Yesterday, the Books editor at Time Out Chicago wrote a blog post critiquing ChicagoPoetry.com’s C.J. Laity’s recent calls to boycott about National Small Press Month. A small press month whose investors include McSweeney’s and Tin House sounds like a good idea, right? Not to Laity. Messinger gives forth considered discourse on each of Laity’s points (that it has corporate sponsors, that it’s not Midwest enough, etc). Laity, in turn, responds with personal attacks as he is wont to do, see this Chicagoist entry about the Printers Ball, in which he calls someone a “little bitch,” among other things. Now, Literago.org exists to promote the wonderfully-thriving (but still somewhat scattered and non-cohesive) Chicago lit-scene, (which Messinger covers intelligently in this week’s issue) but when Laity responds with comments like, “Screw New York. Chicago does not need some folks from New York dictating when and how Chicago should celebrate its wonderful (be it struggling) world of small presses,” it makes us groan. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, of course, but the logic is incorrect; NSPM started in NYC, but is not a “New York event”-plenty of small presses from elsewhere are participating. Plus, polarizing attitudes like this foster further isolation of writers, presses, and publishers. Not to mention the fact that this commentary conveys a vast lack of diplomacy and sense of collaboration–both of which are needed to foster ANY sort of cohesive lit scene. Hey, it’s a big, spread-out city, so let’s learn how to work together and play with the big kids, eh? That’s our take. Give forth your own comments on the actual blog post about this.

Date: Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Danny’s Tavern
Participants: John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse

Poetry without the cigarettes.

Date: Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Women and Children First
Participants: Achy Obejas, Nairne Holtz, & Kathie Bergquist

The addition of “a-go-go” improves most any title. Please don’t be confused if our url soon changes to literagoagogo.org.

Date: Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Cobra Lounge (235 N. Ashland)

Free drinks, free DJ set from Office, free stuff for the first 50 people who show up! Visit the Venus website for details.

Date: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Harold Washington Library

Supernovelist John Edgar Wideman has written a book about Frantz Fanon. I get gooey when it comes to Fanon — he’s definitely my favorite prose stylist among 20th century theorists. After I saw the quarter-page ad for Fanon in last month’s Harper’s, went looking for it at Borders a few weeks ago, but neither of the two booksellers who attempted to help me were able to find it (I could ascribe this to some sort of late-capitalist conspiracy, but I prefer not to). Anyway, I haven’t read it yet. No word yet from any Colonial Studies folks as to whether or not this book is any good, but the premise sounds promising — the plot follows an African-American novelist who’s writing a book about Fanon’s life, who discovers that many of the problems Fanon faced persist (gasp!) in post-9/11 America.

Date: Thurs, Feb 21, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark
Participants: Rosellen Brown, Garnett Kilberg Cohen, Kathy Kelly, Eliza Nichols, Peggy Shinner, Sharon Solwitz, Christina Villasenor and S.L. Wisenberg

Chicago writers, activists and scholars will celebrate the life and work of author Grace Paley, who died at 84 last August. The bookstore claims that these readers will “briefly” read Paley’s work and to this I say Yay!, since I’ve lately been grousing about too-long readings. (Curators take note: Over 1 hour is “too long”. No, I don’t care if the crowd appears to be into it. They want you to break it up. Stop at 60 minutes: PLEASE!). From their site: “We will remember the short story writer who had perfect pitch, a social conscience and tremendous empathy and humor.”
Here’s a quote from Paley during an interview with Salon.
To me it seems a most particularly interesting time in American literature, and a particularly interesting time for the country. With all the other troubles we have and disasters that are coming our way — which are real, I don’t make light of them at all — we also have, for the first time in the last 10 or1 5 years, the voices of all the people who are living in this place and who plan to stay here. You have great Native American writers, you have Spanish voices, all kinds of Asian literature, a number of African-American women writing, and African-American men as well. These books are great, and really very important. What’s happening in publishing is happening to everybody, and that is that publishers are eating each other up, just like all the companies are eating each other up. We live in this amazing system, I believe it’s called capitalism, where as soon as some company fires 30 people Wall Street goes all the way up. I don’t even see how people can read that and not feel horror.

**If I can digress again, my love for feminist bookstores does not prevent my love of this recently-circulated video, a collaboration of Sleater Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein & SNL’s Fred Armison. Because I am a feminist with a sense of humor, that’s why.

Date: Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Quimby’s

This entry is not meant to encourage anyone to go see Neal Pollack read from (ugh, it pains me to type it) Alternadad. In fact, your time would be far better spent reading Martha Bayne’s excellent dissection of the memoir with the horrible name (which was so right on it stayed with me for a year). Rather, it is to alert everyone to the bizarre internet life of Pollack’s son, Elijah. The basis for the memoir is Pollack’s four year-old, about whom he blogs in excruciating detail. In retaliation, Gawker has published slash fiction starring a college-age Elijah and the other famous children of the New York literary elite. There’s even a commenter who goes by the name Elijah Pollack, using his little picture as their avatar. What a mindfuck! (Note: this post is also not an endorsement of Gawker, which has certainly seen better days, but I’m a woman of habit.)

Just as 2007 was notable for being the first year in which celebrities flashed their labia to the paparazzi, so it was exceptional for being the first year in which slash fiction involving toddlers hit the wider consciousness. How can the media hope to top itself in 2008?

A librarian friend sent me a link to the Reanimation Library, a collection of books housed in Brooklyn. These are books that have fallen out of general circulation, now preseved as “resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists. ” Many of the covers are very beautiful.

Date: Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Harold Washington Public Library

Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam. Best title ever. According to the owner of the Book Table (who was nice enough to buy all my galleys for a very fair price), Pope Brock’s book has been selling incredibly well. I can’t say I’m surprised, since anyone called Pope Brock deserves to sell a zillion books. The subject of Charlatan, John Brinkley, made his fortune implanting goat testicles into impotent men. Too bad Brian Dunning wasn’t around in those days…

Date: Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: NOT CALIFORNIA CLIPPER THIS MONTH: Decima Musa, 1901 S. Loomis, (19th and Loomis). Free admission.
Participants: Tim Hernandez, Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez

We’ve featured Palabra Pura before; it’s a bilingual reading series presented by the Guild Complex (and Letras Latinas of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, along with the Rafael Cintron Ortiz Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago). Tim Hernandez will be reading from his book Skin Tax, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and called a “powerful print debut of a poet with a mature and complex talent immersed in the themes of a young male wrestling with his sensitivity and his desires for love and affection, and the societal pressures surrounding male sexuality, violence, and machismo.” Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez (a performer in “Machos,” an interview-based play about contemporary masculinities) will read her poetry.