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Previously: Cahan

March 9, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

We’ve been a little overworked the last few weeks and so have been a little slower to post than usual.

Our students are taking a midterm tomorrow morning. The last lecture before the exam was Cyrus’s take on Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896).

I don’t have anything new to say about it at the moment, and indeed should be working on something else. But I thought I’d offer up some links to prior content for the sake of students who may be checking the blog tonight.

Last year Cyrus posted a general intro, including a sneak preview of Sarah Wilson’s essay on the New York novel of manners from our forthcoming Cambridge Companion. (This year our students have read her entire piece; next year we’ll actually be able to order the book!) Cyrus also gave some additional detail on one of his favorite topics — baseball — which ties nicely into the novel’s film adaptation, Joan Micklinn Silver’s Hester Street (1975).

Maybe once the exam’s out of the way — and a couple writing deadlines have been reached — we’ll be back in regular blogging form.

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American Realists: James and Cahan

March 5, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

We’re finishing up a section of the Writing New York course devoted to the novel of manners. We include in this section James’s Washington Square, Crane’s Maggie, Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and Cahan’s Yekl, though we note affinities between these novels and both the nineteenth-century plays that Bryan discusses earlier in the course and the work of Walt Whitman. We note, also, the overlap between this tradition of manners and the idea of American literary realism. Setting up Wharton’s connection to realism in lecture the other day, I quoted from Henry James in The Art of Fiction: “One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel, –  the merit in which all its other merits . . . helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing . . .”

As an example of James ’s attempt to convey “solidity of specification,” I cited the “topographical parenthesis” from the third chapter of Washington Square, a passage that Bryan always calls to the attention of our students:

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street five minutes’ walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. By the time the Doctor changed his residence the murmur of
trade had become a mighty uproar, which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate isle. Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect–though, seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate–and when most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air
which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare–the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that
didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.

[Click here to read an e-text of the novel at Project Gutenberg.]

On Monday, I’ll ask our students to recall this passage and to compare it to this description of Suffolk Street from Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl (1897):

Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it lies in the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the last two or three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis, and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth–a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe. Hardly a block but shelters Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the “pale of Jewish settlement”; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying political and economical in justice; people torn from a hard-gained foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery–innocent scapegoats of a guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these shores in quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars–all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a tenement house but harbors in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have here risen to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwonted environment; moral outcasts lifted from the mire, purified, and imbued with self-respect; educated men and women with their intellectual polish tarnished in the inclement weather of adversity; ignorant sons of toil grown enlightened–in fine, people with all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of subdialects of the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social caldron–a human hodgepodge with its component parts changed but not yet fused into one homogeneous whole.

I’ll suggest that here Cahan’s project is to make the Lower East Side seem less foreign and more full of potential than his readers might expect. Cahan’s narrator seems to identify both with the people he is depicting and with the readers for whom he is depicting them — and to exist in an ambivalent relation to each. Acknowledging what is idiosyncratic in the experience of Jewish immigrants, Cahan’s narrator nevertheless shows that they are not inscrutable (a tern often applied to immigrant groups from Asia in this period. As the novel progresses, however, we see a marked contrast between the eloquent prose of the narrator and the fractured English of his characters. It’s that kind of authorial superiority that strikes me as one of the Jamesian aspects of Cahan’s writing.

[Click here to find  e-texts of the Yekl in a variety of formats.]

Wharton resources on PWHNY

March 3, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

Our students, who are wrapping up their reading of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence even as I type, may find some past PWHNY entries useful.

Last year, Cyrus offered a general intro to the novel and later  posted about the archives of what Wharton refers to as the “new opera house,” for those who’d like to trace opera in the city beyond the temporal frame of this novel into the moment in which Wharton wrote.

Reaching back to his lecture on Whitman and realism (which this year’s students missed out on, since I took the Whitman this year) he found yet another occasion to share his appreciation of European realist painting.

We’ve also tracked some of Wharton’s engagement with the idea of the Knickerbocker. In recent popular representations of the city, Knickerbocker New York has informed both Mad Men and Gossip Girl, the latter of which included a great Wharton episode last season, complete with the kind of theater-audience-watching scene I love to bring to the class’ attention.

