Chicago Girl is the title of my new book and indeed I am a Chicago girl. I’ve lived here most of my life, with occasional and sometimes lengthy forays to Missouri, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and Kentucky. But I’ve been back to my home base for 35 years and I’m not going anywhere.
My new book of essays is part memoir but mostly a series of reviews and observations on theater, music,film, books, writing, politics, technology and a bunch of other subjects that I obsess about.
The cover is a view that may be familiar to you if you’re a Chicagoan. I took it from the Chess Pavilion at North Avenue Beach, looking south toward Navy Pier.
Many of the essays are adapted from reviews and articles I’ve written over the last eight years. But there are anomalies, like a timeline of my life in technology, starting with my acquisition of a certain special fountain pen at the age of 12. And there’s a long poem titled “City Lady Blues” about why I never wanted to move to the suburbs, despite the temptations offered by a certain gentleman. “Can’t you see I’m a city lady? Don’t wanna be a country girl.” I performed that poem one evening with my son Steve playing background blues on his tenor sax. And the oldest essay in the book is “The Story of Max: The World’s Greatest Cat,” written in 1987.
The ironic aspect of my book’s publication now is that the pandemic enabled me to finish it. In normal times, I would be seeing and reviewing three or four plays a week, but that activity was shut down along with most of the rest of our lives. So I decided to focus on finally finishing the book of essays I had fiddled with for a few years. I wrote about that in “Poem for a Pandemic: A Nightmare and a Blessing” in April..
If you’re interested in learning more about my book, both the personal stories and the arts commentary, check it out here and on the publisher’s website. Right now, you’ll find the print version but the e-book will be available soon.
This was the cover of my old copy of Player Piano, lost in the mists of time and too many moving boxes.
It’s 1952 and a debut novel by a 23-year-old writer is published by Delacorte Press. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Player Piano about a near-future society is categorized as science fiction and doesn’t get much attention.
I first read Player Piano many years ago. Probably some time soon after college, when I was devouring his other books, such as Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five. I read Player Piano then too, but my copy disappeared in one of my moves.
Recently my son Andrew mentioned that Player Piano has parallels to today’s society, made up of an elite, educated upper class and an underemployed lower class. I decided it was time to take another look at Vonnegut. I am amazed by how striking the parallels are to today’s society. And how prescient Vonnegut was, as a young writer/publicist working for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He recreates that milieu in Player Piano as Ilium, home of the Ilium Works, “where machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles….”
The time is after the third world war, which was followed by riots, and a government clampdown on saboteurs. The machines developed in the wartime miracle now control every aspect of life and no humans are needed to operate them.
The hero of Player Piano is Dr. Paul Proteus, a brilliant engineer and head of Ilium Works. He’s mostly happy with his life as an engineer and manager and hopes for a promotion to run the Pittsburgh Works. So does his wife Anita. They’re part of the executive/engineer class who live a privileged life with high incomes and lavish homes and possessions.
The others? Since people are no longer needed to operate or control the machines, they are given the choice of serving in the Army or working for the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps—the so-called Reeks and Wrecks, who fix bridges and fill potholes. The government provides everyone with an adequate income for home, food, clothing, healthcare, education—everything a family needs to survive. Perhaps you think people are happy to have all their needs provided without doing any real work? But no, people are depressed and desperate to do real meaningful work.
As one writer said about Player Piano, “The rotten core buried under a façade of shining machines is that this society has made humanity superfluous, sucked all meaning out of the world, and replaced humanist values with a machine ethic predicated upon a new holy trinity: ‘Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.’” Sound familiar?
Even human relations are mechanized, Vonnegut thinks. Paul talks about his wife being skilled at “the mechanics of marriage.” On their phone calls, Anita ends by telling Paul she loves him and he robotically replies, “I love you, Anita.”
Paul occasionally visits a certain bar in Homestead, the area where the Reeks and Wrecks live. He becomes aware of their unhappiness as he talks to workers who have ideas and skills they’d like to contribute, even though they’re unwanted.
Kurt Vonnegut in 1972. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Nevertheless, he loves the music of his machines. “The lathe groups, the tenors…. the welders, the baritones…. the punch presses, the basses.” He has nagging doubts about his life, which he tries not to acknowledge, until some dramatic events take place at the executive retreat on an island called The Meadows. It’s the kind of event you’d expect it to be: lots of team sports, structured camaraderie, controlled drinking and tight scheduling, announced by the omnipresent loudspeaker. Paul’s future life changes as a result and he ends up joining the revolution concocted by the underground Ghost Shirt Society, a group of radicals who want to destroy key machinery and restore dignity to human work.
