Writing New York

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Previously on PWHNY: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

April 28, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan

We’re nearing the end of the semester in our Writing New York class. Many years we’ve concluded with Kushner’s Angels in America. This year we still have Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker to discuss, and so this morning I don’t feel quite the relief I often do when finishing my lectures on Angels. Still, it’s one of my favorite texts we teach in this course.

We’ve built up quite a few posts on Kushner’s play over the last few years. Here are a few of the highlights: Last year Cyrus supplemented my lectures with a few additional thoughts on Kushner’s use of New York City as a setting and on the play’s engagement with cosmopolitanism (see this one, too, on that score). I’ve offered my own thoughts about the play’s conclusion, in which Prior breaks the fourth wall and blesses his audience, and a year earlier I’d written about the ways in which the play recycles a number of stories and symbols, Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain among them. (Because that post has some links that are now dead, I had to post again on the prior use of Bethesda in Godspell.) Several years ago, a highlight of our course was a guided tour of Central Park at sunset (or a tour of the sunset with Central Park as a backdrop) with our favorite ex-NYC tour guide, Speed Levitch. I provided a more detailed account of that afternoon elsewhere. It’s only indirectly related to Kushner’s play, but still important if you want to think about the ways in which Central Park has long been contested public space, something Kushner’s certainly aware of when he selects Bethesda as the setting for his final scene.

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Previously on PWHNY: The Jazz Singer (1927)

March 23, 2010 in Film, Music, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan | 4 comments

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:

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WNY 7.0

January 20, 2010 in Writing New York by Bryan | 16 comments

This morning Cyrus and I will kick off the seventh incarnation of our team-taught course Writing New York. Here’s what the kids will be ordering, in case you want to read along at home. They’re listed alphabetically by author but we read them roughly chronologically. We’ll post the full syllabus in the coming days.

Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
Abraham Cahan, Yekl
Stephen Crane, Maggie
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Henry James, Washington Square
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City
Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Early American Drama
Philip Shaw, Patti Smith’s Horses (33 1/3)
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
E.B. White, Here is New York

Of course we don’t make our full lectures public here — we have to earn our livings, after all — but we do post some follow-up thoughts and discussion and welcome our regular readers and our students (and former students!) to comment and interact as you please.

Over time we’ve retooled things, a little tweak here and there each year. Among the inhabitants of the WNY graveyard: the Lopate anthology Writing New York (from whence we took the course’s name and which we still highly recommend; we found we liked teaching longer texts better, and the anthology was an expensive buy for an already expensive course); Nella Larsen’s Passing (our Harlem Renaissance unit has slimmed, over time, to a discussion of poetry we distribute on our own); Hart Crane’s The Bridge (which we gave up for an extra day on poetry/music from the Beats to the punks); Joe Harvard’s 33 1/3 volume The Velvet Underground and Nico (to accompany the other album we require students to listen to for class). We’ve added some titles over time, too, notably several chapters of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, which helps us structure the course’s narrative arc for the second half of the twentieth century. Last year we started teaching the essays from our Cambridge Companion, which we’ll keep doing, though the volume won’t be in print until the very end of this semester. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is new to the course this year; it will bump Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which we’re still having them buy but we’ll reserve for an extra-curricular lecture late in the semester. If I could add one text that we’ve never been able to squeeze in it would be Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.

What would you add or drop if you were teaching this course?

Previously.

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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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