Poem: Steve Halle

I'd never met Steve Halle nor had I encountered his work before we read together tonight, at the invitation of Larry Sawyer, at Myopic Books in Chicago.  Steve is 30 years old, lives and is a doctoral student in southern Illinois, and is very active as a poet (he has several books and chapbooks), blogger (I count 4 blogs he runs or is part of), and all-around person of mind and letters. One of his blogs, Fluid/Exchange, has lots of interesting material on it, including critiques of ongoing online discussions in the blogosphere, links to his reviews and poems in print and audio form, readings of various essays and ideas, and much more.  The poems he read tonight were often funny, wrestled successfully with their influences, offered rich sonorities and polysemous pleasures, and, at the start, were decidedly scatalogical, though he ended with a poem that, in addition to being positively Platonic in its engagement with the body and its fluids also, I mentioned to him afterwards, struck me as embodying many of the ideas currently animating the conversations in the now-trendy cognitive neuroscience and studies/evolutionary biology wings of English and American literary studies. It was one of those seemingly simple, but actually quite complex productions that poets--artists--can pull off that anticipate, by years, decades, centuries, what scholars will finally come up with. Such is art, and such was Steve Halle. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work soon.





Here's one of Steve's poems, from the online journal Milk Magazine, Vol. 9:

Before his first steps, he’s off again

funnels of rock smoke charnels of purse. this venus arm found alack a hand in pumice. "fuck you" besmirches the monument but "if" is monumental. spit smears to wipe words an "it if" the missing arms about me. what Stuart Dybek's rough tumble tangible Chicago nay-say air ozone alert black steel rumbles in waves of snodgrass? how about melanomic mornings at no-nose cafe? another cup supple bubble incarnation the beast lives thanks to guitar and compact trashes styrofoam and sudden infant death sesame street. glasses are drug enough the arms of the valley launch as wisps of orange zest in smoke. or sawdust yields to flame. syndrome: the plague of the death sculptor in reverie embalms everything covered in silvers and grays. sunset crater storeroom or portrait profoundly addicted to asleep the outstretched arms of a minor goddess. he lifts St. John of the Cross up to the tree twelve or so nights ago he feasts venus she sleeps. the usual distance from subject the camera attache briefcase spyglass hill walks the long view dimple the longest ball. listen to the smells of subway greats. buskers deal the death of masses for coins etc. or night amasses. pentagraphic videos fingers walk with keys the ivory box my coffin my hand up from the swirls and froths he disbelieves my ship aflight my fools in the hold. charnel house the high sierra void and breakdown bluegrass banjo the handless lover of fire in the airport en post en route. the hunger of desert or maelstrom siren tune to heavy arms so over whatever and out slash off. snow altho beatified while happening rug burns and after a broken arm no venus to rise midmorning nothing for my periscope hand or her telescope love or god sodden eyes over microscope, discovery! live at the five spot seven nights.

copyright © Steve Halle, in Milk, 9, 2010. All rights reserved.

Poem + Photos: John Murillo (Book Launch)

Earlier tonight I headed over to Logan Square to Elastic Arts, where Tres Colony (Krista Franklin, Sandra Ivelisse Antongiorgi and Shirley Alfaro) hosted a book party for poet John Murillo, whose new book, Up Jump the Boogie has just been published by Cypher Books (New York). The collection's cover features one of Krista's collages, and the great Martín Espada pens a foreword that gives real insight into what John's poetry is up to., As the title suggests, hiphop flows through these poems like electricity, though soul and soul's spirit is also here, la alma de vida, and life here takes on tremendous textures in these lyrics, these lyric voices. As Martín says in his intro, John is "young and urban," "African American and Chicano," a "wordsmith and a song-maker": he's a true musician, operating on multiple levels, mixing and breaking, taking his crossfader sensibility to the very edge. These are powerful poems, whether the sequence for Etheridge Knight, or the crown of sonnets about growing up and breakdancing, or the poem, which made me go "whoa," in which John rolls up, for real, like a gangster. Tres Colony brought together a hot roster of poets and performers, including Toni Asante Lightfoot, Kevin Koval, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Avery R. Young, Randall Horton, and Roger Bonair-Agard, who not only offered their words but set things off live, for John to bring to a fitting conclusion with his very live and alive poems. Congratulations, John, and what follows below are some photos and one of John's poems.

John Murillo reading

John Murillo reading one of his poems, "Hustle"



MC Krista Franklin

One of Krista's collages, which were on display (I think this one is titled "Baking Wonders Never Cease" (2008)

Poet Randall Horton reading

Poet Toni Asante Lightfoot, who performed

John Murillo taking in all the good words

Sandra Ivelisse performing her song

And now, one of John's poems, a love poem.

Round Midnight

Some nights I watch you
     sleep, the eyelid's jig

and beg, the blue rise
     of memory and moon.

When you drift, I snatch
     a machete from behind

a bedpost, stalk the night,
     plot the rise of infidels.

Before dawn, maybe you
     whisper the six histories

of river and rain, rise like
     steam from an open wound,

wrap yourself in ash,
     blood and honey.

Maybe you navigate
     stained glass streets,

havoc the avenues, ransack
     basilica in search of me.

Maybe you burn candles,
     moan canticles, conjure

lightning and thunderclap.
     Sweet river woman,

waist beaded and bangled,
     breathe moon and I will

dream too. Rise blue
     and I will find you.

Copyright © John Murillo, from Upjump the Boogie,
New York: Cypher Books, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Jeff Marlin Paintings Show

My practice assumes the wreckage of history, both artistic and cultural, and is in no sense "pure." - Jeff Marlin

On Friday evening, though I wasn't feeling especially social, I headed out to Jeff Marlin's show at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery, in Chicago. Marlin (1969-2009) was a Chicago native and School of the Art Institute graduate who'd been close to a wide array of figures in Chicago's visual arts and literary worlds. (I never met Marlin, but periodically heard about him from a number of local poets I know.) His early works, some of which were on display here, explore dot-matrix disintegration of images (mushroom clouds, UFOs, fascist architecture), using scanned and Xeroxed photos and stencils. As if under a zoom lens or microscope, the imagery of these paintings shift as you shift your position and distance from them. Later works on display play with various kinds of grids, patterns, and layered monochromes, towards an often sombre but illuminating minimal abstraction that also represents a grappling, as I far as I could tell, with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and its aftermath. The Corbett vs. Dempsey writeup of the show notes that some recent "paintings are clearly about surface and working process." I was put in mind of different abstractionists I admire from Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhardt to Robert Ryman and Chris Stackhouse (especially in one particular grain-oriented painting, which was redolent of what Chris was also up to about a decade ago).