There’s a second thread to Player Piano. A representative of the U.S. Department of State is escorting two foreign visitors around to various American cities. The Shah of Bratpuhr and his translator express an outsider’s skepticism of the wonders of American society. It’s Vonnegut’s technique, which he uses in other books, of showing a skewed perspective on our lives.
Player Piano isn’t a diatribe against technology. It’s a critique of corporatized society, of adopting technological change without any thought for social or political change. We can have machines control everything without any human operators, so let’s just do that.
Vonnegut’s writing is a mix of satire and black humor, social and political critique. He’s hard to categorize, which probably didn’t help his reputation among critics who find it more convenient to pigeonhole artists and writers. He’s more likely to be recognized for his literary genius since his death in 2007 gave critics a reason to fully explore his life and oeuvre.
So I highly recommend a reading or rereading of Player Piano for a break from your daily news and political blather. If you’re thinking well, this sounds interesting, but I don’t like sci-fi. Player Piano isn’t sci-fi. There are no aliens with weird-shaped heads, no humans with amorphous sexual abilities, no strange worlds defined by frost and desert. This is the U.S., populated by people like you and me. Furthermore, it’s a readable 340 pages, not a doorstop tome. You can buy it here or here or borrow it from your public library.
And now, it’s time to reread Vonnegut’s acknowledged masterpiece, SlaughterhouseFive.
Last week, more than 300 newspapers all over the country recommitted to the basic tenets of a free press and community service through journalism. At Third Coast Review, we thought it was important to take this same stand and point out that writers for online media are journalists too. We are thus bound to and supported by the First Amendment. Here’s my essay.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” The famously acerbic journalist, A.J. Liebling, wrote that in the New Yorker in 1960. Although that may well have been true in 1960, today we are journalists without owning a press.
On August 16, more than 300 U.S. newspapers joined in editorial harmony to state vehemently that a free press is essential to America’s democracy and to counter the ridiculous and hateful statements of the current occupant of the White House. (Do I have to say his name?)
Initiated by the Boston Globe, the event was joined in by major metro dailies such as the Houston Chronicle and the New York Times, both Chicago dailies and the suburban Daily Herald and many smaller city newspapers all over the state and the country, such as the Durango (Colo.) Herald, the Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune and the Ripon (Wis.) Commonwealth Press. You can read the New York Times editorial and quotes from many of the 350 newspapers here.
We applaud the comments of all these important newspapers, large and small. We particularly liked this excerpt from the Sun-Times editorial:
“We are the enemy of nothing but ‘thoughts and prayers’ when children are slaughtered. We are the enemy of faked-up outrage.
“We are the friend of the teacher who never gives up, of the small business owner who hires ex-offenders, of the bus driver who makes every last stop, of the architect who designs a beautiful building, and of the bricklayer and ironworker who build it.
“We are the friend of an open lakefront, a clean Chicago River, excellent middle linebackers and deep-dish pizza.
“Above all, we are the enemy of bad journalism, and we commit ourselves each day to practicing the best journalism. We do our best to tell our city’s story, the sum total of every Chicagoan’s story, straight and fair, come what may.”
We want to point out that online news media also support and value the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. Our fellow online media—such as our friends at Block Club Chicago, the Beachwood Reporter, Reddit Chicago, and possibly Chance’s reborn Chicagoist—all benefit by the First Amendment. You may not think of this when you read our pop music reviews, our commentary on storefront theater, our videogame reviews and Third Coast Today, our regular news feature. But like our online colleagues, we are beneficiaries of the First Amendment and we damn well will publish whatever we think is important for our readers to know. And no government agency—should they know or care what we write about—will stop us. Not the city, or the police department, the county, the state of Illinois or any government agency. If Third Coast Review is ever silenced, it will be because of lack of funds or lack of support.
So as the Boston Globe and the New York Times requested, read and subscribe to your local newspaper. And read and share your local arts and culture site, Third Coast Review.
And I’ll add here, please read, share and support your local bloggers and other writers who comment on matters political and personal. Share their posts, comment on their sites and donate a few bucks if you can.
