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[Assistant] Buddy, you're, you're paying to maintain this interior line in our apartment and yet you won't get a phone.


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[Assistant] For Buddy, the phone that's within the family compound, so to speak, family apartment, is the more important line of communication.


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[Assistant] So when Zoe goes upstairs to use that phone, it's freighted with all the significance that Buddy has put upon it. But there's a whole ritual involved.


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[Assistant] In Zoe's entrance into this place.


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[Assistant] But he stayed in his room for not more than two minutes.


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[Assistant] There was, however, a slight but fairly distinct change in his appearance. He had acquired a cigar and lighted it, and for some reason he had unfolded an unfolded white handkerchief draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or brimstone.


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[Assistant] So why does he do this? What's the meaning of this little detail of Zoe's appearance?


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[Assistant] Well, one thing that a literary argument can do is take something small like this and try to give an account for it. So that's what I'm going to do. He's venerating.


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[Assistant] The state, the room that Seymour and Buddy occupied. He's covering his head in a traditional religious fashion.


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[Assistant] So in order to enter this holy place, he covers his head. The cigar? I don't have an account of that. You guys figure that out.


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[Assistant] That's the other nice thing about literary arguments, they're always little details that they don't account for. And that's the, the loose thread that you can pull to make your own.


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[Assistant] And they have the quotations that Seymour and Buddy have collected from all their favorite religious, philosophical, mystical, literary reading.


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[Assistant] So this is the bottom of 178. This is from Sri Ramakrishna.


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[Assistant] We ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple. Ramakrishna.


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[Assistant] That's the way with you Calcutta people. You want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves. Do you think God does not know that he is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshiper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent


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[Assistant] This is, I think, one of the best examples of that syncretic view of religion.


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[Assistant] That basically all worshipers


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[Assistant] Are worshiping the same God. They may do it in different forms. They may make mistakes. They may be mistaken about where God resides. But in this view, God is so powerful and so transcendent that God will know the heart of the worshiper.


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[Assistant] So if you apply that back to Franny, why, why does Zoe have this difficulty?


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[Assistant] To this tension between specific doctrine and syncretic religion when Zoe gets to the subject of acting, which is what this second attempt at speaking to Franny, this time over the phone, is, uh, concerned with.


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[Assistant] There's a detail here, of course, that Zoe, in making a second attempt to converse with Franny about this, impersonates his brother Buddy on the phone.


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[Assistant] Now, I'm just gonna leave that observation, remind you of that. I have a way to account for that, but it's gonna take to the end of my argument to do that.


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[Assistant] So, I'm going to argue that that's significant, but I'm not going to talk about why it's significant yet.


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[Assistant] But let's look at that theology of acting. This is on page 198.


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[Assistant] This is coming towards the climax of their conversation.


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[Assistant] Is her frustration with acting and that's one of the things that Lane is so surprised she has given up. It was the only thing she was passionate about. And we know


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[Assistant] From reading Buddy's letter over Zoe's shoulder in the bathtub, we know that Zoe had similar concerns about his own acting career, his own commitment to acting. That Buddy tried to persuade him out of.


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[Assistant] You're stuck with it now, you can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do is act. Act for God if you want to, be God's actress if you want to. What could be prettier?


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[Assistant] Zoe has this understanding of the cosmos that suggests that strong, specific human desires actually change the course of cosmic futures.


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[Assistant] So somewhere, maybe in pre-incarnational time before Franny became Franny, she wanted to be an actress.


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[Assistant] The religious thing Zoe says is to inhabit that, to honor that, to follow up on the results of that prior desiring.


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[Assistant] But why is it acting? Why specifically acting? And why this weird comment at the end, what could be prettier? What does prettiness have to do with this?


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[Assistant] Well, if you look at the description, for instance, of Zoe's face, there's a beautiful description of how his face is beautiful. In what way his face is beautiful. We know that Franny is an attractive young woman.


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[Assistant] We know that she worries about beauty and especially in poetry when she's trying to explain what's wrong. Part of what's wrong is that when she learns poetry in the classroom, none of it seems beautiful to her.


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[Assistant] It all seems like some other kind of production, not the production of beauty.


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[Assistant] So, prettiness, beauty, the aesthetic.


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[Assistant] Is at the heart of the spiritual practice that Zoe is urging upon Franny. The spiritual practice of acting. And I would remind you, looking back to that passage on page 65 and into the 66, that specifically


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[Assistant] Among the figures that Buddy mentions, the religious and literary figures, we find Shakespeare. And I think Shakespeare in this train of figures represents the literary that is also the dramatic. So in our


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[Assistant] Tradition, Shakespeare is THE literary name, above all others.


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[Assistant] It's important for Salinger that Shakespeare was a dramatist.


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[Assistant] It's important for this novel that Shakespeare was a dramatist.


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[Assistant] Not just because Zoe wants Franny to inhabit acting fully as her desire and as her religious practice, as opposed to saying the Jesus Prayer.


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[Assistant] Acting has a deeper relation to the novel and here's where we get back to that question of the enclosed spaces and the lack of movement. If you think about this novel, it has the structures of drama.


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[Assistant] It takes place in small rooms. You can almost, if you begin to think about it, you can almost see the set changes. In the diner.


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[Assistant] On the train station, that's about the most open place, on the train platform. That's about the most open place we see. In the diner, in the apartment.


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[Assistant] All you do in the apartment is move from one room to another. These are dramatic spaces


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[Assistant] Moreover, the bathroom. Completely a dramatic space. It even has a curtain. Hiding Zoe from his mother.


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[Assistant] Not just for Franny and for Zoe.


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[Assistant] Zoe's an actor too. It's a religious practice for the novel itself.


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[Assistant] And that, I would suggest to you, is where we can begin to bring some of those obvious things. The prevalence of dialogue. Those enclosed spaces.


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[Assistant] The tone, the exaggerated tone, the somewhat histrionic quality, the combativeness of that conversation. It's sheer style. These are great talkers.


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[Assistant] But I would suggest to you, Salinger is trying to balance something very carefully that relates back to this question of doctrine versus syncretism in the religious sphere of the novel. In the religious thematic material of the novel. And for this, I'd like to look at the very end of the novel.


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[Assistant] Zoe finally suggests that it's attention to the audience that makes an actor really


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[Assistant] A special actor. A religious actor. And he points back to advice that Buddy gave him


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[Assistant] About, sorry, about, that Seymour had given him about performing on a radio show. So they were all radio show with kids.


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[Assistant] And one day Zoe had not wanted to shine his shoes.


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[Assistant] The announcer was a moron, the studio audience were all morons, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway where we sat, he said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the fat lady. Now why the fat lady? It's this mythical


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[Assistant] One of the first things you want to ask is, why does that person need to be excessively embodied? That's what fatness is in a novel like this. It's excessive embodiment.


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[Assistant] The human. That's what this woman represents. The human. Connect to the human audience.


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[Assistant] Respect the human audience. Act for them, to them. Don't act as if they're just some


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[Assistant] A bunch of philistines out there who can't appreciate your art.


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[Assistant] I'll tell you a terrible secret. Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's fat lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy.


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[Assistant] And all his goddamn cousins by the dozens, there isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's fat lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddamn secret yet? And don't you know, listen to me now, don't you know who the fat lady really is? Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy, it's Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.


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[Assistant] This seems like a completely Christian answer to Zoe's problem. And we're back on the horns of that dilemma. Is this a syncretic religious vision, or is it a Christian one? But look what follows. This is not the last word.


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[Assistant] For a foolish half minute or so, there was no other words, no further speech. Then, I can't talk anymore, buddy. The sound of a phone being replaced on its catch followed.


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[Assistant] Franny took in her breath slightly, but continued to hold the phone to her ear.


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[Assistant] A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself.


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[Assistant] The dial tone is that state of awareness of the divine that Buddy speaks of when he says, when he speaks of being with God before God said, let there be light. Zoe's voice breaking that dial tone in the beginning in his phone call and then the resumption of it afterwards


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[Assistant] But what Franny can tune into after hearing his voice is that very essential divine sound. Meaningless sound.


