September 28, 2014

Columbia Magazine Trivia




Who Wrote What?
Ten New York passages by Columbia alumni. Can you match the quotations and their sources?

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

George Templeton Strong 1838CC, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: 1835–1875

Anna Quindlen ’74BC,Living Out Loud


1 They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! Lifting the city to Heaven
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.

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.

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.


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.