Speaking of the theater, it would be worth students’ while to think about the relationship between the novel of manners, which Cyrus has been lecturing on this week, and the comedies of manners we read early in the semester, including Royall Tyler’s The Contrast and Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion. How do the social concerns raised in the plays find themselves taken up or transformed in Wharton’s novel? Do “manners” perform the same cultural work in these multiple contexts or genres?

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Darkness and Daylight

February 24, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

Today, during a fine lecture on the portrayals of tenement life in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, our teaching assistant Kristen Highland discussed several books that draw on the “sunshine and shadow” made famous by Matthew Hale’s Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1869).

These included one that isn’t discussed much: Darkness and Daylight; Lights and Shadows of New York Life by three authors, reformist Helen Campbell, journalist Thomas Knox, and Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes. Kristen tells us that learned about Darkness and Daylight through a post over at Ephemeral New York.

Bryan and I came across Campbell in the the first chapter of Robert M. Dowling’s recent Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which is one of the books included in an essay-review that he and I have just finished for the journal American Literary History. Campbell’s account, which gives the volume its title, is subtitled “A Woman’s Story of Gospel, Temperance, Mission, and Rescue Work”; the supplementary pieces are described as “A Journalist’s Description of Little-Known Phases of New York Life” (Knox) and “A Famous Detective’s Thirty Years’ Experiences and Observations” (Byrnes). Kristen writes that the book is “some 500+ pages of really juicy stuff with great images–about a dozen or so are by Riis.” During the lecture she pointed out that the volume brings together three interpretive frames through which the slums of the late nineteenth-century were often viewed: as a site for missionary work, as a site for sensationalist journalism, and as a site for criminality.

According to the publisher’s preface, the goal of Darkness and Daylight was “to give scrupulously exact descriptions of life and scenes in the great metropolis under three different aspects … It was essential that each of the writers selected for this undertaking should possess a thorough practical knowledge of the subject, combined with ability to describe what they have seen and experienced.” The preface describes Campbell’s contribution in this way:

The first division was assigned to Mrs. Helen Campbell, whose life has been spent in New York city, and whose wellknown sympathies for the poor and unfortunate, combined with long experience in city missionary work and charitable enterprises, peculiarly fitted her for this portion of the work. Her interest in missions and her labors among the lower classes have brought her face to face with squalor and misery among the hopelessly poor, as well as with degraded men and women in their own homes; while her ready sympathy gained for her access to their hearts, and thus gave her a practical insight into their daily life possessed by few. Who but a woman could describe to women the scenes of sin, sorrow, and suffering among this people that have presented themselves to her womanly eye and heart?

Campbell is a forerunner of Riis, and Dowling writes that she came to believe that “the only effective means of ‘training’ the poorer classes … is not from the outside in, but rather from the inside out. … By immersing herself in the waterfront culture, Campbell accumulates firsthand knowledge that would aid her and her outsider compeers in the struggle to reform the urban poor; looking ‘from within, out,’ she discovers an alien moral framework that was to be effectively torn down.”

If you know Crane’s novel Maggie, you can see why Campbell’s writings might make an effective pairing. Crane also seems to depict something like “an alien moral framework” within the slums, though it is a framework that seems to be a mutated form of the kinds of representations of morality found both in the mission and in the melodrama. In fact, the final chapter of the novel brilliantly conflates these two modes.

Kristen, whose research interests include the print culture of early national America and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. popular culture, was one of the panelists at last fall’s Lost New York conference: she curated a case at the Fales exhibition on the subject of the idea of “Gotham” and her companion essay appears in the Lost New York volume (available here as a PDF).

There are several digitized versions of the book available on the web. The Google has an 1892 printing digitized from a copy in the University of Michigan library; and 1892 printing digitized from a copy at Radcliffe; and a 1900 printing digitized from a copy in the New York Public Library. My favorite version is a full-color scan of the 1897 printing available at the Internet Archive.

Find your way around Washington Square

February 23, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

The novel, that is, not the Park itself. If you’re interested in finding out more about the Park, past and present, we recommend exploring the archives of this excellent blog.

My initial impulse in teaching James’s novel has always been to take the title and setting seriously, to take what we know about the actual history of the development of Washington Square — its origins as a Potter’s Field, the history of class conflict surrounding its development and renovation over time — and read it against the narrator’s account, early in the novel, of the Square’s development and the Slopers’ place on it. (In taking the setting seriously I’m following Marcus Klein’s excellent treatment in Arizona Quarterly many moons ago, which is worth digging up if you have access to the print run in your library.) Last year Cyrus posted an overview of the approach we’ve taken and I offered up the timeline I use in lecture to contrast the novel’s admittedly partial memory with a more verifiable set of events.

