WBEZ | literature

What is the ultimate Chicago book?

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:15:00 -0500

Curious Citizen Pavel Gigov asked a question a few months ago that might have been answered in Rachel Shteir's recent New York Times Book Review article. Pavel wants to know which single book could teach him the most about Chicago. In Shteir's infamous review of three recent books about Chicago, she gave short shrift to the city's literary context, instead focusing on myriad problems plaguing "Poor Chicago." Nearly three weeks out and, with our collective ire down to simmering, now is as good a time as any to answer Pavel's question.

To start off, we reached out to someone who’s at least familiar with the theme: Annie Tully, who directs the One Book, One Chicago program at the Chicago Public Library. After huddling with library staff and consulting their master lists, she sent us a list of titles that could potentially fit the bill for Pavel. That list, produced below, includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children's literature and graphic novels. While The Encyclopedia of Chicago contains a lot of facts about the city, Chicago Poems by Carl Sandberg may convey more essential truths. Could Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville Boys and Girls be more instructive than Mike Royko's early columns?

Of course we can't settle on one book to define Chicago, because there are as many “Chicagos” as there are Chicagoans. Rachel Shteir would certainly have a different choice (possibly Sister Carrie) than Neil Steinberg. But that just means we get to have a conversation about our choices and hopefully understand more about the vast array of different Chicagos.

So please choose a book from this list that best explains Chicago as you understand it. If your choice isn't listed, please add it. Maybe Rick Kogan's Dr. Night Life should be included, who knows? We'll talk about the top five books next Monday on Morning Shift.

Andrew Gill is a WBEZ web producer. Follow him @andrewgill.

'Push' author Sapphire revisits childhood abuse in second novel

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0500

[Trigger Warning]

Sapphire does not shy away from difficult subjects.

The author, who chose her pen name as a salute to strong black women, is known for penning devastatingly realized stories of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. Her 1996 novel Push tells the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an illiterate, obese, 16-year-old girl pregnant with a second child by her own father. The novel was adapted in 2009, and the resulting film, Precious, garnered many accolades, including two Academy Awards. But the film also stirred controversy with its graphic depictions of incest and domestic abuse.

Sapphire was herself the victim of childhood sexual assault. In 2010 she told the London Evening Standard that her father, a Korean War vet, had molested her at age eight. Her mother abandoned their family five years later.

“It was traumatic — but to be left with our crazy dad, doubly so," she told the paper.

She created the character precious from an amalgam of her own experiences and those of students she later mentored in Harlem.

Sapphire followed Push with a sequel, The Kid, in 2011. As the novel opens, we learn that Precious has died of AIDS, leaving her nine-year-old son Abdul alone in the world.

Abdul is sent to live in a Catholic orphanage, and what befalls him there is brutal and heartbreaking -- and all too familiar to anyone who follows the ever-unfolding story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. (A new wrinkle in that story unfolded just this week, as files released by the Diocese of Joliet revealed decades of abuse hidden by high-level clergy.)

Abdul is sexually assaulted by a priest during his time in the orphanage. And as sometimes happens to those who have been abused, he goes on in turn to become an abuser, raping younger, weaker boys living in the orphanage.

“While numerous heterosexual black male writers and critics have bemoaned the . . . one-dimensional portrait of black man as victimizer, few have been interested in or have had the courage to explore the obvious other end of the stick: the black male as victim of sexual abuse,” Sapphire said at a talk in Chicago last week, reading from a Q & A section published alongside her novel. “The Kid, among other things, begins an accurate portrayal of what happens to many young males who have been abused and their sometimes hideous response.”

The results for Abdul are devastating, as they were for his mother. And while Push addressed the failure of the nuclear family to protect its children, The Kid takes up the failure of institutions charged with their care.

“We’re really looking at the abandoning of the social contract in a way we didn’t see in Push,” Sapphire said. “That was something I really wanted to show: What happens when everything except the soul of the individuals fails?”

