Art Chicago is this weekend. It’s sometimes called the Navy Pier art show, although this year it won’t be on Navy Pier. It will be on Butler Field, behind the Art Institute. Over on Navy Pier, there’s another show called Chicago Contemporary and Classic, which has been organized by the same folks who do Art Basel Miami, a relatively new show that has siphoned off much of the attention and audience that used to focus on Chicago in the spring.

Confused? Wonder how we got in this mess? Jim Yood gave a good explanation on last Sunday’s Hello Beautiful (scroll down). I’m still going to go (to both shows, probably), but the list of exhibitors in either case is not encouraging.

Hope appears from other quarters. There’s another show this weekend called NOVA which focuses on young artists. Even better, they’ve added fiction and poetry readings to the goings-on. Here’s the scoop:

Poetry and Fiction and NOVA Young Art Fair: April 28-May 1

The following poetry and fiction readings will take place during the NOVA Young Art Fair this weekend. The Art Fair, located at 840 and 850 W. Washington Boulevard, features Chicago, national, and international galleries. A day pass for all events is $5.

Thurs. April 28
Sam Brumbaugh, 10 PM

Fri. April 29
Suzanne Buffam and Joel Craig, 4:30 PM

Sat. April 30
Erica Bernheim, Daniel Borzutzky, and Kent Johnson, 4:30 PM

Sun. May 1
Miles Harvey and Patty Templeton, 4:30 PM

About the Readers

Erica Bernheim is a poet living in Chicago, where she is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in journals including Black Warrion Review, Gulf Coast, Volt, The Canary, and Bridge.

Daniel Borzutzky been published in several literary journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Fence, Blaze Vox, Octopus Magazine, LIT, Denver Quarterly, and Chicago Review. His book, Arbitrary Tales, is available from Ravenna Press.

Sam Brumbaugh’s novel Goodbye Goodness is available from Open City Books. Brumbaugh has worked in the music industry for two decades, touring with bands such as Pavement, Cat Power, and Mogwai, producing music specials for PBS, and, most recently, a documentary on the great Texas musician Townes Van Zandt (Be Here to Love Me). A relative of Annie Oakley himself, he lives in New York City.

Suzanne Buffam’s poetry has appeared in various journals in the United States and Canada (including Saturday Night, Books in Canada, Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner and The Colorado Review) and in the anthologies Language Matters (Oxford University Press), Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour Press), and Breaking the Surface (Sono Nis Press). Her book Past Imperfect is published by House of Anansi Press. She is the 2005 recipient of the Bridge International Arts Award and the 1998 recipient of the Canadian Literary Award for poetry.

Joel Craig is from Des Moines, IA, and lives in Chicago, where he works as a deejay and graphic designer. His poems have appeared in Fence, Bridge, Spoon River, Iowa Review and canwehaveourballback.com. Craig is a co-founder and curator of The Danny’s
Reading Series. Craig is also a member of the artist collective Pulseprogamming.

Miles Harvey is the author of The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Random House). He has worked for United Press International, In These Times and Outside, where he was a book-review columnist. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.S. in Journalism, 1984) and the University of Michigan (M.F.A in English, 1991), he has had a lifelong fascination with maps.

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My wife has been reading Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn recently, and it’s been a lot of fun to talk with her about it. She doesn’t usually read poetry — though she has a few favorites by heart — so many of the works in Paglia’s book are new to her. Saturday night after dinner we went though some of the poets she’s liked so far (Donne, Marvell, Shelley), got out the Oxford Companion to read about the poets, got out the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to find the famous lines everyone knows, and raided my bookshelves for various other relevant essays, poems, etc. And, in the process, finding all the poems bearing the marks of my patient scansion and which now, as if by magic, appear entirely new to me.

It should be great fun to see Paglia tomorrow night down in Hyde Park, when she matches wits with the locals over at the International House. (Note the location — earlier reports had her speaking at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.)

Maybe I can talk Mrs. Jones into a little blog-based conversation about Paglia, a la Mark and MOTEV. She’s an interesting character, that Mrs. Jones. She has a bullshit detector that would make Hemingway’s look like a cheap toy. And no, it is not the product of her 20 years of marriage to Mr. Jones. If that’s where you were going.

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A quick tip o’ the hat to TimeOut Chicago’s Bookmarks column, which is providing some unique coverage of developments in Chicago’s literary community. In one item this week, Jonathan Messinger notes that local poets Ray Bianchi and William Allegrezza have started Field Press. Books from Field will include one translated work per year, with each year focusing on a different language. The first will be Italian.

TOC’s books section is surprisingly good. The reviews aren’t long, but every issue has three or four, and the title choices are usually pretty thoughtful. The web site suggests that this content will soon be in a subscriber-only section. That would be too bad — especially since TOC’s competitor, the Chicago Reader, will be heading in the opposite direction, making more of its content (including books coverage) available online for free. Or so I’ve heard. Will keep you informed.

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Since both Laura and Wendi have passed the baton to me, I guess I need to run with it. My answers are a little boring — not that that’s ever stopped me before.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be saved?
I’ll surprise you and pick the Bible. And not because I’m particularly religious.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Edvarda from Hamsun’s Pan.

The last book you bought was…?
Hardcover: McEwan’s Saturday. Softcover: George Saunders’s Pastoralia.
Used: Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters.

The last book you read was…?
James Jones, The Ice Cream Headache and Other Stories

What are you currently reading?
Proust Swann’s Way, Zsuzsa Bank’s The Swimmer, Cole Swenson’s Goest, the new Chicago Review Zukovsky issue. And here’s what I will soon be reading, since they are all due back to the library next week:
* Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
* Stefan Kiesbye, Next Door Lived a Girl
* James Jones, The Thin Red Line
* Michele Claire Lucas, A High and Hidden Place
* Richard Stern, Stitch

Five books you would take to a desert island…
Assuming I’m there for a long time:
* Boswell’s Life of Johnson
* Shakespeare, Complete Works
* Proust, ISOLT (I’ll pretend it’s one book)
* Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories (There are still some in this collection that I don’t know by heart)
* World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time

Who are you passing this stick on to and why?
Pete, because he exemplifies the Chicago style (of reader, that is).
Perry, because he sent me that great pic of the Mawson statue in Adelaide.
Megan, because she’s an intermittent reviewer of reviewers, just like me.

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I have to interrupt my enforced absence from the blog in order to observe a few developments on the local events scene:

* A few days ago I received the surprising news that there were still tickets left for Victoria Lautman’s interview with Jonathan Safron Foer at the Lookingglass Theatre on Sunday. How can this be, I thought? Maybe I’m not understanding the English language. Today I learn, courtesy of Chicago Magazine’s Marquee newsletter, that the event is now sold out. That’s more like it. Happily, you can still hear it live on WFMT if you missed out on tickets. Not to rub it in, but it has been on my events list for four freakin’ months. There are two more events in the series, including local favorite Sue Miller and Michael “The Hours” Cunningham.

* Two words: Kazuo Ishiguro. Try and tell me you didn’t notice he’s going to be reading down in Hyde Park tomorrow at the Oriental Institute. As the Lit Saloon notes, reviews for the latest book have been all over the map. I’ll bet that means it’s pretty good.

* Finally next week is French-American Poetry Week. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Cultural Services Department of the French Embassy in Chicago is marking National Poetry Month by “joining with several Midwestern institutions (University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Guild Complex, University of Wisconsin-Madison, International Writing Program of the University of Iowa) to present a week of encounters, cross-cultural readings, lectures and translation seminars dedicated to contemporary poetry.” The events take place in three cities: Chicago, Madison, Iowa City. Here’s the lowdown on Monday’s event in Chicago:

French-American Poetry Week
A Celebration of Contemporary Poetry Across the Midwest

SCHEDULE
1:00-3:00pm – Panel Discussion on French and American Poetry
3:00-4:00pm – Reception
4:00-5:00pm – Readings

The idea of bringing together French poets and American poets for National Poetry Month is very cool. I especially like the idea that Cole Swenson is appearing, since her translation of Pierre Alferi’s OXO was one of the more entertaining poetry titles from last year. Check out the recent review in RainTaxi.

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Turns out I’m doing this feature every other week now. I really couldn’t get excited about the last week’s baseball issue. I’m sure I had a different reason for skipping the previous fortnight’s. Whatever — it’s all part of the ongoing “I do whatever I want” program that’s proven so popular with … I guess just with me.

As previously, I have a few words about last week before I proceed to the current number. I’ve also decided to add a section to the end of the evaluation, called “Nine Blocks West,” which tells you what you would have read if you picked up the Sun-Times on Sunday instead of the Trib. (Is it really nine blocks from the Tribune Tower to the new Sun-Times offices in the Apparel Center? I don’t know. Somebody, please walk it off for me.)

Re last week: Seems like the Trib is sprinkling more literary stuff throughout the Sunday paper, rather than keeping it all in the Books section. Either that, or I’m more assiduous lately in finding it. Last Sunday, as Pete pointed out, there was a remembrance of Frank Conroy amongst the editorials (his prose was “every much as great” as Salinger’s or Keroauc’s), and the great cover story on Heinemann in the Sunday magazine, which I mentioned previously. It was fantastic to see the Heinemann coverage, and Julia Keller (who won a Pulitzer this year) did a nice job of it, aside from a single error of fact (he won the National Book Award in 1987, not 1988) and a conventional but mistaken view of Heineman’s first book as an “utterly conventional” war novel.

This week too, there were several lit pieces outside the book section. I like it. I hope they keep it up.

STATS

The Chicago Tribune, April 17, 2005, Section 14, “Books.” Worthy or not worthy of this great literary city? My verdict: Not worthy.

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From Larry Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam (2005):

At the end of the summer [of 1968] I had no idea what I wanted to do …. I enrolled at Columbia College, a small arts school here in Chicago. The school had an open admissions policy — no SATs, no long drawn out selection process, no nothing; basically all you needed was a high school diploma and a checkbook. Since I had the GI Bill, I was money in the bank, and they were definitely glad to see me. I was one of the few veterans among the students. I took a writing course because everybody knew it was a snap “A” and you didn’t have to work; what the hell.* * *

Then the teacher cracked open a thickish-looking book and started reading a story about a bunch of guys on a ship out in the middle of the ocean somewhere; somebody sights a whale and everybody jumps on these little boats they have, and rows after it; one of the boat crews finally run it down, harpoon it, and the mate (smoking a pipe all the while) kills it by stabbing it in the heart with a lance longer than the spread of your arms while the animal thrashes around spitting up great shots of gore through its spout hole; and finally when one guy says that the whale is dead, the mate takes the pipe out of his mouth, sprinkles the dead ashes in the bright bloody water, and says, yes, both pipes are smoked out.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room, and I’m thinking, that’s a body count story. I was never much of a scholar, much less a student of anything, and I asked, what story was that? Well, of course, it was Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the teacher looked at me like I was some wandering alien just in off the street.

* * *

Melville’s novel is about a lot of things (including a deep understanding of and pleasure in American English and the tall tale as a story form, the same as Whitman and Twain), but it’s also a shitty-job story; reading it, you get a keen appreciation why the passing of that work of slaughterhouse butchery is not mourned.

* * *

And I took my cue from Melville. Look at it this way: at one level being a soldier is just like any other work with its rules and results, punch-in and punch-out, make-work nonsense and shortcuts, and such. Do a job right and there is almost a physical satisfaction; but how can a soldier feel good about the work he does — combat as work simply cannot be as satisfying in that way as ordinary-wages work. War produces an astonishing, pervasive ugliness, and that’s all. To my mind a soldier’s job is never done well, simply done with.

I would write about how the war worked; barracks language and barracks life; what the tracks were, what it was like to run the roads, and what it was like to plow your way through the woods, making your own road by knocking down trees one after another; how ambushes were supposed to go and what happened when an ambush went terribly wrong; the firefights and battles and what happened after ….

Heinemann’s first novel, Close Quarters, was published in 1977. It is being reissued as a Vintage paperback in August 2005 to coincide with the publication of Black Virgin Mountain.

