Greenwich Village Research Articles

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

Queer Rhetoric in Situ

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

Topographies of liminality in 1960s’ New York underground cinema: Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence (1965)

Abstract In the 1950s and 1960s, western metropolises were undergoing major changes in their structure, some of the biggest caused by adapting urban infrastructure to the new society based on individual mobility and progress. This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the city by focusing on a category of independent cinema that most directly relates to its everyday urban environment. Working with Deleuze’s taxonomic approach of interrogating filmic images regarding the concepts they produce, the co-production of filmic and urban space in 1960s New York underground cinema is analysed through a close reading of Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, a study of the bohemian Greenwich Village milieu and its social types. The production of the urban experience through the filmic form of the balade is the main focus. In asking how the movements of a drifting protagonist produce a spatiality that relates to constitutive societal conflicts, this article argues that the filmic images contribute to the way its viewers perceive their urban environment, in that they generate new concepts, not only on cinema but also on the city.

Review: Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks

Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks Museum of the City of New York 21 April 2015–3 January 2016 New York City's landmarks law is fifty years old, and to celebrate this milestone the Museum of the City of New York mounted an exhibition to tell the story. Using both historic documents and contemporary photographs, the curators (Andrew S. Dolkart and Donald Albrecht, with Seri Worden) told this story well, from the demolition of the 1803 St. John's Chapel in 1918 through the enactment of the law itself in 1965 to the continuing efforts of preservationists to protect the historic city in the twenty-first century. If I had one quibble it was that they made it all seem so easy, so inevitable. The conflicts and controversies were there—the loss of Pennsylvania Station and the fights to save Grand Central Terminal and the Broadway theaters, the long campaign to protect Greenwich Village, the battle over a tower proposed for St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue—but they were presented in a rather cool and bloodless fashion. Where were the anger and the passion, of which there had been plenty? The story told by the exhibition ended triumphantly, even though new voices with new arguments seek to undermine the landmarks law today. New …

The Gate to the Village: Shlomo Carlebach and the Creation of American Jewish “Folk”

The Gate to the Village: Shlomo Carlebach and the Creation of American Jewish “Folk” Ari Y. Kelman (bio) and Shaul Magid (bio) “Chassidim believe that in the highest heavens there is a sanctuary that song alone can unlock. Could these songs be the keys to that Gate? Sing them and see.” Rachel Anne Rabinowitz, liner notes for Shlomo Carlebach: Live at the Village Gate “Hevra, let’s pretend we’re happy.” Shlomo Carlebach, Waban MA, 1995 “Please open the gates for me. Please open the gates.” That’s how Shlomo Carlebach introduced himself to his audience at The Village Gate, the legendary Greenwich Village club where he performed on a number of occasions during the early 1960s. This beseeching, almost liturgical invitation opens his 1963 album, “Shlomo Carlebach: Live at the Village Gate,” and serves as an introduction to his version of Psalm 118: “Open the Gates of Righteousness / I long to enter and give thanks.” According to Carlebach, he wrote the melody for the song on his way to the performance, when he may well have been contemplating the connection between his music, its connection to sacred Jewish texts, and the music scene of the moment in New York’s Greenwich Village in which he had become an active participant as a singer, performer, composer, and somewhat marginal figure in the Folk Revival. In other words, Carlebach wasn’t necessarily talking about the club, but he might as well have been. Gates, after all, are places of admission and transformation. They open and close, they protect and they make possible. They are liminal places. Literal thresholds. They are places of tricksters and traders, of migrants and paupers and, in the legends of Jewish midrash and folklore, they are where the messiah, appropriately dressed as a vagabond changing the dressing on his wounds, will eventually be found. And, of course, gates, both closed and open, gesture to the Holocaust, a term barely more than decade old in 1962, its survivors trying to reconstitute their broken lives, and something about which was deeply embedded in [End Page 511] Carlebach’s psyche.1 As a child, Carlebach barely escaped Belgium as the Nazis entered the country and this unspeakable tragedy inflected almost everything he did. He was a post-Holocaust itinerant and his was surely an immigrant experience. He came from elsewhere. It is therefore no mistake, as Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen have noted in their recent documentary history, Folk City: New York and the American Folk Revival that the phenomenon consisted largely of individuals who were not native New Yorkers but who were themselves immigrants from elsewhere.2 By the 1940s, New York and Greenwich Village specifically, had become a destination for aspiring bohemians and folkies looking to find a community of like-minded, politically progressive people for whom music played a powerful organizing force. It is also widely known that Jews played a prominent role in this revival. Bob Dylan became the most well-known but others such as Theodore Bikel, Jack Elliott, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), Arlo Guthrie, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Millard Lampell, lyricist and performer with The Almanac Singers (with a young Pete Seeger) were also Jewish performers, though only Bikel included Jewish material as a regular part of his act.3 Bikel, who was also already successful on Broadway, became widely known in the folk world through his live radio show on WBAI, “Theodore Bikel at Home,” recorded at the folk music club The Bitter End. Bikel’s show included folk music, poetry and commentary on the Folk Revival. On the production side, prominent Jewish figures included Moses (Moe) Asch, the founder of Folkways Records and son of Shalom Asch, the celebrated Yiddish novelist and poet, Maynard and Seymour Solomon, founders of Vanguard Records, Irwin Silber, co-founder of Sing [End Page 512] Out! magazine, Israel “Izzy” Young who established and operated the Folklore Center, New York Times columnist and folk music devotee Richard Shelton (nee Shapiro), Jac Holzman founder of Elektra Records, Manny Roth who founded the folk club The Cock and Bull on Bleeker Street (later bought by another Jew, Fred Weintruab and re-named...

