Works in progress: Jack Clark

 

     I've been checking more books out of the library, not so much out of economic necessity as just not having room for more books. The trouble is, library books must be returned, eventually, and then I don't have them. I also loan out books, usually in a rush of foolish generosity, then forget who has them, and then have to buy new copies — I recently had to buy another copy of Eddy Portnoy's great Yiddish press celebration, "Bad Rabbi" — if you're the person I loaned it to you, well, you might as well keep it at this point.

    As for skipping to the end of books, honestly, the idea never occurred to me until ... well, I'm exploring topics our guest writer and old friend, mystery novelist Jack Clark, probes, talking about his latest book, and so should simply shut up — an art form I struggle to master — step aside and say, "Take it away, Jack!" 

     I took four books out of the library the other day and they sent me an email receipt. At the bottom it said, "You just saved $116.94 by using your library. You have saved $2,228.18 this past year and $82,672.80 since you began using the library!" Wow! That's a lot of money. That's a lot of books. I don't blame them for using the exclamation point.
     I love my library but I didn't save anywhere near that much. If it wasn't for the library, most of the books I read would be paperbacks from thrift shops and second-hand bookstores, or borrowed from friends.
     There's always a danger with friends. You have to return the book in good condition — no reading in the bathtub or while eating chips and salsa — same for the library, of course. You're also likely to be asked what you thought of the book, which they probably recommended. Too many times, I have to confess that I didn't finish it. That's how it often works out, I usually give up on about half the books I start.
     My library never asks what I think of a book. You don't even have to talk to them. You can check out your books all by yourself. Being old, I've never done this. I've never even attempted it. I like to make small talk with the clerks. They usually respond in kind but I sometimes think I can see what they're really thinking: What's this guy up to?
     It's a tough place, this new, do-it-yourself world.
     My friend Marilyn goes through a lot of library books too. She has a 50-page rule. That's how much she'll force herself to read before giving up on a book. I've heard of people with a 100-page rule.
     I have a first paragraph rule. Of course, the books that fail that test never get out of the library, at least not with me.
     When I get books home, my biggest criticisms are, 1) I don't care about the characters. 2) I don't believe in the world the writer has created — or tried to create. 3) The book is too wordy. You really don't have to describe every last, little detail. Let the reader fill in some of the blanks. If we wanted everything spelled out, we'd be watching TV.
     Elmore Leonard had a list of 10 rules for writing. My favorite goes something like this: You know those parts you skip over when you're reading a book? Don't write those.
     When I've had enough of someone breaking this rule, I'll sometimes shout, "Elmore Leonard," and toss the book to the end of the sofa where library books begin their return trip.
     I once saw my father throw a book across the room. It wasn't a very good book to begin with, he explained, and then he came to a paragraph where someone drew a round circle on the ground. That was one word over the line for my dad.
     Years back, I was spending a quiet evening at home with my wife Lisa. I looked up from my book and she was almost at the end of hers, which I knew she'd just started. "You can't do that," I said.
     She was ready for me. "Yes, I can," she said and I couldn't really disagree. We both did pretty much whatever we wanted. This might explain why the marriage didn't work out. "If I think a book is stupid and I'm not going to finish it, sometimes I'll go to the end to see if it's as stupid as I thought it was going to be. And if it isn't, I might go back and finish it." I could see that she was proud of her reasoning. The way she looked at it, she was giving the writer a second chance.
     I wasn't that sold on her argument but, shortly thereafter, I was reading a mystery novel. Things were moving right along until page two or three when a racist police officer showed up at a murder scene. "Oh, tell me you're not going to do this," I said, and then I remembered Lisa's rule.
     I flipped to the back and, yes, the racist cop was the bad guy. Lisa had just saved me a couple hundred pages of misery. If the writer gives the villain away on page two, what other crimes will he commit before he gets to the end?
      Still, I hardly ever flip to the back of a book. Many of the books I give up on, I just can't get myself to care enough about the characters to give them a second chance. "I don't care what happens," I'll shout as the book goes flying towards the sofa.
     Everybody's got their own rules, of course. One of mine is, you don't have to read those parts in italics. That's just for extra credit.
     Way back deep in the last century, Marilyn gave me Continental Drift by Russell Banks. She'd gotten it from our next-door neighbor Bob. They'd both really liked it and I did too. I passed it on to my friend Robin. When she gave the book back, she said she liked it. "But that Haiti stuff was really rough."
     "I skipped all that," I said.
     "It's half the book."
     Robin tends to exaggerate. "It's no more than a third," I said. "Anyway, it was in italics."
     "What does that have to do with anything?"
     She'd apparently never heard about the italics rule. Well, as the justice system is always happy to point out, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
     When I gave the book back to Marilyn, she said she'd skipped all the Haiti stuff too. I asked the next-door neighbor. Yep. He'd skipped that part also.
      I don't know what that says about the book or about my circle of friends. I'm sorry to report that Russell Banks died in 2023, but at least he didn't have to hear about this.
     Meanwhile, early in this century, one of my writer friends was hired to work on a screenplay for Continental Drift. I think it was a script doctor job. I never got the details quite right. When I told him to just skip everything in italics, he said, "I can't really do that. The director is Haitian."
     It shouldn't come as a surprise to hear that the movie never got made. Sometimes the hardest part of editing is figuring what to leave out.
     I had a difficult choice to make with my latest book, Murder Reporter (just released). I showed a late draft to my writing group. Steve circled a paragraph about seven pages in and wrote: "This would be a great beginning."
     I pondered that for a couple of days and decided he was right. I'd buried the lede, as they say in the newspaper business. (Look, that's how they spell it. I don't like it either.)
     So now what was I going to do with the beginning I already had, which I really liked. It was only a page and a half. I didn't want to leave it out. Two seven-year-old boys are talking while sitting in a crabapple tree in Columbus Park. Then the story skips ahead 14 years.
     I couldn't move the scene deeper into the book. That wouldn't make any sense. The story is told in chronological order. What if I just put it in italics? Some of those who knew the rule could skip it — the overachievers could take the extra credit — and the others could read it and then, when the real type began, they'd probably realize, oh, here's where the story starts. I'm pretty sure it works.

