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History Lesson

September 19, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus

Today’s text in vWNY is Washington Irving’s A History of New York, first published in 1809. Here are something of the things that we’d like our students to be asking as they think about Irving’s book.

How does the History provide New Yorkers with a sense of the past comparable to that of other cities? How serious is it about that task? How does Irving’s ironic style work in the History and what purpose does it serve? Look, for example, at the underwhelming first words that Hudson utters when he sees New York in the first chapter of Book II of the History:

It has been traditionary in our family, that when the great navigator was first blessed with a view of this enchanting island ,he was observed, for the first and only time in his life, to exhibit strong symptoms of astonishment and admiration. He is said to have turned to master Juet, and uttered these remarkable words, while he pointed towards this paradise of the new world — “see! there!” — and thereupon, as was always his way when he was uncommonly pleased, he did puff out such clouds of dense tobacco smoke, that in one minute the vessel was out of sight of land, and master Juet was fain to wait until the winds dispersed this impenetrable fog.

Is this what we expect a major historical moment to be like?

Indeed, moments like these might prompt us to ask: In what ways is Irving appropriating the authority of the historian and transferring it over to the imaginative writer? The interested reader might look carefully at Knickerbocker’s account of the rights of colonization in Book I, Chapter 5. Many of the arguments cited there were actually by philosophers to justify invasion and colonization. Why end the chapter with the “lunar” thought experiment?

Finally, in what ways does Irving make evident an ambivalence about the connections between culture and economics that he is forced draw both in his own life and in his text? We might remember the changes in New York that Irving witnessed in the course of his lifetime, in part as a result of the Commissioners’ Plan and the building of the Erie Canal. I’m very fond of a quotation from a letter that Irving wrote to his sister later in his life, which Ric Burns features in his film New York:

New York, as you knew it, was a mere corner of the present huge city, and that corner is all changed, pulled to pieces, burnt down and rebuilt – all but our little native nest in William Street, which still retains some of its old features; though those are daily altering. I can hardly realize that within my term of life, this great crowded metropolis, so full of life[,] bustle, noise, shew and splendour, was a quiet little City of some fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants. It is really now one of the most rucketing cities in the world and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort for instance) in the time of an annual fair – Here it is a Fair almost all year round.

 

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New York Exceptionalism

September 14, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus

Had I actually given a lecture today in Writing New York, I would have taken up the theme of New York exceptionalism introduced in my discussion of E. B. White’s Here is New York on Monday. Today’s reading would have been drawn from Russell Shorto’s history of Dutch New York, The Island at the Center of the World. Shorto writes:

Because of its geography, its population, and the fact that it was under the control of the Dutch (even then its parent city, Amsterdam, was the most liberal in Europe), this island city would become the first multiethnic upwardly mobile society on America’s shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world. It was no coincidence that on September 11, 2001, those who wished to make a symbolic attack on the center of American power chose the World Trade Center as their target. If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape. Many people – whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue – like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it’s an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

A similar point is made by Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar in their introduction to their anthology of New York writing, Empire City:

In 1624 when the Dutch first set up a trading post on Manhattan, their goal was not to convert the Indians or to practice a special religion but to make money. Visiting Manhattan in 1774 from Puritan Boston, John Adams expressed disdain: ‘I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out on you again and talk away.’ Poor breeding? Perhaps. But New Yorkers established the first chamber of commerce in the Western Hemisphere in 1768, developed the first regularly scheduled shipping service in 1818, built the Erie Canal by 1825, and established the nation’s dominant stock exchange by the 1840s.

One of the texts we would have read for today is the “Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of the Town of Flushing” (1657), which Jackson and Dunbar describe as a crucial document in the history of the city’s emphasis on religious freedom for its inhabitants. The Flushing Remonstrance defends the rights of Quakers to worship as they pleased, echoing the Dutch West India Company’s rebuke of Peter Stuyvesant three years earlier, after the governor had attempted to turn away twenty-three Sephardic Jews who were refugees from Recife, Brazil. Jackson and Dunbar note that in the early seventeenth century, “when Puritan Boston was banishing Anne Hutchinson from the city because of doctrinal disagreements, the West India Company, fearing that bigotry might threaten trade and discourage immigration, was welcoming Lutherans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Catholics, and even Jews to Manhattan.”