The Digital Apple

Why am I typing out these words in a New York City office building? Because IEEE Spectrum is located in the official global headquarters of the IEEE; when two earlier organizations merged to form the IEEE in 1963, it was written into the founding regulations that HQ would be in NYC. The city was the obvious choice at the time: For decades, New York had been at the heart of global electrical and electronic invention. Edison's first commercial power plant came to life in downtown Manhattan in 1882. During World War II, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon lunched together at the original Bell Telephone Laboratories location in Greenwich Village. And the surrounding area saw the first modern FM radio transmissions, the first transistor, and the first purely electronic color televisions. A new exhibition at the New York Historical Society celebrates this technological heritage. Called Silicon City and open until mid-April, the small but well-curated exhibition focuses on the city's role in the history of computing.

Introduction: Faulkner, New York

Introduction: Faulkner, New York Robert Jackson (bio) I I’d like to ask,” a visitor to one of William Faulkner’s talks at the University of Virginia in 1958 said, “why is it that Mississippi seems so very active in a literary way, and yet we don’t find the same phenomenon in New Jersey?” “Well,” Faulkner replied, “that’s because Mississippi is in the South and New Jersey’s in the North.” Listen to this exchange at Steven Railton’s “Faulkner at Virginia” online audio archive, and you will hear audience laughter follow not just the answer, but the question, too (16:18–17:05). II Once upon a time there were two Faulknerians. One was a native New Yorker who had spent his educational and teaching career at Columbia, City College, and NYU. Among some two dozen books on modern European and American literature, he wrote an acclaimed biography of Joseph Conrad, and later drew heavily on what he referred to as his own “Polish-Russian-Lithuanian Jewish” background to produce a biography of Franz Kafka (Edwards). He knew the South almost exclusively through his reading and what the TV and movies showed him, and even late in life he could still summon the feelings of genuine amazement he had felt decades earlier upon discovering Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to be the greatest work American literature, and possibly twentieth-century world literature, had produced. “Absalom’s so good—it’s a cliché!” he told me, laughing at himself for losing his cool and being, for once in his life, at a loss for words. The other Faulknerian was a small-town Mississippian, educated in the South, who lived and taught at a university in his home state. He was a fine scholar as well—perhaps the preeminent Faulknerian of his generation, along with his work on Eudora Welty and other Mississippi writers—and his intimate knowledge of Southern literature and culture made him sensitive to the chasm between the quotidian middle-class existence of most Southerners and the popular associations—or stereotypes, as they almost exclusively were—with the region. “I seem to have grown up in a history-less backwash of the South,” he wrote in the 1990s, “and my life as a southerner is completely out of kilter with the southern life portrayed in bad fiction and in the media” (Polk xii). [End Page 3] At some point in the 1980s the man from New York, Frederick Karl, decided to write a biography of Faulkner, believing that the standard work on Faulkner’s life by Joseph Blotner had failed or, as he put it in a New Yorker’s strained attempt to be diplomatic, not attempted, to “understand and interpret that life psychologically, emotionally, and literarily. . . . The growth of the artist is our quest” (xv), he stated in the foreword to his own massive book, which received mixed reviews upon its 1989 publication. A few years ago, when he learned that my studies of Faulkner ran through Greenwich Village rather than Oxford, the Mississippi Faulknerian, Noel Polk, told me a story about how the New York Faulknerian had sought him out when doing his research. The Mississippian had received a phone call from the New Yorker, who said, “I’d like to interview you for my Faulkner biography. I’ll be flying to New Orleans in the near future. Could