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[Assistant] And so this is how Salinger balances the syncretic, the sort of empty mysticism of Seymour and Buddy.


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[Assistant] With the embodied doctrinal specific insistence that we see from Zoe from the insistence on human specificity, the fat lady.


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[Assistant] Salinger's own novel performs in this way. And that's how you would...


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[Assistant] This is describing the bedroom, uh, of Seymour and Buddy as Zoe walks in.


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[Assistant] A stranger with a flair for cocktail party descriptive prose might have commented that the room at a quick glance looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling 12 year old lawyers or researchists. Uhm, and then if you flip back to, uhm, let's see, 172,


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[Assistant] Describing Zoe's sweaty shirt. His shirt was, in the familiar phrase, ringing wet. And there are lots of moments like this. Self-conscious moments of style. So in the familiar phrase, ringing wet, he's saying, I'm about to use a cliche, here it is, there it is.


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[Assistant] He says, someone with a flair for cocktail party conversation, a witticism would say this. He gives it to us, but he frames it as an affectation of style.


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[Assistant] So what Selinger, I think, shows us is that affectation without something like love


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[Assistant] Is just affectation. And that's what Lane represents. That's the affectation of literature without any human connection. That's why when he talks on and on, it's as if Franny isn't even there listening to him. He's been going on a quarter hour and he's just hitting his stride.


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[Assistant] The family language is what makes them very human. They embody this very specific family language. And so I would argue to you that Salinger imagines literature


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[Assistant] As a performance of this kind. A performance of a language of family love.


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[Assistant] That is nevertheless also an aesthetic language. And I think actually probably the best


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[Assistant] The image of that is in Seymour's diary.


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[Assistant] When Zoe sits down to make that phone call, he opens up Seymour's diary, and he sees Seymour's account of his birthday celebration. Where the family had put on a vaudeville show right in their living room. Remember, his parents are vaudevillians.


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[Assistant] Uh, which I won't read just because we're running out of time. It's on 181 and 182. You can look at it yourself. It's brimming with pleasure and love. This is why Buddy really can't


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[Assistant] Insist that Zoe is wrong about this being a religious novel.


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[Assistant] Because being a religious novel and being a love story are finally, for Salinger, the same thing. It's the performance of human connection.


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[Assistant] That's the phone line, that's conversation, that's letters. The performance of family conversation is like acting, and that is why Zoe impersonates Buddy. He's acting.


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[Assistant] She may be mistaken about who she's praying to in the Jesus prayer, but she damn well knows the timbre.


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[Assistant] Of her brother's voice. And his particularity of speech.


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[Assistant] And so when he tries to imitate Buddy, she finds him out very quickly. And this is when you know that Franny really does benefit.


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[Assistant] From Seymour and Buddy's religious education in the same way that Zoe has.


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[Assistant] And so if we step back for a minute now from my reading, there are a couple of things I want to say.


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[Assistant] First of all, I hope you can see just as using that as a model.


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[Assistant] How I went from big claims about the novel


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[Assistant] Into specificity to support those claims. That's the structure of any good literary argument.


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[Assistant] The attention moves from the very small to the large and back again, there's a kind of rhythm to that, that folds in those obvious parts of the novel to a more thematic set of concerns, in this case about the religious, um, philosophy of this novel. So,


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[Assistant] As you think about writing papers, go through that two-step process of thinking about the large picture of what a novel is doing as a piece of literary art.


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[Assistant] And then thinking about a focused set of concerns. And in the final development of your paper, making sure that those two can relate to one another.


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[Assistant] The second thing I want to say is less about paper writing and more about the trajectory of this course and what we're seeing in common between these novels. So you can read this very closely to On the Road. If Dean cared


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[Assistant] For nothing, but for everything in principle.


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[Assistant] You could say conversely that Salinger cares for everything in particular and in principle nothingness. It's nothingness that is the mystical state rather than everythingness.


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[Assistant] And it's interesting to think about whether those two are really opposites. I think these novels imagine them to be opposites.


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[Assistant] But it's something for you to think about, about whether they really are.


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[Assistant] So, Zoe's specificity is the specificity of doctrine, but it's also the specificity, and more importantly, the specificity of person.


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[Assistant] So that's the, that's the everything that he cares about. Person.


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[Assistant] On the road in Franny and Zoe to section this week. And by the way, one last thing. If you've been sketchy about your section attendance, I suggest that you try to pull up your socks and go.


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[Assistant] We will be talking about papers in the section, it will be helpful to you, and it will also give you a chance to talk about these books, so please do go.


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[Assistant] And now, yeaah, push that back and forth.


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[Assistant] Okay, Mofie, let's sing the pajama party song. Ready?


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[Assistant] Okay, time to go to bed everyone. Put your blankets and pillows in a cozy spot. And sleep tight.


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[Assistant] That began long before European explorers discovered its mighty rivers.


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[Assistant] Where a crafty inventor first brought photography to millions.


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[Assistant] On New York soil, Revolutionary soldiers fought to forge America's independence.


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[Assistant] And an elite corps of cadets still learns how to defend the country's freedom.


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[Assistant] Aerial New York tells the stories of the city's tallest spires and the hallowed ground of its fallen towers.


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[Assistant] The story of New York State begins with an incredible gift of nature. More than 10,000 years ago, a torrent of melting glacial ice carved through upstate New York and created Niagara Falls.


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[Assistant] Every second, 3,000 tons of water surge over the falls, making them the most powerful in North America.


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[Assistant] From the breathtaking power of the Niagara to the waterways where America's Empire State began.


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[Assistant] Long before its skyscrapers, a Native American tribe called the Lenape


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[Assistant] Used to hunt and fish on the island and shores of Manhattan. They called it Manahatta, meaning the island of many hills.


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[Assistant] It was also an island of meadows, ancient forests, black bears and bald eagles.


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[Assistant] The Lenape agreed to share their island with the Dutch for an exchange of goods worth 60 guilders, or what would have been about $24 at the time. But the Dutch considered it a sale and soon took control of the island.


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[Assistant] Some of the Lenape's ancient footpaths have become New York City streets.


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[Assistant] And 843 acres of their former land is now one of New York City's treasures.


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[Assistant] Central Park covers 6% of Manhattan. It was the first landscaped park in America.


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[Assistant] Some say that it took more gunpowder to blast and create Central Park's lakes, hills, and meadows than was used in the Battle of Gettysburg.


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[Assistant] A unique feature of its design was its separate pathways for horse-drawn carriages to help people quietly enjoy the park.


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[Assistant] Now, bicycle rickshaws share these old carriage routes with New York City taxis.


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[Assistant] The design of the park was originally inspired by 19th century landscape paintings.


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[Assistant] But ever since, it's been an inspiration for artists themselves.


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[Assistant] Today, a work of art is rising on the roof of one of the greatest museums in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


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[Assistant] Two artists, helped by a team of rock climbers, are assembling thousands of pieces of bamboo to create a 50-foot high sculpture called Big Bamboo. It's designed to look like a cresting wave perched above Central Park's treetops.


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[Assistant] This urban oasis draws 25 million visitors a year.


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[Assistant] But only the lucky ones get to enjoy views of it from their windows every day. The city's first luxury apartment building lies on the park's west side.


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[Assistant] The Dakota has been the home of famous artists for decades, including dancer Rudolf Narayev, actress Lauren Bacall, and John Lennon.


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[Assistant] When it was built in 1884, the Dakota was surrounded by undeveloped land. Now, it's flanked by taller towers.


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[Assistant] With even more spectacular views of Central Park and the city.


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[Assistant] But trying to build the highest has always been a risky proposition.


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[Assistant] Many of New York's tallest skyscrapers today were built during a period of fierce competition between developers in the early 20th century.


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[Assistant] Forty Wall Street, with its distinctive copper roof, was once the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1930. A title it held for only a few weeks. That's because


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[Assistant] Walter Chrysler was already building his own now famous skyscraper uptown at 405 Lexington Avenue. After 40, Wall Street opened its doors.


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[Assistant] Kreisler hoisted a secretly built spire onto the top of his building's Art Deco crown.


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[Assistant] Topping out 40 Wall Street by 120 feet. But Chrysler's achievement was short lived too.


