TRIVIA! SEE IF YOU RECOGNIZE FAMOUS PASSAGES FROM COLUMBIA AUTHORS.
September 28, 2014
Columbia Magazine Trivia
Who Wrote What?
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A Paul Auster ’69CC ’70GSAS, City of Glass B Ric Burns ’78CC ’83GSAS and James Sanders ’76CC ’82APP, New York: An Illustrated History C Allen Ginsberg ’48CC,Howl D Langston Hughes ’21–’22SEAS, Night Funeral in Harlem E Zora Neale Hurston ’28BC ’34–’35GSAS, Dust on the Tracks F Tama Janowitz ’77BC ’86SOA, Slaves of New York G A.J. Liebling ’25JRN,Apology for Breathing H Phillip Lopate ’64CC, Introduction to Writing New York: A Literary Anthology I George Templeton Strong 1838CC, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: 1835–1875 J Anna Quindlen ’74BC,Living Out Loud |
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which exists and is everywhere about us! . . .
2 My children seem to like some of the same things about the city streets that I do: the people constantly eddying around them, the shifting play of color and movement, the 78-rpm metabolism in a 33 1/3 world.
3 October 27th, 1850. Sunday. How this city marches northward! The progress of 1835 and 1836 was nothing to the luxuriant rank growth of this year. Streets are springing up, whole strata of sandstone have transferred themselves from their ancient resting-places to look down on bustling thoroughfares for long years to come.
4 New York’s essence, literary or otherwise, grows out of the street experience, the basis for an aesthetic of a ragged, miraculous simultaneity.
5 I thought I’d just move to New York and sell my jewelry—I worked in rubber, shellacking sea horses, plastic James Bond–doll earrings—but it turned out a lot of other girls had already beaten me to it.
6 Eleanor Beer, who lived on the next chair to me in Economics, . . . was a New York girl with a sumptuous home down in West 71st Street, near the Hudson. She invited me down often, and her mother set out to brush me up on good manners. I learned a lot of things from them. They were well traveled and cosmopolitan. I found out about forks, who entered a room first, sat down first, and who offered to shake hands.
7 New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.
8 With astounding speed the outlines of a new metropolis—an Apollonian dream city—were beginning to emerge. Inspired in part by the gleaming White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which opened in Chicago in 1893—architectural geniuses like the partners Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White were beginning to call forth from within the confines of their own blackened metropolis a new kind of city—a more unified, orderly, and majestic city, whose architectural and public institutions befitted the imperial capital New York was becoming.
In 1893, Columbia University decided to abandon its cramped midtown quarters for a magnificent neoclassical campus on Morningside Heights, high above the Hudson River, that was soon being called the Acropolis of America.
9 Where did they get
Them two fine cars?
Insurance man, he did not pay—
His insurance lapsed the other day—
Yet they got a satin box
for his head to lay.
10 I like to think of all the city micro-cosms so nicely synchronized though unaware of one another: the worlds of the weight-lifters, yodelers, tugboat captains and sideshow barkers, of the book-dutchers, sparring partners, song pluggers, sporting girls and religious painters, of the dealers in rhesus monkeys and the bishops of churches that they establish themselves under the religious corporations law.