The Age of Innocence -- BBC Radio Drama

BBC Radio 7 is presenting The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton in a radio drama format. BBC Radio usually produces excellent radio plays You can listen by following this link. The Age of Innocence is the novel Jennifer presented. Wharton will be the next novelist we're reading in class. The novel: Ethan Frome.

The Dakota: 1 W 72nd St, New York City

Julianna mentioned in her presentation today that part of Jack Finney's Time and Again is set at the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. The Dakota is arguably the most famous apartment building in the country. Many famous performers, including John Lennon, lived there. Lennon was shot dead outside the building by a crazed fan in 1980. The Dakota is also one of the most expensive. According to the real estate website, these are average costs of the condos there:

4 Bedrooms from $18,500,000
3 Bedrooms from $14,500,000
1 Bedroom from $5,900,000

(For sake of comparison, you could buy 10-room mansion with all amenities on a 10-acre lot for under $5.9 million in Cincinnati.)

Here are some excerpts from an article describing the Dakota:

The city's most legendary apartment building, the Dakota is a massive fortress-like structure with a large center courtyard and very large apartments with very high ceilings.

With an impressive, arched entrance with sentry box flanked by large planters, the buff-colored building is surrounded by a very attractive and dramatic low cast-iron fence in front of a "dry moat." The four corners of the courtyard, which has a fountain, lead to separate lobbies and passenger elevators. (Service elevators run up the middle of each side of the building.)

The building exudes solidity as well it should since its bottom walls are 28 inches thick, but its profusion of architectural elements and pale yellow brickwork that contrasts with dark brown masonry at the corners produce a lively and graceful appearance of considerable visual interest because of the mix of gables, arches, balconies, oriel windows, dormers, finials and other ornamentation including a flagpole at the top of its park facade.


When it was built in 1884, it towered over the Upper West Side and was an immediate success with all its apartments rented on opening day. Its developer, Edward Severin Clark, an heir to a sewing machine fortune, died two years before it opened. The building's name allegedly reflected the fact that the building was so far removed from the city's established luxury residential areas that it might as well be in the Dakota territory. Its 72nd Street façade, indeed, has an image of a Native American carved on its façade.

Designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who would later design the Plaza Hotel, the building had tennis courts and a croquet field on the adjoining 175-foot-long lot on West 72nd Street that was later developed after World War II as a separate apartment building.

Many of residents of its cooperative apartments have been celebrities including John Lennon, the Beatle who was shot outside the building in 1980, Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor, Lauren Bacall, the actress, Judy Garland, the singer, William Inge, the playwright, Jo Mielziner, the stage designer, Rex Reed, the columnist.

The 93-unit building's Victorian and Gothic architectural details and ambiance were featured in the popular spooky movie, "Rosemary's Baby," but it is famed more now for its spectacular apartments.

The Dakota is also ranked as New York City’s #7 Most Haunted Place. Many eerie stories are linked with 1 West 72nd Street. In the 60's, the construction workers were said to have seen a ghost of a young boy dressed in a way outdated outfit. And, needless to say, John Lennon was murdered while exiting the front door—some believe that his ghost also visits it from time to time.

Word of the Day: Dun

I noticed that half the class not only missed #37 on the vocabulary test, but those who missed it insisted that the answer was not in the list of choices from which to choose. The word is "dun" and is used in "Bartleby the Scrivener" in the following sentence, when the narrator is commenting upon the mysterious gents who pay visits to Nippers:

I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.

Many of you wrote in the little space for the answer: "dullish brown." Now, I ask you: Does "dullish brown" fit in for "dun" in the above sentence? Did Nippers have mysterious dull-brown men stalking him? Uh, no.

So what is "dun"?

Dun: (v) to importune a debtor for payment; to make repeated and insistent demands, especially concerning an overdue payment; (n) one who duns.

So, in the above statement about Nippers, the reader should understand that the man who visited the office was a creditor coming to collect a payment for a debt.

