June 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Is This a Classic Chicago Novel? By Kathleen Rooney The newly established publishing arm of the Chicago Review of Books identifies itself as “a small press to republish classic Chicago literature in beautiful new editions.” But of what can a classic be said to consist? Looking at the etymology of the term, one finds that the meaning “of or belonging to the highest class; approved as a model” dates to the seventeenth century and derives from the Latin classicus, “relating to the highest classes of the Roman people”—in other words, superior. The obvious questions arise: superior to what and according to whom? Like so many highly subjective designations, the clearest definitions of classic are usually ostensive. The definer simply points to examples and says, That—that’s what we mean. The text toward which Chicago Review of Books Press points to inaugurate their new series is Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers, which they declare to be “the first great ‘Chicago novel’ ” and cite as having been listed by Chicago magazine as number six in their 2010 list of “The Top 40 Chicago Novels.” In his introduction to the reissue, the Chicago Review of Books’s editor in chief, Adam Morgan, quotes Dr. Joseph Dimuro of UCLA as calling The Cliff-Dwellers “arguably the first important novel of the American city.” Read More
June 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Six Books We Could and Should All Write By Anthony Madrid Viola Olerich, the famous baby scholar, 1897. Let’s make sure we’re all understanding each other. I’m not talking about novels and plays and poems. And I’m definitely not talking about great novels and plays and poems. It’s pointless to tell people to write stuff like that. Even the ones who want to can’t. And of course, most people don’t even want to. My topic is different. It’s books anybody could write. Every single thing I’m about to describe, you wouldn’t need any talent to produce it. You wouldn’t need any talent, and you wouldn’t need any understanding. All you’d have to do is stick with it. A little mimicry would help, but that’s really it. That’s why this list is good. Door’s wide open; everyone is invited. And you know what? You’d be producing something of value. At the very least, you yourself would value it. These are your models. Your versions will not be as good as these books. But they will be good just the same. Read More
June 5, 2018 Arts & Culture The Man Behind the Weegee By Christopher Bonanos Mannequins: Weegee with friends in a promotional store-window display at the L.A. Camera Exchange, 1951. Let’s talk about that name first. Or rather, those three names. Usher Fellig was a greenhorn, a hungry shtetl child from eastern Europe who spoke no English. When he came through Ellis Island in 1909, at ten years old, he reinvented himself, as so many immigrants do. In his first years in New York, Usher became Arthur, a Lower East Side street kid who was eager to get out of what he called “the lousy tenements,” earn a living, impress girls, make a splash. He had turned his name (slightly) less Jewish and his identity (somewhat) more American, as much as he could make it. As a young man, he was shy, awkward, broke, and unpolished, and at fourteen, he became a seventh-grade dropout. He was also smart, ambitious, funny, and (as he and then his fellow New Yorkers and eventually the world discovered) enormously expressive when you put a camera in his hands. Read More
June 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Joan Quigley, Ronald Reagan’s Guide to the Stars By Jessica Weisberg “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with this woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” writes Don Regan, President Reagan’s chief of staff, in his memoir, For the Record. Regan kept a color-coded calendar on his desk, with “good” days highlighted in green and “bad” days highlighted in red. Here’s the calendar for the first few months of 1986: Jan 16–23 very bad Jan 20 nothing outside the WH—possible attempt Feb 20–26 be careful March 7–14 bad period March 10–14 no outside activity March 16 very bad March 21 no March 27 no March 12–19 no trips exposure March 19–25 no public exposure April 1 careful April 11 careful April 17 careful April 21–28 stay home Read More
May 31, 2018 Arts & Culture A Black Artist Named White By Kerry James Marshall Charles White, Sound of Silence, 1978, color lithograph on white wove paper. All images: © The Charles White Archives Inc. I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences. He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach. The wisdom he dispensed to the many aspiring artists who gathered around him was always straightforward: do your work with skill and integrity, everything else is superfluous. It is a right time for him to be considered again in the fullness of his expertise. And fitting that he should be recognized with a survey in three of the best museums in the world. Read More
May 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone By Sam Huber In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” originally published in The Speed of Darkness fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external: I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. Since 2016, “Poem” has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When The Speed of Darkness appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women’s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of “Poem” can’t opt out of this deluge, as the vitality of her art depends on its responsiveness to the world it enters. But neither can art concede to that world’s terms: “Slowly I would get to pen and paper, / Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.” Rukeyser struggles, here and elsewhere, to write toward the poem’s divergent “unseen”: an anticipated future audience of poetry and that other living audience already in thrall to newspapers, TV, and the various devices through which the world tries to reach us. Read More