Sapphire read two passages from The Kid during her appearance at Chicago Public Library. We’ve included an excerpt of her talk here in audio form, but please be warned. . . .

TRIGGER WARNING: The book excerpt Sapphire reads here includes a graphic rape scene, in addition to a later scene which shows some redemption and healing for her main character.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Sapphire spoke at an event presented by Chicago Public Library in March. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

The short, unhappy life of Algren Street

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0600

Nelson Algren—one of America’s great writers and a charter member of the Chicago Hall of Fame—died in 1981. Columnist Mike Royko had been one of his friends. Royko came up with what seemed like an appropriate way to honor Algren.

For many years Algren had lived in a three-story walkup at 1958 West Evergreen Avenue. “It would be a nice gesture for [the city] to rename one of the little streets around Wicker Park after him,” Royko wrote. “Algren Court or Algren Place. Nothing big. He wouldn’t expect it.”

That was in May. Early the next year, Royko received word that Mayor Jane Byrne had taken up his suggestion. Evergreen Avenue, between Milwaukee and Damen, would be renamed Algren Street. The mayor even sent Royko one of the new street signs.

The trouble started when city crews began putting up those signs.

Algren had never been popular with the city’s Polish community, who thought his writings slandered them. There were still a lot of Poles living in Wicker Park in 1982. They didn’t like the new street name.

Neither did some of the people who lived on Evergreen. Handbills began circulating in the neighborhood. They warned of all the problems and expense the name change would cause.

Residents would have to spend a small fortune revising their driver’s licenses and other official documents. Delivery men and visitors would get lost. Someone might even die if an ambulance couldn’t locate an address.

Pressure was put on the alderman to change the name back. In the meantime, activists began hanging cardboard signs reading “EVERGREEN” over the Algren Street signs.

After a few weeks of guerilla war, the city gave in. It turned out that the crews had put up the “Algren” signs before the City Council had officially voted on the mayor’s proposal. The local alderman asked his colleagues reject the name change, and they did. Evergreen remained Evergreen.

The whole business made an impression on the politicians. Shortly after the Algren Street debacle, Chicago began issuing honorary street names—those brown and white signs you see hung under the real street signs at hundreds of places around town. That way, some worthy person can be memorialized without arousing the voters’ wrath.

I'd thought the city had settled on making the few blocks of Evergreen an honorary Algren Street. But when I visited there recently, I didn’t see one brown sign. And in front of Algren’s old home, the Chicago Tribute marker is tilting badly to one side. It looks like it was hit by a truck.

Some people have long memories.

A brief chat with author Jami Attenberg

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:31:00 -0600

Jami Attenberg is a writer pal of mine whom I interviewed many moons ago. However, now she has a new book, the fabulous and fabulously-reviewed The Middlesteins, so I wanted to ask her a few new questions. Jami reads this Thursday November 8 at The Book Cellar at 7 p.m., so come say hi, have a glass of wine and get your book signed!

What made you decide to set The Middlesteins in the Chicagoland area as opposed to New York or any of the other places you've lived?
I remember reading Olive Kitteridge, which is such a wonderful book, and thinking I wanted to write something like that about the suburbs of Chicago — it felt like a very complete look at a particular place, and I wanted to do the same for where I grew up. It took another year or so before I actually sat down to write The Middlesteins, but as soon as I started working on it, they physical landscape felt very clear in my mind, even though I hadn’t lived here in a long time.

How did you come up with the name "The Middlesteins"? What (if any) other names did you consider?
Initially, I wanted to call the book Sprawl, because I was thinking about the idea of suburban sprawl, and also this feeling of collapse and exhaustion. Maybe for the first month it was called that. The Middlesteins, to me, is a very obvious name. I can’t really recall the moment I thought of it — I should search through my correspondence! But it was a moment of clarity, I do recall that. The book started out being about a place, but it is the people in the community that anchor it together.