you drive down to meet me there?” “Well, I’d be happy to talk, but could you drive up to meet me where I live?” the Mississippian replied. “I’ll give you a call back when I finalize my travel plans,” the New Yorker said. The Mississippian never heard from him again; and when the biography was published, he was surprised to see his name so prominently included in the acknowledgements section. So this is the story of the missed connection between Mississippi and New York, and the vast psychological distance represented by a one-hundred-twenty-two-mile drive that neither man made thirty years ago. As the direct beneficiary of both of these now-departed scholars at different times in my career, I have long wondered what the field might have looked like if they...

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul by Tanisha C. Ford

Reviewed by: Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soulby Tanisha C. Ford Katie Knowles Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. By Tanisha C. Ford. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 256. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2515-7.) Tanisha C. Ford presents a creative and thoroughly researched piece of scholarship. She deftly moves across the African diaspora to historicize soul-style fashion popular from the late 1950s into the 1970s. Testimonies of individual women from South Africa, London’s Brixton neighborhood, and her own mother’s story of growing up black and female in Indiana form the heart of the narrative. African American soul music and the black press provide an additional layer of sources, as well as an explanation for how soul style moved around the Atlantic. Ford places black women at the center of both defining and popularizing not only soul style but also the transatlantic civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Readers of this journal will be most interested in chapter 3 about soul style in the 1960s U.S. South. By the time readers arrive in the South, Ford has already taken them through the early roots of soul style in the Greenwich Village and Harlem neighborhoods of New York City. These two earlier chapters focus on the connections between fashion and music in defining a soul style that combined African American ideas of authentic African dress, textiles, and hairstyles that were not always accurate. Women members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expressed a different kind of soul style that arose from working in the rural South. SNCC women adopted the clothing of the rural working class as a practical response to their inability to perform civil rights work while dealing with constant hair upkeep and care of expensive fabrics. This fashion also became a response to the respectability politics espoused by other civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and by the black press. The book reaches the height of the soul-style movement in the fourth chapter, which is also the strongest. It is here that Ford’s mother, Amye Glover, becomes the focus of the narrative. Glover grew up attending a predominantly black high school in Indiana but then went to the predominantly white Indiana University. She was an early adopter of soul style in her teenage years, and it became an even larger part of her identity in college. Glover’s story and personal photos are combined with Ford’s analysis of popular magazines like Essence, the mass production of soul style, and an excellent breakdown of the Afro hairstyle. Ford’s international focus allows her to place African American ideas about Africanness within a global framework, particularly in the last chapter describing soul style in anti-apartheid South Africa. Her approach to historicizing a fashion moment within a political movement is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of everyday experiences. In the epilogue, Ford explains her own connections to [End Page 979]soul style and the importance of doing this research to better understand herself. The moving testimonies Ford presents of the black women who lived through soul style’s heyday are proof that activist scholarship motivated by personal experience provides powerful contributions to the field of history. Katie Knowles Alexandria, Virginia Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Interview with Cecile Starr