The Printer’s Devil explained. The symbol of the printer’s devil reflects my love for the printed word. A printer’s devil in history was thought to be a pesky demon that, when the printer was not watching, would iuvert letters, mizspell a word or perhaps remove an entire word or even a complete line. This was in the era when type was set one character at a time. In more recent eras, the printer’s devil was an apprentice who ran errands and did menial tasks around the print shop. That was me in high school, when I worked at my dad’s print shop in the West Loop.
The Printer’s Devil is an occasional column I write for Third Coast Review. This post is adapted from my first Printer’s Devil column. More on the little red devil below.
Poetry has always been part of my life, from Mother Goose rhymes to poetry and poetry-writing classes in high school and college. Mostly it was just on the sidelines of my life, except for a few brief flurries of serious writing. But recently I’ve decided that I need to help jump-start the poetry renaissance.
You may not think a poetry renaissance is necessary in Chicago. After all, Adam Morgan writesthat Chicago may be the poetry capital of America, partly because of the founding of Poetry Magazine here in 1912. He also credits other publications, venues and poets for Chicago’s dynamic poetry scene.
The poetry slam got its start in Chicago in 1984, and the Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition was founded here by Kevin Coval, Anna West and Young Chicago Authors. LTAB competitions are now held in cities across the U.S. (I recently wrote about a night of Coval’s readings from his latest book of poetry, A People’s History of Chicago, at the Driehaus Museum.)
The national Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine, is headquartered here and we also have the Poetry Center of Chicago.
Most any night of the week you can find a live poetry reading somewhere in Chicago.
Poetry lives a full and vibrant life in Chicago.
Nationally, the Academy of American Poets offers you a Poem a Day by email. Some of them are quite good. Many are by contemporary poets and some by traditional poets (i.e. dead white people). The Poetry Foundation has an app for your smartphone that enables you to search and read a favorite poet or “spin” and choose poems that match a mood or situation, like “Nostalgia and Family” or “Frustration and Love.”
The renaissance in poetry isn’t new but it’s exciting. It may have started with the genesis of poetry slams 30-some years ago but hip-hop’s expansion to a wider audience through the work of Chicago artists like Common and Chance the Rapper helped its revival.
I was not much of a hip-hop fan until a few years ago, when I saw the megamusical Hamilton for the first time. It opened my eyes to the wonder of hip-hop in storytelling. Hip-hop artists can smash together a profusion of words—like Dylan and early Springsteen—and make their stories rich and compelling.
My own love for poetry began in college. We read Shakespearean sonnets in my Shakespeare summer school class at UIC (sitting on the grass outside our own “Harvard on the Rocks” at Navy Pier). Listening to Professor Kogan read the sonnets aloud and reading them ourselves was a joy. Then later at Mizzou, I always found time away from my journalism courses for poetry. My favorites were:
A modern lit course taught by Donald Justice in which I learned to love T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Justice was one of the few professors I remember by name from my undergrad years. He was a quietly inspiring teacher and later considered an influential poet and writer. It was exciting to learn recently that a good friend also studied with Justice at another school. We enjoyed sharing our memories of his classes.
A marvelous poetry-writing seminar with the great poet, John Neihardt. I still have my folder of poems, written on a typewriter and edited by hand, from that class. Some of them are not bad; some are embarrassing.
Image courtesy John Neihardt State Historical Site.
As a J-School reporter, I interviewed Professor Neihardt at his farm home and wrote a feature on him for the Columbia Missourian, the J-School’s daily newspaper.
I’ve continued to read poetry, listen to it at every chance, and occasionally write it over the years. My poetry library includes works by my favorite poets—Auden, Eliot and W.B. Yeats, Chicago’s own Stuart Dybek, Kevin Coval and Carl Sandburg, plus Ron Padgett, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca. I’m expanding my poetry interests by reading a more diverse group of poets. I like the work of Richard Blanco, who read “One Today” at the second Obama inauguration. I also like Natalie Diaz; her first book is When My Brother Was an Aztec, and Chicago poets Sandra Marchetti, Eileen Favorite and Laura Passin.
The 2016 film, Paterson, was thrilling because it was about a busdriver poet. As I said in my review, “It’s a beautiful film about nothing much.” It’s the story of a busdriver named Paterson who drives a bus around Paterson, NJ, and writes poetry every day. He also reads William Carlos Williams, a Paterson native.
