This is a great weekend to visit the University at Albany. On Friday, the University honors alum and gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk.
On Friday evening, UAlbany and the Writers Institute welcomes Krugman, a New York Times columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. Krugman has been called “the most important political columnist in America” (Washington Monthly), and “the most celebrated economist of his generation” (The Economist). Recent bestsellers include The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008), The Conscience of a Liberal (2007), and The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (2003). Krugman’s lecture, part of the Visiting Writers Series, will be at 8 p.m. in Page Hall on the University’s downtown campus.
Saturday is the second annual Community Day, and includes a special presentation by Writers Institute Founder Bill Kennedy and Director Don Faulkner, who will provide video highlights of a quarter century of prize-winning authors, poets and filmmakers who have visited UAlbany. That’s at 2 p.m. in Fine Arts 126.
At 3:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall of the uptown campus you can catch a film screening of Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award-winning film MILK.
At 8 p.m., the University hosts Soldier and statesman General Colin Powell, USA (Ret.), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War and U.S. Secretary of State from 2001-2005. Powell gives the inaugural address of the University’s World Within Reach Speaker Series. He will speak on "Diplomacy: Persuasion, Trust & Values,” at UAlbany’s SEFCU Arena.
And don’t forget about the Writers Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration on November 16th at Page Hall. Joining us will be special guests Governor Mario Cuomo and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin.
In what Writers Institute Director Donald Faulkner has called "the most difficult series I've organized and one that I'm most proud to present", the New York State Writers Institute offers its 25th anniversary season. As ever, most events are free and open to the public.
In an important update from the recently published series brochure, the Oct 26 co-sponsored event with the Archives Partnership Trust will feature Henry Louis Gates, Jr. James McPherson, previously announced, will not be able to attend.
The website will provide details, but consider this partial list of writers for the fall series:
Douglas Blackmon, current nonfiction Pulitzer awardee in nonfiction for his "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" on Sept 24.
Joseph O'Neill, novelist and author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning "Netherland" on Sept 29.
Rita Moreno, winner of an Oscar, a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy. She will speak on her life in theatre on Oct 7.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and weekly columnist for the New York Times, on Oct 9.
A celebration of Writers Institute friend Frank McCourt in a dramatic presentation of "Teacher Man" on Oct 13.
Novelists Lorrie Moore and Richard Russo in their first joint reading on Oct 15.
Novelists Russel Banks and Don DeLillo talking about their mentor Nelson Algren on Nov 6.
And the actual celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Writers Institute on Nov 16 with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and former governor Mario Cuomo who signed the legislation creating the Writers Institute 25 years ago.
Many other events and festivities will be listed on our website, and additions will follow.
William Kennedy remembers his friend, Frank McCourt
[Note: This material is ok to quote in other materials and sites, but only with a link and reference to the New York State Writers Institute website: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst]
A recollection of Frank McCourt
By WILLIAM KENNEDY
Frank McCourt may be dead, but I don’t think so.
He grew up and old with death, a frequent visitor to his family and to his neighborhood in Limerick; he wrote about it in unforgettable fashion in his book ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ and he had been looking at it eye-to-eye for the past five years.
We were friends for twenty-five years and he came to Albany too many times to count, three times to the New York State Writers Institute, the last time in 2006 when he drew crowds close to 2,000, with 500 or more turned away.We had gone to Ireland and Saratoga and Cuba together and we would see him in New York when it wasn’t raining.
In July 2005 I was en route to Manhattan and got this note from him saying it was uncertain whether we’d get together, for he was in physical trouble: “The divil came in the form of melanoma on the leg.I had two dramatic incisions and the PET scan now says I’m fifty-fifty in the clear.”
Fifty-fifty, not great odds.My wife, Dana, and I saw him and his wife, Ellen, a few months ago after their return from Tahiti where he had suffered the seizure that sent him into horrible pain; and he had to endure it in Tahiti for three days as a hostage to Air France, which couldn’t find him a seat on any US-bound planes.Back in New York his doctors found the spinal fracture that was torturing him and the brain tumors that were going to kill him.He was thin and uncomfortable when we talked, but in usual form, speculating on whether 2009 was really the optimum financial year to die, as far as his heirs were concerned.
I met him first on January 4, 1984, when he and his brother Malachy and a dozen other writers, literary critics, talkers, and drinkers came to Albany for lunch.This was a Friday, and the formal monthly meeting of the First Friday Club, an event which then Governor Mario Cuomo took note of by issuing a Proclamation declaring the first Friday of January hereafter to be ‘First Friday Day’.By odd coincidence one of Mario’s speechwriters, Peter Quinn, soon to become a novelist, was a First Friday Club member.
