A Conversation with Zadie Smith

good evening my name is Paul Holden Graber and I'm the director of public programs at the New York Public Library as all of you know my goal here is to make the lion's roar though with Jay Z recently we made them rap it is a great pleasure to welcome back to this stage Zadie Smith who is also three critically acclaimed novels Whitey's autograph man and on beauty last year she published changing my mind occasional essays which is in part the pretext for having her here part of which of this book appeared in The New Yorker the New York Review of Books and The Guardian as well as on this very stage in 2008 she presented the Robert silvers lecture which was called speaking in tongues two years ago they dismisses a professor of creative writing at NYU and earlier this month she was honored as at the New York Public Library as a library lion I would like all of you to become members of the New York Public Library tonight it's a great wonderful deal for just $40 a year you will get discounts on all of the programs at the upcoming year because we are nearly ending our season it's been a very intense season from everything from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to Keith Richards to Jay Z 2 Zeta Smith's tonight to finishing the year with a tribute to the National Lampoon and we begin the season early in January with a tribute to Gypsy Rose Lee so we'll have an evening of burlesque the New York Public Library in fact has the archives of Gypsy Rose Lee so that might be quite an interesting evening to experience what you may not know about Zadie Smith I read the biography a bit earlier but you may not know that from the age of five 2:15 they dismiss wanted to be a musical movie star actress she states I tap danced for 10 years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore all I wanted to be was an MGM actress working for Arthur freed or Gene Kelly or Vincente Minnelli historical I love this historical and geographical constraints made this impossible slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick up time step with shuffle please welcome Ladysmith who will be reading hi I'm just going to read a little bit from the book of essays it's always hard reading for a book of essays there's not many obvious entertaining options I'm always aware of something brain greens that spending a lot of time with writing if you're a writer is kind of masturbation and reading about writing so it comes on to the same category I think so I'm just going to do a little bit of it this is from an essay called that crafty feeling and it's just about what it feels like to write a novel it's in ten parts and I'm just going to read from four till the end for middle of the novel magical thinking in the middle of a novel a kind of magical thinking takes over to clarify the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical center of the novel by middle of the novel I mean whatever page you're on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post I mean when there's nothing in the world except your book even as your wife tells you she's sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon her arms are parentheses and you were wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle the middle of a novel is a state of mind strange things happen in it time collapses you sit down to write at 9:00 a.m. you blink the evening news is on and for thousands of words are written more words than you wrote in three long months a year ago something has changed and it's not restricted to the house if you go outside everything I mean everything flows freely into your novel someone on the bus says something it's straight out of your novel you open the paper every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel if you're fortunate enough to have someone waiting to publish your novel this is the point at which you phone them in a panic and try to get your publication date move forward because you can't believe how in tune the world is with your unpublished novel right now and if it isn't published next Tuesday maybe the moment will pass and you'll have to kill yourself magical thinking makes you crazy and renders everything possible incredibly naughty problems of structure now resolve themselves with inspired ease see that one paragraph it only needs to be moved and the whole chapter falls into place but why didn't you see it before you randomly pick a poetry book off the shelf and the first line you read ends up being your epigraph seems to have been written for no other reason five dismantling the scaffolding when building a novel you'll use a lot of scaffolding some of this is necessary to hold the thing up but most isn't the majority of it is only there to make you feel secure and in fact the building will stand without it each time I've written a long piece of fiction I felt this need for an enormous amount of scaffolding with me scaffolding comes in many forms the only way to write this novel is to divide it into three sections of ten chapters each or five sections of seven chapters or the answer is to read the Old Testament and model each chapter on the books of the prophets or the divisions of the bhagavad-gita or the Psalms or Ulysses or the songs of Public Enemy or the films of Grace Kelly or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the liner notes to the White Album or the 27 speeches Donald Rumsfeld gave to the press corps during his tenure scaffolding holds up confidence when you have none reduces the despair creates a goal however artificial an endpoint use it to divide what seems like an endless unmarked journey though by doing this like xeno you infinitely extend the distance you need to go later when the book is printed and old and dog-eared it occurs to me that I really didn't need any of that scaffolding the book would have been far off better would have been far better off without it when I was putting it up it felt vital once it was there I worked so hard to get it there I was loathe to take it down if you're writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding well I hope helps you but don't forget to dismantle it later or if you're determined to leave it up out there for all to see at least hang a nice facade over it as the Romans do when they fix up their palazzi 6 the first 20 pages Redux because I talk about first 20 pages earlier on late in the novel in the last quarter when I'm rolling downhill I turn back to read those first 20 pages they're packed tighter than tuna in a can calmly I take off the top let little air in what's amusing about the first 20 pages they're funny now three years later now I'm no longer locked up in them it's how little confidence you have in your readers when you begin you spoon feed them everything you can't let a character walk across the room without giving her backstory as she goes you don't trust the reader to have a little patience a little intelligence this reader who for you know has read Thomas Bernhard Finnegan's Wake Gertrude Stein georges perec yet you're worried that if you don't mention in the first three pages that Sarah Malone is a social worker with a dead father this talented reader might not be able to follow you exactly it's awful the swing of the literary fraudulent pendulum from moment to moment you can't decide whether you're the forge an idiot or your reader is the fortune an idiot for writers who work with character a good deal going back to those first 20 pages is also a lesson in how much more delicate a thing character is than you think it is when you're writing it the idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seem so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curler keys of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another in fact character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes naturally it can be destroyed lightly - I think of a creature called Audra dick who at first glance appears to be a flat star-shaped spool for thread but who is not quite this or Dudek he won't stop rolling down the stairs training string behind him who has a laugh that sounds as if it has no lungs behind it a laugh like rustling leaves you can find the inimitable audio deck in a one-page story of Kafka's called the cares of a family man curious audio deck is more memorable to me the characters I spent three years on and 500 pages seven the last day there's one great advantage to being a micromanager rather than the macro planner the last day of your novel truly is the last day if you edit as you go along there are no first second third drafts there's only one draft and when it's done it's done who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel it's a feeling of happiness it knocks me clean out of adjectives I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word the last time it happened to me I uncorked a good son stare I've been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time crying it was sunny late autumn and there were apples everywhere overripe and stinky ate step away from the vehicle you can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight it's the only absolutely 24 karat gold plated piece of advice I have to give you I've never taken it myself though one day I hope to the advices as follows when you finish your novel if money is not a desperate priority if you don't need to sell it at once or for it to be published that very second put it in a drawer for as long as you can manage a year or more is ideal but even three months will do step away from the vehicle the secret to editing your work is simple you need to become its reader instead of its writer I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival all of us with red pens in hand frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage read from them it's an unfortunate thing but it turns out the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after its published ten minutes before you got on stage at a literary festival at that moment every redundant phrase each show-off pointless metaphor all the pieces of deadwood stupidity vanity and tedium are distressingly obvious to you two years earlier when the proofs came you looked at the same pages and couldn't see a comrade of place and by the way that's true of the professional editors too after they've read a