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[Assistant] Less than a year later, the new, even higher Empire State Building was completed after just 14 months of construction.


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[Assistant] The Empire State Building hasn't always been the tallest structure in Manhattan, but it is again today.


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[Assistant] After what many have called the greatest tragedy in American history.


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[Assistant] On September 11th, 2001, clouds of ash engulfed lower Manhattan.


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[Assistant] After terrorist attacks brought down the city's tallest buildings, the towers of the World Trade Center. It happened here, at Ground Zero.


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[Assistant] Nearly 3,000 people died in the attack, including 343 firefighters.


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[Assistant] Now, the footprints of the World Trade Center are being turned into reflecting pools. Memorials to those who perished.


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[Assistant] And New York City's skyline is about to change again.


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[Assistant] A new tower is rising above ground zero.


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[Assistant] More than a thousand workers are building America's tallest skyscraper. It's the largest construction site in the country. One World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom Tower.


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[Assistant] This city has been reinventing itself ever since it was founded. In the 1960s,


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[Assistant] The earth, excavated during the construction of the original Twin Towers, was used as landfill to extend lower Manhattan and its shores.


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[Assistant] Today, New York City has more than 600 miles of coastline.


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[Assistant] This tiny island was the gateway to America for a staggering 12 million immigrants.


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[Assistant] It's believed that 40% of Americans can trace their roots to at least one ancestor who passed through Ellis Island.


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[Assistant] New arrivals from Europe and beyond lined up to be inspected and processed. In the island's single busiest year, 1907, more than a million immigrants arrived here.


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[Assistant] Three million people from around the world visit the Great Hall every year as tourists. But not all of New York City's islands are places most would want to come.


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[Assistant] The prison population at Rikers can swell to nearly twenty thousand.


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[Assistant] Even though it's the most densely populated county in America.


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[Assistant] 70% of its workers, or nearly a million and a half people, still live somewhere else.


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[Assistant] Most get to work via the eight bridges that connect Manhattan with the boroughs and beyond. The Brooklyn Bridge may be more famous, but its neighbor, the Manhattan Bridge, is one of the busiest. It links Brooklyn with Manhattan's Chinatown.


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[Assistant] This double-decker suspension bridge dates from 1909 and carries cars and trucks on both levels as well as four New York City subway tracks. Maintaining the city's bridges can be a dangerous job. One misstep and you could end up in free fall.


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[Assistant] That's when a European explorer appeared on the horizon and set the stage for New York to be born.


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[Assistant] New York City's Verrazano Narrows Bridge.


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[Assistant] It spans the mouth of New York Bay and links the boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn. The bridge is named for Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano, the first known European to chart these waters. In 1524, Verrazano arrived at the mouth of the bay, but didn't sail very far inside.


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[Assistant] 85 years later, in 1609, it was an English explorer who did.


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[Assistant] Henry Hudson was mapping new trade routes for the Dutch when he discovered the Native American island of Manahatta.


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[Assistant] Dutch traders quickly followed and called their new settlement, New Amsterdam. But in 1664, the British conquered the area and renamed New Amsterdam, New York.


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[Assistant] When a group of Dutch settlers arrived in 1624, they landed on this island.


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[Assistant] The Dutch called the place Island of Nuts because of its plentiful chestnut trees. But the British later renamed it Governor's Island. Remains of the earliest settlements here are long gone, but forts have survived. The oldest one is the star-shaped Fort Jay.


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[Assistant] Which lies on the site of earthwork fortifications that were built to defend New York against the British during the American Revolution. But those fortifications were a miserable defense.


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[Assistant] And the British took control of the island after the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776. One of the largest battles of the war.


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[Assistant] In the early 1900s, Governor's Island was enlarged by more than a hundred acres.


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[Assistant] With landfill from the construction of New York City's subway system.


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[Assistant] After mapping Manahatta and the surrounding shores, Henry Hudson set out up this mighty waterway, which would later bear his name.


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[Assistant] Just ten miles north of the city, he arrived here, at one of the widest points on the river. It's called Tappan Zee.


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[Assistant] Tappan was the name of a nearby Native American village. Zee is Dutch for sea. When Henry Hudson saw that the river widened,


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[Assistant] He was convinced that he had found a new passage to Asia. But then the waters narrowed again just a few miles north and Hudson's search continued.


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[Assistant] Today, a 3.1 mile long bridge crosses Tappan Zee, linking communities on the West Bank with Tarrytown to the East.


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[Assistant] It's the sight of famous tales, of a headless horseman, and a man who slept for a hundred years.


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[Assistant] Writer Washington Irving lived out the last years of his life here in Tarrytown, after having created the famous characters Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle.


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[Assistant] In honor of Irving's tale, the village of North Tarrytown renamed itself Sleepy Hollow in 1996.


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[Assistant] The Headless Horseman Bridge is gone, but this one leads to the Old Dutch Church.


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[Assistant] Where Ichabod Crane was chased by the ghost in Irving's Tale.


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[Assistant] It's also the resting ground of major American industrialists Andrew Carnegie, Walter P. Chrysler, and William Rockefeller, who all chose the banks of the Hudson River as their final resting place.


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[Assistant] Just six miles north of Terrytown lies the notorious Sing Sing Prison. It's home to more than 1,500 convicts.


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[Assistant] Its name comes from SinkSink, a Native American phrase that means a place of small stones.


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[Assistant] Convict laborers built the prison's original cell block in 1825.


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[Assistant] Since then, serial killers, Russian spies, and Charles Lucky Luciano, who some call the father of organized crime, have all done time here. But Sing Sing itself has a checkered past, too.


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[Assistant] Early prisoners were forced to live and labor in absolute silence. And those who broke the rules were brutally punished.


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[Assistant] It also used to be home to the state's notorious electric chair. In the 1938 film, Angels with Dirty Faces, James Cagney's character, Rocky Sullivan, was executed at Sing Sing.


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[Assistant] The last real criminal to be put to death here was a 34-year-old convict named Eddie Mays in 1963.


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[Assistant] New York became one of only 16 states to ban capital punishment. Though Sing Sing's reputation still inspires fear.


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[Assistant] When Henry Hudson first discovered this river, he called it the River of Mountains. Just 100 miles north of New York City,


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[Assistant] Lies one of the most beautiful landscapes in North America.


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[Assistant] A stunning range of peaks, speckled with forests, rivers and lakes.


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[Assistant] And they literally keep New York City alive.


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[Assistant] One hundred percent of the city's drinking water comes from watersheds like this one. And to ensure its continued supply,


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[Assistant] The city has purchased more than a hundred thousand acres of land upstate, making it one of the largest landowners here.


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[Assistant] Water from lakes and streams feed into underground aqueducts that carry fresh drinking water down to the city.


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[Assistant] Many locals don't even know where these giant underground pipes lie.


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[Assistant] The Hudson River is a lifeline for ships and barges carrying cargo from New York City to Albany. But its seemingly quiet waters hold hidden dangers.


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[Assistant] Mudflats can ground a vessel at its million dollar cargo in seconds.


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[Assistant] But one obstacle in the river is a welcome sight to pilots. The Aesopus Meadows Light


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[Assistant] There's been a lighthouse on this spot since 1839.


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[Assistant] The light was later closed after ice flows damaged its foundation.


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[Assistant] But citizens banded together to save this historic site.


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[Assistant] is the only surviving clabbered lighthouse on the Hudson.


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[Assistant] But the fish they catch in the Hudson could be more of a threat than food.


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[Assistant] The General Electric Company pumped as much as 1.3 million pounds of toxic compounds called PCBs directly into the river from its manufacturing plants upstream. Luckily, New York City's watershed in the nearby Catskills wasn't affected.


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[Assistant] But fish, birds and other species along the Hudson have been found to contain dangerous levels of toxins that could cause cancer in people too.


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[Assistant] It's why the state banned fishing on huge stretches of the Hudson for almost two decades.


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[Assistant] Environmentalists and fishermen rallied to save the river's ecosystem. They formed Riverkeeper.


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[Assistant] Which grew into one of the fastest growing and most successful environmental organizations of all time. In 2002, their work finally paid off.


