Chicago -
And Neither Are They
1. Book One.
“The first American book – and one of the most valuable – is coming to town,” the Tribune reports.
“In advance of it being sold at auction, the work known as the “Bay Psalm Book,” printed in 1640, will be on display at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday.”
Posted on September 10, 2013
More Than 70 Years In The Making
“Brian Dolinar’s new book, The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers, was released this summer, and if the title sounds dated it’s because the book began its long road to publication in the late 1930s but was sidelined by two formidable obstacles – World War II and a rejection letter,” Dawn Turner Trice writes in the Tribune.
“How Dolinar came to complete the book is a story of a nearly decade-long effort to do justice to work started by a team of more than 100 African-American writers hired to document black life and history for one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration programs.
Posted on September 9, 2013
Plus: Poets Meet Muse
1. Lemony Snicket Does Poetry.
“The September 2013 issue of Poetry magazine features a portfolio of 20 poems selected and annotated by children’s author Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) and illustrated by Caldecott Award-winning artist Chris Raschka.
“The portfolio, entitled Poetry Not Written for Children That Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy, is, according to Snicket, a collection of poems ‘all strange in some way, because all great literature is strange, the way all good slides are slippery.’ Snicket’s portfolio was born out of what might have otherwise been an unfortunate event.
Posted on September 4, 2013
By Jessica Dimmock & Roosevelt University
This project began when I met Jim Diamond on the street in lower Manhattan. He approached me because he saw that I was taking pictures and made it clear that he wanted to be photographed. He also let it be known that he was a cocaine dealer.
The night that I spent with Jim was fevered and chaotic. Jim’s phone rang constantly – a soft ambient tone alerted him to a call and Jim, sweaty, frantic, almost rabid, would answer often cursing loudly into the other end.
I followed Jim through the streets, as he screamed about cocaine deals, met with people quickly in phone booths, he seemed to know everyone.
With Jim I explored a hidden archipelago of the lower Manhattan’s underground economy: an upscale apartment, two cocaine-filled parties, the owner of an escort service operated from a fancy hotel room.
And eventually, 4 West 22nd Street – an elegant narrow building across from the famous Flatiron in Manhattan.
Posted on August 30, 2013
By The Poetry Foundation
Eliza Griswold, Anna Maria Hong, Laura Kasischke, Idra Novey, Miller Oberman, Randall Mann, Joshua Mehigan, Seamus Murphy and Michael Robbins are the winners of eight awards for contributions to Poetry over the past year. The prizes are awarded for poems, prose and visual content published during the past 12 months, from October 2012 to September 2013.
The Levinson Prize, presented annually since 1914 through the generosity of the late Salmon O. Levinson and his family, in the amount of $500, is awarded to Joshua Mehigan for his poems “The Professor,” “The Cement Plant” and “Down in the Valley” in the October 2012 issue and “The Orange Bottle” in the February 2013 issue
Posted on August 19, 2013
Stan Lee Is Watching
A few highlights from the weekend.
1. Oppa Gangnam Style.
Posted on August 12, 2013
And Dinner With Jimmy The Turk
The Moth Story Slam is held on the last Tuesday of every month at Martyrs’.
This week retired Chicago police officer Jim Padar told a particularly funny story.
Posted on August 2, 2013
By The Massachusetts School of Law
In this excerpt from the Massachusetts School of Law’s hour-long “Program Books Of Our Time,” dedicated to James Atlas’s book My Life In The Middle Ages, Mr Atlas discusses what he believes the “Chicago Personality” is and how it came to be.
“Mr Atlas is the president of Atlas & Company, publishers, and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.
The host of “Books of Our Time” is Lawrence R. Velvel, dean of The Massachusetts School of Law.
Posted on July 26, 2013
Plus: A Human Time Poem
1. How We Do It. And By “It,” We Mean “It.”
“How long does pregnancy last?” Marlene Zuk writes for the Wall Street Journal.
“Nine months, of course, or more precisely, 40 weeks, and we can use the date of last menstruation as a reliable indicator of when the pregnancy began. But as Robert Martin notes in How We Do It, his meticulously researched account of human reproduction from conception to early childhood, ‘things are not always that simple.’ In many female primates, including women, monthly cycles persist into early pregnancy, for reasons still poorly understood. The date of conception is surprisingly hard to pin down, and due dates are as much guesswork as measurement.
“Mr. Martin’s humble but crucial acknowledgment that biology is unavoidably complicated – that we can’t capture millennia of evolution or decades of research in glib sayings about the sexes’ planetary origins or in single surveys of psychology undergraduates – is what makes How We Do It so compelling.
“It’s not that Mr. Martin, a curator of biological anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum, claims that sexuality is such a morass of science, culture and mistaken beliefs that we should throw up our hands. Instead, he takes a calm, soothingly detached approach to the evolution of sex and child-rearing. No Mars and Venus, no extrapolations about why we evolved to love – or hate – strip clubs or whether bottle-feeding dooms a child to a life of puerile amusements and a career at the Kwik-E-Mart. Here instead are the facts of life as you may have never thought about them.”
Posted on July 24, 2013
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