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Coming Soon to the Metropolitan Playhouse

August 21, 2008 in City on Stage, Resources by Bryan

logo72dpi.jpgI’ve mentioned before my abiding affection for the folks who run the Metropolitan Playhouse. I feel extraordinarily lucky to teach earlier American lit (including 19c drama) and the literary cultures of NYC in a neighborhood — one of the few in the world, I’m sure, if not the only one in existence — where you can actually see earlier American plays regularly staged. From Mowatt’s Fashion to Fitch’s The City and Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, the Playhouse is also its own virtual “City on Stage” archive; indeed, I’m pretty sure my idea for the chapter I’m currently writing on that topic gestated over several years of watching Met Playhouse productions.

Of course, our encounter with these plays in such an intimate space differs radically from how 19c and early 20c audiences encountered them — often in enormous theaters. But I’ll take it, and I’ll take my students along as often as possible.

The coming season has a lot to offer theater and Am Lit buffs: They’ll be doing Nowadays by George Middleton (one of Emma Goldman’s favorite American playwrights), a 1914 play that deals with gender issues; O’Neill’s Anna Christie (woo-hoo!), and an adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I’m especially looking forward to the Middleton, since I’m working, when I get a chance between more immediate deadlines, on a chapter of our cultural history that situates Goldman and O’Neill in overlapping, but not identical, theater and intellectual circles.  I’d never heard of Middleton before I starting researching Goldman’s lectures on modern drama.

And then there’s Melvillapalooza! For each of the last several seasons, the Playhouse has hosted a festival of small pieces celebrating, roasting, or inspired by famous American authors, including Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne. This year our beloved HM holds pride of place. I can only hope someone dramatizes the death scene from Pierre, one of Melville’s finest NYC scenes!

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Charles Brockden Brown: New Yorker

July 17, 2008 in History, People, Resources, Writing New York by Bryan

I’ve spent the better part of the last few months finishing a chapter on the early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel (not to be confused with the Cambridge History of American Literature, the multivolume project Cyrus had a hand in producing).

brown_charles_brockden.jpgWorking on this piece reminded me again of something I was struck by while writing my dissertation (later revised as Republic of Intellect): that most critics and biographers have treated Brown as a Philadelphia writer, even though the majority of his best-known works — his gothic novels Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn — as well as his first magazine venture, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, were produced (if not always published) in New York. Brown may have come from a Philly Quaker background, that is, but he stands as an early example of an American writer who came to New York to launch his career. (Warning: the prior sentence risks anachronism, since New York was by no means established as the center of American publishing in the 1790s.)

Brown’s first book, the philosophical dialogue  Alcuin, or the Rights of Women, recounts a series of conversations in a New York parlor, where the title character, an impoverished schoolmaster, carries on an exchange with the metropolitan salonierre Mrs. Carter on topics ranging from women’s education to politics and the rules of polite conversation between the sexes. Here’s a taste of the scene-setting, which reveals some of the narrator’s insecurities as he anticipates the “scene” of conversation. Although the conversation itself is rather high-minded, think of these anxieties as an early version of Lou Reed’s “New York Telephone Conversation.” Alcuin narrates:

I looked at my unpowdered locks, my worsted stockings, and my pewter buckles. I bethought me of my embarrassed air, and my uncouth gait. I pondered the superciliousness of wealth and talents, the awfulness of flowing muslin, the mighty task of hitting on a right movement at entrance, and a right posture in sitting, and on the perplexing mysteries of tea-table decorum.

An early Woody Allen? Certainly there’s room here for a comedy of manners. If you want to see how it unfolds, you can nab a used copy of the dialogue here, or find the Bicentennial Edition of Brown’s works in your local library. That or shell out for volume one of the forthcoming Wadsworth Anthology of American Literaure, eds. Jay Parini and Ralph Bauer, which includes the dialogue in full with a headnote by yours truly. For more on Brown, visit the site of the Charles Brockden Brown Society.

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Bowery Boys

July 15, 2008 in Neighborhood Scenes, Resources by Bryan

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No, not the B’hoys, and not the early 20c stage and film crew variously known as Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids, and Bowery Boys (pictured above).