One of the more interesting disjunctions between the novel and the Square’s actual history is the fact that the Slopers arrive on the Square — ostensibly to escape the clamor of commerce farther downtown — right on the heels of the Stonecutters’ Riots, in which laborers and masons resisted the city’s and University’s decision to use convict labor to build what would be NYU’s gothic University Building (pictured). I wrote a little bit about this issue last year — as well as about the contemporaneous development of another ritzy neighborhood, Colonnade Row, on the newly cut Lafayette Place, which bisected a mixed-class leisure space, Vauxhall Gardens, and undoubtedly helped pave the way for the Astor Place Riots there only a few years later. All of this unrest the novel would push to its symbolic margins. The Washington Square of James’s novel exists blissfully unaware of class conflict pushing right up against its borders.

Yesterday morning in lecture I took this contextualization so far as to suggest a parallel between the lawyer in Melville’s Bartleby and Dr. Sloper: each is subject to a certain blindness, to borrow a phrase from Henry’s older brother, William. Certainly the lawyer’s cozy kissing up to John Jacob Astor in Bartleby anticipates Dr. Sloper’s complicity in a market economy he thinks he has risen above. (We talked earlier in the semester about ways to read Bartleby in the context of the class conflicts that culminated in the Astor Place Riots.) And just maybe, I suggested, Catherine Sloper has a little bit of Bartleby himself in her. When it comes time to get married at the novel’s end, as good heroines are supposed to do, she simply prefers not to.

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Where Is the Underworld?

February 15, 2010 in Books, Film by Cyrus | 1 comment

Woody Allen apparently once said to Groucho Marx, “I don’t know how you live in California. For a man of your piercing intellect to be able to live on the West Coast is incredible to me.”

When we get to Allen’s film Manhattan in our Writing New York course later in the term, one of the subjects we discuss is the rivalry between New York and Los Angeles over the production of what we might call the national imaginary. New York’s place as the preeminent producer of cultural images and symbols, by virtue of its role as the center of the U.S. publishing industry starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, was challenged and — arguably — overtaken by Los Angeles, which became the center of the U.S. film industry in the early part of the twentieth century.

Allen has a love-hate (well, mostly hate) relationship with Los Angeles. The year after Manhattan was released, he said:

What I feel about New York is hard to say in a few words. It’s really the rhythm of the city. You feel it the moment you walk down the street. There’s hundreds of good restaurants, thousands of brilliant paintings, you see all the old movies, all the new ones … It has to do with nerves, with the blood that runs through the city. It’s dangerous, noisy. It’s not peaceful or easy and because of it you feel more alive. It’s more in keeping with what human beings are meant to feel about the world … There’s more conflict than anywhere else. The struggle to survive here is much more exciting than Los Angeles, say, where everything is pleasant. I mean, all those people sitting in their tubs, can you imagine it?

I imagine that Allen would have approved of these passages from Rick Riordan’s book The Lightning Thief:

“Well now, there’s Mount Olympus in Greece. ANd then there’s the home of the gods, the convergence point of their powers, which did indeed used to be on Mount Olympus. It’s still called Mount Olympus, out of respect to the old ways, but the palace moves, Percy, just as the gods do.”

“You mean the Greek gods are here? Like … in America?”

“Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.”

“The what?”

“Cow now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it …”

*

“You’ve been to Olympus?”

“Some of us year-rounders — Luke and Clarisse and I and a few others — we took a field trip during winter solstice. That’s when the gods have their big annual council.”

“But … how did you get there?”

“The Long Island Railroad, of course. You get off at Penn Station. Empire State Building, special elevator to the six hundredth floor.” She looked at me like she was sure I must know this already. “You are a New Yorker, right?”

*

“The entrance to the Underworld is always in the west. It moves from age to age, just like Olympus. Right now, of course, it’s in America.”

“Where?”

Chiron looked surprised. “I thought that would be obvious enough. The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.”

Previously. And. And more.

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Wooden Turnstiles

February 13, 2010 in Art, Books, History, Lost New York by Cyrus | 2 comments

In my last post, I mentioned that older son loves to read series of books — the longer the better. Before he read the Percy Jackson series, he read all of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books. He’ll still read the latest one for old times’ sake: he read the latest, Magic Tree House #43: Leprechaun in Late Winter and pronounced it “very good.” His little brother the kindergartener loves them too, so we read them aloud to him on the bus to and from school.

