VAC Poetry Reading – Paul Friedrich, Elizabeth Raby, Steven Schroeder
Three poets published by Virtual Artists Collective (VAC) Poetry will read from and discuss their work.

Paul Friedrich  is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought. His poetic publications include four chapbooks and three books of poems and translations: From Root to Flower, Harmony in Babel, and, his latest, a goldfinch instant: Concord to India Haikus.

Elizabeth Raby served as a poet-in-the-schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and taught poetry at Muhlenberg College. Her poems have been translated into Romanian and she is co-author (along with Patricia Goodrich and Casandra Ioan) of a bi-lingual chapbook, Bone, Flesh & Fur (Oase, Carne & Blanã). She has published three collections with virtual artists collective, The Year the Pears Bloomed Twice, Ink on Snow, and, most recently, This Woman.

Steven Schroeder is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. His most recent poetry collections are Turn and (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) a guest giving way like ice melting: thirteen ways of looking at laozi.

Books will be available for sale at the event.

May 24, 2012
6–7 pm
57th Street Books
1301 E. 57th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

and

dwell in possibility
encountering the divine in poetry
…a free reading and conversation open to all
Daniel Bowman, Jr.
David Breeden
Nina Corwin
Albert DeGenova
Larry Janowski
Katia Mitova
Charlie Newman
Elizabeth Raby
Deborah Rosen
Steven Schroeder
Judith Valente

May 26, 2012
1–4 pm
Lutheran School of Theology
1100 E. 55th Street
Chicago, IL 60615

But the risk that people seem most reluctant taking is not a physical but a mental one: just as the concrete in children’s playgrounds has been covered with rubber, so the hard truth about the effort needed for intellectual attainment is being softened by a sort of semantic padding.

Our arts and humanities education at secondary level seems particularly afflicted by falling standards – so much so that universities are now being called upon to help write new A-level syllabuses in order to cram our little chicks with knowledge that, in recent years, has come to seem unpalatable, if not indigestible – knowledge such as English vocabulary beyond that which is in common usage.

Both general readers and specialist critics often complain about my own use of English – not only in my books, but also in my newspaper articles and even in radio talks such as these. “I have to look them up in a dictionary”, they complain – as if this were some kind of torture. Continue reading.

Amplifying Voices Conversation with Theaster Gates and Bart Schultz on the Politics of Architecture and Space

Free

Tues., May 1, 7 p.m.

Location: Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

Here I am talkin’ of parties. I came down here for a party. What happens? Nothing. Not even ice-cream. The gods look down and laugh. This would be a better world for children if the parents had to eat the spinach.

Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, written in 1923, was a four-hour psychodrama acclaimed for its modern use of soliloquy and unflinching approach to adultery, madness and abortion. That the Marx Brothers could so ruthlessly spoof O’Neill’s recently established theatrical trademark – along with those poetic non sequiturs, the invocation of indifferent deities, a whiff of the ineffable beneath the hokey vernacular and the doom-laden register – tells us plenty about the cultural range and tolerances of 1930s cinema audiences, the Marx Brothers’ hair-trigger sensitivity to intellectual pretension, the giddy extent of the 42-year-old playwright’s celebrity and, finally, something about O’Neill’s writing itself.

The weaknesses, then and now, are the portentousness, the thumping candour (not to be confused with honesty, or even sincerity), the heightened sense of the bathetic, and the humdrum observations presented as profound insights into the human condition. They’re weaknesses, but not necessarily flaws, as what fails on the page can be great on the stage.

Weakness, as it happens, was O’Neill’s strength as a writer. He is the laureate of eloquent losers and his work gives voice to a disenfranchised underclass of prostitutes, sailors, drug addicts, suicides, nomads, deadbeats, fringe-dwellers and no-hopers, presented for our instruction and, of course, entertainment. The epic length of some of the plays and his characters’ often chronic loquaciousness make the O’Neill experience a gruelling one for actors and audiences, and rightly so. He suffered for his art and, as the old gag has it, now it’s our turn. Continue reading.

WHAT goes on during a deliberation is a private matter for the jurors alone; the rest of us are privy only to the verdict. That holds true for book awards as well as murder cases. So when the Pulitzer Prize Board announced on Monday that there were three finalists for the fiction prize and no winner, we were left to draw our own conclusions.