Yes, dun does has another meaning. It is a kind of horse of a dullish brown color. But again, Nippers was visited by a creditor, not a horse.

Term Paper: Important Dates

Here are some important dates regarding the 3-Book Term Paper project. I advise that you refresh your memory as to the scope and focus of this project. It is easy to lose sight of the primary goals when completing a project over multiple quarters. Please refer to the handout "Three-Books Project Info," which is available here in PDF format. And now the dates:

Third Quarter
Monday, Feb. 15: 2nd Book Data Sheet due
Monday, March 8: 3rd Book Data Sheet due
Thursday, March 11: Guiding Question & Working Thesis Statement due

Fourth Quarter
Monday, March 29: Thesis Statement + Note Cards due
Thursday, April 15: Final Outline due
Thursday, April 22: Final Research Paper due in MLA format

N.B. This is a tentative schedule and subject to change, but none of the due dates will be changed to earlier dates than appear here. In March you will be given a full research packet, which will include all specifications for research, note-taking, and writing. Classes from April 12-21 will be dedicated to completing the outline and final research paper.

Shape Poetry, Concrete Poetry

When we finish with our unit on Herman Melville, we will be moving on to poetry for a while as you continue to read your three books for the term paper assignment. Since Penelope asked today about poems that take the shape of their subject, I thought I'd provide a few examples. As far as I can tell, there's no other name for this style of gimmick poetry other than "shape poetry" or "concrete poetry." This is defined as a poem in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.

In the examples above, the male poem is intended to resemble a dumbbell, and the female poem is intended to resemble an hourglass. What can you come up with?

Word of the day: Puddinghead

Pudding head (puddenhead, pudd'nhead): a person who is not very bright; dolt, dullard, pillock, poor fish, stupe, berk, blockhead, bonehead, dunce, dunderhead, hammerhead, knucklehead, loggerhead, lunkhead, muttonhead, numskull, nitwit

Many historians believe that the term “pudding head” came from the American colonial belief that if children learning to walk fell frequently and hit their heads, they could scramble their brains, making them like the consistency of pudding, thereby becoming “pudding heads.” In Colonial Williamsburg’s Children’s glossary, it adds that toddlers were often and lovingly referred to as “little pudding heads."

Some children, in fact wore pudding caps to prevent them from becoming pudding heads!

pudding cap in Australia

A pudding cap is a stuffed roll placed on a toddler’s head and tied in the back. It was worn for the same reason children today wear helmets — to protect the brain from damage in a fall.

In several Flemish and Dutch paintings of the early 17th century toddlers of the 1620-30’s are depicted wearing their pudding caps. A drawing by Pieter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) shows a toddler wearing one that is a sausage shaped padded roll of fabric, tied at the back of the head. There is one narrow ribbon stretched across the top of the head (from side to side, not front to back) and continues as ties under the chin. There is a linen cap under the pudding cap.

There's even a movement in Australia to require all children in day care to wear a pudding cap. Don't believe it? Read here.

You may have noted the irony in Pudd'nhead Wilson: though our eponymous character is given the nickname of a dunce because of his initial "half-dog" comment (and his subsequent obsession with collecting fingerprints), he turns out to be among the smarter folk of his day, at least when it comes time to defending the innocent.

3-Book Term Presentation Order

The presentations will be given in chronological order, from oldest book to newest. You should be prepared to take good notes and ask intelligent questions, because you will be quizzed on the material presented. Here's how the order shapes up:

Larry
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain(1889)

Elizabeth
Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (1894)

Mike
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

Marcella
My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)

Jennifer
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton(1920)

Joseph
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo(1939)

Olivia
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison(1952)

Annmarie
The Outsider by Richard Wright(1953)

Naomi
A Separate Peace by John Knowles(1959)

Gabriela
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee(1960)

Ashley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller(1961)

Peter
Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck(1962)

Sean
The Chosen by Chaim Potok(1967)

Julianna
Time and Again by Jack Finney(1970)