Intolerance emergence in these texts as a luxury that money-minded New Amsterdammers and New Yorkers simply cannot afford. This is a hypothesis about New York’s exceptionalism that we’ll be investigating in the course of vWNY.

Meanwhile, Shorto’s text is useful to us in another way: it brings up the issue of history-writing as storytelling. Shorto’s account of Dutch New York is a good story, and he’s been faulted for over-emphasizing the role played by Adriaen van der Donck in the history of Dutch New York. For Shorto, Van der Donck serves as a useful foil to the more familiar Peter Stuyvesant. But we ask our students to pay attention to the gaps in stories like the one Shorto tells, just as we later ask them to think about the devices that a filmmaker like Ric Burns can use to persuade his viewers to believe the story he’s telling. Shorto’s account would be less appealing without a figure like Van der Donck at its center; Burns’s film would be less appealing without the stirring soundtrack that accompanies its sweeping statements about New York’s exceptionalism.

[For more on Adriaen van der Donck, see John Easterbrook's essay in our Lost New York collection available for download here.]

 

Changing Horizons

September 12, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

It was an interesting experience, rereading E. B. White’s Here is New York on 9/11. It reminded me how valuable a tool the concept of the horizon of expectations is for literary critics. Coined by the literary historian and reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss, the term refers to the set of expectations against which a literary text — indeed any work of art — positions itself when it is conceived and then brought before the public. This horizon is created both by social practice—what Jauss describes as “the milieu, views and ideology of [the] audience”—and by literary tradition. Jauss argues that

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text. … The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.  (“Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”)

This model suggests that the meaning of a literary text is a function not only of its author’s intention in writing it but also of the milieu into which it is received, which includes its reader’s social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts. Meaning, in other words, is a negotiation between writer and reader through the medium of the text.

As a result, the “meaning” of text can shift when the historical milieu of its readers shifts. (It can also shift when later works force us to reread it in a different light, or when critical opinion or literary scholarship forces a change in expectations.) For example, White’s Here is New York is often taken to present an abiding portrait of New York and its inhabitants. That’s what Hillary Clinton believed when she cited it during a debate with her challenger Rick Lazio during her campaign the fall of 2000 to become one of New York’s U.S. senators. (See our earlier post on this subject.)

But on closer investigation, we that White’s book is truly a product of its historical moment, and not just because it is full references to once-recognizable names that now beg for footnotes. here are darker ways in which White’s essay is marked by the historical moment in which it was written:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s prose suggests that the dropping of the bomb changed everything, that New York would never be the same now that it “must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.” White’s contemplation of “the destroying planes” seems uncanny in the wake of 9/11, which White did not live to see: in some fundamental ways, the “meaning” of his text has changed.

Perhaps it always was a prophetic text, but it strikes me that the nature of its prophetic vision has subtly  shifted. Where once it was a jeremiad, crying out against the evils of its present moment, now it seems like something of a Delphic oracle, whose prophecies have come true — not, perhaps, in the way we (or it) expected, but in a way that is even more terrifying and continues to haunt us still.

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Ten Years Later and Many Miles Away

September 11, 2011 in History, This Day in New York History by Cyrus | 1 comment

Halfway around the world from New York City, my 9/11/11 began in the most uncanny of ways. You can read about it over at patell.org. And you can read an alternative account of the same event over at mannahattamamma.com.

How did you mark the day?

 

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The Walk Down Broadway (and Other Streets)

September 7, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus

 

The “walk down Broadway” is one of the motifs that we introduce on the first day of Writing New York and trace throughout the term. During the opening lecture, we look at  at early manifestations such as James Kirke Paulding’s “The Stranger at Home; or a Tour in Broadway,” published in 1807 in Salmagundi:

[A] man who resides in Pearl-street or Chatham-row, derives no kind of dignity from his domicil, but place him in a certain part of Broadway … any where between the battery and Wall-street, and he straightaway becomes entitled to figure in the beau-monde, and strut as a person of prodigious consequence! … Quere, whether there is a degree of purity in the air of that quarter which changes the gross particular of vulgarity, into gems of refinement and polish? … A question to be asked but not to be answered.