I’m talking about the fantastic NYC history blog featuring weekly podcasts on neighborhood history. The most recent one features the Meatpacking District.

Who are these guys, and how do they have so much time for quality blogging like this? I’m green with envy; in any case, we’ve added them to the “Keys to the City” links at right.

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Dispatch from Saratoga Springs, part 1

June 7, 2008 in People, Resources by Bryan

emma waite.jpgGreetings from upstate, where the 29th Conference on New York State History is underway. In an hour or so I’m presenting a paper called “The City on Stage,” which grows out of an undergrad seminar I’ve taught a few times and will serve as an early run at my contribution to our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City.

This is my first NYSHA conference, and I’m enjoying myself, even though this remote locale (we’re at Skidmore College, where I’m writing from a dorm room that smells like dirty feet) reminds me that I don’t miss being at a college with a quad: there’s something creepy about the insularity of it all. Which doesn’t mean the school hasn’t been a wonderful host …

The conference itself is a nice blend of academics and public historians — like many such conferences, a little on the grey side, which I actually enjoy. I’ve met multiple borough historians and some local history association presidents (including one for Randall’s Island) with whom I hope to keep contact and rely on as resources for teaching NYC cultural history.

I’ll have more to write later about last night’s highly enjoyable keynote by Kevin Baker (author of the historical NYC novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Striver’s Row).
First I wanted to provide a couple links based on one of the more
interesting presentations I hit yesterday: on celebrity culture,
burlesque troops, and what appears to be a stalker diary written by a
young African American woman named Ellen Waite, who had been a hotel
worker in Saratoga Springs but moved to the city sometime during the
year chronicled in what seems to be a fascinating little diary.
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Emma’s diary, owned by the New York State Library, has been beautifully digitized and is available online, both in pdf images and as a transcript. A paper by Susan Ingalls Lewis and Morgan Gwenwald of SUNY New Paltz chronicled Emma’s growing obsession, once she’d relocated to New York City from upstate, with the British burlesque bombshell Lydia Thompson, who was famous, among other things, not only for her intensely physical stage presence but for horsewhipping a man who’d insulted her husband/manager. (Aside from the paper yesterday, anything I know about Thompson comes from Robert C. Allen’s very fun book Horrible Prettiness, on the cultural meanings of burlesque performance in 19c NYC.)

Waite apparently goes, in the diary, from fawning over Thompson on stage to following her around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She ends her year with this:

“Saturday 31. The weather is not settled yet. but it has moderated considerably. my eyes were gratified by a sight of my darling tonight. I shall not have much longer time to look at her. well the old year is about gone into the vast gazes[?] of eternity with the hopes and fears sorrows and disappointments of Millions in its grasp. it has been a year of sorrows and disappointments like many others to me, I wish that the new year might bring brighter prospects and answered petitions to me, and so farewell to 1870.”

I count it among small miracles when such documents — especially from people who would otherwise be confined to anonymity in history’s dustbin — somehow manage to survive.

Later last night, Gwenwald, a librarian at New Paltz, told me about the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a project she’s been long affiliated with, located in a Park Slope brownstone. I’ll have to add it to our list of NYC resources.

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Roundup

March 10, 2008 in Neighborhood Scenes, Resources by Bryan

A few weeks back, my dad emailed me a link to John Strausbaugh’s Times article on the history of jazz and other popular entertainment at Lincoln Square, a “cradle for serious grooving” roughly in the area where Lincoln Center now stands.

The email also served as a reminder that I’d promised here, last fall, to keep tabs on Strausbaugh’s series of neighborhood notes and walking tours. So I should mention that, since I last mentioned these installments, Strausbaugh has also published entries on the Upper East Side and what he calls “P.T. Barnum’s New York,” meaning lower Manhattan in the 19th century.

I’ve also noticed that the Times is maintaining an interactive map with convenient links to each piece in the series, allowing you to get more details on specific sites Strausbaugh mentions along the way. As always, each installment is accompanied by a downloadable walking tour, though I have yet to give one of these a go. I’d love to hear from someone who’s tried out one or more of them.