This book, your fourth novel, received a major push from your publisher. How do you think you'd be affected if this was your first novel as opposed to your fourth? Has there been any downside to the additional attention?
I don’t know how I would have handled it had it been my first, but I suspect I appreciate it more now, especially since my books have not done particularly well in the past. I have a lot gratitude to everyone around me, the people at my publishing house, my agent, and the press that have given the book coverage — and to the people who are buying it. I have perspective; I know this can all go away in a second. People can be excited about you and your work one minute, and ignore you at a party a week later. In the end, you know who your friends are, and what matters the most is actually being able to do your work. I must admit along the way I have developed an exceptional bullsh*t radar.

And there is no downside to the additional attention, Claire. I’m happy to have people reading my books!

What do you always make sure to do when you're back home in Chicago?
Can’t wait to eat! I fantasize about the decadence. It’s going to be either pizza or Hot Doug’s. (Or both.)

For novelist Don DeLillo, sometimes a single picture is worth more than a thousand words

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Novelist Don DeLillo says some of his densest, most complex tomes have been inspired by viewing a single image. Often it's a photograph, or sometimes a painting, or even the blocky, visceral letters of the Greek alphabet carved into the frieze of a temple. The novelist behind classics like Underworld and White Noise was in Chicago last week to accept an award from the Chicago Public Library. Donna Seaman, senior editor for Booklist, spoke with DeLillo and teased out this thread in the author's work.

Take a listen to an extended excerpt from Seaman’s interview with DeLillo, and check out some of the powerful images that spurred him to write.

On the influence of French New Wave cinema:

“I grew up in the Bronx, and we had movie theaters – plenty of them – and we went to the movies frequently, the young guys. Suddenly, a bit later, when I was living in Manhattan, European movies appeared, strikingly different from westerns and Hollywood musicals and so on. Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni – so many good directors. And it began to occur to me that ‘film’ as it was now being called, could have the depth and range of an album. This was new to my mind.”

On the newspaper headlines that inspired the novel Underworld:

“Something made me go to the library. Some sense of importance beyond the [famous Brooklyn Dodgers vs. New York Giants baseball game]. I went and found the front page for The New York Times the day after the ball game, Oct. 4, 1951. . . The second headline across the page was ‘Soviets explode nuclear bomb.’ I saw these two headlines, literally, in a pictorial way, the way they were matched, each followed by three columns of type, and of course some sort of historical resonance taking place. Bobby Thompson’s home run became known immediately as the ‘Shot heard ‘round the world,’ which was a kind of American vanity, assuming that everyone in the world was aware of this ballgame. This got me started on Underworld.”

On the influence of Baader-Meinhof, Gerhard Richter’s painting series about the left-wing German militant group:

“The first time I saw these paintings I wasn’t that influenced by them; I wasn’t that impressed by them. But when I saw them again and then again, I began to see things I hadn’t seen the first time. I don’t know if I could tell you what I saw – I’m not an art critic . . . And so I wrote a short story about a woman sitting alone in a gallery. I tried to discover who she was and what would happen.”

On the influence of a single image of September 11th:

“Something in this photograph just hit me. There were much more dramatic photographs; I don’t know why it was this one. About a day later it occurred to me: the briefcase was not his. This is what inspired me to write the novel [Falling Man]. Essentially to find out whose briefcase he was carrying.”

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Don DeLillo spoke at an event presented by Chicago Public Library earlier this month. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

One hundred years of Poetry

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 05:00:00 -0500

This month marks the 100th birthday of Poetry magazine. It was founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe.

Monroe was born in 1860. The daughter of a prominent Chicago lawyer, she was a lonely child, and devoured the books in her father’s library. She became determined to pursue a literary career.

Her first poem was published in 1888, and over the next two decades Monroe established herself as a poet. She also served as an art and drama critic for various newspapers. Besides volumes of verse, she wrote a memoir of her late brother-in-law, architect John Wellborn Root.

