Changing My Mind On Zadie

Zadie Smith's prose and I do not get along.

I tried befriending it when I started (and stopped) reading White Teeth and On Beauty a few years back, this on the recommendations of well-meaning bookish friends. Of what I read, I felt afterward...detached...disengaged...just dunce cap dumb. Her prose just flew over my head, making me second guess what I read, how I read it. Did I not get it? Do I even know how to read? Ugh.

I saw a reviewer on GoodReads brand her right: she is a "glib genius". Her text truly preens in the mirror with little regard. Now, don't think me emerald green envious of her obvious gifts. Smith is an intelligent and perceptive writer who crushes stereotypes that woman of color can analyze Middlemarch one moment and label 50 Cent as a "leading man" with a straight face the next (and all in the same book, mind you), but she's still in a glass casing of academia, removed from a sense of realness.

I thought Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays would be an easier meal to digest and get on the right track with Zadie instead of a sprawling novel that I'd end up getting lost in. All it is is a collection of essays that cover various subject matters ranging from literature to film, and just possibly Smith would be better read in smaller, concise portions?

No such luck.

Changing My Mind --- while meant to be an inconsistent collection of random thoughts --- works in theory, but on paper the thought processes within just don't come together in an effective way.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

"The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, not describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do--I think it is even what fiction is for"

I find a lot of writing books redundant.

I should clarify: I find a lot of books about the instruction and lifestyle of writing to be redundant. Even a little pointless, and sometimes polarizing after a while.

It's not because I don't like to be told what to do, it's just that you can read so much advice, so much instruction that you spend more time on reading about writing, than actually writing. Also sometimes after reading, I'm left with a tinge of inferiority, that I don't fit the "criteria" for what makes one an illustrious author. How I didn't go to this school, graduate this particular program, know these awesome kooky writing peers, don't live in this bookish cliquish area, not tapping into the right writing 'zen'...catch my drift? Some authors just polarize, marginalize an aspiring writer, making them feel as if us peon hardscrabble scribes can't live up to whatever impossible lifestyle standard, all cause we are not this, that, and come from a certain background.

Granted there are some writing books that don't waste trees, and authors who in innocence just want to humble brag and dish freely about their writing lives, but I myself have certain criteria for what constitutes as a biblical tome for the written word. I prefer a book where the author is conversational, not instructional, and that they come from a real place, not some mythical fantasia of vintage typewriters, high-rise socials, and wrap-around scarves, pipes in the crooks of mouths. Leave that pretension at the doormat, I don't want it tracking in my house. I tend to like a book that just gets to the damn point, and tells me how fucking frustrating, spirit shattering, bloodletting, and all-around grueling writing is, while patting me on the back in support, showing me its ultimate rewards. I like a book that possesses lines like these:

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people--that is to non-writers in a capitalist system--for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim" 

"Being a writer can feel a lot like writing and giving up on writing at the same time." 

"Writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit---an exercise in finding out what you really care about." 

YES. This is what I want. Give me more.

Mucking Around With Mitford

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty" - Jessica Mitford

I must admit that today's political climate (and the exposure of Hollywood's sexual abuse "open secrets") has reinvigorated my love for investigative journalism.

For a time, the media seemed to allow one of its cornerstone mediums to sit on a shelf and collect dust as a new form of communication sashayed its way in. That new, sexy moll was the quicksilver truth serum known as social media. As it caught on, it became the fastest, most effortless way to compartmentalize and digest news, and it gave us a gift in return as it stoked our need for instant gratification and affinity by way of shares and likes.

Not that there is anything wrong with seeing those little hearts light up or wanting to nosh on your news in bite-sized tweets, videos, and memes --- I too enjoy the zip n' zeal of Samantha Bee's half-hour, hunkering down in forums of interest, and getting my point across in less than 140 characters (or is it 280 now?) --- but with the good comes the bad, and with every push towards progress, "clickbait" and "fake news" were bred as journalism's unfortunate new reckless onuses.

Instead of safeguarding how we share and report news I hate to say that journalists slept at the wheel. It often pained me to see falsities not taken to task, opinions weren't constructive but an exercise in ignorance and assholery, where we seemed closer to an Orwellian' "doublespeak" vocabulary that backed people into corners, and bred a sense of classist and racist entitlement. With such a breakdown of ethics, a laziness towards protecting the fourth estate was inevitable, and why I shouldn't have been surprised at the media's contribution to the rise of the walking bowel movement that is currently residing in the White House.

News isn't supposed to be glamorous, but it isn't supposed to erroneous either. It's to give voice to voiceless, not turn the volume up on those who are already screaming. Now we're getting a brisk, frigid shower wake-up to why you can't have it both ways, that you can't refashion the news just because the outcome doesn't suit you. Such distraction and ill-informed tactics do in fact dumb down a sizable portion of the population, and make it easier for propaganda-driven media conglomerates and cyber warfare to slink in.

Not only that, it allowed people to forget that fact checking, interviewing, extensive research, and the exhaustive and meticulous organization of such matter are elements that are essential for journalism and its assembly, and that all these elements work to expose and bring down corruption. It's bad enough with the current Fool In Chief we are gaslighted into believing that facts, realities, and just literal common sense are figments of the imagination, but for someone who came of age during drastic shifts in media --- where the Internet pretty much changed everything --- it was obvious to me that journalism took a hit, and began to dissent into fallacy and well, fuckery.

Time will tell if we're witnessing an All The President’s Men on steroids moment, where careers will be made (and others will crash and burn) and where we stop trying to legitimize talking heads and web darlings as "journalists". American journalism at current, to me, continues to be in a state of flux. It still wants to flirt with the loudest foghorn in the room, all while not checking any balances, but if there is anything  positive that has come out of the current presidential shitshow, the fourth estate --- the art of hunting and gathering, reporting and being forceful in corralling answers to inform the masses --- got its groove back and proved it wasn't totally knocked out by emojis and snapchats.

This new era of journalism was in the back of my mind while reading Poison Penmanship last year, and reworking this review for this year. I wondered what its author, the late Jessica Mitford would've thought of the "alternative facts" clusterfuck that became American journalism. What would she have thought of the Liar In Chief?  The infiltration of the fake news she so often rallied against in her hey-day? What response she'd have if she'd heard the authoritarian bravado of former Press Secretary Sean Spicer when he said that we should "disagree with the facts"? Maybe I answered my own questions, because within the pages of this 1979 collection of Mitford's greatest hits (and misses) is an honest and fierce exploration of the world of investigative journalism, and a woman who reveled passionately in it to seek the unfiltered truth.