Anne Frank exhibit at Griffin Museum of Science and Industry underlines the widespread appeal of denialism

 

     “Holocaust deniers say that her diary was written with a kind of ballpoint pen not available at the time,” said Eric Strating, the consul general of the Netherlands in Chicago.
     We were standing in the entrance of “Anne Frank The Exhibition” at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the doomed Dutch teen’s handwriting projected on the walls around us.
     I chewed on that information.
     Give credit to haters. The mental gymnastics they go through. Of course Anne Frank had to be a fraud, because ... why exactly? ... nobody died in the Holocaust? Because it’s impossible for a Jewish teen to be sympathetic?
     And the detail of the pen ... genius, with its implication of thorough historical rigor. “We’d like to believe this Frank lie. But our extensive knowledge of the history of pens and ink reveals the hidden hand of the octopoid conspiracy straddling the globe...”
     We need to teach denialism in school. Right now. Not only Holocaust denial — that’s just one popular brand of the bestselling denial line of faux intellectual products: climate change denial, medical science denial, humanity of whoever you are given permission to hate denial. People will cling to the most ridiculous suppositions to explain away anything that chafes against their cherished biases.
     If you hate Jews — and who doesn’t nowadays? — it can be awkward to have this enormous atrocity, the fruit of that hatred, just sitting there, staring at you out of the pages of history, complete with films, photos and those meticulous German records carefully accounting for every gold filling pried out of the mouths of their victims. So much easier just to say the whole thing never happened.
     “Don’t argue with Holocaust deniers,” I told the consul general. “It’s not intellectual pursuit, but a form of hatred. Nothing you can say is going to make them slap their forehead and go, ‘My God, you’re right, it did happen!”
     Facts are meaningless to such people. Did you see how Donald Trump reacted to the midterm blowout? A day of rational acceptance. Immediately followed by “it’s rigged!” denialism. Followed, when that was hooted down (“Just stop,” said Megyn Kelly, of all people), by whatever is coming next. Mutating fantasy in a consequence-free world.
     Actually, lies have consequences. As Anne Frank reminds us. I didn’t plan to see the show at the GMSI, which opened in May. I’d already toured the secret annex itself, visiting Amsterdam in 2023, and taken away its grim lessons — totalitarianism rises, innocent, ordinary people are caught between the gears and crushed, thanks to the genius of their friends and neighbors at denying their humanity based on lies.