As I said, my passion for poetry makes me want to jump-start the poetry renaissance. I guess I want everyone to appreciate poetry. So I ask, why do so many people say they don’t like poetry?
I belong to a book group that meets every month or two to read and discuss a notable book of fiction or nonfiction. It’s a group of a dozen or more highly literate and well-read people. One night I suggested we read the Kevin Coval book I mentioned above and I got groans. “I could see reading a few poems,” one person said, “but a whole book?”
My attempt to sell poetry that way didn’t work but the host for the next meeting asked me to spend a few minutes talking about poetry and reading a few poems. So I did that and I think most people said they enjoyed it. But several insisted they still hated poetry. Why, I wondered?
Matthew Zapruder tries to answer that question in his 2017 book, Why Poetry? It’s “an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for its accessibility to all readers.” Zapruder thinks the aversion to poetry results from the way it is taught in most schools—as something to analyze, parse and understand. Really, he says, the way to read poetry is just to read the words of the poem and forget everything we were taught in school about it. Just read the words.
Plaque on house where Auden lived in Brooklyn Heights. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Zapruder tells about how he was assigned to read a poet in high school and he picked W.H. Auden because the name was listed first. He knew nothing about Auden, whether the name indicated a he or she. But he still remembers the first lines he read, from “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Something just clicked, he says. He didn’t quite understand all of it but he knew it said something important about being human.
Auden is perhaps my favorite poet of all; I have half a dozen books of his work. In his great poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” he writes, “For poetry makes nothing happen: It survives in the valley of its saying … / It survives / A way of happening, a mouth.”
The little red devil is a toy that operates under solar power, so it’s hard to make him hold still for a portrait. He’s standing on the letters that make up my first name, from fonts of various sizes from California job cases. Thanks to my son Steve and his wife Jan for finding them at an antique store.
My copy of The Waste Land from my modern lit class at Mizzou.
(An homage to the St. Louis poet who became a Brit and also to Lou Rawls)
January is the cruelest month.
Where did T.S. Eliot get that April business?
January is the cruelest month, breeding
Black ice boulders out of the dead streets, mixing
Memory and desire, the memory of light,
The longing for sun, at least more of it every day.
January is the cruelest month, building
Slippy slides on the sidewalks, lurking
In wait for me to land flat
On my butt, if I’m lucky.
January is cruel, refusing
To share its light with those who wake in the dark
And work through the rare hours of sunshine.
Assuming there is any anyway.
Sometimes winter keeps us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life for spring.
What branches grow
Out of this icy rubbish? We do know
There is life to come under this ugly blackness.
I will show you how winter can be beautiful
If only the ice would melt
And we could walk happily again
On dry sidewalks, even if the temp is single digits
With a wind chill below zero.
While the Hawk blows off the lake, sending
Me on to a dead end street
Where there is nothing to stop the wind.
So they put ropes on some of the buildings to help
Us get around the corners.
January is still the cruelest month.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold because she didn’t get a flu shot
Despite being the wisest woman in the Midwest.
Here, said she, is your card. The frozen Phoenician sailor
Who should have known better than to go out without
Boots, hat, earmuffs, mittens and down.
Those are shells that were his ears. Look!
Now frozen to pink marble.
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks.
I could have told her not to swim off the rocks
At Addison, when chunks of ice cover
What was once and will be again
Our beautiful blue lake.
January is the cruelest month, even if, as I,
You love winter.
Just not quite as much of it.
———————-
T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land And Other Poems, (1930, Harcourt Brace and Company, Inc.)
Lou Rawls, “Dead End Street Monolog” from Lou Rawls at the Century Plaza (Live) (1973)
And Mr. Justice (I think), my senior year English professor at the University of Missouri, who taught me to love modern poetry and especially, T.S. Eliot.
The first time I heard of Brian Doyle or his book, Chicago: A Novel, was when I read a review on my own website, Third Coast Review. I have read a lot of Chicago history and lore, and my first thought was, how did I not know about this book? I bought a copy right away.
I fell in love with the book from the first page.
“On the last day of summer, in the year I graduated from college, I moved to Chicago, that middle knuckle in our national fist, and rented a small apartment on the north side of the city, on the lake. I wanted to be as near the lake as possible, because Lake Michigan is no lake at all, but a tremendous inland sea, and something about its vast blue sheen, and tumultuous weathers … appealed to me greatly.”
wasI’ve been reading the book in small sips, before I go to sleep at night. The reason is, it’s only 300 pages and I don’t want it to be over. When I started writing this essay, I had only 20 pages left to read and I was sad.
