Tag / New Yorker

by Edward Champion

Zadie Smith: The Literary Material Girl

There are many unpardonable qualities within Zadie Smith’s recent New Yorker confessional, which should bother anyone who has even a shred of empathy for anyone making less than $50,000 a year.

There are many unpardonable qualities within Zadie Smith’s recent New Yorker confessional, which should bother anyone who has even a shred of empathy for anyone making less than $50,000 a year.

There is the embarrassment in Zadie Smith blabbering about a very private matter with a “friend” in a very public magazine (did further calumny emerge when the New Yorker‘s notoriously thorough fact checkers contacted this woman?). There is Zadie Smith’s callousness in collecting a loan from someone who is clearly impoverished (particularly when the money was “no skin off my nose,” as Zadie Smith reports; it is certainly “no skin off my nose” to buy a homeless man a sandwich from time to time, but one would never consider asking for the sandwich back). There is Zadie Smith using her privileged position as a New Yorker contributor, where she will collect a check she really doesn’t need for an article in which her friend receives no compensation (indeed, if anyone who knows both Zadie Smith and “Christine” connect the dots, Zadie Smith’s friend actually loses some “value” in this Faustian bargain). Zadie Smith characterizes her previous self as “a working-class girl who’d happened upon money” with her “essential character unchanged,” which sets up Zadie Smith, a 34-year-old debutante, to come out to her discreetly charming bourgeoisie demographic. (We do know that Zadie Smith attended the Franzen party, where she was “surrounded” by Nathan Englander, Mark Ronson, and Patrick McGrath. It would be difficult indeed to detect blue-collar bonhomie from this bunch.)

In short, Zadie Smith has written a tremendously insensitive article that is essentially the confession of a selfish and stingy ablutomaniac who seems to possess little desire in comprehending the motivations of anyone outside her bubble. This is the same novelist (“Fail Better!”) who confessed that she couldn’t write fiction after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger, but who didn’t even have the guts to stand by her words — much as she didn’t have the nerve years ago to stand by her characterization of England as “a disgusting place”. (Go to the Guardian site now and you’ll see that the Shields article “has been removed as our copyright has expired.” And isn’t it interesting that this essay, published in The Guardian, on November 21, 2009, didn’t appear in the paperback version of Changing My Mind, while there’s no such problem with other essays published at The Guardian. One expects such cowardly backtracking from an army of publicists surrounding an overly protective Hollywood actor.)

But it’s this George Sand mess that I feel the overwhelming need to clean up. From Zadie Smith’s article:

Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it. George Sand: “Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.” Well, it needn’t, but it does the way I do it.

Forget the split infinitive. The Sand quote, which Zadie Smith has lazily leeched from the shaky Thinkexist.com website, doesn’t appear in five editions of Bartlett’s Quotations that I consulted. And that’s because the quote doesn’t really come from Sand, but from a character within La Comtesse de Rudolstadt: a youthful-looking, middle-aged Zingara with a beautiful guitar beneath her cloak who is trying to express how she lives and relates to other people. Zadie Smith (like many self-published quotation books before her) leaves out a key part of the passage she’s quoting from. Here is the appropriate context:

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true exchange will disappear in the future society. We, I and my mate, practice that exchange and so enter the ideal.

This specific translated phrasing can be found in Joseph Amber Barry’s Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 284. Barry quotes from a three volume edition that was published in Paris in 1959. Regrettably, he doesn’t indicate whether or not this is his own particular translation from the French. (There was a three volume Classiques Garnier edition of La Comtesse de Rudolstadt published in 1959.) But other translations of the same passage suggest that Sand was getting at much more than some facile “leave them out in the cold because they won’t appreciate your succor” philosophy, as implied by Zadie Smith, the self-declared “financial illiterate.”

Here is the Gretchen Jane Van Slyke translation: “We, on the other hand, we have no need of the rich man’s money, we’re not begging; alms demean the receiver and harden the giver. Everything that is not exchange must disappear in future society. In the meantime, God allows my husband and me to practice that life of exchange and thereby to partake of the ideal.”

The Francis G. Shaw translation: “As for ourselves, we have no need of the money of the rich; we do not beg; alms debase him who receives and harden him who gives. All that is not exchange must disappear from the society of the future. In the meanwhile God permits us, my husband and myself, to practice this life of exchange and thus enter into the ideal.”

The Frank H. Potter translation: “We do not need the money of the rich, we do not beg; alms degrade those who receive them and harden those who give them. All that is not an exchange should disappear from the society of the future. Meanwhile, God permits my husband and me to practice this exchange, and thus to enter into the ideal.”

