thoughtcrumbs

Thank God I'm younger than Zadie Smith. I still have a couple of years to catch up with the savant darling of the literary world. And until last night, I wasn't even aiming to be a writer, but somehow she manages to inspire anyone within earshot. words leap from her tongue, like "autodidact," "infantile," and . . . well, I'm struggling to remember a third but am failing because I also spent half the evening fantasizing about what smart children she and Dave Eggers would have. (Anybody else do mental celebrity genius matchups?)

Two choice passages from her latest essay, On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair:

Coming from two cultures, as I do, both with hundreds of years of hair experience between them, it has become my habit to give hair-product advice to American writers, who – let us be honest – spring from a younger, immature grooming tradition, vibrant though it may be. If we can save nothing else from our old and beautiful Europe we must pass on what we have learnt. It is with this pedagogic mission in mind that I have taken such writers as Easton Ellis and T.C. Boyle aside and discussed the dangers of excessive gel and spray, respectively; I do not shy from sitting Sontag down and discussing the possibilities of subtle highlights. My advice is not always heeded, but I am English and so continue to give it.

Sometimes, when I am very embarrassed, language leaves me and only one word comes to my aid. That word is: thing.

And so I end up saying to Lorrie: “Oh, no…but when I said the thing I didn’t know that you and thing were like thing… and the thing is if I had known the thing about the thing I never would have gone on about the thing like I was some kind of a crazy thing who just does things as if saying that kind of thing was in any way …”