The Colossus of New York & It Came from the Closet
essays meet memoir or slam poetry, the answer MAY SHOCK YOU
In which I cannot remember where I got a recommendation for a book, saw the audiobook was available from my library, saw it was a mere three hours long, and threw such caution to the wind that I don’t remember who sold me on it or about what. This is to say: this is where I write about why and how we read more so than I actually write about, say, books.
So, I don’t looooooove The Colossus of New York. One critique I saw skimming GoodReads (not exactly a wealth of critical thought, but) was from a reader who similarly bounced off Colossus because nothing felt particularly New York City about this book about New York City. People get caught in the rain or go to the park and peoplewatch everywhere, and much of the book hasn’t made a compelling argument that these are particularly different when they take place in New York.
The writing, however technically proficient, is too flowery for me.
Check the clock to see how much more sleep. Still time. Down there, they deliver and pick up. We each have routes we keep to keep this place going. Gods, here’s a tip: to gain converts, recruit atheists, change your name to snooze button.
But what strikes me as less of a personal preference–type complaint is that despite the slam poetry–style qualities of the prose, there’s suprisingly little emotion in Colossus and little position being staked out. I feel like there’s a huge gap between the speaker and the subject; as a reader, I’m not sure what Colossus actually thinks about New York City.
It reminds me, conversely, of Feral City, Jeremiah Moss’s personal account of life in the city during the pandemic and protests of 2020. In Feral City, a lifetime of living in New York City flavors the author’s opinions of what was gained, lost, thought to be lost but actually gained, etc, during this time. In The Colossus of New York, a commitment to capturing detail slowly starts to feel for detail’s sake alone. It’s clearly not going for the memoir angle that Feral City did, and Colson Whitehead has very different, more impressionist goals as a writer. But beyond personal preference, it’s unclear to me if Colossus is a celebration, criticism, or tone poem of commuting to the office, especially when the platitudes leap out.
Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.
Maybe I’m just particularly sensitive to the idea of enshrining commuting right now, as someone who 1) has lived in New York City for a decade, 2) now works fully remote after the pandemic and cannot express the extent to which I prefer this, and 3) finds the pendulum swing back to the office unsettling. Grindr has abruptly announced a return-to-office policy – whether you live in the same state as an office or not – as a union-busting tactic. Zoom is going hybrid, which, although for employees already within commuting distance only, sure is ironic given the only thing they do is make a product that helps people work remotely. And Amazon, as always, sucks shit:
despite the pushback, Amazon’s leadership remains resolute. Mike Hopkins, senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, recently said in an internal meeting that it was time for workers to “disagree and commit” to coming back to the office. “We’re here, we’re back – it’s working,” he reportedly proclaimed. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
So I’m kind of just not in the mood for an ode to the commute framed as a quintessential element of New York life. For a work so focused on the people of New York, Colossus has yet to particularly study the community of New York, which, in contrast, was Feral City’s whole thing. I keep reflecting on the conclusion of Arwa Mahdawi’s piece linked above about the bleakness of how capitalism breeds no imagination:
In the first year of the pandemic, I thought that this collective traumatic experience, which claimed so many lives, might change the way we live. I thought – how naive! – that there might be a widespread reassessment of what was important, and we might all fight for change. I thought the pandemic might be a portal to a better society.
It wasn’t. We clapped for essential workers, then abandoned them. The poor got poorer; the rich got richer. House prices shot up; shelter became even more unaffordable. Remote work seemed to be the only positive change that might stick, and now it has gone. Three years on, it is very clear which path we chose.
This is, perhaps, not a fair line of critique to level at The Colossus of New York, published 20 years ago, by all indication just not for me, and with many chapters admittedly not about people getting up in the morning to go to the office. But 20 years have passed and this isn’t the essential writing about the city I was under the impression it would be! And the Mission Statement of ReadOnly isn’t to write reviews of 20-year-old books, but to find what I actually like to read and do that weird memoir-ish, essay-ish thing I like and muse about why that is.
And there is a separate chapter about leaving the office.
Eeking out all day and then quitting time, and they hit the streets. It’s already dark, their days are growing short. This time of year makes you feel even grayer than usual. Tacked-up cartoons add a little homey touch.
We’re here, we’re back. It’s working. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I know it’s better.
It’s certainly more fair that I’ve bounced off Colossus for having too neutral a tone or unclear a position than it is for not incorporating memoir into its poem-essays, which it never set out to do. I have learned that, perhaps not surprisingly, I prefer things that do. I’ve been reading It Came From The Closet, an essay collection about horror movies through a queer lens, partly as research I could maybe apply to my own poetry about horror movies, but also I love how these are movie essays combined with personal essays, working in tandem, building off of each other, strengthening each other.
