Late And Great
Over the transom.
1. The Society of Midland Authors presents a panel discussion Tuesday on Harold Washington as we near the 30th anniversary of his landmark mayoral election.
The deets:
6 p.m. in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library.
The panel:
Peter Nolan is a former NBC5 reporter whose book Campaign! The 1983 Election That Rocked Chicago is a firsthand account of Washington’s election to mayor.
Timuel Black is the author of Bridges of Memory, a two-volume history of black Chicago.
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor at In These Times, a host on WVON-AM 1690 and the author of the text in Harold! Photographs from the Harold Washington Years.
Robert Starks is founder of the Harold Washington Institute for Research and Policy Studies at Northeastern Illinois University.
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2. “Public transportation became an absolute necessity for Chicago around 1860, when the city’s population had ballooned to more than 112,000 from about 30,000 only 10 years earlier,” Jon Hilkevitch writes for the Tribune.
About 7,000 horses were pulling transit vehicles in the city by the 1880s. Horsepower provided mobility to the burgeoning metropolitan area, but it also deposited millions of pounds of manure and countless gallons of urine on the streets each year, creating health hazards that included the tetanus virus carried in horse feces.
A cleaner, faster, smoother and more reliable form of transport was urgently needed. Between the transitions from the horse-drawn omnibus (from Latin for “all,” and later shortened to “bus”) in the early 19th century to horsecar street railways, and later, electric trolleys in the 1890s, one of the largest cable-car systems in the world operated in Chicago.
Chicago historian and transportation author Greg Borzo has chronicled that forgotten era, which lasted not quite 25 years (1882 to 1906), in his new book, Chicago Cable Cars, published by The History Press.
Borzo is scheduled to speak at the Harold Washington Library on January 24.
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3. Poetry Magazine Editor Steps Down.
From The Poetry Foundation:
“Christian Wiman announced that he will leave Poetry on June 30, 2013, after a decade as the editor of the magazine, to join the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.”
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“Born and raised in West Texas, Wiman attended Washington and Lee University. He has taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the Prague School of Economics.
“He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Every Riven Thing, and a book of personal and critical essays titled Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.
“In 2012, in addition to The Open Door, he published Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam.
“His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, and many other venues.
“His new book of nonfiction, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, will be released in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.”
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“A national search for Wiman’s successor will begin this spring.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on January 6, 2013