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[Assistant] General Electric agreed to dredge 800 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of PCBs from the river.


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[Assistant] Work has begun, but no one knows how long the cleanup will last.


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[Assistant] And if the river will continue to be a potential threat to offspring of eagles like these.


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[Assistant] North of Sing Sing, the Black Knights of the Hudson are preparing for battle.


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[Assistant] Inside the oldest occupied military post in America.


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[Assistant] West Point sits high above the river, overlooking a narrow bend.


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[Assistant] Once considered it to be the most strategic military site in the country.


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[Assistant] American soldiers at West Point once controlled river traffic here using a 150 foot long iron chain strung across the river to stop ships.


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[Assistant] was established in 1802 by President Thomas Jefferson.


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[Assistant] And can only register if they agree to abide by a strict four-point honor code. Not to lie, steal, cheat, or tolerate anyone who does.


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[Assistant] Competition is nothing new to the banks of the Hudson River. One of America's wealthiest fortunes was built on it.


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[Assistant] Frederick Vanderbilt commissioned this estate in Hyde Park in 1895 on 211 acres.


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[Assistant] But the wealth he used to build it came from a fortune first earned by his grandfather on the waters of the Hudson.


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[Assistant] It was here off Manhattan that America's once richest man


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[Assistant] Cornelius Vanderbilt got his start as a small time ferry operator.


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[Assistant] He said to have bought his first ferry with a loan of $100 in 1810, and then beat out his competitors, including his own father, one by one. By the 1840s, Vanderbilt was the largest employer in the United States.


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[Assistant] And soon bought up railroads and shipping companies that reached all the way to California.


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[Assistant] Modern ferries still apply Vanderbilt's old roots. Today,


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[Assistant] The Staten Island Ferry carries 21 million passengers a year.


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[Assistant] Vanderbilt's old rail line on the Hudson is still in operation.


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[Assistant] In Vanderbilt's day, his train steamed right along the river and into the city down 10th Avenue on street-level tracks. At the time, this busy street was nicknamed Death Avenue due to the number of train-related fatalities.


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[Assistant] It's why every train traveling through the city had to be led by a man on horseback to warn residents of its approach.


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[Assistant] They've been transformed into the Highline.


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[Assistant] It's a suspended ribbon of walkways and native plants that weaves its way down the city's west side.


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[Assistant] Today, green space in New York is also sky high.


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[Assistant] The second tallest building in New York City is also its greenest skyscraper.


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[Assistant] Insulated floor to ceiling glass walls and a rainwater collection system.


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[Assistant] Have helped enable the Bank of America Tower to become the first skyscraper in the world to receive Platinum LEED status. The highest green building rating possible today.


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[Assistant] Green skyscrapers are the latest addition to New York's rich architectural heritage. But many of the state's most unique structures require a trip upstate.


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[Assistant] The banks of New York's Hudson River can best be explored by air. A two-seater helicopter lifts off over the valley.


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[Assistant] Below, the houses and the states of some of America's most illustrious names.


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[Assistant] John D. Rockefeller, once America's richest man, built this six-story stone house called Kai-Kat in Sleepy Hollow.


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[Assistant] Turning profits from Standard Oil into a palatial 3,500 acre estate. It lies on one of the highest points on the river.


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[Assistant] Rockefeller designed much of Kai Cut's gardens himself. The house now belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.


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[Assistant] This is believed to be one of only two domed octagonal residences in the world. The Armour Steiner House in Irvington.


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[Assistant] In 1859, a New York financier named Paul J. Armour built this eight-sided country residence.


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[Assistant] It was believed that an eight-sided house would have twice as much sunlight in its rooms as a four-sided one.


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[Assistant] Later, a prominent tea importer named Joseph Steiner bought the house and added its most distinctive forms, a colorful domed roof and cupola.


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[Assistant] After Steiner, residents included a Finnish writer and a poet.


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[Assistant] In 1976, the house had fallen into disrepair.


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[Assistant] And the National Trust for Historic Preservation stepped in to rescue it from demolition.


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[Assistant] Now restored, it's part of the Hudson Valley's unique architectural heritage and is as visually stunning from the ground as it is from the air.


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[Assistant] But architects aren't the only ones who have made their mark on the landscape.


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[Assistant] This is said to be one of the largest works of art in North America.


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[Assistant] Until a local sculptor named Harvey Fite bought the site in 1938.


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[Assistant] He set to work on a sculpture he called Opus 40, since he expected it to take 40 years to complete.


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[Assistant] It's a work of passion and patience. Employing the techniques of ancient Egyptian builders.


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[Assistant] Fight, hoisted and pieced together giant individual slabs of the quarry's bluestone to create a sculpture of multi-level curved terraces and ramps.


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[Assistant] Sadly, Fight died here in 1976 from an accidental rockfall, just three years short of his goal. But even incomplete, Opus 40 remains one of New York State's artistic treasures.


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[Assistant] Another piece of the Hudson River Valley has been transformed into art space.


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[Assistant] Until half a million concertgoers descended on them in August 1969. For what's been called the greatest musical event of all time. Woodstock.


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[Assistant] Performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead drew so many concertgoers that New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller used the National Guard to airlift in supplies.


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[Assistant] The site of the concert was turned into the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.


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[Assistant] Today, its amphitheater holds 15,000 people. Just 3% of the attendance at Woodstock.


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[Assistant] Original Woodstock musicians including Crosby, Stills and Nash have returned to play here.


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[Assistant] In New York State, freedom has always been hard fought and won.


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[Assistant] Some of the most important battles in the American Revolutionary War took place on New York soil.


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[Assistant] An obelisk in the town of Victory celebrates two of the biggest.


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[Assistant] It was here in the fall of 1777 where British forces surrendered in the Battles of Saratoga.


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[Assistant] Afterwards, France finally recognized the independence of America and entered the war as its ally.


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[Assistant] Three of the obelisk's four sides hold statues that honor the generals that led the American advance. Horatio Gates, Daniel Morgan, and Philip Schuyler. Schuyler lived nearby, in this farmhouse.


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[Assistant] During the war, British troops occupied the site and burned his original house to the ground.


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[Assistant] But after the war, Skyler later salvaged what he could and rebuilt his farmhouse in just 29 days.


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[Assistant] Saratoga lies on the Hudson River, but Henry Hudson never made it this far north. His last stop was a place on the river now known as Albany, the New York state capital.


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[Assistant] Dutch fur traders first established a settlement here in 1614.


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[Assistant] Today, Albany is the second oldest chartered city in the United States.


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[Assistant] At the city center lies the Empire State Plaza.


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[Assistant] Home to the more than 10,000 employees that run the state, as well as the state library and museum.


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[Assistant] Governor Nelson Rockefeller is said to have first sketched the original plan for the plaza on the back of a postcard.


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[Assistant] Its two billion dollar price tag, marble facade and stark design have drawn criticism ever since it was finished in 1979.


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[Assistant] Upstate New York has long been a popular haunt for weekenders.


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[Assistant] But its forests are also home to those seeking more permanent solitude. Unless you're looking from the air, it would be hard to know that they're even here.


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[Assistant] Three separate, but united communities live in this picturesque setting.


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[Assistant] New Skeet was originally started in 1966 when a small group of monks broke away from the Franciscan Brotherhood and formed their own monastery.


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[Assistant] Three years later, eight nuns followed, establishing their own practice nearby.


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[Assistant] A few married couples arrived and formed a third religious community in the area.


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[Assistant] New Skeet broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1979 and is now part of the Orthodox Church.


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[Assistant] Each day revolves around intense monastic practice.


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[Assistant] Finding sites for peaceful contemplation in New York State has never been hard.


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[Assistant] If Henry Hudson hadn't turned back at Albany in 1609 and had followed the Hudson River to its source, he would have ended up here.


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[Assistant] This is the largest area of protected wilderness in the continental United States.


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[Assistant] The Adirondack Park covers 6.1 million acres, one-fifth of New York State.


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[Assistant] It's nearly eight times the size of California's Yosemite.


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[Assistant] Unlike most mountain ranges, the Adirondacks are not strung out in a chain.


