← Book Riot - The Podcast
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- [00:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Incoming transmission.
- [00:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Hello, this is Matt and McKinley from History Dispatches. We are the father Son duo bringing you the weird, the wild, the wacky and the craziest tales from across time, from the Ice bowl to the Great Heathen army and the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years. Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more@historydispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [00:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.
- [00:38]
Jeff O'Neill
And today we're talking about Zadie Smith's new essay collection, Dead and Alive Rebecca. This was going to be a Patreon episode, but because of programming notes, life, things also we had something else slotted in that we didn't feel that excited about. And we both read this like, let's bring this in. We can talk together about one of our favorite authors newest books. Again, it's not a novel, not a short story collection, not a memoir, but a collection of essays, short pieces, speeches. I guess I was surprised to see how eulogies, eulogies, some that are original and many of which have appeared elsewhere. It's a collection of Zadie Smith's writing and we're going to talk about it. There's, there's quite a few. There's not really a thorough going line to talk about, but I thought we might do a couple things if this is interesting to you. One is talk about what we want from a literary essay. Two, what kind of thinker and writer Zadie Smith is in nonfiction. And then maybe third, talk about some of the specific pieces, but especially her own. Writing about fiction and craft is pretty interesting, even for a general reader who doesn't have any pretensions towards writing fiction. Rebecca, does that sound like a decent game plan to you?
- [01:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, that sounds good to me. And just for Patreon folks listening, you will still get something bonus this week. Yes, it just won't be Zadie Smith. We're going to do a check in about what we've been watching, listening to, reading, all the media we're consuming off the pod over there on Patreon. So you can join us@patreon.com BookRiotPodcast I.
- [02:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Guess I'll start here. Rebecca Smith in this collection does talk multiple times about the algorithm, which is different than the Internet. I think crucially for us and for her, the Internet is a place where you know things. You can read the New Yorker on the Internet, but that's different than scrolling TikTok or X or something on the Internet. And I think the kind of thing Zadie Smith cares about, is worried about, is cultivating, nurturing, protecting in her own life. Resonates so hard with me in those moments that it got me thinking about, you know, where her sensibility, I want to talk about the idea of sensibility here and consideration is. This is pretty. She's clearly a different person than I am. I'm not suggesting I'm anything like her. I'm not as good of a writer. I haven't had her life experience for sure. But in terms of what she seems to want to do with her writing, whether I agree it's not a question of agreeing with it, but how she uses her writing, how she deploys her thinking, how she performs it either to herself or to us or somewhere in the middle is sort of how I like to think about things.
- [03:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes. Yeah, she actually says in one of the later pieces, which I think is one of the most interesting ones, it's answers that she wrote to emails she received from, I believe, a Spanish language journalist at an old, like, basically defunct email address that it's like the only public facing email address she has. And people just take flyers like send her questions and she answers, what are you trying to do in your essays? And she says she's not trying to persuade, she is simply trying to show what her thinking is. She, she's interrogating her own consciousness and kind of wondering at consciousness sometimes too. Like, isn't it weird that we're, that we can do this, that we have these brains, we walk around in these bodies, but these brains, they do things. And how is my consciousness different from yours? But she's after clarity and she's after a demonstration of like hers is clearly a mind at work, to borrow a phrase that, that you really love. And she's after showing to us what her mind at work looks like. And I think in that is an inherent invitation to the rest of us to think about what our own minds are working on. What are we doing, what do we think about things, but moreover, how do we go about thinking about things?
- [04:42]
Jeff O'Neill
And she seems resistant to either philosophically, ethically, morally, artistically, person personally to certainty, which is also. That's a frame. There's one note I can play on the cello and that's one that I can play is uncertainty and doubt. And it stands in such relief to the currency, the coin of the realm of the modern Internet, which is the take the opinion, the dunk baby, both our attention and the algorithm because our algorithm, if nothing else, is a digital expression of the lowest common denominator of attention is to certainty and extremity. And that is understandable and maybe has always been been the case. But what she is trying to do and what goes back to the origin of the essay like this is not an episode of zero to well read though we should do one on the essays of Michelle Diamante. Let's put that in the hopper today just we just released our Sophocles Oedipus the King episode and in that one we talk about like the invention of theater. Like this is things someone had to think about. The essay itself was similar. Right. Michel de Montaigne's like these essays means these are trials, they are attempts, they're not fully formed, they're not policy, they're not written in stone declar declarations of principle personality that sort of to stand for all time and to hold the essay as a container for momentary it means something between momentary and forever thought I find to be super generative. And it's easy to pick apart and say well, it should. Why not this? Or you really should think this. But to think to hold those things in abeyance and keep the essay, a certain kind of literary essay, especially as a space for. Let. Let's gather around. I want to show you what I'm thinking and here's how I'm approaching something and we can maybe hold in abeyance judgment or determinacy. But I'm going to give you my best shot of how I take how this, what this means to me, whatever is I'm talking.
- [06:52]
Listener/Interjection
Yeah.
