. I missed the call. She was upset. I finally got there but the line to the terminal snake like. I crossed the distance by feet and was amazed that she hadn’t aged; still molasses coated, bald & beautiful with the black girl bottom that has escaped me. The same derriere I envision on jeans & bikini days. Teeth ever rivaling porcelain with a gap that needs no braces to be called beautiful. We hugged and stayed in the embrace that was needed for a very long time. She smelled divine. A hint of ocean and lots of allure. Definitely something expensive…something I hoped to snatch before the visit was over.

The drive home encompassed chatter about family and the joy of being in the flesh with one and other, smiles and the ease of falling into the ever familiar Creolese only to find mine laced with American speak. Six years and I had walked a significant distance down the Decreolization Continuum. At home, she wanted to “cuddle & smell me.” Indeed a familiar past time of ours, but at twenty five cuddling lost a great chunk of its storge, philia and agape connotations when it became associated with the opposite sex & post orgasm conversations. She asserted, “one is never too old to love up on their mother.” I knew this bunny behavior is part of her varying ways of saying I love you so with the memories of blissful screams filed, night found us nestled in the crest of arms where sleep came easier than it did on most days. However, my mom snores louder than I on the hardest work day. The night cap became a feat lost until being too tired to count the length of each drone forced a collapse into the quiet of night.

The following morning worry returned to inquire whether she sees me as a woman and what kind of woman. Although it mattered, I was willing to let on otherwise and refused to ask. Still insecure about the apartment, over breakfast I fired question after question wanting to know if the space was too small, if she is uncomfortable to the loving reply, “I am fine…just really happy to see you sweetie.” Yet, that wasn’t good enough because she failed to mention anything about the apartment. I replied, “I am really happy to see you too.” And I was. “but what about the place…will you be comfortable here?” she said “it is fine. I‘d be comfortable anywhere with you .”

The days eroded during an unseasonably cool summer where we visited relatives, went shopping, waxed nostalgic and cooked delicious but unpretentious meals reminiscent of my childhood. Meals that lost their authenticity at my hands. Our first spat came when she insisted on eating bakes (fried dough) after 10 at night. My fear for her health gave rise to arguments that would eventually try our patience. She would run several guilt trips of being unwanted in my home; the music that came from the headphones was always too loud, she can’t sleep with all that noise….I’m forcing her to go to bed hungry….she’ll develop an ulcerated stomach. On the other hand, my demands for phones and text messages to be put aside whenever we conversed annoyed her. How could a mother be more attached to technology than the child born of the digital age? She claimed she has other children, younger children, that needed her attention too. This gave rise to a slighted feeling on my part; after all this time, don’t I at least deserve a few moments of her undivided attention? She tried to text less but then the demands of being an administrator stole her fingers and the keys clicked in between our words. Feeling very much like the unattended lover, and in this case I was displacing or maybe after everything I had gone through here, my inner child needed nurturing. I didn’t want to be mature. I just needed my mother and I didn’t care much about the woman she thinks I am. I wanted to tell her how alone I felt in the beginning and how hard it was at times to adjust to the blinding lights of neon city. Where was the open communication? Lost in between pride and the desire not to hurt her feelings.

Growing up, we were each other’s companion and cheerleader which provided a conducive environment for fierce loyalty and love. So being fully aware that hurt people hurt other people and that I was hurting from wounds only living in New York can inflict, I allowed sleeping dogs to lie. We sauntered on. She bonded and went shopping with my friend, cooked for another to rave reviews and despite the hiccups we were still very happy to see each other. Under the covers of my bed- not hers where we used to paint toes, read the Sunday Stabroek and discuss the week before- I asked about undefined, on and off, in limbo relationships, their repercussions and discussed my passion for a lover. One that makes me come undone, inhabits my art and heart and with whom most of my days were spent. My mom, who is one of the most liberated and outspoken women I’ve met became bashful, stuttered and denied having any of ‘those.’ As a matter of fact, when words finally found coherency she reprimanded “you need to slow down and that’s what you need to do!“ Me? Slow down? Reminding her that this lover was my first of that nature; a precarious situation indeed but different from always being in a serious relationship or single, only set the tone for a diatribe about how much I had changed. If my mind served correctly, we had discussed one such relationship of hers ; one she used as a testament of women’s lib. Unearthing that memory only served to put her defenses on high alert since she saw it as an attack on her morals.