Writing poetry is not a lucrative profession. A hundred years ago things were even worse. The few publications that accepted verse didn’t pay much, if they paid anything at all. And even after the work was printed, the poet was often stalled off with those immortal words, “The check is in the mail.”

Monroe’s idea was to publish a monthly magazine that would actually pay for whatever was accepted—at a fair rate, and in a timely manner. The magazine would also provide an outlet for the newer style of poetry that was starting to take shape.

In 1911 Monroe enlisted the aid of her friend Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor. Twenty years before, HCC-T had helped introduce golf to Chicago, and had wide contacts among the city’s elite. Monroe asked him to round up a hundred wealthy people who’d subscribe $50 each for a new poetry magazine to be established in Chicago.

HCC-T’s friends came through with the necessary stake. Volume 1, Number 1 of Poetry—A Magazine of Verse rolled off the press in October 1912. The 32 pages of that first issue contained works by William Vaughn Moody, Grace Hazard Conkling, Ezra Pound, and others.

Critical reception to the new magazine was mixed. Midwesterners loved it. The effete East was more condescending. One Philadelphia paper titled its review “Poetry in Porkopolis.”

Monroe carried on. Her studio was at 543 North Cass Street (Wabash Avenue). Within a few months, one writer remembered, “almost every transcontinental train disgorged a score or more of young hopefuls who walked from the station up Cass Street before breakfast to read their verses to Harriet.” If Monroe couldn’t buy all their work, she could at least give the disappointed ones a cup of hot chocolate.

But the ones that were published made the magazine a success. Monroe continued to edit Poetry until her death in Peru in 1936. At age 75, she’d been on her way to climb Macchu Picchu.

Among the poets Monroe discovered was T.S. Eliot. Perhaps he summed it up best when he wrote, “Poetry has had imitators, but has so far survived them all. It is an American institution.”

In praise of 'One Book, One Chicago'

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Fall is in the air. Trees are beginning to turn yellow and orange. Football season is in full swing. And, the mayor’s office has just announced the fall selection for One Book, One Chicago: The Book Thief by award-winning Australian author Markus Zusak. The setting is World War II in Nazi Germany, and the story is of an orphan girl, Liesel Meminger, who finds friendship and love in a family who takes her in. Amidst the madness of the Nazi regime Liesel learns how words can be used to make life meaningful and worthwhile — or conversely, to create evil and darkness.

Since the inauguration of One Book, One Chicago in 2001 there have been 23 books offered to the public, usually in the fall and spring. I've been uncomfotable with a few selections, mainly because I thought they were either too long, too arcane or too disconnected from the Chicago experience to interest a local audience. But overall, I have enjoyed the selections, and in fact, six of them are in my personal pantheon of favorite books! To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Go Tell It on a Mountain by James Baldwin; and, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

The purpose of One Book, One Chicago is not just to generate a list of worthwhile books. It’s real purpose is to share ideas and encourage debate and dialogue through seminars and presentations. But for me the best part of it has been the innumerable spontaneous chats I’ve had with fellow readers while riding the Green Line and the cups of coffee I’ve had with colleagues while debating the nuances of the latest selection. And, the simple pleasure of simultaneously reading a book with my wife and sharing our impressions while on a leisurely walk or in the car.

Of course, the beauty of all books is that they take us out of ourselves, show us other parts of the world and introduce us to characters we might never otherwise meet. Good works, good ideas, good reads — it's truly a worthwhile personal and communal activity. As Groucho Marx once said: “Outside of a dog, a book is a (person’s) best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read!”

WBEZ is a media sponsor of One Book, One Chicago. Al Gini is a Professor of Business Ethics and Chairman of the Management Department in the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago.

