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00:02:02 12.05 |
Funding for The Eleventh Hour announced over show graphics.
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00:02:20 29.87 |
Show Opener, Eleventh Hour graphics animated.
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00:02:43 53.6 |
Aerial from top of high rise in New York City
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Show Host, Robert Lipsyte, welcomes viewers to program from inside a high rise building glass window overlooking New York skyline. Lipsyte holding a book, "Our New York".
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00:02:53 62.93 |
Robert Lipsyte:
Concrete may crumble, but the dreams of a young writer can last forever. And New York is a writers city. Welcome to The Eleventh Hour. I'm Robert Lipsyte. The photographer, David Finn, and the literary critic, Alfred Kazin, put their dreams together in this new book, "Our New York" |
00:03:15 85.24 |
cut to var black and white still photos of New York City from the book, as author and literary critic, Alfred Kazin reads. Photos of bridges, NYC skyline, people on the street of different denominations, store fronts, etc. are seen
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00:03:49 119.48 |
Close up of Alfred Kazan reading from inside high rise overlooking the city skyline, Alfred Kazan.
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00:04:15 145.01 |
INTERVIEW INSERTED:
Robert Lipsyte: How did you learn New York. Alfred Kazin: I absorbed New York. And I think New York absorbed me Robert Lipsyte: Because of the sense of kind of embracing this enormity seems more than one person can ever do? Alfred Kazin: Yes. Well. I never felt that I was doing anything in the conscious, deliberate learning thing. The real, the real adventure was the fact that I grew up practically on the outside of the city in the Brownsville area, which was near the new station, the very end of everything. Consequently, I had to get into the city to see what was happening. I felt like a provincial, which I was. You know, Norman Mailer says that Brooklyn is not the center of anything. And I was at the very end of Brooklyn, so that to see the city was always a romantic, adventurous thing. Robert Lipsyte: When you thought of the "city", you thought Manhattan was the city. Alfred Kazin: of course, that's what we called New York. And Brooklyn was not New York, it's just what you put at the end of the address. The Manhattan was New York, and New York was Manhattan. Robert Lipsyte: But yet, the hope was in Brooklyn. I mean, if you talked about Brownsville, you know, as a place of hope of hope, not only for individual immigrants, but hope for all humanity. Alfred Kazin: It was hope, because of my parents were poor Russian Jewish immigrants. And wherever there are people who are poor, at least in that old fashioned way of being poor, there was great hope. In fact, you might say, that you lived on hope, because there was everything to live for in the future. There was so little in the present. And it was that romantic feeling of going up with, hoping to go up with, which which made the Brownsville exciting to me. But also it was family. I was surrounded by people, American born children of Eastern European immigrants. And I felt I beloned to a very common sort of condition. You know, as a matter, of course. Robert Lipsyte: and yet, you still had to get away from Brooklyn to fulfill yourself, you had to get away from that community. Alfred Kazin: Yes, it was expected of me, not to get away from them, but to improve myself in some basic way. But also, it was an extraordinarily exciting place because it was full of old fashioned Jewish boxers who got knocked out of the ring regularly in in Canarsie. And I was always fascinated by the fact that in the very tenement in which we lived, there were the same thin barrel, thin chested guys who were always running away from the police and, I once to my amazement, when I when I was up on the roof, which was the great place to be to get some air and to watch the birds, I saw these guys skipping from one roof to another just ahead of the cops. I never got over that, it was the Keystone cops exactly, but it was very serious. Robert Lipsyte: 05:07 I was always touched by your when you went back to Brownsville. Brownsville now is still poor as it was. And yet it's desperate in different ways than it was, then what happened? Alfred Kazin: Well, Brownsville used to be all Jewish, and now it's all black, and has been all black for some time. And the poverty I knew as a boy in the 20s in the 30s, early 30s, was very different from the rather desperate poverty, the welfare poverty, and I have to say also the drug poverty that you get there. I don't know how to describe it is so sad for me. All I know is that not only my path was obliterated, but the whole idea of our heritage was obliterated as a matter of course. See, I never felt in the least sorry for myself, because my family, my father was a house painter and mother