This is Bryan’s section of the lecture, and he usually mentions George G. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850), which is on this year’s vWNY syllabus –

Fashionable, aristocratic Broadway! Certainly we shall find nothing here to shock our senses and make our very nerves thrill with horror. Broadway, with its gay throng and dashing lights beaming from a thousand palace-like shop-fronts, where fortunes are spread out to tempt the eye of the unwary or the extravagant, surely will not afford us material for much of the horrible. … On the contrary, we shall rather be in danger of envying the fortunate position of those we see and hear on the great fashionable promenade.

– noting the likely irony of “we shall find nothing here to shock our senses,” followed by brief nods to Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) –

The flight was a bold and perilous one; but here I am, in the great city of New York, safe and sound, without loss of blood and bone. In less than a week after leaving Baltimore, I was walking amid the hurrying throng, and gazing upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway.

– and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) –

So true and well understood was this fact, that several years later a popular song detailing this and other facts concerning the afternoon parade on matinée days and entitled “What Right has he on Broadway?” was published and had quite a vogue in the music halls of the city.

– before landing in an unexpected place: Glen Campbell’s popular 1970s song “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Most of the undergraduates in our audience have never heard — or even heard of — the song. But even those who know the song well are surprised to discover — or, perhaps, to remember — that the song is, in fact, about walking down Broadway. Here are the lyrics:

I’ve been walkin’ these streets so long
Singin’ the same old song
I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway
Where hustle’s the name of the game
And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain
There’s been a load of compromisin’
On the road to my horizon
But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me

Chorus:
Like a rhinestone cowboy
Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
Getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
And offers comin’ over the phone

Well, I really don’t mind the rain
And a smile can hide all the pain
But you’re down when you’re ridin’ the train
That’s takin’ the long way
And I dream of the things I’ll do
With a subway token and a dollar tucked inside my shoe
There’ll be a load of compromisin’
On the road to my horizon
But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me

Chorus

Or you can just watch the video:

 

This year, however, I don’t hear the song in quite the same way, after writing my little book on The Rolling Stones’ album Some Girls, in which I described the Stones’ song “When the Whip Comes Down” as “the bastard child of Glen Campbell’s 1975 hit “Rhinestone Cowboy” and the Ramones’ second single, “53rd and 3rd,” which was released in 1976.”

The Ramones’ song is set a few blocks north and east of Broadway and Times Square at an intersection that was notorious in the mid-Seventies as a locale for male prostitution. And “When the Whip Comes Down” is, like “Rhinestone Cowboy,” a coming to New York story: following the advice of his “mama and papa,” the song’s narrator has left Los Angeles, where he’s disparaged as a “fag,” for New York, where he can simply be “gay.” But his hopes are dashed: “wherever I go they treat me the same.” The song’s second verse puts him at “53rd and Third,” where (like the Ramones’ protagonist), he’s “learning the ropes … learning a trade.” Puts me in mind of John Rechy’s classic hustler-in-New York book, City of Night, published in 1963 by Grove Press, the same press that published Henry Miller.

 Further reading: Bryan’s thoughts on Broadway from 2006.

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Introducing vWNY

September 5, 2011 in Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

 

 

 

For many U.S. academics, Labor Day marks the end of summer: for my colleagues at NYU, tomorrow marks the beginning of the fall term. Today, therefore, seems like the right moment to announce Bryan’s and my new “course”: Virtual Writing New York, or vWNY for short.

I’m spending the academic year at NYU Abu Dhabi and Bryan is concentrating on other activities (including being Director of Undergraduate Studies), so our Writing New York course is on hiatus. But Bryan and I have always wondered what it might be like to teach that course over a full year, allowing ourselves the time to explore books currently on the syllabus in greater detail and to take a less hurried tour of the twentieth century by adding a few more titles.

vWNY is a step in that direction. It’s a thought experiment: Bryan and I are imaging what a year-long syllabus might look like for this year were we actually teaching Writing New York this year. We’ve put together a course schedule, and we’ll be writing blog posts that approximate the blog posts we would have written had we actually given the lectures that are listed on our virtual schedule.

So here’s the “syllabus” for the fall term. [Note that CCLNY stands for our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York; EAD stands for Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey Richards.]

