Patell and Waterman’s History of New York
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I’m getting out of Manhattan for the weekend and noticed this view on the west side of Lexington Avenue between 40th and 39th Streets while waiting for a bus. I think it embodies quite a nice bit of the history of New York.
It might make a good prompt for the exam in the “New York and Modernity” course that I’m teaching this January for NYU ABu Dhabi.
Lost Penn Station
Bryan and I began our third seminar for NYU’s Faculty Resource Network, which sponsors a variety of week-long programs each summer for faculty from affiliated colleges around the country. The subject of our seminar this year is “Lost New York“:
Has New York always been a lost city? On the heels of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage for the Dutch and the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s legendary reimagining of this New World encounter in his Knickerbocker’s History of New York, this seminar will explore the dynamics of creativity and destruction, nostalgia and invention, that have for centuries marked efforts to represent life in New York City. Readings and discussions will address the relationships between the literary imagination and the archives, between migrations and displacements, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s greatest cities. We will focus our analysis on two famous cultural moments in the city’s history — Greenwich Village Bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance — and explore the ways in which our approaches to uncovering forgotten urban pasts might serve as a methodological foundation for the exploration of urban modernity more generally.
In the end, we decided to cut back on the reading we planned for the course, making it less literary and more interdisciplinary. We’re featuring three guests: David Freeland, the author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure; the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns; and the architectural preservationist and Brooklyn maven Ward Dennis.
Our group includes literary scholars, librarians, architects, historians, and a scholar of immigration and public health. During our morning session, we used NYU’s Founders Hall and the old Penn Station to open a discussion of the dynamics of creation and destruction, nostalgia and counter-nostalgia, and the politics of preservation. We showed an excerpt from the seventh chapter Burns’s New York documentary (which we will be showing in its entirety on Wednesday morning in preparation for his visit) and then two scenes from the second episode of the third season of Mad Men, in which Don Draper’s ad agency (on the wrong side of history once again) proposes to represent the Mdison Square Garden Corporation, which is bent on tearing down Penn Station.
The afternoon presented a case study in the loss and recovery of a figure from New York’s downtown scene, the avant-garde cellist and pop musician Arthur Russell. We showed the biopic Wild Combination and afterward Bryan contextualized Russell’s work by linking it not only to the downtown music scene and Allen Ginsberg, but also to Frank O’Hara and his successors. My favorite insight of the day came from seminar member Alma Vinyard, chair of the English Department at Atlanta Clark University: that O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” which recounts the poet’s activities on the day that Billie Holiday passed away, might appeal to today’s college readers because it resembles a Twitter feed!
Tomorrow we’ll be talking with Freeland and joining him in the afternoon for a walking tour of Harlem. Stay tuned.
Today my “Downtown Scenes” class will be considering conceptual art and performance and the stirrings of minimalism in music, painting, and sculpture. Some analogies and overlaps with the world of poetry we’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about as we move into the Second Generation New York School later this week. The first two figures we spent intensive time with were Ginsberg and O’Hara. Today we’ll think about the vast influence of John Cage.
Here’s my favorite early Cage clip. I know I’ve posted it before, but in case you weren’t reading at that point — trust me. It’s worth the time:
Here’s a 2007 performance of the same piece at Brown University.
Our reading for today includes Calvin Tomkins’s seminal New Yorker profile of Cage, originally published in 1965 and later included in his book Bride and the Bachelors. It’s not the most academic take on Cage, but I wanted to use it in part to consider it as a product of the period itself: it’s chatty, gossipy, and works to create Tomkins’s persona almost as much as Cage’s. But it also allows us to think about Cage before the longevity of his influence could have been known.