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Of course, when it comes to Barnum, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to the extraordinary resources available from the CUNY Social History Project, including their site “The Lost Museum.”

Also in the realm of virtual NY, I’ve been meaning to say something about the Virtual LES articles that popped up in the paper a while back. You can visit the virtual LES at vles.com. I have more I want to say about that — including some gossip about the site’s treatment of rock and roll venues — but that will have to wait for another time.

On the general subject of the LES — cleaned up, virtual, or otherwise — I’ve been keen on getting Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, set in the neighborhood in the 90s.  Friends have recommended that I listen to his interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. I haven’t yet, but you can beat me to it by clicking here.

(Price, incidentally, will be speaking at the Tenement Museum on Tuesday, April 15, at 6:30 pm.)

One reason they’ve been on me about Price is that I’ve been obsessing, over on The Great Whatsit, about nostalgic and antinostalgic strains in New York writing. I haven’t had the time or space to work out everything I’m thinking on the topic, but for initial noodling around — with fugitive comments on Edith Wharton, Michael Chabon, Adam Gopnik, Theodore Dreiser and others — you can begin here.

[update, later that night: if Lush Life is half as entertaining as Sam Anderson's review of it in New York  magazine, I think I'll dig it. Sam, by the way, among other things is an advanced PhD student in our department; he just won the NBCC's Balakian Award for his reviewing. Go, Sam!]

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Radical NYC Films at NYU’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture

February 4, 2008 in Resources by Bryan | 1 comment

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE presents:

NO, NOW, NEVER: RADICAL NEW YORK CINEMA

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BORN IN FLAMES (dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983), 80 minutes

WHEN: Tuesday 5 February 2008, 6pm

WHERE: 53 Washington Square South, Room 428

All Welcome. Refreshments provided.

“The right to violence is like the right to pee: you’ve gotta have the right

place and the right time.” One of the headiest, most fiercely out-there

independent films of the 1980s, BORN IN FLAMES is an unclassifiable mash-up

of science fiction, post-No Wave docudrama and exercise in radical

dialectics. Set ten years after the Social Democratic War of Liberation, it

depicts a tumbledown, self-proclaimedly Socialist New York in which

competing groups of women, when they’re not pedaling across the city on

their bicycles in order to attack macho idiots and discontented hard-hats

hitting on their sisters, fight for a braver, more combatively feminist new

order.

BORN IN FLAMES is a seething, combustible and strangely joyous time capsule

of a film, populated by black separatists, vigilante groups and brusque FBI

agents, that was inspired in part by the Italian free-radio movement of the

1970s and 1980. It features a range of downtown luminaries – Adele Bertei

(The Contortions, The Bloods), Kathryn Bigelow and, in his first screen

appearance, Eric Bogosian – and is accompanied by a terrific soundtrack of

post punk, art rock and hip hop. A feminist classic, a piercing critique of

the media structures that pervert and betray social reality, as well as a

bulletin from the frontline of a still-raging set of ideological conflicts,

its scene of the World Trade Center being bombed alone makes it an absolute

must see.

The screening will be introduced by Asad Raza, writer and PhD candidate in

the English department at NYU.

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Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City

January 9, 2008 in Resources by Bryan | 8 comments

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We’re pleased to announce a prospective Table of Contents for our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City (edited by Waterman and Patell), due out in late 2009:

Introduction: Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman (New York University)
1. Dutch New York, Before and After Irving: Elizabeth L. Bradley (New York Public Library)
2. From British Outpost to American Metropolis: Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter University)
3. The City on Stage: Waterman
4. Melville’s New York: Thomas Augst (New York University)
5. Whitman and the Whitmanian Tradition: Lytle Shaw (New York University)
6. Sunshine and Shadow: Literature of Sensation and Reform: Glenn Hendler (Fordham University)
7. Writing Brooklyn: Martha Nadell (Brooklyn College)
8. New York Novels of Manners: Sarah Wilson (University of Toronto)
9. City of Immigrants: Political and Popular Cultures: Eric Homberger (University of East Anglia)
10. Performing Greenwich Village Bohemianism: Melissa Bradshaw (DePaul University)
11. From the Harlem Renaissance to Civil Rights: Thulani Davis (New York University)
12. From Poetry to Punk in the East Village: Daniel Kane (University of Sussex)
13. New York’s Cultures of Print: Trysh Travis (University of Florida)
14. Staging Gay and Lesbian New York: Robin Bernstein (Harvard University)
15. Emergent Ethnic Literatures: Patell
Afterword: 9/11 and Beyond: Waterman and Patell