Wed. Sept. 7: Introduction

Mon. Sept. 12: E. B. White, Here is New York (Little Bookroom)
Wed. Sept. 14: Excerpts from Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (Vintage)

Mon. Sept. 19: Washington Irving, A History of New York (Penguin)
Wed. Sept 21: Irving (continued); Elizabeth L. Bradley, “Dutch New York from Irving to Wharton” [CCLNY]

Mon. Sept 26: Royall Tyler, The Contrast [EAD]; Washington Irving, “Jonathan Oldstyle Letters”
Wed. Sept 28: The Contrast (continued); Bryan Waterman, “The City on Stage” [CCLNY]

Mon. Oct. 3: George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (University of California Press)
Mon. Oct. 5: New York by Gas-Light (continued)

Mon. Oct. 10 – HOLIDAY
Wed. Oct. 12: “MIDTERM” Contest

Mon Oct. 17: Anna Cora Mowatt, Fashion [EAD]
Wed. Oct. 19: Benjamin Baker, Glance at New York in On Stage America: A Selection of Distinctly American Plays, ed. Walter J. Meserve.

Mon. Oct. 24: Selected Poems and Journalism by Walt Whitman; Cyrus Patell, “New York, 1819–61”
Wed. Oct. 26:  Whitman (continued); Thomas Bender, “New York as a Center of Difference”  in The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (NYU Press)

Mon. Oct. 31: Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Excerpts from Moby-Dick; Thomas Augst, “Melville, at Sea in the City” [CCLNY]
Wed. Nov. 2: Melville (continued)

Mon. Nov. 7: Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme
Wed. Nov. 9: Cecil Dreeme (continued)

Mon. Nov. 14: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (Norton Critical Edition)
Wed. Nov. 16: Ragged Dick (continued)

Mon. Nov. 21: Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Bedford Cultural Editions); Jacob Riis, “The Problem of the Children” and “The Working Girls of New York,” in the Bedford Maggie, 128–132 and 202–207.
Wed. Nov. 23: Wed. Nov. 30: Maggie (continued)

Mon. Nov. 28: Henry James, Washington Square (Penguin)
Wed. Nov. 30: Washington Square (continued)

Mon. Dec. 5: Abraham Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom (Dover)
Wed. Dec. 7: Yekl (continued); Eric Homberger, “City of Immigrants: Politics and the Popular Cultures of Tolerance” [CCLNY].

Mon. Dec. 12: Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Penguin)
Wed. Dec. 14: The Age of Innocence (continued); F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”; Sarah Wilson, “Beaufort’s Bastards” [CCLNY]

Mon. Dec. 19: “Final Examination” Contest

Our Twitter feed will be using the hashtag #vWNY to refer to the “course.”

Please join us for our introductory blog post after Wednesday’s hypothetical opening lecture!

Kushner, Cosmopolitanism, and U.S. Emergent Literatures

April 21, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

Two years ago, I wrote a post here, entitled “The Cosmopolitan and the Provincial,” about using the idea of fallibilism to think about Kushner’s two-part play, Angels in America (1992-95). Today, I’d like to share a few additional ideas about the play’s relation to the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism.

Increasingly, Kushner’s play has become important to my work on U.S. emergent literatures after 1940, literatures that express marginalized cultural identities and that construct themselves over against the dominant canonical tradition of U.S. literature. I’ve come to consider Angels in America to be one of the great pieces of late-twentieth-century U.S. emergent writing. I think of the play in the context of what the novelist and critic Edmund White and others have described as a “post-gay” perspective.

In a 2006 roundup of gay fiction for the Village Voice, White described Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (2002) and Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004) as “post-gay” novels, because “the action of both of these books, to be sure, takes place outside the gay ghetto and includes many important straight characters.” White describes “post-gay fiction” as “a subgenre that David Leavitt may have invented in his first collection of stories, Family Dancing [1984].”

Cunningham’s novel, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, takes its inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, as it tells three interwoven stories: the “Mrs. Woolf” sections of the novel tell the story of Woolf’s final days; the “Mrs. Brown” sections tell the story of a housewife living in Los Angeles in 1949, who will ultimately leave her family, which includes a son who will grow up to be Richard, a celebrated gay poet suffering from AIDS who is one of the two main characters in the “Mrs. Dalloway” sections of the novel. These sections recapitulate elements from Woolf’s novel as they focus on the preparations that Richard’s friend Clarissa is making for a party in his honor. In the “Mrs. Dalloway” sections, Clarissa has a daughter, but she lives with her partner, a book editor named Sally.

