I offer you a roundup of the ovation vocation. 
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty made the Booker shortlist; she’s a Booker virgin (thanks, Neha). It’s out next Tuesday, but you might find it shelved stealthily in the fiction section as early as Saturday.
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, an homage to EM Forster’s Howards End, has received mixed reviews from critics. [Link]
Zadie Smith, On Beauty*
Julian Barnes, Arthur and George*
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
John Banville, The Sea
Ali Smith, The Accidental [Link]
It is a story about Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle… The George in the title is George Edalji, a Birmingham solicitor and the son of a country vicar from Bombay who was a converted Parsee… in 1903, Edalji was convicted of maiming horses in his father’s parish of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire. The ‘Great Wyrley Outrages’, as they were known, became a cause célèbre when Doyle took up the cudgels in order to correct what he regarded as legal injustice and racism. Doyle became to Edalji what Emile Zola was to Dreyfus. [Link]
<
p>M.I.A. lost the Mercury Music Prize to Antony and the Johnsons (thanks, PB). Gayest thing ever recorded? Nuh-uh. It’s gotta be ‘Carolyn’s Fingers’ by the Cocteau Twins. Gayest thing ever recorded? ‘Carolyn’s Fingers’ by the Cocteau TwinsAnything by an artist who’s actually gay is too obvious (sorry, ‘YMCA’).
“It’s like a contest between an orange and a space ship and a potted plant and a spoon.” … His voice has been likened to Nina Simone and gay magazine Attitude described his album as “the gayest thing ever recorded”… [Link]
The drama of defining second gen continues apace. Come on, yaar, it’s a simple vada pav test. If he doesn’t know marmite, fish and chips, bangers and mash, he’s not a true deshi:
Although he holds a British passport… Hegarty, 34, has spent most of his life in America after his parents relocated to California when he was 12. Earlier this month, Kaiser Chiefs accused Hegarty of sneaking on to the shortlist through a “technicality”. “He’s an American, really,” said Nick Hodgson of Kaiser Chiefs, who hail from the rather less exotic Leeds. “It’s a good album, but it’s daft he’s got in on a technicality.” [Link]
Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six
* Sepia-fied 
sadly, manish, I don’t think there are any Cocteau fans here to take umbrage at that. Would Echo& the Bunnymen count as gay?
A &the Js looks too much like a Tim Burton cartoon sprung to life, so I can’t hate..too much.
RIP, MIA. Slayed by her hype.
(unless she drops a second album that shuts up the naysayers once and for all. but I’m not holding my breath waiting for it. A gangsta bitch has shit to do, yo!)
Ahem. called it. sort of.
dearest cicatrix, you are both correct and not. 🙂
(i just didn’t take umbrage.)
here:
Apparently MIA flounced out of the ceremony in a hissy fit when the result was read out and she lost – what a diva
that’s not very gangsta ho of her. She should have started slapping people and throwing her shoes.
Don’t forget pulling people’s hair while hissing and spluttering like a cat gone psycho. Maybe she’s from the Mariah Carey school of divadom instead….
I thought the gayest thing ever recorded was Y.M.C.A or I Will Survive?
Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” should at least get special mention…
Shall we turn this thread into a ‘Whats the Gayest Song Ever Recorded’ thread?
On an Indian tip I would say any song from any Karan Johar film.
Have you noticed how camp some Hindi films are these days?
Forget MIA – even Zadie Smith has gone all gangster diva on us:
Right – money everywhere like those writers with their quarter of a million pounds book deal for their first novel. How vulgar!
oh hey now! Authors work like dogs, get treated like shit, and make a pittance. Don’t hate cuz she wrote something really bloody good and was recognized for it! (my God, I just told someone not to hate…what is this – opposite day?)
Pick someone like that da vinci code guy, or Danielle Steele, or some other overpaid schlock writer (aoughdeepakchopracough)if you wanna go down this route..
ANNA, my deepest, most sincerest apologies. I should’ve known you’re both exhuberently full of life and appreciative of quiet melancholy. Given that list, you are more of a shoe-gazer than I will ever be 🙂
wow cicatrix, how quickly you turn 🙂
i’m still down with the sister. brilliant music don’t lie. the rest is noise.
peace sm
Siddhartha, you wound me deeply! I’m so loyal, I stand by my girl like Dubya stands by his every fuckup appointee!
I’m so unwavering, it’s like I was born in a flight suit aboard an aircraft carrier!
My snark must’ve blurred my sincerity because I thought this:
makes it clear who I was rooting for, and that I think this sort of anti-popularity pick is just stupid when that blue moon moment happens and popular happens to also be good.
I will be carrying lillies to her graveyard plot every Sunday, at least until that next album shows up.
my apologies, darling. my snark-o-meter hasn’t been functioning too well of late. i should send it back for a refund.
glad to hear you’re “staying the course” and “completing the mission.” after all, “it’s hard work!”
sm
cicatrix
I support all those struggling writers who make no money and work hard and in obscurity – if I could I would go to their garrets and feed them all soup and buy them bread and cigarettes and wipe their artists brow as they cough in damp and poverty.
But Zadie is a diva for sure though. She has nothing to complain about. £250,000 is a good deal! Anyway I like divas.
