On Connection: Katherine, Zadie and Me
I went to a marathon watching party this weekend, and I ran into my friend Katherine Center. Not literally, because I was eating donuts, not running. She wasn't running either, she was returning home from a literary event in Dallas, something that sounded sort of like an Iron Chefs for writers, although as she said, "Writers are so sensitive, they couldn't really judge us too harshly." Picture writers in the hands of Simon Cowell.
She said the people who put the event on thought that readings could be a little iffy sometimes, and they wanted to spice up the medium. They had Nerf footballs and stuff. They had a ball, literary-ly.
Katherine's main job is writing books and doing literary stuff. My main job is editing books and doing publishing stuff. Net net, she goes to infinitely more readings than I do, so I hadn't exactly gotten the news that readings could be iffy. I still put them in the category of the word from Mt. Sinai
Here in H'town we have a wonderful reading series put on by Inprint called The Margarett Root Brown Reading series. It brings amazing authors to town. Between my responsibilities at Bright Sky and my responsibilities at home, I don't get to go to these readings as often as my fancy Editorial Director title might insinuate, but when I do go, I am always transported.
I read with great delight in the New York Times that Zadie Smith has a new collection of essays just published. Stop everything and google Amazon. Like Katherine, maybe a little more famous, Zadie Smith is an amazing author. I was first introduced to her at an Inprint reading. She is beautiful--in a completely Beauty of Different way--and smart, and as clever with words as any writer I have ever admired or analyzed for a grade.
Having stumbled into the reading that night at the invitation of a friend, I hadn't done any due diligence on who Zadie Smith was or what she wrote about. I vaguely remembered an unread copy of White Teeth on my shelf. As I listened to her in the velvet-seated darkness of the Wortham, I was blown away by her eloquence and her story's similarity to one of my all-time favorites, E.M. Forster.
Well, go figure. On Beauty, the book from which she read that night, was a reworking of Howard's End. Only so modern and so insightful it made me think that there was no time or space between me and not only Forster, but any great writer I have read. Hearing her read in her sexy Anglo tones from her gorgeous prose was an experience far beyond iffy, by anybody's definition. I've never been able to think of glee clubs the same way since.
So today, when my old friend Zadie popped up on my screen-saving NYT. I was delighted. Her essays sound so fine to me, although of course our Overtly Intellectual Friends to the North had to rake them over the coals. In them, she talks about David Foster Wallace, and Zora Neale Hurston, of course Forster, and so many other people who have given us gifts of prose beyond panel--or New York Times-- judging.
I can't wait to get the book. And when I read it, I'll hear her beautiful voice in my mind. Just like I hear Katherine's lovely voice when we eat donuts and cheer for runners or when I read her books. It will be like Zadie is my friend, too.
Thanks to that iffy, old-school reading.
This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...
Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."~Zadie Smith on Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
~E. M. Forster
Ooooooo, I just love you.