Lit & Lectures
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:13 PM
What’s happening this weekend, and it may not be anything at all, is happening at the
Chicago Cultural Center, which hosts a day of happenings inspired by
Fluxus, the 1960s anti-art movement famous for its bizarre, anarchic “happenings.” George Maciunas coined the term, which is related to the Latin word for “to flow,” in 1961. In a review in the
Reader in 1993,
Fred Camper noted that Fluxus artists “worked in a wider variety of media than any other ‘movement’ I know of,” and to the extent that people still follow the movement, that’s true—in 2010 the Experimental Sound Studio hosted a
Fluxus-inspired musical bike ride. In conjunction with its show
"Write Now: Artists and Letterforms," that bastion of avante-gardism the Cultural Center presents Fluxus Day on Fri 2/11 from 11 AM to 5 PM. Some highlights lie beyond the jump.
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Tags: Fluxus, Fluxus Day, Chicago Cultural Center, George Maciunas, Stampland, Fred Camper, Experimental Sound Studio, John M. Bennett, Write Now: Artists and Letterforms
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM
A suite of essays on Facebook in the
New York Times Sunday Review this week includes
a contribution by local legal scholar Lori Andrews, who was featured in December
in the Reader's People Issue. (
My boss, Mara Shalhoup, is treating Andrews’s piece elsewhere.) I was particularly befuddled by Evgeny Morozov’s
“The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” which takes the discussion in a direction . . . you wouldn’t expect. Morozov laments the passing of what he calls the “cyberflaneur” (actually the term was coined on a website called, for some reason, Ceramics Today), based on the original, more corporeal flaneur—the boots-on-the-ground flaneur. A 19th-century French ideal whom Baudelaire and Benjamin (stay with me here) viewed as “an emblem of modernity,” the flaneur in Paris “would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades . . . to cultivate what Honore de Balzac called ‘the gastronomy of the eye.’ . . . His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism.”
OK, now think about GeoCities circa 1995.
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Tags: Lori Andrews, New York Times, Sunday Review, Evgeny Morozov, The Death of the Cyberflaneur, GeoCities, Facebook, People Issue, Baudelaire, Honore de Balzac, Walter Benjamin, flaneur
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Monday, February 6, 2012
Posted
by Jerome Ludwig on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:12 PM
For the Reader
's Chicagoans column, writer Anne Ford switches into oral-historian mode, seeking out interesting characters and letting us hear from them directly. Here we turn the tables in honor of Anne's book signing Tuesday at the DePaul Center Barnes & Noble.
"I got asked to write Peaceful Places Chicago for a few reasons—I used to be a travel editor at Rand McNally, I still do travel writing in addition to other things like Chicagoans, and I’ve lived in the Chicago area for 15 years. But my secret qualification is that I really hate loud noise. Fortunately, I mostly work at home, but a girl has to leave the house sometimes. So, this book.
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Tags: Chicagoans, Anne Ford, Peaceful Places, Chicago, DePaul Center, Barnes & Noble, Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Backward Jesus, Todd & Holland Tea Merchants, Garfield Park Conservatory, St. Therese Chinese Catholic Mission
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 11:00 AM
"Must a man become a demon just to survive?" wonders the protagonist of Hiroshi Teshigahara's striking Japanese drama
Pitfall (1962). On the basis of the movie, I'm inclined to say yes, though the story unfolds amid such a stark natural landscape that even becoming a demon may not be quite enough. You can judge for yourself tonight at 6:30 PM when
Pitfall screens at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Washington; I'm scheduled to take part in a panel discussion after the movie.
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Tags: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Pitfall movie, J.R. Jones, Chicago Cultural Center, Toru Takemitsu, Kobo Abe, Century Club, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, The Man Without a Map, Peter Grilli, Criterion Collection, French New Wave, Luis Bunuel, Los Olvidados, Knox College, Michael A. Schneider, Mat Ryohei Matsuda, Orna Shaughnessy, Robin Metz, Elizabeth Carlin-Metz, Vitalist Theatre of Chicago, The Ghost Is Here, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, theater, literature, movies
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Friday, January 20, 2012
Posted
by Mara Shalhoup on
Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 5:30 PM
I’m probably the last of the rabid Haruki Murakami fans to be forming an opinion on
1Q84. More industrious Murakami readers will chasten me for reaching that opinion too late—the book came out back in October, after all—or too soon—I’m not even halfway done.
But still, having muscled through 800 pages of what’s 1,800 pages on the iPad (that’s twice as many pages as the hardcover edition, true, but plenty of words on which to form an opinion), I’m as perplexed as a modern Japanese antihero whose woman wordlessly left him. Either 1Q84 is a masterpiece waiting (for me to read faster) to happen, or there’s been an awful lot of Nobel Prize hype for something that might, on a conceptual level, be the culmination of Murakami’s mind-boggling body of work, but is still clunkier than almost all of his preceding novels when it comes to things like language, character, and plot.
