By Steve Rhodes

“It’s a little-known fact that the Virgin Mary was fond of creamed spinach,” Paul Collins writes an essay titled “The Oddball Know-It-All” in the New York Times Book Review. “And did you know that sauerbraten was invented by Charlemagne? That the geneticist Gregor Mendel spent much of his time developing a recipe for fried eggs? Or that “people who use considerable red pepper in their foods are almost immune to atomic radiation”?
“If you’re nodding in recognition, you’re a lucky owner of George Leonard Herter’s farrago Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices – one of the greatest oddball masterpieces in this or any other language. A surly sage, gun-toting Minnesotan and All-American crank – the kind of guy who would take his own sandwiches to Disneyland because the restaurants were No Damned Good – Herter wrote books on such disparate topics as candy making, marriage advice, African safaris and household cleaning.”
Who knew?
Well, these guys did.

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Posted on December 9, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

An occasional look through the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Teen Scream
Sociologist Mike Males pretty much rules. Every journalist in America ought to get a lecture from him to find out why nearly everything they write about teens, for example, is wrong. The great thing about Males is that A) he bases his conclusions on hard facts and B) he doesn’t perceive teenagers as irrational aliens.
In the New Yorker, Males responds to an article about teenage pregnancy with a letter to the editor that opens this way:
“Margaret Talbot, in writing about teen-age pregnancy, focuses on sex and abstinence education, religion and media messages (‘Red Sex, Blue Sex,’ November 3rd).
“The main reason that the United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy among comparable nations, however, is that youth here suffer the highest rate of poverty.”
As usual, he has the research to back him up, which, curiously enough, is far more dependable than the ready-made narratives of journalists projecting their own family problems on their readers.

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Posted on December 5, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

1. Deborah Solomon vs. Studs Terkel.
From an interview of Studs Terkel by the Reader’s Michael Lenehan.
*
TERKEL: For example, you said that you cut your questions out and you make it sort of a soliloquy. Well that’s what I do, you see. I keep the question in when it’s necessary, as a transition moment, or when a humorous or whimsical aspect can be revealed in an exchange. But generally speaking, I shift things around. An interview is not written in stone. You can adjust the sequences. But never altering the words – the words are the words of the person, that’s clear.
LENEHAN: But you’re the guy who set the form, Studs. I think it will be useful; writers are going to be interested to know what your rules are. So, for example, I would take a paragraph from the end and put it at the beginning, if that made the story go better.
TERKEL: Right. That’s right.

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Posted on December 2, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Beer Me
I’m thinking Beachwood Beer is next.
“Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek,” Burkhard Bilger writes in The New Yorker. ” (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was ‘Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.’ It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries.”
Mmm, cloudberries . . .

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Posted on November 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A periodical look at the decreasing number of periodicals laying around Beachwood HQ.
By the end of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden – not Sarah Palin – had become the gaffe-prone vice-presidential candidate hidden out of sight for fear that he would capsize the top of the ticket.
His gaffes weren’t surprising; he’s made a career of making them despite his enormous intelligence and political skill. In part, his mouth and his past as a lying plagiarist led the media to mostly dismiss Biden as a joke when he was running for president early in the campaign. The minute he was selected as Barack Obama’s running mate, however, Biden was transformed; suddenly he was the wise foreign policy guru and old Washington hand who would add ballast to Obama’s light resume.
And suddenly – thanks to the dark hand of David Axelrod – he was a working-class kid from Scranton, not the elegant senator from Delaware with exquisite tastes and hair plugs.
“Although Obama seems to have chosen Biden partly because of his legislative experience, the campaign introduced him by emphasizing his biography – a moving story,” the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza wrote in “Biden’s Brief,” which appeared in the magazine’s October 20 edition.

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Posted on November 10, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

The New Yorker seemed to slump over the summer but it’s come back this fall with a vengeance, especially in a series of outstanding profiles. In the current issue alone, you will find compelling portraits Bob Barr, Robert Mugabe, and (the late) Marlon Brando.
Let’s start with Brando.
I have a high appreciation of the art, power, and technique of film, but I am by no means a buff, so I can’t say whether what Claudia Roth Pierpont writes will be new to students of the cinema, but I found it pretty interesting.
This isn’t a full-blown profile, but it may as well be. Pierpont uses Brando’s Method acting style to plumb his psyche and what she finds is disturbing.

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Posted on October 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Who knew – among us mere civilians – that Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe’s son, had such a strange life.
“He knew that he would never have been made Secretary of War or Ambassador to Great Britain without the Lincoln name, and his weird accidental presence at the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901, must have seemed a fateful punishment for refusing his father’s invitation to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865,” Thomas Mallon writes in the New Yorker.
Paging conspiracy theorists and spiritualists! I mean, my God!

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Posted on October 20, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ that has really gotten away from me so let’s just try to get updated from newest to oldest also considering that due to financial constraints I barely get any magazines at all anymore.
Beaten
“He was a star in the Republican Party,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine says. “Now, like dozens of his GOP colleagues, he’s quitting Congress, fed up with his party, his president and the process. Tom Davis gives up.”
This is a fascinating profile that really gives you an idea of what it’s like to be a United States congressman – and particularly a United States congressman with good intentions who wants to work across the aisle and get things done. It also illustrates how corrosive – and corrupting – zealous partisanship is.

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Posted on October 9, 2008

By Lauren Hammond

As Open Books, Chicago s first non-profit literacy bookstore, works on our new location, we remain busy collecting used books, raising awareness about illiteracy and improving reading skills throughout the city. To help us do that, and in partnership with Better World Books, we are holding The Great American Book Drive later this month.
You can donate books without even getting out of your car. Our volunteers will unload your books and process your donation while you wait. All of the proceeds will go towards funding literacy programs for children and adults in the Chicago area. We ll be saving your old books from ending up in landfills and sending them to people who will enjoy reading them as much as you have.

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Posted on October 2, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Geez, I didn’t know the PC guy was an author. John Hodgman’s his name, and this blurb by Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor piqued my interest. (I mean, I didn’t even recognize him from his appearances on The Daily Show – what gives?)
His new book, More Information Than You Require, is billed as a satirical almanac.
Here’s his Wikipedia page, and here’s his interview with Boing Boing TV.

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Posted on September 30, 2008