Can't stop thinking about this Zadie Smith essay
Plus some food for thought on MasterClass + a little more "folklore" - but mostly the essay
My consistent Sunday evening writing schedule was bound to get mucked up at some point, and last night it finally happened. So here I am on a Monday night. I want to get a few things down before I forget them entirely but also before I forget them in this moment - how they’re affecting me here and now.
Timmy and I drove to Rhinebeck on Saturday, a town upstate, and didn’t do much of note but did stop in a great bookstore, Oblong. For safety and health reasons, they asked everyone to limit their browsing to 20 minutes, but I could have spent an afternoon there. A girl who came in behind us asked the guy who greeted at the door if they had a certain book - she couldn’t remember the name, but knew what it was a sequel to. Before he could answer, another employee walked by and said, “Oh yeah, we have that.” I felt I could trust them - as humans and as readers. It made me want to inspect all their staff recommendation cards.
I ended up buying a copy of Zadie Smith’s new essay collection, written during the lockdown, called Intimations. I learned about it shortly after finishing White Teeth so I figured why not continue reading her and dive into something more current.
While it is super short (less than 100 small pages), I’m still working through it. I bought it thinking I’d totally finish the whole thing that day, as we sat in the upstate sunshine, but in reality I melted in the upstate sunshine and got hangry and had to re-read the one essay I did finish once in bed later that night because I hadn’t done it justice.
The essay is the book’s leadoff, and it’s titled Peonies. Smith reflects on being captivated by bright pink, orange-streaked tulips (“Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies,” she says) planted in a New York City street garden, just a few days before the pandemic changed the way we live. The tulips are the launching point for a meditation on control - the control she seeks as a writer and the control (or sense of it) we’ve had to give up in the last few months.
I haven’t stopped thinking about these two sections:
Writing is routinely described as “creative.” This has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience - mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious - rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. Which can be a handsome, and sometimes even a useful, activity - on the page. But, in my experience, turns out to be a pretty hopeless practice for real life. In real life, submission and resistance have no predetermined shape.
This second part makes less sense out of context, but it’s the very end of the essay, after she’s talked about writing as a form of control, a way to make the world do what she wants even as she pushes against what is natural (like being drawn to bright pink tulips in the middle of winter, even though she sees herself as more of a refined peony lover):
I am not a scientist or a sociologist. I’m a novelist. Who can admit, late in the day, during this strange and overwhelming season of death that collides, outside my window, with the emergence of dandelions, that spring sometimes rises in me, too, and the moon may occasionally tug at my moods, and if I hear a strange baby cry some part of me still leaps to attention—to submission. And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic. Just before an unprecedented April arrives and makes a nonsense of every line.
I can’t get enough of those words and how they feel so timed to this moment but also like I’ll still be able to connect with them ten years later - when I won’t be in lockdown, but will still try to control the world through my words. It’s also how she ponders the existential (spring sometimes rises in me, the moon may occasionally tug at my moods) and acknowledges the practical and shallow (a self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic). We are always more than one thing at a time.
Couple links for the road.
Tonight I read this Atlantic piece about MasterClass - “What is MasterClass Actually Selling?”. It was equal parts enlightening and therapeutic. Something has always seemed weird to me about MasterClass. Not that there’s anything inherently shady about the company. Just like - what do people really think they’re going to learn? So in some ways, the story validated me. But it was also interesting to hear from both from people at the company and from celebrities who teach courses.
This section was the most fascinating - but by the same token, the most depressing:
In a way, MasterClass seems ideally suited to frustrated 30-somethings for whom education has not necessarily resulted in upward mobility or even a job, who feel stuck in their career without a clear path to success.
In fact, the company refers to its target customers as CATS: “curious, aspiring 30-somethings.” CATS are old enough not to be planning to return to school, but young enough, in theory, that they need help advancing in their career. A CAT is a person whose life has become complicated, who has had to put aside some of the things they loved to do, who isn’t exactly doing the thing they dreamed of doing, David Schriber, MasterClass’s chief marketing officer, told me. They’re anxious about their future, their present, their position relative to that of their peers.
Maybe I’m too hard on MasterClass itself, and instead realizing that its solutions strike me as unsatisfying. I feel that anxiety the CMO describes. But it feels like there has to be a better way - in terms of practical ways to start doing “the thing I dreamed of doing,” yes, but also in making peace with who I actually am.
The Rolling Stone Music Now podcast did their folklore album breakdown, and while the conversation wasn’t as revelatory for me as their Lover discussion last year, it’s still worth a listen if you’re digging the album.
Favorite tidbits:
Love what Brian Hiatt said about “last great american dynasty,” a song that has grown on me a ton - compared to a sister tune, “Starlight,” he thought it was written with a “jaundiced, distant, and acerbic eye” and I think that’s a perfect description
Rob Sheffield: “There isn’t a single song set at 2am. And most shocking of all, first album ever where she doesn’t laugh at one of her own jokes once.”
Felt very seen by Brittany Spanos saying she loved “peace.” It’s one of my faves and I don’t think it’s appreciated. She compared it to “False God” from Lover, which I totally see and connect with because I love “False God,” too
Alright. That’s it. Goodnight.