- [06:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
And you know, like in opposition to a take or a dunk or whatever, you know, word we want to use for the very online way of communicating that is here's what I think and it's what you should think too. Even though these essays are really are one way communication. Zadie Smith is talking to us and we don't get to say anything back to her. It does feel more like a conversation. It feels like she is opening a space for here's the thing I'm thinking about. Here's how I am thinking about it. Here's what I struggle with, here's like little tidbits about my background that inform how and why I think about this thing in this way. How about you? The how about you is quiet or silent, but that's the. I think that's what a really good essay does when you ask like what is the thing that I want from an essay or an essay collection. It's an invitation to think about things either that I haven't thought about before or things I think about a lot, like the algorithm in a new or deeper or richer way. And one of the things that I so appreciate about Zadie Smith's writing in general, and these pieces in particular, is the level of care and nuance. Like, I think I've talked on past episodes about how one of my friends, one of her favorite, favorite insults for someone who she thinks is kind of dumb is that person's not a very nuanced thinker. And the Zadie Smith essay collection is the antithesis of that. It's here is this thing and I have an opinion on it. It's a big, hard, difficult thing and it's probably not perfect, but let's get in there and. And she's into the mess. She's not trying to offer some clean, packaged, you know, it's not a take. These are her working through things and in some cases she's updating her thinking or, or telling us. I wrote this when I was hoping for a certain thing to happen and history has proven otherwise, but we can still carry forward. There's just so much consideration and a real willingness, I think, to, to sit in the, in the Rilke of it.
- [08:55]
Jeff O'Neill
All, to love the questions I love. I like the considering and reconsidering. Like there's, there's section titles to these. And I really thought about a. There seems to me at the core of how she thinks and feels, because one thing about these essays is those two things kind of move back and forth, which I really like. And I think it's a more honest appraisal about the interiority of us, you know, calcifies or expresses into this or that position or idea or expression she considers. But she's also considerate. And that's. It's interesting. They come from the same line. But there is no invective here. There is no boogeyman, there is no name calling, there's no dunking, there's no excoriation. There's clearly a political position, right? She has a certain affinity for the Post Thatcher National Health Service in the uk. If Zadie Smith likes anything, it's the Post Thatcher National Health Service in the uk. But it is very much for something rather than against something. It's only. She's only ever against something if it's not for this thing that, that she wants, even as she's riding on a plane on election night 2016. And clearly that's not something she desired. But it's not. It's not vitriol, which I find. I don't know. I guess I just like that. I just. That resonates with me. I like that way of discussing.
- [10:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
I feel like it's. It's a model for how I aspire to think and how I aspire to show up. And I certainly don't succeed, you know, but it's nice to be reminded of what's going on there. I felt like, like. Well, first of all, she never preaches, but to use a colloquialism, I think she practices what she preaches. That there are important thoughts in several of these essays about connecting with our communities, about being the neighborhood where you live, knowing the people helping each other out and functionally, like not even reaching across the aisle, but forgetting that the aisle is a thing. That we are all just people and we are working together towards this common project of being people in this society. She lives in London, but a lot of these things are applicable for the US we're recording this on election day here, so that's interesting. But she also has obituaries here or sort of eulogies that she's written for people like Martin Amos, whose politics were very different from hers, and Philip Roth, whose politics were probably more similar, but whose like ideas about gender and certainly the. The way that we've evolved our thinking about Philip Roth has moved away from what you might guess is a Zadie Smith sensibility. But there's deep appreciation for individuals for their work, for the complexities alongside acknowledgement that they did not agree about everything. But she' demonstrating that she doesn't just say we need to be out in our communities, we need to know people, we need to be working together. But look, that she shows us that she has done it and is doing it by virtue of. Here's evidence of her relationships with people who were very different from her.
- [12:04]
Jeff O'Neill
I think one these are. That's not even a river system because river systems are sort of flow one way into one river. This is. I don't know, there's some sort of capillary system because these things flow into each other differently. A circulatory system. There we go. There's the fluid metaphor I was searching for. One of the capillaries that feed into that bloodstream though, is her interest, insistence on specificity and peculiarity. And that I think lends itself. You can't have nuance without that. And if you're interested in specificity and peculiar, you're going to by extension be nuanced because that's the only way to do it. Because the more specific you get, the more edge. It's all edge cases and corner cases and dodecahedron cases. And so if that's your way of thinking in this sort of prismatic way, you cannot see in flat planar fields of color intake because you're too interested in a specific consciousness in a specific moment, a particular point. In the first case, I. I don't know. If I were putting this collection together, I would put it together like they did. Because you start out with these relatively specific, very specific, close readings of individual artworks that not many people know, though they're included, so you can see them, but they're always mediated, which I think is. Is a statement of purpose to some degree as a reading experience. I think it maybe turned some people off. I was like, I'm gonna get. I'm gonna get 30 close readings of paintings by Celia Paul. It's like, okay, that's fine. But. But what I think it does show is the atomic unit of her care. And by care, I mean her attention. Because it's the same thing for a writer like Zadie Smith is to look at a thing, a position, an idea, a gesture, a location and a consciousness and take it seriously on its own terms for a little while.