Chicago: A Novel is really more the memoir of an unnamed protagonist’s year-plus spent living and working in Chicago in about 1979-80. (It’s Doyle’s history and his story.) For the most part it’s a realistic story of the characters (especially the residents in his apartment building and the dudes from the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles he plays basketball with on a nearby school playground) and places, such as Comiskey Park (he and his neighbors were Sox fans despite living a few blocks from Wrigley), blues and jazz clubs and places to buy empanadas and gyros. Near the end, there’s the story of John the Mailman, a student of dragonflies.
It’s the story of a guy just out of college with his first real job, working for a Catholic magazine at a Loop office. We travel with him on his bus rides to work on the Sound Asleep Bus and on his long walks exploring the city or dribbling his shiny old basketball along the lakefront. What keeps it from being a real memoir and makes it novelistic is the addition of bits of magical realism. The most important is Edward, an amazing dog of an indeterminate breed, who collects stamps and speeches by Abraham Lincoln. Then there’s the detective who—when the opening day trip to Comiskey has to be canceled because of an illness—tells the entire game, play by play, picking up the action from some radio waves in the air unheard by anyone else.
Doyle’s book is well written and full of Chicagoness. He places major and minor places in their exact places on the city map like the way “Broadway bends between Roscoe and Aldine streets” and a wonderful gyro shop over on Washtenaw. It’s hard to believe it was written by a guy who lived here less than two years.
When I was about midway through the book, I learned that Doyle, who now lives in Portland and is editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland and a widely published author, is now suffering from brain cancer. He had surgery for what he called “a big. honkin’ brain tumor” last November and also has been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. There’s a Doyle family GoFundMe page to help with his expenses.
Chicago: A Novel is a love letter to the city I love. I marked so many quotable passages in the book. Here’s one of my favorites.
“Sometimes, even now, years later and far away, on steel-gray days when the wind whips and I am near large waters, I feel a bolt of what I can only call Chicagoness, and I remember, I remember … what? A certain Chicago of the mind, I suppose. And sometimes then I sit by a fire, and I remember aloud…. about the way buildings crowded the streets and the sidewalks were narrow and buckled in the oldest parts of the city, and how stores and shops leaned in eagerly toward the street…. And the swirl of snow along the lake, eddying and whirling and composing drifts deep enough to hide a horse. … And the bone-chilling cold, and shuffle of boots leery and weary of ice…. And the smell of sausages and kielbasa and onions and beer at games and carnivals and festivals and street fairs…. Perhaps this is true of every city, but it was certainly true of mine then, that what the world saw … was not at all the real city, and was only the gloss and sheen of a rough grace that was the actual bone and music of the place.”
Susannah Pratt, who wrote the review I mentioned, observes, “Doyle’s book is a balm. While not shying away from Chicago’s ruthless side, the book is also a reminder of the real people and food and stories and music and resilience that continue to exist here. Those of us living here know these things; what a relief to read it coming from somewhere outside.”
I finished the book last night. I didn’t want to finish it because I knew the ending—when the protagonist drove south along the lake, “past the ragged glories of the South Side … over the Calumet River and onto the interstate highway and over the Illinois border into Indiana”—would make me cry. And it did.
Paterson, the fine new film by Jim Jarmusch, has finally opened in Chicago. And it’s getting some of the attention it deserves. It’s a beautiful film about nothing much. The life of a bus driver named Paterson, in Paterson, New Jersey, who observes the life around him on his bus and in the city. And he writes poetry in his spare moments. On the bus, while eating his lunch at Paterson’s Great Falls of the Passaic River. His wife, played by a delightful and funny actor named Golshifteh Farahani, stays at home and makes art…and yearns to be a country singer. Oh, and there’s a dog too.
Paterson is showing now at Chicago theaters, including Century City Cinema. Here’s the review by Steve Prokopy from Third Coast Review. His comments perfectly encapsulate why this is such a wonderful film.
The poems that Paterson writes in the film are by Ron Padgett, a poet whose work I wasn’t familiar with. I’ve now read a lot of his poems online and just ordered two of his books. Jeffrey Brown interviewed Padgett and filmmaker Jarmusch last night on the PBS Newshour.
