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Do you know Kevin Walsh's Forgotten New York?

I've had a copy for a year or so, and every once in a while remember to pack it with me when I'm heading to an unfamiliar neighborhood. (There's also an accompanying blog, cheerfully cluttered, that's well worth checking regularly.)

The book offers hundreds of out-of-the-way or in-plain-sight-but-easily-overlooked details from the city's past, broken into categories like "Truly Forgotten," "Quiet Places," or "What's This Thing?" It's  designed for New Yorkers rather than tourists; it's for people constantly on the look for little glimpses into lost parts of the city.

I rarely use the book to find a destination for an afternoon outing, say, but when I pack it along it always adds a nice dimension to a trip to or from somewhere I already wanted to go. A few weekends ago, ssw and I took our bikes and headed up the paths along the Hudson. We weren't sure how far we'd go, though we had a vague idea we wanted to go kayaking up at Pier 96 before the weather turned. Once we were done (and had spent enough time spread out in the sun to dry our asses off) we got back on our bikes and headed up as high as St. Clair Place, around 125th street.

I had my copy of FN in my basket, and vaguely had some idea that we were close to Grant's Tomb, which we'd never managed to visit. So we circled around until we hit Riverside Drive, pumped our way up the rather steep hill, and made our way back a few blocks to 123rd St.

Do you know who's buried at Grant's Tomb? I'm sheepish to admit I didn't know the answer to that riddle until we visited with FN's assistance.

One minor disappointment, though. I remembered, when the Hudson River path hit St. Clair Place and we decided to stop our journey north, that FN had an entry explaining that street's name. It accompanies the entry on Grant's Tomb, in fact. It has to do not with the more famous tomb, but with an obscure grave nearby:

Five-year-old St. Clair Pollock was playing on the rocks overlooking the Hudson River on the Pollock property, and fell to his death on July 15, 1797. When the Pollocks later sold the property, his father (perhaps his uncle; records are unclear) made the request that St. Clair's grave, which was on the property, would always be respected. A small stone urn remains marked, "Erected to the memory of an amiable child." St. Clair is also commemorated with the very short St. Clair Place, which runs between the Hudson River and West 125th Street under the Riverside Drive Viaduct, about a half mile to the north.

We only spent about 15 minutes looking for it, but we couldn't find the little stone urn, which is supposedly a little ways "up Riverside" (I assumed that meant north), "standing by itself, surrounded by an iron fence."

I suppose I'll have to go back and look again. Tip for bikers: ride back downtown as far as you can along Riverside Drive itself, which is somewhat more spectacular than I would have imagined and certainly lusher than a ride along the river at that point.

Yglesias laments the recent announcement of a new Moby-Dick film adaptation -- directed by the guy with the unspellable last name who just directed Wanted, written by a team that has only teen comedies to their credit (including the Olsen twins vehicle New York Minute), and co-produced by the folks who're bring us the American history adventure series National Treasure. (Recall Nicolas Cage peering at the all-seeing eye on a dollar bill: "I think the Illuminati were trying to send us secret messages!")

Is it indulging in Ivory Tower elitism to join Matt in thinking: "Terrifying!" -- and not in a good, White-Whale-crushing-your-boat way?

Part of what's to be lamented, apparently, is that the writers are conceiving this as "an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story" -- something more akin to dramatizing a graphic novel.

Actually, Melville wrote that version of the story himself. And then he spent a year rewriting it into Moby-Dick. Biographer Delbanco draws on Melville's own words to set the scene as a vampire story:

Looking back at his labors on Moby-Dick, Melville saw "two books ... being writ ... the larger book, and the infinitely better, is for [his] own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink."  Moby-Dick was Melville's vampire book. It sapped him -- but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author's stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship.

So what's lost in reducing Melville's two-in-one grand-slam to a film adaptation of a graphic novel? Lots, I suspect, as is true with all other film versions of the book. This time they're jettisoning the first-person narration, for one -- something most of the graphic novel adaptations of the book don't even manage, as far as I can tell.

The news of the new adaptation -- and its conception in relation to graphic novels -- led me to do some poking around. I quickly realized the graphic adaptation of Melville's book had gone through many more versions than I was aware of. I grew up on the old Illustrated Classics rendition; my wife picked up one for our kids when she worked for Scholastic. We own the pop-up version, of course. What self-respecting Am Lit professor under age 50 doesn't?

But I hadn't realized until this morning that there's a Will Eisner version, along with two others that feature major figures from my experience as a teenage comic book collector in the 1980s: Dick Giordano and Bill Sienkiewicz. And just this year Marvel published a six-installment adaptation, due for single-volume hardcover release next month (see illustration to the left). I've just put in orders for all of the above -- of course there are many more -- but I have to say that list of names here heartens me. Certainly some of these adaptations are smart? Maybe this will turn out better than the 90s version of The Scarlet Letter, before filming which Demi Moore didn't even feel the need to read the novel.

I blogged this elsewhere last year, but this afternoon I'm leading an annual Sweets and Cheap Eats on the LES walking tour for students returning to the Residential College where I live as faculty in residence.

If you were to add something to this tour, what would it be?

I'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!

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).

Working 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.

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.

Greetings 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.

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.

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.

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE presents:

NO, NOW, NEVER: RADICAL NEW YORK CINEMA



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.

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