- [13:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Want to talk about that first section, which she calls eyeballing. Those are the, like, art and movies and performance reviews. Before that is an introduction that she writes to the collection where she reinforces this idea that readers have absolute freedom of movement in an essay collection that you can skip. You can skip essays. You can move around. You can close the book anytime you want. And I think she knows that essays are perceived sometimes as intimidating or that readers might struggle to approach them. It can feel maybe, like, not as exciting as picking up a novel. And you're getting, like, something like, here's five obituaries I wrote for people, plus five works of art criticism, plus five kind of political things. Like, it is a real mishmash of what. The kinds of things she thinks about. But I feel like she recognizes that. And I had notes in my copy right up front. This is it. We need to close this gap. Gap of essays not seeming accessible. Like, Zadie Smith for President. Let us make this kind of public thinking seem accessible. And she writes several times about how it's important to her that her writing is clear and that her sentences don't challenge people. That it's not work to get through anything that she's presenting to you. That most thoughts can be expressed, you know, pretty Directly. And that's that. That's what she's trying to do. But I found that, like, even though I didn't know any of these works of art before I read her pie pieces about them, the way that she writes about them helps you understand what it is like to stand in front of one of those paintings or to walk through one of the exhibits. And her writing can be so discursive. Also, like, she wanders away from the painting she's writing about. She wanders away from Celia Paul's memoirs about. And she completely takes the word museography, which is supposed to be the study of museums, and she turns it into what does it mean to be someone's muse or to have a muse? Like, this kind of thought that is like, let go here and let's go there. And like, it's kind of jazzy almost in the way that she does it. But I find that to be really exciting. And that does feel accessible. Like, I totally agree. If I were organizing this, I would have probably put the art criticism, like, smack in the middle, you know, and start with something that is a little voiceier or maybe more relatable to more readers. But I do think you're onto something that is sort of a statement of purpose here that she's not interested in. Let me grab you right up front, because she's already told you, if you're not interested in the essays that are up front, keep flipping till you find something.
- [16:16]
Listener/Interjection
Something.
- [16:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I think that's a noble thought. I'd be curious, in actual human life, how many people do that, like, actually, like, pick around an essay collection? I think I read this digitally initially because it's how I got it. And I have a physical copy, too. I think there, it's easier. You're more inclined to skip around if you can actually turn the pages and go back and forth. So, I mean, I think it's a gesture of humility, but also offering the reader their own agency. I think it's noble, but I think to a first approximation, no one does that. People, if they're going to read it, they're going to read it straight through. And if they bump on it or hit something, don't. Like, it's like, is it going to be like this the whole time? They're not going to jump ahead. Maybe they will. Email podcastookright.com if you're the kind of essay or short story collection reader that, you know, there are gods among us, Rebecca. And some of them will skip to the ninth short story and read it first. Not knowing anything about.
- [17:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Listen, I'm on a years long campaign to that the novella in a short story collection should always be the last thing.
- [17:18]
Jeff O'Neill
So I agree.
- [17:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
You must have a novella. Put it at the back.
- [17:22]
Jeff O'Neill
I feel you like on an album you put the single first. Like this is. This is just play the hits, man. But anyway, that's. We were going to read the whole collection anyway. And I don't know how many people are picking up a Zadie Smith collection like this that aren't in the tank for her already. So I don't know. But I think it's, it's. I think it's indicative of something about her which is she is not. Not only does she not sort of rail against any specific person or personality or really even idea rather than for someone you do not feel when reading her a. I don't know, an opposition. Right. You don't feel like you're trying to be sold something. Yeah, it's very. It feels like a more of a collaborative reading experience. And I'd love to know or see her process because there is a casual. It's not, it's not casual. This is not sub stack essay writing. What? There's a place for that. Like it feels different. It's just the quality of it, the care and her ability to hold an idea, to write a sentence that is not flashy, but clean and smooth and rich. Like a really, really good vanilla ice cream. We're like, oh, that's what vanilla tastes like. If it's really good and not like the knockoff stuff that you get, you know, for. By the gross. When we were kids at the pool, like, this is someone who's actually, you know, this is hand churned, high quality vanilla so that you can actually taste vanilla. If you taste a really good vanilla. Like, oh yeah, this is the best flavor in the world. There's a reason this is the best. And there's an element to that with her that I find so appealing. Like I'd read a hundred of these little things.
- [19:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, yes.
- [19:11]
Listener/Interjection
Yeah.
- [19:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
I heard her on a podcast recently saying that she's not really sure what she's going to do next because she's written all the novels that she felt she needed to write. And reading these essays, I thought, you know, I love the fiction of Zadie Smith. But if Zadie Smith just does a book like this every couple of years and keeps writing interesting essays and let's all just think out loud together, Zadie Smith, I would sign for that right now. I would agree to never read another work of fiction by Zadie Smith if she agreed to just keep thinking with us publicly for a few more decades. These are really wonderful and I do want to experience them as a book. I'm glad you made the substack comparison because there is something that is just a deeper experience if there are several of them. You sit down, you devote your time. You can read one essay at a time, or you might read several in a row and you can sort of move in and out. It's just. I mean, man, it's just better.
- [20:10]
Jeff O'Neill
She's just very good. She's very, very good.
- [20:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it's an elevated experience. It's just an elevated work and it's an elevated reading experience. And I feel like lucky to share a timeline with Zadie Smith and and to be.
- [20:26]
Jeff O'Neill
She's a few years older than I am, but we're sort of similar of a cohort. So I think if there's sort of a transatlantic generational thing that can happen, I feel alongside of her in many ways.