Kill Your Darlings, a traditional piece of writing advice*, is the title of the live lit series I’m participating in, along with other Third Coast Review colleagues and a crew of other writers and performers. We’re having a great time with it – and it’s consuming a huge amount of my time.
Kill Your Darlings: A Live Lit/Improv Mashup is the full title and we’re performing for the next six Wednesday nights at ComedySportz Theater on Belmont. We have writers and actors who read their own stories, plus improv players and sometimes live music. Each night has a theme based on one of our website’s cultural categories. And we’ll have a celebrity guest reader each week.
Kill Your Darlings: A Live Lit/Improv Mashup
7pm Wednesday, August 10, is Food Night
Csz Theater, 929 W. Belmont
Hear me read a story about potato pancakes and my Jewish/non-Jewish heritage
I hope you’ll come out and see us this Wednesday and any Wednesday thru September 14. For each night, I’m writing a new personal story (something like a blog essay), baring my soul in some cases, editing, refining, rehearsing and refining it. I mention this as sort of an explanation why I haven’t been writing for Nancy Bishop’s Journal very much lately.
(Of course, I’m still editor in chief and theater critic for Third Coast Review. Check out my recent reviews on the Stages page. I’ve recently reviewed War Paint; Between Riverside and Crazy; Byhalia, Mississippi; Direct from Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys; and Einstein’s Gift. I also enjoyed interviewing and writing a feature on Ron Keaton, the actor who starred in Churchill and, along with Kurt Johns, has formed a new theater company, SoloChicago.)
* What does “kill your darlings” mean? Slate magazine tried to track down the original source a few years ago when a film of the same title came out about Allen Ginsberg as a young writer. Basically, the advice means “get rid of your most precious and especially self-indulgent passages for the greater good of your literary work.”
So the idea for this live-lit series is that we each resurrect various darlings we’ve killed in the past and turn them into new, sharply written stories. And a few of mine actually do include or were inspired by something I wrote in the past but never published.
The Kill Your Darlings team.
Here are the stories I’ll be telling for the next six weeks. Opening night was last Wednesday and I told the story about my film addiction and my favorite film directors, focusing on Guy Maddin, the Canadian film director who made films you never heard of. The Darlings, our improv team, performed along with me. I was on a DVD and they paused me now and then to comment on my “lecture.”
August 10. The theme is Food. My story is “Potato Pancakes—and Why They’re Not Latkes.” Monica Eng, the WBEZ food editor, will be guest reader.
August 17, Music Night. My story is “How I Became a Bruce Springsteen Fan and How It Governs My Life.” My friend, June Sawyers, who has written a couple of dozen books on pop music topics, will be the guest reader.
August 24. The theme is Stages and I’m curating the night. The concept will be how social media and the comment community are affecting theater reviews. My story will be about the uproar around the Steppenwolf for Young Adults play, This Is Modern Art, which I reviewed last year with my 17-year-old grandson. Kerry Reid, theater critic for the Tribune, will be the guest reader.
August 31. The theme is Beyond, beyond now, beginnings and endings. My story for this night is about my divorcee love life — it includes a long poem. My son Steve will accompany me with an improvised solo on the tenor saxophone. The guest reader will be Ian Belknap of the Write Club.
September 7 is Art night. I haven’t decided what I’m going to write for this night yet. I may even skip the reading, but of course I’ll attend.
September 14 is Lit night and appropriately, it will be set in a Chicago saloon. NU prof Bill Savage, the guest reader, will critique our readings in real time. My story is about my obsession with the Spanish Civil War.
Perhaps life will get back to normal after that. Although I’m not sure what my normal is any more.
Stuart Dybek at the Art Institute. Photo by Nancy Bishop.
Last week I spent an hour wandering around the Art Institute’s Modern Wing with Chicago poet Stuart Dybek and a bunch of other poetry fans. As I described in my article on Third Coast Review, the Pop-Up Poetry event was designed for a poet to discuss works of art that influenced him—and how they related to the writing to be discussed.
Dybek talked about a period in his life when he was interviewing for jobs and used the Art Institute as a place to hang out between interviews. Its pluses were that it had phone booths and clean rest rooms, but it also had light—light streaming in from skylights, but also the light glowing from the paintings of the Impressionists. He read a section from his book of short stories, The Coast of Chicago, called “Killing Time” about that experience.