It’s [Christmastime] in the City*

December 18, 2007 in Resources, Writing New York by Bryan

*[Enter holiday of your choice.]

tugboats.jpgI  received a flier in my mailbox today alerting me to NYU Press’s 30% holiday discount for several outstanding titles in New York history — any one of which would make an appropriate gift (for me or someone else you love). Matteson’s illustrated history of the NY tugboat looks extremely compelling. I’ve picked it up more than once while browsing local bookstores.

For more NY-centric gift reads at discount prices, see the Press’s complete list of related titles here.

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Finally, The Jazz Singer on DVD

October 28, 2007 in Film, Resources by Cyrus | 1 comment

Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927)

The last three times that Bryan and I have taught our Writing New York lecture class, we’ve assigned Alan Crosland’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Often described as the first “talkie” because of its use of the Vitaphone recording process, the film serves several of our course’s storylines: theater in New York, representation of ethnic cultures New York, the interplay of word and image in New York “writing,” and New York’s competition with Los Angeles to the site where the national popular culture is produced.

We ask our students to consider:

  • What does it mean for the son of Jewish immigrants to be a Jazz Singer? To replace immigrant patriarchy with American sentimentalism (“Mother!”)?
  • In what ways and to what effect does this film preserve older or competing forms of cultural expression (print, stage, live music)?
  • What do these preservations say about the relationship between New York and Hollywood as cultural capitals?

But teaching the film has always been a big problem for us, because it hasn’t been available on DVD and the VHS version is out of print. We’ve had to make do with letting the students view the library’s worn copy, which we’ve supplemented with personal copies purchased used through Amazon. And we’ve arranged film screenings. But we’ve never been able to require that students study the film closely, because of the difficulty of obtaining a copy.

The Jazz Singer DVDNo more. Warner Brothers has just released a three-disc deluxe DVD edition of The Jazz Singer, with sound taken from original Vitaphone discs. If the review of the DVD in the New York Times is to be believed, we ain’t heard nothin’ yet until we’ve heard the way that “Mammy” and the “Kol Nidre” now sound.

The set also includes a new documentary, ”The Dawn of Sound: How the Movies Learned to Talk,” produced by Turner Classic Movies; a variety of promotional shorts from the period; a Tex Avery cartoon parody starring “Owl Jolson”; and a full disc’s worth of Vitaphone shorts, many recovered through the work of a non-profit group called The Vitaphone Project.

According to the Times, “These fascinating documents may belong more to the history of American theater than of American film: perfect records of some of the most celebrated vaudeville performers, nightclub singers and opera stars of the day, performing exactly as they would before a live audience.” Which means that the discs are perfect for our course’s account of the film.

I can’t wait! Amazon’s sending mine as I write.

New Netherlands Institute

October 24, 2007 in Resources by Cyrus

I’ve added a link to the New Netherlands Institute under “Keys to the City” in the right-hand sidebar. According to the site, “The New Netherland Institute (formerly Friends of New Netherland) seeks to increase public awareness of the work of the New Netherland Project and supports the Project through fund raising.”

What is “The New Netherland Project”? Established under the sponsorship of the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York, the Project’s “primary objective is to complete the transcription, translation, and publication of all Dutch documents in New York repositories relating to the seventeenth-century colony of New Netherland. This unique resource has already proven invaluable to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. It also serves to enhance awareness of the major Dutch contributions to America over the centuries and the strong connections between the two nations. The Project is supported by the New York State Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New Netherland Institute.”

I expect that the site will be useful to us as we work on our history and as we plan a conference on New York writing to be held in the Spring of 2009 at NYU.

By the way, Russell Shorto uses the New Netherland Project to frame his account of Dutch Manhattan in The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2004).

 

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