manuscript multiple times they stopped being able to see it you need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it nor the head of a professional editor who's seen it 12 different versions it's the head of a smart stranger who picks it up off a bookshelf and begins to read you need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow you need to forget you ever wrote that book 9 the unbearable cruelty of proofs proofs are so cruel breeding lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire stirring doll roots for spring rain proofs of the wasteland where the dream of your novel dies and cold reality asserts itself when I look at loose leaf proofs fresh out the envelope bound with a thick elastic band marked up by a conscientious copy editor I feel quite sure I would have to become a different person entirely to do the work that needs to be done here to correct what needs correcting fix what needs to be fixed the only proper response to an envelope full of marked up pages is give it back to me let me start again but no one says this because by this point exhaustion is set in it's not the book you hope for maybe something might yet be done but the will is gone there's simply no more will to be had that's why proofs are so cruel so sad the existence of the proof itself is proof that it's already too late I've only ever seen one happy proof in King's College library the manuscript of Eliot's the wasteland Eliot upon reaching his own point of exhaustion had the extreme good fortune to meet Ezra Pound a very smart stranger and with his red pen Ezra went to work and what work his pen goes everywhere trimming cutting slicing a frenzy of editing the why I'm we're for not especially obvious at times indeed almost ridiculous almost at times indiscriminate whole pages stuck out struck out with a single line underneath pounds marking the wasteland is a sad proof like any other too long full of lines not worth keeping badly structured Lucky Eliot to have Ezra Pound lucky Fitzgerald to have Maxwell Perkins lucky Carver we now know to have Gordon lish we're of all the smart strangers gone ten ten years later nausea surprise and feeling okay I find it very hard to read my books after they're published I've never read white teeth five years ago I tried I got about ten sentences in before I was overwhelmed with nausea more recently when people tell me they've just read that book I do try to feel pleased but it's a distant disconnected sensation like when someone tells you they met your second cousin in a bar in Goa I suspect white teeth and I may never be reconciled I think that's simply what happens when you begin writing a book at the age of twenty-one then a while ago I was in an airport somewhere and I saw a copy of the autograph man and on a whim I bought it on the plane I had to drink two of those mini bottles of wine before I had the stomach to begin I didn't manage the whole thing but I read about two-thirds and at that incredible speed with which you can read a book if you happen to have written it and it was actually not such a bad experience I laughed a few times I groaned more than I laughed and I gave up when the wine wore off but for the first time I felt something other than nausea I felt surprised the book was genuinely strange to me there were whole pages I didn't recognize I didn't remember writing and because it was so strange I didn't feel any particular animosity towards it so that was that between that book and me and now exists a sort of blank truce neither pleasant-nor-painful bTW I read maybe a third of it not consecutively but chapters here and there as usual the nausea as usual the feeling of fraudulence and the too late desire to wield the red pen all over the place but something else - something new here in there very isolated pockets I had the sense this line that paragraph these were exactly what I meant to write and the fact was I'd written them and I felt okay about it felt good even it's a feeling I recommend to all of you I was talking to writing students that feeling feels okay thanks you you wrote that piece for writing students and you were trying to be helpful to them yeah I don't know if it was but did you want to try and help them um I guess I when I'm talking about writing with writing students I just want to demystify the process why because I find it so helped I'm helpful to have it thoroughly mystified I mean when I was wanting to write sometimes I go and hear a right to speak and they'd say something like you know I wake up at 6:00 a.m. I go for a four mile run I stand on my head I see well this kind of supposed essential ritual and I that's not my experience of work mine is much more chaotic and not very organized and much I'm always learning on the job I don't feel like an expert in that sense learning on the job in in some ways a nice way for us to enter the realm of these essays I particularly like the quotation you have at the beginning which I think in some way can lead us into speaking about the book as a whole by David Foster Wallace you get to decide what to worship in in some way this book is precisely the decision of what you get to decide to worship oh yeah I mean what struck me about that quote by David is that for a certain kind of reader that quote is like a epigraph of relativism you know it doesn't matter what you would if you can worship anything then life is easy you pick and choose like some bad New York Buddhist or something I think that's how people I read you oh yeah but but from David's practice I would take that to be a very serious commitment you do get to decide to worship but that also means you have to decide carefully work hard and you have to make choices that are genuinely meaningful to you I don't think it's a kind of a simple thing to do so in this case the book I just wanted it to be a record of the things I guess that I I have loved in that nation led high quality YA book really it hasn't any dry quality the way indeed you're not becoming a tap dancer has an inner giant quality maybe you left that world because it was no longer available I just for me I'm sure it's true for most people I have to keep on moving and the books that I I loved as a child which I think have represented here a certain kind of British Canon I suppose that was important to me because when I was young I was trying to make some kind of point that these books were for me too but then I guess once I'd established they were for me too then I found there were other places I wanted to go you say somewhere and that most of the books we read actually we read between the age of 11 and 14 or 11 and 17 I'm a that's in the book offside there and I find it to be true he suggested that he'd read an enormous amount between the age of about nine and fifteen and that reading in one sense that reading I think forms you like I can't get rid of the fact that my foundational ticks are people like George Eliot and Virginia Woolf rather than I don't know Camus and I don't know someone can have a million miles away I have to deal with the foundational texts I have but I also think that you can stay agile as you get older you can still try and read out of your comfort zone you can keep moving but you can't replace that that foundational thing you can't replace it but it changes it changes dramatically and one of the things that I'm becoming more and more obsessed by which I found to be a common obsession in some way is relationship between M taste and aging yeah I've read a little bit about that in the book a good example for me is the book Middlemarch which when your wolf pointed out first when you're a young woman reading that book you tend to relate very strongly to Dorothea and think of her as a heroine and the older you get the more absurd she seems you know she's are completely over the top drama queen who makes terrible decisions for 600 pages but at 15 I didn't see that I found all her almost obsessive sense of commitment and her self flagellation and her religious feeling all very admirable and as I've got older the people in that book who are more pragmatic who aren't so obsessive are much more attractive to me I think I find obsessive people much more frightening now when I was 15 probably I was one of them but that's different but you're attracted to some obsessive characters and thinking in particular a passion we share is a passion for Vanna hat so you mentioned you have a small because you have these reviews you I think used to do or continue you know I used to used to do them no not much I would like to I like movie reviewing it's fun reviewing movies in particular but but hats of Grizzly Man was a film you you I think enjoyed yeah no I love I love her so that it's something to do my favorite is little detainees to fly yeah absolute classic but the idea of people in states of extremity and people who make their own lives difficult on the prints on a principle I guess and it's another example of you get what to you choose what to worship some people choose to worship things which make their lives impossible and that fact I find really fascinating well was her took I remember asking him once why he believed that FileMaker needed to know how to pick a lock and he said because filmmaking is about trespassing I also I also recalled when my little boy learned to on a summer vacation milk the cow hats have called me up to say that is of monumental importance a boy needs to know how to pull the other yeah and I you know I thought he was maybe mentioning the other but it was a other going back to kind of an essential yeah quality no I liked about him it's something about Herzl himself as well he has a complete lack of him ambivalence and a bivolo is kind of the normal state of most of us as as late moderns but Hertzog it's not he's got that wonderful thing a short film where he he made a bet with someone he said if he lost it he would eat his own shoe and he did lose a bit and he ate his own shoe on film he cooked it and cut it up and ate it and that kind of monomania I I get you're attracted to characters I'm attracted to it's not my personality at all but I suppose I kind of something about it like characters in my book quite often there's one one or two types like that I'm just interested in it because I find it very hard to have strong feelings of that kind I guess that's what it