Cecile Starr was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 14, 1921, and she died in Vermont on December 9, 2014. During World War II she worked at the Australia News and Information Bureau, associated with the Office of War Information and at the March of Time as she moved amongst the greats of documentary filmmaking of the period and Greenwich Village: John Grierson, Robert Flaherty, Damien Parer, Alexander Hammid, Joris Ivens, Helen van Dongen, Raymond Spottiswoode, Helen Levitt, Henwar Rodakiewicz, Willard Van Dyke, Boris Kaufman, Irving Jacoby, Ricky Leacock, and Aram Boyajian, whom she married in 1957, as well as James Agee and Iris Barry. In 1949, Starr started writing film reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature, taught film and film history in the Graduate Program from 1955 to 1961 at Columbia University, and created and coordinated school film programs for the Lincoln Center Education Department from 1967 to 1968. During this period she was particularly active contributing to Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly, and Filmmakers Newsletter. She was an instructor and consultant in film and film history at the New School for Social Research and Hunter College in New York City, the New York Society of Ethical Culture, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Walden High School. Starr also consulted for the United Nations World Health Organization, the Institute of Adult Education, the Public Library Inquiry, the Film Council of America, and the Mental Health Film Board. As producer, scriptwriter, and consultant on four films including Fellow Citizen: A. Lincoln (1972), Islamic Carpets (1970), Richter on Film (1972), and Rembrandt and the Bible (1967), Starr turned her scholarly interest in film to a practice born out of her research. Starr also published the books Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1968) (with Robert Russett), Ideas on Film: A Handbook for the 16mm Film User (1971), and Discovering the Movies: An Illustrated Introduction to the Moving Image (1972).Cecile Starr: Let's go backwards a little. You asked how I got into this. My first real job was at the Australian News Bureau. I got that because a fellow I had known in college at Louisiana State University, he came up to New York at the same time I went to Columbia graduate school. He was going to Harvard business school. He introduced me to his sister. His name was Peter Fritsch, her name was Mia Fritsch, and she had just met a new boyfriend whose name was Jim Agee. I went to dinner at Mia's house with Peter. Jim was there and was very much in love with Mia. Though he was married and had a previous wife divorced and he was young, the relationship with Mia lasted the rest of both their lives. Peter and Mia's brother, the Fritsch family, were kind of early refugees from Nazi Austria. Their brother, Henry, was married to an Australian woman whose name I forget. She was working for the Australian News and Information Bureau, but she came down with TB [tuberculosis] and her doctor said she had to have bed rest for a year. So I was looking for a job, and they asked me if I would take her job. Her job was listening to recordings. This was now 1942, and the recordings were from the Australian government, which were newscasts about what was going on in the war in the South Pacific area where we had some bases and other European countries had some territories. New Guinea. Was it the Dutch that had divided up that place? I started listening to recordings, which were the size of big dinner platters. They were brought in by truck every morning from Montauk, the far end of Long Island. They were received by radio and recorded because it got a clearer sound than if it was recorded in the city. It was from Australia. I then took these recordings about 10 o'clock in the morning and played them on a transcribing machine, typed them out. Then we called the messenger, and the messenger took them by hand to the New York Times, the New York Herald Review, and the New York Daily News. …

Spitfire and Sass: Valerie Solanas’s “A Young Girl’s Primer” and the Creative Possibilities of a Survival Self