According to someone who knew him well, Marlin hadn't had a gallery show in years, and was looking forward to this show, which was in the planning stages in 2008, when he tragically came down with leukemia last year. Corbett vs. Dempsey's own press release says the following about the preparations for the show

Before he died in October, Marlin's CvsD show had been rescheduled for this winter (still hoping he would be able to attend), and together with Marlin work had been chosen for the exhibition. En route to hospice from the hospital, Marlin made a final stop at the studio to put the finishing touch on a last painting and feel the energy of the workplace one final time. The intensity of his commitment to his work, his passion, and his artistic achievement are great sources of inspiration, and CvsD is honored to show Jeff Marlin's outstanding paintings.

A few photos from the event, which eventually became very crowded:

The beautiful Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery space

One of the Untitled dot-matrix paintings

One of the black monochrome paintings that made me think of Reinhardt, Rauschenberg, Malevich

Another one of the monochromes

Some of the soft-grid and grainy Untitled paintings

Some of the small, patterned paintings

Reg Gibbons Chicagoan of the Year for Literature + Some RIPs

Slowly I have been making my way through my university email account, and so it wasn't until just the other day that I learned that my esteemed colleague Reginald Gibbons, a writer of multifarious talents (a poet whose volume Creatures of a Day (LSU Press) was a 2008 National Book Award finalist, a fiction writer, an essayist, a translator, an editor, among so much else); scholar and teacher; mentor and friend to colleagues and students; administrator and program head; and literary and cultural activist, was named "Chicagoan of the Year" for Literature by the Chicago Tribune! The blurb about him reads:

Reginald Gibbons is a poet, essayist, translator and professor of English at Northwestern University. He edited TriQuarterly, one of the nation's premier literary magazines, for 16 years. This year, Gibbons added another line to his resume: muse. A woman whose work he long championed, Angela Jackson, saw the publication of her first novel, “Where I Must Go” (2009).

This of course only scratches the surface; check out Reg's website here, which includes his richly insightful blog and a listing of his many publications. Emerging poets might find his "A Few Cells from the Great Hive: a reading list for new poets" especially useful. He co-directs the university's graduate MA/MFA program, which he helped to create, while also serving as director of the Center for Writing Arts, and teaching in three different departments. I often speak of "greatness" and "amazing" people on this blog, and Reg is one of the people who fits both descriptions. Congratulations, Reg!

***

So as not to turn this blog into an obituaries column, I will only note in passing the recent deaths of such figures as Percy Sutton, the businessman, former Manhattan borough president and Malcolm X's lawyer; Dennis Brutus, one of South Africa's major poets and anti-apartheid activist, whom I witnessed announce live, at the Celebration of Black Writing in Philadelphia, that Nelson Mandela had been released from jail, causing the entire auditorium to cheer and weep for joy; Eunice Johnson, the longtime treasurer of the Johnson publishing business and the pioneering founder of the Ebony Fashion Fairs and cosmetics line; the feminist scholar theologian, philosopher and writer Mary Daly, many years resident as a professor at Boston College, whose works include the Wickedary; the great Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, one of the leading lights of American painting; and, perhaps least known among all of them but a figure whose name I heard all throughout my undergraduate years, because several good friends were studying the European classics, Ihor Sevcenko, whose field was Byzantine history and literatures. To all of them, resquiescant in pace.

Back to Classes

It's January 4, which means the first day of classes at the university. And so my micro-sabbatical is over and I'm back; we flew in a few days ago, set up the new apartment, which is bigger and not so far from the previous ones, I finished my syllabi, posted the first one (for today) online, and met the 24 very smart and talented souls I'll be teaching in one of the three classes I'll have in my "Situation of Writing" class this quarter. A required course for all writing majors (poets, fiction writers and creative nonfictioners, some of them dramaturges and budding journalists, all in the same class!), it looks at various aspects of writing, literary history and culture, the publishing industries, and so much more. It should be fun. As part of the course the students will be tweeting, so I'll post a link to their feeds when that's up and running.

On Wednesday evening I'll have my first meeting with my graduate fiction writing (MA/MFA) students, at the Chicago campus, so this will be another winter of racing from Evanston downtown after the sun disappears and the truly frigid temperatures appear. Lake Shore Drive is always a challenge between 5-6 pm, but the drive home, especially if snowless, is especially serene. And Michigan Avenue is just down the street and around the corner, so I'll have incentive to get downtown early and while away an hour or so if I can. As with the "Situation" class, I have taught some of these students before, but many are new faces, so I'm looking forward to meeting them and becoming acquainted with their work.

My third class doesn't begin until mid-quarter, as it--and its mirror classes in the undergraduate program's other tracked two genres, poetry and creative nonfiction--is the only one in the college that's still on the (old?) semester system; it's the second half of the advanced theory and practice of fiction class that all fiction majors and minors must take, and the students will be transitioning from writing short stories to writing a novella, to be revised several times before they submit a final version at the end of the school year (the spring quarter, or the semester), in June. Given the extremely heavy reading load--two parallel fiction classes, which I often carry--I may not be blogging as much as I'd like, though I've made a vow to try to be more regular, and break the law of diminishing returns that anyone viewing this blog's yearly tallies could quickly identify.