is say something more about that I am I don't I mean I tried in the book I try to work it out a little bit it's possible that I grew up in a state of ambivalence which is maybe something to do with being mixed race or or living between two things that other people take to be extreme essences you know if you're part of both the essential nature of those two things isn't obvious to you because you're yourself you're an ad next year is that ambivalence well expressed theoretically one might say by the great tension which exists between ahora Bhatt and Nabokov you have that essay where you you create a tension yeah I might say yeah I don't know if you created it there but you take the most formal list of Bart and the most hot-blooded of of Nabokov the Nabokov who says that a novel and a work of art needs to give you a tingle in your spine and and 4/4 back the back that you love quoting at that moment there's another back which will come to the back that you love to call there's a marketer's is a formalist and rather doesn't believe really that the author as such it is important but the text is I think when eyes are you absolutely right I chose a particular part of boxes Bart is actually a much more expansive and generous critic than that as they allows but what I was trying to write about is a feeling that I think is quite common in students of writing and people who care about literature it was a feeling I had in myself and I extrapolated wider which is I guess what I didn't really do but if you go through learning the theory of literature and you have some ambition or some wish to be a writer you find yourself in a great deal of conflict I think you're not sure for instance reading Foucault for the first time I really took that as a kind of J'Accuse you know I was being accused of wanting to be the producer of all meaning you know that's what you're being accused of and as a writer you have to confess that you do want to produce meaning at the same time to write a certain amount of humility is necessary it's a strange balance between saying I think that I have something to say here I have something to write which I think my students they want to be able to say that but the same time they fear that as a oppressive statement you know who are you to go around writing things do you read academic critiques of your books no never my god no oh that would be a masturbation on a whole other level it's bad enough as it is um know someone who's absent from this book um who I was longing to find it's Italo Calvino Calvino has a line a paragraph which I'd like to read to you and I'd love you to respond to it a girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies I see that my work served her perfectly to demonstrate her theories and this is certainly a positive fact for the novels or the theory I do not I do not know which from her very detailed talk I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued but by my books seen through her eyes proved unrecognizable to me I'm sure that this lot area that is her name has read them conscientious ly but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she already is convinced what in in them what she already convinced of before reading them I tried to say this to her she retorted a bit irritated why would you want me to read in your books only what you're convinced of I answered her that isn't it I expect readers to read in my book something I didn't know but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn't know that's a very subtle version of the argument I I think I think the great thing about that Calvino quote is that it doesn't set up an argument between two different ways of reading because they needn't really be a row I mean for me when I'm teaching I'm trying to encourage the separate spheres because for me that kind of academic criticism of a novel is absolutely viable and enjoyable but the thing to remember about it is it's an art in itself and a beautiful art but I also want to keep a little place in the university of small sport where it students also feel free to say things which are emotive expressly if not particularly academic to express that little response to novels that we all have it's not that you can't use a novel to prove the sex life of Germans at the turn of the century or feminist mores in Iran or and any other arguments and novels are useful that's a productive use of novels but there should be some corner of University where a student feels free also to say I love it I love this book and and you find that a difficult thing to come by in the university do students feel bashful to express such emotions I think I think it's different now when I was in college I was in English degree exclusively whereas a lot of my students I guess are in creative writing and in English and I I did feel that my effective experience in front of a novel was not really for discussion that wasn't really what we were there for it was beside the point it was beside the point and also we were a class of maybe 18 and I'm sure many of us wanted to write novels but it was never something you would confess in public it was like considered something of a sin and it's so different from the American model where everyone you meet is constantly going on about how they going to write a novel but for me it was it was not when I finally told my professor at the end of my course you know he was not impressed by that revelation that was something to be slightly ashamed of I think so I think that's a bad habit it's a different way of creating writers the experience I went through believes that you make writers by reading and that's what you do and with everything yeah and and you you speak about this appetite for reading it's as if you can't really stop reading you can you cannot write but you cannot not read reading for you is like a third lung it's something that you must do at every particular moment especially during your day time inside it sounds like most of your time is taken by readings that's my whole life yeah I don't yeah I don't know if it I think it's true for other writers too that right some people have writing as a compulsion I don't have that I mean I admire the writers who have it who feel the need desperate need to write everyday but that isn't that's not my compulsion reading on the other hand I think we said too before we came home and I recently had a baby and my certainly quite in baby development my husband said you know you got to speak to her she's never gonna learn to speak if you're always reading while breastfeeding or whatever she's going to be a mute oh yeah good point no but but what but but but what you you you are instilling in her is the sound of pages being - yes we're psychological horror when she goes into therapy 20 years from now yeah you yeah I know it's it's tremendous you want one thinks of that five dollars every day is what you need to put aside yeah but they're very yeah this is this is what I'm I'm saving up at this moment but you one of the important characteristics of reading for you is that and reading with a kind of passion that this book tries to inspire in the readers to have for novel say a reading is that reading no longer does to you what reading did to you when you were much younger which is isolate you so in some way you are trying it's also an elegiac book in the sense that you're trying to create a community in some way we're reading Once Upon a Time seemed to be such a solitary endeavor it it's it for me it was solitary but it's also person making which is something which fades over time like now I can read a wonderful book but I'm just too old for it to have the kind of impression on me that it would have had when I was 14 15 you can take little things as stylistic things from from new great writers that you enjoy but they're not going to get into your kind of literary DNA the way that you people you read when you were young it's a feared for me it's sad because I like to be transient moments then I like to be transformed and sometimes a voice is so strong I think of an example George Saunders for me is a good example that you an adult writer can read him and and really feel the the pressure of his style because it's just so particular and so brilliantly done and it can create very bad results I think for a long time I'd never published any of them right year after I read your job is just imitating you know constantly because his influence was so so strong but that's rare and I think might even be the definition of a genius when you come across writing that has the power to do that to you so late in the you call in a day what is creative fevery yeah it's really that's extraordinary when that happens um but mostly I just wanted to encourage and defend an idea of reading which is absolutely passionate and engaged that there's a kind of trend that maybe it's just me but I keep on reading in essays like various people as usually a little section where someone will say oh you know I looked at that book I didn't even bother reading it I could tell what was in it I could tell it was about I'd read the press about it and I know that that's meant to be like the last sign of hipster sophistication that you're so well leader you have to read the book to know what's in it but for me it's a kind of like it's like a fetishization of philistinism and I just find it unbelievable that's become a kind of sign of ascetic sophistication that you needn't even read something to know how bad it is that's kind of shocking to me so I'm just trying to reinforce the idea there's there's no replacement for the actual reading you can read all the press you can look at the photo on the back you can talk about it with your friends at dinner party you could all that but you have to read the damn book because it's going through it's not just something that happens on the outside it's a process you go through the English psychoanalyst once said that the goal the goal and role of the mother was to be a was for the child to be alone in the presence of the mother which seems to me like an extraordinary description of reading namely that you're alone but deeply nurtured yes I I mean I'm sure a lot of people in this room read the same way if I go out for a short coffee break and I know I'm meeting a friend I have four books in my bag why do I have four books