Colson Whitehead

I think you know what time it is. It's time to get ill.

And my op-ed is up, too.

Basically, I looked into Pat Buchanan's head to describe his boogey-man.

Scary!

I had to get a beeper 'cause my phone is tapped.

My article on Self-Lit is up here.

For "space" reasons, we cut a little. With the magic of the internet, I present these crucial paragraphs:

I ask Jane Persons, an associate editor at Quist Publishing, about the sudden popularity of personal memoirs, or Self-Lit. “Reality TV is responsible,” she declares one evening in her office, the exuberant hubbub that is Union Square percolating beneath the windows. “Before reality TV,” she explains, “there were no memoirs. Only dry histories of important subjects, a few novels, and the occasional travel guide. But once ‘Cops’ went on the air during the writers strike of ’88, starting the reality TV craze, there was no looking back. People started writing about their lives. And the public started buying them.”

I look at the walls of her office, which are literally lined with books. Above the couch is a poster for last fall’s big memoir, “She Called Them Brussel Sprouts: A Survivor’s Tale,” which Persons edited. The author, Stephen Meadows, is following up with a book on grilling -- recipes interspersed with personal anecdotes that one assumes he left out of his first book. I wonder, can there be such a thing as too many memoirs? Will we run out of interesting stories?

Persons remains sanguine about the prospect: “The world is full of things it would never occur to most people to do, but which can be quite harrowing if handled correctly. Gerbil taunting, cheese rubbing. Unicycles. One of last year’s best-selling Self-Lit books came from that most unlikely quarter, the underground world of butter-smearing. I’m still kicking myself for passing on it.” I investigate later. According to BookScan, “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margarine: Confessions of a Butter-Smearer” has sold 4 million copies and been translated into two languages.

The next week I’m in the cemetery. Margaret says she wants to show me where her friends hang out. As we walk past the graves, she murmurs their gang names, as if to refute that which has been carved into stone. “Choc …Ula …Franken …Berry …Lucky …Charms.” She whispers, “All my homies are dead or in prison.”

So all this time we've been talking about a transference issue?

My piece on Brooklyn is up.

It contains a sort-of reference to the unfinished killer Google app, the Google Superego. It will be quite handy. When you’re out late and say to yourself, “I’ll have another pint before I go home,” the Google Superego pops up and goes, Did you mean: Go home right now? When you think to yourself, “There’s a twelve hour Top Chef marathon on Bravo and I’m going to watch it,” the Google Superego pops up and goes, Did you mean: Read a book and tell your family how much you love them?

Hurry up, Google.

Rain Gray Town. Known For Its Sound.

So, I handed the book in. It will be published by Doubleday in April of 2009, it looks like. It’s a love story set on the cusp of the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of white people in it, so I had to do great amounts of research because I was writing “outside of my experience.” Basically, I watched a lot of “Golden Girls.” And it worked out!

I have three readings coming up.

February 8th at Pianos for One Story’s reading series.

February 20th at Rutgers University.

March 25th at Pacific Standard with Christopher Sorrentino

I'm only reading new stuff these days ("The Tsar has dimissed the Duma! The Tsar has dismissed the Duma!"). It's fun and easy to do!

That's the way it is!

Touch It, Bring It, Pay It, Watch It, Turn It, Leave It, Stop – Format It

Actual news.

I am on the nicotine patch – the 30th time is the charm.

I finished a draft of my book. Still plenty of stuff to be done, but it’s at the point that if I get struck by lightning tomorrow, or a few seconds from now, the book won’t end with, “Inspector Georges looked around the room and said, ‘The murderer is – *

I will be returning to the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop next summer.

I have a few readings coming up.

Monday January 14th
Seattle
Benaroya Hall

Tuesday January 15th
Portland
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Friday, February 8th
New York City
Pianos

This event is part One Story’s reading series. The venue, Pianos, is where I threw a birthday party with some friends 12 years ago, back when it was still a piano store and had a little space in the back that they used at night for parties. It was also where I paid my rent when I lived on Ludlow Street – my landlords owned a bunch of properties in the area, and kept their office there. I always paid late, because I was broke. So it’s like Old Home Day.

*It was the dimwitted groundskeeper. The whole dimwitted thing was just an act.

It Is A Hybrid, Gentlemen – Half Pig, Half Vampire. A Hampire, If You Will

I Don't Think I Can Make It, But I Want To Send A Gift

The Industry Has Changed So Much, But There’s Still a Lot of Money To Be Made in Ancillary

Obscure Blog Header as Jenny Holzeresque Statement on the Banality of Discourse

Are You a Black Writer, or a Writer Who Happens to Be Black?

Is that a dumb question, or a question that happens to be dumb?

The Ships Have Returned! The Ships Have Returned! The Fleet of Sorrows! Let's Pack Our Things!

That's it for me. Writing from now until New Years, with these brief detours:

The Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, where I'll be teaching.

The 2nd annual Brooklyn Book Festival, where I'll be reading.

Summer Literary Seminars Kenya, where I'll be teaching/chilling.

The book is going swell, just finished Chapter [redacted], making me glad.

