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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 216
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 30, 2005 - 01:14 am: | 
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I had a chance to read his latest as yet unreleased novel, "Apex Hides the Hurt," which, although under 200 pages, packs an allegorical punch. Though I can't say that the cover is particularly controversial, the discussion of the multicultural adhesive bandage (the main character is an ad man who specializes in nomenclature consultancy) eventually gives way to a quite interesting story about the history of a town, which the hero is called in to rename.
I like everything the guy writes, so this is no exception.
Btw, I also had a chance to read his "Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts" for the first time and really loved it, as I think anyone with a connection to New York City would. A prose poem to the city, a really lovely piece of writing. I must confess that I tried listening to it on CD while jogging and although the author's speaking voice is perfectly fine, I found that the audio format just doesn't work for me, so I returned it and read the book instead. Black print on a white page, so to speak, just works for me in a way that the spoken word doesn't, it allows me to savor certain phrases which would be lost otherwise. No, I could never speedread, who would want to?
So I suppose I'm now supposed to ask a question: Hey, how's it going? |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 810
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 30, 2005 - 06:51 pm: |
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Have you heard DJ Spooky's remix of "Colossus"? http://www.djspooky.com/sounds.html and scroll down to "John Henry 5000 Remix."
(He also has collaborations w/Amira Baraka from this link) |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 218
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 30, 2005 - 07:12 pm: |
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No, I hadn't heard that before. Thanks very much for posting the link. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1721
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, December 31, 2005 - 11:21 am: |
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Whitehead is so dry I haven't been able to develop a taste for him. Heard him read in person soon after his first novel came out. He puts on a good reading. |
Kris_broughton
Newbie Poster
Username: Kris_broughton
Post Number: 2
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 05, 2006 - 01:08 pm: |
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Saw Whitehead down here in the ATL two years ago at a reading. Didn't know who he was at the time, but since he was a black male writer, I figured I needed to check him out.
He comes in wearing some red sneaker looking shoes, a pair of grey pants that that looked like he slept in them, with a dress shirt over a t-shirt, a pale blue dress shirt that was untucked and unbuttoned. For a moment i thought I needed to bag it and go home.
He opened by reading the lyrics from "Fear of a Black Planet" - pretty impressive given that nearly all of the crowd consisted of well-scrubbed white faces.
He read from "Colossus" and took questions about his work. Somewhere along the way, the visual image of him and the marmalade sound of his voice faded into the background as he described how he created and edited his books.
I bought the "Intuitionist" that night.
Of all of his books, I think it is the best - the way he used the detective novel format to drive the narrative gave it just enough of a pace to keep you from getting bogged down in the prose. The spare approach he used in illuminating his key metaphor, the elevator, was as close to masterful as I've seen in a long time in a book by a black author.
"John Henry Days", while well researched, is leaden by comparison. I think the shorter length works better for him. I have been wondering about this Band-Aid book and how he was going to pull it off.
He is pretty squeamish about sex, unless it is an abstraction, one of the few things that he doesn't do well. I don't know if he is deliberately pandering to his market or if he has been drinking the literary fiction Kool-Aid so long he doesn't even realize that he doesn't include anything other than the perfunctory references to sex as if it is something that is not really supposed to be enjoyed, at least by civilized people.
I think his stint during his early (earlier, I should say - he's still under 40 ) as a part of the Fourth Estate has left him with some vestiges of the perspective of the disinterested bystander whose job is to chronicle, which is the role most reporters are trained to play.
It should be very interesting to read his work as he gets older.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 3235
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 05, 2006 - 02:06 pm: |
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Speaking of "interesting", your report was just that. |
Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 817
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 06, 2006 - 09:37 am: |
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The Intuitionalist is one of my favorite all-time books. I've re-read it and did not get that same feeling I got upon first reading it so I suspect my feelings about it partly has to do with where I was at the time. But it still is a breath of fresh air compared to so much that was out then, and has come out since.
In fact, I think I'll read it again! |
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