in my bag it's coffee with a friend at most she might be five minutes late but it's not going to be time to read four books but you you know that she's very yeah very late but I always notice that about writers too that if you ever happen to meet a writer for lunch if you're late they're delighted like I'm always happy when someone's late apart from jeff dyer he hates lateness of all kinds but every other writer you're happy for that 20 minutes where you get a chance to read something and all the time is measured in in how long have you got to read it's ridiculous but that that kind of um yeah I'm really lonely for that reason I guess because I always have books with me but writing by contrast I find a very isolating and sad activity then it is just you the the building um you think about reading that it's a building in some way of a persona and of a person and of a self and I've I read with passion which I imagine many people have read your recent piece on the new movie probably all of you saw at the social network in the most current issue or the issue before the most current issue of the New York Review of Books um what wipers were why did you review this movie um the only like I have no time for doing any spare work I've got kid I've got to teach and I like this and Bob Bob Silver's the additive of the New York Review sometimes sends me things would you like to do this or that and normally I just say no no no because I don't there's no time and I can't afford to do it but something I don't know why that's the thing which interest me when he sent that Thursday John reviews movie I found I what that I said yes and I wondered why it interested me I think for me when I'm writing an essay I'm not writing from a position of X but what you're watching which I'm sure is perfectly obvious if you read them is somebody learning about the thing is they're as they're writing it so something about that subject I just wanted to to know I knew I'd had a feeling when I was on Facebook and I couldn't really describe it and I knew it was a way of finding out what that feeling was what worries you most about Facebook it doesn't I don't think Facebook is the end of the world and you know a little bit was a playful piece but I I did think an hour after I wrote the piece I got a lot of mail from people it made me think there's nothing at all original in that place I was talking about a feeling that I have that I had a guess a lot of people had and it turned out that was correct it's not some people write essays where they're giving you you know a view from beyond what I'm trying to do is articulate as well I can with my talent which is just about making sentences sound okay just to express what a lot of people felt what I had a gut feeling perhaps they felt because I felt it and then your it your little jump you make is well I'm not a total freak am i somebody else must feel this and once you've made that assumption then you kind of go forward and I emailed my students name of my friends and family and just said well how do you feel when you're on this thing what does it feel for you to be on and then I was extremely lucky and having lunch with another writer just read this gerund mania book and put it in front of me and so then all the dots start to connect but for me it's always about just again sorry thinking about Wallace just because he was on my mind when I was writing it it's just he seemed to me to have a basic idea that human beings are sacred and that can be a massively conservative position to go from and I was very aware when I was writing the piece that it's going to come across as technophobia and I know I'm not brilliant on the internet as a lot of it I don't understand but I'm always interested in is there a way to stick with that idea that human beings are sacred there is something sacred about them which I do believe is a way to take that belief and some and not go into the first and easiest conservative position to try and push self and consider is it possible that human beings are sacred and they can exist on the Internet I absolutely think that's true and what's great about the lanyard is that he is a real Internet visionary he's really interested in how we can have exciting fulfilling lives on the Internet which i think is totally possible but my feeling was that just this particular format is not that fulfilling that was the only point I wanted to make and it doesn't allow for this idea that the human beings aren't just flat pieces of data that they're a little more than that but your piece is a little more critical than you make it sound now am i right should I read the last yeah Gossage I mean just to give people a sense of of what in fact you're saying at the very end um maybe just the last no the last two paragraphs the last defense of every facebook addict is but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away well email and Skype do that too and they have that added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg but well you know we all know if we really wanted to write to these far away people or see them we would what we actually want to do is the bare minimum just like any 19 year old college boy would rather be doing something else or nothing at my screening when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal still popular in Russia the audience laughed I can't imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as livejournal in this sense a social network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called Mark Zuckerberg it is a cruel portrait of us 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore that's the thing which blows my mind 500 million people I think that's what the lania book is so interesting about it's just the scale of the thing any other revolution that took place with so many people in so little time would have a philosophy at a period of thought a period of discussion an argument but the internet revolution has happened like that so quickly and most of us have just fallen into it without a very foundation we come early I mean in the last two years no one in this room for the night walking down streets in New York everyday everybody people walking though I mean everybody if you were on a different planet you would say it looked like a zombie race like this everybody is governing I mean really feels that way and so that just needs to be thought about it's not that it needs to end but it needs to be thought about but what is lost because I am curious about this I am curious I want to push you in that direction because I'd like you to think what I'm thinking which is that and then we'll get to changing my mind but but but but the poor what strikes me I went to see the film yesterday and it's as you say in your fine review it is a very well made film was extremely good I mean the acting I would say is perfect and the way it is cast is perfect and the but the subject matter the paucity of that the paucity of well of of experience but I see I think the subjects quite interesting I think it's interesting about people who perhaps have a positive experience but you know with all these things the problem is that you can't go backwards like you can write as many articles about the internet revolution as you like you can't turn the thing backwards and that truly is a conservative position there's no putting the cap back in the bag that's not going to happen but it might be that we can think a bit more carefully about where we're going next and to me if you ask what's lost it's just a very simple thing it's something about being relational rather than performative the weird thing about Facebook is that everybody on it is like their own mini celebrity that's what it turns you into you have fans you're costly giving them updates you like a little celebrity and in the relation no matter what anyone says it's pretty much one way and then you avoid a stick about other people's celebrity profiles and how many friends they have it's an idea of being human which is one way and real life is relational you have to deal with other people you have to have some kind of relationship with them and you can't just to look at yourself you have to let them look at them in the eye which has become increasingly difficult for younger people quite often I have a cousin who it's like this all the time but on the internet you know it's also presentation so it creates a sense of feeling or sense of intimacy without the necessity for it but I I think that - but I also think and I wanted to try and say in the piece that you don't need to have a kind of Oh God where are we going - reaction because young people will always find their way out of these things they're not no generation is more foolish than the one that came before they'll always find creative ways to work themselves out of this situation and you can already see it happening they're ready artists on there all kinds of radicals on the net they'll find some way and in fact the more culpable and I don't if I made this clear in the piece are not the kids who went on Facebook but all the adults it was the animals he didn't even them to sit back and think for a minute in question what is this platform what is it doing but they fell like you know girls fighting in a puddle over this stuff they really they all went on Twitter they all went on Facebook the it was the adults who really fell for it and what the kids do will be more interesting we'll see I'm I'm struck by the title of your book changing my mind how does one change one's mind um because it's it's something I think that people don't do very often and they certainly don't speak about it with such relish as you do it seems it's so often with stuck in thinking what we think and don't want to change our mind you know it definitely often everyone will I'm sure feel this it gets harder as you get older as your positions become entrenched and your relationships become entrenched is not so easy to flit around but I guess just for me personally when I look at my life you know I have a pretty staid life I'm married I teach it's not I'm not know kind of Bukowski or Hemingway running around the world having wild experiences so it kind of the place where I try and be free is in my reading it would kill me if not only this part of my life is so staid that it also in my reading I shut