“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
Between The Covers
Looking for a new literary podcast to fill your downtime? David Naimon’s “Between the Covers” author interview series may do the trick. The series, which appears regularly on Portland, Oregon’s KBOO 90.7 FM, is available for free on iTunes. Past guests have included Karen Russell, George Saunders, China Miéville and Junot Díaz. Forthcoming episodes will feature the likes of NoViolet Bulawayo and Jami Attenberg.
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Snail Twitter
If you're tired of only getting catalogs and bills in your mailbox, ask your friends to mail their tweets. For a month, Giles Turnbull corresponded with 15 of his Twitter followers by mail. "Tweeting by post made me appreciate the online and the offline. Brevity is a good thing, but there’s no reason we should only be brief on Twitter," Turnbull writes for The Morning News. Pair with: Our roundup of literary Twitter's first tweets.
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In The Shadow of Odessa
Craig Fehrman reviews Keith O'Brien’s Outside Shot, a book which follows the 2009-10 boys’ basketball team at Scott County High School in Georgetown, Kentucky. O’Brien’s book is much in the mold of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, writes Fehrman, in that it’s concerned with a “troubled town, precarious season, political resonance” – but it’s also a book that falters under the legacy of its predecessor.
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Cousin/Cousine?
What are those crazy kids from Vampire Weekend saying in their new single, "Cousins"? It's a little disappointing, as the beleaguered translators of lyrics at We Listen For You reveal.
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The Made-up Divide
For The Guardian, Richard Lea investigates the fine line between fiction and nonfiction writing, a boundary that is drawn most firmly in the anglophone world. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of blurring the lines of fiction and autobiography.
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‘Mockingbird’ Removed from Reading List
A Mississippi school district has decided to pull Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird from its junior-high reading list because it "makes people uncomfortable." The novel, which frequently tops the American Library Association's "Frequently Challenged Book" list, tackles racism. See also: an essay on the symbolism of mockingbirds.
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)