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[Assistant] Instead, they're formed as a giant dome, 160 miles wide.


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[Assistant] This region was once flat, but five million years ago, giant forces from below


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[Assistant] Pushed up rock and soil, creating the Adirondacks peaks and valleys.


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[Assistant] They are almost as impenetrable today as they were 400 years ago.


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[Assistant] The Adirondack Park's lakes and streams are some of the country's hidden treasures. But one is well known around the world.


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[Assistant] Was the site of one of the greatest events in American sports history.


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[Assistant] It was here, during the Winter Olympics in 1980, when the U.S. Hockey Team, made up largely of amateur players, beat the Soviets in what's been called the Miracle on Ice.


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[Assistant] The headwaters of the Hudson River were discovered in 1872. But by then, it was another waterway to the west.


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[Assistant] A group of Native American nations that inhabited the valley's rich forests and hills. Stretching from the Hudson River all the way to Canada,


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[Assistant] Its rivers and ancient footpaths became a major route for the fur trade. By the early 1600s,


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[Assistant] The popularity of hats made from beaver fur were driving the beaver to near extinction in Europe. Fur traders set off for the New World, which still had large numbers of beaver, especially here in upstate New York and further north in Canada.


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[Assistant] Access to the Mohawks rivers and trails were paramount.


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[Assistant] A British general named John Stanwycks established a fort on this site in what is today Rome, New York.


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[Assistant] Fort Stanwix was built to control an important six-mile land route connecting the Mohawk River and nearby Woods Creek.


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[Assistant] The Oneida hoped the fort would bring peace between their tribe and the pioneers.


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[Assistant] But the British abandoned Fort Stanwix just three years after completion. And in 1777,


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[Assistant] An American Revolutionary Force successfully defended the fort against attack by British and Iroquois troops.


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[Assistant] Rome became the site of the biggest construction project in the state's history.


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[Assistant] A man-made waterway that would replace the Mohawk Valley's ancient trading routes and turn former trading posts into boom towns.


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[Assistant] The 363 mile long Erie Canal follows New York's Mohawk Valley and links the Hudson River with a string of towns to the west. All the way to the Port of Buffalo on Lake Erie.


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[Assistant] Today, locks in the canal still help ships move upriver, just as they did almost two centuries ago.


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[Assistant] When it was finished in 1825, after seven years of digging,


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[Assistant] Cargo could travel on a single ship from New York City to America's Great Lakes right through the state for the first time. The going is just as slow today as it was then.


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[Assistant] But the canal's route through the Mohawk Valley is as scenic as it gets, as it approaches Rochester.


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[Assistant] Today, the Rochester metropolitan area has the second largest economy in the state. And part of the canal still runs right through downtown.


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[Assistant] The arrival of this waterway in 1820 caused the city's population to double in just 10 years.


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[Assistant] With mills turning out more flour than any other place in America, Rochester became America's first boomtown and was nicknamed the Young Lion of the West.


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[Assistant] The city has been known for its broad avenues, elegant homes, and famous citizens.


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[Assistant] Abolitionist and women's rights leader Susan B. Anthony lived in this humble red house on 17 Madison Street.


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[Assistant] Where she was once arrested for trying to vote in the 1872 presidential election.


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[Assistant] These well-tended gardens once belonged to a man whose name and company are synonymous with Rochester.


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[Assistant] In 1884, long before he made the fortune he needed to build this mansion,


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[Assistant] A scrappy inventor named George Eastman patented the first mechanism that held rolls of paper film.


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[Assistant] Photography required big cameras, heavy glass plates, and messy chemicals.


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[Assistant] Kodak film rolls and cameras brought picture taking to the masses.


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[Assistant] And help turn Rochester into the imaging capital of the world.


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[Assistant] Bausch & Lohm and Xerox, two other imaging giants, were also founded in and around the city.


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[Assistant] Today, the digital age has reduced Kodak's fortunes, but the company's headquarters are still right in downtown.


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[Assistant] The Erie Canal isn't the only waterway flowing into Rochester, New York.


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[Assistant] Water from the Genesee River once powered the city's mills. It's the longest river that flows north in the Western Hemisphere, on its way to Lake Ontario. Before it arrives in Rochester, the Genesee flows through Letchworth State Park.


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[Assistant] It's been called the Grand Canyon of the East. In 1852, the Erie Railroad Company built a bridge across the river, just above Upper Falls.


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[Assistant] The old portage bridge was called the highest wooden bridge in the world before it was destroyed by fire in 1875. The bridge that replaced it is made of steel and is still used by trains today.


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[Assistant] But they're no comparison to New York State's most famous natural wonder.


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[Assistant] The falls straddle the border of the U.S. and Canada in the northwest corner of New York State.


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[Assistant] When glacial waters carved up this land and created the falls, they were seven miles downstream.


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[Assistant] But over time, the raging water has eroded the rock below.


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[Assistant] The first to survive the falls was a woman named Annie Taylor in 1901.


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[Assistant] On her 63rd birthday, she climbed inside a wooden barrel and, flinging to her heart-shaped pillow, disappeared over the American Falls.


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[Assistant] Taylor managed to survive the more than 70 foot drop with just a few bruises.


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[Assistant] Enough to power two giant hydroelectric plants that siphon water off the river.


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[Assistant] Churning out millions of kilowatts of power that shared between the US and Canada.


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[Assistant] Harnessing power from the Niagara River is nothing new.


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[Assistant] In 1759, a Frenchman named Daniel Jonquere constructed a small canal above the falls to run his sawmill.


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[Assistant] More than a century later, new mill owners expanded the canals.


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[Assistant] And in 1881, Niagara Falls became the site of the country's first large-scale hydroelectric power station. JP Morgan and the Vanderbilts invested.


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[Assistant] And electric power soon lit up mills and towns all around the river.


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[Assistant] Nearby Buffalo, New York became the first city in America to have electric streetlights, earning its nickname the City of Light.


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[Assistant] Today, Buffalo is New York State's second largest city.


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[Assistant] And most of its power still comes from Niagara Falls.


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[Assistant] May I have a fork? Yes, you may.


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[Assistant] May I have a fork? Yes, you may.


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[Assistant] We need a big leaf. And a long vine. To make an aeroplane. So we can fly to acorn land. You find the vine, I'll find the leaf.


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[Assistant] And I'm going to connect that with the human stain and some of my general thoughts about Roth's work at the very end of lecture. So I'll give you a little bit of history and then a little bit of meditation on Roth. I asked you for today


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[Assistant] To go around to the various book stores in New Haven, choose one and go, and observe what you saw there. And in particular, I asked you to think about what you are not seeing there. Uhm, so does anyone want to tell me what they saw on their little observation trip? What did you observe?


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[Assistant] By Yale graduates, but here's a question. Not by Yale professors?


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[Assistant] It's a significant difference. Uhm, what else did you notice? Yes, local market. What else did you notice?


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[Assistant] Well, this is a really important question. Where to shelve the book? Now, it's not just about categories, although it is partly about categories. What subject matter does a book belong to? It's also about what kind of shelf, physically. So, those tables, uh, that, you know, we're thinking about in labyrinth,


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[Assistant] Uh, one question is, who chose that? Now those tables are in Barnes and Noble, too. So you walk into the bookstore on the ground level, and there are all those tables, and the stacks go up really high. There are all these elaborate ways of getting books, covers, to face you.


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[Assistant] Okay, then there are all the stacks and shelves up on the upper level.


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[Assistant] And those books are interspersed with smaller displays. So if you go up there, you'll begin to see some very interesting things. There's a little table, for example, up on the right. Have you noticed this? Right as you come up the stairs in Barnes and Noble. And it usually has, it's, it's, uh,


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[Assistant] Promoted as like, urban literature. Well, it's really, uh, in my experience, having seen it over the years, it's really, it's just like code for black writers, somehow.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so it's all these books about the black history of New Haven or whatever. Uhm.


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[Assistant] So, you have these little tables around. Now the big tables in front of Barnes and Noble. Who chooses what goes on there? That space is bought and paid for by publishers. Bought and paid for.