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Restaurant notes: Prairie Grass

 

    I shouldn't write about Prairie Grass Cafe. As it is, the Northbrook institution was packed at lunchtime on Wednesday. Swinging by impromptu, to cheer up the dreary day, without a reservation, we were lucky to snag the one remaining table in the bar.
    And the special I had my eye on — a turkey burger with Chef Sarah Stegner's signature slaw, sweet potato wedges and a honey mustard cranberry sauce that sounded intriguing — was sold out. I shifted to their Amish blue cheese-topped bunless sirloin burger, forced to order the slaw on the side, so as not to go slawless. Even after our server warned us that there would be an upcharge. Fine, charge away; $8 is a small price to pay to soften the disappointment of wanting peerless slaw and not getting it. Slaw with chunks of apple in it. Worth every penny.
     First, an appetizer, which is why I'm writing this. Grilled Brussels sprouts with bacon and a basil remoulade. Really, look at the thing. One glance and I realized, with a sinking heart, that I'd have to write about it here, just to share that photo. It would be journalistic malpractice not to. Even though doing so might encourage you to patronize the place. Making it all the more difficult for me to get in. 

    And here's the funny thing. I had been against ordering the Brussels sprouts. Even though I'd eaten them many times here, and always loved them. Based on my lifelong aversion to Brussels sprouts, as mangled by lesser chefs. My wife, who knew better, who always knows better, ordered them anyway. 

     "You'll like them," she said, right as rain. She got the whitefish with potato wedges and broccoli. 

    In my defense,  I can't be 100 percent certain even the previous Prairie Grass sprouts had that remoulade — a scrape-worthy green sauce. I like to think I'd remember that. The burger comes without a bun, under a circle of toasted blue cheese, with marvelous grilled onions and a warm beefsteak tomato slice.
     Was the meal perfect? No. And I'd never undermine the honest praise I lavish on Prairie Grass by coughing into my fist when they miss the mark. The vegan coffee ice cream, topped with crushed chocolate covered almonds, made by Chicago's Pretty Cool Ice Cream, tasted more coconut than coffee — that would not do, in my wife's reckoning. She actually unwrapped a stick of gum, immediately, to get the taste out of her mouth. Not the experience you expect for a $14 bowl of ice cream. If you're going to miss the mark so spectacularly, just serve Graeter's.

     In its defense, I shrugged and polished off the whole thing. Then again, I tend to be less discerning; "a cheaper date" is the phrase I use. We agreed that days where there is no pie on the menu at Prairie Grass, well, those are pieless days. Sometime I have to ask Sarah how her keen sense of social responsibility jibes with there being days of no pie. Is pie not a human right? I believe it is.
     That said, despite the ice cream, and more salt on the broccoli than was necessary ("I'll wash it off" my wife said, when I said she should include it in her doggy bag) we left thinking that we really need to come back here more often in the middle of the week, vis a vis nothing, just to perk up our spirits. And I suppose you may visit as well, but truly, not all at once. Space yourselves out. It's busy enough already.

On Veterans Day, Pete Hegseth picks which vets to honor — and which to abuse

Display at the Obama Presidential Center Museum on the Department of Defense joining militaries around the world in allowing trans soldiers to serve openly in 2015. 

     Wednesday is Veterans Day — originally Armistice Day, begun in 1919 for the first anniversary of the end of World War I, which wasn’t called that at the time, since nobody knew another was coming. It was called “The Great War” or “The World War.”
     The first Armistice Day was a dramatic moment in Chicago — at 10:55 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1919, soldiers in Grant Park let off a fusillade of artillery and small arms fire, promptly stopping at 11 a.m. — the war had ended, famously, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Cops paused Loop traffic. L cars stopped. A full minute’s silence, then a cheer went up and LaSalle Street became a blizzard of confetti.
     Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1954, acknowledging the millions of Americans who had served in World War II and the Korean War.
     There is no possessive in Veterans Day — it isn’t “Veterans’ Day” — for the simple reason the day does not belong to them, but to us. It is a time when the American public is supposed to reflect on our debt to those who served our country. (And are still alive; we honor the fallen on Memorial Day.)
     But which veterans should we honor? Do Black veterans count? Black people have served since the Revolutionary War, but the Army wasn’t integrated until 1948. This was done over the objections of the brass, such as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley, who argued that mixing races would lower morale, hurt unit cohesion and turn the military into a social experiment rather than a fighting force.
     This wasn’t accepted by President Harry Truman, nauseated by the horrific abuse Black soldiers suffered when they returned home to the segregated South, which instead of honoring Black vets often brutalized them for the crime of wearing crisp uniforms and carrying themselves with pride.
     Truman said he was from Missouri, and his forebears were Confederates, but: “My very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers just back from overseas were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten. Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President, I know this is bad. I shall fight evils like this.”
     He did, by desegregating the military. But what one president giveth, another may take away. Donald Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has waged an open battle against Black service members, blocking or stalling promotions of Black and female senior officers, claiming any advancement had to be due to DEI rather than merit. Others have been dismissed or forced into retirement. Online tributes to historic Black service members have been taken down while books by Black authors were removed from military academy libraries.