down you know then there would be no hope and I think also for a writer who has come out of books and many writers don't some writers come from experience some writers come from trauma a little different kinds of writers but I obviously am right you came out of other books oh my whole my whole arena the way I can move forward is through reading creatively so this book for me was just a record of what I have read and to be honest what I don't intend to read any more of because I I need to go elsewhere you need to go elsewhere one of the Impressionist when one gets when reading this book is that this book is a farewell in some way to many of the earlier passions and also an acknowledgement of some new new desires maybe one of them might be rap music that's an old one kids family because of you because of your two brothers yeah I guess I maybe yeah I guess they started it I mean I I think I gave them good soul music and then they came up beneath me hit hit put yeah that's probably true and now you're now you're reading a lot of graphic novels yeah I've read I've been reading not sure I mean I only for about a decade not like you know proper comic heads who start when they're very small and never stop but I love I love graphic novels it just it kept on striking me in the past decade when people ask you for your books of the year or your best books when I was honest with myself it was graphic novels that were so frequently the answer just seemed to be so much genuine imagination on display you know even if you just buy those best American collections that come out every year in America the breadth of styles and risk-taking and it just really struck me that something exciting was going on yeah there's a passage I love of Nabokov which I'd like to read you which in some way I think maybe in communication with the social network and it's the difference between the social network and the way Nabokov sees reality reality is a very subjective affair I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information and as specialization if we take a lily for instance or any other kind of natural are object a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person but it is still more real to a botanist and yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies you can get nearer and nearer so to speak to reality but you never get near enough become reality because reality is an infinite succession of steps levels of perceptions false bottoms and hence unquenchable unattainable you can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing it's hopeless of course he had a better chance than most with all his extreme or knowledge broke yeah I mean so three like Pell Phi I feel we feel such a surge of jealousy because for most people for most novelists the tree is just the tree but the book of is able to look at the tree and the insect on the tree and there the cycle of the insect on the tree and it's more than just information that anybody who reads the book off doesn't feel like he's just an information machine it's loved detail you know he understands it and loves it and sees things which without that knowledge you wouldn't even see he's extremely fortunate and were most fortunate novelists for that reason but yes he's right I mean the perfectly obvious example which always strikes me I guess has so many writes a lot about family is that if you sit down at this Thanksgiving coming with your family and try and go over any incident from your mutual background anything you cannot get two yards without a storming route it becomes really obvious to you that you and your siblings residents have literally lived different realities I mean absolutely different realities not versions not different realities and that just is so amazing to me and what is amazing about that from the point of view of being a novelist because whenever you're right wherever I'm writing you know you think you have a some kind of perspectival authority you think you know what's going on and then you're constantly disabused of that the inability to absolutely fixate fix on the thing and say exactly what happened how people felt about it it's what gives you a space to continue because you know you can't pin that thing down precisely but the shock of it and the shock of relative experiences of the same incident it's very overwhelming to me because it's also it destabilizes you morally the things you think you know are right the right actions you think you made for some from somebody else's point of view or a horror or something that was extremely painful to them when you're very young I think you don't know that you don't realize among the great passions in this book that you describe is your passion for George Eliot George Eliot is an Middlemarch in particular but not only Middlemarch a it's a book that is extremely important to you and extremely important to you as you said earlier in the rereading process in rediscovering it what is it about George Eliot in particular that is so deeply moving and I might add that just before coming down here we showed you some manuscripts of George Eliot and I felt that the greatest attraction in the reading room in the Special Collections was to see George Eliot's penmanship um yeah I was actually quite overwhelmed saying that the thing about Eliot it's a lot of my love of her maybe it's true of a lot of women writers it's kind of extra literary I do think the books are astonishing but it's more the fact of Eliot her life if you ever read the biographies her life was so difficult for so long and she had a will of iron what she achieved she achieved with her entire self and it was so hard she was incredibly ugly she felt she was completely unloved she was totally isolated she was on not educated university she's an autodidact par excellence it's unbelievable and what we saw upstairs is her research notes for Daniel Deronda which I read it has a Jewish theme and in order to write that book in which the Jewish theme appears but isn't the whole of the book she clearly from the notes upstairs research today ISM to the nth degree she learned everything she made notes on everything and knowing that in the end she would only use small amounts but she felt she needed in that Hemingway sense the whole of the iceberg even if you only saw the tip and that kind of work that she did without support without institutional support without love which is extremely important I think for writers generally she came to love late in her life and she was able to write more and but so much he did alone I in a society which made her I mean treated her like a pariah because in the end when she found love she didn't marry and it's just a to me it's really extraordinary and so I it's just I don't often think about role models in that sense but her will is so impressive that when you have to hold a word press she would be one I can't I can't help even though it's a cheesiest choice for any woman writers and she's George earlier but the scope of her achievement um is just mind-boggling to me you you're particularly interested in many of the essays by the the power and virtue of empathy and George Eliot has a wonderful line not included in your book which I'd like to read to you which says the greatest benefit we owe to the artist where the painter poet or novelist is an extension of our sympathies artists enira thing to life it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot that was in an introduction she wrote to the history of life in Germany and then in your book one of the most exquisite passages from middle which I had completely forgotten but which makes me want to reread the book is this one if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heartbeat and we would die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence as as this a quickest of us walk about well weighted with stupidity an incredible it's an incredible quote but I the older I get the more I feel it can lead to a dangerous conclusion there is a kind of philosophy and of the novel a kind of religion of the novel which puts that principle empathy and and the empathetic feeling for strangers or for other people or for animals at the center of its philosophy if you could do that if you understood how another person lived you would care and do right by them and that's a very intresting trancing belief in something that I grew up hoping was true and and and hope and believing I suppose but it can also be a very lazy belief and it's a story on the front of the New York Times it really struck me I'm a massive dog lover but there was a dog recently who performed some heroic action in Afghanistan like Aaron Burr what kind but he was brought here and then accidentally euthanized when he ran away one night he was used to nice so I was reading this story with sympathy for the dog and then I realized you turned the page and there's two more pages about the dog and about the vigil for the dog that's a candlelight vigil which is going to happen soon and there you see where this kind of fetishization of empathy skills sometimes they go in one place like the poor dog and the major part that story what's happening Afghanistan took up about three lines so there can be a kind of sentimental reaction and also there's a good piece by Terry Eagleton recently talking about this that in the end empathy it is one of the most useful social glues and one of the most wonderful things for us to behave rightly towards each but is nothing without political systems that function without a kind of exercise against injustice which is a slightly more active than I read Middlemarch and I felt so for Dorothea you know there's a limit to that kind of empathy in action and I think that the novelist should always be aware of that you can you can fool yourself writing novels that you're saving the world you know one by one opening the hearts of people and so they become better but a people's heart can be opened extensively and they can do not you have to be careful you're fighting the kind of melia wrist feeling that that literature actually makes us better I just think that the English tradition of the novel as represented that kind of apex of it Bailey it doesn't always recognize that people are perverse people are profoundly perverse the French understand that very well but the English they tend not to