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[Assistant] That it be displayed in certain ways. You know those nice discounts that you get 20% off the New York Times best seller books when they're in hardback?


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[Assistant] Those are possible at Barnes and Noble because of the huge buying power of that bookstore. So they buy in huge volume. Now, a store like Labyrinth or its predecessor, Bookhaven, wasn't able to have that kind of volume in sales.


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[Assistant] And so they couldn't negotiate with the publisher that sort of discount. So that means that a smaller bookstore, because of its smaller buying power,


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[Assistant] Can't provide a competitive price in a market where Barnes and Noble is right next door.


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[Assistant] Now, there were ways that, uhm, independent bookstores try to compensate for that, especially in this market, uhm, by giving discounts to faculty members stocking their books at the bookstore. This is somewhat controversial, although it's Barnes and Noble that has tried to make it controversial. Uhm,


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[Assistant] But that's the way that a store like Labyrinth or like Bookhaven before it was able to try to be price competitive among people it knew wanted to buy from them, those professors who stocked their book at an independent bookstore.


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[Assistant] What's on the table? She said, well, you know, I had a good, uh, general education, uh, as a young person and I kind of know who's who in the intellectual circles in Europe and in the United States. And so I browse the lists and I talk to sales rep when they come in and I read and I look at what certain courses are stocking.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and I see what people are reading on campus in the night aside. That's really different.


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[Assistant] From that space being bought and paid for by a publisher as part of a marketing agreement.


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[Assistant] Those tables are very powerful in, for browsers, in shaping what browsers might possibly buy or think about when they come into a bookstore. So,


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[Assistant] That space is particularly key to a bookstore's presence culturally in the community. And, uh, Sarah's point about the Yale graduates on the bookshelf. That is a nod to Barnes & Noble's immediate context. So there is that local marketing piece. But think about this.


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[Assistant] There are just a few fiction buyers who work with publishers to decide what novels will be in Barnes and Noble.


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[Assistant] So writers, when they're thinking about, can I sell my book? Instead of thinking, I wonder if I can impress the owner of the seminary co-op in Hyde Park in Chicago. Very famous, huge, wonderful bookstore. Not a chain.


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[Assistant] Instead of saying, you know, I want to sell my book in Chicago, it's set there, and maybe it'll be appealing, I wonder if I can impress the owner of that bookstore. And having a strategy that addresses those kinds of individual circumstances in different spaces, um, Powell's in Seattle, Labyrinth in New York, uhm,


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[Assistant] They have to say, I wonder if I can impress THE buyer from Barnes & Noble.


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[Assistant] So instead of many people making that decision about whether a novel is worthy of being promoted, it's one person.


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[Assistant] That person becomes extremely powerful in shaping what literary texts reach us. What comes to our attention.


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[Assistant] Through the bookstore. Now have you ever wondered, as you're driving down the street,


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[Assistant] Why there might be a Dunkin' Donuts here and a Dunkin' Donuts just like two blocks away? Have you ever noticed that?


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[Assistant] There are various stores that you'll see this. Gas stations sometimes, fast food restaurants, sometimes Walmart. Bookstores are another that you will sometimes see this. Why is that?


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[Assistant] In an overwhelming way with another store in that market. Usually this happens when they're trying to drive another store out of business.


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[Assistant] So they're big enough chain they can absorb losses from an unproductive second store to saturate a market.


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[Assistant] And then they can absorb the closing of that second store once the competitor has been driven out of business.


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[Assistant] So that's why that market saturation happens. It's not because they think it's going to be profitable. That there's another, you know, 100% increase when they add that second store one block over. It's, it's all about market saturation.


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[Assistant] So, those kinds of tactics are possible for chain stores, and they are not possible for independent book stores. And this is how many independent book stores have been, uh, have, have, have been taken off the map in our cities.


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[Assistant] Comes to us, not in that old fashioned way of censorship laws.


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[Assistant] But in a new way, market censorship. This has always been part of how things work in a capitalist economy.


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[Assistant] It's true that in the past, literary enterprises, be they selling books or writing books or publishing books, had to make a profit in order to stay afloat. But the way that profit was made has changed.


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[Assistant] From the early 20th century until this point. And I'm going to say more about that. So just by going into the bookstore,


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[Assistant] Okay, not, not a majority. Uhm, taking out classes, books you buy for pleasure, your own decision to buy them.


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[Assistant] They still shape what you think about and what you read. It's browsing, or maybe that you've read about something and you go looking for it, uhm, that brings you into the bookstore.


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[Assistant] Censorship does have a legal history in this, uhm, part of the century. And so now I wanna just give you a little


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[Assistant] So this is, this is actually the title of a chapter of a book that I will be writing on the post 45 novel. And I'm gonna have this as the last chapter of that book. Uhm, the reason for that is that censorship and what I'm calling censure, that's the public outcry against literature, even not on legal grounds.


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[Assistant] So I spend a lot of time in this class and in my teaching in general and in my writing talking about what books say to us. But what do we say back to those books as a society? Well censorship and its companion censure, uh, do a lot of that talking back.


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[Assistant] So there are two sides of access to literature. I've just been talking a little bit about market constraints on what can be published and read.


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[Assistant] Since the early 20th century, a lot of the legal constraints on publishing and distributing literature have eased.


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[Assistant] In the 1870s, the Comstock laws in the United States aimed to regulate the use of the males for the, uh, for the dissemination of obscene materials.


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[Assistant] These laws were used in 1914 to indict Margaret Sanger for sending information about contraception across state lines. And she had to flee and she left the country to protect herself.


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[Assistant] So just the description of how contraception worked, uh, was a violation of the Comstock laws.


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[Assistant] So of course we're happily out of that, uh, moment. In 1933, for literature, it was a major decision


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[Assistant] Uh, by Judge Woolsey, declaring that James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene. Uhm, often censorship in literature would have to do with the import of


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[Assistant] So this is sort of on the same logic as the Comstock laws. Comstock laws regulate the traveling of obscene literature across state lines. Customs regulations regulated obscenity coming into the United States.


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[Assistant] Why is obscenity important? Well obscenity is largely, uh, recognized by legal scholars as not being protected by the 14th Amendment. It is not protected speech.


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[Assistant] So that's why it was important for someone who wanted to keep Ulysses out of American hands to call it obscene. Now, it's very interesting to read what Woolsey says about Ulysses.


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[Assistant] It just shows you how the learned reading of literature comes to have a legal impact in the world. So this is Woolsey on Joyce.


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[Assistant] Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success, to show how the screen of consciousness, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions, carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him,


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[Assistant] But also on a penumbral zone residual of past impressions. Some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. It's talking about the stream of consciousness method of narration in Ulysses.


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[Assistant] He shows how each of these impressions affect the life and the behavior of the character which he is describing. And I'm going to skip down. Uhm, he goes on to detail more about Joyce's technique. It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique


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[Assistant] And has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about.


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[Assistant] That he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented.


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[Assistant] So here Woolsey takes a very serious view of Joyce's artistic project.


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[Assistant] And he takes as the mark of its success what he calls the loyalty of Joyce to that project of showing exactly what characters think in their subconscious associations as those rise into consciousness and into language. That principle


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[Assistant] Woolsey's approach to the literary is enshrined in American law, affirmed as a precedent.


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[Assistant] So according to the Roth case, something can be judged obscene.


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[Assistant] Only if it meets three conditions, and those are these.


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[Assistant] So that phrase, community standards, will become very important in later law. And I'll mention how in a minute.


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[Assistant] It must not appeal to the interest of the average adult.


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[Assistant] You have to be really aberrant in order to meet this standard. It can't appeal to the interests of the average adult. That's what makes it obscene. So, I don't know, necrophilia, maybe that counts.


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[Assistant] It must have no redeeming social or literary value whatsoever. That means if you can prove just that one, you're safe.


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[Assistant] If you can prove that it has literary value, it cannot be obscene.


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[Assistant] And I think it's 1959, it goes on trial.


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[Assistant] Similarly, a customs case, uh, or, and a case about selling, uh, the book. It was bought at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and the poor sales clerk was indicted for selling it, uh, and also the bookstore was indicted for importing it. It had been published in Europe.


