Zadie Smith on Writers and Readers

"There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called "The Great American Novel" and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man ... Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible - it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve. The reason it is so hard to think of more than a handful of great novels is because the duty I've been talking about - the duty to convey accurately the truth of one's own conception - is a duty of the most demanding kind. If, every 30 years, people complain that there were only a few first-rate novels published, that's because there were only a few. Genius in fiction has always been and always will be extremely rare. Fact is, to tell the truth of your own conception - given the nature of our mediated world, given the shared and ambivalent nature of language, given the elusive, deceitful, deluded nature of the self - truly takes a genius, truly demands of its creator a breed of aesthetic and ethical integrity that makes one's eyes water just thinking about it."

- Zadie Smith (Full article)

My thoughts on Zadie Smith flunctuate with the seasons. I couldn't bare her first two novels; then I fell in love with her at the Hay Festival when she interviewed the writer George Saunders; then I lost my patience when I read the deeply flawed On Beauty. But now, here I am again, reading one of her essays and agreeing with everything she says.

Lets All Move to Monaco

I can't believe Jason Statham is only three years older than me. That means that he was about 30 years old when he filmed The Transporter, which is just one year younger than what I am now. And there I was, a few minutes ago, watching The Transporter and wondering what it would be like to look like him in ten years time! I seriously thought he was in his late 30s, early 40s. I just came to terms with the fact that my gaydar doesn't work, and now I have to accept that I'm also no good at judging people's ages.

The Transporter was beyond silly, in the same tradition as xXx. Things were somewhat bearable until the point where he got shirtless, covered in oil and... well, if you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. One of the villains was a man in his 60s with the kind of disastrous plastic surgery that only Michael Jackson could sympathise with. Still, watching a shirtless Mr Statham beat up some baddies was a nice way to pass this mellow Tuesday night.

This post is 10% inspired by murdermystery and oatmeal_texas. They know why.