Squawkies and Talkies

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The images accompanying this essay are provided by the author (collection of Will Straw). 1. Virginia Pope, ‘The Changing Cycle of Entertainment/After a Long Era of Shadows and Voices Comes a New Call for the Actor’, New York Times (16 October 1932). 2. Virginia Pope, ‘The Changing Cycle of Entertainment’. 3. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p.123. 4. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p.111. 5. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.1. 6. Michael Warner, ‘Zones of Privacy’, in What's Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), p.102. 7. Lenny Kaye, You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon (New York: Villard Books, 2004). 8. Walter Winchell, ‘Broadway’, syndicated column, Port Arthur News (24 March 1936), p.4. 9. Unsigned, ‘Foreword’, Squawk, no date, no pagination, pp.1–2. 10. For claims about Knight's ‘invention’ of the term, see the discussion on the American Dialect Society listserve, archived at ⟨http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi‐bin/wa?A2 = ind0001D&L = ads‐l&P = R1218⟩ [15/01/2008]. 11. Jim Bishop, The Mark Hellinger Story (New York: Appleton‐Century‐Crofts, 1952), p.55. 12. For a lengthier account of Clow's trial, and his life in general, see Will Straw, ‘Traffic in Scandal: The Case of Broadway Brevities’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 73:4 (2004), pp.947–971. 13. Unsigned, ‘Mirrors of Mayfair’, Broadway Brevities, 3:20 (June 1924), p.17. 14. ‘The Press’, Time (11 August 1930), p.23. 15. Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p.53. 16. Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 17. John Guillory, ‘The Memo and Modernity’, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004), p.126. 18. For images of the covers of Broadway Brevities from all periods in its history, see my website, ‘Print Culture and Urban Visuality’, ⟨http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/ahcs/cultureofcities/Print%20Culture.html⟩ 19. Stephen G. Clow, ‘Parasites Who Have Fattened Off Brevities. Our Original and Unique Style of Banter Copied Everywhere B Columnist Winchell on the Most Brazen and Contemptuous imitator B Boasted “Winchellisms” But an Echo of Brevities (1916–1924)’, The New Broadway Brevities 1:4 (1930), pp.32–33. 20. Stephen G. Clow, ‘Parasites Who Have Fattened Off Brevities’, pp.32–33. I have shortened the text Clow reproduces for reasons of space. 21. Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, p.80. 22. The three‐dot ellipsis is used in Walter Winchell's ‘Merciless Truth’, Vaudeville News (20 August 1920), p.2. 23. James Carey, ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.201–30. 24. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.94.