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[Assistant] All they had to do in that trial, and it's very funny to read the transcript, is to prove that Ginsburg in Howell


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[Assistant] was doing anything remotely resembling literary work.


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[Assistant] And it's very funny to see people trying to argue that he was not.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so it's not enough to say that he uses the word cock, for example, in that poem. That's not enough.


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[Assistant] And they try to, the prosecutor tries to make the case on the basis of individual words. And then you see them having these hilarious conversations about how individual words work in metaphors and how they mean different things.


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[Assistant] This standard really saves literature from any kind of legal, continuing legal censorship.


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[Assistant] But there are other ways of, uh, producing censorship that community standards comes to be a problem in, for example, textbook design.


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[Assistant] So there are these huge markets in public schools in Florida and Texas and California.


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[Assistant] And so textbook publishers have to appeal to the community standards of those huge powerful markets. And that has an impact on what's available to school systems all over the country.


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[Assistant] So there is a way that those community standards, while in the Roth case, they're redeeming, they help to make the case against censorship.


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[Assistant] Against a too wide definition of obscenity, it does have an impact in other ways in the opposite direction.


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[Assistant] Since the 1990s, in the wake of these changes, libraries have become the primary place where legal cases are based. So in 1982, the


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[Assistant] School board of Long Island, uh, in, in Island Trees of Long Island tries to remove, or actually does remove, Black Boy, Slaughterhouse Five, uhm, and various other sort of books of the 1960s mainly about, uhm, eh, politics mostly, has them removed from the school library.


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[Assistant] And as soon as brought against that school system for doing that the decision in that case


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[Assistant] Affirms that even though public school systems are within their rights in the context of the classroom to restrict what is on the syllabi of their teachers.


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[Assistant] That the school library represents what they call special environment.


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[Assistant] The special environment is a place of voluntary study. It is a place where the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be suspended. And as they say, sort of poetically, students do not leave their rights at the school door.


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[Assistant] In certain sectors of the country, in certain ways of thinking.


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[Assistant] Black boy was cut in half because it didn't seem like a good reflection on America. It's still a problem for some books in being accepted and read.


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[Assistant] So I began to talk about market constraints and I want to just say a little bit more about that and how it affects the writing of literature and the publishing even before you arrive at the bookstore.


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[Assistant] Uhm, traditional publishing has undergone a huge consolidation since the 1980s. So there are large multinational corporations that have bought up publishers. The one signal example of this is when Bertelsmann, a German company, bought up Pantheon books.


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[Assistant] Uhm, this is written about, uh, in a book, now I'm forgetting the name of it, uhm, it'll come to me.


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[Assistant] One of the Pantheon editors led a revolt when this happened. It became clear that


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[Assistant] Could work with writers who they found to be difficult, interesting, path breaking, unusual, not catering to what was popular. They could work with writers and cultivate them.


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[Assistant] And they knew that they were taking on a book, say it's a collection of short stories, these are notoriously hard to sell. They were taking on a book that was not going to make a profit. But then they would also take on the joy of cooking.


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[Assistant] And they knew that the profit from a popular book could help to carry and balance those less profitable books or not at all profitable books that they had on the list.


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[Assistant] To allow different kinds of books into the public domain.


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[Assistant] Publishers were taken over by multinational corporations that were very distant from


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[Assistant] And they started to demand that every book have its profit and loss analysis and that a very strict regulation be followed in ensuring that all titles were going to make a profit.


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[Assistant] That's a very different standard. And it had a huge impact on how editors, what kind of latitude editors had in working with writers who they thought might be a little unusual or not so marketable.


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[Assistant] At the same time, agents began to have a role in the publishing business. In the 1950s when editors were


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[Assistant] Encouraging literary writers directly.


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[Assistant] They had a much more collaborative relationship with writers. But as profit became more important, writers needed to turn to someone else who wasn't going to pressure them to follow the market. And agents came to have a role.


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[Assistant] Now, it's interesting, there's yet a third role, uhm, that has just begun to emerge in this structure, and that is of the coach.


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[Assistant] If you're a writer, to have someone who will call you up every week and say, hey, how's the book going? Let's talk about your ideas. Are you writing today?


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[Assistant] It used to be that agents took that kind of active role. Well agents are very busy now with their clients selling movie rights and such things. Movie rights are where a lot of the profit in a book sale come from.


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[Assistant] There's an ever ongoing search for that person who will be the ally of the literary in this process.


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[Assistant] I've talked about the consolidation in book selling, the rise of the chains.


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[Assistant] And I've also talked about those financial relationships between booksellers and publishers where space is bought. They also have incentives, uhm, that publishers give, sometimes give money.


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[Assistant] For readings to be held at a bookstore. So sometimes those things are bought also. Those kinds of events, promotional events.


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[Assistant] There is of course this whole context of the rise of the internet and all kinds of competition from the film industry, other media.


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[Assistant] Market constraints are sometimes, uh, paradoxically produced by that overload that we get from the internet. So what that means is


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[Assistant] The culture is finding new arbiters. So you have this huge volume of information and cultural offerings being given to you.


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[Assistant] In that welter of information, we all look to some arbiter to tell us, how do I sort this out? Nobody has the time to read all the blogs and decide which one they're gonna read regularly.


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[Assistant] So you might get a link from someone else's page, someone you are friends with, someone you admire, a writer you've seen elsewhere. Uhm, you might read certain print publications and from there follow them into the internet, into cyberspace. Most books now come with a web address somewhere on them. A lot of films do, most films do.


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[Assistant] Gets connected up with those arbiters isn't yet very clear.


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[Assistant] So companies are experimenting with paying for placements, you know, like when you do the Google search and there are certain Google sponsored links at the top. That's like having the space in the front of your store bought and paid for.


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[Assistant] So, you think that you're getting, or I think we all know that those are sponsored links now, but at the beginning, people didn't really quite know that. So it looked like you were getting the product of a disinterested electronic search, but in fact you were getting a promotion.


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[Assistant] So the internet experiments with all kinds of, uh, both new and tried and true ways of using money to create prominence among the welter of information.


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[Assistant] Then there is another rising problem in question and that is of intellectual property and access as books are digitized. So I don't know if you have heard of the Google Book Project and also all the digital libraries initiatives. There are various ones, but the Google Book Project is uhm,


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[Assistant] Digitizing with a special technology, uh, people think it's probably a robotic technology, it's kept secret, for scanning books that are in the public domain. And they've made agreements with lots of university libraries including Stanford, Cornell, Michigan,


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[Assistant] To digitize all the books that are beyond the copyright that are in their collections. To make a huge digital library.


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[Assistant] And the dream is that this will be a sort of bonanza of access. It'll be searchable. It'll be, well, maybe free.


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[Assistant] Publishers and writers groups, unions, are very worried about copyright infringement because Google has stepped over the line and is interested in pushing the envelope into scanning copyrighted material.


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[Assistant] So what has started to happen is that individual publishers have made deals with Google.


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[Assistant] To let Google digitize their list for a fee.


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[Assistant] But see, now that money starts to come into this arrangement,


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[Assistant] It starts to look less like free access and more like an access that is once again shaped by these financial considerations.


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[Assistant] It's not at all clear how the nobility of the project and the financial context are gonna work themselves out. And it's not at all clear yet what the general approach of educational institutions will be towards this. Yale has not signed on to this, for example. So some universities have, some haven't.


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[Assistant] Uhm, how much access we have among the vast choices that the internet makes available to us.


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[Assistant] I want to just mention one more thing and that's about internationalization. One thing that uhm,


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[Assistant] Fiction in translation, contemporary fiction in translation, notoriously impossible to sell.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there is a press called the New Press that was founded after some of the Pantheon editors left. And, uh, they founded this non-profit press.


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[Assistant] That is the only kind of fiction that the new press publishes. Contemporary fiction in translation. Because they knew that only a non-profit press could publish this. It will never sell.


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[Assistant] Vision of the world's knowledge. Because it does have pretensions to be the repository of the world's knowledge.


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[Assistant] About whether literature was the purveyor of ideology, political ideology.


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[Assistant] So the question is, does literature have a message that it's trying to tell us?