Our primary text, though, is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, originally published in 1964 and expanded in 1970, with a new introduction by John Lennon (“Hi! My name is John Lennon / I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono”). Grapefruit is primarily a book of instructions, what some performance scholars call “event scores.” They are conceptual pieces that present themselves variously as instructions for music, dance, painting, film, or other artistic performances. Like musical scores, they do not depend on the composer being present to perform them, often blurring the line between artist and audience. (To what degree that’s actually true will be part of our discussion.) A number of these instruction pieces are collected as part of her website; she also regularly tweets instructions that work in the same vein as these early pieces.
Ono met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had taken part in Cage’s seminar on Experimental Composition at the New School (along with a host of others who would become important to the Downtown Scene). She made her loft space on Chambers Street available for early experimental performances and loosely affiliated with Fluxus artists, based more or less in SoHo, who also operated under Cage’s influence. (The MoMA blog just last week ran a feature on Yoko’s Fluxus wallpaper featuring an imagine from her famous Film No. 4.)
Here’s a fairly recent clip of Ono reading from her instruction pieces:
I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I’ve encountered the claim that John Lennon thought of the lyrics to “Imagine” as akin, generically, to Yoko’s instruction pieces, which I suppose makes it appropriate to wrap up this post with Yoko singing that song:
P.S. If we have time at the end of class today, we’ll take a quick field trip to SoHo to see Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room. This class is turning out to be pretty fun — at least for me!
Starting my morning over coffee by looking for clips of Frank O’Hara reading his own work. Wound up getting sucked down a rabbit hole of Man Men blogs. (Getting ready to teach O’Hara today has been more fun than getting ready to teach most things. Maybe it’s just that I don’t teach this stuff all that often and so it still feels fresh.)
First, O’Hara on O’Hara:
If you want to start making sense of O’Hara’s poetry, you could do worse than to think about his tongue-in-cheek manifesto “Personism” (1959).
Two: I found something sweet about the idea of a 15-year-old Jim Carroll dogging O’Hara’s steps one afternoon in an attempt to see everything he was seeing, so as to be able to identify, at some future date, the poem O’Hara was about to go home and write:
And finally, the Mad Men episode. I had forgotten the use of Meditations in an Emergency at the opening of Season 2. Don encounters someone in a bar reading the poems over lunch (heh, heh: lunch poems, get it?). He later winds up sending the volume to an unspecified lover, probably Midge, his bohemian girlfriend from the first season who had finally blown him off. (Too bad, too — I kind of liked the midtown/downtown tension of that relationship more than the similar function of Paul Kinsey’s beard or the pot-smoking punks brought in to help the firm reach a younger demographic.) The actual sequence from the end of the first episode of the second season has been disabled by request. Here’s the voiceover with a fan montage of scenes, which has the over-the-top effect of making the poem even try harder to get at Don’s particularly shifty interiority, but also extends the “emergency” to the rest of the cast:
“Grey” in the poem calls up the idea of “grey flannel suits” quite effectively.
For kicks, here’s where the Man Men blogs took me. One post noted that in the commentary track for the DVD release of the season, the series creator described how accidental his encounter with O’Hara was, and how chance the use of that specific poem (“Mayakovky”) was as well:
Matthew Weiner was at an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York where there were snippets from Frank O’Hara’s poetry on the walls. The poetry he saw that day was from a different O’Hara book, Lunch Poems. Weiner wanted to use this book in the show, but it had not yet been published in 1962. Instead, he chose Meditations in an Emergency, seemingly without having read it. When Weiner had finished the script for “For Those Who Think Young”, he and a co-worker looked at the last poem of the book out of curiosity and found that the last poem, “Mayakovsky”, fit perfectly with what Don was experiencing in the episode. This is how they came to have Don recite the poem as he walked to the mailbox in the last scene. Not the brilliant creative decision I had expected, but an interesting case of serendipity.