In July 1966, Valerie Solanas had just finished her play, Up Your Ass, and would soon begin to pen her famed indictment of men, masculinity, and Daddy's girls, SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967, published with Olympia Press in 1968, self-published again in 1977 as the CORRECT version). While scholars have taken the intellectual contribution of the SCUM Manifesto and its relevance to contemporary (radical) feminism seriously (Deem 1996; Fahs 2008; Harding 2001; Harrison 2013; Haut 2007; Heller 2001; Ronell 2004; Third 2006; Warner and Watts 2014; Winkiel 1999), and a few have analyzed the histories of Up Your Ass (Harding 2001; Rosenberg 2010)-particularly its role in inspiring Solanas to shoot Andy Warhol (Rowe 2013; Warner 2012)-most work on Solanas has grossly ignored the savvy, subversive, and wildly funny essay Solanas wrote for Cavalier magazine, A Young Girl's or How to Attain the Leisure Class (1966). As Solanas's biographer, I have contextualized her life in relation to the times and places she inhabited, just as I have worked to frame her writing in relation to her various (and changing) constructions of herself (Fahs 2014). As her third piece of published writing, the Primer most directly speaks to the conditions of her embodied, lived experiences as a homeless prostitute on the streets of New York and, as such, serves as a commentary not only about Solanas herself but also about more broadly.Deploying rhetorical and affective strategies of nihilism, anger, and callousness, Solanas reveals how can paradoxically require contradictions and tensions like optimism/pessimism, humor/outrage, and grandiosity/self-effacement. This essay explores these contradictions and tensions, revealing the ways that Solanas carefully constructs different selves in her text and in her life that play up these egos and caricatures, all while actually struggling to survive on a daily basis. Barely getting by, starting to unravel with various symptoms of her emerging paranoid schizophrenia, and struggling as a writer who had to carry her typewriter from one crash pad to the next (Fahs 2014), Solanas wrote the Primer as a textual counterpart, an effortful meditation on how she could (and did) survive in a context that degraded and dismissed her.W hile most people may imagine to mean meeting one's basic needs for food, shelter, and safety, Solanas's needs presented a much more complicated set of priorities. As a fringe character on the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia and Warhol's Stupid Stars, and as a brilliant writer and thinker (she scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on her IQ test), Solanas's ambitions extended far beyond mere physicality. Solanas's need to survive differently, embodied in her decision to craft an alternative self who could withstand the stressors of her daily life, shines through in the Primer. W hatever deterioration she experienced in her actual self/body, she could resist these indignities and intrusions by honing her skills as a writer and satirist. Vivid in its startling contradictions with her actual self, brash and bold in its depiction of the shamelessly downtrodden, funky, low-down counterpart who emerges unscathed from life in the Primer, Solanas cultivates a revolutionary self who thrives on the chaos of New York City panhandling and S&M sex.This essay considers this survival self as a viable strategy for (struggling) feminist artists, writers, and thinkers-particularly those whose conditions of daily life require an alter to endure the various taxations, trivializations, violences, and mockeries directed toward women within a patriarchal culture. Building on previous work on constructions of the self (Smith and Sparkes 2008), I first trace the particular textual assertions of Solanas's ego in the Primer, and then analyze how it contradicted Solanas's lived conditions in 1966. Following this, I return to Solanas's philosophy of the gutter, where knowledge, revolution, and self are produced within conditions of trash, waste, and excess, and I make connections to Solanas's politics of the visceral, guttural, and trashy/ trasher. …

Helping Your Facility Adjust to a Rainbow World

Helping Your Facility Adjust to a Rainbow World

Samuel F. B. Morse and the dawn of the age of electricity

Preface Chapter 1: An American Artist: Fame and Misfortune Chapter 2: Starving Artist Invents Telegraph in Greenwich Village Garret Chapter 3: From Wilderness to Empire: Morse and the System Builders Chapter 4: The Question of Origins and Originality: Did More Really Invent the Telegraph? Chapter 5: The Great Man Revered and Reviled Chapter 6: Locust Grove Concluding Remarks