I wasn’t charging after her morals or placing them on the chopping block but she was correct about one thing. I had changed. Always a precocious child then an independent adolescent, as an adult I found little need to demand a sovereign space. Instead, a desire for interconnectedness and the truly candid communication only sisterhood can provide took its place. Also, I started measuring my success against hers and with it came a slew of insecurities. On the other hand, I was less prudish and very much in tuned with my sexuality where she found religion and closeted her womanist behind prayers. I was convinced that the years had dug a ravine between us. An urgent phone call from home would force the premature expiration of her visit. Still concerned with how I would be perceived and too proud to beg, I clothed myself in alleged maturity to help with packing and acquiring the new ticket. Until mid act when all pretenses crumbled into shards of tears. I came apart. Sobbing child like because time had vaporized, my insecurities still wrestled on the inside, I was afraid we had grown apart and had gotten accustomed to sharing space under the same roof with her again. Eventually, I broached the subject and we tangled. Attacking the crux of the matter, ignoring the surface stuff that served as distractions, I’d expose how much her perception of me matters, my new desire for sisterly camaraderie and the extent to which the visit reminded me of that. She in turn stated that being more spiritual would never efface the sometimes ribald woman of her flip side and how it aches to leave. Among the words uttered from her lips, these would stick closest to the heart, “it is a sincere honor to be your mom.”

The fifty ton gorilla had left the room. Our conversations grew lighter, laughter punctuated many more sentences, shoes were bartered, and the perfume I wanted to snatch stayed with her. A lot had changed in a matter of weeks, from being consumed with what type of woman she saw to understanding the woman being revealed. One who understood that as much as I wanted to be seen as woman, sometimes a petulant child reared her ugly head, that my mother and I will always have open communication whether near or far and like me, she will continue to change. From these changes, a few head butts are guaranteed but if we continue to make common ground the goal, our relationship will grow stronger.

Days later and over our overpriced JFK sandwiches, she said “this city bothers me with its constant motion and buffet of stress activators. I couldn’t live here. But you are a stronger woman than I was at your age. It is something I admire a great deal.” Boarding call interrupted her speech. Teary eyed she continued “I’m so happy I got to see you. You’ll never really know how much I love you ‘cause there is no way to show the full extent of this love…maybe when you become a mother you’ll understand…but I love you dearly.“ We embraced then garnished our goodbyes with humor about tear stained cheeks, snotty noses, balled up tissues and next year’s visit.

Back at home, I opened the door to the roach infested abode that houses my emotions with gratitude for the space that now holds precious memories and one of my most cathartic experiences. It has been months since her visit but every now and then, the insecurities surface except they are now accompanied with a stronger drive to persevere, to excel. To write. To evolve. How can I not? I’ve got my mother. The very person who introduced me to the arresting beauty of literature; the power of honest words, the comfort of prose, the life of poetry, and the dance of musings as inspiration. As a prime example. As my catalyst.

Peter Ackroyd

As soon as you finish Paul Auster’s “Invisible” you want to read it again. And not because, as sometimes with his novels — as with the novels of Georges Perec, one of a handful of other real authors mentioned in the book — you suddenly suspect, at the very end, that you haven’t properly understood a word of what has gone before. You want to reread “Invisible” because it moves quickly, easily, somehow sinuously, and you worry that there were good parts that you read right past, insights that you missed. The prose is contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk. It has the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline. As often happens when you are in the hands of a master, you read the next sentence almost before you are finished with the previous one. The novel could be read shallowly, because it is such a pleasure to read.

Zadie Smith

Interview on NPR with Zadie Smith:

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna:

In the end, Kingsolver gives the idea of disappearance a surprising moral dimension. When Shepherd and Violet Brown decry the constant talk in America, the gossip, the radio, the filling in of silences with lies – “God speaks for the silent man” – they risk self-righteousness. Yet a more subtle observation is at stake, and at last it emerges in a conversation they have about the Mayans, and whether they should consider themselves a “failed culture” because they are no longer a dominant one. “No use admiring a thing just because it lasted”, Brown tells Shepherd. Perhaps, she suggests, rather than glorifying the urge of writers and politicians and lovers to be remembered, to impress themselves on the world, “we should admire people the most for living in this jungle without leaving one mark on it”.