There is of course all the rest of the university business that needs attending to, which is to say, a lot of reading and advising and so forth. I intend, to the best of my ability, to continue the writing progress I was able to make during my short respite from June to about late November. It was a bit of spring after so much winter; so many creative buds began to blossom, and one of the things I hope to do is to continue to nurture them, so that by the end of this year I will have several more complete drafts of projects, i.e., books, my books, ready to go. That's only a part of what I'm hoping and striving for in 2010.

Back to the Future: Chicago

Recently I was forced to confront the fact that my brief fall quarter sabbatical is winding to its close. In July of this year I ended the lease on the Chicago apartment I'd been renting for several years, because the likelihood of finding a decent subletter for the rest of the summer, or for the fall quarter, especially given the flood of apartments on the market, was minimal. But I have to return in January--sorry, novels!--to resume professing, so I had to head back out to Chicago to find a new apartment. I did, it's done. (My top choice, which supposedly no one was looking at, somehow rented within minutes of my filling out my forms at the realty company. Hmm. I also had to deal with the usual suspects who, either upon seeing me or hearing my voice, began going on about "good credit" and "what do you do?" and "how long have you been teaching at..." and "what do you teach?" and so on. I now can urge them, politely, to visit the Google. One elderly woman, however, seemed bent on insisting that I was starting my first gig. I did not rent her large but horribly kept apartment, naturally.) Being back in the Windy City feels like moving through a familiar yet foggy landscape; I know it well enough not to have to think about it that much, and yet it always keeps me somewhat off kilter. I also feel my melancholy rising as soon as the plane touches down on the tarmac at O'Hare or Midway. But so it is.

Commuting in either direction grows less and less pleasurable with each passing year. I'd have thought that at Newark and O'Hare that, 8 going on 9 years after 9/11, that procedures would be streamlined, but unfortunately this is not the case. Often some arbitrary element is introduced to heighten the Kafkaesque aspects of the experience. This time I had my bags searched at Newark because my electric toothbrush and batteries, which I have managed to carry across the country and to foreign countries multiple times without a problem, looked like a "knife" (???). Perhaps they were in the grip of metaphor, who knows? Also at Newark, a woman at the security gate was demanding that people have their passports or IDs readily open for inspection, the tone of her voice almost at a threatening pitch. (You have to show both anyway, so what's the big deal if you take a second to open them up? The line was moving briskly.) At O'Hare, the security lines were clotted like bad arteries, barely moving, and several people were anxious they might miss their flights. I wasn't, since I knew mine, to Newark, would be delayed. And it was! First by 30 or so minutes, then by 45 more, then we sat on the tarmac and...I was almost having erotic visions of high speed trains by the time the plane finally ascended above Lake Michigan, though I haven't read anything by J. G. Ballard in over half a year.

On the flight out I ended up watching Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), which I'd seen before, on VHS, some years ago. (That was during the summer when I decided I need to catch up on as much foreign and pre-1950s American cinema as my video and bank accounts could bear.) I also used to periodically listen to Sergei Prokofiev's cantata version of the score on CD, but I haven't done that--or listen to a CD, for that matter--in a while. Watching Alexander Nevsky this time, what struck me were three things. First, how completely Eistenstein grasped the use of space, particularly deep shots, to convey a sense of the story's intrinsically epic and heroic, almost mythic nature, and also its grandeur, exaltation, utter importance. This was especially evident in such different scenes as those of the fisherman in the water, or Nevsky's forces massed on the edges of the lake as the Teutonic Knights (i.e., the Germans) approach. Second was Prokofiev's score, which works both as an abstract musical piece, but also in stirring accompaniment to Eisenstein's images. The music in the scenes leading up to and through the slaughter of the Russians at Pskov by the Teutons, who are some of the most scary-looking villains I can recall on screen, chilled me to the core, while the post-battle passages conveyed the Russian triumph, and also, as was Eisenstein's aim, hopefulness, quite seductively. Once or twice I found myself perhaps too carried off by the music, but Eisenstein's scene-making rarely let this last long.


Nikolai Cherkasov, as Alexander Nevsky, in Eisenstein's eponymous film

Third, the acting, whose expressiveness, gesturality and blockiness derived both from specific conventions espoused and promulgated by such eminent figures as Vsevolod Meyerhold, with whom Eisenstein had worked, and the just prior silent movie and much older stage traditions, sometimes struck me as cartoonish. Even taking into account the differing conceptions of acting--and the striking difference from American/Hollywood approaches, such as the Method, nevertheless among some of the secondary characters, the acting verged on being unnecessarily comical. Nevsky, as the noble hero, presented the right amount of reserve, perhaps too much for a similar film today (though no US filmmakers could make such a film nowadays), but the other characters seemed sometimes almost on par with Will Ferrell or Ricky Gervais, smirking, goofy, a bit too hammy. After I settled into the story, though, this didn't bother me as much. Lastly, the fact that the film is propaganda still does not bother me at all, or rather, I think I apprised it the first time I saw it as I did this time, with an acknowledgement of how crucial its propagandistic subtext was at the time it was made. (I feel this way about other films of this sort, like Mrs. Miniver.) What I did note this time was the sinister portrayal of the Church in abetting the Germans' crimes. The creepy-looking priest--for the story takes place before the Reformation--doesn't bat an eye as the Russians are tortured, and this, I thought, was as much a slap against the Roman Catholic Church's silence on Hitler as, under Stalinism, against religion's role in bourgeois rule and oppression. I plan to rewatch October again soon, to refamiliarize myself with its visual language and narrative strategies, but also to see if it's the same film I remember as clearly as I did Nevsky.

One of the things I noticed while back in Chicago was the increase in empty storefronts in many of the neighborhoods I tend to frequent. Rogers Park, Edgewater, Uptown, Andersonville, and Lakeview all had even more plate glass façades bearing "For Rent" signs than when I left. There were a few stores that I could remember that have now closed in just the past 6-8 months, but a number I couldn't; so many had cycled through one particular venue near where I lived during my first stay in Chicago in 2001 that I tried to visualize what had been there just last year, and could only bring up a restaurant of some sort, or perhaps it was a deli. It is good to see that a number of longtime businesses, with affordable leases, I gather, are in place, and some of the very arts-oriented businesses that sprouted up along the Morse-Glenwood Arts corridor in Rogers Park are still operating, but I do wonder whether landlords are still holding out for high(er) rents, there simply aren't enough people with access to capital (i.e. loans) to open businesses or keep them afloat, or what. I probably should check on the economic climate rather than relying on anecdotal observation, but I was particularly surprised by how many new storefronts on Clark and Broadway were now empty.