- [20:40]
Listener/Interjection
Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook the Dinner Party by Viola van de Sant, read by Rose Elisa for fans of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and assembly. An intimate and darkly propulsive story told over the course of a dinner party from its careful preparations through its explosive, irrevocable finish, about the tensions of love and autonomy, grief and female rage, and the surprising moments when they come crashing to the surface. Franka left the Netherlands behind to start her new life in England with Andrew. Andrew, who suggests a dinner party with his colleagues to celebrate their big upcoming launch. A dinner party that Franka must plan and shop and cook and clean for a dinner party during a heat wave when the fridge breaks, alcohol replaces water, and an unexpected guest joins their ranks, upending the careful balance between everything Franka once was and now is. I don't know about you, but it sounds deliciously messy to me. Make sure to check out the audiobook the Dinner Party by Viola Van de Sant, read by Rose Lisa and thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Bloomsbury Publishing, publishers of the Marvel Age of Comics series. A series of concise, affordable, beautifully designed books that explore the history of over 85 years of Marvel Comics. The series is an epic, deep dive into the creators, characters and cultural forces that shape the Marvel Universe. Launching with volumes on Daredevil, the Avengers and Doctor Strange, this series is a must read for fans of comics, superheroes and pop culture history. You can start your collection and pre order all three today. I also think they make great gifts for the comic book lovers in your life, which might include yourself. They include everything from Doctor Strange's debut in 1963 to the mighty Avengers versus the 1970s and also the fall and defiant rise of Matt Murdock in Daredevil Born Again. So make sure to check out Marvel Age of Comics. And thanks again to Bloomsbury Publishing for sponsoring this episode.
- [22:53]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [23:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Do you want to let's talk about some specific moments or pieces. Do you want to talk about? Where would you like to go?
- [23:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
Rebecca? I think we have to talk about the piece about fiction. Fascinated to presume in defense of fiction. And it's interesting that it's a defense of fiction. She's talking about how we've moved away from fiction as a truly imaginative, generative, like playful, exploratory space and more towards works of fiction that are focused on authenticity and relatability and that fiction is meant to be unruly. Like one of the great quotes is novels are machines for falsely generating belief, and they succeed or fail on that basis. So you should not need to relate to a work of fiction for it to be good. That's not part of the definition. It doesn't need to be authentic or feel like the author is the same as the characters. That there's something to the power of this form that allows a writer to think what would it be like to inhabit this other experience, this other kind of consciousness? And if they do it well, readers get to do that as well. And that when we run fiction through the moral assessment first or through the can this author, is she allowed to write about these things? We rob fiction, but we also rob ourselves of a really valuable experience.
- [24:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's a natural extension of the idea of specificity and peculiarity where one of the, one of the tensions of, you know, life and identity is how like or unlike am I from literally anyone else or even the people most like me, right? To say, you know, take my, my middle brother who, you know, one of my best friends joked that like, when he finally men was like well, it's nice to know if anything happens, you. There's a spare. Right. Like that.
- [25:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
I've also had this experience with your brother.
- [25:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. But we are we. If the two of us who know ourselves and each other as well as anyone also know we're extraordinarily different people. And that, you know, if you take that as a principle or an assumption to build a theorem on, has to be the case that even groups that feel identifiable as a group, and we know this inherently, I don't think this is really up for debate. Have such wild heterogeneity within them. And she's wrestling with and talking around this idea of like, you know, to boil it down to sort of the Internet version is like, could I write a black woman character? Right. Could I like. And each of those words is heavy with portent. Right. The could is should. Could you do it? Well, could I write versus represent versus stereo? Like, all the. All the things we could play a bit of, you know, Rolodex of switch the word out to get slightly different valences. And we had been part of a discourse about, like, wanting to diversify the reading experience. And that's something I certainly agree with. But part of that is as much about there being plenty of room for a lot of different voices.
- [26:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [26:35]
Jeff O'Neill
And the weight of any particular representation, any particular consciousness, character, setting, scene or story is lessened. And so then you get that freedom to play when there's a lot, you know, when there's abundance of opportunities for a whole bunch of different kinds of people. So the sort of political, cultural weight of carrying the banner for X that's never had its banner carried or doesn't get the banner carried very often is given to Mark Twain to write a slave. Well, that seems a lot different in a world where James exists and Percivalett exists. And I think I'm coming around to. And I have come around to think of fiction as a sense of consciousness at play, where the essay is the idea of a mind at play. And in order to do that, in order to write anyone that's not you, hell, even to write you, you've got to go outside yourself even a little bit. But where does that end and begin in her argument? Rebecca, if I'm getting this right, is like, is it interesting? Is it good? Like, if it's good, then, you know, she doesn't seem to care.