The Hours is a great middlebrow novel: it is literary but not nearly as challenging a reading experience as Woolf’s formally experimental novel. Cunningham uses the middlebrow in the way that Stowe uses sentimentality: as a way of luring readers to a set of insights that they might not be otherwise willing to confront. In the case of The Hours, these insights center on the ordinariness of gay experience, which is omnipresent in the novel but never the novel’s central subject.

Like The Hours, Kushner’s Angels in America is animated by a post-gay perspective, but I would describe it additionally as  “cosmopolitan” because of the way that the play dramatizes the interplay of sameness and differences in its exploration of what it means to be gay during the Reagan era at the height of the AIDS crisis. The play brings together an unlikely set of elements including Jewish humor and Mormon mythology to create a vision of cultural redemption in the face of intolerance and indifference to those in need.

Late in Perestroika, the second part of the play, Prior Walter, who is dying of AIDS, is examined by his nurse in a scene that captures some of the play’s central dynamics:

Night. Prior, Emily (Prior’s nurse-practitioner) and Hannah in an examination room in St. Vincent’s emergency room. Emily is listening to his breathing, while Hannah sits in a nearby chair.

EMILY: You’ve lost eight pounds. Eight pounds! I know people who would kill to be in the shape you were in, you were recovering, and you threw it away.
PRIOR: This isn’t about WEIGHT, it’s about LUNGS, UM … PNEUMONIA.
EMILY: We don’t know yet.
PRIOR: THE FUCK WE DON’T ASSHOLE YOU MAY NOT BUT I CAN’T BREATHE.
HANNAH: You’d breathe better if you didn’t holler like that.
PRIOR (Looks at Hannah, then): This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother.
(Little pause.)
EMILY: Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.

The scene is an example of the play’s humor, but it also reinforces an important idea that runs throughout the play: the idea of cosmopolitanism.

New York emerges in Kushner’s play as a cosmopolitan space of transformation, a place that’s all about learning to embrace difference and change in contrast to Heaven, depicted in Perestroika, as a place of stasis. Most of the play’s characters resist being typecast by U.S. culture—even the play’s villain, a fictionalized version of the historical Roy Cohn. Told by his doctor that he has AIDS, Roy counters that he has liver cancer: “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.” Roy refuses to accept the label of “homosexual,” refusing to accept the logic that his sexual preferences are in any a determinant of his identity. He tells his doctor:

This is not sophistry. And this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.

In this moment, Roy sets himself against the logic of U.S. identity politics—and of the pluralist multiculturalism that grows out of it. And in this moment, the play’s sympathies are with its villain.

Angels in America is a play that recognizes, and is committed to, the transformative power of language. The play bears out Kwame Anthony Appiah’s suggestion that cultural change is

a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don’t say that we can’t change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it’s rarely because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done—or what we plan to do—are typically made up after the event, rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we cannot become accustomed to doing things differently. (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers)

Angels in America is all about how people can learn to do things differently by learning from one another, and the play ends with a conversation—or rather two. The first conversation the conversation among four friends who have come together against all odds: Prior, the AIDS survivor; Louis, his ex-lover; Hannah, his ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother; and Belize, a gay African American male nurse who serves as the moral compass of the play. The second conversation is between Prior and us, the audience, and it ends with a blessing: “More life.”

It’s important the Prior uses the word “citizens” in the moments before he utters that blessing: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.” What Prior is evoking is the idea of the world-citizen, a fundamental concept for cosmopolitan theory. It’s the idea that each of us has a fundamental obligation to humanity as a whole. The time has come, Prior is telling us, to step up and be cosmopolitan, to be citizens of the world, to take responsibility for the way in which the world spins forward. That is what the play’s final line—“The Great Work Begins.”—ultimately signifies. To my mind, that’s a powerful way of understanding the project of emergent U.S. literatures.

March 14, 1979

April 18, 2011 in Pop Culture by Cyrus

OPENING SLIDE AT TODAY’S WRITING NEW YORK LECTURE

March 14, 1979: Woody Allen’s Manhattan released.

Cyrus Patell is about to graduate from high school. He plays “Sweet Jane” with a band called “Sweet Pig” at Folk City.

Bryan Waterman is in fifth grade in smalltown Arizona. He watches Mork and Mindy religiously and wears a “nano nano” tee-shirt.