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[Assistant] And one way to think about this is to think about English 125, major British poets.


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[Assistant] The picture of what the old fashioned canon might look like. It's all white guys. I think there might be one woman that you can put on the syllabus in the spring. A modern poet. You can probably teach bishop.


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[Assistant] I think people do teach bishop in the second term of English 125. Did those poets represent the communication of an ideology?


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[Assistant] She's such an overwhelmingly powerful author at this time by the sheer quality of her work.


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[Assistant] Uh, an aesthetic object, something that we should understand as part of the history of an art form.


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[Assistant] Do you have to choose between these two? And I cite here what became an incredibly important book. It's really a wonderful book by actually a Yale graduate, John Guillory.


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[Assistant] And that the aesthetic, if it had an ideology, it was an ideology of bourgeois privilege.


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[Assistant] would be communicating something about an elite bourgeois ideology but rather that the very act of being in the institution where you would study such a thing at Yale in English 125.


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[Assistant] That was the repository of the elite power of these texts. So it had much more to do with institutions than it did about the content of any particular literary work. And it makes some very persuasive readings of canonical poems.


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[Assistant] That demonstrate the undecidability of their ideology.


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[Assistant] Or the way that they resist how they'd been cast, how those poems had been cast by critics.


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[Assistant] Become part of this picture. So we've talked about Black Boy. I mentioned how, how controversial Woman Warrior was because of its impurity as a Chinese text.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Toni Morrison became a real advocate of writing by women of color in particular and also as a literary critic.


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[Assistant] She mounted an argument about how whiteness functions as a...


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[Assistant] Uh, a central part of the traditional canon of literature and she wrote Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in 1992, a very influential text.


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[Assistant] Internationally, we had the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie's persecution, the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini.


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[Assistant] After the publication of the satanic verses for its depiction of Islam. That kind of persecution


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[Assistant] It becomes, uh, a feature of this more internationalized debate about what is okay to say, especially about religions. And then of course we have the Danish cartoon episode with the cartoons of Mohammed that are now seemingly, uhm, it's resurgent. There's another question about a film about Mohammed's life, I believe it is. Then there's Roth's work.


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[Assistant] Philip Ross' work has been defined by these kinds of objections, that censure that I was talking about.


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[Assistant] Young Jewish protagonists living in a Jewish context in Jewish communities in Newark or in New York.


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[Assistant] Actually, a little older than young boy. Maybe he's a teenager. Ozzie Friedman.


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[Assistant] Becomes extremely agitated because all his questions to his family and to his rabbi about Christianity


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[Assistant] If his family, all the assembled students from his Hebrew school and the rabbi won't kneel down and pray to Jesus, which of course they do because he's about to jump off.


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[Assistant] This story was quite controversial, uh, as you might imagine. So there was a taste of Roth's, uhm,


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[Assistant] Vexed relationship to Jewish community in that story.


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[Assistant] So it was all about how a hidebound Jewish community was preventing and, and circumscribing the curiosity of a young American boy.


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[Assistant] And it really highlighted Ozzie's Americanness.


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[Assistant] And Roth has always emphasized that about himself. He's an American writer.


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[Assistant] Uhm, like Saul Bellow before him, Saul Bellow had been his mentor and teacher for a brief time at the University of Chicago. Bellow insisted on bringing into American literature the voice and sensibility of an immigrant Jewish family.


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[Assistant] Bella was from a Russian Jewish family that emigrated to Canada in the early 20th century.


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[Assistant] Bellow was told he would never, because of his heritage when he was at the University of Chicago, he was told he would never have the ear for language that would allow him to write beautifully.


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[Assistant] Because of his linguistic background. And because he was Jewish.


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[Assistant] Well Bellow pioneered the way of bringing in a particularly Jewish and European notion of literature and a sensibility about the body.


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[Assistant] And certainly this was a very powerful current, and Roth is the continuation of that current in American letters.


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[Assistant] Roth comes out in 1969 with Hortnoy's complaint.


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[Assistant] It's about Alex Portnoy jacking off in the bathroom to every possible, uh, provocative thought he can have. And it's told as if to Alex's psychiatrist in a sort of ranting, over-the-top style. Very explicit. This got Roth into big trouble. Partly because Alex


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[Assistant] Irving Howe, a very prominent Jewish literary critic.


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[Assistant] Public Intellectual. Wrote a famous essay in 1972 called Philip Roth Reconsidered.


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[Assistant] And he basically said that Roth, the adulation given to Roth was entirely inappropriate, he now saw on reflection, now that he had read Portnoy's complaint, because Roth,


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[Assistant] had an unfocused hostility towards the Jewish community. This enraged Roth. That rage fueled huge portions of his career.


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[Assistant] In a certain way, he's describing his own origin as a writer.


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[Assistant] So bear with me, you have just five minutes. I want to get to one last point.


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[Assistant] In case you haven't noticed, uh, is a very misogynist writer. Did you notice? Hard to, hard to miss that. Why do I like Roth?


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[Assistant] Writers are taken to task for their offensiveness on cultural grounds, on gender grounds, on the grounds of identification.


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[Assistant] How can you like someone who has this major flaw, who seems to see all women as sexual objects, who is unembarrassed about saying his writing is about a man's life, the life of men? It's not about the life of women.


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[Assistant] Well partly, it's that like no one else, he can take me into a voice. Seamlessly draw me in.


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[Assistant] Nevertheless, he can take me in there, and the way his sentences work are really sometimes just astonishingly beautiful.


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[Assistant] There's a part in the human stain that I particularly like, uhm, and you'll get to it as you finish the novel for Monday, and that's when he's describing Coleman and Fania at Tanglewood. So just think about, uh, that when you read that. Pause for a minute over that.


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[Assistant] I think what it is ultimately is that I'm very moved by two things in Ross writing. That is the meditation on mortality. And what goes along with that, I think,


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[Assistant] There's a very Whitmanian sense to his understanding of sex and the body in all its complexity. I appreciate that.


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[Assistant] I moved by that sense of the inaccessibility of the other person. This was from my lecture on Monday.


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[Assistant] The way you always get the other fellow's life somehow wrong.


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[Assistant] That speaks to me about the difference between my consciousness and anyone I encounter in the world. That to me is profound and moving.


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[Assistant] It reminds me that for all Roth's linguistic energy and skill as a writer, there's still that great divide that language is trying to cross. And that's what I appreciate about literature in general.


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[Assistant] That it's that great attempt to cross that divide. I can overlook the misogyny for those things. Am I like Roth? Probably not. But that's why I like him.


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[Assistant] And so, Roth's very difference from me, his misogyny, is part of what allows me to feel that I am entering, however partially, however always in a compromised way, into the consciousness of another person. Through that beautiful, amazing medium of language.


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[Assistant] So that's why I like Roth and I would encourage you to think about your own responses to the books that we've read together. Think about what it means, uh, about you as a reader that you respond in certain ways. So we'll pick this up on Monday. Thank you for waiting.


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[Assistant] Little, little kid, you know this place is really weird, right? Like, living in this place is not cool.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] F.J.B.C. F.J.B.C. F.J.B.C. I got it. F.J.B.C. Hell yeaah. Hell yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We got this. F, J, you and me. F, J, B, C. We got this. Oh yeaah. F, J, B, C. F, J, B, C. F, J, B, C. F, J, B, C. F, J, B, C. Stands for fun, jolly, big cock.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's me, that's what they call me, FJBC, Mr. Funj- Anyway, ahem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't think- okay. Oh wait, no, I know, I know. I gotta dodge the attack first, and then hit him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's no good, that's no cool. Get ready for a face full of fucking this fist. I'm coming for you, baby. Okay, forgot that there was another turn there. Alright, I'm on the way, baby. I'm coming for you. You're gonna get it- Well, I'm here, okay? Alright, well. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, Diane, here comes the paying train, ready to give you a face full of fuck in this fist. We're coming for you, baby.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was so good! For every part of that was good! Fuck! Fuck! I'm just so good! I have no complaints about it!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] God, I want more! God, good God! Who, like, uh, Koala? What was it, Koala something? That made it?