- [27:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
I agree. And she talks about this some. Like the algorithm, as we said, is sort of underneath a lot of this. But she talks about reading and fiction, especially as a form of resistance to the algorithm and to the ways that the algorithms try to like funnel us into very specific but also very polarized places that a book does not watch us reading. It cannot morph itself page by page to suit our tastes or to deliver us only depictions of people we already know and among whom we feel comfortable that one of the amazing magical things that fiction can do for us is be challenging. It is can. It can present us with things that scare us, with things that make us uncomfortable, with things we disagree with and find abhorrent with, with all sorts of experiences. And it' just in a book like those are things that are just happening in our minds and our consciousness and they're not coming for us in real life. And she's saying like, let us, we need to take ourselves into this place because what we're getting from the algorithms is just more of what the algorithm knows we will look at and is not. That's not about engaging. It's with any real depth. It's about, you know, like feeding more data into an advertising based system. But the this like a book does not watch us reading. It cannot morph itself paid by page to suit our tastes. Like just hit me in a very deep place in my soul. Like Amazon is working on ways to generate you an AI ebook and a whole bunch of them with exactly the tropes that you like, with exactly the things that make you comfortable with exactly the ideas. And they'll have real, real people sounding names on them like, but this is a thing that is coming for us. Technology trying to serve us just more content. That is exactly what we already know and like and feel comfortable with. And that fiction is a space that can and should push against that as much as possible. That fiction can be resistance. Like we say that reading by itself is not just resistance, and certainly not all reading is resistance, but it can be such a powerful mechanism in your own mind of helping your mind resist what the algorithms are attempting to do.
- [29:53]
Jeff O'Neill
The idea of unruliness, I really like to see that again. I once wrote a paper when I was in grad school on Colson Whitehead and how much he liked Gene Toomer, who's 19, you know, 26, weird little book of Cain he liked because he said it was unruly. Like me, he like Cain. So that in that unrulyness, you know, not, not to be all philologists, but like it's unruled. So like if you feel like there's a rule, unruliness is to try to unwind that momentarily or forever. Or at least provisionally, like, what happens if we unwind this? What falls out? You know, even going back to this really fantastic image she found of Kara Walker, it's like what I want history to do to me of this tension between these two stereotype representations. Her Kara Walker stuff is great. Kara Walker is easily recognizable, and I think it can have a first wave of understanding of just. Of just satire. But what Zadie Smith unlocks, I think, and she quotes some of Carol Walker's own writing, is the complexity and the deep layeredness and the back and forth, but this tension of two people straining against each other. And Zadie Smith suggests, like, what would happen to history and to us if this tension is who would fall forward, who would get to run? Maybe they would both get to run. Maybe they would both fall momentarily and other things would happen. But the. To keep. To draw a line around the essay and to draw a line around, I'll say literary fiction now is to allow in those spaces certain kinds of freedoms. Not even to allow them, to allow yourself to do them. Right. It's not even. I would even say it's about external validation. I'd say interior freedom to do X, Y or Z in the name of exploration, identification, articulation, and these other kinds of processes that are always hard and always have been hard, but are possibly uniquely difficult now because of how circumscribed our content consumption, our ideas really are. I mean, there's no more sacred space to me now, I wouldn't think, than the privacy of your own mind. And then to try to connect the privacy with the thoughts of others without judgment, at least for the moment, seems super validating to me.
- [32:09]
Listener/Interjection
Me.
- [32:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it feels like a real antidote to the kinds of, like the liberal purity test that you see among extremely online people, that we want to move in the same direction. We have similar values and shared goals. But it is not only okay, but wonderful if we don't all think exactly the same things and exactly the same way ways. And there is certainly a disincentive for expressing anything heterodox on the Internet, but I think it can extend into people policing their own thoughts about things, policing themselves around challenging and scary ideas. And I think that one of Smith's projects is encouraging us to engage with that, encouraging us to explore things fully, to wrestle with ideas is. And then also giving us a space to do it by showing us how she does it. Yeah, it's kind of a like, watch one, do one, teach one, Right?
- [33:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And then when the time comes to Vote or when the time comes to advocate directly or to write a position paper, an op ed that sort of clearly are taking a position you want other people to follow on. That's a different mode.
- [33:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [33:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Of conversation. That's a different mode of discourse. But even the, even the felt hegemony of whatever circle you in towards, even to have an opinion on this thing is something that, putting a Celia Paul consideration front and center is a, you know, not, not a rejection of, but an alternate way of being in the world to say like I, I have WhatsApp on my laptop.
- [33:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like she does like real God level stuff there. The only way she gets her WhatsApp messages is on her laptop.
- [34:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Or like, you know, this. I think we told the. That we're not going to mention the name, but in doing some publicity work, we were told by an author we want to talk to that he's not answering his email to the third week of October. This is way back in July. It's like, I think of anything that kind of sensibility can allow you the space to allow yourself to imagine possibilities you don't even know you're not imagining right now.
- [34:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [34:30]
Jeff O'Neill
And that to me is the most exciting thing. Our art and writing and ideas and other people, frankly. Because the writing and thinking of other people is the only way to get out of me. There's no other way. Yeah.
- [34:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
That moves us, I think naturally to my favorite essay in the piece, Notes on Mediated Time, which is where she mentions that the only way she can access WhatsApp is on her laptop. And this is the source of a lot of communication that she has with the world. There's also a reference to printing out maps to go places and getting lost. So I think what we're learning here is that Zadie doesn't have a smartphone at all.
- [35:06]
Jeff O'Neill
No, I don't think she does.