The folks at AMC’s house blog, though, have pushed a more academic approach, suggesting just how brilliant the creative decision was. They enlist David Lehman, the collective biographer of O’Hara and the other New York School poets, to tease out the “hidden messages and literary motifs” in the episode. Lehman obliges:
“‘Mayakovsky’ has the phrase ‘the catastrophe of my personality,’” Lehman explains. “It is part of O’Hara’s charm that he uses such self-deprecatory humor, and I think that charm extends to the voiceover. Also, the ending of that poem implies a split in the speaker’s personality: ‘It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, / perhaps I am myself again.’ Note the difference between ‘I’ and ‘he.’ Does Don ‘feel like’ himself?”
Well read! Though I can’t help but note the sharp difference between O’Hara’s reading style, which camps everything up, and the gravity of Hamm’s delivery. Maybe that’s another point to be made: how the poetry can’t help — perhaps especially because O’Hara died so tragically young — but be more serious than his own delivery would have signified.
Tags: Frank O'Hara, Jim Carroll, Mad Men, New York School, poetry
Today I begin teaching a two-week intensive undergrad seminar on New York’s Downtown Scenes, 1960-80. The course meets four hours a day, five days a week. It promises to be a little intense.
To set the stage, today we’ll discuss Ginsberg’s Howl, talk about the physical space and population of the Village and the LES in the 1950s and 1960s, and head out on a Beats-themed walking tour led by Cary Abrams of the Lower East Side History Project. (You can take the tour Thursdays at 2:00 if you’re interested.)
We’ll also, assuming the new super-smart business-school classroom we’re meeting in has something as old-fashioned as a VCR, watch Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank’s 1959 film Pull My Daisy, considered a watershed in avant-garde American film. Narrated by Jack Kerouac and adapted from his play, the film stars Ginsberg and Gregory Corso as themselves and also features the musician David Amram, both as music director and actor. Amram discusses the film in this three-part interview, which includes enough clips to give you an idea of what the film’s like:
And here’s the film in its 26-minute entirety:
Tags: Beats, downtown scenes, Film, Ginsberg, Kerouac
Just back in town from a long conference weekend in Albuquerque. Cyrus was jetset to and from Abu Dhabi in the meantime. I’m kind of hoping we’ll be able to keep up the blog a little more regularly than we have the last few weeks.
Tomorrow I’m lecturing on The Jazz Singer (1927), one of the more complicated “texts” we discuss in Writing New York. As repulsive as some elements are, I find the film more compelling each time I view it or teach it.
For the sake of students who may be checking the blog on the eve of class, here are a few links to past discussions of the film on PWHNY: Since I’m usually the one to lecture on the film, Cyrus has offered his own take on the blog on a couple of occasions — the 2007 DVD release being one, and it looks like he actually liveblogged my lecture on another occasion, or at least supplemented it as I went. Maybe he realized I was running short on time and wouldn’t have time to squeeze in the Bamboozled clip I like to show. (SPOILER ALERT: I may show that last clip tomorrow if I have time, so save it if you want to see it first in class.)
In my own supplemental commentary to previous lectures, I mentioned how the DVD packaging notes that the original publicity for the film all centered on ways in which the film was supposedly “Al Jolson’s own story” — that is, it emphasized similarities between Jolson’s story and his character’s. I’ve also provided post-lecture thoughts on Jolson/Jakie’s performance of Kol Nidre at the film’s conclusion, with special attention to our friend Marshall Berman’s reading of that scene and the film in general. Finally, to jump from Jewish to Christian holidays, I had some thoughts last winter about the relationship between Jolson’s performance and the songwriting of the great American composer Irving Berlin, “White Christmas” in particular.
This year I’m kind of wishing we had the time to read it against Kern and Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat, which premiered the same year the Warners released The Jazz Singer. There’s a lot still to say about the cultural collaboration of Jews and African Americans in the early 20th century to produce not just modern American culture, but more specifically what the cultural historian Ann Douglas has called “mongrel Manhattan.” From Show Boat: Music by Kern, lyrics by Hammerstein, iconic performance from the 1936 film by Robeson:
Tags: Berlin, Broadway, Jazz Singer, Jolson, Kern, Writing New York
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.
