When I Get the Shiver

Coates, Yang, Smith, Christie and the Early Detection of Radiant Objects

I knew Ta-Nehisi Coates was going to be big when he was still an under-employed freelancer, writing on his own blog, just starting to garner some attention through links and short excerpts on higher profile blogs, in particular Andrew Sullivan’s blog (maybe at The Atlantic by that point?). There was a distinctiveness and electricity to Coates’s writing that jumped out at me (and others, obviously). “He’s going to be important,” I remember saying to a friend. 

I knew Wesley Yang was something special about a third of the way through the second paragraph of his 2008 essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” when he stuck the landing on this bit about his old friend Ethan: 

“Ethan had left New Providence High School in central New Jersey for the progressive utopia of Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Simon’s Rock was a school for high school juniors and seniors ready for college-level work, a refuge for brilliant misfits, wounded prodigies, and budding homosexuals. Ethan was a pretty bright kid, brighter than me, but mostly he was a budding homosexual.”

“...mostly he was a budding homosexual.” Shit, I remember thinking, that’s good.

I’ve been raving over the last year or two about Blake Smith, who’s been publishing a series of critical essays about various American and European intellectuals whose thought, he believes, contains intellectual and creative resources that may aid in the revitalization of contemporary liberalism. I’m surprised Smith hasn’t been called to the show yet, but it may have something to do with the admirable, but also reckless, bluntness of some of his work. Too often he just says what he means–insulting other writers, stepping blithely over various third rails of contemporary politics–and it has to make potential editors uncomfortable. Consider the opening of his recent piece on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:

There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their ‘creative’ and ‘interesting’ counterparts.

The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality. (Why young women of this type increasingly purport to be gay men, and pursue surgery in an attempt to make themselves so, is a mystery for another time.)

There’s a tingle I get, a brain shiver, when I read something like this. Some of it, I realize, is the transgression. Who has the balls, these days, to type anyone in this way, much less women? But it’s not just the transgression. Transgression is easy, technically. You just have to have the nerve for it. What’s rare is this kind of mastery of language and acuity of perception. Some people just see more subtly, penetratingly, or novelistically than the rest of us. And only a small subset of people with such vision have the writing talent to translate their cognitive perceptiveness into compelling language.

I’m not the only person out there who can sense this energy when it’s coming from a certain kind of political intellectual or cultural critic. I’m reading these people in the first place because an editor invited them to write a piece, or accepted their pitch. But I’m pretty good at it, IMHO. When I get the shiver, I’m usually right.

I got the shiver in the third paragraph of a recent essay in Tablet, “The Class Politics of Instagram Face,” by Grazie Sophia Christie. Christie is a London-based writer whose day job, per LinkedIn, is “content specialist” at Spotify. She’s also a 2018 Harvard grad (BA, English) with a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford. At Harvard, she was the fiction editor of the undergrad literary magazine and worked as a research assistant for both Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand (Henry Louis Gates must have been on leave). She went to high school at the Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart, which a random website says is the best private school in Miami. She probably knows whereof she speaks, in other words, when it comes to upper class politics and manners. Which proves nothing about whether she has the chops to say anything interesting about them. What proves it is this:

Good face, like good taste, has a direction: downward. The success of Instagram Face, its ubiquity, isn’t the start of cyborg aesthetics. It’s the end of it. Because what might save us from such apocalyptic beauty is something almost too ugly to say out loud: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?

The rhythm of that first sentence, and the potency of the thought packed into it, is pretty exceptional. The last sentence is less virtuousic, but it plays its role beautifully in relation to the other. It’s the easy, langurous chaser–not a comma or colon in sight–to the staccato shot of “Good face, like good taste, has a direction: downward.” 

This isn’t just, or even, writing at a high level of professionalism and elegance. It’s evidence of a rare mind finding the language to express its distinctive perception of the world, of fierce intellect under intense pressure. Most writers at the best publications simply can’t do this, ever, though they may be able to do other things that Christie can’t. I’m not sure if I can do it. Maybe I can sometimes.

I don’t know if Christie will become an important writer. All sorts of things can get in the way of talent fully expressing itself. Yang, for instance, lost his groove for almost a decade after “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” then found it again for two or three years, and now seems to have lost it again. I don’t know what’s going on with Coates, who hasn’t written anything nonfiction in years. I wrote a whole book about Dave Hickey, a writer who could easily have snorted himself into dullness or death a dozen times before his talent matured, and who did his best work only within a very specific and rather fragile matrix of forces.

Luck and conditions play a big role in all this.

What I can say with some confidence is that what’s evident in this passage, and a number of others in the essay, is that Christie has the talent to be special. It’s exciting to see.