- [35:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Truly admirable. But this is a killer piece about aging and about understanding and assessing how you understand your life and all of the things that mediate our understanding of our lives. And certainly today it's the Internet and the algorithms, but also the books that we read. This essay collection that you have in front of you that is written by Zadie Smith. All of the media that we consume and she's able to pop herself out of it. It just enough to be like, this is so interesting. And this is one of those places where I'm so, so grateful that Zadie Smith is going before me. Like she's about 10 years older than me. She has been there, but she's like we thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead, it's just been one thing after another and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death. And over the years, as each perfectly boring, predictable milestone has been met with dumbfounded shock, from the first gray hairs to the menopause, I have had the thought, did the ancient Greeks think of time?
- [36:03]
Listener/Interjection
This.
- [36:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Taino Indians to the Maasai? Is this reality? How much of all this is mediated and how much mediation is too much? And I feel like I should just read that paragraph every morning and then I will be right with the Lord.
- [36:19]
Jeff O'Neill
And notice, notice listener, there's no answer there.
- [36:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
No.
- [36:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. This is like the articulation, you know, Again, this is something that Emerson said. You know, when you see a shock, you have a shock of recognition about someone else's mind at work, especially when you read it, because it's that as she's. Zadie Smith herself says, this is our purest form of getting access to someone else's consciousness is to read their writing. You know, you see your own experience distilled in the alembic of their genius. No, that's Ellison. Alembic of their genius, not the wrong E. Ralph Waldo Ellison, believe it or not, is his name. If you didn't know that, folks, that's where you see that. Oh, that. Yes. Yeah, that, that is. That puts not voice. Because that's really a metaphor or metonym that gives specificity, clarity and reflection of my own unarticulated intuitive experience. And then that allows you to do the next step, like then by. By giving you that articulation and then giving that series of questions like what's the most in how it opens? This is how we used to teach writing. Right. I'm in a moment now with my own kids where they're learning the five paragraph essay that I spent most of my teaching life teaching. Unlearn. Right. Though I know it's part like those are to make that you're trying to prove something like math.
- [37:33]
Listener/Interjection
Yeah.
- [37:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
You got to learn the rules. And then you can break most of.
- [37:36]
Jeff O'Neill
The interesting writing as you get towards an adult. Gather something that was ungathered and that presents it as like here, go forth and be confused or consider or what is your own. Maybe we're all gonna have. You're gonna have six different answers to this question. But it's interesting to think of them in these terms that is super enlightening and super generative and that there just.
- [38:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
Is something to the personal specific experience of even a very common thing like I am in the gray hairs and menopause years that Zadie Smith is writing about. It has been met with dumbfounded shock by myself and all of the women in my life who are tiptoeing in to this place. We knew it was coming, but there was.
- [38:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Is.
- [38:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
No matter like how good your doctor is or how good the advice your mom or your older female friends give you, there is still something dumbfounding about it happening to you.
- [38:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Is it made less dumbfounding by being pre forewarned? I wonder. You know, like, it's going to feel weird. I think there's something to that though.
- [38:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
But there's like, you can't know what the weird feels like until you're feeling the weird. You can know that it will be weird, but not how or it's conceptual until it's felt. And I think she really is able to tap into that in so many of these pieces about like, these are things I have thought. Have you thought these things too? These are experiences I've had. Isn't that weird? Did you have that weird experience too? Isn't it weird to just have thoughts? And isn't it weird that we can go through these things that you know are coming? Like she does reflect later on that she thinks women, because we are our. Our bodies have these like, much more marked transitions that women are a little bit less surprised by just the fact of aging than men seem to be in her reading because we. We can't escape it or we can't be as much in denial about it as. As some men might be able to be. But you can still.
- [39:44]
Jeff O'Neill
It.
- [39:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's still when it. When it's yours. It's not the thing that everybody else warned you about. It's your version. And that she does that with so many pieces in a way that's like. I just find it to be kind of warm and inviting. But that she can be warm and inviting without being soft. There's like. There's nothing soft or no rigorous. She's a rigorous mind here.
- [40:08]
Listener/Interjection
And.
- [40:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I appreciate that so much.
- [40:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And. And she's perf. I guess you only. I only know Zadie Smith through the words. Right. I don't even. I haven't even watched really interviews or done any of this. So it's just. Just. She's a being of text and striking profiles. Interesting cover choice for this particular volume. She's turned away one of the few recognizable writers of literary work that we have. And she's turned away. Which is fascinating and you can still kind of tell it's her. It's fascinating stuff about iconography there, but she is not that. The, the Z that she took on. To move from Sadie to Zadie is a aspirational sharpness rather than an actual one. I think for her, like, I think that's aspirational. She talks interestingly about Didion. Right. I think changing your name to Zadie is a Didion, like, move, right? Like you want to be something. But I think she's come to terms, or at least differently with her younger self and younger versions of herself. Had a different kind of sensibility. Her wonderful stories about her personal life with these other writers, but like this 40 foot fall from a balcony, which is amazing. I didn't remember that piece. I think for me, the, the puzzle, the enigma within the puzzle is her borrowing slave narratives from Philip Roth, who at the end of his life became a amateur scholar, collector and reader of slave narratives. I didn't have to. I didn't know what to do with that. Like, I just stopped for a second and I was like, yeah, beyond. I. I don't know. I want an essay from Zadie Smith about that moment. I want more like, what did she make?