Laura Maw’s essay “Loving Annie Hayworth” is half queer reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and half personal essay about a similarly possibly coded friendship. I love this ekphrastic kind of study of media through intensely personal, stranger-than-fiction anecdotes; how can you not find two teenagers who might be lesbians watching a movie with two characters who also might be lesbians fascinating?
It’s the film’s most intimate scene. Annie talks openly about her previous relationship with Mitch, assures Melanie it’s over. She is witty, flirtatious, charming. Like their earlier conversation on the porch, it’s full of subtext: Annie offers Melanie her sweater; she tells her, coyly, that it’s extremely cold in her house at night – and they both pause here, uncertain. There’s a palpable friction in this scene between desire and the anxiety of its expression; both women are wary of vocalizing it too directly and opt instead for coded phrasing, double meanings, invitations that are both sexual and platonic. […]
It was a conversational rhythm I knew well: the punctuating sparks of jealousy, the careful negotiation between vocalizing and disguising desire
So we get some juicy sad storytelling:
I kndw something had changed, and wondered if she knew, but I wasn’t prepared to ask her.
Which goes on to inform the lens the text is studied through:
The camera toggles, back and forth, between a closeup of Melanie and the jungle gym behind her. Each time we look at the playgorund, another crow has settled. To me, it’s hard not to read this scene as a visual expression of queer anxiety […] The horror here is not about action. It’s about anxiety – anticipating what will happen without quite knowing.
And the ambitions and success of the art just absolutely glow through the lens of this writer’s personal experience, the life they’ve lived, and the truth they want to tell, perhaps understood with this mirror truth in another work of art that predates them.
This was, too, what my relationship with Laura felt like: orchestrated by the thrilling agony of suspense.
And it circles back around to the juicy sadness of real life, escalating:
After that day at her house, I fixated on the next time we would be alone. What would happen? Would she kiss me? I felt feral with anticipation
I just fucking stared out the window when I finished this essay, just floored by 1) a beautiful analysis of a film I’d not really considered particularly good, through a subtext I never picked up on, and 2) the narrative of the author’s formative experience, which could easily just have been a “and technically not much ever really happened” story, but gets heightened with this parallel analysis.
Anxiety, then, looks toward the frightening possibilities of a future event, and it is resolved once that event takes place – either in the sense that the threat has passed, or its extent has been misjudged. In horror, this rhythm of anxiety lowering and heightening is a faimilar one: it’s a cycle that repeats itself until the third act, in which – usually – the threat is escaped and the possibility of future threat is eradicated. In queer narratives, this type of anxiety – one that has an end point – is a familiar convention too: this anxiety exists in order to be overcome, eventually, by the sheer force of teh potagonists’ desire […] But anxiety is not resolved – either by the eradication of threat or by the antidote of desire – in The Birds.
Ambiguity – rather than resolution – is the final note of the film
The essay uses this reading of the text (ambiguity) as a lens on her own experience (which progresses and ends… ambiguously), helping improve the authors’ understanding of both, and the reader’s of more.
It’s the kind of dance that I absolutely love about – changing gears wildly once again, but I swear I’m wrapping this up – Tim Rogers’s video game reviews. Analyzing the dating sim Tokimeki Memorial can tell us as much about the medium’s strengths and limitations on telling stories and conveying ideas about romance as it can about processing our own past selves’ limited understandings of romance. His video on Boku No Natsuyasumi – a game about being a child on summer break – becomes analysis on both the text’s explorations of childhood, vacation, and memory and on Rogers’s understanding of his own childhood and relationship with memory.
I just think this is pretty cool stuff when done well, don’t ask me to write a whole counterpoint about the affective fallacy. I just wish this early passage from The Colossus of New York – where the speaker was more clearly Colson Whitehead as opposed to an omniscient New Yorker – was ultimately the direction it kept going in:
You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.
Just a little rough to go from that to Times Square as written by, idk, Times Square?
Is that an angel up there or just a forty-foot soda can?
Standard plugs zone:
I have a new review up at Kissing Dynamite of Ashley Cline’s two new chapbooks of 2023: electric infinities and cowabungaly yours at the end of the world. I liked them! You should, uh, still read the whole review though, there’s more than that.
Speaking of Kissing Dynamite, did you know I am Book Reviews Editor there? I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books, but I also will edit your reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write! Surely everyone’s dream is writing poetry reviews under the mentorship of one half of the team behind Bad Books, Good Times. Who could ask for more
Over on Trash Garbage, a playlists and vibes blog thing I’m part of, we posted a new free jazz, jazz fusion, & avant garde jazz playlist jokingly titled THIS JAZZ KILLS FASCISTS and a background noise video playlist that is more and/or not at all exactly what it sounds like titled Weather Channel Playback for Mentally Ill Girls