Tags: Cahan
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.
Bryan and I have often thought how nice it would be if Writing New York were a full-year course rather than a semester-long course. One book that we would add to the syllabus is Ralph Ellison’s marvelous novel Invisible Man, which I think is one of the great literary achievement s of the twentieth-century. At 581 pages, however, it seems like too much to ask our students to read in a week — although I seem to recall that we did precisely that at the school where I was a graduate student. And given the chronology of our course it would have to be mid-April, already a rough time of year. Still, it’s tempting …
When the novel opens, our narrator – the “invisible man” of the title – is speaking to us from a basement in Harlem, or rather, a “border area” somewhere near Harlem: “My hole is a warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night.”
The narrator arrives in New York at about p. 157. “How do you get to Harlem,” he asks a Red Cap at the train station. “That’s easy … You just keep heading north.” A few page earlier a black veteran warns the narrator about the dangers of the city:
“New York!” he said “That’s not a place, it’s a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot. I can see you after you’ve lived in Harlem for three months. Your speech will change, you’ll talk a lot about ‘college,’ you’ll attend lectures at the Men’s House … you might even meet a few white folks. And listen,” he said, leaning close to whisper, “you might even dance with a white girl!”
Invisible Man is the first novel that we’re reading in my summer graduate course on U.S. Fiction after 1940, which began this evening. One of the questions I asked, in order to set up our discussion of the novel for the next class, is what difference the New York setting makes to the novel. What do you think?
The New York setting certainly made a difference to Ellison. In a 1981 introduction to a reprinted edition of the novel, Ellison wrote: “In retrospect it was as though writing about invisibility had rendered me either transparent or opaque and set me bouncing back and forth between the benighted provincialism of a small village an the benign disinterestedness of a great metropolis. Which given the difficulty of gaining authorial knowledge of this diverse society was not a bad discipline for an American writer.”
How would the addition of Invisible Man affect the stories we tell in Writing New York, particularly the one about the city’s cosmopolitan traditions? I’ll have more to say on that score on later in the week.
As Bryan wrote earlier this week, we decided to end our Writing New York class on a dystopian note, with Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns rather than on a more hopeful note as we’ve done in recent years — with the blessing that concludes Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America.
There’s a way, though, in which we did manage to give Kushner the final word — or, perhaps more appropriately, the final question. Because the final question on the final examination for the course was framed by a quote from Kushner:
This city is an example of a fantastic and completely unworkable variety of cultures, and consciousnesses, and generational differences, and sexual preferential differences, all living together in one place and forming a peaceable kingdom, a workable government, a real democracy, and creating a city that is genuinely an exciting civic space.
The quote comes from the supplementary materials included on the DVD version of Ric Burns’s New York, and we invited the students to think about its implications in one of a number of different ways.
One topic arose from the idea of New York’s “variety of cultures”: we invited students to talk about ways in which different works on our syllabus had represented the interactions of enclaves, subcultures, or countercultures.
The second topic focused the idea of variety around the idea of cosmopolitanism, asking students to think about the promises and limitations of cosmopolitanism as dramatized in works we had read or seen during the term.
Students could also elect to talk about the implications of Kushner’s idea of the “fantastic,” by discussing the use of “realism” — whatever they took that to mean — and alternatives to it that we encountered over the course of the semester.
Finally, a fourth topic picked up on the slight tinge of uneasiness implicit in Kushner’s statement. We suggested that, optimistic as it seems at first glance, Kushner’s quote does suggest that there may be something dark or “unworkable” about New York City, and we invited students to thinking about works on our syllabus that dramatize New York’s failure to make good on its utopian promises.
I guess we did end on a dystopian note after all.
Which of these questions did most of our students choose to answer? And what were some of the most interesting things that they wrote in response to the exam as a whole? We’ll let you know later in the week.
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