Cyrus Patell

Edith Wharton and the Clarifying Rage of the Menopausal Writer A confession: there have been times when I’ve looked at my lovely, loving family and thought, “I need to get out of here.” What if I just walked out, ignoring the endless questions about whether th…

Celebrate Edith Wharton's birthday today by reading @mannahattamamma.bsky.social's insightful account of Wharton's mid-life personal, sexual, and creative awakening.

The Hidden Danger of the Supreme Court’s New Trans Rights Case The Supreme Court hears arguments on Wednesday in Skrmetti v. U.S.

4/4 While I was lecturing, the US Supreme Court was considering United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to a Tennessee law that denies transition care to transgender youth. This piece from @slate.bsky.social makes a compelling argument about what is at stake:

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

3/4 "Eliza," of course, is a callback to the first chatbot developed by by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1960s. This piece from @theguardian.com reminds us why Weizenbaum came to worry about AI and the uses that humans would make of it.

2/4 The moving vignette about a bot named Eliza near the end of the novel suggests that while some people will be able to develop an ethical and mutually beneficial relationship to such an intelligence, most will not.

1/4 Second lecture today on Jeanette Winterson's "Frankissstein: A Love Story." I suggested that the novel asks us to contemplate: "What if general artificial intelligenceis a form of intelligencethat is radically other? How will human beings deal with it?"

A Ghost with a Camera - Post45 Candace Chen recognizes the photograph immediately. It’s one of the best-known portraits from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986), and its two figures are drenched in a yellow-ora...

4/4 @waterman.bsky.social directed the students to this insightful piece on the novel's use of the photograph and the novel's relationship to the old blog site "New York Ghost" by @alixbeeston.bsky.social from the online journal Post-45:

YouTube video by CollDocumentary Nan Goldin / The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

3/4 The passage reads:

"Splayed out on her desk was a Nan Goldin photograph, Greer and Robert on the Bed, NYC. I could recognize it on sight.

"'I love Nan Goldin,' I said, lingering in the doorway. 'She was my favorite artist when I was a teenager.'"

To contextualize Goldin, we watched this:

2/4 One focus was the passage that mentions this photograph by Nan Goldin from "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency."

1/4 Yesterday in our "Writing New York" class, @waterman.bsky.social gave his second lecture on Ling Ma's novel "Severance." #booksky

YouTube video by Waterstones Jeanette Winterson: The Waterstones Interview

4/4 Then the first five minutes of Jeanette Winterson's 2020 interview with Waterstones, in which she addresses why Shelley's 1818 novel is so "prescient." She offers an insightful interpretation of the resources that the novel provides for thinking about the politics of rights, gender, and AI.

3/4 Hard to believe that "Rocky Horror Picture Show" will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year!

YouTube video by VideoXL The Rocky Horror Picture Show "Sweet Transvestite" (1975) - (4K)

2/4 ... followed by ... (Say It!) ...

YouTube video by VideoXL The Rocky Horror Picture Show "Time Warp" (1975) - (4K)

1/4 Today's lecture on Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel "Frankissstein: A Love Story" began with a video callback to a classic queer take on the Frankenstein story: "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," starting, of course, with "Time Warp" ...

5/5 But that's not the way the anti-trans folks see it apparently. Or maybe they're just afraid of the future and what it holds.

4/5 Victor said, "I have never met anyone who is trans."

[Ry:] "Most people haven’t."

He smiled. "Weren’t we just saying that in the future we will be able to choose our bodies? And to change them? Think of yourself as future-early."

3/5 In the view of the novel's Victor Stein—an avatar of both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Victor Frankenstein—being trans is an expression of the idea of self-making that underwrites US individualism. Consider this exchange from the novel:

November 30, 2024 Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democra...

2/5 One of the topics this term has been the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the US cultural mythologies surrounding individualism. I highly recommend @hcrichardson.bsky.social's November 30 Substack newsletter on the shifting politics of individualism in the US:

1/5 The last text in my "Cosmopolitan Imagination" course is Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel "Frankissstein," a mixture of historical fiction and speculative fiction. It dramatizes the life of Mary Shelley as she is writing "Frankenstein" and also the experience of a trans avatar named Ry Shelley.

5/5 Here is Building A6 today with its new signage facing the public road. The Institute's space in the building is apparently quite diminished.

Let's call this thread "Signs of the Times."

4/5 The permanent campus opened in 2014. The physical space was marked by disciplinary thinking, as each division had its own building. The Humanities were housed in Building A6, along with the interdisciplinary NYUAD Institute, which had offered academic programming to the public since 2008.

3/5 Meanwhile, NYUAD was building a permanent campus on nearby Saadiyat Island. I took this picture from an Etihad jet while returning to Abu Dhabi from London in 2013.

NYUAD Announces Inaugural Class

2/5 The first campus building was near the oldest part of Abu Dhabi. The "Downtown Campus" was a wonderfully interdisciplinary community, where faculty from all disciplines routinely interacted with one another and with the students. It was billed as "the World's Honors College."

1/5 I began working on NYU's Abu Dhabi campus project in Fall 2008 as part of a committee designing the arts and humanities curriculum and doing initial hiring of faculty members. The campus opened in 2010, and for its first three years, as I served as NYUAD's inaugural Dean for Humanities.

In pictures: First look at Notre Dame’s breathtaking restoration five years after fire | CNN The resurrection of Notre Dame – the treasured Gothic gem in the heart of Paris struck by a devastating fire in 2019 – has been a closely guarded secret. Few had seen the meticulous work of architects...

2/2 The cathedral reopens on December 7, and this CNN piece gives us a glimpse of the wonderful restoration. I can't wait to see it in person when I'm in Paris this spring.

1/2 I was last in Paris on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. Here's what Notre-Dame looked like on Valentine's Day 2020.

In other words, we dropped most of the c19 content in order to make room for c21 titles that didn't exist when we started doing this.

Screenshot of a blog post from Jan 20, 2010 from our old ahistoryofnewyork.com website. Illustration: Cover of Chang-Rae Lee's NATIVE SPEAKER. Text: This morning Cyrus and I will kick off the seventh incarnation of our team-taught course Writing New York. Here’s what the kids will be ordering, in case you want to read along at home. They’re listed alphabetically by author but we read them roughly chronologically. We’ll post the full syllabus in the coming days. Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick Abraham Cahan, Yekl Stephen Crane, Maggie E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime Allen Ginsberg, Howl Henry James, Washington Square Tony Kushner, Angels in America Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Early American Drama Philip Shaw, Patti Smith

To give a sense of how it's changed over time, here's a snapshot of the reading list from 2010.

As @cpatell.bsky.social and I wrap another round of our "Writing New York" class (est. 2003) we're inclined, as always, to tinker. We're also thinking about developing another version of the course as a college core/gen ed requirement. What would be your non-negotiables in a class abt NYC lit?

YouTube video by Rebel Waltz: Celebrating The Clash Stay Free: The Story of The Clash Podcast

7/7 Here's what makes me think that I really need to write the "Fight the Power" book: @chuckdpe.bsky.social turns out, like me, to be a fan of The Clash. So much so that he hosted a podcast called "Stay Free: The Story of The Clash" for the BBC. Check it out here on YouTube.

YouTube video by João de Carvalho Do the Right Thing (1989) opening credits

6/7 Lee's presentation of a pugilistic Rosie Perez, doing an aggressive hip-hop dance on a stage in front of a projection of Brooklyn stoops, to the angry words and beats of "Fight the Power."