“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 Empathy Exams
"[G]uess what, spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place." Alex Balk at The Awl takes the piss out of recent studies that have suggested reading literary fiction might make us better people. Writer John Vaillant, whom we interviewed last year, might disagree.
The Future of the Book (& the Future of the ‘Do)
Could e-books be one 2012 presidential candidate's secret weapon? Perhaps. So, too, could a very talented hair stylist.
A Little Bird Told Me
Catapult has a new anonymous column in which a little bird called Magpie collects nice things that happen each week.
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Write to the End
“This is worth repeating to yourself every day as you sit down at your keyboard: You must write to the end of the story. You must make progress toward that end today. A sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. You must push the story forward, forward, forward. Don’t stop until you get to the end.” Hugh Howey on the Amazon Author Insights blog about how to write a rough draft. Pair with a popular and wonderfully motivating piece by Nick Ripatrazone, “Don’t Worry. Don’t Wait. Write.”
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George and Robin
Our own Elizabeth Minkel has been posting sights and quotations from a recent George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb event in London. You can check out her coverage over on Tumblr.
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Get Excited For The Belmont!
I’ll Have Another scratched from the Belmont yesterday, which dashed our hopes of seeing the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, but you can still get excited for today’s race by checking out this beautiful passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood-Horses.
Twerking with Morgan Freeman
You might have heard that "twerk" (among other words) has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. But you probably didn't hear Morgan Freeman reading the definition aloud.
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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)