Maya Angelou sits down for an interview. David Vann writes an ode to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

Representations of hell have always worked to reveal the shapes of our lives, abstract landscapes meant to describe the felt and suspected landscapes within us. The external world is a sign in fiction, all of it responsive: “Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.” The landscape in Blood Meridian is a portrait of us, a secular inferno necessary because, although we may not believe, we still know we are doomed. We shall destroy all we know and then live on.

Vann talks about Legend of A Suicide:

Blake Morrison looks at a century of Poetry Review:

In gathering up the best of 100 years of poetry and debate for this anthology, Fiona Sampson, the current editor of the Poetry Review, doesn’t dwell on the duels and hissy fits. But neither does she pretend that schisms didn’t, or don’t, exist. The first few pieces map out the war zone. On one side, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” by Rupert Brooke (“And is there honey still for tea?”) and Henry Newbolt on why Robert Bridges is the greatest poet of the age (“The joy that abounds from these poems is from a bluer heaven than any other that has shone over England”). On the other side, Marinetti’s manifesto for futurism and Ezra Pound on his hopes for the poetry of the next decade (“It will be as much like granite as it can be . . . austere, direct, free from emotional slither”). It’s the old guard versus Modernists, with manifestos flying like grenades.

Jane Urquhart

Every year, friends and family (and so on, and so on) of Pearson employees are invited to participate in a massive warehouse sale. Books are sold dirt cheap and the money goes to charity—sounds good to me. It took three hours of waiting to make the front of the line, but when we were finally unleashed, I managed to score some pretty unbelievable finds. Among the wreckage:

$2 each. I spent $36.

Let’s go crazy about Nabokov!

On the Media talks to Ron Rosenbaum of Slate about his conflicted feelings over the publication of The Original of Laura.

Aleksandar Hemon is sorta against Laura seeing the light of day.

Nabokov specimen covers.

Lit.

• Village Voice on Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.

• Tao Lin will sell you a bunch of his stuff for a really good price.

• John Irving is worried about me?  I was worried about John Irving!  So crazy!

• I’m confused.  If these books were so “unadaptable“, then how come somebody went and adapted them?

• Robert Brinbaum talks abut the The Invention of the Jewish People.

Music

• Four Words: New Magnetic Fields Album!
  

• New Hot Chip announced, and we get excited.  Not as Excited about the Magnetic Fields thing, but excited nonetheless.

• Sasha Frere-Jones gets us excited about young upstarts Metallica.

• The Beets played a museum.  Another reason to love them.

Weird world of sports.

• Well, Sammy Sosa is white now I guess.
  

1) Doesn’t this music just look beautiful itself? Every morning at school drop off, I read Emma a book in the hallway. This morning, she chose a book about the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. He had TWENTY children! Only 10 lived into adulthood and 4 were given a variation of his name. 3 boys named Johann and a girl named Johanna. Kind of like George Foreman and all his Georges. I find that really funny.

When I got to work (since I have nothing better to do. No, really, I have nothing better to do since this job was totally mischaracterized to me before accepting and is totally mundane and not challenging at all), I looked up Bach on Wiki. Look how perfect this sheet music is.

Here it is for your ears as well: Sonata

2) “Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful.” This is from the novel On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. I am hesitant to dissect books because I think it destroys their beauty. So much of what makes a story a great story is how it makes the reader feel. I can’t do that for you or you or you. And one reason why I have always hated English classes and why I just couldn’t be an English major in undergrad (other than the fact that I thought there would be no jobs, other than teaching. Too bad I should have known then I would love to be a teacher now. Youthful ambition. sigh.) But, the book questions – what is art? what is music? is beauty physical – can you touch it? is it spiritual? is it academic? She does this through a philandering academic, a hip hop listening teen and a pie-baking older woman.