was a home dressmaker. I thought nothing is more exciting than being the child of proletarians, working people. Because needless to say, I always had my nose in a book so that the contrast was very strong. It was a very literary place. Whenever I walked home from the library, and I had, my sister, had at one point had six library cards between us to make sure we got enough to read. Half of them were forged, of course. I had to show my books to the guys on the corner when I came back to make sure that they thought it was worthy of me. And I tell the story in my book, and I've never forgotten it. There was a fellow with whom I was always quarrelling. We were always punching each other around. We were 12 and 13. And one day after one of these scrimmages, he said, Look, I want to show you something. He took me inside the vestibule, the whole of the place where we live in a tenement. He said to me, very slowly, I've discovered the most wonderful poet I said, Really, who? he said, his name is Ezra Pound. And to this day, I can't get over the fact that we'd been hitting each other around the same time he was reading Ezra Pound. |
00:08:56 426.25 |
Robert Lipsyte:
The neighborhood bully was reading Ezra Pound, Alfred Kazin: Well, there was a great belief. You have to understand that the hope also came from the labor movement. The important most important thing in my childhood was the fact that the labor movement and the synagogue seem to be counterparts of each other. You see, I grew up between two orthodoxies. My mother was orthodox, my father was an orthodox socialist. They were always arguing, always disputing, and I was fascinated by both of them. And the way I guess I took a little bit of each. But the point is that there was a tremendous feeling that life, the future was possible. And that's what I mean about the sadness. You see in Brownsville today. I don't feel, I go down there, I go down there very often, out of nostalgia, out of desire to see what's happening. And also, frankly, because I feel so terrible what's been happening there. Though television and the crime news, often bringing up of the news of the place to me, I'm talking now about Brownsville and East New York, you know, the Bedford Stuyvesant areas. it's called right now, which a phrase I never heard before. Anyway, the labor movement was brought hope, because the working people together were going to make a great and glorious America. And there was a great belief in working class, solidarity, workers are very proud. And most of all, they had great passion for their work. Also, I grew up among bakers. Bakers with my favorite kinds of proletarians. And one of my favorite memories, I never got over this, was the fact that when I left the school in the morning to go to public school, a neighbor, a widow, who had baked all night would leave an enormous onion roll for me outside the door. It looked like a cartwheel. So when I open the door, it would fall against me. And I could bring it in and take it to school with me. Robert Lipsyte: But what I hear you talking about is the hope that sprang out of those neighborhoods, and in a sense, the feeling that their children were the future. And you had to make sure that they read books, and you gave them food. Did you just think this exists in the city now? Alfred Kazin: Well, you know perfectly well, you are raising a very difficult problem here. I don't know. I can only talk. I mean, I have my doubts about a lot of it frankly. I don't want to pursue this because it's too painful for me very painful. Robert Lipsyte: painful, in what sense? Alfred Kazin: Well, a few years ago, a classmate of mine from City College, who was the principal of a very famous High School in Brooklyn, one of the last grade high schools left in Brooklyn at that time. This was quite a few years ago, was telling me about a girl in his class, a black girl, who he thought was absolutely brilliant. And he wanted her to go to get a scholarship to Smith or Ratcliffe or Brown, wherever. So he went to her parents, to her father, to get permission, and to get encouragement. The father said no, I didn't have that kind of education. Why should she? And the Principal was bashed and came back very sadly. Well I found this very painful. |
00:12:04 614.26 |
cutaway to scenes of pedestrians on New York City streets, reading newspaper, walking by, sitting on the steps of the library.
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00:12:19 629.63 |
Still photo, pigeons sitting on the head of lion sculpture.
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00:12:35 645.26 |
various b&w photos from the book, Our New York, as Kazan narrates. ie, oriental women holding cantaloupes, posters on pole, skyscraper, riding the crowded subway
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00:13:06 675.93 |
Close up literary critic Alfred Kazin speaking to Robert Lipsyte against the backdrop of the New York City skyline.
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00:13:10 679.72 |
INTERVIEW INSERT CONTINUES..