One thing that was also surprising was how many condo buildings are still going up, or perhaps I was just hallucinating them. I thought this might depress rents in the areas I was looking at, but those appear to have fallen only a little, and not as much as would seem reasonable. I'm not sure what's going on. Perhaps the landlords have enough cash or have paid off their mortgages so long ago that they aren't really pressed to rent out units. Maybe they are in denial. Who can say? I do know that one building I lived in shortly after returning to teach at the university has now been gutted and renovated, in a moderately appealing fashion, and now the landlord wants a really unreasonable sum, if you ask me, for what could be easily found for $50-$100 less just blocks away. Eventually they'll figure this out, or the economy will improve and resolve the issue, or both. Or neither.

I also had my first encounters the new parking system. You get less time for the same amount of money, naturally. But, and I'm sure everyone else has figured this out, the new parking authorizations--vouchers?--appear to be portable. Or maybe I'm not reading them carefully enough. Am I missing something? Each machine does stamp a unique code on each ticket, yet unlike the old meters, unless the meter-reader is carefully scrutinizing the machine stamp, you don't have to stay at your original spot and either lose money or sacrifice a Muni-meter voucher for a regular meter, and thus lose money, since the entire city now consists of Muni-metered streets. I tried this several times, and even accidentally missed placing a new 15-minute voucher in my car window, yet the cop who passed by to inspect it simply glanced at all the ones in the car and walked on by. Hmmm. Maybe for once I should thank Mayor Daley?


On Clark Street, in Lakeview

Whenever I'm back in Chicago I find myself having to suppress the urge to comment, even to myself, about how cold it is. There's always a day, nevertheless, when it's impossible to do so, and that day was earlier in the week (Tuesday?), when the temperature dropped down to about 11°F, though I believe the newscaster reported that with the wind chill it was 7°F or lower. Fortunately the place I stayed was warm enough, but parking the car and walking the several blocks was a challenge, even with warm clothes and hat (buff). At some point I lost my gloves, as I always do (they simply will not stay in my coat pockets, so I may have to resort to that old childhood standard, that the wife of a professor at MIT I once temped for also found useful, which is clips or closepins, to keep them attached to the coatsleeves), which will necessitate a trip, I'm glad to say, to Uniqlo in SoHo. I am hoping that they have gloves comparable to their really cool-looking thermal underwear, which, like everything in the store, come in so many bright colors that I'm in a trance only minutes after setting foot in the door. Really, any excuse to go there is welcome. Now, how to get them to open up a branch in the Third City.

Banned Book Week + Right Wing Rhetoric + Derrion Albert & The Children

It's Banned Books Week (September 26-October 3, 2009). But you probably already knew this.

Why do we need a week highlighting the issue of banned books? Because every day all over the US, there are attempts to ban or suppress the sales and circulation of books.

Above at right is a map, drawn from cases documented by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Kid's Right to Read Project (a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression), of the book challenges or bans that occurred from 2007-2009 (courtesy of Banned Books Week). According ALA, at least 513 occurred in 2008, but the total could be higher since up to 80% are never reported. (For more information, you can review ALA's Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008, and Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009, and the Kids' Right to Read Project Report.)

In 2008, the 10 most challenged books were:

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

   (Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint,and unsuited to age group)
   

2. His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman

   (Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence)
   

3. TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle

   (Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
   

4. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz

   (Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence)
   

5. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya

   (Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence)
   

6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

   (Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group)
   

7. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar

   (Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group)
   

8. Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen

   (Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group)
   

9. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

   (Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group)
   

10. Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper

    (Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group)
    

Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-e-bertin/banned-books-week-still-n_b_302248.html

, writes in today's Huffington Post about the ongoing problem of US book banning and challenges.

All over the country, libraries and bookstores are hosting events. If you can, please attend one this week. A major launch event, the Banned Books Week Read-Out, took place in Chicago (I wasn't there, so I couldn't attend.) There are a number of other things you can do as well, like these.

±±±

Just so we're clear:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), using some of the most extreme rhetoric yet by a sitting member of Congress against President Barack Obama, yesterday called the president an "Enemy of Humanity" at Phyllis Schlafly's How To Take Back America Conference in St. Louis.

On Newsmax today John L. Perry wrote an article calling for a military coup against President Obama's administration; it urges this step to address the "Obama problem."

On Facebook some creep(s) started a poll asking whether President Obama should be killed, and the post received 700+ votes before being taken down. After blog The Political Carnival and others contacted the Secret Service, they finally began their investigation.

And today, at Schlafly's wackofest in St. Louis, North Dakota Eagle Forum head Kitty Werthmann is urging people to ready themselves with guns for a "bloody battle" against the President, who she claims is both a Nazi and Communist.

All of this is occurring on top of the extremist speech and behavior against the President and Congress, funded by corporations and right-wing groups, fostered and funneled into the wider discourse by major right-wing and mainstream corporate media figures, and furthered at extreme right rallies and gatherings, that we've seen since the height of the campaign last summer.

It is not harmless, it is not cute, it is not worthy of simply being dismissed as wacko or crazy or nutty and yet somehow benign.

Remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995?

I have given up hope that either senior members of the Democratic Party, be it the President, leading figures in Congress, or anyone in the party apparatus (especially now that Howard Dean has stepped down), will denounce these people or attempt to ratchet the rhetoric down. As for the mainstream corporate media, they're not worth the breath. Instead, things will continue to spin out of control, as they always do, and if something horrific happens, the question posed in the public sphere will be, How could this have happened? Why did we miss it until it was too late? Why didn't we take proactive steps to address it?

When will we take proactive steps to address it?