On the airwaves in NYC:
Village People, “In the Navy”

Richard Lloyd on the Stones

April 15, 2011 in Books, Cultural History, Music by Cyrus

Bryan’s last three lectures for Writing New York have traced the development of the West Village, East Village, and Downtown cultural scenes from Ginsberg and the Beats through Dylan and then the Velvet Underground, up to the CBGB’s scene. As part of last weeks’ reading, students were able to read some excerpts from the uncorrected proofs for his forthcoming 33 1/3 book Television’s Marquee Moon, due out on June 16.

For Monday, the students have excerpts from my 33 1/3 book, The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, which juxtaposes the history of the band with the history of New York City in the Seventies. Here’s an excerpt, which happens to highlight a point of connection between the Stones and Television, with some hyperlinks added:

My first record player was a Panasonic combo-unit with both a turntable and a tape player. Not audiophile-worthy, but it served me well while I was in high school. The first album that I bought was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), but the second was the Stones’ compilation album Hot Rocks 1964-1971. By the time I got to the end of Side 3—”Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Gimme Shelter”—I knew which side of the fence I was on. Andrew Loog Oldham, whom Keith Richards describes in his autobiography Life as “the great architect of the Stones’ public persona,” deliberately constructed a public image for the Stones that made them out to be “the anti-Beatles.” Stones vs. Beatles? After side 3 of Hot Rocks, it was no contest as far as I was concerned. (Richard Lloyd, the guitarist for the legendary New York punk band Television, once said something similar: “When I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I thought it was interesting. Musically it was okay. But I really liked the Rolling Stones. So there were two camps: The Beatles camp and The Rolling Stones camp. So I was definitely in the Stones camp. Much darker.” Television would include a cover of the “Satisfaction” in their live shows, and two different versions are preserved for posterity on The Blow Up and Live At The Old Waldorf, both recorded during the band’s 1978 tour.

The quotation from Lloyd comes from an online interview, which you can read in full here.

The Civil War Begins

April 13, 2011 in History by Cyrus

One hundred fifty years ago today, the United States was at war — with itself.  On the morning of April 12, 1861, the first shots were fired on the Union’s Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina beginning the war that still leads the list of U.S. wartime deaths. For comparison’s sake, there were 623,026 Civil War deaths, compared to 407,316 in World War II, 116,708 in World War I, and 58,169 in Vietnam.

Melissa Block of NPR’s All Things Considered did an interesting interview yesterday, to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the war, with Civil War historian Harold Holzer, who has published widely on the Civil War and is the editor of The New York Times Complete Civil War. The two talked about the “eerie calm” pervading U.S. newspapers on the day the war began. They began with The New York Times:

BLOCK: Let’s start with The New York Times on that day leading up to the first shots being fired on Fort Sumter. The New York Times had a brief item from Charleston, talking about intense excitement in the city and that it has a map, actually, of the forts in Charleston Harbor; lots of anticipation leading up to that day.

Mr. HOLZER: Absolutely. And a map itself was a rarity. It was a declaration by the publisher that something special was afoot, indeed, because the newspapers were very gray in those days, bereft of illustration, unless they were the picture weeklies. So The Times is heralding the kind of breathless anticipation that’s gripping the whole country.

You can view the first page of the Times from that day here and read the transcript of the NPR interview (or listen to it) here.

The Times has a superb collection of materials about the war on their Disunion blog, which follows the progress of the war. Among the materials is a reproduction of the note that actually began the war and a vivid account by Adam Goodheart of the circumstances surrounding its delivery.

One piece that should be of interest to our students in Writing New York describes how Walt Whitman spent the evening of April 12:

On the evening of April 12, 1861, Walt Whitman attended a performance of Fromental Halévy’s opera “The Jewess” at the Academy of Music, on 14th Street and Irving Place in Manhattan. Just before midnight he was walking down the west side of Broadway, toward the Fulton Ferry to return to his home, in Brooklyn. Suddenly, he later recalled, he “heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side more furiously than usual.”

Tom Chaffin’s piece, “How Manhattan Drum-Taps Led,” describes the way in which Whitman would come to leave New York for Washington, D.C. where he ministered to wounded soldiers.

The site also features a virtual reproduction of the notebook that Whitman carried during the war. Students of Whitman — and of U.S. literature more generally — will find it fascinating.

[Photo from the Times blog: Adam Goodheart's piece, "The Defenders."]

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