look at things which are certain parts of human nature they'd rather not think about and that kind of perversity I guess interests me more than it used to can you can you teach perversity no I think that's a natural god-given right yeah no help me when when you when you were here two years ago you gave a lecture which is now published in this collection of essays speaking in tongues and you you said that Obama was a man from dream city and when you came here he had just recently got it gotten elected and I'm wondering how you see him now if you still see him and negotiating well coming from dream city which for you meant belonging to so many different worlds may be the different kinds of words that you belong to as well at the end of the essay eyes I said what what I feel that basically my thought when I drag my ass is that you've just elected a novelist to be President and we'll see how that goes yesterday the argument was on the one side you know there are lots of things about novelists on the other side they do tend to have this strong sense of ambivalence and I think you've seen that in a bomb in that campaign maybe the ambivalence as far as I read it seems so such a relief and so necessary given that people were screaming at each other so loudly and so absurdly but I imagine it doesn't function as well in government when as w would say you need to make decisions you have to be the decider so I I don't know I mean I still find him you know for me I know when jay-z was sitting here last week you know it will never stop being an extraordinary fact that there is a black man in the White House you know yet some very fundamental level as a black kid growing up you feel you kind of sublimate a feeling of I don't know it it's some kind of insecurity or some sense that certain things can't happen and so when it did happen I felt that it kind of broke something open in me and I'm sure the law of black people felt the same way and you know it's not probably a very sensible reaction because Obama is a bomber he's not me to feel proud about somebody you're not related to who you have nothing personally to do with but it but it was a feeling of a kind of relief and and pride which was a lovely experience the title of the book comes from in part from seeing the Philadelphia story is that correct yes but yeah I I don't know I maybe yes lightly I mean the Philadelphia Story is in there a lot but I hadn't thought of the direct connection but you're right yeah what does the title what what what what does the title mean well I guess I saw that film when I was very young like literally a kid and in fact the last time I saw it was right here in Bryant Park I'm a huge yeah a huge screen which was just so wonderful it just struck me that films about somebody who is a in her personal life a kind of militant and who is is made to change and when I first watched it I was very offended by the idea that he was a bright strong feminist woman whose brokens in some way by her father and then the other men in her life and is changed and I didn't like that and then as like it's another case of growing older and watching the same movie and feeling differently and you realize it it's really not about a person being broken down it's not about a man against a woman it's really about somebody opening up and realizing that things aren't always black and white that ambivalences exists that she isn't always certain and the line the line from the Philadelphia Story is the time to make up your mind about people is never yeah which I love I I always loved as a kid I think a lot of it is you know if you're not a white man white men have the kind of experience of never being pinned down exactly they can be what they like they can do what they like they're kind of free in the symbolic world but if you're anything other than a white man wherever you go decisions are made about you what you're capable of what you do what you think what you like and I was always very aware of that as a child my supposed to a certain extent like looking at this book and the books I picked up as a kid I was always working against the assumption that I should read a certain kind of book listen to certain kind of music so in a way I went a long long way around to avoid people making decisions about me well you know the free choice of course it's a choice made in opposition to the first I think in the very first page of The Great Gatsby if Scott Fitzgerald says that reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope yes and when you were child maybe 11 12 is that when your your mother put in your in your hand Hurston to read yeah he said to you you must read it and she sort of gave it to you and you rejected it that you rejected because I felt always that I didn't want to be tied naturally to an experience which is very it's very different being a black woman in English black woman in America and the idea that we were sisters just because of skin color I couldn't understand and then of course I read the book and I think I loved it more than any book that I'd read up to that point it was a kind of it was a transformative book for me and it was annoying because my mom was really hoping that's that that would happen so to concede her wisdom and then I read that warrant anymore as all these extraordinary writers and I felt that I there was some kind of sister that despite this extraordinary historical difference which should change so many things I did still feel something intimate and it's a very simple thing it's because they had my hair they had my skin had my looks had my experience of the world and your physical experience of the world is no small thing you know it means the way people react to you will respond to you so for me it was a real it was just as everybody always says it was just that suddenly I saw people like me in these things that I love books and it was just wonderful and you speak about in that essay the first essay of the book you speak about the physical reaction you had to that book of of being nearly overwhelmed and and drowned by it you read it in one sitting in three hours whether it was your mother surprised that she had finally gotten through it was very cunning tuned you all the time she's just lying in wait and it's just I think the thing which really struck me is that when white people are reading they're not even aware of how of this identification it's so neutral to them they never think twice I just think they're reading about humanity never realizing the humanity is always dressed in their would their color skin with their habits their cars their lifestyles and so to read something in which for once something that looked like you felt like you was humanity was a thing under discussion there's no small thing and now when I'm writing I like some of the books I've written on beauty I think particularly you know it's quite an old-fashioned structure it's kind of a 19th century book but but part of the reason for writing it for me was a kind of sublimated desire to fill the books that I used to read with people I recognized and hoping that some kids would pick up that book and think oh this is you know big book about people and the things they do but the people aren't all white for once they're not all white this is a the other side of empathy I mean you were here the other day when on the stage Cornel West and myself interviewed jay-z and there was that moment which I probably will never forget where he with jay-z basically said you can't imagine what it was to be me you can't imagine what it was to be me coming from Marcy projects being a nine year old kid and seeing my friend shot in front of me no I mean it's not something I don't think it is something you can imagine but through his music you can get really close and that's the most and for me a jay-z I'm sure for a lot of people who room it you know is a big a big hero because he is able to pick Lee the early music his rap is a way of thinking that's why it's strange to see him on a stage because he's a great intellectual in his music it's hard to describe but he's thinking through this form called rap and he thinks extremely eloquently in that form and then to see him on stage as like a fish out of water because I want to hear him doing that extraordinary thing he does with his language but but the gap in experience there to me and I still feel this far more than race is close what you can't imagine I think is being poor like that and that's the thing that I always particularly my own experience from being relatively poor and then not being poor I see already how you stopped being able to remember what that felt like that is really really hard that gap to cross and to contain and what's fascinating about rap music is it's all about that it's all about I used to be in the hood and now I'm no longer in the hood and does that make me still a rapper or not a rapper my still black Who am I not black am I still real or am I not real it's a articulation of that experience of not being working-class anymore which is extremely painful on one hand because everything that in jay-z's example everything that's fresh and beautiful and meaningful about his music came from that experience and he's slowly moving further further away from it exactly so it's a way of trying to to talk about that and what's brilliant about jay-z and the rapper's liking is that instead of pretending that movement hasn't happened he recognizes it he talks about it Dre is the same way if you pretend that you're still in the hood 30 years later when you're living in Beverly Hills some terrible betrayal has happened but jay-z doesn't do that he discusses the progression and talks about how it feels what it means not to be that type of gangster anymore to be this different kind of gangster and different kind of and he has he'll Sayed himself he has not abandoned at all the hustler mentality in him he spoke about it was with great eloquence now I think that what happens also is that that transformation changes you as a a reader you the fact that you your own life has changed and that your situation in life has changed has changed the way you read books yeah I'm very I guess I become weary of I suppose a sentimental ization of working-class experience so I always find that a bit annoying maybe more so than than when I was younger I just