Rahm Made Her Feel Small; Her Words Made Her Big
This poem by Lane Tech English teacher Molly Meacham has been making the rounds.
She performed it again on Sunday as captured in this video by Cliff Potts. (Text here.)
Posted on September 25, 2012
Local Book Notes: A Multisensory Scrabble Experience
Poets, Politics And The Lights Of State Street
Over the transom.
1. From Chicago Art Expo 2012:
Posted on September 24, 2012
The Chambers Report: Ayes For Atheism
By Bob Chambers
I.
Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated “public intellectual” who was born in Dartmoor, Southwestern England, but eventually became an American citizen, died of esophageal cancer on December 15, 2011, at the age of 62. As one for whom the elegant use of language was a defining attribute, Hitchens himself wryly observed the irony of ultimately losing his vocal abilities. In Mortality, his final book of essays – much reviewed recently, most prominently in The New York Times by his friend Christopher Buckley – the dying author caustically noted:
My two assets, my pen and my voice – and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I had been “straying into the arena of the unwell” and now “a vulgar little tumor” was evident. This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.
As perhaps the English-speaking world’s most famous and outspoken atheist, Hitchens on his deathbed became the unsurprising target of scores of religious proselytizers, all hell-bent on playing some role in bringing about an eleventh-hour conversion experience for the Great Heretic.
Not to worry, however, for various pages of Mortality are, in effect, continuations of Hitchens’ atheist classic God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and thus, in Buckley’s words, “devoted to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.”
Posted on September 17, 2012
Read It Maybe
Local Book Notes: Through The Eyes Of Angels And Art
Strange Big Moons And Homegirls
Over the transom in four parts.
1. From The Society of Midland Authors:
Chicago author Mahmoud Saeed, a native of Iraq, will discuss his novel The World Through the Eyes of Angels in a Society of Midland Authors program Oct. 9 at the Cliff Dwellers Club, along with one of his translators, Allen Salter of Chicago.
Saeed has written more than 20 novels and short story collections, starting with Port Saeed and Other Stories in 1963. That same year, Iraq’s first military-Baathist government seized two of his novels and imprisoned him for a year. After being incarcerated six times, Saeed left Iraq in 1985. He has lived in the United States since 1999, and he now teaches Arabic and Arabic culture at DePaul University.
Posted on September 11, 2012
Lost and Found: Dorian Gray in Chicago
Amnesty For A Faustian Work Of Goth Fiction
“When the Chicago Public Library announced its first amnesty in 20 years, it didn’t expect to get back a rare classic,” CBS2 Chicago reports.
“But the library also didn’t know that the daughter of a patron had found a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that had been checked out in 1934. She just wanted to be sure that if she turned it in now, she wouldn’t go to jail.”
Perhaps Rahm should make this book the next One Book, One Chicago pick. The current selection is The Book Thief.
Posted on September 6, 2012
The Evolution Of His Block
On Corners Now Crowned
The Poetry Foundation named five fellowship winners last week including Chicagoan Jacob Saenz.
“Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero,” the foundation notes. “He earned his B.A. from Columbia College Chicago. Saenz received the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship in 2011, currently serves as an associate editor for RHINO, and works at a library. He has published poems in Apparatus Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Great River Review, Poetry, RHINO, and other journals.”
Let’s take a look.
Posted on September 4, 2012