Links randomly selected from the stuff I saw the previous week: an essay on climate change by Zadie Smith, a tweet about baseball statistics, a photo I took of cherry blossoms in Vancouver (which itself contains further links), and an interview with the developer of a social reading service. Some links are from longer than a week ago.
Zadie Smith
Finished reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Really great book, which I bought at Powell's Books late at night and started reading at the Portland Coffee House that night. Bought it because late one night the month previous I saw the made-for-TV special based on the book, but only the second half, so I wanted to know how it started. The second half of the book differs enough from the series—the principle example being the back-story about the French doctor and the denouement of that thread—to make that part of the book worthwhile too. Really great insight into immigrant British culture caught between their two "homes" as well biraciality (if that's a real word) of Irie, one of the principal characters of the novel.
I've already quoted from the book twice: once about the twentieth century, and another about teenage smokers, and I'm keeping track of the author's mentions in weblogs.
Zadie Smith: “It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convince us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Chris in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
Zadie Smith on a section of Glenard Oak school, in London: “This concave section of wall, depending where you stood, provided low teacher-visibility for smokers too young to smoke in the smoker's garden (a concrete garden for those who had reached sixteen and were allowed to smoke themselves silly—are there any schools like this anymore?). The drama hollow was to be avoided. These were hard little bastards, twelve-, thirteen-year old chain-smokers; they didn't give a shit. They really didn't give a shit—your health, their health, teachers, parents, police—whatever. Smoking was their answer to the universe, their 42, their raison d'être. They were passionate about fags. Not connoisseurs, not fussy about brand, just fags, any fags. They pulled at them like babies at teats, and when they were finally finished their eyes were wet as they ground the butts into the mud. They fucking loved it. Fags, fags, fags. Their only interest outside fags was politics, or more precisely, this fucker, the chancellor, who kept putting up the price of fags. Because there was never enough money and there was never enough fags. You had to become an expert in bumming, cadging, begging, stealing fags. A popular ply was to blow a week's pocket money on twenty, give them out to all and sundry, and spend the next month reminding those with fags about that time you gave them a fag. But this was a high-risk policy. Better to have an utterly forgettable face, better to be able to cadge a fag and come back five minutes after for another without being remembered.”
I'm about 2/3 done White Teeth after seeing the second half on late night CBC. So I already know how it ends, or at least how the made-for-TV version of it ends, but this is already one of my favourite books, and the above quote, taken from a longer paragraph about the smokers in Irie's, Millat's and Joshua's school is a fantastic example of the humour and allusion (in this case, to Douglas Adams) and repetition Smith uses effectively in the book. The main topics are very serious: that is, Irie's mixed race, about immigrants trying to feel comfortable in their adopted land (there's a really great section near this one about English given names on a “collision course” with their parents' non-English family names), but also sex, between teenagers and between consenting adults, even if one of those adults could be another adult's parent. The section on masturbation is ... handled very well.
Jason Cowley: “no other art form privileges consciousness and interiority in quite the same way. One can tell fabulous stories through moving images, but how to show thought in film without resorting to the clumsy device of the voice over? How to show in film what Virginia Woolf called the 'quick of the mind'? Only the novel can truly show, from the inside, how it feels to move through space and time, from one day to the next, with contradictory thoughts constantly clashing, over the narrative of a lifetime.”
Article via Prufrock, itself via a PubSub search for 'Zadie Smith' (syndicated on my site). Prufrock's pointer reminded me to buy White Teeth. I saw the miniseries on CBC late at night one night, but only the second half, so I resolved to buy the book and seek out the DVD. Mission accomplished on the book, but I'll wait until I've finished reading it to rent or buy the adaptation.
As if I didn't have enough non-fiction to read, I'm finally getting back on the book-reading horse after spending most of my waking hours reading online materials. Having more time with a plan to cut yet more from my online reading routine—number of sources currently holding at 104—and a larger stack of unread offline books are waiting to welcome me back to mild-mannered bookwormdom. That somebody has declared the return of the novel has made it all the more easy.