By Steve Rhodes
November 3 – 4.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Um, if you look hard enough, you’ll realize it’s a “Spotlight on Education” issue. Is the school year starting?
A paragraph from You Won’t Remember Me: The Schoolboys of Barbiana Speak to Today thus graces the cover. It’s not a bad paragraph, I’m just not sure – once again – why this is the cover of the Chicago Tribune book review.
The book featured on the cover doesn’t even get its own review; it shares a review with Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher. I think we can see what the editor was thinking here, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Which it isn’t.
Other Reviews & News of Note: What can I say, there’s only three other reviews in the whole damn issue, and one of them is of the new Charles Schultz biography. Been there! One of the other two combines three books in one review. Budget cuts at the book review?
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Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “Anatomy of a Movie Maker,” a review of Foster Hirsch’s Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King. (Maddeningly not online.) Hirsch will introduce films and take questions at the Otto Preminger film series at the Music Box starting on Saturday.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Sun-Times TV critic Doug Elfman takes on Howard Kurtz’s Reality Show: Inside The Last Great Television News War (Verdict: Who cares?). Books Editor Teresa Budasi takes on Valerie Plame’s Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House (Verdict: Not as good as you’d think).
Inside Stories Promoted on the Cover: The Chicago Lit column about Stay Tuned: Conversations With Dad From the Other Side, Jennifer Weigel’s book about her relationship with her late Chicago sportscaster father Tim. And Sun-Times art critic Kevin Nance’s look at “three new photo books highlighting Chicago’s stories history, including Chicago’s Nelson Algren.
See the difference? If you wake up confused about where you’re living, the Sun-Times book review reminds you. The Tribune book review makes you not only forget where you are living, but why you ever read books in the first place.
Also Notable: Sun-Times reporter Mary Wisniewski interviews Chicago actor David Blixt, author of The Master of Verona, while the paper’s former classical music critic Wynne Delacoma reviews Mozart’s Sister (neither of which is online at this writing early Monday morning either).
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Publication: Chicago Reader
Cover: “Stranger Than Fiction,” the weekly’s annual fall books special. As indicated by the headline, the focus is on non-fiction. And this is why I prefer non-fiction – because when I’m reading it I’m usually saying, “This actually happened?!” I saw an interview of Vincent Bugliosi Sunday on C-Span’s Book TV in which he said he can’t even get through the first paragraph of a fiction work; something that didn’t happen doesn’t interest him.
I wouldn’t go quite so far, but I’m not that far away.
Notable: Kerry Reid reviews Paula Kamen’s book about her late friend, Iris Chang, the story of a talented and driven woman with a secret, apparently tormented inner life who rejects a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, yet ends up dead at 36 in an apparent suicide. (The Sun-Times’s review was previously noted in this column.)
“The most startling thing Kamen uncovered about Chang, however,” Reid writes, “didn’t emerge until after Finding Iris Chang was set in galleys. She’d already spoken with Chang’s widower, Brett Douglas, and knew about the fertility treatments the couple had undergone in order to have their son, Christopher, who was born in 2002. (Another of Chang’s unfinished projects was a book on defeating the biological clock). Like others, Kamen had wondered if postpartum depression might have played a role in her mental decline. But Douglas finally told Kamen that Christopher had been born with the help of a surrogate mother.”
Chang’s tragic life story, it seems, is a complicated one, but an important window into mental illness and a reminder of how difficult it is to know what lurks under the surface in the minds of friends and acquaintances. Chang did have something to accomplish and teach us in the end, but something far sadder than perhaps she intended.
Also: Wow, there’s some dude in Bridgeport who may be the world’s foremost authority on U.S. soccer, and also its harshest critic – so much so that the U.S. Soccer Federation has banned him from covering its games.
And: I can’t judge the merits of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and The Erosion of Integrity because I haven’t read it, but I know enough about Moore’s argument to say with confidence that Reader reviewer Harold Henderson just doesn’t get it.
Henderson argues that “punk” doesn’t “get” capitalism. I think punk gets it just fine – it’s everybody else who doesn’t even stop to think about capitalism’s grinding gears who don’t get it. Truer yet, capitalism doesn’t get punk. That’s why it has to clean it up in order to sell it, thereby making it a representative of everything it stands against. And I use “punk” here broadly, as a stand-in to any kind of indie or counter-culture that values honesty over the exploitive deceptions capitalism foists on us in order to satisfy various venal greeds and obsessions.
When Henderson argues that punk confuses “marginality with merit,” and unwisely venerates “purity,” I feel like I’m hearing the false frame of arguments about gentrification or bankrupt rationalizations for bands like Wilco to sell their songs to car companies. It just ain’t so.
Ani DiFranco used to say that major labels didn’t have anything to offer that she wanted. Methinks Henderson might not understand that view. This whole argument reminds of the storyline in Reality Bites when Ben Stiller recuts Winona Ryder’s video to make it more palatable for public consumption in order to make slacker angst marketable while marginalizing it as a cute phase. In other words, it is capitalism – or more specifically, corporate values – that is confused about merit.
In a world not ruled by narrow corporate interests that co-opt everything in sight to serve a soulless agenda, the Ramones would have been on the radio in real-time instead of marketed as punk nostalgia 30 years later (and still not on the radio), and Nike would at least eliminate sweatshop labor and environmental abuses before buying Converse so it could add Chuck Taylors to its arsenal and ruin wearing them for everyone who used to have a heartfelt reason to do so. Call it cultural gentrification, in which the inherent social criticism of a fashion or piece of art is stripped away as it is commodified for the masses who want to “feel” cool without actually being cool, who prize “attitude” over authenticity, because “attitude” is merely feigned and therefore safe and non-threatening, and who in reality scorn those who actually are authentic.
I look forward to reading Moore’s book, and I don’t doubt that possibility that I will find things in it to disagree with, but as a general matter, I’m already a believer and fellow warrior in my own way against the co-opting, branding and marketing of everything under the sun that renders all threats to the dominant corporate worldview and its values futile. That way lies madness, and complete cultural and economic sedation.
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Publication: New York Times
Cover: “Tour de France.”
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Three years after the American invasion of Iraq, after endless searches had found no sign of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush still believed that Saddam Hussein had them,” Antony Lewis writes in “The Imperial Presidency,” an essay on Dead Certain and The Terror Presidency.
What do we do with a president like this?
In 2004, we re-elected him.
In 2007, we still haven’t impeached him.
But has any president so controverted the Constitution and upended the principles and values of our country as much as this one? A president who didn’t even win his first term and won his second on a fear-and-smear campaign?
We don’t even have to wait for historians to understand what has happened; the books have come fast and furious and there is no factual counterargument to the despicable truths contained in them. Bin Laden has won; terrorism is a tactic to instill the kind of fear that can cause a nation to tear itself apart. Mission accomplished.
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In fact, Bush repeatedly stated that Hussein had WMDs at least until 2006. And that’s really the worst of it. But shouldn’t a president of such willful misjudgment be removed, perhaps due to mental defect?
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And it just gets so much worse from there, but anyone with half a brain already knows the bill of particulars. But if anyone doubts anymore that “it” – martial law, fascism, suspension of constitutional rights – can happen here, we’re living through a close approximation of being on the glide path. One more terrorist attack and we might be there. (Remember when Rudy Giuliani suggested he remain mayor beyond his term?)
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America, people. Let’s not forget what it’s supposed to stand for.
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CHARTS
1. Stephen Colbert
2. Eric Clapton
3. Clarence Thomas
4. Alan Greenspan
5. O.J. Simpson
6. Ann Coulter
Posted on November 5, 2007