Appropriately enough given this week’s snowy weather on the East Coast, we’ve been reading book #36 in the series, Blizzard of the Blue Moon, which is set in New York in 1938 during the Great Depression. For those of you who don’t know the series, the premise is that eight-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Annie, two kids who live in “Frog Creek, Pennsylvania,” discover a magic tree house in the woods near their house: the tree house is full of books and when you point to one and say, “I want to go there,” well, you go there, wherever “there” is. Their first four adventures take them to the time of the dinosaurs, to the middle ages, and to ancient Egypt. They learn that the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, who is portrayed as the magical librarian of King Arthur’s Camelot. (She’s much friendlier than any other version of Morgan le Fay I’ve ever encountered: remember Helen Mirren’s characterization in John Boorman’s Excalibur?!)

The books are very formulaic, as Morgan sends them on various missions that last about 10 chapters. The description of the tree house embarking on its journey is always the same, and my son can now recite it by heart. He’s learning about genre, which is fine by me. But in book 29 Christmas in Camelot, Osborne varies her formula: it is Merlin who sends Jack and Annie on their missions, four of them to mythical places like Camelot, and four to real-life places like Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle (for which the Eiffel Tower was built).

Blizzard of a Blue Moon is one of these Merlin missions, and my son is enjoying hearing about places he knows: like Central Park and the IRT subway, which costs a nickel in 1938. Reading the book made me remember those old cross-shaped wooden turnstiles that were still installed in a few subway stations when I was growing up. Here’s a picture from the New York Transit Museum:

Note the fare: 5 cents! (Click here for more information about this particular photo, which comes from a wonderful collection of photos and images at nycsubway.org. The site is a treasure trove for subway buffs; in addition to the pictures, there is a wonderful collection of map PDFs.)

By the way, Jack and Annie’s mission in 1938 New York involves rescuing a unicorn that has been enchanted. Where do you suppose they end up?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Percy Jackson and the Epicenter of Western Culture

February 11, 2010 in Books, Film by Cyrus | 2 comments

My older son, who is in now fourth grade, devoured Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books when he was in second grade, though he had to wait until third grade for the fifth and final book to be released. I haven’t read them myself, though I expect I will now that the movie is here. (Okay, I confess: I just had the first one, The Lightning Thief, which we had borrowed from the library, beamed to my Kindle).

My son loves fantasy — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Yu-gi-oh, Chronicles of Prydain, though not yet Tolkien — and he loves book series. But he’s also been quite taken with the narrative voice and general sensibility of — egads — Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which means that the Percy Jackson books are like a perfect narrative storm for him. (He agrees that the two narrators have somewhat similar voices.)

The first chapter of The Lightning Thief is entitled “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher,” and it begins this way:

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

If you’re reading this beause you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your om or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you think you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages — if you feel something stirring inside — stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ve got a book that puts Mt. Olympus above Manhattan and makes the Empire State Building the access portal. Our former WNY TA Spence puts it this way: “In the novels, Olympus sits atop the Empire State Building (it moves with the epicenter of Western culture).” We’ve heard that they change quite a few things in the movie, but they didn’t change that:

What gives me pause: the director is Chris Columbus, director of the first two Harry Potter films, which are fine but don’t hold a candle to the later entries.

What I’m looking forward to: Uma Thurman as Medusa.

WNY Bartleby

February 4, 2010 in Books, Film by Cyrus | No comments

In preparation for Monday’s lecture on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” we’re showing Jonathan Parker’s film adaptation Bartleby (2001) this Friday evening to our students. The film stars Crispin Glover as the title character, who comes to work not in a law office but in a public records firm headed up by a character listed in the credits as “The Boss” (David Paymer). One of the clerks is transformed into “Vivian,” the office manager (played by Glenne Headly), while the others are named “Rocky” (Joe Piscopo) and “Ernie” (Maury Chaykin).

Despite these changes, the short story’s signature phrase — “I would prefer not to” — remains prominently featured.

New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott writes that “Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of ‘The Drew Carey Show.’” We’re hoping our students will agree.

Previously.

RIP

January 28, 2010 in Books, Lost New York by Bryan | 1 comment

Full obit from the Times.

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