I I I think the principle of hip hop is a very good principle for literature the idea of keeping it real even if the real has transformed is a good one you have to be honest to your present experience and and the good thing about that rule is if you're extremely honest you will always be extremely weird that's what I always want to say to my students that the honest expression of experience is always strange and it kind of there's a movie I went to see recently I don't know if it's many people have seen it here or love it or hate it but musical tiny furniture which is by a girl who's a you know incredibly entitled a rich family all the rest of it but and most kids in that situation in there trying to make a run a million miles because so they're kind of ashamed of where they come from they think there's nothing there to say but she managed a way of just being brutally honest about this situation and that to me is a kind of hip-hop spirit it doesn't matter what the subject is if you can be honest to that experience and to tell the truth with which aren't always pretty and not particularly flattering to yourself art will find a way that will kind of squeeze out the situation and in in some sense your recent piece about the social network is an investigation of what constitutes reality yes and that's I mean that you say the thing you you you measure you I feel you answered that question by saying yeah Slayer I I don't know if I guess that's my nabek of speaking in my head isn't that reality is a kind of Kant term there's no such thing as reality in the general senses there's only a very particular personal reality and it is up to artists to try and be as accurate as possible to that experience of the world I can always say to my writing students always worrying about their subject is a subject more interesting and I find I wish I had more interesting life or but none of that is relevant the only relevance is to be as as accurate as possible it's not even about churning out autobiography it's it's something much I don't know lying to tell the truth it's a weird dynamic but you have to be honest in your practice of it um I was saying to you little earlier that you had chosen part of bucked which was a formalist back but then when you read the other books for instance his his kind of autobiography she changed his mind he was a great he changed his mind but I'm curious about that because you didn't quite answer it you know how how does one go about changing one's mind does one I mean what what do we need in order to because I mean in a way changing one's mind is a way of ensuring that we we remain interesting I think you have to put yourself in the way of things you wouldn't normally be in the way of and be honest that's the main reason I teach is because forces if you're in a room with 12 people under the age of 25 they're going to force you to read things you don't want to read to watch films you don't want to watch to look at things on the internet you don't want to look at and that's all positive to me it's just the feeling of being around younger people with different ideas you challenge your ideas I need that particularly in a job like mine where you have very few colleagues you know you have writers here and there you can email but you don't get a lot of company and I find my students have throw things at me that I have to handle so that's part of it and you also I suppose have to and I'm the I find is very difficult you have to keep on trying do you have to be willing to realize that what you did before it is very good you need to see the problems in it in order to change them the thing which I always have a horror of and maybe that's why I too much in the other direction is when I first started writing and first met writers had never met right before in my life when I was first published I started meeting all these writers and every now and then you'd meet someone who'd become so defensive and angry about their work and and would claim that they're all the worst books they'd ever written were their best books and I just thought god I never want to not know that this was good and this was bad I never want to lose the judgment of a reader in the ego of a write you don't suffer from that at all because you can't read yourself I may be too extreme at the other end you can have too much nausea and then not be able to write at all but I just having come from the world of readers I just always wanted to be to continue that feeling because I find readers to be good expansive people and writers sometimes could close down you know you become the defender of your own little backyard of novels even when you know they're not good and then you get older and then they give you awards just for being old and then it gets worse and worse and that I just didn't I I kind of have a horror of this how is it getting the spigot ward at the library becoming a library lion yeah named so very old I wasn't example yeah I was it was the reason I took it liked it was the idea of to me it's so surreal to be sitting here like a girl from wills that it's like it's something from the story of a musical and to be in New York and to have a life in New York to be able to write for New York publications for all of that stuff to me is extraordinary you know I never expected anything like that to happen in my life so and then to have some involved with the library it was just amazing so yeah that's why I took it when my mum was delighted she was very pleased in in in Hollenbach biorobot he has a passage which i i i love and which is very different from the back you you bring about in your Nabokov versus bath which is gems and EMPA I like I don't like and the like I like salad cinnamon cheese a pea more marzipan the smell of new cut hey why doesn't someone with a nose make such a perfume roses peonies lavender and then he goes on I mean it's honor the list move our epic we share is after death van for year Eisenstein I don't like women in snacks in slacks Gerron and names strawberries a harpsichord Miro tautologies animated cartoons ask you lab rubenstein villas that ya Villas to because the afternoons yeah but here what would interested me and the reason I'm bringing up this passage is that changing my mind is most forcefully in my mind a book affirming the importance of taste I mean taste which seemed to me such an important thing growing up I mean the the reason we were friends with people is because they in some form or another shared our adjective I love the idea thinking when you're young that you're friends with someone because they like the same band as you so inconceivable as you get older and older that that would be the thing which joined you something I love about teenagers is exactly that kind of seriousness like if you don't like this band we cannot be friends but but it's a profound it is serious but where is it in your book that you you speak about old an old boyfriend who you left and he did my Adam's rib I didn't meet him for that reason but it didn't help that's true III think I mean that's a beautiful passage of art and the wonderful thing about bird and the reason why I think he's a savior to a lot of people who are in those literary theory classes like I was feeling desperate is that boy is the man who's brave enough to say I like I like I like to bring this aesthetic joy and pleasures we saw as he said into back into the classroom and I think for him changing his mind was really a very personal Matty became this kind of intellectual superstore and then very quickly realized that you have to then defend your position and do all this tedious stuff that I don't think he was interested in he was really a lover of objects a lover of the Arts he wasn't out to be the King semiology so that was not his mission and some of his writing like a lover's discourse you realized that love is discourses it's exquisite and remember that passage on waiting yeah yeah I mean it's one of my favorite movie mazing he he analyzes what it means for a lover to wait for the and we feel so tremendously original when we're in love yeah we are we are really doesn't know everything I mean we are waiting we're looking at our watch if we're waiting too long we probably will leave not to be seen waiting and he goes through it and they anyway that really makes you actually be in pain for having been so lacking in originality that book is just a revelation when you and that's a thing when we stayed at the beginning that criticism and and the creative arts don't have to be in an argument because Bart showed that criticism is an art it's a separate art it's a beautiful intelligent wonderful art doesn't have to be the same as the creative arts it's something different but he was he made me have respect for the critic as someone who has absolutely as much genius as his supposed subject the novelist because you know when I was growing up there was a sentence in our Latin classes a hundred years ago which was the gustibus non despot and amassed of tastes you don't discuss and it seemed to me or is it the most interesting part of our life was to discuss and debate taste yes but when you taste changes it's changing your taste the same thing as changing your mind yes because I think all tastes are expressions of belief I'm about to choke sorry much no seems like coffee in the will um you know each novel I've written any novel anybody writes it's not that you sit down saying I believe this and I will write this but just by the nature of your sentences just by the things you emphasize or don't emphasize you're constantly expressing a belief about the way you think the world is about the things you think are important and those things change they do change and the form of the novel changes as well I a very simple example isn't a lot of my fiction I've delved very deeply into people's heads into their consciousness and kind of I tried to take out every detail the older I get the more I meet people and realize I don't know them my own husband is a stranger to me really fundamentally at the end you don't know these people that should be reflected in what you write that total knowledge is impossible gonna have to leave and choke backstage total knowledge is impossible thank you very much thank you you anything myself and I a few few questions if you'd like so we'll bring up a mic oh