I realized after mentioning Changing My Mind in the reading clearout earlier this month that I had a few more thoughts on Zadie Smith's essay collection. How about a classic TOA riff-off?
As usual, the thoughts in italics are based on how I originally took the notes from the book.
The trick for editing is to become a reader rather than the writer, and this may require stepping away from the final draft until enough time passes for the transition.
I think this trick also works for enjoying your own work - the way you appreciate something as a writer is often far different from the same feeling experienced through a reader's perspective.
A good story doesn’t force the subject into a preconceived mold.
Smith shared this thought in the context of the story itself, in the sense that storytelling has certain patterns which a writer can fall into if he or she transcribes rather than recreates the story in the work. However, I also think the mold in question can be the frame of the medium, and I'm not just talking about the way youngsters are taught essay writing through the esteemed Five Paragraph method. I read a short story recently that made me wonder if it would be more suited to a novella, play, or even a song, and I think contained within the common expression "the book was better than the movie" is the wisdom that the author originally chose the book form because it was the best mold, so to speak, for telling the story.
Scaffolding is the frame that creates confidence when there is none. At some point in the process, the scaffolding can go and the writing can move forward without the extra structure.
The fear of emotional connection epitomizes the idea of knowing the meaning of words without understanding their value. The verbosity can be a shield from feeling.
There is a special form of ignorance you can spot if you pay close attention to the people who always seem to have a lot to say about any topic under the sun - I call it the Fact Parade, where one fact after another piles up until it seems entirely inconceivable that the speaker is knowledgeable about the subject matter. It is, in my mind, a form of scaffolding for the way it protects the ignorant from the fact of their own ignorance, and their verbosity is a shield that can be used to deflect an outsider in the same way it can obscure our inner feelings from ourselves.
Multinational corporations will seek international regulatory voids to find potential opportunities for exploitative deals.
The president of Firestone once implied, after working out the math he shared in a quote, that the average Liberian rubber worker “only” works for twenty-one hours per day.
If you need to see an example of the Fact Parade in action, ask someone to explain capitalism, and keep asking follow up questions anytime you get a list of facts rather than the truth. It might take a few days, but eventually you'll stumble into the reality at the root of the matter - in order to articulately explain why one person is worth less than another, you really do need to be completely clueless, and it just so happens that these clueless people are using their power to keep the system running.
You're the queen of the superficial, and how long before you tell the truth?
The larger idea built into the previous two points is that at some level we must all confront ourselves regarding the various delusions, deceptions, and disguises that represent the moral scaffolding of our daily existence. For the least fortunate among us, an entire lifetime may pass without ever partaking in this critical reflection...
...what?
Huh?
OK, fine, this isn't a thought I borrowed from Changing My Mind, it's lyrics to Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole". But who better to close out a riff-off?
Thanks for reading, y'all.
Footnotes (admin)
It didn't come up naturally in the course of the two posts about this book, so I'll just state it here - from my reading, I noted to check Remainder by Tom McCarthy, which given my current reading list will probably show up in a TOA reading review sometime after Emperor Trump's fourth term. I also reread the essay "One Week in Liberia".