Courtesy of McSweeney's, Emily Dickinson in the age of Twitter

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:00:00 -0500

I like to consider myself fairly well-educated but the fact of the matter is, I stink when it comes to Emily Dickinson. I've read just about nothing by her. Fortunately, before I actually had to read her poetry with my precious own free time, along came Paul Legault's The Emily Dickinson Reader, published by McSweeney's. LeGault has bravely set out to interpret or transpose each of Dickinson's poems into one-line renderings. Legault introduces the Reader thusly:

Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is both the father of American poetry and the most infamous lesbian vampire of the nineteenth century.
She wrote 1,789 poems in her lifetime, the bulk of which remained unpublished until her (supposed) death in 1886, when her younger sister Lavinia found them in a trunk. After escaping their Pandoran chamber, Dickinson’s works emerged into the twentieth century like an apocalyptic army of angels made entirely of paper.
Emily Dickinson wrote in a language all her own, thus the need for this English version of what she meant. The translations presented here are my attempt to rewrite her poems (with their foreign beauty intact) in “Standard English.”

With that said, please enjoy Paul Legault's takes on Dickinson's first 15 poems, reprinted here with permission from the author:

1. Everything has to love something.

2. Hey, really historically important people. Guess what? You’re all dead.

3. Life is like a little boat on a sea of itself.

4. The arrival of spring is somewhat sexually charged.

5. I am in love with my brother’s girlfriend. I am as fond of her as I am of my younger sister, though I do not want to have sex with my younger sister. My brother’s girlfriend’s name is Sue, and I want to have sex with her.

6. I’m kind of like a little boat in the sea of life. Who wants to have sex with its brother’s girlfriend.

7. If you’re a flower, I’m your zombie gardener.

8. Dig up my grave, would you? I’m a zombie, and I’ve got some flowers for you!

9. If today is opposite day, I’m happy.

10. I could probably only be queen in a completely imaginary state. Otherwise, I don’t think the country would do so well culturally or economically, because I would probably appoint plants, specifically roses, into key political and religious offices.

11. If you pick a rose, it can no longer access water and other vital nutrients that it needs to live.

12. I lost something that seems to be easily replaceable, but it is not easily replaceable.

13. I can’t wait for this great time when things will really be great. I think this time probably won’t occur until I’m dead.

14. This really is too much.

15. I woke up this naked woman under a tree, and she was excited to see me. Unfortunately, her name was not Sue.

Carl Sandburg in Chicago

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders . . .

There was a time when every child in Chicago learned those words. They are the opening lines of Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago.” The house where he wrote them still stands at 4646 North Hermitage Avenue.

Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill. in 1878, the son of Swedish immigrants. As a young man, he drifted through a series of jobs–milkman, bricklayer, fireman, soldier, hobo, political organizer for the Social Democratic Party. Then he got married.

Time for stability. Sandburg moved to Chicago and became a reporter. He landed a job with the Daily News. He’d been writing poetry for years, with little success. That began to change.

His collection Chicago Poems appeared in 1916. Another anthology followed, then a series of children’s books. Sandburg was gaining a reputation. His publisher suggested he write a Lincoln biography for young people.

Sandburg did the research, and more research. In 1926 he emerged with Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. The children’s book had morphed into an adult book in two volumes.

The Lincoln book was a best-seller and ended Sandburg’s financial worries. It also made him a literary lion. For the rest of his long life, he was as famous for being Carl Sandburg as for anything he wrote.

He moved to Michigan in 1930, and eventually settled in the hill country of North Carolina. The Lincoln biography grew to a total of six volumes, with the publication of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. He won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for the Lincoln books. In 1959 he even won a Grammy for his narration of Copeland’s “Lincoln Portrait.”

The house on Hermitage was built in 1880 by attorney Samuel B. Gookins. Sandburg rented the second floor apartment from 1911 through 1914. He later lived in Maywood and in Elmhurst. The Carl Sandburg Home is an official Chicago Landmark. It is privately owned.

Though he lived elsewhere after 1930, Sandburg remained one of Chicago’s favorite sons. In 1960 the city embarked on an urban renewal project in the Clark-Division area. The idea was to stabilize the west end of the Gold Coast with a series of high-rise apartments. They called the new buildings Sandburg Village.