***

I heard about and then read this tragic story, and my heart sank. On Friday in Chicago, a group of boys beat 16-year-old honors student Derrion Albert to death, because he happened to pass by the wrong place at the wrong time, though according to other reports, he was killed because he was unwilling to join a gang forming near Fenger High School in the Roseland neighborhood. Albert's death is sickening whatever the trigger, but unfortunately, it's not a rarity. So far this month, two other Chicago teenagers have been killed this month, while at least seven more have been shot. During the last academic year, 36 students were killed and over 500 were shot. One child is too many, a truism so simple and simplistic that I wonder if it hasn't gotten lost in the shuffle.

This is an ongoing crisis that parents and guardians, school officials, representatives of the City of Chicago and Cook County, the State of Illinois, and the federal government, all need to get involved in. One of the chief issues with Roseland, as with so many parts of Chicago, like other urban areas, is the serious economic decline, and concomitant social breakdowns, that set in during the late 1970s and 1980s, and which have never been adequately addressed or turned around, even during the national economic expansion of the late 1990s. The current economic crisis has only worsened things, and while I know that there are ongoing attempts to address this particular situation and the larger social, economic and political issues out of which it's arising, but given that the President has chosen to jump on the folly-fueled bandwagon of bringing the Olympics to Chicago (which could use affordable housing, jobs, jobs, and more jobs instead of yet another Daley vanity project/boondoggle), he and his administration could and should expend some time and political capital on this issue, which is especially serious in his home city, but a problem elsewhere as well.

Commencement Day + Life Thus Far + Photos

Today is Commencement Day at the university, so I can now say to all of the students, mine and others', undergraduate and graduate, CONGRATULATIONS! I won't enumerate all the wonderful students I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years who've finished up this June, but they've been terrific, and I wish them all the very best, in full confidence that they will all make their distinctive marks upon the world.

***

The end of the school year means my return home, and my unshakeable belief, despite years of contrary evidence, that I'll finally have some (more) time to devote to my creative work. This week, however, has proved that life always has its own plans for us, and this is especially the case when you own a home (or condo, or any other costly piece of real estate for which you're responsible for the upkeep). As I've noted on here before, a great deal--perhaps half--of my time spent at home in New Jersey has coincided with the presence of contractors. This has included the initial renovators and subsequent repairers--the painters, one of whom moved to Hollywood to direct films, another of whom coughed so badly that I thought his lungs would fly out of his mouth as he hovered on a ladder high above the backyard; the electricians, a gaggle that included one who set off sparks as he was installing a light and wondered why I looked ready to call the fire department; the plumbers; the succession of roofers, one of whom went mad and another of whom had the brilliant idea of covering our then-unlined chimney in chicken wire and stucco (we passed on that); a porch builder who promptly vanished from the tri-state area after some of the wood cracked within a week of his installing it; the doormaker-carpenter, the only sane and economic of all the doormaker-carpenters we've dealt with, who'd gone to MIT and produced work worthy of a prize; innumerable hucksters whose mercurial behavior made us wonder how they managed to stay in business at all; and so on--and others unforeseen, like the representatives from the private water contracting company our municipal water company, now privatized, employs. These skillful people not only cracked a 100-year-old water pipe once while deinstalling our water meter, but recracked it while putting it back in! And so now this pipe, which was dripping, is now seeping water, which a series of towels are sopping up. Every day this week, the water company contractor has assured me--promised me--he will show up "after 8 am," though that has meant 11:30 or not at all, if he "forgets." So today, after both C and I called first thing in the morning, I waited, he showed up, we chatted about the state of the pipe, he denounced Jersey City's placement of trees on the sidewalk and galvanized lead, we inspected the curb and learned that 100 years ago, the developers had thought through infrastructure placement quite well, and so now rather than shutting off the entire neighborhood's water supply, they may be able to target their efforts and fix this pipe (replacing it would be the best option). I am sincerely hoping they complete this sooner rather than later (and that, though I had to broach the subject, no lawyers have to get involved), since in adulthood no season ever feels more fleeting than the summer.

***

When we were packing up things in Chicago, C asked if we could spend a little time having lunch at the nearby beach. For all of my time in that city I've always lived in walking distance of one and, as past photos on here will attest, I've walked and snapped shots of them. My favorite time to visit them is when a heavy fog is blanketing both them and the Lake. We went and sat on a (not so comfortable but convenient) bench on the concrete walkway and observed people lying out on the sand, walking their dogs, dipping into the water, and basically enjoying a break from the drear of weeks of cold mornings and rain, and this got me thinking about how this essential feature of Chicago life is almost never portrayed on film or TV. When movies and TV shows depict contemporary Chicago, we see the skyscrapers, the immense suburban homes and the bungalows, the El, sometimes the (remaining) projects, some of the city's unforgettable cultural and architectural highlights (the Art Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, etc.), the baseball stadia (especially Wrigley Field), various restaurants (i.e., anything having to do with food), and the Lake.

But interestingly enough, rarely do they show the city's beaches that line the Lake for miles, from Rogers Park (Howard and Jarvis Parks) all the way south to the Indiana border (Rainbow Park and Beach). As a result, I imagine that many people, like C., are probably unaware that Chicago, like Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Diego, and Miami, just to name some of the more obvious US examples, has pleasant, sandy beaches, real beaches, at its doorstep. (In noting this I'm not suggesting that Lake Michigan is the same as either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, or that the sand or beach quality is the same.) Yet I have not met a single native Chicagoan, or anyone who's lived in the city for a while, even those resident far inland to the south, north, or west, who doesn't know about the city's beaches. I also didn't know how extensive or pretty the the beaches were for a good while.

This leads me to ask J's Theater readers, when you think of the cities and towns where they you or have lived, what are some notable aspects or features that everyone who's a native or a longtime resident knows about, but that are never depicted in films or TV shows? What are some of those major hidden elements of the city that might transform how people think about it? Please post a few of these in the comments, and append your name (or a name) in case screenwriters happen upon this blog page (not likely, but you never know).

***

And to conclude today's entry, a few photos from the last few months.


