Saturday, January 3, 2009

Zadie Smith on "Speaking in Tongues"

While traveling on New Year's Day, I caught up on some podcasts. One I want to recommend is Zadie Smith's "Speaking in Tongues," the 2008 Robert B. Silvers Lecture, sponsored by the New York Public Library and posted on the New York Review of Book's website, especially if you would not have thought to compare Eliza Doolittle and Barack Obama on your own or appreciated what an Elizabethan Jesuit's treatise on equivocation can tell us about Macbeth and William Jefferson Clinton. A stunning performance, as well as a sobering illustration of the great expectations being freighted upon the president-elect.