Sandburg himself kept Chicago in his heart. He often returned to the city that made him famous. He appeared regularly on Irv Kupcinet’s TV round-table. When Orland Park named a high school in his honor, Sandburg came to the dedication and had a grand time, telling stories and singing ballads.

He had been a workingman. He always cultivated the image of the people’s poet, with rumpled clothing and unkempt hair. A few years after the dedication, he decided to revisit “his” high school. By then a different principal was in charge. The new man thought Sandburg was a panhandler and threw him out.

Carl Sandburg died in 1967. Some years earlier he had summed up his philosophy this way: “What I need mainly is three things in life, possibly four–to be out of jail, to eat regular, to get what I write printed, and then a little love at home and a little outside.”

In his new novel, writer Shalom Auslander resurrects the living ghost of Anne Frank

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0500

At a recent reading in Chicago, Shalom Auslander confided in his audience that he had asked his publisher if he could skip the normal book tour Q & A, and just interview himself.

The questions he gets are “often repetitive,” he lamented. “Normally, the first one is about Philip Roth.”

Upon reading Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead Books, 2012), it’s not hard to see why. It’s not just that both Roth and Auslander are Jewish writers who struggle with questions of contemporary Jewishness, like the presence or absence of God in modern life. It’s not just that each writes explicitly about his various sexual urges, whether in Portnoy’s Complaint (or, OK, just about every Roth novel) or in Auslander’s very NSFW essays for GQ and Nerve.com.

No, it is also because with Auslander’s latest novel, Hope: A Tragedy, each writer has now conjured a speculative fiction or “what if” version of Anne Frank -- not as a young diarist murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, but as an adult who secretly survived the Holocaust and who now lives in hiding somewhere in America.

In Roth’s case, a fictionalized Frank appears in The Ghost Writer, the first book in the Zuckerman series. Published in 1979, it is, like many of Roth’s books, a portrait of post-war America: The Holocaust has just happened, Jews are not yet fully assimilated and, anxious about their status and security in this country, are eager to portray themselves in a positive light. The main character, Nathan Zuckerman, is a young, aspiring writer who has been criticized by his parents and his rabbi for supposedly bringing shame to his family and his faith by writing honestly about the moral and financial foibles of some of his relatives.

Searching for his path, Zuckerman goes on a pilgrimage to visit his hero, a reclusive and aging novelist living in the countryside with a young mistress—who may or may not be Anne Frank. Marrying Anne Frank, it dawns on Zuckerman, could solve all of his problems: If he were married to this patron saint of Jewish writing, he and his writing would be unassailable.

Zuckerman’s fantasy is, of course, just that. But the question, even accusation, that Roth seems to raise with this scenario is provocative and troubling: In a world determined to “never forget,” is Anne Frank more useful dead – as a symbol of persecution, injustice and mass murder – than she would be alive?

In Auslander’s Hope, his fictionalized version of Frank reaches a similar set of conclusions when she walks into a publisher’s office after escaping from Bergen-Belsen. “Stay dead,” the publisher tells her. “They want a martyr, they want to know we’ve hit bottom. That it gets better, because it can’t get worse.”

Auslander’s treatment of this material is darker than Roth’s, yet somehow much funnier, too. This American Life fans know Auslander from radio stories that detail with deadpan hilarity and horror the drama of his Orthodox Jewish upbringing. The same listeners will be pleased to find these same qualities here.

Hope is set in the present day, and Auslander’s main character, Solomon Kugle, has moved his wife and young son to the rural town of Stockton, where nothing has ever happened, trying to escape the past. We already know that Kugle can’t, though, and the point is driven home when he discovers a feisty, half-dead Anne Frank squirreled away in the attic of his newly acquired farmhouse, trying to write the story of the latter part of her life.

That’s where we find Kugle in this excerpt of Hope: A Tragedy, read aloud by Auslander during his recent stop in Chicago. You can listen in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Shalom Auslander spoke at an event presented by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in February. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.