“In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” Zadie Smith‘s remarks upon accepting the 2016 Welt Literature Prize on November 10th, and the question of whether “multiculturalism” is a failed experiment. Read our review of Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time, here.
On Optimism and Despair
Broken Embraces
Catch it while you can: Charlie Rose‘s hour-long interview with Pedro Almodóvar and his muse, Penélope Cruz, touches on character, confidence, and control, and is currently available online. Almodóvar’s latest film, Broken Embraces, which I saw last summer in Madrid sans subtitles, was so visually stunning and well-acted that despite my meager translation the film enthralled. With a proper translation, it should be ravishing.
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Quick Links
Patrick Reardon looks at 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die for the Chicago Tribune, and decides he wants to add his own favorites. Check out his eclectic list at the end of the piece. (thanks Steve)Maud mentioned off-hand that she abandons 95% of the books she starts before page 50. Sandra posted that this was “quite a failure rate,” and Maud responds in the comments that in this case she was “pining for a very specific kind of manic reading experience that happens for me maybe ten times a year now rather than every few days, as it did when I was a child.”Dogbert writes a book: “It’s part fake autobiography and part plagiarism” (via H2O)Pinky is about to start an MFA program at Pitt. The reading list looks excellent.Harper Lee will have an item in O of all places. According to the AP story, “a letter for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine on how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town.” It’s for the July “special summer reading issue.”
Soda Series
Tonight at 7pm in Prospect Heights’ Soda Bar: the 10th installment of the Soda Series. Short readings followed by conversation from Roberta Allen, Robin Grearson, John Haskell, and Kirsten Kaschock. The conversations will be moderated by John Dermot Woods and Greg Gerke. The Series also has a Facebook page.
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10 More Books to Read Just Because
Since we’re deep into the season of “year end” lists, here’s a list of ten great novels written by women that didn’t get a lot of critical attention this year. That isn’t to say that aren’t a ton of other books deserving of this distinction, just that these are some really good ones. Go list-crazy and pair with our own Year in Reading series.
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White Lies
“As adults, we should hold each other’s work to high standards, and our own work to the highest of all. As writers, we shouldn’t settle for a single pale line. But before the poem is written, I say, we should lie to ourselves, the way we lied to that winded child. Before composition, we have to be gods.” Alex Chertok writes about literary pep talks for the Ploughshares blog.
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The Indiana Review is Digitizing
The Indiana Review is adding archived story excerpts and poems to its website. Here’s a Peter Jay Shippy poem they recommend.
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Very few nations (barring, perhaps, North Korea, but I wouldn’t know, exactly) are monocultural. To the extent that metropolises have always worked, or not, Multiculturalism has worked, or not.
It’s very popular, right now, for Editorialists to ask the leading question “has the experiment of multiculturalism failed?” because, for whatever reason, someone would like us to think it has. But in what way does this failure manifest itself (and in what sense are the manifestations particular to “foreigners” and their interactions with “natives”)? How many different languages are spoken in Manhattan or London or Berlin or L.A.? How many religions are practised thereabouts? How many styles of dress have we seen in these cities? How many types of music are heard? Consider the wide variety of cuisines. Have these cities, as “experiments”, failed? How far back were these cities *not* “multicultural”? Certainly, the villages, the backwaters, the tiny towns of cousins, verge on being microcosmic monocultures (or did before the advent of cross-connection-enforcing Hyper Mass Media)… but that’s why the word “provincial” has had the timbre of the put-down to it since long before any of us were born.
As Smith puts it in her address, “At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.”
Regarding which comment I’d say that the “whither Multiculuralism?” question is being circulated, basically, by the people who are agitating to ban the Burka; who are these shears-wielding Carrie Nations of the changing room and the closet? The sartorial expressions of the Amish, the Sikhs, the Hare Krisnas… these doesn’t seem to trigger the crusading Editorialists quite the way the Burkas do. Maybe if the Amish were sitting on massive deposits of fossil fuel (which the US Gov didn’t have direct access to), the Amish would be under investigation for the multicultural provocation of their anti-Stripper look, too.
I’m still curious about the results of various famous modern experiments in *monoculturalism* on a national scale. Well, there was the Third Reich, of course…
erratum: “these DON’T seem” (that’s what happens when you re-write half of a sentence; laugh)