The club had been formed to promote mid-day drinking while talking, and perhaps eating, by members, and on this day in 1984 I heard Frank McCourt talk for the first time and I was convulsed.A luncheon in Albany carried on from noon until 4 p.m., when Frank called a taxi to take him to the train to New York where he had a heavy date.But, when the taxi came, Frank was telling a story and someone sent the taxi away and Frank was forced to keep talking until six-thirty when the next train left.I never laughed so hard for so long and Malachy and the other First Fridayites were also responsible for much of it.I told a few stories and passed muster and became a club member.
I learned that the club had been founded on the basis of a novena in the Catholic religion: that if you receive communion on nine consecutive first Fridays you will die in a state of grace and go directly to Heaven.This was slightly modified by the club to assure members that whoever came to lunch nine Fridays in a row would be guaranteed a bartender at his deathbed.
On March 4, 1996 Frank sent me a letter:
“Do you realize it’s 12 years since the First Friday Club pilgrimated to your side at an Italian restaurant in Albany?That you’ve published a number of books since then while the rest of us, Peter Quinn excepted, sat on our arses and talked about writing books?
“I, meself, couldn’t stand it any longer, so I wrote a book and I’m sending you a copy for perusal and, perhaps, a blurb note.That’s if you like the book, of course; if you don’t like it we have a special place for the negative notes and it’s usually not on the book jacket.
“I haven’t seen you in ages … Will we see you ever again at a F.F. gathering?Your membership is not in danger.First Fridayites are like Mafiosi – once you’re in the only way out is the grave.”
So I gave a blurb to the book, which he called ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and I said he was a wizard and that his writing about his boyhood and poverty and family pain in Limerick was as real as a stab in the heart, and I said its language, its narrative grace were that of a fine novel, which is the highest praise I can offer to a prose work.Frank had taught school all his adult life after he came back to this country (he was born here in 1930), and he only began writing with fervor after he retired in 1987.In time the book took shape and it was snatched up in 1996 and Frank’s life changed.
“Nothing happened to me till I was 66,” he said.
But then it happened with skyrockets.‘Angela’s Ashes’ won rave reviews from the critics, was a New York Times number one best-seller for a year and on the list for two years; it sold four million in hardcover, millions and millions more in England, Ireland, Germany and everywhere else too.It won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, it became a movie, and Frank became one of the most famous people on earth.We were in Ireland in 1999, a rural town north of Galway, walking along and someone said, ‘Frank McCourt?’ and Frank said yes, and the man said I loved your book and someone else stopped and said it’s Frank McCourt, and then you couldn’t walk on the sidewalk with all the Frank groupies.Frank turned up in all the gossip columns, the talk shows, the celeb circuit.He dined with royalty and movie stars, was in demand as a speaker on cruises and even became writer-in-residence at a posh London hotel, a plum assignment the likes of which I’d never heard of before.When he had dinner with Bill Clinton people would ask, “Who’s that guy sitting with Frank?”
His talent was singular – in the spoken word as well as his writing, a master raconteur.Every word he uttered could be comic, if he wanted it that way, and he usually did.‘Angela’s Ashes’ reads like a novel (as do his two subsequent books, ‘’Tis’ and ‘Teacher Man’) but he called it a memoir and so it became; and its form and style loomed with such excellence and success that the memoir has become the form of choice for a legion of authors ever since.Frank had been trying for years to turn his old diaries into a novel but couldn’t make it work.Then he found a voice that sounded like the child he remembered being and he let the boy talk, and the talk captivated the world.
Listen to Frank the boy watching Protestant girls going to church.“I feel sorry for them, especially the girls, who are so lovely, they have such beautiful white teeth.I feel sorry for the beautiful Protestant girls, they’re doomed.That’s what the priests tell us.Outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.Outside the Catholic Church there is nothing but doom.And I want to save them.Protestant girl, come with me to the TrueChurch.You’ll be saved and you won’t have the doom.After mass on Sunday I go with my friend Billy Campbell to watch them play croquet on the lovely lawn beside their church on Barrington Street.Croquet is a Protestant game.They hit the ball with the mallet, pock and pock again, and laugh.I wonder how they can laugh or don’t they even know they’re doomed?I feel sorry for them and I say, Billy, what’s the use of playing croquet when you’re doomed?
“He says, Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed?”
Frank was very good on doom.But I don’t think it’s in the cards for his big book.That silver-tongued kid from Limerick is still in very good voice, and I believe he’ll be talking to us for years down the road.Doom may lurk out there for the Protestants, but not for Frank McCourt.
Margo Jefferson, talking about her book “On Michael Jackson” (Pantheon, 2006) 2/2/2006 (transcription from an archive interview at the New York State Writers Institute)
My take on Michael Jackson—well the Michael Jacksons, there are a number of them—is that it interests me as a writer, as a critic, to write about people, experiences, artists, art, and cultural phenomena that arouse strong feelings in me and that often arouse competing [feelings]. It’s a little bit like what a novelist means when she or he will say, “The characters took over. I didn’t quite know what they were going to be doing.” That can happen when you are encountering a singer, a dancer, a novel, a movie, any kind of thing. The conversation between you and it takes over, and you don’t know how that collaboration will end up. Well, who is better for this than Michael Jackson?