He talked about standing in front of those paintings and feeling that he could walk into them. He wrote, “I wanted to be somewhere else, to be a dark blur waiting to board the Normandy train in the smoke-smudged Saint-Lazare station; I wanted a ticket out of my life, to be riding a train whose windows slid past a landscape of grain stacks in winter fields.”
But he would always end up standing in front of Edward Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks,” because he felt he needed the darkness to balance the light of the Impressionists.
While talking about Hopper, he mentioned a book I was not familiar with. It’s The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, with poems collected and introduced by Gail Levin. He mentioned that the works of many well-known as well as obscure poets created word paintings that brought new meanings to Hopper’s imagery.
Hopper’s work is quiet, even when several people are in the space within the picture frame. Are they lonely? Not necessarily. Being alone doesn’t necessarily mean loneliness. Lovely solitude.
The book sounded fascinating and I looked it up when I got home. Nope, it was not in any bookstore I could find. Since it was published in 1995, I was afraid it would be out of print. But not so amazingly, I found it on amazon.com, for sale from one of the Amazon Marketplace vendors. I’ve had very good luck buying quirky, hard-to-find books that way, so I immediately ordered a copy that was described as being in very good condition. I was thrilled to find it in my mailbox yesterday and it is a treasure. It’s hard cover, a slim 80 pages, with a dust jacket. The size is 7.5 x 7.5 inches.
Levin’s introduction is a lovely essay on the themes of poetry and solitude and the public awareness and appreciation for Hopper’s work. (The Art Institute’s 2008 exhibition of his work was beautifully curated with thought-provoking legends about his life and his work.)
In The Poetry of Solitude, poet Larry Levis tells a story about the woman in the 1931 painting titled “Hotel Room.” He suggests she has just finished arranging her mother’s funeral and her small estate.
Her face, in shadow,
Is more silent than this painting, or any
Painting … .
You sell the house and auction off each thing
Inside the house, until
You have a satchel, a pair of black acceptable
Shoes and one good flowered dress. There is a check
Between your hands and your bare knees for all of it —
The land and the wheat that never cared who
Touched it , or why ….
Four poets reflect upon the 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” and the stories of the four people in the painting. Joyce Carol Oates writes,
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves,
even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit,
and there’s a woman. The woman is wearing
a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms,
a curve of her creamy chest, she’s contemplating
a cigarette in her right hand thinking
her companion has finally left his wife but
can she trust him?
Of the 1930 painting, “Early Sunday Morning,” showing a row of storefronts, John Stone writes,
Somewhere in the next block
someone may be practicing the flute
but not here
Where the entrances
to four stores are dark
the awnings rolled in
Nothing open for business
Across the second story
ten faceless windows
In the foreground
a barber pole, a fire hydrant,
as if there could ever again
Be hair to cut
fire to burn ….
As I described in my post about my hour spent with Stuart Dybek, he read his own poems and the work of other poets and reflected on the nature of words and images. The book gives even broader meaning to the relationship of words and images, narrative and abstraction.
A note on the paintings mentioned here. You can see “Nighthawks” at the Art Institute. “Early Sunday Morning” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “Hotel Room” is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
If you do a search for “Edward Hopper paintings” online, you can see and enlarge thumbnails of all of them.
Chicago Girl is the title of my new book and indeed I am a Chicago girl. I’ve lived here most of my life, with occasional and sometimes lengthy forays to Missouri, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and Kentucky. But I’ve been back to my home base for 35 years and I’m not going anywhere.
The Printer’s Devil explained. The symbol of the printer’s devil reflects my love for the printed word. A printer’s devil in history was thought to be a pesky demon that, when the printer was not watching, would iuvert letters, mizspell a word or perhaps remove an entire word or even a complete line. This was in the era when type was set one character at a time. In more recent eras, the printer’s devil was an apprentice who ran errands and did menial tasks around the print shop. That was me in high school, when I worked at my dad’s print shop in the West Loop.
The poetry slam got its start in Chicago in 1984, and the Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition was founded here by Kevin Coval, Anna West and Young Chicago Authors. LTAB competitions are now held in cities across the U.S. (I recently wrote about a night of Coval’s readings from his latest book of poetry, A People’s History of Chicago, at the Driehaus Museum.)
The first time I heard of Brian Doyle or his book, Chicago: A Novel, was when I read a 
When I was about midway through the book, I learned that Doyle, who now lives in Portland and is editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland and a 
nancy bishop's journal 