Collect like seconds." I also recommend the audio book edition of this title, as Whitehead himself reads the thing in a dizzying performance. The people fall from above into hourglass dunes. They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train. ![]() Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder. One day the fiscal importunities of the subway announcer's union will be exposed and that will be the end of the hot tubs and lobster, but until then they break out the bubbly. What are their rooms like, the men at the microphones. With a dial controlling the amount of static. The postures on the platform sag or stiffen appropriately. From his secret booth the announcer scares and reassures alternatively. On the opposite track it's a field of greener grass, you gotta beat trains off with a stick. Here's one of my many favorite passages, set in the subway system: "This is the fabled journey through the underground, folks, and it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. And yet it never feels overwrought or exhausting, probably because he pays equal attention to the rhythm of his prose (this is one of those books you can't help reading aloud). In sentence after sentence, he manages to surprise you, keeping you in gleeful suspense for that next line, and the next one. Whitehead sculpts sentences here with dazzling, fluid mastery. ![]() As Whitehead eventually says: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world." He even outdoes Iain Sinclair in this territory because, hey, "Colossus" is actually readable. Whitehead simply uses it as a convenient dumping ground for heaping piles of metaphor, innuendo, and wry pseudo-Freudian slip-riffs. But interestingly enough, the city's identity is almost incidental. Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York" is a sort of prose poem to New York.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |