In place of my normal “In the Locals” feature, here’s an overview and evaluation of the Chicago Tribune “Books” section this week. As you can see, I’ve adopted a modified version of the Mark Sarvas Thumbnail® format. For similar looks at books coverage in other papers, see Mark on the Los Angeles Times, Scott on the San Francisco Chronicle, and Ed on the New York Times.

You won’t be surprised to see that I focus my detailed comments on reviews of fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction. I don’t assign grades to individual reviews, but I do give the entire book section a type of pass/fail grade of my own devising.

STATS

The Chicago Tribune, February 27, 2005, Section 14, “Books.” Worthy or not worthy of this great literary city? My verdict: Not worthy.

I don’t normally cover theater in Chicago — I can barely keep up with readings — but I am intrigued by this new series from The Poetry Foundation.

The Poetry Foundation Sponsors
Chicago Series of Staged Verse Readings

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of POETRY magazine, is pleased to announce the premiere of Poetry on Stage, a new series of dramatic readings of verse plays. The first production in the series, T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, will be presented in April on five succeeding nights at five Chicago-area churches. All productions start at 7:30 P.M.

Monday, April 4
Old Saint Patrick’s Church
700 W. Adams Street

Tuesday, April 5
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel
5850 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Wednesday, April 6
The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
Michigan Avenue at Delaware

Thursday, April 7
Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ
2335 N. Orchard

Friday, April 8
St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church
1424 N. Dearborn

Jeff Award-winning actor Nicholas Rudall, in the role of Thomas Becket, will be joined by a cast of eleven leading Chicago actors. Bernard Sahlins, legendary co-founder of The Second City, is director and producer of the series. Each performance will be followed by a discussion of the play led by former Chicago Tribune chief theatre critic Richard Christiansen.

Subsequent productions, at venues to be announced, will include Seamus Heaney’s new version of Antigone entitled The Burial at Thebes, Molière’s The School for Husbands, and Archibald MacLeish’s JB.

“Besides stimulating interest in the wonderful world of verse drama,” John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said, “our goal is to encourage more work in this genre by theaters and playwrights.”

Murder in the Cathedral deals with the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket, his one-time chancellor and drinking buddy. Henry, seeking to control the church and its revenues, appointed Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. But once in his new office Becket fought for the church’s autonomy, a move that he knew would enrage Henry and lead to disaster.

“We are extremely pleased to be working on this project with Bernard Sahlins who has directed so many productions of this type,” said Stephen Young, the Foundation’s program director. “This is a work that plays wonderfully in churches, which of course provide this play with its natural setting.”

For its soaring poetry and dramatic excitement, Murder in the Cathedral is considered to be Eliot’s finest dramatic work.

Tickets are $20.00 for general admission and $10.00 for seniors and students. For additional ticket information and reservations call The Poetry Foundation at (312) 787.7070.

From Harold Bloom, “Don Quixote at 400,” in today’s The Wall Street Journal. (I tried to pick the passage with the fewest nonsequitors. The last sentence suggests Bloom is acquainted with the genre known in Spanish as el anuncio farmacéutico.)

The Desert Island Question (”If just one book, which?”) has no universal answer, but most readers with authentic judgment would choose among the Authorized English Bible, Shakespeare complete, and “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three competitors were almost simultaneous?

The King James Bible appeared in 1611, six years after the publication of the first part of “Don Quixote” (whose 400th anniversary was just upon us). In 1605, Shakespeare matched the greatness of Cervantes’s masterwork with “King Lear,” and then went on rapidly to “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” James Joyce, when asked the Desert Island Question, gloriously answered: “I should like to say Dante but I would have to take the Englishman because he is richer.” A certain Irish resentment of Shakespeare can be felt there, and also a personal envy of Shakespeare’s audience at the Globe, which is expressed in the still unread (except by scholars and a few other enthusiasts) “Finnegans Wake.” The Bible is read, Shakespeare is performed and read, but Cervantes seems less prevalent in English-language countries than once he was. There have been many good translations into English since Thomas Shelton’s in 1612, which Shakespeare evidently knew, but the extraordinary version by Edith Grossman, published in 2003, deserves to be read by those among us who cannot easily absorb Cervantes’s Spanish.

Sometimes I’m just your scribe. Here’s the full text of the item in the February 18 issue of the TLS concerning literary weblogs, which others have mentioned today:

About once every five years, the death of print culture is announced. It has always surprised us how eager some folk are to see off the maggoty old book. The internet was supposed to have been the final nail in its coffin. As things have turned out, books and the internet have learned to coexist peaceably. Literary weblogs (blogs) are occasionally cheering and informative complements to the world of print and paper, but only a cyber-fanatic would now argue that they could replace it. More books are published than ever before. And it is notable that, while literary blogs feed off print culture, print culture is barely nourished by blogs.

Bloggers have the advantage of universality, but are casualties of transience. The signs are that they pine for the permanence of print. Michael Allen, author of the blog grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com, has just issued his dispatches in the form of a 300-page book, called Grumpy Old Bookman (Kingsfield, £12.99). And the Guardian recently gave a spread to Jessica [sic] Crispin, the brains behind bookslut.com. “Yesterday I read a book that was so bad I ended up ranting to my boyfriend for ten minutes about the doomed nature of the publishing industry.” In a clever bit of subversion, she was pictured peeping out from behind a big fat book.

From Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (1966):

The epic poet is a repository of tradition, fulfilling the functions of entertainer and historian simultaneously. The tradition provides him with his authority. The familiar invocation to the muse of Homeric epic may well represent an attempt on the part of the Greek epic poet to shift the authority from constricting tradition to inspiration, which is freer because personal and creative. The inspired bard must answer to his muse alone, and his muse can only speak through him …. In seems highly likely that the invocation is a sophisticated feature which developed late in Greek oral epic as a manifestation of the creative impulse toward a more fictional kind of narrative ….

The Greek historians in their narratives substitute for the authority of tradition a new kind of authority. The histor as narrator is not a recorder or recounter but an investigator. He examines the past with an eye toward separating out actuality from myth. Herodotas takes his authority not so much from his sources as from the critical spirit with which he means to approach those sources. Where the traditional poet must confine himself to one version of the story, the histor can present conflicting versions in his search for the truth of fact. Thucydides is the perfect type of the ancient histor, basing his authority on the accuracy of conclusions he has drawn from evidence he has gathered.

The principal other source of narrative authority which we would expect to find in empirical narrative is not so readily found there in the ancient world. This is the authority of the eye-witness. We have commented elsewhere on the rarity of first-person narrative in pre-Roman narratives. This absence is nowhere more striking than in such a narrative as Xenophon’s Anabasis. Here the author witnessed the events narrated and took a prominent part in them. Yet he not only narrates in the third person, casually introducing himself (Xenophon, an Athenian) in Chapter 8 of Book I, but originally caused his manuscript to be circulated under someone else’s name. Thucydides also refers to himself bleakly in the third person in Book IV of The Peloponnesian War, striking the personal note of the eye-witness momentarily — in Book V — and even there emphasizing his leisure for investigation rather than any immediacy of observation… The reason for this employment of third-person narrative of historical works may be that the reliability of the histor seemed to the ancients clearly greater than that of the eye-witness…. First-person narrative seems to have been used mainly in the ancient world not for factual or mimetic representation, but for highly unreliable and one-sided apologiae …

Speaking of About Last Night, me and Mrs. Jones — we got a thing goin’ on — head to New York this weekend for the annual ADAA art show. Terry often talks about his collection on ALN, so for your amusement I put together a list of some of the things we have. No photos, but I provide links so you can see what the artist’s work generally looks like.

Stephane Couturier, 1998. Cibachrome print.
Valerie Demianchuk, 2003. Pencil on paper.
Richard Diebenkorn, 1986. Drypoint, etching and aquatint.
Lionel Feininger, 1944. Ink and watercolor on paper.
David Hirschi, 2004. Oil and alkyd on canvas.
Horst Janssen, 1973. Etching.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, 1915. Woodcut on laid paper.
Michael Triegel, 1997. Mixed media on board.
Jacques Villegle, 1961. Paper decollage.
Stephen Wright, [undated]. Oil on canvas.

We have a couple more that I like, including the rather cheerful Janssen poster depicted above. A few of our pieces have literary connections; one was inspired by a scene in Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Most came from Chicago galleries, a couple from New York, one from San Francisco. We go to the AADA show in New York every February, and also to Art Chicago. (Waiting to see what happens with Art Chicago this year, given its new competition. Neither has published an exhibitor list, which seems odd for shows supposedly taking place in the spring.)

We’re complete amateurs at this, but it’s been fun to get to know the galleries, to learn about the artists, and to have interesting things to look at on our walls.

Addition 9/27/10: Updated the list with a few things we’ve bought over the last couple years.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but About Last Night’s redoubtable OGIC came in from the cold over the weekend. Like mad King George, OGIC’s always been herself; now she seems herself.

To mark the occasion, here are a few of her book reviews that are available (often in abbreviated form) online:

Nani Power, The Sea of Tears
Lawrence Thornton, Sailors on the Inward Sea
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past
Clare Boylan, Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Bronte

Apparently the link on woods s lot to George Orwell’s “Bookshop Memories” (1936) caught the eye of a lot of people, not just me. It’s a great reminder of how funny Orwell could be — a fact you may have missed if you were made to read Animal Farm or 1984 in high school. (I’m afraid I can never share a laugh with an author whose company has been forced upon me. Laugh at him, yes. With him, never.)

Many of the details from Orwell’s little memoir — from Ethel M. Dell, to customers who smell of “old breadcrusts” — are familiar to readers of his novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which he wrote the same year. The hero is Gordon Comstock, a young poet who works in a bookstore and spends his spare time cursing “the money god.”

Anyhow, while we’re talking about “funny Orwell,” here’s a little hymn to spring from the same book:

Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805.

But how absurd that even now, in the era of central heating and tinned peaches, a thousand so-called poets are still writing in the same strain! For what difference does spring or winter or any other time of year make to the average civilized person nowadays? In a town like London the most striking seasonal change, apart from the mere change of temperature, is in the things you see lying about on the pavement. In late winter it is mainly cabbage leaves. In July you tread on cherry stones, in November on burnt-out fireworks. Towards Christmas the orange peel grows thicker. It was a different matter in the Middle Ages. There was some sense in writing poems about spring when spring meant fresh meat and green vegetables after months of frowsting in some windowless hut on a diet of salt fish and mouldy bread.

If it was spring Gordon failed to notice it.

Aleksandar Hemon has a story, “The Conductor,” in the February 28 issue of the New Yorker.

From Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own color. This literary coloring is a protective one — like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail — making it impossible for me to tell where the literature ends and I begin.