A late-night snapshot of artist in his studio in Rogers Park

Morse Avenue El (towards Lake Michigan)

Harris Sockel, the literature honors student I supervised, holding the students' cake at the lit honors celebration (part of his thesis topic is highlighted in the lighter frosting to the left: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. (He also was co-winner of the Best Senior Literature Major award: congratulations, Harris!)

Marvelous poet and scholar Evie Shockley, reading at the university

Election day a few months ago, Jersey City

The ubiquitous signs (in NYC and Chicago)

One of my favorite NYC statues, Gertrude Stein, in Bryant Park

Gray's Papaya in the West Village, recession special (and they were already a great deal)

Four Electric Ghosts + Italian Poets + On Tiller Murder

A few weeks ago, I caught the last show of Mendi + Keith Obadike's astonishing new opera-masquerade, Four Electric Ghosts, at The Kitchen in New York City. These two never cease to amaze me. For this show, which also included breakout performances by poets-performers Natasha Latasha Diggs, Karma Mayet Johnson, an incredible band, and four of the flyest dancers I've seen in a while, Mendi + Keith started with Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and combined it playfully with their take on Pac-Man, the iconic videogame (everyone remembers this, right?) to create a profound and joyful experimental, experientially multimedia extravanganza. They even beckoned people out of their seats to dance at the end, making the event truly interactive.* The opera-masquerade's narrative, essentially an updated fable, involved the three singer-sayers, Mendi, Natasha and Karma, bounteously afroed and futuristically and funkily attired, relating by text and song the story of four sisters, played by the four superbly lithe dancers, who were schooled by their mother and who died after a lightning strike, sending them to the Land of Ghosts, from which each eventually ventured out, thus generating the narrative. Blessed with knowledge, gifts and protective chalk, each Ghost sister, bearing a differently colored series of metallic stripes across her suit, encountered a scenario in which she dealt with a dangerous "mortal" and forgot, temporalily, or failed to register the mother-lessons of her previous life, and had to return home chastened but also recharged by the experience and revitalized by the recognition of what she'd previously learned. It's difficult to convey how seamlessly this all flowed together: the narrating and singing, the dancing, the light displays and projections on the back wall, the musicians' riffs, the complex weave that just keep pulsing with energy and brilliance and depth in a way that I, no huge afficionado of theater and musical performance but no stranger to them either, rarely have witnessed. And it was so grounded in a range of black cultural traditions while also feeling so new.

In addition to the Mendi + Keith and the singer-speakers I mentioned, other collaborators included Angela’s Pulse Performance Projects, comprising choreographer Paloma McGregor, stage director Patricia McGregor, and dancers Maria Bauman, Catherine Denecy, Marjani Forte and Keisha Turner, and design by Kate Cusack (costumes), Yuki Nakajima (animation/projection), Alexandre Delaunay (scenery), and S. Ryan Schmidt (lighting). After the performance Keith introduced me to bassist and producer Melvin Gibbs, with whom he, Mendi and musician Guillermo E. Brown had composed the music, which Keith, Brown, pianist Shoko Naga, and bassist Keith Witty performed live.

In addition to the unforgettable orchestration, songs and singing-saying (though not Sprechstimme), and choreography and dancing, what powerfully struck me was how Mendi + Keith had rethought and tinkered with Tutuola's powerful story and its implications for our current post-modern, hyperwired, digital moment, making it as much a vision about new ways of thinking about living and learning and a vivid, veritable (afro-diasporic-)futurist parable, grounded in the stories of these women--the ghosts and the singer-speakers--as a rereading and renovating of the past. I know they were recording it (and it was also simulcast via the Web, I believe), so I hope that it's available for many more people to see soon, and I also hope that Mendi + Keith follow their precedent of issuing the tracks online in mp3/CD/DVD form. I'm telling you, these tracks were hot, and while I know Mendi is bursting with talent and have heard both Natasha and Karma sing, working with Keith and his combo in songs with richly remixed R&B, house, Afropop, electronica, rock, and hiphop flavor, they set it off individually and as a trio. You have to hear them. I certainly want to again, because this was one of the freshest and most interesting performances I've caught in years (and that includes another recent favorite, Passing Strange).

*(I was fortunate enough not only to leave my seat, but to be bopping with Tracie Morris (I swear!), while Myronn Hardy and others were stepping only a few feet away. As George Lewis watched from the front row. Where else are you going to have an experience like this?)

Here are a few (blurry--my apologies) photos from the event:

The three Singer-Sayers, Natasha Latasha Diggs, Karma Mayet Johnson, and Mendi Lewis Obadike (left to right)

The Electric House

At the end of Four Electric Ghosts, Mendi at left, Karma at center

Curtain call

Mendi after the performance

**

Though I was feeling down and crappy earlier in the day, on Friday evening I dragged myself out to a reading by four major established and emerging Italian poets, Maria Attanasio, Giovanna Frene, Marco Giovenale and Milli Graffi, at Think Art gallery in Wicker Park. Poet, critic and translator Jennifer Scappettone organized this event, part of a two-city, four event Italian Poetry Festival, in conjunction with Litmus Press and its wonderful journal Aufgabe--whose issue #7 included a special section on contemporary Italian poetry edited by Jennifer, entitled "Embargoed Voices: Poesia Ultima/Italian Poetry Now--and the Poetry Center's Francesco Levato and UIC's Chris Glomski. (Other sponsors include Poets House, the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, St. Mark's Poetry Project, University of Chicago Arts Council and Departments of Romance Languages and Creative Writing, and the Northwestern University Department of French and Italian.) Each of the poets read in Italian, with Jennifer reading hers and others translations, presenting work that was often striking in its innovation and political engagement, after which they engaged in a conversation led by Jennifer that touched upon questions of the poets' respective "generations," politics and Silvio Berlusconi, and American vs. European aesthetic influence. One of the highlights was the exchange in which Milli Graffi suggested that whereas she had been surer of her place in the literary world in the past she now felt "lost," and suggested that Marco Giovenale's generation--1968 to 1978, as he defined was, in Gertrude Stein's famous comment to Ernest Hemingway, also a "lost generation," a appraisal to which both he and Giovana Frene, also a young poet, challenged vigorously. Afterward I had an opportunity to meet all the poets and chat about contemporary literature, and even show Maria Attanasio and her husband my poetry month blog featuring her, for which Jennifer supplied me with the requisite Italian. Now I need to learn enough to read her book, Il falsario di Caltagirone, which I think means The Forger of Caltagirone, and which has merited considerable praise. I also got to chat with Marco Giovenale and picked up several of his books, including CDK, which is a Flarf-inspired text. Ah yes, even in Italy, they're Flarfing! When I got home, I felt 1,000 times better....