I first wrote about him in 1984, partly because (like so many people here, I’m sure) I had been a big fan. I was 20 or 21 in 1969 when he and his brothers first had an album. They were adorable. He then turned out to be a major performing talent, one of popular cultures great entertainers. He will be remembered as an original dancer, a crack singer, and just one of these performers who has this incandescent self-containment.
When I approached him in the 80s, we were already—“we” meaning observers, fans, dissenters—engaged in questions like: “Who is he? What is going on?” You know, his skin was lightening, it was said he had a skin disease in which pigment changes, half the people in the world didn’t believe him, he was starting to feature some make-up, was feminized and yet engaged in this elaborate masculine crotch-clutching drama in his videos. So the first piece that I wrote was actually an attempt to challenge the tendency on all of our parts, including mine, to be very sociological. We wanted to say, “This is all about racial self-hatred. He’s probably gay, and he doesn’t want to admit it.” I just decided that I could not pretend that this was not unsettling. The fact is: this is a sophisticated artist who lives by borrowing, by appropriating, all sorts of styles. What’s that great line from “I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”… “How do you live? I steal.” And that’s what performing artists do all the time; Michael is a master at it.
And secondly, we’re living in the era of (and Michael was a little ahead of them): Madonna, who is being paid everyday for these capsulated self-transformations, and the artist Cindy Sherman, whose work I’m sure a lot of you know. She would photograph herself in all sorts of scenarios, insert herself in classical paintings. Let’s think about transformation itself: this remaking the self as art object. This is not completely satisfying to me. Madonna, whether you cared about her or not, always seemed completely in control of what she was saying and what she was doing. With Michael, there was this curtain, often, between what he said and what he did. You know: “Well, honestly, I just had two operations on my nose,” and you think, “this is not possible.” So there was still this child [in him] who would say, “No, this is just the way things are,” and there would be this adult who was rather relentlessly, and with a curious kind of stubborn valor, transforming himself before our eyes into something—something that he had to know many people were very rattled by—and he was going to do it anyway. So there was a mystery that intrigued me.
And finally, American mass culture since the 20s has been the most powerful in the world. That is terrifying and interesting. Michael Jackson for about 20 years was probably the most powerful entertainer in pop music. And pop music, along with movies, is the mass culture forum that is at the center of world culture. So this was formidable.
When I started talking about this with an editor, about five years ago, one crucial impulse was, “You know, he looks like he’s about to self-destruct in some way or another. What about a short book that gives him his dues as an artist, [a book] that reminds people of all the innovations, of what it still there on film, and puts him in context with many aspects of our culture? Let’s do that before he self-destructs.” Then a friend of mine said that as usual, Michael was ahead of us.
And then when I had gone on to do other things, the second round of sexual molestation charges came, and the editor called me and said, “Look I still want the book. We have to, obviously, take the trial and all of that into account.” That was now part of this cultural landscape, this fantasia, that includes fantasies and dramas of racial and gender transformation, sexualization of children—and by that I mean on several levels. Michael, sexualized from the age of five by American and by world culture, the sexualization of child stars: Michael is from that generation of Brooke Shields, Tatum O’Neil, Michael Jackson, little Jodie Foster, and the little perky children on TV, the Brady Bunch. There was a cultural obsession. And then there is our horror at the emergence of facts about the sexual abuse of children, and again, in that classic American popular cultural way, the way we turn it into a form of entertainment. I’m thinking particularly of a show I watch a lot, “Law and Order: Sexual Victims Unit.”
All of that was very interesting to me, and the fact that he contained so much of entertainment history in his body; [his] videos, which really are short films, make their postmodern way through so many landscapes: horror films, old fashioned romances, Peter Pan, Edgar Allen Poe, all of that. You can find so many styles in his work. To me, he seems the end-product of one hundred years of our wildly complicated, ever-moving popular culture, made more and more complicated by the fact that it is now a 24-hour, 7 day a week, multi-media pastime obsession information industry. Oh, and of course our obsession with making ourselves over, from body dysmorphia, plastic surgery: he’s always there. We’re here with our obsession, and he’s already there or he’s about to be.
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Annette Gordon-Reed, who visited the New York State Writers Institute on March 4, 2009, has received the Pulitzer Prize in history for her newest book, The Hemingses of Monticello. In awarding the prize, the panel of judges called the book "a painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson." Visit our video archive for clips of Gordon-Reed's presentations in Albany.
Other Writers Institute visitors named as finalists for Pulitzer Prizes this year include poet Frank Bidart , who read last April from his prize-nominated volume, Watching the Spring Festival (2008), poet Ruth Stone, novelist Louise Erdrich, and UAlbany Music Professor Don Byron, who performed on saxophone and clarinet as an opener for our evening event with filmmaker Spike Lee. Recent visitor Dava Sobel served as a judge for the prize in General Nonfiction.
