Matt Snediker > Recent Status Updates

Nothing to say about the book so far, still settling in, but I’m listening to STATION TO STATION by David Bowie while I read, specifically “Word on a Wing”, and I have to say…

“In this age of grand delusion, you walked into my life out of my dream”

…is maybe the best opening line to a song in the long storied history of opening lines to songs.

Sometimes ur like “wow Colson hasn’t done that thing where he stops me in my tracks at a certain line in a while” and then he goes:

One of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village.

Just, yknow, not a sentence that changes your life or anything, but one that is so insanely deceptively difficult, smartly crafted, all the rest of it. He’s so good at this stuff.

Maybe it’s bc I just finished Another Country by James Baldwin but I’m getting a lot of ‘Another Country’ (by James Baldwin) vibes from the Freddie character at this point in the book. Uptown-downtown vibe, falling on tough times, not visiting family, a few reefer episodes in Greenwich Village, bunking with a chill ass gay white boy. Just saying. The vibes are there.

Just so impossibly in love with this thing so far. The Michael Corleone-style “surrounded by crime all his life, has always kept his nose clean, but can’t resist the gravitational pull of That Life once the heat is on” arc that Carney’s slowly slipping into is so satisfying and Whitehead’s prose is really just incomparable. Simple but masterful. The Tim Duncan of writers.

This is like the Fat City of crime novels. A novel about all the real, working class lives that revolve around the outer orbit of crime. A novel about what it’s like to be a real dude living in a place where crime is a language you’re semi-fluent in. North of “puedo ir al baño” but south of carrying on a full conversation. North of Chester Himes, south of James Baldwin, in terms of New York story tones.

Maybe the first person to ever compare Colson Whitehead to Kacey Musgraves but something I love about both of them is this employment of an effortless colloquialism, that feels at the same time a hundred years old and at the same time totally bespoke, brand new. Like it was from another,very similar dimension

“The traffic at that hour was nothing. King Kong come running down the street, there was no one to see.”

“They were cousins, mistaken for brothers by most of the world, but distinguished by many features of personality. Like common sense. Carney had it. Freddie’s common sense tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket.”

Entire worlds, lifetimes, novels in their own right, exist within Whitehead’s sentences, man. He’s so cool.

Coming back to this ahead of the publication of Cool Machine. I really did love Chester Himes’s COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, I thought it was phenomenally written for a piece of genre fiction, loved how insistently and smartly it tackled racial and class issues (if not gender politics)……………but this is a whole ‘nother thing, man. Colson Whitehead is 1 of 1. His prose is so… slippery, so clean, but so dense.

“And the summer came, the New York summer, which is like no summer anywhere. The heat and the noise began their destruction of nerves and sanity and private lives and love affairs. The air was full of baseball scores and bad news and treacly songs; and the streets and bars were full of hostile people, made more hostile by the heat.”

Sometimes this dude is so good I get actually, bodily, mad at him.

The idea, at the end of a long night of drinking on a thin, desperate wallet, of being down to “cab fare and hot dog money”, is hilarious.

“For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.”

Shit yeh bruther I didn’t think we’d get some stray bullets in the ACAB direction but ofc, if it came any way, it would come as effortlessly, with as much infinite wisdom, with as much certainty as this quote. He’s so fuckin good dude oh my GOD.

“I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can’t figure out whether I’m human or not. If they don’t know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.”
“That’s not very Christian,” he said, lightly.
“It’s the best I can do. I learned all my Christianity from white folks.”

Baldwin’s dialogue is so exacting, so sharp, so subtly poetic.

“The number ended and Ida stepped off the stage, wet and triumphant, the applause crashing about her ears like foam.”

He just doesn’t quit with the purple stuff, I swear