By The Beachwood BookNotes Division

1. “After my partner showed up and informed me I would be driving the wagon in downtown rush-hour traffic, he directed me to a cafe for his coffee, obviously in no hurry to reach our assignment,” Chicago cop Martin Prieb writes in The Wagon. The brief narrative on the computer explained that a woman was dead, and removal meant we must take her to the morgue. The narrative stated she was in her fifties. That was it. My partner did not speak about the task ahead, though I could not stop thinking about it. The service entrance to the address of our assignment, a high-rise building on Michigan Avenue, was below in the labyrinth of alleys and parking lots off Lower Wacker Drive.”

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Posted on April 23, 2010

By The Poetry Foundation

At the end of National Poetry Month, 53 students who emerge from a field of nearly 325,000 competitors nationwide will gather in Washington, DC, to vie for the title of Poetry Out Loud National Champion and $50,000 in awards.
On April 26 and 27, champions from every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands will showcase their skills in poetry memorization and recitation at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC. The roster of judges for the National Finals will feature author Garrison Keillor, actress and activist Alfre Woodard, poets Valerie Martinez and Jane Shore, poet and critic Adam Kirsch, and the 2009 Poetry Out Loud National Champion, William Farley.
Poetry Out Loud is a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts that encourages the study of great poetry by offering educational materials and a dynamic recitation competition to high schools across the country. Poetry Out Loud gives students an opportunity to master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage. Now in its fifth year of national competition, Poetry Out Loud has been embraced by thousands of students, teachers, schools, and communities as a dynamic way to discover classic and contemporary poetry, from Walt Whitman to Natasha Trethewey.
“Arts education is essential to raising America’s next generation of creative thinkers,” said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman. “The NEA is proud to provide leadership in arts education through high-quality national education programs like Poetry Out Loud.”
“To learn a great poem by heart is to make a friend for life,” said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation. “The national recitation program brings fresh energy to an ancient art form by returning it to the classrooms of America.”

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Posted on April 15, 2010

By The Poetry Foundation

Eleanor Ross Taylor Awarded 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Award recognizes lifetime accomplishment with $100,000 prize
The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce that poet Eleanor Ross Taylor has won the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Presented annually to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. The prize will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Tuesday, May 18.
In making the announcement, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, cited the strong reserve in Taylor’s poems and praised their “sober and clear-eyed serenity” and authority:

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Posted on April 13, 2010

By The Beachwood Rhymes & Crimes Affairs Desk

1. Poetry Foundation Celebrates National Poetry Month.
Programming includes Poetry magazine, poetry films, iPhone app, multimedia poetry tours, recitation contest, readings, online educational resources, and more.
CHICAGO – The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce an exciting array of literary events and programs in celebration of National Poetry Month, April 2010.
Poetry
For its April issue, Poetry has dispensed with the usual prose section in order to make room for extensive Q&As with the poets. Designed to enable readers to have a deeper experience with the poems in the issue, and also to give some insight into the questions that editors ask when considering submissions, the Q&As are probing, surprising, sometimes testy, and often funny.
Poets featured in the issue include Rae Armantrout, Todd Boss, H.L. Hix, Cathy Park Hong, Devin Johnston, Adam Kirsch, Randall Mann, Spencer Reece Donald Revell, and Robyn Schiff.
The Q&As are also available online at here.

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Posted on April 6, 2010

By The Beachwood Workplace Disobedience Affairs Desk

How Ordinary Americans Subvert An Unfair Economy.
“Here is a book that tells the real story of the countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives,” says publisher The New Press. “Whether it is a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker’s children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.
“In a national tale of a kind of economic disobedience – told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the country -hundreds of supervisors, teachers, and health care professionals describe intentional acts of defiance that together tell the story of a quiet revolt, of a moral underground that has grown in response to an immoral economy.”
Here are some examples pulled from the text.

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Posted on March 15, 2010

By Nancy Simon

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . “ – Emma Lazarus
For as far back as our forefathers’ time, we have called people who belonged to a lower economic class poor.
Poverty – or the state of being poor – has been used in reference to everything from a person’s financial status (or lack thereof) to their unfortunate lot in life, e.g., “That poor SOB has a nasty wife at home who is what makes him so miserable.”
Yet, while poverty comes across as respectful, the term poor conveys a most negative connotation.
And though times have changed and politically correct terms pertaining to everything from race to religion have been placed under a microscope, one may muse that terms used in reference to society’s bottom rung have neither been questioned nor adjusted for contemporary times in any conceivable way.

