Colson Whitehead shows Zoom can be fun
HARK!
I hear … techno-tainment …
The COVID pandemic has been devastating and horrible -- but, by forcing us to use technology that has been collecting dust, the dread coronavirus is also helping us to advance as a species.
Take Zoom -- which some of you will quickly add, “please!”
Sure, Zoom meetings have become a business stereotype: Picture the awkward leader, the horrible unmuted microphones, the co-worker eating with his mouth open, another exploring the treasures hidden deep inside her nose…
Zoom has been around for a decade, though it was little known until the pandemic, when it more than doubled its users.
And not only business grinders.
Bands with members locked down figured out how to do rehearsals and, later, shows via Zoom and similar platforms.
It also works - surprisingly well, based on the Colson Whitehead sort-of comes to Phoenix last week - for author appearances.
Seriously, why did it take us so long to do this?
Why for the last decade have we been crammed in small bookstores, breathing in each other’s dirt and germs, sneezing and coughing and generally projecting viral loads up our neighbor’s noses?
“Excuse me! I think I just blasted you with this nagging cough I’ve had for weeks -- sorry! My bad!”
The Changing Hands hosting of Whitehead, to promote his new book “Harlem Shuffle,” shows how not only effective, but stunningly intimate a techno-event can be. Whitehead was charming and wise without being didactic. He's the kind of author you listen to and think, "Yeah, I'm glad he made it: good dude." (Watch a clip here)
The pitch: “Please join us as we welcome Colson Whitehead, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Underground Railroad’ (an Oprah's Book Club selection and now an Amazon Prime series) and ‘The Nickel Boys’, to discuss his eagerly awaited new book, HARLEM SHUFFLE , a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.”
For an author who scored near-universal acclaim and back-to-back versions of the literary world’s Super Bowl, Whitehead came off as gentle and appreciative; indeed, he made multiple references to an unpublished first novel, notably not complaining that it was great and blaming the publishing world, instead saying it was pretty much terrible.
Indeed, from his Manhattan apartment, the morale of his Zoom: don’t give up - and don’t let anyone pin you down.
Rejection be damned, he decided early on, he was going to continue writing books, figuring that, just like carpentry or electronics or being a heart surgeon, he would continue getting better the more he did it.
Ten books into his career, he said “generally I like to go from a more serious book to a lighter book,” answering a question about what brought him to the doorstep of “Harlem Shuffle,” which can loosely be labeled as a “bank-heist novel.”
Asked about his genre-hopping career,
“As a child, I was a comic book collector and big movie fan. Artists like Stanley Kubrick, ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ ‘The Shining,’ ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ ‘The Killing’ - his heist movie. That seemed to be a good model.”
Though he refuses to be pinned down, bouncing from a poker novel to historical novels to zombie sci-fi, Whitehead is returning to warm territory with his next novel.
“I turned in ‘Harlem Shuffle’ to my publisher July 4,” he said. The next day, he added, he started writing more adventures of Ray Carney, a used-furniture salesman who, he writes, “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…”
The author is clearly attached to his latest creation, a “fence” who has one foot in the square world, the other in the underworld...
On Sept. 22, Whitehead returns to Zoomland, with a Barnes and Noble-hosted event that will have him chatting with fellow author Michael Connelly (“Fair Warning,” “The Dark Hours”). Tickets are $36.95, at Eventbrite
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/colson-whitehead-harlem-shuffle-tickets-168241140781?keep_tld=1