‘A Genuine Respect for the People’

I, first, discuss the ethical and scholarly bases of approaches ‘emancipated’ from mainstream societal discourses. Next, I reinsert into the genealogy of us migration history’s development several ‘early’ research clusters or schools from the 1880s with a focus on other people than white western and northern Europeans. Third, I argue that, in a subsequent phase, such approaches coalesced around Franz Boas and what I call the Columbia University/ Barnard School of interdisciplinary research from the 1890s to the 1950s. Both men and women were part of this group working in the spatial-intellectual context of New York City’s Ellis Island, Greenwich Village, and Harlem. In addition, a network of cooperative scholarly transnational relationships emerged esp. to Polish post-1918 scholarship. I will focus on the Columbia-Barnard scholars’ research on (a) European immigrants and exiles, (b) Mexican migration to and life-ways in the us, and (c) African American (more precisely: ‘African-us’) and African-Caribbean cultures. To emphasise agency and networks I will emphasize individual scholars’ contributions and connections. The question, why this scholarship was ignored or (deliberately?) forgotten, remains latent but any suggestion for an answer can be made.

One is always nearer by not keeping still

In an article entitled My Own Life published by the New York Times in its 19 February 2015 issue Oliver Sacks announced to his many fans and admirers that at the age of 81 his luck had finally run out. The rare ocular melanoma, which he had written about in his book The Mind’s Eye and that had left him blind in one eye for the last few years had spread to his liver. In the spring of this year when I visited him at his home in Greenwich Village, he was still writing furiously. His desk was covered with metals and crystals. He told me that the steely grey beryllium (element 4) rectangle reminded him of his Elysian childhood while his bismuth (element 83) sample sparked optimism for a future he feared he was unlikely to ever see. He also described how he had been moved one night while visiting the country by the celestial beauty of a sky peppered with stars. During his admission to hospital for a hepatic embolization he had lapsed briefly into stupor, but with characteristic curiosity he later recorded his delirium. He told me that his liver now closely resembled a wodge of Emmentaler. He then showed me his notebook where for an hour or so his script had become spidery and uncharacteristically small and we speculated whether manganese atomic number 25 might be the culprit. The chemotherapeutic beads allowed him to rebound and have several months of health. He was able to see his memoir published, to make a farewell visit to England, and to continue his daily swims. I later learned that he had requested to be wheeled out to look at the heavens in the hours before his death. On the Move, the most autobiographical of his 13 books, can be …

The “Loft Cause” or “Bohemia Gone Bourgeois?”

The Westbeth Arts Center in New York’s Greenwich Village was one of the first large-scale institutionally sponsored conversions of nineteenth-century factories into residential lofts for artists. A privately and publicly financed project to provide housing for low-income artists, Westbeth stood apart from individual-artist-led loft conversion in SoHo in both its scope and its philanthropic goals of democratizing the arts in postwar America. Westbeth never met its sponsors’ hopes that it would serve as a model for similar nonprofit artist residences in cities throughout the nation, but it did prove to private real estate developers that residential lofts had cultural value in postindustrial cities. Ultimately, Westbeth represented a transitional moment in postwar urban development between publicly funded urban renewal and private real estate development.