- [41:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Philip Roth are like, talking about swimming laps and what they think about while they're swimming laps. And then all of a sudden they kind of have a book club of two. Yes, it's. It's wild. And you know, just to go back to something that you were saying a second ago, like, the little pieces of Zadie that we get from the book, they're pretty few and far between. Like, she is not known as a personality. Like, she's not dropping much information about herself at all. And so it's very exciting when you get the little nugget of like, she.
- [42:21]
Jeff O'Neill
Must know that the scarcity is part of the appeal of those nuggets.
- [42:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes, she must, like, you just get these tiny little nuggets about her. Most of what we know of her is just what she chooses to share with us about how she thinks about things. Like, and, and I, I find that so admirable. I think it is also a form of resistance to Internet and algorithm that we don't know what Zadie Smith eats for breakfast. We don't know who her favorite designers are or what her workout routine is or what she's doing about the menopause and the gray hair or any, like, any of those things that could be sources of content. You know that it's just like, it is titillating when she's like, I once bummed a cigarette off of Joan Didion, and I didn't know who Joan Didion was. And you're like, what?
- [43:07]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And the scene of, like, some of the speeches, like, I was getting this award from Austria, it's like, wow, that's cool. Right? And she. She made her brand, and her brand was made in the pre. Essentially the pre Internet, like the last of the pre, like, you know, 2000, 1999 and 2000, where, you know, it could happen differently. And I, you know, could. Could someone like Zadie Smith, with her sensibility and talent and, you know, worldview, become Zadie Smith without participating in those things? I haven't seen it yet. I'd love to know who those people are. But then she also has done a pretty remarkable job of protecting that space, both personally and professionally. And even when it comes to how she moves through the world, of either having to put up boundaries or being the kind of person that doesn't. Doesn't feel the siren song of take the take industry, I think, allows her space. And those. It's hard to know. It's a yin and yang. It's a push me, pull your chicken the egg. Is she like that because she does that, or does she does that because just because she's like that? I don't know.
- [44:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right. It's impossible to answer. And it does create this virtuous circle. Like, she can think in a really complex way and write in a complex way about complex issues, partially because I think she's not having to filter the way that she expresses them or what the opinions are through the Internet. Like, she. There does some writing about the student protests around Palestine and Gaza and how, like, how complex that was on campuses. But the way that she expresses what she thinks about it is just like, you can tell this is a thing that she has thought deeply about. She's saying, here is what I understand about protests. Here's what I understand about students rights to feel safe in the places that they go to college. Surely we can have a conversation that holds all of these things. And I thought, like, we should be able to have a conversation that holds all of these things. But I've been on the Internet, you know, like, I've seen people not be able to do this for the last several years. And it's. It's like, could I get in the time machine and never have gone online is really a feeling that I leave as 80 Smith essay collection with. Or to be honest, she would put it as small a dose as possible. Yeah, low dose of the Internet.
- [45:19]
Jeff O'Neill
It almost. I like to think that I myself try to hold some space for the kinds of uncertain, you know, curious uncertainty. That's not the throwing up of hands, but of another kind of consideration. But in reading these, it is such. It does, you know, and I'm sure if you read any collection of literary essays by many people, you know, I don't do these that often. I tend to perform longer former nonfiction or fiction right now, now. But it's reminding me like, oh yeah, there's really something to be done here. But I felt so when it, when it would come down to specific issues. I'm sure if we were sort of like Zadie Smith and I were feeling out like if I could write into existence this law, we probably would come up with different laws or different, you know, military positions or you know, foreign policy or whatever. But in excess of that, I felt like I was in conversation with a mature adult, sophisticated and open minded person. And I don't know what I want other than that. I don't think I do want anything other than that from a book like this.
- [46:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's really the dream. In one of the pieces that she wrote right after the US election last year, she says, all I know is that to get through the next four years we will need all the moral intelligence we can muster. And that I think that moral intelligence is something that drives her. The pursuit of it drives her, the exercise of it drives her, the exploration of it drives her. And it underlies a lot of these pieces, but seems to me a foundational component of how she sees the world or how she tries to see the world and to approach these kinds of ideas. And it was like that moral intelligence and then the willingness to act upon what your moral intelligence tells you. We could do a whole lot worse than have a bunch of writers out here considering that. And, and this kind of essay collection is a real gift in that way.
