“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
The Summer of Butterflies
In his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov travelled widely, logging many years each in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Ithaca, New York, where he wrote Lolita while teaching at Cornell. His peripatetic history explains why few people know he spent a summer in Utah, during which he spent a lot of time chasing butterflies and fishing in the streams. In The American Scholar, an excerpt of Nabokov in America, an upcoming book by Richard Roper. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
●
●
Rosenbaum on Nabokov’s Laura
Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum talks with Brooke Gladstone of NPRs On the Media about posthumous publishing, specifically Nabokov, but also Kafka and in general.
This Charming Man
His music isn’t letting him get what he wants, so Morrissey is turning to writing instead. After his autobiography, Morrissey, was more successful than any of his records, the musician is writing a novel next.
●
●
2 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Book(case) Criticism
Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
●
●
40 Years of Terry Gross
“Over the years, Gross has done some 13,000 interviews, and the sheer range of people she has spoken to, coupled with her intelligence and empathy, has given her the status of national interviewer. Think of it as a symbolic role, like the poet laureate — someone whose job it is to ask the questions, with a degree of art and honor.” Terry Gross sits down with The New York Times Magazine in honor of her 40th anniversary hosting Fresh Air.
Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen in Conversation
The New York Times unearthed footage from a 1996 interview with Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen. The pair discuss a trip they took to New Guinea in the 60s, which “resulted in Gardner’s film Dead Birds and Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall.”
●
●
Moneyball Movie Back on Track
The embattled film version of Michael Lewis’ baseball bestseller Moneyball, once set to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, is now back on track with Bennett Miller, director of Capote, set to helm. Brad Pitt is still lined up to play Oakland A’s G.M. Billy Beane.
●
●
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)