Plus: Chicago’s Last Company Town

“Life in the big city can be exhilarating and terrifying, fulfilling and exasperating,” according to the Guild Literary Complex.
“In Urban Realities/Realidades urbanas, February’s installment of “Palabra Pura,” Puerto Rican poet Luis Tubens and students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School will share stories about their daily lives in the Windy City.
“The program will take place at La Bruquena Restaurant (2726 West Division Street), from 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., on Wednesday, February 18. As always, it will begin with an open mic. Palabra Pura is open to the public (all mother tongues welcome), and is pay-what-you-can ($5 suggested donation).
“Curated by Mary Hawley, a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, February’s “Palabra Pura” will examine the perils and triumphs of those who live in the inner city – the dualities that make Chicago a heaven for some and a hell for others.

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Posted on February 17, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“When all hell broke loose two years ago over the yanking of Persepolis from the Chicago Public Schools, Mayor Emanuel’s press handlers wrote it off as a misunderstanding. They said some bureaucrat in the bowels of the central office misunderstood what he or she had been directed to do and things got out of control,” Ben Joravsky reports for the Reader.

“The message got lost in translation, but the bottom line is, we never sent out a directive to ban the book,” Becky Carroll, the CPS spokeswoman at the time, told reporters.

“Well, guess what? It didn’t really happen like that at all.”
Click through to Ben’s story to see the definitive proof that Carroll – and CPS superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett – lied.

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Posted on February 11, 2015

By Michael Golden

Clay Hunt was a 28-year-old U.S. Marine veteran who served his country in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In Anbar province, under ambush, Hunt watched more than one of his friends die on the battlefield – images that would replay over and over in his mind’s eye through countless sleepless nights. In 2007, a sniper’s gunshot narrowly missed Hunt’s head, wounding him in the wrist instead. He was treated for the injury in California and also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet after recovering, in 2008 this brave soldier returned to the fight – this time in southern Afghanistan. There he watched two more of his friends lose their lives.
When Clay Hunt came home, he began another courageous fight. He started working with other service members to help them try to defeat the mental demons that he, himself, knew all too well. Hunt lobbied Congress on behalf of veterans and appeared in public service messages geared toward educating Americans about mental health and the unseen wounds of war. But in the end, the depression and guilt he felt for having survived when so many others did not, proved to be just too much. Clay Hunt shot himself to death on March 31, 2011. On the wall inside his apartment in Sugarland, Texas, he left behind a shadow box with photos of the four friends he’d lost in the wars, and the medals he’d earned fighting for his country. Clay Hunt is far from alone. Every year, thousands of proud yet tortured U.S. veterans suffer the same, suicidal fate.

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Posted on February 8, 2015

Plus: Lucky Prof Writing Vaccine Book; Brian Urlacher Writes A Children’s Book

“This past Sunday, students and community members alike braved the snow to hear Cornel West discuss his new book The Radical King at Rockefeller Chapel. Notwithstanding the talk’s title, West spoke on issues ranging from to Hollywood to Wu-Tang Clan to President Barack Obama,” the Chicago Maroon reports.
Here’s a snippet.

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Posted on February 4, 2015

Plus: J. Ivy And The Cycle Of Pain

1. Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality.
From the Society of Midland Authors:

Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson will discuss their new book, Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality, in a Society of Midland Authors program Tuesday, Feb. 10, at Cliff Dwellers Club, 200 S. Michigan Ave., 22nd floor. They will speak at 7 p.m. A social hour, with complimentary snacks and a cash bar, begins at 6 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
Coming in February from the University of Illinois Press, the book examines Illinois’ notorious culture of corruption, its historical roots and explains the reasons its political corruption continues to thrive well into the second decade of the 21st century.
Gradel and Simpson describe the history of political corruption in the Prairie State from vote rigging in 1833, when Chicago was first incorporated, and trace the dishonorable tradition through the criminal convictions of four of the last nine Illinois governors, a $53 million embezzlement by a downstate official, and the blizzard of bribery, extortion, tax fraud and other crimes that have led to the conviction of 33 Chicago aldermen.

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Posted on January 29, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“Robert H. Chambers III, whose tenure as the seventh president of Western Maryland College was marked by a renovated campus, increased enrollment and expansion abroad, died Jan 15 at John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio, Calif., of complications from an intestinal ulcer. He was 75,” the Baltimore Sun reports.
As the Sun notes, Bob wrote book reviews for us in his later years; he was an energetic and elegant writer whose passion for ideas and baseball made him a good fit for us.
I knew Bob had been a college president, which I found intimidating at first as an editor, but I gleaned several fascinating aspects of Bob from the Sun that I did not know – chiefly his association with Garry Trudeau.

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Posted on January 24, 2015

Plus: Open Source Textbooks & Jessica Hopper Lives

“Recognizing the financial difficulties students have, Jonathan Tomkin, associate director of earth, society and environment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created a solution to high-priced textbooks,” USA Today reports.

With the help of professors at two other University of Illinois-affiliated schools – the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Springfield – Tomkin created a stand alone “open-source” textbook called, Sustainability: A Comprehensive Edition, which is available online to students free of charge.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and the Department of Education awarded the University of Illinois a $150,000 one-year grant in 2012 to develop open-source textbooks in students’ curriculum. The grant aided the funding for Tomkin’s book, which provided a stipend to the contributing authors.
The online textbook is used for “ESE 200: Earth System” and “ENSU 310: Renewable & Alternative Energy,” both of which are taught by Tomkin. The 560-page book, which took more than a year to fully develop, features content on varying topics such as climate and global change and environmental and resource economics.

Click through for a video of students’ reactions.

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Posted on January 23, 2015

First Stop On 2015 Tour

“Sugar Gamer Valencia aka ‘Glitch’ interviews Selene Gill of Alleycat Comics on the first stop of the Chicago Comic Book Tour 2015.”

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Posted on January 21, 2015

Plus: Read It And Eat; Booksploitation

“The underground Chicago literary community knew him as J.J. Jameson; the Massachusetts penal system knew him as Norman A. Porter Jr., a murderer who escaped in 1985,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“In 2005, Porter/Jameson was arrested in Chicago. ‘It’s been a good 20-year run,’ he told the police at the time. Now in his mid-70s, Porter is up for parole in Boston.”

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Posted on January 13, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

Emptying the notebook.
1. Becoming Richard Pryor.
“Becoming Richard Pryor is a book that breaks new ground, even if it has a tendency to take its insights very seriously and its audience’s knowledge of the Pryor oeuvre for granted. It spends a long time on this tormented funnyman’s childhood years in Peoria, Ill.,” Janet Maslin wrote for the New York Times last month.
“Pryor got a lot of mileage out of the fact that he grew up in his grandmother’s brothel. [Author Scott] Saul gets a lot of mileage out of explaining what kind of matriarch that pistol-packing grandma, Marie Pryor, was, and what a huge influence she was in Richard’s life.

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Posted on January 1, 2015