Charles D’Ambrosio is giving a reading for the lucky few who can attend the events of The University of Chicago Creative Writing Department. Dude’s freaking genius at times (check out his essay about his brother’s suicide in the Open City collection on Catcher in the Rye if you haven’t already). But that’s not what concerns me.

Rather, Charles is married to Heather Lorimer. Does anyone remember Heather Lorimer, tambourine-shakin’ ex-girlfriend of Stephen Malkmus? The lady who is said to have broken up Pavement? The subject of the Nerve Sex Interview with Stephen Malkmus and the infamous photo where he’s grabbing her boob?

Does anyone know how this woman went from dating one of the sexiest guys on the planet to marrying a schlubby, bespectacled New Yorker staple? This picture confuses me as much as it does you. I have to admit, the pink satin pants provide a nice contrast with the blue t-shirt.

Mark Slouka has done much for the University of Chicago Creative Writing department since he was denied tenure at Columbia. I can’t vouch for his teaching style (as his student, I vowed to tear off my own ears if I heard the phrase “The Poetry of Silence” one more time), but the writers he’s bringing in this spring are truly first-rate. Lydia Davis? Unbelievable. My beef is with the times of their impending appearances. Five pm is too early for any working person, including those who are still tens of thousands in debt to the University of Chicago. Mr. Slouka, you wouldn’t want to give the impression that good writing is reserved for ivory tower’d Men of Leisure, would you?

Thank the baby Jesus it’s 2007 and the elite no longer need to assume stewardship of Lettres, er, letters. Look at this entry we found in the irrefutable Encyclopedia of Chicago:

“…after poet Harriet Monroe pressed for and received the commission to write the dedicatory poem at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, she discovered that belles lettres ranked low on the list of artistic forms that Chicago’s elite were willing to support financially. At the high point in the city’s cultural uplift, Monroe’s “Columbian Ode” barely sold, and the poet used the unsold copies to fuel the stove in her bedroom. In a city dominated by economic interests and lacking in literary traditions, even the most genteel efforts to boost literature’s cultural importance had limited influence. Founded in the early 1890s, the Little Room brought together the artistic and professional elite …the Little Roomers gathered in the Auditorium Hotel and the Fine Arts Building for afternoon teas and midnight dramas, all the while fostering an atmosphere of aesthetic playfulness and serious intellectual engagement that lasted until the club’s demise in 1931.”

Anyone up for tea and midnight dramas can send me a text. Oh, and any genteels who stumble across our site can make checks payable to Eugenia Williamson.

Not to sound like a crank, but I miss Modernism for its earnestness. We’d get our asses kicked if we pulled anything like that.

Just found this “preliminary” list of books about growing up in Chicago, per UIC. Exciting to see Sandra Cisneros alongside Richard Wright, Don DeGrazia, and Joe Meno.

Murakami wins the world’s richest short story prize
Richard Lea
Monday September 25, 2006 — Guardian Unlimited

Haruki Murakami has won the second Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, his third collection of short stories to be published in English.

I heart Murakami. Incidentally, a friend sent me a mini-book version of Murakami’s story “Tony Takitani” put out by the loverly, LA-based Cloverfield Press (their books make great gifts, kids). There’s also a film version of this sad, sweet tale of loneliness, beauty, love, and consumerism. Check it.

Keir Graff defends funnyman David Sedaris’s “journalism” at our friendly neighborhood Booklist blog. An excerpt: I admit to sharing Heard’s concern that too many memoirs are made-up these days, but I’m flabbergasted to find David Sedaris in the same paragraph as Frey, Glass, and Blair. The distinction is that key word in the third sentence: humor. ….more…

The new One Book One City selection is James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain. We should all be digging into it, no?

Press release is here:

And news & information about discussions and events are here:

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin is the latest selection for One Book, One Chicago. Previous selections for the citywide book club were: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Night by Elie Wiesel; My Antonia by Willa Cather; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek; In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez; The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri….

….James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924 in New York City’s Harlem and was raised under very trying circumstances. As is the case with many writers, Baldwin’s upbringing is reflected in his writings, especially in Go Tell It on the Mountain.

I’m totally going to this series of lectures explaining black holes to lay-people like me.

Free lecture series to explore most violent places in the universe
March 20, 2007

Nine free lectures at the University of Chicago will explore how black holes, remnants of exploded stars and other exotic celestial objects emit streams of powerful gamma rays.

“The Quest for Gamma Rays: Exploring the Most Violent Places in the Universe,” is the title of this year’s Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored each spring and fall by the University’s Enrico Fermi Institute. The 65th series of these public lectures will begin Saturday, March 24, and will be held each Saturday through June 2 (except for April 21 and May 26, when there will be no lectures). The lectures will be given from 11 a.m. to noon in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave.

Compton Lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the physical sciences….more

Read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Cuz Oprah Said So, That’s Why

Oprah book club’s latest pick
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

CHICAGO SUN TIMES — March 29, 2007
BY MEGAN REICHGOTT

Oprah Winfrey announced her latest book club pick, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on Wednesday. It’s a bleak, apocalyptic novel by an author who rarely talks to the media.

McCarthy, a reclusive author who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and is known for novels such as All the Pretty Horses, is widely seen as a literary heir to William Faulkner…