The Happiest of Finds: William L. Rathje's Influence on the Field of Discard Studies

The study of waste has many roots. For more than half a century, anthropologists, historians, and policy analysts have attempted to understand what, how, and why societies dispose of materials deemed worthless or hazardous. Historical approaches to discard studies include analyses of the creation of industrial wastes, the development of infrastructures such as landfills and wastewater treatment facilities, and the emergence of formal and informal recycling systems (Melosi 2005; Tarr 1996). Anthropologists, including Mary Douglas (1966), have considered cultural constructions of waste. Sociologists and economists have assessed consumption and disposal patterns (Bullard 2000; Strasser 1999; Thompson 1979). William L. Rathje, who died in 2012, made a unique and enduring contribution to the interdisciplinary study of waste by focusing on the materiality of discards. Rathje applied his archaeological training in unearthing the material culture of prehistoric societies to provide new perspectives on industrial societies, perspectives that have proved influential on the broad field of discard studies. Rathje completed his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University in 1971, submitting a dissertation on Lowland Classic Maya socio-political organization (Rathje 1971). He subsequently continued to study Mesoamerican societies. In 1973, he was a co-director of the Cozumel Archaeological Project, sponsored by the National Geographic Society (Sabloff and Rathje 1975). As Rathje completed his degree, interest in contemporary garbage was on the rise. Environmental concern about waste in the 1960s had led to the passage of a series of federal and state laws intended to curb garbage and pollution. A few aficionados began attempting to use discarded materials to interpret contemporary life. By the end of 1970, A. J. Weberman had begun calling his attempts to decipher Bob Dylan’s lyrics through the songwriter’s Greenwich Village trash “garbology.” Any value Weberman gained from analyzing Dylan’s old coffee grounds and his young son’s dirty diapers was limited to fantasies; however Weberman’s scrounging brought to light the possibility that studying garbage might illuminate our lives. Not long after Weberman began snooping through Dylan’s garbage, Rathje applied his more rigorous methods to modern garbage, but with the goal of ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 7 No. 2, October, 2015, 173–178

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Jeraldine R. Kraver Let me confess that I am not always the best citizen of the College English Association Board of Directors. As Editor of The CEA Critic, I sit on the Board and attend both our virtual meeting in the winter and our on-site meeting the evening before the annual conference begins. Typical of such conclaves, there are reports from each of the officers (that is a total of thirteen or so) and a variety of sub-committees. During the four very long hours of the meeting, there are multiple calls to question and motions and seconds. There are seemingly endless budget items to review and policies to revise. For the CEA, the annual conference is our New Year’s Eve: March in Indianapolis was the coda to 2015. And while the Board’s eyes were now on the future and Denver in 2016, mine were growing increasingly heavy. Despite my lethargy at business meetings, Second Vice-President, Jeffrey DeLotto, grabbed my attention when he described his visit to the CEA’s archives at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. Centenary is the home of former CEA President (and former editor of The CEA Critic) Earle Labor, Emeritus Professor of American Literature and Director of the Jack London Research Center. Although I have met Professor Labor in person only once (and he was all the gracious southern gentleman one would expect), I feel as if I know him very well because my husband—and Critic co-editor, Peter Kratzke—wrote a dissertation in which Jack London featured prominently. As far as I was concerned, Professor Labor was all but living with us in our Lexington, Kentucky, flat. Not only did I thus perk up a bit during Jeffrey’s presentation about what will become of the archives, but, when the discussion turned to CEA Historian Joe Pestino’s recollections about the founding of the organization itself, I was fully alert, even taking copious notes. Since the Board’s meeting in Indianapolis, I have discovered through a little digging of my own that the founding fathers of CEA declared their independence in 1938 from the then- and still-reigning King of Language and Literature, the Modern Language Association. In his Preface to a 1972 Peabody Journal of Education issue devoted to “A Look into the Future of College English,” Professor Labor traces how the CEA was founded “by a group of young radicals in the Modern Language Association who felt that the research-oriented MLA was slighting the concerns of teaching” (1). Reading this history, I wondered, “What did a radical English professor look like in the 1930s?” Did these young radicals meet for post-session cocktails and rage against the MLA machine? Did they gather downtown [End Page 147] at Café Society, the Bohemian hot spot in Greenwich Village? Perhaps they traveled uptown to Harlem and Minton’s, at that time the hip new jazz club. Was all the talk about Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize for The Good Earth or the November pogrom in Europe, already known as Kristallnacht? In explaining how the first generation of CEA members “continued to place primary emphasis upon concerns of the frontline classroom teacher. . . “ (1), Professor Labor offers a clue about what these young CEA Turks might have been discussing (beyond the release of the first Superman comic or Bette Davis’ performance in Jezebel, that is). Given their commitment to placing teaching at the center of what we do, I like to think that what they were talking about was Louise Rosenblatt’s just-published Literature as Exploration. Six months earlier, The New Republic, identifying the work as written “chiefly for teachers of high-school and college English,” suggested that Rosenblatt had addressed social science and aesthetics in ways “unequaled by some of our best Marxists” (231)—and, after all, are not most young radicals at the very least left of center? In fact, I envision that Rosenblatt, who was teaching at Brooklyn College in 1938, might very well have been one of these young CEA radicals. Or, perhaps Mark Van Doren, who would serve as CEA President in 1945 and 1946 and was then teaching at Columbia...