Alfred Kazin: The great thing that happened to me I never got over it, was the fact that I discovered one day that I was a writer, I began to write book reviews for the New Republic, for the New York Times. I was a literary critic, and it fascinated me to do that. But my way into Manhattan was very slow. I went by way of Brooklyn Heights, which I have to say is still my favorite neighborhood in all of New York. I never get over it. It has things that are as beautiful as most beautiful parts of London. And I love to walk along the Esplanade. And I remember too because from that Esplanade from below, I left in a convoy during the war for England, one of the most romantic and difficult adventures in my life. But bit by bit, I did make my way from Brooklyn Heights to 24th Street and Lexington Avenue. And it was very exciting being a writer. In the 1930s, when I began, it was possible to be an honest freelancer in New York, to get a book, all excited about getting the covers out and everything else, and meeting the deadline. And walking on 43rd Street to the Times to hand in a piece because the mail of course, I couldn't trust for a freshest manuscript of mine. And of course, it was exciting too, because in those days, the Paramount was on the corner 43rd and Broadway. I had to pass all the "Bobby Soxers" who wanted to get into this to hear Frank Sinatra, things like that. And all of New York at that time was incredibly exciting to me, because I felt like a provincial as I say. And in those days, the L still ran on Third Avenue and on First Avenue, and nothing was more exciting than just riding, showing friends from Buffalo and osh gosh, what New York looked like because the windows in the springtime were opened. People would lean out the windows like something out of a John Sloan, you know, painting, they would look at you, you would look at them. And you were sitting in this wonderful train above the streets of New York. And if you were down below in the streets, the darkness, which john Sloan and Bellows, and so many other painters of the ashcan school made so wonderfully vivid. You also had a sense of being part of a world that was not to plain, there were shadows, there were mysteries, extraordinary things. Robert Lipsyte: I was amazed you, you had mentioned that hoppers early Sunday morning. Alfred Kazin my favorite New York painting. What about it? Robert Lipsyte: Well, it evoked New York for you. Alfred Kazin: It still does. Robert Lipsyte: Do you feel? Are you still a provincial? Or do you feel that you live here now? Alfred Kazan: Honestly, honest, do you want my honest answer? Robert Lipsyte: I hope so. Alfred Hazin: Both. I still feel that New York is it, you know, though I've lived everywhere else in the country. But for obvious reasons,New York these days can be pretty painful in many ways. I see things in New York nowadays, which I simply can't get over. People lying on the street, and other people stepping over them. And people sleeping on the steps. Every time I go to Pennsylvania Station, for example, come out of it. I see dozens of people sleeping, they're sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. And it really is a tragic picture. Robert Lipsyte: Why does that pain you? Alfred Kazin: Because nobody cares. And sometimes I feel that even they even they don't care, so it's not caring. Well, I don't have to mean I'm being banal as possible, but these reactions are everybody's reaction. realize it, what what do people say? What can you do? In other words, a pragmatic thing is the first thing they say. If they ever looked at these people, looked at them, and saw them as individuals, something could be done. We would have to start with that at least. But if we just see them as a bunch of people have the same color and condition who are sleeping, then obviously nothing can be done, as such. Robert Lipsyte: The reason I asked you this question is because kind of suffused in the book, if I may, is a sense of disappointment. New York has disappointed you. Alfred Hazin: Yes, it has it had disappointed everybody. Murray Kempton, one of the few people of my generation of writers, who has remained faithful to the sense of outrage, and is allowed to be outraged by these days, says that New York is just a failure. He said this years ago. And in one sense, humanly it is a failure. And of course, it's full of people who who bother me because they don't want to learn English, because they talk to themselves, they talk to their children, and the children talk to each other in a foreign language. And that bothers me, it means that they're cutting off their future. It bothers me a great deal as such, New York has become like the world itself. I mean, in one sense, it is the third world, it is Eastern Europe, until recently, it has the typical heartlessness of any kind of human organization in which you pile people on top of each other as such. But I have to say there's another side to New York, which we mustn't leave, which is New York. As literature is New York, is painting New Yorker is music. When I went to Carnegie Hall as a kid, and sat in the topmost balcony, with the French school, being a child of Paradise, you're so near heaven, and nothing seems to be so thrilling as the kind of music you could hear then. And I still feel that about music in New York and about painting in New York about literature in New York. Robert Lipsyte: Well, you said New York is the biggest subject for or should be the biggest subject for American literature. Alfred Lipsyte: It has been. It has been, oddly enough, more great books have been written, especially in the 20th century about New York, than about any other places. And it makes me mad, I have to say, at the same time I am I'm always a New York chauvinist. When people say New York is not American, is that America? Who what, but America could have created this city. I mean, what what what possible civilization except the one we live in, could have created New York? And New York, is at the same time, the greatest experiment and democracy conceivable. All these people trying to get a foothold on life, scrambling up and down the ladder all the time, you know, working against each other and not seeing each other. It makes a fantastic example of what I call democracy in action. |
00:18:46 1016.37 |
INTERVIEW CONTINUED WITH ALFRED HAZAN.