The Sand quote is one of the article’s most irresponsible components. For it paints George Sand — a literary figure who was very much concerned with charity — as a Reagan Republican. Let the bums starve on the streets. They’ll feel degraded anyway. And you, the benign charity giver, will harden your heart. It’s all about money, which isn’t neutral. Etcetera.

This clearly isn’t what the Zingara suggests at all. The rather idealistic viewpoint being promulgated by Sand’s characters is that all actions should be predicated upon exchange and that life, which does involve giving and receiving, would be more manageable with mutual consideration.

Zadie Smith chooses to view her exchange with her “friend” Christine as one that is centered around material goods. Give the “loan” to a friend and ask for the money back, rather than give the “loan” to a friend because it is the kind thing to do. Whoops! It was never about giving the money back. Christine then performs the charity of forgiving Zadie Smith, perhaps hoping that Zadie Smith will learn that what she did was extremely shitty. A fair enough exchange. But Zadie Smith hasn’t learned at all. Zadie Smith feels “degraded.” So Zadie Smith seeks a new form of exchange by memorializing this incident for the New Yorker in a professional capacity, where, presumably, others reading the incident will be able to pay this “exchange” forward. But it’s not really an exchange at all, because Zadie Smith will be remunerated materially for her inhumane solecism.

Writers routinely mine from their own personal experience. This has been true of artists as far back as Lascaux. But George Sand was very clear about how charity factored into her craft. Here is her epigraph to her autobiography, Story of My Life:

Charity before others; Dignity towards oneself; Sincerity before God. Such is the epigraph of the book I undertake. — April 15, 1847

The date is only five years after she had written La Comtesse de Rudolstad.

In an October 28th, 1854 letter, Sand would write to Armand Barbès:

But let me tell you what my sentiments are. There are actions which are beautiful and good. Charity may impose silence upon honor itself. I do not mean real honor, that which we keep intact and serene in the depths of our conscience, but visible and brilliant honor, honor as a work of art and as an historical glory. (Emphasis in original)

Barbès, of course, was an opponent of the July Monarchy — a period in French history when the haute bourgeoisie very much dealt the cards. When the Society for the Rights of Man was broken up by the police, Barbès created the Society of Avengers and was thrown into prison. There was also the Society of Seasons. In 1849, Barbès was sentenced to life imprisonment after attempting to bring down Auguste Blanqui, a one-time revolutionary collaborator who had become his enemy.

Barbès was, as many histories have shown, a fiery and colorful character. Sand was a friend. She was responding to Barbès’s sentiment (“I acted in a moment of surprise, when thinking more of my own interests than of those in the cause”) in relation to the Blanqui incident. She knew Barbès to be capable of charity.

In a May 11th, 1861 letter, Sand would write to her cousin Pauline Villot, in reference to the possibility of the Academic Francaise proposing Sand as a candidate for the Gobert prize:

I should not think it honest to accept a charity to which others in worse circumstances have real claims. Should the Academy accord me the prize, I would accept it, not without regret, but so as not to pose defiantly and to allow the morality of my works (which are said to be immoral) being openly declared. (Emphasis in original)

In other words, should any writer accept a great honor, they should view the honor as a form of exchange. The charity should be reciprocal. And as far as Sand was concerned, that reciprocity extended to not delimiting the morality contained within her work.

Aside from her experiential blunder, why then is Zadie Smith showing so little charity to the intricate moral questions contained within George Sand’s work? Why does Zadie Smith show so much dishonor not only to her friend, but the moral possibilities of writing?

It is because Zadie Smith does not appear to understand this vital “exchange” component of charity. It is because Zadie Smith blithely assumes that the New Yorker readership does too. It is because Zadie Smith has given George Sand a superficial read.

One must therefore ask how Zadie Smith will be able to take up the Harper’s New Books column with anything less than self-serving motivations. One of Zadie Smith’s predecessors — the late John Leonard, who wrote the same Harper’s column for many years — objected in 2007 to the sense of opportunism and entitlement that afflicted so many young critics. But now those young critics are growing up. Like Zadie Smith, the critics who remain entitled now approach writing not as a calling, but as a way to declare how little they care for viewpoints outside their own. That isn’t charity by any definition. It’s a writing approach that has the rare distinction of both degrading and hardening its practitioners.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #315. Auletta is most recently the author of Googled and writes the “Annals of Communication” column for The New Yorker.

segundo315

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if his Chinese food takeout history can be Googled.