‘Clothes make an awful difference in a girl’: Mlle. Modiste, Irene and Funny Face as Cinderella fashion musicals

Abstract The world of fashion has been a frequent setting for the many Broadway musicals inspired by Charles Perrault’s Cinderella (1697). Using two Broadway musicals and one Hollywood musical as cross-historical case studies, this article examines how the American musical has variously adapted and interpreted themes of ‘clothes make the woman’ by posing Cinderella as a shop girl or model in fields of consumer fashion. The 1905 Victor Herbert/Henry Blossom operetta Mlle. Modiste, and the 1919 Cinderella musical Irene (by James Montgomery, Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy) both assert the democratizing power of fashion. In Mlle. Modiste, the resourceful title character uses both her singing talent and her access to stylish clothing to rise in the world as an opera diva, as well as a viscount’s wife. Irene emphasizes themes of masquerade and meritocracy, as the eponymous Irish American shop girl models dresses for couturier ‘Madame Lucy’, fools high society as a pedigreed lady and marries her Prince Charming. By contrast, the 1957 Paramount movie musical Funny Face problematizes its heroine’s fashion-world makeover. While Funny Face’s narrative depicts the transformation of Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a bookish ‘Greenwich Village Cinderella’, into a glamorous Paris mannequin, Funny Face’s musical numbers, use strategies of camp and parody to undercut the concept of ‘The Quality Woman’.

The birth of the pill: how four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution

We know it simply as pill, yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

Crossing over into neighbourhoods of the body: urban territories, borders and lesbian‐queer bodies in New York City

The geopolitical focus on territory as a fixed and cohesive nation‐state simultaneously conceals the ways territories form and are operationalised at other scales. At the same time, the fleeting ability of minority bodies to make and retain cohesive, property‐owned territories overlooks the limited agency that marginalised groups possess while they continually reproduce social territories as they navigate their everyday lives. Lesbians, gay, bisexuals, trans and queer people began to develop urban territories – often dubbed neighbourhoods or gay districts – in which to find, build and share a sense of safety and refuge. Yet all urban territories are not neighbourhoods or districts because not all groups possess the power and capital to secure their boundaries through property ownership. In this paper, I draw specifically upon the experiences of urban lesbians’ and queer women's often overlapping public displays of affection and harassment in New York City to demonstrate the shifting dimensions of territory in these women's lives beyond the neighbourhood/district model. I make use of two cases: the popular ‘gaybourhood’ of Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the border zone of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Using a queer‐feminist theoretical approach and drawing on Elden's geopolitical theorisation of territorial ‘volume’, I argue that a broader meaning of territory is possible. When lesbian and queer women produce and then return to them or their former sites, they experience what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa describes as ‘crossing over’. This approach highlights the role of the body for rethinking social and cultural territories and borders across scales. I suggest that territory plays a significant role at the urban scale as operationalised through the everyday movements of bodies.