a goldfinch instant: Concord to India Haikus

Paul Friedrich’s a goldfinch instant is in the spirit of Basho – but it breathes with Henry David Thoreau as well. Haikus “from Concord to India” are embedded in a prose poem that will be of particular interest to readers familiar with Friedrich’s poetry as well as his work in anthropology and linguistics – and [...]

Irina Ruvinsky – Proust Questionnaire

What is your greatest fear? Forgetting my past What is your greatest extravagance? Teas from Harney & Sons What do you consider your greatest achievement? Surviving a MOSSAD-style 7 day hiking trip in Israel What do you most value in your friends? Reciprocity What is the quality you most like in a man? Irony What [...]

Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook

After losing his lower jaw to cancer, the film critic, who can’t eat, has written a cookbook that is an ode to the rice cooker. In those first few moments at the table, you try not to look at the empty place where his jaw used to be. You wonder how it feels to receive [...]

Close to Moby Dick: instructor Claudia Traudt sails on 19th century clipper ship in Chicago’s Tall Ships Festival

Basic Program instructor Claudia Traudt will be guest-crewing aboard the spectacular Baltimore Clipper Pride of Baltimore II as she races down from Port Washington, WI into Chicago for the Tall Ships Festival at Navy Pier (August 24-29).  Visitors can see and board more than fifteen ships during the festival (see festival website for pricing, access, [...]

Reports from Hell

The damned make for interesting reading, and the underworld has occasioned remarkable travelogues whose vividness has impressed itself deeply into our imagination. This course is an opportunity to compare famous accounts from the two traditions that shaped Western civilization as we know it: Athens and Jerusalem. How are these traditions related, and how do they [...]

Greetings from Greece – from Basic Program Chair Michaelangelo Allocca

My Basic Program teaching colleague Cindy Rutz – shown here with me, prior to sharing an amazing seafood dinner at the Nero Tis Agapes restaurant overlooking the harbor on the island of Spetses, in a photo taken by our student Luke Bretscher – and I recently spent three weeks in Greece, as instructors with the [...]

Paramours and Friends, Monsters and Fiends: Intelligent Love and Evil Passions in Jane Austen’s Novels

We would like to make you aware of the following event sponsored by the Winnetka Public Library to be held at Corner Cooks in Winnetka on Friday, July 9. To register, please call the phone number below. Dine and Discuss – Paramours and Friends, Monsters and Fiends: Intelligent Love and Evil Passions in Austen’s Novels Hear [...]

Bloomsday Readings

Among many things, Joyce’s Ulysses intertwines the day of Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the unforgettable Leopold and Molly Bloom and Dublin denizens.  In this Bloomsday celebration, BP staff lecturer Claudia Traudt will emcee as well as read from “Nausicaa” – the Gerty McDowell and the [...]

Students are Odyssey Project heroes: Studying the humanities as a transformation for the poor. – chicagotribune.com

Eight years later, Star Perry is still blown away by “The Allegory of the Cave.” Plato’s classic philosophy text imagines a group of prisoners living in a cave. Unable to see anything but shadows of objects made by the light of a fire, they conclude that the world is made of shadows. One of the [...]

Rhino Poetry Workshop with Katia Mitova

Welcome Katia!  Poet, teacher, translator. From Eastern Europe to Chicago to Mark Strand.  Wow. FOURTH SUNDAYS RHINO POETRY WORKSHOPS and peer exchange sponsored by RHINO/the Poetry Forum COME AND TRY OUT YOUR NEW WORK ON US! Evanston Public Library Church & Orrington 1:30-4:30 pm — Room 108 Past leaders and readers and all poets welcome. Drop [...]

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