Plus: Jim Dine With Bass Accompaniment

“Richard Bales will speak about his forthcoming book, Nelson Algren: The Forgotten Literature, in a Society of Midland Authors program on Tuesday at the Cliff Dwellers Club, 200 S. Michigan Ave., 22nd floor,” the society has announced.
“Bales will speak at 7 p.m. A social hour, with complimentary snacks and a cash bar, begins at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
“Bales will discuss poetry, book reviews, essays and short stories by Algren that were once published but then forgotten. Although Algren was best known for novels such as The Man With the Golden Arm – winner of first National Book Award for fiction – the Chicago writer was much more than a novelist. Throughout his life, he wrote poetry, and in his later years he made a living by writing short stories, essays and book reviews. Algren was also a member of the Society of Midland Authors and spoke at SMA events.
“Bales is also the author of The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, in which he used his legal and land-survey skills to solve the mystery of the cause of the Great Chicago Fire. He and his findings became the subject of a Discovery Channel Unsolved History episode.”

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Posted on March 3, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hello,
One Cedar Rapids man believes that he has been given God’s message for the world and has published his ideas for a new world order.
In his new book, Scott Chally also discloses a diagnosed mental disorder and asks readers to decide for themselves: Is this the Second Coming, or are Chally’s visions mere delusions, brought on by mental illness?

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Posted on February 26, 2016

Plus: Hitler, Hoodie & Staten Island

“The political mobilization of gays and lesbians in Chicago relied in part on a fragile alliance with the city’s black community,” Hunter Clauss writes for WTTW.
“That’s just one of many fascinating revelations captured in the book, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics by Timothy Stewart-Winter, a University of Chicago alumnus who currently teaches history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.
“Queer Clout follows the political rise of Chicago’s LGBT community, from fighting against police raids of the city’s gay bars to being courted by the city’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington.”

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Posted on February 25, 2016

As Described – Devastatingly – By Fellow Conservative Jurist Richard Posner

On the occasion of the late judge’s book about how to interpret law, “America’s most prominent conservative judge offer[ed] a blistering assessment of the Supreme Court’s most outspoken conservative justice.”

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Posted on February 16, 2016

Plus: Pop-Up Poetry & Chicago’s Black Women’s Library 

“The National Book Foundation on Wednesday announced that Lisa Lucas would become the third executive director in the history of the literary organization, which presents the annual National Book Awards and has made recent efforts to expand its reach and visibility,” the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Lucas, 36, was previously the publisher of Guernica, an arts magazine with an international and often political focus. Before that, she had worked at other nonprofit cultural institutions, including the Tribeca Film Festival and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.”
Lucas is a University of Chicago grad.
Now for a Lucas tweetscene/life lesson:

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Posted on February 12, 2016

By Chicago Public Library

Return your overdue books to Chicago Public Library before February 18 – or risk a visit from a library cop who doesn’t like your kind.

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Posted on February 5, 2016

Gender, Race, Drive, Ambition, Ego, Obsession!

“All museums are sex museums,” the University of Chicago Press says.
“In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality – particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed – and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality.”
Unsurprisingly . . .
“Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors.”

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Posted on February 3, 2016

Plus: Downstate Reverend Inherits Images From 1723

“From the inaugural issue of the Illustrated London News in 1842 to the first chapter of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning serial Maus in 1980, comics have had a long affiliation with documentary and reporting,” Dominic Umile writes for the Reader.
“So why isn’t the illustrated medium associated with nonfiction as reflexively as news articles and photographs? In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form that ‘endeavors to express history.'”

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Posted on January 27, 2016

Plus: An American History of Bookmaking And Sports Betting

“Chicago Review Press has set a May 1 release date for Stick It!: My Life Of Sex, Drums, And Rock ‘N’ Roll, the new autobiography from legendary rock drummer Carmine Appice,” Blabbermouth reports.
“The book was co-written by Ian Gittins, who wrote The Heroin Diaries with Motley Cure bassist Nikki Sixx.
“Official book description: ‘Carmine Appice has enjoyed a jaw-dropping rock-and-roll life – and now he is telling his scarcely believable story. Appice ran with teenage gangs in Brooklyn before becoming a global rock star in the Summer of Love, managed by the Mob.
“He hung with Hendrix, unwittingly paid for an unknown Led Zeppelin to support him on tour, taught John Bonham to play drums (and helped Fred Astaire too), and took part in Zeppelin’s infamous deflowering of a groupie with a mud shark.
“After enrolling in Rod Stewart’s infamous Sex Police, he hung out with Kojak, accidentally shared a house with Prince, was blood brothers with Ozzy Osbourne and was fired by Sharon.
“He formed an all-blond hair-metal band, jammed with John McEnroe and Steven Seagal, got married five times, slept with 4,500 groupies – and, along the way, became a rock legend by single-handedly reinventing hard rock and heavy metal drumming.
“His memoir, Stick It!, is one of the most extraordinary and outrageous rock-and-roll books of the early twenty-first century.”

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Posted on January 21, 2016

Prohibition, The Police & The Daily Caller

1. “My great-grandfather Vincenzo negotiated Prohibition by fermenting two barrels of wine a year,” James Marone writes for the New York Times.

“It was perfectly legal, he insisted. Vincenzo was lucky to be a New Yorker. In her fine history of Prohibition, The War on Alcohol, Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard, shows us that a poor Italian in Illinois or a black man in Virginia might very well have been jailed, shot or sentenced to a chain gang.

Indeed.

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Posted on January 14, 2016