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A little later today I’ll have my review of the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday book section. While the book section was pretty thin — the theme this week was baseball books — the cover story of the Sunday magazine focused on Chicago novelist Larry Heinemann, whose new book, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, comes out on Friday. I’ve been immersed in Heinemann, Vietnam novels, and war novels in general over the past couple of months, so I’ve got some observations to share about that. I also did a piece on Heinemann’s new book for Chicago Public Radio, which is supposed to air this coming Sunday.

As my events list shows, this week and next represent the peak of the spring literary season in Chicago, with thirty-odd events over the next 14 days. If you could be several places at one time, you’d get a good year’s worth of literary events on Tuesday alone, with Hemon at Northwestern, Winterson at the Newberry, Elizabeth Gaffney at Barbara’s in Oak Park, and Pierre Joris down in Hyde Park. Toward the end of the week, it’s poetry, poetry, poetry. (See the right-hand column for links.)

Joris (bio) lectures on Celan on Tuesday afternoon and reads from his own poetry, as part of the Poem Present series, on Wednesday night. This is the literary event of the spring, as far as I’m concerned. (A melancholy thought: I said the same thing at about this time last year.)

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Perhaps as a Bellow admirer I’m just more attuned to it, but it seems to me that the amount of press generated by Bellow’s death has been really extraordinary. Looking for yesterday’s piece by A. O. Scott on the New York Times website this morning, I notice that the Times — just one paper — has done nine pieces on Bellow since his death on Tuesday:

Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89
By MEL GUSSOW and CHARLES McGRATH, Published: April 5, 2005

A Parade of Humanity: The Complete List of Saul Bellow’s Books
BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, Published: April 5, 2005

Saul Bellow, Poet of Urban America’s Dangling Men
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, Published: April 6, 2005

Saul Bellow: A Writer Captivated by the Chaos of New York
By JOSEPH BERGER, Published: April 7, 2005

Master of the Universe
By IAN MCEWAN, Published: April 7, 2005

Mr. Bellow’s Planet
By BRENT STAPLES, Published: April 7, 2005

Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Let Down Your Hair
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, Published: April 9, 2005

Bellow’s Democratic Nobility of the Intellect
By DAVID BROOKS, Published: April 10, 2005

Saul Bellow, America’s Poet of Urbanity
By A. O. SCOTT, Published: April 10, 2005

Anyhow, Scott’s piece, though otherwise not exceptional, included this observation:

The postwar American novel resembles, for the most part, a suburb, populated by standardized ciphers who dream of becoming characters and wonder (along with their readers) why they can’t quite succeed. But Bellow’s books, refusing to flee the cities — even in the face of nihilism and social crisis — are like cities unto themselves: densely populated, often messy and full of the contradiction and cacophony that make up the true noise of civilization.

I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the Times again — an article about a new series in the Atlantic in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy — retraces Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 journey through America:

I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the again — an article about a in the in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy retraces 1831 journey through America:

And in the deserted factories and office buildings of Cleveland and Detroit and Lackawanna, N.Y., he sees an enigma about America, something missing that is taken for granted in Europe: “a love of cities.”

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Imagine you’re a house painter, and you’re applying for a job. Now imagine that your competition for the job includes not only your contemporaries, but every house painter who ever walked the earth.

That’s probably what it feels like to be a novelist today.

Of course, new entrants do have some advantages over competitors from bygone eras. The Tribune, for example, is likely to find your novel more coverage-worthy than it would Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, unless there’s a new translation. (Which there is. But don’t look for it in the Books section.) And some people are put off by old books just as they are by old movies, old music, and old persons. Yes, those people are ignorant. But they are real. I’ve met them, and spoken to them in their own strange tongue.

Still: compete against Proust? Woolf? Dickens? Joyce? Not your man Jones. I don’t have it in me. Happily, others do. Whence otherwise come tomorrow’s Proust, Woolf, etc.? For that reason I’ve joined up with the newly formed LitBlog Co-op, whose purpose is to draw attention to the best contemporary fiction by recommending one new book four times a year. Kind of like Oprah, except our weight will remain stable and we won’t give you a car.

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