Wednesday, April 28th, 2007

This was the most thrilling reading I’ve attended since I saw Jonathan Franzen recreate the orgasmic yelps of an injured soccer mom at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2002, and Michael Friedman is to thank. Maybe I’m sheltered, but I was completely unfamiliar with his work until last month. I came for Matthew Zapruder (who read a terrific poem about Canada) and caught Matthew Roher (pretty good himself), but it was Friedman and his deadpan recitation of an epic story about Richard Gere and Julia Roberts that won my heart. I forever pledge my allegiance to Martian Dawn. The thirty-odd people in attendance were totally receptive to all of the readers, but seemed to favor Zapruder (indicating as much through an increased emission of those same knowing laughs you heard watching Sideways in the theater). The audience was also surprisingly compliant with the (new?) request to refrain from smoking except during breaks (wuddup with that?). This was the best reading in Chicago’s best series since Danny’s hosted Sam Lipsyte a few years ago.

Last week, Venus Zine edatrix Amy Schroeder appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” with the authors of the book How Sassy Changed My Life. Ms. Schroeder deftly fielded questions from Sassy enthusiasts and some confused woman who thought Venus was all about s-e-x. You can listen to the program here.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION ALERT: Literago is co-sponsoring an event with Venus Zine and the authors of How Sassy Changed My Life at the Hideout on May 31st. Trust me, we’ll keep you posted.

Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park, once known for its awesome fiction section (and prodigious amount of gay porn) has seen something of a decline in recent years (I’d like to think it’s coincident with my departure, but I digress). Its aisles, once teeming with scads of Important Literary Fiction and audience members filing in for David Sedaris and the like, are now filled with Penguin Classics editions and old people snoozing in the window bays. I blame the Borders down the block, the discount book emporium across the street, and the general corporatization of Downtown Oak Park (did they really need that Chipotle right next to the Lane Bryant?).

Enter Lynda Fitzgerald, Barbara’s stalwart and the best-read person I’ve ever met. Two weeks ago, she resumed her position as manager of the venerable flagship and already, the store is hosting as many good events as it’s seen in the past year. Everyone should take the Green Line down there and buy a book. It’s sure to pay dividends.

When I moved to Chicago in 1998, I planned to write. I was almost 22 and spent my birthday two days after arriving playing pool with the only friend I had in town. We didn’t talk about starting a lit mag that night, I think I can say with certainty, though I actually don’t have any recollection of talking about much of anything, really. It was a less heady time, perhaps. Or perhaps there was a girl in the bar I was tantalized by from afar and we spoke of it. Perhaps we were silly drunk — though I think that part comes later.

What I did those first couple years in Chicago doesn’t particularly matter. I managed to come quickly to the realization that, whatever people do with their lives be damned, I would make things. And Chicago’s a wonderful city for that pastime. Whether it pays or not, there are thousands of people making things, from trash sculptures to paintings to novels, unencumbered by the trappings that compel some to refer to an aggregate of humans as an industry.

Though I scribble to you from Birmingham, AL, Deep South, USA, today, my mind most of the time is half-wedged between the right angles of the city grid, under the flickering streetlamps freezing in the snow, shoved up against you a crowded Friday at the Hideout, at the Rainbo, Skylark, wherever. Just as I’ve often joked that I left my native South Carolina to spend a decade thinking about her in Chicago, so something of the reverse is becoming here.

So, an attempt at a definition:

Chicago Lit is words inspired by doom, the story that springs eternal from the youthful sprint from the mugger on your way home at 3AM. She’s my favorite THE2NDHAND story — “The Astronaut of the Year,” by Joe Meno, or Al Burian’s wishful Chi history “Zangara,” Brian Costello’s “Floating to Chicago,” Literago host Gretchen Kalwinski’s “Meantime” and all the gems that hit my inbox daily (dominated by the great city’s scribes as they are). She’s a Dollar-Store Friday night a month at the Hideout before a night of reading on the door stool at another bar, a conversation with Eric Graf about the potential of indie broadcasting never acted upon, a zine fair or BEA stopover and all the parties where the kids get a little, and the older folks a lot, too hammered.

She’s a crowd of 15 of three million humans in the back of Quimby’s or the front of the Hungry Brain, or 100 at the Hideout, or 6 on the second floor of Myopic, or 10 at the Comix Revolution in Evanston, all gathered for tale telling, or surface-level or depth-charging wordsmithery, for the back-and-forth afterward at some nearby beer hole, all those times the event potential feels a great deal smaller than you realize later that it really is, time ceasing to be and camaraderie inserting itself as if of its very own accord into an argument about the relative merits of any number of things, the totality so ecstatic it once put me down, it did. I fell out a year and a half ago of a conversation in which I attempted to give directions to two scribes visiting from Louisville. The reading had been not so great, the night afterward nothing to write home about, but ‘twas a day full of activity — the afternoon at a table in an art fair peddling magazines and books and by this silly end, I’d not eaten since noon. I cracked my head on the bar on the way down. We have something to talk about for life.

An experiential totality, Chicago Lit’s likewise that next morning, sitting at a desk with pen or keyboard, jotting the insult of it all down.

Todd Dills is the editor of Chicago- and Birmingham-based lit broadsheet and online magazine THE2NDHAND. His first novel, Sons of the Rapture, was published by Featherproof in September 2006.

