Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith is a person.



References

2016


2013

  • Zadie Smith. (2013). “Some Notes on Attunement - A voyage around Joni Mitchell." The New Yorker
    • QUOTE: ... Perhaps this is only a story about philistinism. A quality always easier to note in other people than to detect in yourself. Aged twenty, I listened to Joni Mitchell — a singer whom millions enjoy, who does not, after all, make an especially unusual or esoteric sound — and found her incomprehensible. Could not even really recognize her piping as “singing.” It was just noise. And, without troubling over it much, I placed her piping alongside all the interesting noises we hear in the world but choose, through habit or policy, to separate from music. What can you call that but philistinism? You don’t like Joni? My friends had pity in their eyes. The same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces. ...

      ... And then what? As I remember it, sun flooded the area; my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems; I began humming a strange piece of music. Something had happened to me. In all the mess of memories we make each day and lose, I knew that this one would not be lost. I had Wordsworth’s sensation exactly: “That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” Or thought I had it. Digging up the poem now, I see that I am, in some ways, telling the opposite story. What struck the author of “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) was a memory of ecstasy: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzy raptures.” ... It’s striking to me that this past self should at all times be loved and appreciated by Wordsworth. He understands that the callow youth was the basis of the greater man he would become. A natural progression: between the boy Wordsworth and the man, between then and now. His mind is not so much changed as deepened. ...

      ... I should confess at this point that when I’m thinking of Joni Mitchell it’s “Blue” I’m thinking of, really. ... the album pretty much every fool owns, no matter how far from music his life has taken him. And it’s not even really the content of the music that interests me here. It’s the transformation of the listening.