3) Emma. Ok, I cannot post about beauty without posting about Emma, who is the most beautiful person I have ever witnessed. But, deeper is the sheer terror I feel when I think that she will ever question her beauty, which she will, since she’s a human girl and all. I am totally unaware of ANY woman on this planet who has truly loved herself all her days. Maybe this just isn’t realistic of humans at all, but I’d like to think that maybe it’s possible and maybe it will start with my daughter. When I think of the loathing aimed toward myself growing up, I feel so sad. It’s not something rational, I don’t quite know why I thought those things, but I’ve been trying to get to the root so that maybe I can help Emma navigate through the preteen and teen years. For the first time a few weeks ago, she referenced “being pretty” (by wearing patent leather shoes). I’ve purposely restrained myself from talking about myself in those terms (those monthly pants battles are waged in the privacy of my own room, with no little eyes to witness). I don’t say “I look so fat” or “I’m so ugly” and I don’t talk about other people in terms of physical beauty. I do tell her that she is beautiful, that she is the most wonderful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on, and that Daddy is, in fact, a very handsome man. But I do wear make up, buy clothes to show off my figure, and spend money on hair products and scented things. I shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. What is this saying to her? That I need to cover myself in order to be “presentable” for work? That I need to push up and suck in, as I look in the mirror at all angles. That I complain about my achy feet and sore blisters while limping in 3 inch heeled shoes (even I have largely abandoned heels. I remember when I refused to wear flat shoes.).

I can’t imagine her ever thinking she’s anything other than beautiful by just being herself. Why don’t I feel the same about me?

Why do I feel so down today?!

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~

So, I ‘ve given you music, given you a picture (of music at least). Now I must give you a poem – and a laugh.

]]> http://josephrobertlewis.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/why-do-people-read-contemporary-fiction/ Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:56:44 +0000 Joseph Lewis http://josephrobertlewis.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/why-do-people-read-contemporary-fiction/

This is an honest question in search of an honest answer, so I am hoping that some of you will volunteer your thoughts: Why do people read contemporary fiction?

First, let’s clarify. I am defining contemporary fiction as any made-up story set in the modern-day world that does not fall under the umbrella of “genre” fiction. So no romance, urban fantasy, scifi, magical realism, horror, thriller, mystery, or chick-lit books. What does that leave? I’m not entirely sure. Is everything else literary fiction (highbrow nonsense)?

Want examples? I’m afraid I can’t be of much help, since I don’t read these sorts of books. How about Zadie Smith’s White Teeth? It was written in 2000 and set in 1975, so that’s not perfect. I’m also thinking of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, which was written in 1997 and spans the 1940s to 1990s. Anyway, they are books about fairly normal people in fairly normal situations in a fairly normal world.

Why would anyone want to read that?

I read the two books mentioned above because one was assigned in college and one was recommended by a friend, and while I appreciated both as interesting and well-written, the experience was much like visiting a museum. You feel a little smarter and more cultured for a short while, but you still wish you had spent the day doing something else, something fun, instead.

I understand why people like fantasy and science fiction. Those books offer escapes to entirely different worlds. Thrillers, mysteries, and romances offer escapes to much more exciting versions of reality.

Some people dislike all fiction, and would rather learn about real people and events than read some made-up story, and while I think that betrays an unfortunate lack of imagination on their part, I fully understand their position.

But contemporary, non-genre, standard fiction? Unlike other types of fiction, which carry you to exotic cities or the distant past or alien worlds, contemporary fiction only carries you into your neighbor’s living room so you can watch their very boring, very recognizable lives playing out with all the same problems and half-solutions that you experience in your own life.

Where’s the fun in that?

Me sucede más seguido de lo que yo quisiera: alguien se acerca a mí y me dice: “recomiéndame un libro”. En teoría, las respuestas deberían salirme a borbotones: estudié literatura, doy talleres de narrativa, he escrito libros, he sido editora. ¿Entonces por qué la frase me deja como perro lampareado a la mitad de la autopista? Trataré de justificarme.