Author: Ken Auletta

Subjects Discussed: Clarifying Auletta’s theory of Sergey Brin and Larry Page as “cold engineers,” responding to Nicholson Baker’s review, whether an engineer’s viewpoint is applicable to business, the efficiency of newspapers, Talking Points Memo, journalism that is translatable to the online medium, addressing the Gray Lady’s deficiencies, the McSweeney’s answer to the newspaper, Coach Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, Brin and Page’s apparent insensitivity to the book industry, Al Gore’s observations about Google’s eccentricities, the Google Chrome EULA controversy, user trust, the moral dilemma of Google Book Search, whether Google should be recused to some degree because the world has become increasingly privatized, the CIA and outsourcing, whether or not Google Book Search’s threat to an author’s livelihood has been overstated, Google’s obsession with 150, comparisons between Itek and Google, collapsing computers, Auletta’s affinity for control, Eric Schmidt’s views on promotional value, Rupert Murdoch’s recent dealings with Bing, CBS’s early involvement in YouTube, traditional media and online advertising, when Google is efficient, and investigating the semantics of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” mantra.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

aulettaCorrespondent: There’s one question that is presented in the book, but never actually quite answered. It’s probably something I just observed. And that is Google’s fixation with the number 150. They have 150 projects. They have cafeterias and conference rooms that are max 150. Did you ever get an answer as to why they were obsessed with this number? Numerologists?

Auletta: (laughs) I don’t think they’re obsessed with the 150 products. In fact, now they’re probably below 150 projects. The 150 — Larry [Page] actually did a search. Larry’s fixated on 150. It’s the size of cafeterias. To have people collaborate and talk to each other and not pull back and engage. And he did a Google search and came up with that answer to confirm his instinct. Now have I done that search to check that he’s right? No, I have not. But he, in his scientific way, came up with that answer. And he goes around the cafeterias. And he’ll say, “This is too big. This is the right size.” You know, each of them have little fetishes that they’re passionate about. And they’re insistent on. And that’s one of Larry Page’s. And who’s to say he’s wrong? They’ve done pretty good.

Correspondent: Let’s go back to the three horses you were talking about earlier. Google is developing anywhere from 150 projects to less, as we’ve just established. Search revenue is starting to dwindle. I’m curious if some of the more recent products — like, for example, Chrome OS, which is an open-source scenario, and Google Wave — these are a little bit different from the norm. Because the learning curve is a little bit more. It’s something that’s more designed for geeks than for regular people. Do you see this as a way of them anticipating that more regular people, more lay people, will become power users? Or are they just essentially carrying on with the same instinct that drove their company in the first place? Which was, “Let’s go ahead and do this and the revenue will come later.”

Auletta: Everything’s a jump all. Everything is “Let’s experiment. Let’s try this.” And that’s part of the genius of Google and the genius of the two founders. Their willingness to try things. To basically ask uncomfortable questions. And the why question: “Why not?” They come into every meeting and they say, Why not? So why not do Chrome? Why not do Wave? Why not have cloud computing? We have this computer capacity? Why don’t we utilize it? And why do people have to spend three hundred some odd dollars for Microsoft packaged software? Why not have it in the cloud which will follow you wherever you go on any device you’re on? So they’re asking those questions and they’re trying those things. And I think it’s much more the latter point. It’s basically: Let’s take some risks. We have the resources to do it. And wouldn’t this really be cool?

Correspondent: Or maybe it’s just a natural expansion. For some reason, reading your book, I was struck very much by the history of Itek in the ’60s. You know, Itek, where they were the people behind Project CORONA. And they just gobbled up companies left and right. Similar to what Microsoft did two, three decades later. But Google is a little bit different in the sense that everything is essentially developed in-house. Does this ensure that they won’t implode like Itek and, to some degree, Microsoft?

Auletta: But Google buys. They bought Android.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Auletta: They didn’t invent that. They bought it and took the guy who invented it. And he’s there running Android for them. Mobile device business. One of the dangers they have — and, for instance, the argument is that they don’t have a social network engine. So they’ve been slower in that area. So you noticed yesterday, what they did, they announced that search would extend to social networks in real time. And it’s a weakness they have. And it’s a weakness that any company, if you rely just internally. It can be a weakness if you just go out and acquire, and outsource everything. They’re trying to do both. Will they succeed? I don’t know. No one knows. The game continues and there’s no end in sight. But at some point, we’ll find out. Other great companies failed and then came back. Apple failed and then came back. So I take a long view of this stuff. They are trying things, but they’re getting large. And as you get large, you start losing creative people.

(Image: JD Lasica)

BSS #315: Ken Auletta (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Did the New Yorker Make Nicholson Baker Elitist?

Last year, the New York Review of Books had the bright idea of commissioning Nicholson Baker to write an exuberant essay about Wikipedia. Beginning with the simple sentence, “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing,” Baker’s piece went on to chart his participation and subsequent obsession with the well-known website. Baker expressed his genuine horror at cavalierly deleted articles and depicted the many communal surprises he found along the way. It was a journey of self-discovery that permitted many who had used Wikipedia to rediscover the collective pixie dust selflessly sprinkled in the pursuit of knowledge. The essay was widely cited and linked. Here was the man who had once tapped his life savings to preserve newspapers now mining unexpected nuggets from a rich digital deposit. And Baker, under the moniker “Wageless,” continued with his Wikipedia contributions for some months after the article had been published.