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Tags: Fiction Week, Variations on a Theme, Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, cats, wells
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Posted
by Ted Cox on
Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 5:00 PM
I have great esteem for Chad Harbach's debut
novel,
The Art of Fielding, as a work of contemporary fiction, for its feel for its characters (most of them, anyway), its deft handling of themes, and its incorporation of Melville and Chekhov. But I have to admit, as a baseball fan, I quite nearly can't stand it.
Baseball and its players are interesting enough in themselves for me, so novels that try to invest the sport with a bunch of mythological hooey, like The Natural and Shoeless Joe, drive me up an ivy-covered wall. After a start every bit as promising as a rookie pitcher's shutout debut, Fielding sours for me from the moment the near-perfect shortstop Henry Skrimshander commits his first error, sending himself and everyone around him into a funk of Steve Blass Disease.
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Tags: The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach, Bernard Malamud, The Natural, Shoeless Joe, baseball, baseball books, baseball novels, Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al, Mark Harris, The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, Danny McBride, Kenny Powers, Eastbound & Down
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Posted
by Jerome Ludwig on
Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 2:30 PM
I'd be remiss to let Fiction Week on the Bleader pass without mentioning the upcoming
Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference, to be held February 29 through March 3 in Chicago.
Billing itself as "the single largest literary gathering in North America" (no argument here), the conference features hundreds of events and more than 500 exhibitors. And there will be dozens of related off-site events open to the public.
Margaret Atwood delivers the keynote address, and other featured presenters include such literary luminaries as Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jennifer Egan, Nikky Finney, Aleksandar Hemon, Audrey Niffenegger, Marilynne Robinson, Luis J. Rodriguez, Rebecca Skloot, Jane Smiley, and Irvine Welsh. And that isn't the half of it.
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Tags: Fiction Week, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jennifer Egan, Nikky Finney, Aleksandar Hemon, Philip Levine, Audrey Niffenegger, Marilynne Robinson, Luis J. Rodriguez, Rebecca Skloot, Jane Smiley, Irvine Welsh
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Posted
by Craig Champlin on
Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 8:00 AM
Editor's note: Craig Champlin submitted a number of shorts for our annual Pure Fiction issue, writing "Pick any of them. What I’d really like is to run 'The Ernie Bedlam Stories' weekly. I have a lot of them and people seem to really like them." We'll run five of the Ernie stories here on the Bleader this week. Here's the fifth and final one.
Inspiration
Ernie felt like the Jack Nicholson character in the movie The Shining. The empty pages of his composition book mocked him. He needed inspiration. He had a deadline to meet.
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Tags: Pure Fiction, Craig Champlin, The Ernie Bedlam Stories
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Thursday, January 19, 2012
Posted
by Craig Champlin on
Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 8:00 AM
Editor's note: Craig Champlin submitted a number of shorts for our annual Pure Fiction issue, writing "Pick any of them. What I’d really like is to run 'The Ernie Bedlam Stories' weekly. I have a lot of them and people seem to really like them." We'll run five of the Ernie stories here on the Bleader this week. Here's the fourth.
It was the first day of Gettysburg
The rebel army was looking for shoes. The Union cavalry was there to prevent them from getting their Buster Browns. The Yanks were led by that Sam guy who played the lifeguard and sold everything on TV. Ernie held a deep affection for history. The rebel army was led by Martin Sheen. Charlie’s dad. The Sam guy, the fella with the giant mustache, wanted to hold the high ground. Ernie understood. He liked to be high too, perhaps because he was short. He had married a woman who was taller than him. She was also smarter than Ernie. She sang better, was better employed, liked to cook, and was good-looking to boot. Frankly, they didn’t have much in common. She was entrenched in reality; Ernie was entrenched in quicksand, constantly seeking the higher ground. That Sam guy was probably a better choice for a husband but was a hundred years too old and off fighting Martin Sheen in Pennsylvania. Sometimes Ernie was a damn visionary. If Martin Sheen told him to cross a big field and attack 20,000 guys playing with guns and canons three days before July 4th; Ernie wouldn’t be attending that picnic. He’d just worry about shoes later on.
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Tags: Pure Fiction, Craig Champlin, The Ernie Bedlam Stories
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Posted
by Craig Champlin on
Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 8:00 AM
Editor's note: Craig Champlin submitted a number of shorts for our annual Pure Fiction issue, writing "Pick any of them. What I’d really like is to run 'The Ernie Bedlam Stories' weekly. I have a lot of them and people seem to really like them." We'll run five of the Ernie stories here on the Bleader this week. Here's the third.
Good Judgment
Ernie always told the truth unless he didn’t. His son Toyboy certainly knew he would go blind if he kept playing Scratch and Sniff Lotto tickets. Ernie’s entire family knew the tickets must be administrated properly if one ever expected to win. You never scratch them off in the store. That task must be done at home with soft music playing. You never win listening to AC/DC playing in the background. God doesn’t like AC/DC.
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Tags: Craig Champlin, The Ernie Bedlam Stories, Pure Fiction, Variations on a Theme
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