So far I’ve been able to come up with two: either the board was unable to reach a consensus, or at the end of the day the board members decided that none of the finalists, and none of the other books that were not finalists, were worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

What I am sure of is this: Most readers hearing the news will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction.

As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this. It’s fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one.

Still, it is infinitely more galling to me as a reader, because there were so many good books published this year. I put Edith Pearlman’s “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories” at the top of that list, and so did many others. She was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. Her collection would have stood among the best winners in the Pulitzer’s history.

My other favorite was Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” which did make it onto the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. I don’t think there is a sentence in that book that isn’t perfectly made, and its deeply American story fits with the Pulitzer’s criteria. Continue reading.

None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.

Even without the ‘nothing else’ this is a pretty hyperbolic proposition. With the ‘nothing else’ it turns into a form of madness, a suggestion that we shall not grow old at all unless we keep failing to receive the passions, vices and insights that come to see us. This would be a life governed by new necessities, entirely free from the old ones, exempt from time and biology. The sentences are clear enough but don’t read easily as fantasy or figure of speech. Benjamin is asking us to entertain this magical thought for as long as we can, and not to replace it too swiftly by something more sensible.

He is writing about Proust and he found the trope in Proust, where ageing and death are caused not by missing experiences but by fret and worry, and more significantly by the fret and worry we bring to others:

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

The implication, again, is that a human life would last for ever if we didn’t intervene – or in Benjamin’s case, fail to receive our visitors. But why would anyone make such a claim, and why does it, on a certain wavelength, seem so weirdly plausible? Continue reading.

Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters. Continue reading.

Justice Hugo Black once called George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, “too stubborn for his own good.” Sixty-some years later, Anastaplo sits in a basement room in the Gleacher Center, in downtown Chicago, surrounded by a dozen adult-education students, the picture of cheerful amiability. At 86 years old, Anastaplo has taught in the University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults for 55 years. A small man with white hair and clear gray eyes, wearing running shoes and an old tweed jacket, Anastaplo is lively and relaxed. A photocopy of Emerson’s essay “Friendship” lies on the table in front of him.

“I was appalled by how elitist Emerson was in his view of friendship,” says one student, a middle-aged woman.

Anastaplo’s eyes light up. He leans forward, and a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “You were appalled?” he says. She reads from a passage in which Emerson writes, “‘I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.’ Give me a break!” she exclaims, rolling her eyes. Delighted, Anastaplo swivels his head around the room. “Any reactions?”

This was not the life Anastaplo envisioned. On the morning of November 10, 1950, three days after his 25th birthday, he put on a coat and tie and headed downtown to the offices of the Chicago Bar Association, on LaSalle Street, for what he assumed would be the last step to launching a legal career in Illinois. The son of Greek immigrants from downstate Carterville, Anastaplo was a World War II veteran—he had navigated B-17 and B-29 bombers—and a top student at the University of Chicago Law School.  Continue reading: One door closes | The University of Chicago Magazine.

FOR a nation like ours that is seeking its way home from 10 years of war, maybe there’s a dash of inspiration in the oldest tale of homecoming ever — “The Odyssey” — and in new findings that shed stunning light on it.

Homer recounts Odysseus’s troubled journey back from a military entanglement abroad, the decade-long Trojan War. “The Odyssey” is a singular tale of longing for homeland, but it comes with a mystery: Where exactly is Odysseus’s beloved land of Ithaca?

Homer describes Odysseus’s Ithaca as low-lying and the westernmost island of four. That doesn’t fit modern Ithaca, which is mountainous and the easternmost of the cluster of islands in the Ionian Sea.

A British businessman, Robert Bittlestone, working in his spare time, thinks he has solved this mystery — and his solution is so ingenious, and fits the geography so well, that it has been embraced by many of the world’s top experts. Gregory Nagy of Harvard University and Anthony Snodgrass of Cambridge University both told me that they largely buy into Bittlestone’s theory. Peter Green, an eminent British scholar, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Bittlestone is “almost certainly correct.” Continue reading.

So the Bible tells us, and so the Viennese Expressionist Gustav Klimt depicted in a famous 1901 painting, “Judith,” that reflects, in tune with the psychological and artistic sensibility of his era, the braided ecstasy and aggression of women’s sexuality. Klimt depicts her “as a symbol of the devastating power of the female erotic urge.” Judith, “barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture,” writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight.

Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who’s spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails? What’s he doing lecturing us on art history?