Good luck, smell ya later.

Rise Up Little Souls and Join the Doomed Army

I’m talking a bit in the coming weeks, before I disappear for a long time. Typing all this up, you’d think it was Black History Month or something.

Friday, March 30th
NEW YORK CITY
“Branding and Freedom in the Market Economy”
Lolita Bar, 7 p.m.
Maud Newton has put this together. I’m talking with Calvin Baker, author of Dominion and Once Two Heroes. I think this will be rather fun.

Friday, April 6th
PENN STATE
“Community Read Gala Lecture”
Palmer Licton Auditorium, 7 p.m.
This is a symposium about The Intuitionist. Michael Berube will start things off, and then we’ll take it from there. Complete info is here. Pretty neat. April 15th is the 10th anniversary of finishing the book, so expect me to get a little misty.

Thursday, April 12th
LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY
“Becoming a New York Writer”
6 p.m
Colossus of New York, getting the city in there, the whole megillah.

Friday, April 13th
NEW YORK ROUND TABLE WRITERS CONFERENCE
12:30 p.m.
I’ll be the lunchtime “speaker.”

Thursday, April 19th
MILLERSVILLE UNIVERSITY
7:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 22nd
PHILADELPHIA BOOK FESTIVAL
Skyline Room, 2:30
With Colin Channer, whose new book is Girl With the Golden Shoes.

Tuesday, April 24th
PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL
“Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment”
Cooper Union, NYC, 7 p.m.
A veritable cavalcade.

And then it’s back to the home dimension for debriefing. Except for this:

July 8th-July15th
TIN HOUSE WRITERS WORKSHOP
Portland
Teaching, taking in the Pacific Northwest air.

Then more debriefing. Smell ya later!

Can't You See Me Dancing Here, I've Got My Back Against the Record Machine

Things have been swell. After a couple of weeks of on and off travel, I’m back home for a stretch, and it is very nice. Warming up outside, the time of year when shut-ins start looking for their clean clothes.

The tour for the paperback of Apex ended up being a fun time. It started in Seattle, with an interview for Nancy Pearl’s "Book Lust," which was filmed in the University of Washington Bookstore. The weird thing was, I’d spent a summer in Seattle living in an apartment building called The Malloy – and my window looked out on the back of the University Bookstore. Spent a lot of hours looking into that alley…Actually, it was as if I’d spent 18 years crossing the alley so that I could look at that apartment from the other side.

It – the tour - ended up in Los Angeles, and I have good friends and a cousin there, so I had a nice time hanging out between gigs. The first half of my stay, I stayed in the Bel Age Hotel, off the Sunset Strip. The cabbie who took me from the airport took the smaller roads, so I was like, I’m in the middle of nowhere, but of course when I went out that night I saw I was across the street from the Whiskey A Go Go, and around the corner from the Viper Room. (Moment of silence.) The carpets of the Bel Age had years of cigarette smoke trapped in them, and the rooms had bees.

I checked into a room on the 8th floor, nice view. Open the balcony door, go to the bathroom, come out again and there’s a bee in my room. Kill the bee with a magazine and it falls between the cushions of the couch. There’s another bee. Kill that one, too, and close the balcony door. I think, there’s a hive out there, I won’t be able to use the balcony while I’m there, fine. Five minutes later, there’s another bee. Kill that one, too. But then there’s 4th bee, and 4 bees is my limit! I call the front desk and tell them I want another room.

On the elevator, there’s a maintenance guy. He says, “How are you?” I say, “I’m fine, except there was a beehive outside my room.”

He says, “Oh, you’re in room 817?”

The 1978 Michael Caine-Henry Fonda-Katharine Ross bee vehicle “The Swarm” was on television last Sunday. I couldn’t decide whether to watch that or “The Towering Inferno.” I went with “The Towering Inferno.” They were both written by Stirling Silliphant.

Make of that what you will.

I'll Let You Be My Chaperone at the Half-way Home

Here is where I will be on the West Coast...

Monday, January 22
SEATTLE
University Bookstore
UW Kane Hall 220
4326 University Way NE
7:30 pm

Tuesday, January 23
SAN FRANCISCO
Booksmith
1644 Haight St.
7 pm

Wednesday, January 24
BERKELEY
Black Oak Books
1491 Shattuck Ave.

Thursday, January 25
LOS ANGELES
Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Ave.
7:30 pm

Sunday, January 28
LOS ANGELES
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd. at Westwood Blvd.
6 pm

And then I’ll be back in Brooklyn, reading at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble, January 30 at 7:30 pm.

Okay!

Someone left the cake out in the rain

If anyone has another copy of the recipe, I’d really appreciate it.

The paperback of Apex Hides the Hurt is out today. I like the cover. It is kinda cheery, as is befitting the story of a young boy’s erotic awakening on the eve of the Russian revolution.

Next week, on Thursday January 18th, I will be reading at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, with my good friend Kevin Young. His new book of poems is called For the Confederate Dead, just out on Knopf. It’s great.

You should come and check out the reading if you’re able. I’m going to read some Apex stuff, and some new stuff.