yeah that'd be great I had sorry poor thing like you knew but oh oh thank you have a kind you like oh I'll take this first and then we'll move on just a few don't worry I won't be long-winded come up to the mic if you would to the whole question of the Facebook and so forth this one I was talking about that with somebody and they used a word I had never heard before and the rest different and I was wondering do you have any ideas like that about the the effect that these new technologies have all creating neologisms beyond the technical neologisms but like different emotional neologisms I have to admit I quite like the neologisms that technology creates and I find defriend a really useful one I quite often in the real world think I must befriend that person um but again the difference in the real world is that defriending should be along you mean needs to be a proper process you need to have the conversation Internet makes it a little easy to different-- but uh I you know anything that makes new words I know that you're meant to find them Barbara sztyc but I kind of loved them that's the bit of Internet I love most is the word creation half of which I don't understand particularly the acronyms but but I kind of love that that's happening that to me is the creative part of the internet that it's kind of terrific terrain you're not serious um from the piece the new piece um just talk about what it means to be a person one point over since person 2.0 and at your age it must be a bit of a struggle to not become person 2.0 um I don't I have to be honest I don't know because I am opting out I can see it happening as each new platform happens I shrink back into my old ways so I really feel that when I was writing the piece that was my point of commentary from now on I'll be completely invalidated I would be able to comment because I won't know but I just from what I see I do think that my friends were heavily involved when it it does seem to be an inverse relation between the capacity intimacy and the kind of self-revelation that goes on online in a very basic way the inability to form eye contact kind of nervousness in person and and the wish always to text rather than phone all that kind of stuff those kind of minor ways of being of relating to someone um but it might be that those relations are a way the worlds can operate you know but the thing which I I do find exhausting as a person 1.0 is the amount of time everything takes it just it's easy to remember that 15 years ago that that email thing that we do that time didn't we didn't weren't doing that you know though how are we actually well it's interesting because it's thinking about seeing like Virginia Woolf manuscript upstairs I do remember from the Diaries and letters that she's writing about 20 notes a day right someone comes and picks them up and takes him down the street and put some all over London that's about the same as email right not so different though her notes would tend to be sure - I guess but the amount of time I have to give to this self admin I just don't think in 1994 I had this thing in my life called self admin that takes hours and that that seems a bit scary to me self generated unnecessary email yeah hello first thank you so much for mentioning George Saunders I love the article was a wonderful I sent it off to other people whose then young son wrote back and said at the beginning he knew there was something wrong with it he was about 16 when he went on it and he started making fake like groups and he said there was something about people just trying to celebrate the normal things of life he made a group where if he turned the light on in the bathroom sometimes he would forget so they need to go to the bathroom and then he turn it off do you like this and he said lots of people were doing that were becoming part of his like group are you like me do you turn the light on or off when you leave the bathroom one of the main things that I think it can be used for I after your reading your article I know two people one severely emotionally damaged another one definitely Asperger's they're having a great time they the damaged one said that because of the family situation she's been able to go into the little I don't know what it is farmland house land whatever it is and she can sit on the couch in the living room with her severely damaged sister in herself and talk about the family problems it's fascinating she can't talk to her in person they can't get along and it's it's interesting that it has aspects to it that normal people who have friends and can talk and write we don't like it it's creepy I think they're getting a lot of but I think the relations can be useful you know the same with the TV it's not that you go to TV for everything you need but it's also sometimes useful to have one in the back of Thanksgiving when you're about to kill your aunt so I I don't think it's those thin relations are evil it's just that you worried that they become the only thing and that you forget that there were other ways of relating to people but everybody knows that there are some certain people you'd rather text and talk to there is a criteria of person you really don't want to talk to a text is just good enough so I I don't think that's a inherently evil relation it's just it's the idea of it as is the way we should relate and the way Zuckerberg talks about it as a philosophy that slightly unnerved me yeah let's take a couple more questions I Miss Smith I bunked work in Washington DC to be with you here today thank you so much my question is relation to empathy and and your article that you wrote about the social network what what does empathy do to for the art of writing the novel does it change that oh sorry what is the social and others Facebook and does that reduce empathy and does that reduce our innate ability to be another I imagine no it it just might be that the novel is we've known it or the way that Eliot wrote it that novel just changes into something else I'd love to read a novel which managed to capture truly the texture of our lives now which are great deal of them spent online it to me the responsibility of a novel is to try and be honest to the times it exists in so it will change the form of a novel but that's a good thing the novel can't stay at the same place forever it can't have the same beliefs that Eliot had forever because people aren't that way anymore and that's okay I think hey the conversation minded me of another Foster Wallace essay which is the e pluribus unum one more talks about television and it seems like one of the insights from that applies to the internet conversation which is that it's not that it's inherently bad it's actually extremely good at what it does and then it's just easy and that the real issue is its easiness and in some ways it that seems to parallel with what's going on with reading right now where readings job is increasingly to convince people that a harder medium a process as you said is the way that they want to absorb life lessons and information and so forth and reading is now a niche process tool and I was wondering you just said that the novel should evolve do you think about how it could be I don't know easier I know it's almost a bad word but I I think the reason why novelists attracted difficulty or the reason someone like Wallace was is because that he's trying to slow you down really that's really what it's about he's trying for you not to process what's coming at you in the same way you would process TV or the internet when it's easy it's not always easy the internet but this job of the novel has always been to try and slow you down and be attentive to this thing and all what this was trying to say is that that job has become a little harder I have to slow you down in different ways because you're so such a great media consumer that I really have to go around the houses to make you stop and think and so I think that's why the novel is attracted to complexity and maybe that is annoying to a lot of people but I really feel with so much that's easily consumed can't we have this little corner which is occasionally a bit difficult it's not going to be the end of the world is it and nobody's forcing them on anyone if it ends up being a small community you were interested in that kind of complexity that was a movement for slow food there should be a movement for so really exactly it's just a different way of being in the world it doesn't seem to me a bad one one more I guess I people have to go eating stuff yeah I have a question I'd like to ask you with the aim of sort of demystifying the process of writing um coming from a former and why you creative writing suited actually um but I'm curious when you sit down to write a novel how fully fleshed-out is your idea for the book do you know each character intimately do you know each location each step no no no no matter of Mariette not at all and just upstairs when we were looking at to the lighthouse Woolf I really knew this about Woolf because I've seen other manuscripts but she will have like for each chapter a word pretty much maybe two and and what she's trying to get her is a sensation she's made a little edit for herself and the one page saying I see I used to be a start loose and get tighter where now I always start tight and get loose that means something to me immediately I don't know whether it means something to you but that is the way that novelists really talked to each other and that's why in a creative writing class like you've been in like I'm in there's so much dishonesty because it's very hard to say to 12 kids how about if you start loose and get tighter but that's the truth that's how writers really think about their work in that completely random stupid stupid way it sounds stupid but but it's something you do with your gut and and it happens sentence by sentence so a character is barely in my mind until I get to it and then I start making the sentences but I made absolutely no extensive plans I have an idea of a sensibility and a color and whether it's going to be loose or tight literally thank you very much thank you thank you so much you

Channel: Electric Cereal

Views: 97,076

Rating: 4.9038191 out of 5

Keywords: Zadie Smith

Id: 6Rx_2EB2p3o

Length: 96min 14sec (5774 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2013