We see part of the general’s severed head, Kandel goes on, and “the theme of decapitation is carried further by Judith’s gold choker: Rendered in the same gilded style as the background, it formally severs Judith’s own head from her body.” That Judith is dressed like the sort of elegant, often Jewish Viennoise whose portraits Klimt painted and with whom he was rumored to have affairs, that she particularly resembles his famed subject and mysterious intimate, Adele Bloch-Bauer, only heightens the work’s mysterious, carnal charge.

Hmm. Is Kandel, the 82-year-old Columbia University professor, indulging a little dilettantish fancy after his 50-plus years of intense lab research and theoretical thunderclaps? Or perhaps, after all that strain, he’s just going a little bonkers? Continue reading.

Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth’s collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for “scarab beetle”. The scarab, also known as the “dung beetle”, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, labourers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth. Continue reading.

The Turnip Princess: a newly discovered fairytale.

Perhaps none of that crossed Ann Romney’s mind when, on joining Pinterest last week, she added the gorgeous “Anna Karenina”—a  heart-shattering work by Leo Tolstoy from the 1870s that both Dostoevsky and Nabokov believed was flawless—to her two-entry list of “Books Worth Reading.” (The other entry is “The Forgotten Garden” by Kate Morton.) Yet in the kind of book-club circles that also use Pinterest, a passion for “Anna Karenina” usually signals a romantic disposition. It sometimes makes you seem like you’re open to an extramarital affair.

To illustrate her choice, Romney posted an image of the makeshift gold-and-crimson digital cover of the public-domain edition of the novel. “One of my favorites,” she wrote. Continue reading.

March 15 — Katia Mitova
Nobody, the Writer
“I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?” What if we take Emily Dickinson’s question seriously and try to answer it? Nobody-ness as a creative attitude begins with ancient Odysseus and is exemplified in the works of Shakespeare, Keats, Kierkegaard, Whitman, Pessoa, and Borges. We will try to identify where Nobody the Writer belongs on the map of the creative process and where we belong as readers and writers. The seminar will offer a new perspective on the mysteries of writer’s block and creative flow. Katia Mitova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and lived there and in Poland until 1993, when she moved to the US. She has published short stories, literary criticism, and a chapbook, The Human Shell (1994), in Bulgarian. Since 1999, Mitova has been writing in English. Her doctoral thesis, “Erotic Uncertainty: Toward a Psychology of Literary Creativity” (University of Chicago, 2005), proposes a new approach to understanding the writing process, with useful practical implications. Mitova teaches at the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at University of Chicago and is a professional faculty at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. No manuscripts.

March 22 — Cynthia Rutz
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: Turning a folktale into literature
Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew is based on taming tales that persist in many cultures to this day. But in adapting these sometimes-crude tales for the stage, Shakespeare transforms them into something much richer and more complex, spinning straw into gold. This lecture will explore how Shakespeare retained the basic structure of the folktales, and yet turned the point of the story on its head. Instead of merely a misogynist account of how a man tortures his shrewish wife into submission, in Shakespeare’s hands it becomes a story of empowerment and enriched experience. This account should lead to some good conversation about how a writer can add complexity and nuance to the bare bones of a simple folktale.
Cynthia L. Rutz received her BA from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and MA from the University of Chicago. For several years she worked with Mortimer Adler on his Paideia Project, an education reform project which encourages high school and elementary school teachers to help students think critically through Great Books seminars and coaching. No manuscripts.

Off Campus Writer’s Workshop

Winnetka Community House,
620 Lincoln Avenue
Winnetka, Illinois
9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Networking starts at 9:00 a.m.
Click here for registration information.

A rat, weary of the life of cities, and of courts (for he had played his part in the palaces of kings and in the salons of great lords), a rat whom experience had made wise, in short, a rat who from a courtier had become a philosopher, had withdrawn to his country house (a hole in the trunk of a large young elm), where he lived as a hermit devoting all his time and care to the education of his only son.

The young rat, who had not yet received those severe but salutary lessons that experience gives, was a bit thoughtless; the wise counsels of his father seemed boring to him; the shade and tranquillity of the woods, instead of calming his mind, tired him. He grew impatient to travel and see the world.

One fine morning, he arose early, he made up a little packet of cheese and grains, and without saying a word to anyone, the ingrate abandoned his father and his paternal abode and departed for lands unknown. Continue reading.