Jolly Good Fellows
columbians score at the public library
PrintAn initial foray into the main branch of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street inspires a sense of awe not unlike that which Columbia inspires in prospective freshman. Within the library’s imposing depths, however, lies an office that contrasts aesthetically with its surroundings—a cozy room of limited access with unassuming wooden floors and yellow lighting.
This is the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which opened in 1999. Since then, it’s been the source of a notable fellowship awarded annually for excellence in a specific field of work, ranging from academic disciplines to the visual arts. 15 fellows are given a sum of money, an office, and unhindered access to the NYPL’s much-sought-after reserves. The Fellowship’s objective is to support research and writing—fellows are encouraged to develop a literary work over the course of the year, in an environment that fosters a high degree of creativity and internal communication. This year, three of these fellows are Columbia professors: Michael Golston, Karen Russell and Rivka Galchen.
When I visit the NYPL to speak with Golston and Russell, Jean Strouse, who has directed the Center for the past seven years, sits me down in her office. As she tells me about its history and mission, her enthusiasm for the Center is infectious. The Cullman Center was the brainchild of cultural historian Robert Darnton, who felt that New York needed a place to encourage scholars in a multidisciplinary milieu—a foundation that would parallel the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Dorothy and Lewis Cullman, patrons of the NYPL, agreed to help establish the center, but maintained that the fellowship should be extended beyond the realm of academia. They particularly insisted upon providing spots for creative writers.
In the past few years, thanks to its incredibly open-ended qualifications, recipients of the Cullman fellowship have included poets, playwrights, novelists, and even cartoonists. Strouse attributes the lack of academic crossfire at the Center to this diverse set-up: “This collaborative environment … is really a place where people live together for a year. They [the fellows] are having fun!” she says. In her opinion, interaction with novelists is a huge boon to academics, whose viewpoints are altered by this unique channel of communication. Consequently, the Center has cultivated a tradition of interdisciplinary writing that manifests itself in both Golston’s and Russell’s works.
Michael Golston—a professor of English and subject of a Facebook group called “Prof. Golston is the Man Club”—ushers me into his office, which is decorated with large sketches of human organs. These, juxtaposed against the postmodern texts on his shelves, create an initial sense of dissonance, but the organs are very much representative of the interdisciplinary nature of Golston’s past and future works.
Golston explains that there are structural similarities between elements of physiology like “brainscapes” and the paintings of surrealist artists like Yves Tanguy. He finds that, in turn, postmodern poetry is heavily influenced by surrealist art. Golston is interested in exploring the relationship between surrealism and literary allegory and translating this into a manuscript.
How, then, will organs fit into his completed work? “That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now,” he replies, laughing. Aside from recognized figures like John Ashbery, Golston’s research will address a number of obscure poets, “some that literally no one has worked on”—Craig Dworkin, Mary Rising Higgins, and Lyn Hejinian in particular. Access to the art criticism archives in the Library will be crucial to his work. Golston’s book, still in its embryonic stages, will not be his first venture into an interdisciplinary approach to poetry—he published “Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science” in 2008, and is now moving away from musicology and technology to re-contextualize poetry and art.
Karen Russell has a very different goal in mind. An undergraduate creative writing professor and graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, Russell has already been named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and is the von der Heyden Fellow at the Cullman Center. While cheerfully offering me coffee and snacks, she explains that the novel she is working on will grow out of a short story about Florida she wrote previously.
Russell was raised in Miami, and it shows—she is infatuated with the mythic elements of Florida, which she sees as a place where the natural is slowly being sidelined in favor of the artificial and materialist. She wants to write a novel that draws upon the sort of supernatural reality created by the paradoxes evident in the Floridian landscape: “the true weirdness of the alien beauty of the Everglades and these ‘ticky-tacky’ outposts.”
While rummaging around for a book of Dustbowl-era images, Russell tells me about the research she hopes to conduct into the lives of the 1930s homesteaders and their relationship to their surroundings. She wants to explore different perspectives in a limited setting, like a town, to try to understand: “What would keep a person in a place like this?” Her work will greatly benefit from the NYPL’s non-circulating diaries, firsthand accounts that almost seem specially tailored to her project.
The Cullman Center seems to be a kind of anomaly: a setting where academia is personalized, thanks to the inter-scholar exchanges it facilitates through events like lectures and lunchtime discussions. It really is, as Russell jests, “like living the life of a 7th grade bookworm.” But although the Fellows acknowledge the rarity of the vast resources offered by the NYPL, they seem far more enthused about the repositories of human knowledge in the offices immediately around them.
23 October 2009
vol. 7, issue 6
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