As always, a few photos:

Jennifer and Giovanna Frene (R) reading in sequence

In conversation, from left: Maria Attanasio, translator and U. of Chicago doctoral student Rafaello Palumbo, Jennifer Scappettone, Giovanna Frene, Maro Giovenale, and Milli Graffi.

Group portrait with the poets, their loved ones and friends

***

Last night I briefly dropped by the Rogers Park salon that Loyolaites Charles Gabel and his compatriots stage every month or so to hear Lily Brown, Lisa Goldstein, and Nathanaël read their work. It was lively, to put it simply. The evidence:

Lily L. Brown reading her poems

Nathanaël reading from Absence Where As


***

I've been noting how much the rhetoric surrounding abortion and women's reproductive rights has been heating up crazily of late. It bubbled up into a full scale imbroglio surrounding President Barack Obama's invitation to receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame. (As we all know by now, Notre Dame thankfully didn't rescind its invitation; the President spoke; and according to polls and despite some of the browbeating bishops, most Roman Catholics in the country, Indiana, and at Notre Dame supported the invitation; yet the media couldn't stop itself from stoking the controversy and extrapolating broader Roman Catholic opinion from the likes of the odoriferous Bill Donahue). In fact, the strident tenor of the abortion discussion has been reminding me of the period in the late 1980s and 1990s when anti-abortion fanatics, led by Operation Rescue and similar organizations, staged wide-scale public protests and took to targeting and killing doctors who performed abortions. Nevertheless, it was still surprising and horrifying to hear today about the murder in Wichita, Kansas of Dr. George Tiller, 67, a women's reproductive health specialist who was one of the few doctors across the country providing late-term abortions. Tiller was shot dead as he was serving as an usher in the foyer of his church, Reformation Lutheran Church. Authorities have apprehended the suspect, an anti-abortion fanatic named Scott Roeder, 51, from a Kansas City suburb. This wasn't the first attack on Tiller; his clinic was firebombed in 1985 and he survived a shooting, in both arms, in 1993. In addition to increasing security at his clinic he frequently wore a bullet-proof vest. He also had survived repeated legal attempts to close down his clinic.

President Obama quickly issued a statement saying that he was "shocked and outraged" by the murder and condemning the turn to "heinous violence," and Operation Rescue has reportedly denounced it, as have some other high-profile anti-abortion commentators. But former Operation Rescue head Randall Terry responded by calling Tiller a "mass murderer," and on some right-wing message boards, posters have been celebrating what amounts to an assassination. Why do I call it that? Because while I don't watch Fox News Channel if I can help it, you can trace a line of authorization and legitimation of this horrific act back right-wing social agitator Bill O'Reilly. He actually authored and uttered the following statement: "If we allow Dr. George Tiller and his acolytes to continue, we can no longer pass judgment on any behavior by anybody. What Tiller is doing is that bad. And that's the Memo." [H/t to comments on Brad Blog.] That verges on incitement to me. O'Reilly's comments aren't the only ones of this sort, and he may not have directly urged Roeder to act, his and others' extremist rhetoric has played a role in fomenting rage and raising the stakes among right wingers; the nutcase who went on a murderous rampage in Knoxville last year had cited a guest on O'Reilly's show as an inspiration, and he wasn't the only one. It will be interesting to see whether Fox News addresses this issue (doubtful) or if the legacy media, who have in the past used right-wing frames ("pro-life" etc.) and repeated conservative cant on abortion without any apparent awareness of what the affects of doing so might be, addresses the stridency of the anti-abortionist rhetoric and their role, even if inadvertent, in advancing it.

It's important also to note that this murder occurs at a time when safe, legal and affordable abortions for women across the country are far less available than they were 25 years ago. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses, we've witnessed a steady assault on Roe v. Wade and a steady erosion in unimpeded access to clinics. The days of Bill Baird centers or public hospitals performing abortions are long gone. Federal and state laws have made it harder for women in some parts of the country to get an abortion at all. These assaults have occurred alongside the increasing lack of universal, affordable health care for all and the relentless promotion and inculcation of failed "abstinence education" in elementary schools and public health programs, both domestically and abroad. (Bristol Palin is the most recent high-profile poster-child for the last issue.) Yet for doctrinaire anti-abortionists, whose behavior points both to sexism in its desire to control, restrict and limit women's rights and classism in its desire to control, restrict and limit poor and working class women's rights to knowledge, information and access (upper-middle-class and rich women can undergo abortions whenever they see fit), this sorry state of affairs is still unacceptable. They are determined to control and limit women's reproductive rights--not just the "choice" to have an abortion but basic and free access to knowledge and information about human sexuality, as well as to contraception and abortion--and personal autonomy, autonomy over their own bodies, even further, and they evidently so fear the new administration's babysteps around, as opposed to back from, this present dreadful state of affairs that some of their adherents are resorting to the sorts of terrorist attacks the country witnessed two decades ago. While I applaud the Attorney General's decision tonight to post federal marshalls at some reproductive health clinics that provide abortions, far more important will be for the administration, the media and entertainment industry--which has been complicit in where we've ended up, since mainstream films and TV shows have tended not to deal truthfully or candidly with human sexuality, unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and abortion--along with the rest of us addressing the broader problems of which this murder is only a terrifying symptom.