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Posted on March 12, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

I made the mistake of thinking Money Talks, Bullsh*t Walks: Inside The Contrarian Mind Of Billionaire Mogul Sam Zell this was a real book, instead of quickie hagiography. Nonetheless, let’s take a look at some of the interesting and relevant items and passages. See if you can spot the bullshit walking.
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“Once in the States, [Zell’s father] settled into the wholesale jewelry business, moving the family to Albany Park, Illinois, a community dominated by immigrant Jews just northwest of Chicago.”

Evil Twins Black Talks, Zell Walks.

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“Even at the tender age of twelve, it was no stretch of the imagination to see that Sam Zell had ‘entrepreneur’ written all over his psyche. During his daily train rides to Chicago [from Highland Park, for Hebrew school], Zell’s inquisitive mind often worked in overdrive. One day in 1953, he was scanning the magazines on sale at the train station. There he found the first issue of a brand-new Chicago publication unlike any he had seen, or should have seen at his tender age. The magazine was aptly titled Playboy and founded by a little-known Chicago entrepreneur named Hugh Marston Hefner. At the time, Playboy was not the mainstream media product that it would become years later. In fact, it was considered so nefarious that its circulation was limited only to certain sections of the inner city.
“Zell acted on his impulse, sensing an untapped commercial aspect to this exotic commodity. He bought Playboys for fifty cents a copy and sold them to his suburban chums later in the day for three dollars.”
At age 12 he was a smut peddler! And that markup – what a prick.
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“The caption under his 1959 Highland Park High School yearbook photo says much about those formative years: ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.'”
Like I said, Prick City.
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While in law school, Zell became a landlord to college students.
“With only $1,500 in savings, Zell parlayed the meager sum to purchase a land contract on a small apartment property. After a fresh coat of paint and some new furniture, he doubled rents and went in search of more buildings to buy.”

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Posted on February 11, 2010

By David Rutter

Of all the topics that gush garbage, the post-apocalyptic assessment of failed newspaper vultures in Chicago is among the most resiliently productive.
The desire to snuggle up to Sam Zell about his misunderstood grandeur never ceases to amaze. The latest in this category is Ben Johnson’s new business biography, Money Talks, Bullshit Walks: Inside the Contrarian Mind of Billionaire Sam Zell, which offers a favorable and totally erroneous view of Zell’s quirks.
There were those who insisted then and still do that Conrad Black was a charming, rogue genius, rather than a callous pillager of the Chicago Sun-Times Empire. Those of us close enough to Black’s various thug hirelings surely could catch the scent of mendacity on the air when they ran the Sun-Times. The interim ownership of the Sun-Times, manifested by affable but totally baffled CEO Cyrus Friedheim, was less evil than merely inept.
Sam Zell is no less a barbarian than Black. And history now suggests a willfully, doggedly, ignorant barbarian whose only skill was possession of money. And because I know a little first-hand about both situations, I can tell you what the two enterprises had in common and why they both ultimately failed.

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Posted on February 11, 2010

By The Beachwood Literary Affairs Desk
Beachwood contributor Drew Adamek writes:
From my wife’s Contemporary Culture 101 Syllabus:
1. Busting Rhymes and Fighting Crimes: The Tao of Barney Fife
2. Fuck It, I’ll Pay For It: The Tom DeLay Story
3. I Don’t Know You, I Don’t Know Your Life: Intro to Mass Communication

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Posted on January 26, 2010

By Nancy Simon

The whole world is being rebalanced it seems – whatever that means.
President Obama recently called for a rebalancing of the world economy. Cook County officials instituted a rebalancing of its employees to help resolve budgetary problems. Rebalancing has even found its way into an advertising campaign – Merrill Lynch’s Wealth Management Group promises rebalancing in its “help2 Achieve” commercials.
In light of the onslaught of rebalancing efforts taking place, we thought we would provide a little help of our own and attempt to explain what rebalancing is and why so many appear so keen on it.

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Posted on December 16, 2009