Plus: A Guide To Free Improvisation

“Geoff Harkness, assistant professor of sociology at Morningside College, recently received the 2015-2016 Midwest Sociological Society Distinguished Book Award for his book Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class,” the Sioux City Journal in Iowa reports.
“Harkness [received] the award [this month] at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting in Chicago.”
The book was published in 2014, but for some reason it’s never made it onto the Beachwood, so let’s take a look.

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Posted on March 29, 2016

By SIU Press

One of the 20th century’s most original and influential literary theorists, Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is also known as a fascinatingly atypical, polarizing public intellectual; a loud, cigar-smoking contrarian; and a lightning rod for both the political right and left. The truth and the limitations of this reputation are explored in Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible by Gary A. Olson. At once a literary biography and a traditional life story, this engrossing volume details Fish’s vibrant personal life and his remarkably versatile career.
Born into a tumultuous family, Fish survived life with an emotionally absent father and a headstrong mother through street sports and trouble-making as much as through his success at a rigorous prep school.
As Olson shows, Fish’s escape from the working-class neighborhoods of 1940s and 1950s Providence, Rhode Island, came with his departure for the university life at the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale. His meteoric rise through the academic ranks at a troubled Vietnam-era UC-Berkeley was complemented by a 1966 romp through Europe that included drag racing through the streets of Seville in his Alfa Romeo. He went on to become an internationally prominent scholar at Johns Hopkins before moving to Duke, where he built a star-studded academic department that became a key site in the culture and theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Posted on March 23, 2016

By Steve Rhodes

“Twenty years ago, Donald McCloskey, a brash and brilliant economist at the University of Iowa, surprised the academic world (and his family) by transitioning to Deirdre,” The Chronicle of Higher Education notes.
“In a 1996 profile in The Chronicle, McCloskey is quoted as saying, ‘I expected to lose my job. I was prepared to move to Spokane and become a secretary in a grain elevator, but I didn’t have to.’
“No, she didn’t. McCloskey has continued to thrive as a scholar. The final installment of her trilogy on the Bourgeois era, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press.”
Which is interesting, but click through to read the interview – which is about writing.

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Posted on March 21, 2016

By Steve Rhodes

“Author Irvine Welsh catapulted to fame when his first novel, Trainspotting, became a blockbuster movie in 1996 starring Ewan McGregor and directed by Danny Boyle. The gritty story chronicles the lives of a group of unemployed heroin addicts in Scotland,” WTTW reports.
“Since then, Welsh has continued to write about many of the same working-class themes and follow many of the same characters in his books. There is even a follow-up to his acclaimed film in the works.

“We’re going to shoot the sequel this year. We’re all getting back together, 20 years later” said Welsh. “Everybody’s back. The toughest part was getting myself and the screenwriter and the producer and the director together. The actors were OK. Once they realized that the background team were all kind of singing from the same song sheet, they were quite happy.”

“And while he’s been called the best storyteller in Britain, for about 10 years now he’s lived in Chicago. (Don’t miss an upcoming appearance by Welsh at the Chicago Humanities Festival on March 8.)”
From that appearance, with Jessa Crispin at the Bottom Lounge:

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Posted on March 11, 2016

Plus: Chicago’s Trauma Queen

“A little over a decade ago, a forgotten book was suddenly remembered,” Daniel A. Gross writes for the New Yorker in “The Custodian Of Forgotten Books.”
“Its second life began when a fiction writer referenced it in a book of her own. A blogger read the new book, then tracked down a copy of the old one, and wrote about all this on his Web site. An archivist read the blog post and e-mailed it to a small publisher. By 2009, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine, first published in 1962, was back in print.
“Most novels are forgotten. Glance at the names of writers who were famous in the nineteenth century, or who won the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the twentieth, or who were on best-seller lists just a few decades ago, and chances are that most of them won’t even ring a bell. When The Moonflower Vine resurfaced and ricocheted around the publishing world, it became an unlikely exception.

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Posted on March 9, 2016

Plus: Jim Dine With Bass Accompaniment

“Richard Bales will speak about his forthcoming book, Nelson Algren: The Forgotten Literature, in a Society of Midland Authors program on Tuesday at the Cliff Dwellers Club, 200 S. Michigan Ave., 22nd floor,” the society has announced.
“Bales will speak at 7 p.m. A social hour, with complimentary snacks and a cash bar, begins at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
“Bales will discuss poetry, book reviews, essays and short stories by Algren that were once published but then forgotten. Although Algren was best known for novels such as The Man With the Golden Arm – winner of first National Book Award for fiction – the Chicago writer was much more than a novelist. Throughout his life, he wrote poetry, and in his later years he made a living by writing short stories, essays and book reviews. Algren was also a member of the Society of Midland Authors and spoke at SMA events.
“Bales is also the author of The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, in which he used his legal and land-survey skills to solve the mystery of the cause of the Great Chicago Fire. He and his findings became the subject of a Discovery Channel Unsolved History episode.”

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Posted on March 3, 2016