Robert Lipsyte: And yet for all your enthusiasm, there's there's kind of this a touch of dyspepsia. When you look for example, at Central Park, and the joggers, you talk about the pursuit of health instead of the pursuit of happiness. You look at people sunbathing, you look at people drinking beer, you talk about the revolt of the masses. Is theres something about Central Park that you no longer enjoy? Alfred Kazin: No, I love Central Park, just that I know too much about the history, and I know too much about the illusion that the great designer Frederick Law Olmstead had for it. You see Olmstead was a Victorian gentleman, the genius who really pictured Central Park as a place where people would wander, no doubt, with gold headed canes on Sunday, staring at things in the wordsworthian sense. And, of course, now it's just a Coney Island in many places. Central Park, what bothers me is not the park itself, and not certainly not ,ertainly not the fact that people are using it on mars. After I come out of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which honestly was Olmsted's greatest achievement. And I remember all too well, my mother in the family bringing pots and pans for lunch on Sunday afternoon to Prospect Park, so I can hardly complain about the way the scene has trouble is there's too much of everything in the park right now. You know that? My favorite example of this is when Peggy Guggenheim, the niece of Solomon Guggenheim, complained that the museum, the famous museum on Fifth Avenue should have been put inside the park, not across the park. And it was pointed out to her that they forbade this sort of thing originally in the rules. She seemed astonished. You know, her idea of a park was to have a museum in it. And as a point of fact when General Grant died in the 1880s, they want to plant him in the Central Park, and Olmstead and fortunately was able to resist that. But of course a place where they played bicycle Polo, where they have cricket, where they have football and baseball, where very often you see a lot of people who frankly are not part of the mass but just waiting to attack it in many ways, that makes for a slightly unhappy thing. Lipsyte. |
00:20:54 1144.61 |
cut to b & w still photos New York Central Park scenery, people sitting on blankets in the park, tunnel in the park
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00:21:13 1163.03 |
RETURN TO INTERVIEW:
Robert Lipsyte: In talking about New York as a great subject for literature. Do you think Bonfire of the Vanities got it right? Alfred Kazin: It got it right, but mixed in with an awful lot of scorn and hatred for the poor populace. Tom Wolfe is a is a southern Confederate. And I think of that book as the Confederacy's one victory especially in New York. You know, Wolfe comes from Richmond, and he has a good solid wasp background. The book is very charming, very brilliantly done, but it's journalism, because he's dealing with types all the time, and then it hasn't escaped me that the one who comes out of the end, as the one innocent victim of everybody else is of course, this miserable wasp, who was originally shown as an adulterer and all sorts of types of crap. But nevertheless, he's perceived as being slightly more innocent than the others you know. it's a wicked book in both sense the of the word wicked. Robert Lipsyte: The problem, of course, is that that is the picture of New York that is being offered now to the country and the world. Alfred Hazan: Exactly. Robert Lipsyte: And it's not your picture of New York, Alfred Kazin: certainly not, certainly not. there were things in it because it made me laugh, but also it made me very mad. Sample the picture has, you know, it's as if Jonathan Swift, instead of writing Gulliver's Travels had written had written about the blacks and the Jews in the Bronx. That scene in which the Jewish judge is holding on to the back of the doors of black Maria, and the black friends inside, they are cursing each other and the violence, racial epithets. That's New York, according to Mr. Wolf. I don't think it is the real story of New York. There is there is still more feeling between people between the different types. But of course, New York is like Austria Hungary before the First World War, you know, with Koch, of course, as the Emperor Franz Yosef, God help us. You know, it does have this fantastic lineup of nations, of languages, of tribes. I have had experiences in New York with people. Do you know that I've been driven by taxi by an Eskimo from Alaska, by Hassad wearing the full regalia, for example, and who scared all the other taxi drivers whenever they looked at him. In fact, one while we were waiting for red light was so frightened, he went right through the red light. And in one way or another, you know, there is that incredible.. What bothers me