A veces, el “recomiéndame un libro” se formula como exigencia y no como petición. Miro los ojos de quien me habla y leo entre líneas: “Más te vale ser capaz de hacerme leer. Si tú (que estudiaste literatura, das talleres de narrativa, has escrito libros y has sido editora) no puedes sugerirme un libro que me guste muchísimo, entonces soy caso perdido”. O también: “Si tú (que estudiaste literatura etcétera etcétera etcétera) no puedes hacerme leer, entonces todas tus teorías son un vil fracaso y esto de la literatura es pura pose”.

Y claro, todo lo anterior puede ser absolutamente verdadero.

Detrás del “recomiéndame un libro” suele ocultarse un formulario que ninguna humilde creación literaria puede llenar. Ciertas personas, cuando me piden un libro, me piden al mismo tiempo que cumpla con todos estos requisitos:

• Que sea una obra de gran calidad, pero no un Clásico Inmortal de los que nos obligaban a leer en la secundaria, sino algo que uno pueda presumir con los amigos sin quedar como nerd.
• Que sea barato y fácil de conseguir.
• Que esté en español, porque en inglés no leo / Que esté en inglés, porque en español no leo.
• Que sea ágil y divertido, que “me lo devore”, que fluya de principio a fin, que tenga la estructura adictiva de una buena telenovela.
• Que pueda leerse en la alberca sin hacer el menor esfuerzo en términos de concentración. Es más: que pueda leerse mientras los escuincles te brincan encima y el efecto de tres piñas coladas te zumba en la cabeza.
• Que sea “transformador” e “impactante”, que “me cambie la vida”.
  Que tenga un “tema interesante” (todavía no entiendo qué es eso), pero que no sea “deprimente”.
• Que no esté demasiado “loco”: que no caiga en excesos de ninguna especie.

Muy de vez en cuando, algún título que yo recomiendo cumple con las expectativas arriba mencionadas, al menos para uno o dos lectores. Suele ser un libro que está dentro de lo que yo llamo “la zona Murakami”: más cool que Dostoievsky, más light que Bernhardt, con más pedigrí literario que Stephanie Meyer, más exótico que Rulfo y un poquitín irónico, pero no tan ácido como Onetti o Gombrowitz. (Créanme: no es fácil encontrarlos).

La mayoría de las veces, sin embargo, me siento como una pésima alcahueta. Tengo un montón de razones válidas para sospechar que mi amigo A es perfecto para mi amiga B, pero al día siguiente de la cita a ciegas que yo tan amorosamente me preocupo en organizarles, ambos me hablan por separado para mentarme la madre. Yo me quedo callada y un poco ardida. Algo hice mal, hubo un malentendido que debí haber previsto.

Entonces me consuela releer un ensayo en donde Cesare Pavese dice:

“Hay un obstáculo al leer, y es siempre el mismo, en cualquier campo de la vida: la demasiada seguridad en sí mismo, el rechazo del que es distinto. Siempre nos hiere el inaudito descubrimiento de que alguien ha visto, no mucho más lejos que nosotros, pero sí de un modo distinto. Estamos hechos de tristes costumbres. Nos gusta asombrarnos, como los niños, pero no demasiado. Cuando el estupor nos obliga a salir realmente de nosotros mismos, a perder el equilibrio para encontrar otro, quizá más arriesgado, entonces fruncimos la boca, pataleamos, verdaderamente nos volvemos niños. Pero de éstos nos falta la inocencia. Nosotros tenemos ideas, tenemos gustos, ya hemos leído libros: poseemos algo, y como todos los poseedores, tememos por ese algo”.

O sea: si no les gustan los libros que yo les recomiendo, la culpa es suya. ¡Ja!

No, en el fondo no pienso eso. De verdad. Pero sí pienso en lo complicado que es propiciar encuentros entre libros y lectores, y sobre todo pienso en que (como dice Zadie Smith), una cosa son los deberes del escritor y otra muy distinta los derechos del consumidor. Pienso en que me encantaría atinarle siempre cuando “doy de leer” a otros, en que estaría increíble cubrirme de gloria después de haber sugerido algún título. Ni modo, soy bastante soberbia y me gusta el protagonismo.

Por eso invado este espacio para voltearles la tortilla y lanzar ahora mi propia petición: Por favor, por favor, RECOMIÉNDENME UN LIBRO.

Lupita