Fast forward to today, with The New Yorker — a publication that not a single writer can afford to say no to — commissioning Nicholson Baker to write about the Kindle. But where The New York Review of Books managed to subvert expectations, the New Yorker has applied a marketing team’s craven predictability, with Baker corrupting his voice in the process. Baker’s essay is laden with cheap shots and clumsy generalizations. He’s not interested in seeing the bigger picture, even as he attempts some slapdash journalism when talking with Russ Wilcox on the phone. I’ll defer to Teleread’s Robert Nagle for Baker’s gross technological oversights. The more troubling betrayal here — one I hope that is merely temporary — is that the man who once unapologetically expressed his passion about John Updike, Wikipedia, and the use of “lumber” is nowhere to be found in this piece. He has been replaced by a brazen elitist who — in this essay at least — is closer to Lee Siegel in temperament than the man who once wrote gently and eloquently about card catalogs, or the writer who has devoted his career asking us to find the magic within the quotidian. The man who has subtly beseeched us to commiserate with the lonely and misunderstood people toiling in offices and talking on phone sex lines has momentarily transformed into a cavalier ruffian who scoffs at regular people for having the temerity to express their enthusiasm on Amazon and who likewise suggests that all blogs are “earnest and dispensable.” (That last comment echos a regrettable stance that can also be found within an inexplicably meanspirited passage from Baker’s forthcoming novel, The Anthologist: “You have to hand it to those podcasters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody’s listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.”)

For a writer who has been so careful with his sentences, it’s astonishing to see Baker capitulate like this.

I’d be willing to accept Baker’s assaults on Jeff Bezos and the authors who appeared in the Kindle promotional video if Baker wasn’t so fixated on kicking down the average Joe like this. If Baker is going to go after Michael Lewis, Toni Morrison, and Neil Gaiman, then you’d think that he’d cop to the fact that he’s betrayed his own endearing populism for the New Yorker‘s lucrative word rate and prestige. (It should be observed that this is Baker’s first appearance in the New Yorker in nine years.)

The essay’s apologists will probably point to Baker’s defense of the iPod Touch (via Eucalyptus, ScrollMotion, and Stanza) later in the essay as a pro-technology concession. But aside from Baker’s inherently subjective position (indeed, one that doesn’t seem to consider other viewpoints), there’s Baker’s more troubling elision of class. How many unemployed types can afford either a Kindle 2 or an iPod Touch (costing $70 less than the Kindle 2) right now? Oh yeah. Baker hasn’t bothered with that. I guess one of the deals you make when you now sign on to write for the New Yorker is to act as if any thinking or feeling individual making under $30,000 a year doesn’t exist. Or that anybody who puts long hours into a blog or a podcast, or who uses a Kindle to read, can’t possibly be of societal value.

That’s a far cry from the man who once celebrated the “strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose” and who marveled at the capacity for people to build grand things with merely a keyboard and a desire to help. I hope that the old Baker comes back. But this new guy who can’t be bothered to laugh at a wasp passage because it appears on a screen? He sounds like a guy at a house party who can’t laugh at the Seth Rogen movie because it’s not playing in a movie theater.

[UPDATE: I will let this article stand unmodified and uncorrected as a reflection of how I felt at the time. But after some thought, I believe that I jumped to several needless conclusions, some of which have been cleared up by Nicholson Baker himself in the comments. (This update, incidentally, is not motivated by Baker’s appearance. I should point out that I was all set to respond to several comments before he arrived. But propinquity being what it is, the timing has worked out accordingly.) The upshot is this: I suspect that the rather grumpy tone of this article came about because I wrote it just after coming off a particularly terrible six-hour bus ride spearheaded by an unpleasant authoritarian driver who was screaming at random passengers and who did not know how to drive. My girlfriend and I, both in the early leg of this rather hellish journey, had acquired the article through email and read it on a cell phone. Perhaps these reading conditions prove Nick Baker’s point that the medium and the circumstances in which one reads can indeed factor into how one perceives the article, I detected several sentences as troublesome, interpreting them in an emotional way. I presented my findings in rather persuasive terms to my girlfriend, who was somehow persuaded. (I have a regrettable tendency to be able to persuade people of things even when I am wrong.) And the writing of this post occurred not long after we finally decamped from the raving lunatic driving the bus. I still believe that Baker should have used his writing talent for more enthusiastic purposes, but it was wrong of me to suggest some Svengali-like collusion between Baker and Remnick.]