- [47:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. My favorite moment, I think was when she was talking about, I think it was in mediated time. I don't have it marked here. Her own mass media consumption as a kid, like watching TV for nine hours a day, you wouldn't guess like that Zadie Smith was a nine hour, a TV person. Just because like she's Zadie Smith and she gets to take a picture and this beautiful sculptural outfit turned away from the camera in black and white and you know, get essays in, you know, basically she has an open phone line to New York Review of Books. As someone who watched Niners of Television, a Day because she's trying to think broadly about this thing she doesn't like, which is the Internet or the algorithm. Right. And how harmful it feels. And she uses the metaphor of metabolization and I thought was really cool idea. It's like, well, you know, as much as, and this is not a quote, but like this is sort of the process. As much as I abhor the idea of the algorithm, what it does to people, I myself consumed ungated pop culture, which is our algorithm was tv, broadcast television. That's what you just turned on and had on. And yet without saying it, I am still Zadie Smith and I write this book before you. And she wonders like maybe this generation will be able to metabolize it. Like she understands herself having been able to metabolize cable or just non stop access to tv, which has its own, you know, I'm sure Mark, we'd have a whole discussion about the TV and the algorithm, but maybe we can, maybe we can metabolize it. Like we metabolize monounsaturated fats or poisons or other things. We can get through them. It doesn't mean they won't have a cost, but that our human sensibility can do something with them other than just be subject to them and rot away. But I thought that. So that initial reaction and she doesn't say, well then the Internet is fine. That's not what she does. She said, well, we were fine with tv, but she's sort of presenting them and holding them and articulating an idea. And then you're left to think, well, that's, that's a way through that. That's something for me to consider that's outside of a yes no. Like there's something this, this is a metaphor that allows you outside of the yes no. So that was my favorite. I thought I was put that out there. Anything else you want to mention from the collection or favorite quotes?
- [49:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's just so worth spending some time with. I really was surprised by how much I loved the pieces about Philip Roth and Martin Amis. And it's a delight to read essays about writers that I don't know a ton about or whose work is not among my favorite work and be excited to go back and explore them. This is the first time I've read anyone write something that made me want to read Wolf hall, you know. But it was Zadie Smith talking about having interviewed Hilary Mantel and that Zadie had a pug puppy named Maude and she smuggled Maude the pug to her interview with Hilary Mantel. But the way that she writes about Hilary Mantel's, like, liveliness and lively is the word she uses for Martin Amos as well. But, like, sort of the sparkle in her eye and the power behind the voice of Wolf hall, like, that's just not typically my kind of novel. I'm sure we'll get there someday for Zero to, well, read. And then I'll be like, oh, my God, why didn't I read this 20 years ago?
- [50:32]
Jeff O'Neill
It's pretty as a work of art. It's. It's singular.
- [50:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
But that's what a good essay collection, a good book like this of someone showing you their mind at work makes you want to read stuff and watch stuff and look at stuff and engage with ideas that you don't normally or wouldn't seek out on your own. It is the. It's just the very best kind of invitation. And like, this is the party I want to go to. This is a literary party of my dreams. Is Zadie Smith telling me about the time she bummed a smoke from Joan Didion?
- [51:02]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, Rebecca, that was great. Thanks for talking. We went a little bit longer than even thought, and we could have gone longer if we dove deep and into some of those there. You can find show notes@bookriot.com listen, you can choose email podcastookriot.com go check out zero to. Well read. You get to do Oedipus the King with us over there. We had a great time with Oedipus.
- [51:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
We did. It was really. Speaking of, like, having a great time with something that you would not normally have reached for on your own. I had a ball. It was really fun.
- [51:31]
Jeff O'Neill
I having read just, you know, now that I'm a Greek scholar, having done 45 minutes of research. No, I'm kidding. I don't think the Greeks were like, oh, my God, I'm losing my hair. I think they just. They were subject to larger forces. As someone who started losing their head at 7:17, aging came for me early, but I don't think they were like, can you believe that? Ironic by Alanis Morissette is 30 years old this year. I don't think they had that same kind of experience, which it is, by the way.
- [52:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
They did either. Yeah, I envy them that. But I don't know. We have menopause hormone therapy, and I wouldn't trade that.
- [52:07]
Jeff O'Neill
I was thinking about. I don't know if she mentioned watching Friends directly, but when I was watching Friends, I remember the episode where Joey turned 30. Oh, and he even expressed in that moment, disbelief. But my parents generation, and we maybe talked about this before. They would throw over the hill party.
- [52:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [52:23]
Jeff O'Neill
When they turned 40, like a black balloons and everything. So they like, they were ready for it. Like it became a trope. I think there's something too. And I don't know where it came from. Maybe the 90s or MTV or Nirvana. Like this perpetual youth we are all experiencing. But even by that episode of Friends, the surprise at our own change over time, aging, whatever you want to call it, was in the culture even then. Somewhere between 1984 and 1994.
- [52:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean.
- [52:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [52:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
And there was like, I mean, I don't want to throw myself and I'm too, I, I've passed 40 already. I can't throw myself an over the hill party for that. But there was a sort like a tension in those things of like, well, life is over now. Like there it was jokey, but also not jokey. And it wasn't.
- [53:08]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't. Yeah, it was. You're right. It was both.
- [53:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And like when I was a kid, when I was, you know, 8 to 10 and all the moms around me were turning 40, it was like frumpy one piece bathing suits with skirts attached. Because now you're old and your body doesn't belong in public anymore. And it feels radical and exciting as a middle aged woman that. That's not the middle age I'm supposed to be having anymore. But I think it is just. I'm going to borrow Zadie's dumbfounding. Like it is just dumbfounding for all of us in our own ways. But I'm, I am glad. I'd rather be surprised by it than have spent the back half of my 30s being like, well, I'm going to turn 40 and then I might as well be dead.
- [53:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. Right. To take the culturally ascribed off ramps to existence.
- [53:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'd like to have another 40. Thanks.
- [53:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. All right, Rebecca, we'll talk to you later.