Abstract Invention: Why I Follow Colson Whitehead

I am not a stalker, not in the classic sense. I huddle in a dark corner of cyberspace and watch while people expose themselves in 140 characters or less. I follow them without leaving my chair and observe their deepest thoughts flowing down my LCD screen like the striping virtual reality symbols from The Matrix. Some people, in turn, treat me in the same manner. I am a Tweep.

Twitter has become an obsession for millions around the world. This is not to say that everyone registered with a Twitter account is obsessive about it, but the number of those who are represents the going rate of obsession in general. Internet pornography is still much bigger, although instances of 140 characters in a single setting are rare and usually signal an impending bukkake exhibition. Little foo-foo doggies are also big on the obsession scale, in their little foo-foo way, if that’s your idea of fun. My idea of fun with such animals is both cruel and sporting, and involves football goalposts.

On Twitter, we get to choose whom to follow, as much as any choice is a choice at all, rather than some predetermined reflex born from inheritance and freakish childhood experience. I’m not specifically pointing out the German people for the whole Hitler era, although that is a classic example of a choice making itself and sticking fast. Decisions are more plastic on Twitter; we can stop following a particular account with a mouse-click. It’s commitment lite, and cheaper than a Vegas wedding. Still, I don’t “unfollow” capriciously – it’s usually in response to a first strike by a mutual Twitter friend. An immature reaction? Agreed, but I don’t care, so there.

Colson Whitehead is a celebrated novelist, just obscure enough that many of the people reading this never heard of him. Neither had I, until early this year when the e-mail arrived from The Center for Fiction in Manhattan trumpeting his appearance to speak on the “Craft” of writing. I think the cost was ten dollars to get in. As a writer, I’m wanting in many respects and I’ll take the help wherever I can get it. Here was a real-life successful contemporary novelist willing to share his experience and the money seemed trifling in comparison to the value. I made my reservation for one and looked forward to the event. I was so excited I sent out a tweet: Heading into NYC tomorrow evening to hear Colson Whitehead tell me why no one's buying my fiction. I already know ... it's because it sucks 10:34 PM Feb 22nd via web

It was a rainy February evening. The trip in on the LIRR from Ronkonkoma was uneventful, as was the walk from the Bryant Park subway station to 47th Street, except for the cold, wet sponge that kept swabbing my clothes and missing my umbrella. The Center is a fairly new entry on the scene, squatting in the space previously occupied by the Mercantile Library. Walking in, I felt the dry air of an ancient bookstore and smelled that decaying odor of old books and older people standing guard over them. They perked, not unlike casually dressed prairie dogs, members of an intellectual patrician coven peculiar to New York (though not nearly upper crust nor ambitiously friendly and fortunate that Manhattan lacks trailer parks), estimating the strangers among them with a visual frisk. I checked in, removed the wet coat, wrapped the umbrella, parked them on a rack and headed up the stairs.

A quick aside, because I think it’s important. I usually don’t include photos in my posts. Maybe I should, if only as a distraction. I do so in this case because Colson Whitehead appears to be of African descent. He’s good-looking in a gawky masculine way, resembling a cross between Lenny Kravitz and Tracy Chapman (though I can’t imagine the E-Harmony tabulator spitting out that match).

His background, however, belies the physical appearance. He attended a toney private school in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard. He made his bones at the Village Voice, the vanguard of White Liberalism. Besides the four books, he has written essays describing a post-racial vision for America. I’m 100% behind him on that, with the added pragmatic view that people still have eyes and still lean towards snap judgments based solely on visual information. It’s an intrinsically human reaction to massage sensory data with symbolic identifiers. We see it, attach a thought to the sight, and put that thought into words. The schematic of the brain sets the route and asserts an impulse.

I never cared for the term African-American, if only because it automatically assumes that every Black person in America is American, which doesn’t jibe with a trans-global existence. We need to improve on it, if only for the time required for Colson to work out the post-racial conundrum. I nominate the term Africanish. It satisfies the demand to describe the external visage without assuming too much more. I will use Africanish, when appropriate, for the balance of the piece.

I found the room filled with chairs, mostly empty, upon my arrival. I took a spot several rows back to the far right of the podium, next to an old oak table conveniently placed against the wall to hold my bottle of water and my notebook. Yes, I was prepared to take notes … I’m such a dope. The room began to fill with a variety of different human forms – young and old, male and female, Caucasian and Africanish. It seemed to be a great turnout and we all awaited the guest speaker.

Heads turned and a few stragglers rushed to find seats as a tall Africanish man with long hair tied in a ponytail loped towards the front, towing an entourage of old biddies whose major literary claim lay somewhere in their deep past as students at NYU, maybe trying to orally convince Gregory Corso that he wasn’t gay.

Old Biddy in a younger body: (Wipes the edge of her mouth with a lace hankie) Well?
Gregory Corso: Sorry, it didn’t work. I still prefer men.
Old Biddy: Are you sure? You seemed to be enjoying it.
Corso: Well, that’s because you look like a guy.

Sitting in the seat to my left was a young, very serious-looking Africanish man in a business suit, brandishing a Blackberry. I’m not shy about engaging strangers in conversation, but I’m not so doltish as to ignore the invisible wall when raised. I respected his No Trespassing sign and focused my attention toward the front of the room as the introduction rambled forth.

Properly announced, Colson Whitehead, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Grant, winner of several awards for writing and runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, began his hour-long presentation with the following sentence.

“I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin' on the porch with my family...”

Yeah, I knew at the outset that this wasn’t going to be very educational. Colson immediately expanded on that throwaway line from The Jerk by describing his background and the reasons why he didn’t identify himself as a strictly Black author detailing the Black Experience in America. He felt he didn’t possess the proper credentials.

I do him an injustice by not relaying the witty candor with which he described himself. Colson Whitehead is a humorist at heart and as self-effacing as he is a master at pointed observation. However, as the evening wore on and he delighted the literati in the crowd with satirical jabs at old wordsmiths and critics, peppered with insider references that eluded at least half of the audience, I could feel the growing sense of disappointment, and not just my own, circling the room. His message to the young (and, in my case, not so young) writers was simply that there was no “craft” involved in an endeavor as personal as writing.

The young man next to me spent a good part of the hour staring at the screen of his Blackberry. I spent my time scribbling notes in an outraged vein, not so much on my own behalf but rather for the more impressionable young people squirming in their folding chairs, awaiting the touch of the golden hand of Calliope while enduring the launch of a comedy career. I made a promise to write about the experience, but only after its image shrunk to a dot in my rearview mirror. Check another one off my to-do list.

Here’s the postscript. I haven’t read any of Colson Whitehead’s books yet, because I wanted to get this out of the way first. I know I’m going to end up being a huge fan of his writing. It’s inevitable, and that sort of allegiance forgives all. I wanted to make certain to get my ten dollars worth before I forked over more dough for his books.

In the meantime, I’ve been following him on Twitter. That began soon after I tweeted about attending the Center for Fiction event. He replied to my tweet, something to the effect that he had the same problem. The exact wording is lost in the Twitter ether, probably deleted by the author. His Twitter entries are witty, intelligent and generous. He’s the only person I know confident enough to use the word torpor in a tweet. That’s high-octane English, my friends, and always worthy of a retweet. You can join me in following Colson on Twitter - @colsonwhitehead. His website URL is http://colsonwhitehead.com