about New York is that not only do I not know what language is being spoken in the subway, I don't know which language it is you see and that bothers me. I should like to think that, you know, it's something I might possibly get some more knowledge of, but it's out there. Robert Lipsyte: Do you think that, do you feel it's slipping out of your grasp? Alfred Kazin: definitely. I mean, I mean, I put it very simply. It's the kind of thing which only very tough, very cynical people like Tom Wolfe can really do justice to it. And it's no accident, that Wolfe's book sold tremendously you see. I mean, the fact is that New York does not, I mean who wrote about New York with love. It was O'Henry. It was even F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. It was Nathaniel West. It was um well, Saul Bellow. It was Bernard Malamud. It was Richard Wright, even, it was most of all it was Ralph Ellison. But these people you see were writing about New York as a human thing, where people like Wolfe write about it as a sociological problem. And then of course, they talk about themselves as Balzac, you see, and they want everybody to be like themselves. Well, that's just nonsense. Alfred Kazin: What I miss about New York, frankly, more than anything else, is the lack of fraternity between the different tribes or different countries, different languages, that's something I'm not used to. In the old days, where I grew up, it was a matter of course, you know, the Italians and the Greeks, and the Russians, outside my Jewish neighborhood, we were all very much aware of each other, because we had all come over at the same time, so to speak, or rather, our parents or grandparents had, and we all recognized ourselves as children of the poor. And there was no, nothing demeaning about that at all on the contrary. Robert Lipsyte: let me let me read another line of yours that that really struck me. "The city arouses us with energy, by which it exhausts us". "here's almost something sexual in that, and also a sense of completion and defeat. Ultimately, the city uses us often." Alfred Kazin: It's perfectly true. INew York is, of course, after Paris, the sexiest city in the world, sex is always in the air. But in Paris, it means a love affair. Here, it means that one night stands as far as I'm concerned. It's something brutal and hurried about the whole thing here. But the energy is fantastic. During the war in England, I used to be told by Englishman who lived in New York, that they needed less sleep than anywhere else. And I said, and you get less sleep, they don't you? And they said we certainly do. New York is a capital of insomnia. But one way or another, that energy flows through the streets, you realize it, every time I come back, I realize I'm galvanized everybody has as luckily people walk, for example, down 42nd Street, pushing others out of the way. Even though the schedule like everybody's schedule is a very important thing. We all know that. There's a kind of desperation and getting to the thing as such, you know, this morning, the subway example, I watched a woman being pushed out by another woman by another woman, who said, very simply get out of my way. And that might say, could be the slogan for a great deal of New York living these days. Get out of my way out of my way. Robert Lipsyte 24:43 Would you read something for me? It's on page 219. Something else? Alfred Kazin: Well, thank you for knowing my books. Oh, well, you know, the page number. In New York retain so much of the world's tragedies is endless displacements and tragedies, yet no one walking in streets with attention. You can miss some very deep grooves of the human experience as the century of lay gaze on Shin rumbles to within. So it's exciting to be a writer here, as it is fruitful for an artist photographer to keep his eyes open. The subject never lets you off. There is so much humanity packed up in the streets so much friction, so much idiocy. So much learning artistry, appetite for living. So much crime with so much love making so much eating and drinking on the street. That is not altogether in human to shut our ears to the screams we hear in the night. Too much we say it as much of the time or too much" Robert Lipsyte: Thank you so very much. That's the Eleventh hour. I'm Robert Lipsyte. |
00:26:59 1509.27 |
B&W still photos over Hazn's reading excerpt of his book. African American children playing in street, sculptures, hasidics leaning on car, man holding New York Post.
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00:27:43 1552.89 |
Show ends. Credits over New York City skyline.
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00:28:26 1595.77 |
Charitable funding announced.
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00:28:31 1600.77 |
Reel ends.
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