UPDATE: from The American Prospect: Ann Friedman's take: "Why Clinic Violence Is Obama's Problem"

AWP Conference, Chicago

I guess I shouldn't have spoken too soon about burrowing--clawing, carving, wrenching--my way out of the grave, because fresh shovel-fulls of reading material just keep falling, but I did manage to have an enjoyable weekend (a belated Happy St. Valentine's Day to all) at and around the Associated Writing Programs Conference, which took place in Chicago this year. The conference began on Wednesday and concluded on Saturday, and as always, it was overwhelming and invigorating (sooooo many panels, writers, books, conversations, etc.), though I would lean on the side of invigorating, since I woke up every morning exhausted but ready to head downtown to the Chicago Hilton for more. For me the highlight of these conferences is running into folks I haven't seen in years or since the last one or the last visit to their town or campus, and so while many of my friends and literary acquaintances didn't attend this year, many were in the house. Seeing fellow Cave Canem or Dark Room (or Kundiman or New York in general) writers always brings a smile of joy to my face, as does former colleagues and writers I've admired for years and never met or heard, or met and heard once, or met and heard many times. There were many such moments this year.

I was on two panels on Thursday, the first a noon assembly called "The City--Real and Imagined," with my very famous university colleagues Reg Gibbons (the moderator), Sasha Hemon, Alex Kotlowitz, and Stuart Dybek, and that discussion drew a huge audience, including several of my graduate students (Jen I said hello to, but Anna, it was great to see you out there), and friends like wonderful poet Jaci Jones LaMon, who came up afterwards to say hello. I had the opportunity to expatiate, briefly, on Morrison, Ellison, Paley, and Proust, in one answer, which I must say doesn't come along very often. The second panel, later that afternoon, which I organized and moderated, focused on "Post-racial Writing," and brought together scholars Dorothy Wang and Angelica Lawson, and poet and critic Prageeta Sharma. All three offered provocative critiques of the notion of "post-raciality," and I only wish that we'd had more time to unpack the idea even more, particularly in light of my opening comments about perspective, performativities and normativities. The audience was one of the most racially and ethnically diverse I witnessed at the conference, and it was particularly great to see poet Samiya Bashir (!) sitting in the front row.

Thursday evening I participated in a full and packed reading at Myopic Books (one of the best used bookstores in Chicago, BTW) sponsored by Litmus Press/Aufgabe, Saturnalia Books, and Nightboat Books. Afterwards a poet archly asked me, "And what is your connection to these presses?" and I reminded him that some of my work--among the first published poems from Seismosis--appeared in Aufgabe. Other readers that night included Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël, one of my favorite contemporary innovators, whose marvelous new book-length essay, Absence Where As, is out from Nightboat; Jennifer Scoppottone; Cal Bedient; Sebastian Agudelo; Lytton Smith, whose first book Terrance Hayes selected for Nightboat's most recent annual prize; and Laura Moriarty, whose work I've admired for years. Jennifer and another poet read from Italian translation section in the new Aufgabe (#7), and I urge you to pick it up if you're at all interested in new Italian poetry.

On Friday, after going to hear Maggie Brown's tribute to her late father, Oscar Brown Jr., and Deedee Bridgewater and an ensemble (including original sidemen Julian Priester and Ray Mantilla) bring the late Max Roach's "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" to new heights (thank you again, Dorothy!), I dropped by the Second Sun Salon, hosted by Krista, Duriel and Lisa Lee at Lisa's dream space. I'm not going to be able to list all the folks I saw, but it was great to run into people from the Chicago poetry scene like Erin Teegarden, as well as so many people I hadn't seen in a while, including Denenge Akpem, Christian Campbell, Kelly Norman Ellis, Ross Gay, Tyehimba Jess, Parneshia Jones, Dawn Lundy Martin John Murillo, Obike, William Perdomo, Hermine Pinson, Evie Shockley, Treasure Williams, Ronaldo Wilson, Avery Young, and to meet folks I've only know via the Net, like Lillian Bertram and Doc Brown, or via their work, like David Mura. I caught the second half of the Salon performances, which featured John and Duriel performing their poems, and Avery performing Averyness! I only wish there'd been live feed so that everyone could have enjoyed them as much as the people at the event.

On Saturday I popped into a few panels, ran into a lot more people, including many university colleagues (Eula Biss, Shauna Seliy, Brian Bouldrey, Ed Roberson) and students (Barbara, Eric and others), whom I was so glad to see out and about, and spent a great deal of time at the Bookfair. So many books, so little time! I must give shout-outs to Essay Press and Canarium Books, founded by my colleagues Eula (and others) and Robyn Schiff (and others) respectively; Seismosis's publisher 1913 Press, and its founders poets Sandra and Ben Dollar (whose stock was snapped up, yea!); Northwestern University Press, and editor Parneshia Jones, who hipped me to some great new books they're publishing; and the PEN table, where my college friend Stacy Leigh was representing with grace and wit only she can! So far I've been able to read just one of the many books I bought, Monica de la Torre's incisive and often hilarious Public Domain (Segue Books, 2008), but I'm determined to scale the K-2 peaks of books I've been setting aside and viewing with waxing anticipation since the relentless academic year began.

And now, some photos (my ability to document via photographs appears to be diminishing at the same rate as my ability to blog or do anything else, save teach and read for work, but nevertheless):


Writers gathering outside the Hilton (Smokers' walk)

Brian Bouldrey and University of Wisconsin Editor Raphael Kadushin

Stacy Leigh at the PEN American Center table

At the Bookfair

At the Bookfair

Tyehimba Jess at the Second Sun Salon

Avery Young and ensemble performing

Listening to the Salon performance (Christian Campbell at center)

Poet John Murillo performing at the Salon

Columbia College of Chicago window exhibit

The brilliant and beautiful Tayari Jones

Ron Kavanaugh and Toni Asante Lightfoot (this was the first time I'd seen her since her new daughter was born!)

Toni and Kate Rushin

After my noon panel, (l-r) Alex Kotlowitz, Bill Ayers (yep, that's him!), and Reg Gibbons

Max Roach's "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" at Symphony Hall