Animals

Zadie Smith reads Frank O’Hara’s Animals at Coudal.com

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Picnic, Lightning

(apologies to Nabokov)

Can I make you think, now, of Mrs Carshalton.
Absurd as it would seem, every morning she commutes from the centre of London to the centre of Paris in a series of neat navy two-pieces, to attend to business at the embassy and then to déjeuner in the same brâsserie every day at 12.50, an establishment that frowns on sparrow-feeding. Still, surreptitiously, she tends to let crumbs gather in her napkin and then fall discreetly when she finishes around 1.30, stands up knees together like a lady – she is no great animal lover, I think, but she is full of that misplaced English verve for charity.

Mrs Begum’s Son and the Private Tutor

So Mrs Begum said to me, “Young man, young man… I can see you are getting some ideas. Don’t get ideas. No ideas round here, yaar? My son does not need a companion, or a friend-type-thing, or any of your English moral guidance – Magid needs this one thing: A private tutor. Question a) – are you willing or not, will it do or won’t it? Question b) – have you the ability? Can you or can’t you?”

Hanwell Senior

Hanwell Snr was Hanwell’s father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his person—he was a “big personality,” in that odious phrase—but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A feckless and slapdash man—worse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all.

Letter from Liberia (from guardian.co.uk)

PART ONE

Monday

There are no direct flights from England to Liberia. Either you go to Brussels or you book with Astraeus, a specialist airline named after a Roman goddess of justice. They run a service to Freetown, in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The clientele is mostly Africans dressed as if for church. Formal hats, zirconiums and Louis Vuitton holdalls are popular. A toddler waddles down the aisle in a three-piece suit and bow tie. Only non-Africans are dressed for ‘Africa’, in khakis, sandals, wrinkled T-shirts. Their bags are ostentatiously simple: frayed rucksacks, battered cases. The luggage of a nomad people.

Hanwell in Hell

I am looking to enter into correspondence with anyone who remembers my father, Mr. —— Hanwell, who was living in the central Bristol area between 1970 and 1973. Any details at all will be gratefully received by daughter trying to piece together the jigsaw. Please write back to P.O. Box 187.

Read better

11. System readers, system writers

“A work of art,” said Nabokov, “has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.”

A writer with such strong opinions would find it hard

Fail better

1. The tale of Clive

I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel.

The Zen of Eminem (from Vibe)

As Chris Rock had it, something sure has changed in America when the best golfer is black and the best rapper, white. Rock’s choice of words is remarkable: not richest, not most famous, but best. Because there can be no doubt about it anymore, and it’s getting sort of churlish to deny it.

Dreaming up Finch

BEN GREENMAN: You have written about a woman who has a trauma in her past—specifically, a woman who, when she was a girl, killed two other children. This will partially ruin the story for those who haven’t read it, but it’s important for the first question: Were there any famous child killers on your mind when you started this story? What are the risks involved in writing about a character like this?