Tell me Cicatrix, do you believe that every woman has a hissy-fit Diva inside them just waiting to get out?
I think Zadie’s hissy fit is a sure sign that she is about to move a real country.
Martin Amis, I believe, said something about England having no more “piss and vinegar” left. He said this before or soon after he left.
Inspite of your new Culinary aspirations, Brit Pop, “lad” culture blah blah blah, you are nothing more than Norway with more people.
My apologies to the Norwegians.
Wow tef thats a really insightful post thanks alot!
Why thank you Punjabi Boy. : ))
I am just making a prediction that Zadie is going to move. That is my hunch. You know every single one of you really wants to “make it” in a country that matters.
Hell, even the Irish are doing better than England.
Let’s face it, the English whilst occasionally amusing are of little consequence.
tef
Errr – yeah whatever dude.
Sweetheart, not any more than every man, straight or bent. It’s just that ‘diva’ and ‘hissy-fit’ are what a woman is called, while a man is said to ‘know what he wants.’
pish-tosh. For every chick I’ve known who burst into tears, I know a guy who’s punched a wall. Same diff, in my book.
See, Martin Amis can whine about the lack “of piss and vinegar” and it’s sort of admirably curmudgeonly, no? But Zadie mentions “aspiration arseholes” (too fucking true! hello, what is reality TV than people trying to get ahead on zero ability or minimum effort?)and she’s a diva…
cicatrix
I know all that I was just teasing you 😉
But you dont think someone who gets millions for her books complaining about money and aspirational people is a little…..strange?
ack! my own razib moment. I’ll never live this one down 😉
someone who gets millions for her books complaining about money and aspirational people is a little…..strange? No. I see a difference between her situation and the people she refers to.
(I’m going to get stoned for this)
She wrote White Teeth as a relative unknown (a total unknown as far as I know really) and had no idea how much she’d ever get for it, or even if anyone would ever even read the damn thing. Work first, money nice surprise, yeah?
by “aspirational arseholes”, I assume she’s refering to people who keep money first and foremost (well, maybe the things it’ll buy first and foremost), judge others by their net-worth, and have a generally crass attitude towards life. I saw a lot of that in NY around the time of the hi-tech bubble.
sorry if this is just pedantic rambling and not answering your question. er, what was your question again?
I dont know – I think we were just shooting the breeze 😉
Well, yeah I suppose so. But she had it really easy. There was no real struggle there. Her best friend at Cambridge introduced her to one of Salman Rushdie’s best friends, who introduced her to his agent, who took her on, and then Uncle Salman wrote the blurb, and then she was invited to Ian McEwan’s wedding party when she was 19 years old, where she made friends with Martin Amis. So whatever she has done she has not struggled. I believe she got the advance on the basis of a few chapters of White Teeth and completed it after she signed the deal.
I dont begrudge her that success – she is short listed for the Booker and you dont get there if you are an amateur. She is a quality author no doubt about it. But I can imagine that writers who do struggle for years and then get little reward or review space might imagine she was being a little churlish. Multi millionaire writer decries the great unwashed money grabbing masses. Those with money are always the first to say that money doesnt matter.
I agree with this, but as determined as I am to avoid idealism at all costs, I’ve chosen a career that pays peanuts because I value what I do over another path that would definitely pay more. Sepia is a great example of that since Abhi, Anna, Manish & Co. could be looking at this in terms of billable hours, you know?
We are looking at Zadie’s comments in fundamentally different ways, I think. Sure, she got lucky. But talent needs some luck. Struggle doesn’t necessarily equate with talent. And the very lucky but talentless end up being Paris Hilton. So find a better target, dammit 😉
Damn, go offline for 2 days and come back and see my fave band of all time being picked on!
I’m not offended, but I do think it was a VERY weird song to call out. Where do you get the gay vibes in that song as opposed to any other CT song, or 80s song in general?
There’s an excellent review of “On Beauty”, written by Michiko Kakutani, in the NYT (needs a free subscription):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/books/13kaku.html
From the review: Following the lead of both “White Teeth” and “Howards End,” this novel also pivots around the stories of two families with intertwined lives – families who represent very different ways of looking at the world. Not unlike the bohemian Schlegels in “Howards End,” the English-born Howard Belsey and his African-American wife, Kiki, are multicultural liberals, whose view of the world is rooted in the political struggles of the 1960’s and the academic zeitgeist of a would-be Ivy League college. Howard’s rival – in the rarefied world of Rembrandt studies and in the larger world of cultural politics – is Monty Kipps, a right-wing Trinidadian professor and pundit whose old-fashioned materialism recalls that of Mr. Wilcox in “Howards End.” Monty’s enigmatic wife, Carlene, forms an unlikely spiritual bond with Kiki and upon her death leaves Kiki an expensive bequest that, like the bequest left by Mrs. Wilcox in “Howards End,” will have all manner of unforeseen repercussions.
Kakutani calls it “glorious… wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed”.
For a non-fictional account of the experiences of George Edalji and his family from 1876 to 1914 visit http://www.the plebeian.net. This is an overview of “Conan Doyle and the Parson’s Son: The George Edalji case”, to be published by Pegasus on the 6th March 2006