Hey, thrifty bookworms: in case this isn’t on your radar.

Bookmooch is a site that lets you earn points for giving away your books and use those points for mooching books from others across the globe.

Sorry to bring more bad news to journalism-types on a rainy Wednesday, but the Trib will be cutting more jobs soon. So, um, maybe don’t include them on your mass resume-blast, eh? Not unless you’ve nepotism on your side.

Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times plan to cut up to 250 jobs

By DAVE CARPENTER
AP Business Writer

CHICAGO –
The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times disclosed plans Monday to reduce their staffs by as many as a combined 250 jobs, the latest cutbacks in a newspaper industry reeling from a falloff in advertising and circulation.

The actions by Tribune Co.’s two largest dailies, which had been expected for months, come on top of earlier cutbacks by both papers.

The Times said it hoped to cut its staff of 2,625 by up to 150 employees, or nearly 6 percent. The Chicago Tribune said it intends to trim its staff by as many as 100, or 3 percent….more

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

Ben Katchor launched right into his reading with zero small talk, while the corresponding illustrations from his Julius Knipl comic strip and books were projected onto the large screen next to his podium. He spoke in a deadpan, drone-y style, that perfectly complemented the witty banality of the vignettes; “Catsup please, and a little more butter over here.”

Katchor’s stories incorporate the everyday and practical with the fantastic. A man’s quest to find a hand-dryer in a restaurant leads to the discovery of a hidden back-room that holds a secret club. A barber shop holds untold secrets. In short, the finely drawn stories allow us to see the inner worlds of people’s compulsions, highly specialized/weird jobs, loneliness, idiosyncrasies, and it’s not a stretch to say that they contain notes of keen brilliance and attention to the most ordinary yet riveting details. He covers a lot of restaurant territory, in part because “my mission is to figure out where Jewish dietary laws meet up with the French idea of a restaurant and public eating.”

During the Q & A session, he talked about his idyllic Brooklyn upbringing. “My neighborhood was a kind of urban paradise with the Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Museum. We played stickball on the street. It sounds like some kind of an ancient Egyptian world now but that’s what it was.” In grade school Katchor would begin drawing comics and handing them out to classmates; he later graduated to distributing his work via a fanzine.

Another audience member asked about what she called Katchor’s “antique” view of the American city, complete with family owned delis, pay telephones, and uniquely neighborhood-y, non-gentrified, or corporate settings. To this, Katchor shrugged. “Well, I do live in a building built in 1905 so maybe my view is weirdly antiquated,” he admitted, “but it’s as up-to-date as I can make it.”

The vintage overtones in his work are also due to his interest in “found literature” like old phone booths and instruction manuals. “I like things that were not meant to be read; things that were written under duress.”

Metro, April 12

“They’re all Nordic!” exclaimed my companion, surveying the crowd seated in folding chairs on the ground floor at Metro. It was a very blond, very BEZ crowd that had assembled to see a group of five New Yorkers speak extemporaneously for ten minutes each. The stories were universally entertaining, especially Jonathan Ames’ (unsurprisingly about smoking crack with a transexual). Amy Dickinson recited a story about the Cubs, Greg Wallach told a story about his cerebral palsy, Jon Langford talked about Lester Bangs, and DMC told a story about his spiritual connection with Sarah McLaughlin.

The Moth has its shit together; their merch booth was something like that of the most successful, tasteful rock band imaginable. The doorman at Metro told me he had admitted around 170 people to the event. If that many people are willing to pay twenty dollars or so to see an evening of live storytelling, there’s hope for this town yet.

It turns out that the person responsible for the largest mass murder in American history was an English major. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that we have an earning potential that caps somewhere around 12k a year. Now, we’re faced with further stigma.

The press equates “English major” with “loner,” as though the choice to study books makes you an antisocial weirdo.

Why does the world hate us? This is a rhetorical question, since my time in grad school has made it quite clear to me why the world hates us.

ABOUT LITERAGO

Literago.org is intended as a portal to news and information about literary goings-on in and around Chicago. The site features a curated calendar with a corresponding weekly newsletter, news and photos, post-event write-ups, and the occasional essay about the state of literature in Chicago.

Literago.org co-founders Gretchen Kalwinski and Eugenia Williamson are Chicago writers and editors (and former English majors) who have had their collective hands in a whole lot of local literary stuff: Barbara’s Bookstore, University of Chicago Press, The University of Chicago Department of English, Chicago Review, Centerstage Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, THE2NDHAND, American Library Association, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Foundation, Venus Zine, Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, UR Chicago, Stop Smiling, Guild Complex, and Punk Planet.

They created Literago in order to show the world that Chicago isn’t an illiterate sinkhole, but a city with a vibrant literary community. Furthermore, they want to provide a service to Chicagoans interested in literature: to give them a one-stop shop for noteworthy literary events, happenings, and information. While this “Porkopolis” has a vast number of literary projects – everything from small presses and magazines to giant lit organizations – the Literago editors are bugged that there is little cohesion, promotion, or community evident outside of events like Printer’s Row Book Fair and the Printer’s Ball.

In short, Literago is a website that should have existed long ago. The editors wish it had been around when they were seeking out a community and trying to find worthwhile readings to attend. They hope Literago will be a useful tool for people like them. You can contact them with feedback or info about your literary event or project at: editors [at] literago.org. For events, please send at least two weeks prior to the event.