Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Overview

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.”

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784781590
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	928
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.80(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Kenneth Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PennSound. He was an artist and sculptor for many years before taking up conceptual poetry. He has since published ten books of poetry and is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age.

Editorial Reviews

The book is an ever-rising crescendo of voices talking over and past one another inside a very confined space, and together that energy becomes the heat and light that made New York City the 20th century’s most necessary city. Capital is as enriching as it is unwieldy, and a must-read for anyone who has even a little skin in this game. Ultimately, with both New York City and Goldsmith’s book, all you have to do is say ‘yes’ to begin. Then, suddenly, everything comes at you all at once.″
—Scott Heins, Gothamist

“A fascinating work. Kenneth Goldsmith has set before us a Petronian feast in which every page offers up a toothsome morsel to anyone with an interest in New York and its pre-eminent place in the cultural life of the twentieth century.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Reading Capital feels like walking the city, through time and space, jumping neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, slipping through wormholes. It’s a kind of exuberant eavesdropping on the muttering, shouting narrative of the twentieth-century city.”
—Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York

“Capital is … meant to be dipped into, to surprise, like a chance encounter on the street. The infinite richness of the city is an apt form for [Goldsmith’s] ambition. Capital is a book to get lost in for hours, like some obscure corner of the Lower East Side; it helps us see the universe in a chunk of asphalt.”
—Lauren Elkin, Financial Times

“The spirit of a city constantly wrestled with and romanticized all out of proportion suffuses Capital.”
—Andy Battaglia, Wall Street Journal

“[Goldsmith] gives you the feel of what it is like to be living in New York now.”
—Marjorie Perloff, New Yorker

“Capital could be seen as Goldsmith scaling up, a skewed take on the Great American Novel.”
—Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian

“[Capital] is an extravagantly complex construction, opening with a cinematic sweep of the city as a dream-like impossibility, then diving down from sky to earth, languishing in the street before digging underground and emerging to the sky, the weather, the atmosphere and, finally, the apocalypse … [Be] astounded by this epic, ten-year effort to shape an impossible portrait of a miraculous city which—as EB White puts it—should never have existed.”
—Gilda Williams, Art Monthly

“A skyscraper of words—literary, journalistic, poetic, and prosaic—to celebrate and chronicle teeming Gotham. The title alludes to Walter Benjamin, and the conceit is one to do him proud … there is an embarrassment of riches here.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Goldsmith’s material, unmistakably real, refuses to remain in a literary frame.”
—Bookslut

“Capital scintillates … Goldsmith has produced a book that reminds us how close we can still get, via the labour of sound and thought and syntax, to the rhythms of a real city.”
—Brian Dillon, Guardian

“As massive, intimidating and fascinating as its subject … The book is much like the city it describes: once you start exploring, you won’t want to stop.”
—Spectrum Culture

From the Publisher

2015-07-27
A skyscraper of words—literary, journalistic, poetic, and prosaic—to celebrate and chronicle teeming Gotham. The title alludes to Walter Benjamin, and the conceit is one to do him proud: a fat book made up of nothing but quotations in collagelike conversation with one another, all having to do with New York. Here, in conceptual artist/poet Goldsmith's (Seven American Deaths and Disasters, 2013, etc.) arrangement, for example, are three quotations in a row: "New York is not and will not be Paris." "Gertrude Stein: ‘Paris was where the twentieth century was.' " "Manhattan is a counter-Paris, an anti-London." So is New York Paris' semblable and frère? Is it the City of Something Else to the City of Lights? This is where a knowing commentator might do a little sorting out—but these quotations come without editorial intervention, and the conversational thread or thrust is therefore not always evident. Not that that's always a bad thing: Goldsmith opens with evocations of New York as "dream city," and in those dreams, food, animals, and open spaces often figure in no apparent order: "A Good Humor bar gooily obstructing Park Avenue." "Dogs wag their tails up and down instead of sideways in the Flatiron Building." "What is a ship, in fact, but a great skyscraper turned upon its side and set free?" Prostitution, advertising, art, music, dirt, transportation, civil unrest: all this and more figure in these overstuffed pages. For all its cleverness, a little goes a long way—and there's way more than a little to reckon with in the 900 pages Goldsmith has assembled. There are also curious lacunae and many missing or underused voices: Kazan, Sontag, Ferlinghetti, Melville, Grogan….Still, there's already an embarrassment of riches here, so much so that one hopes a collagist across the water is pulling together a complementary volume for Paris. Big Apple-phile collectors will want to have this, of course, but it helps to think of it as more of an art installation than a book.

Kirkus Reviews