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After all that, she hardboiled the eggs

Not poached.

     Sunday morning the dog cleared her throat by my bedside at 4:40 a.m. and I did what I always do. Rolled out of bed, got dressed, took her on her walk, fed her, and then made the executive decision not to try to go back to sleep, but to head up to my office, to email my blog post, finish the column and, taking a break at 6 a.m.-ish, go downstairs to see after coffee, which involved reheating yesterday's.
       Breakfast seemed an option — sometimes I wait for the wife, sometimes I don't. She had bought Muenster cheese the day before and that settled it for me. I put a slice on a piece of toast, sprinkled with with oregano, and browned it in the broiler. Heaven.
     And hour later, when my wife got up, she asked if I had breakfast. I admitted I had, seduced by the presence of Muenster cheese. 
      "I think I'll poach an egg," she said. 
      "You mean steal it, perhaps from a game preserve?" I replied. 
      I was playing off the dual meanings of "poach" — to nab something, usually an animal, that doesn't belong to you. And "poach" as to cook something by simmering it in water.
     Leading to today's episode of my favorite game — what's the connection? And which usage is older?
     Honestly, I was stumped. The Oxford English Dictionary starts by tracing the word to the French, pocher, meaning, to enclose in a small bag — we see a remnant of that in the expression "a pig in a poke." Plus, don't forget, "pouch."

     Then the cooking meaning: "Poach 1. trans. To cook (an egg) by dropping it, without the shell, into boiling water. [F. pocher, in this sense, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.]" The usage is traced to 1390.
     Then a meaning having to do with poking things with a stick or finger, such as an 1859 usage, "We'll poach the fire"
    Then stamping with the feet and, finally, a third section:
     "III. 9 intr. To encroach or trespass (on the lands or rights of another) in order to possess oneself unlawfully or unfairly of something, esp. in order to steal game; hence, to take game or fish illegally, or by unsportsmanlike devices." 
      This usage is far more recent, 1611: "to poche into, or incroach upon,, another mans imployment, practise, or trade" 
    I should probably point out that "pocket" comes from here, with a familiar usage showing up in Shakespeare's Henry IV ""Have you enquir'd yet who pick'd my Pocket?"
    If we want to gaze into the more distant past — and we probably shouldn't, especially if you're having that poached egg — I see that poc in Old English was a pustule, or ulcer, or other little bags of skin filled with fluid, going back to the year 1000, hence the word "pox." I have to think they're somehow related. 

Maybe 450,000 Lollapalooza fans trampling Grant Park every year isn't such a good idea

You can't get there from here. The former U.S. Steel South Works site.

 

     The 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition worked so well, between the Graf Zeppelin floating by and Sally Rand, with her naughty bubble dance, many Chicagoans never wanted it to leave.
     They extended the fair for an extra season in 1934, then wondered: why not keep the party going? Mayor Edward J. Kelly proposed building a sprawling lakefront pleasure center — a "wonderland" of exhibition halls, picnic shelters, public beaches, an ice skating rink, a casino, and a big parking garage. Paid for by the federal government, of course.
     There are some funny moments in the "Secret Diary of Harold Ickes," where Franklin D. Roosevelt's penny-pinching secretary of the interior, a University of Chicago graduate, dismisses Kelly's dreams of a "Coney Island" on the lakefront, warning FDR that a significant chunk of any federal money thrown at the plan would end up in the pockets of the Kelly-Nash Democratic machine.
     Still, Kelly's dream was not far-fetched. The site where this wonderland was to be built became McCormick Place, and having a vast hall — then two — has been a magnet drawing exhibition business to Chicago: all those auto, electronics, restaurant and houseware shows.
     With the historic fireworks coming from last week's election, you could be forgiven for overlooking that more than two-third of Chicago voters — 68% — said "yes" on the referendum question: “Should Chicago develop a permanent festival and outdoor event space for large-scale events?”
     Hell yes. The result isn't binding, but makes sense. Venues lure business. As it is now, big music festivals hijack public spaces not only while they're going on, but during lengthy preparation and even lengthier clean-up. Repairing Grant Park after Lollapalooza took a month. Restoring the damage after this year's rain-soaked Riot Fest in Douglass Park might take until Thanksgiving. Yes, the festivals cover clean-up expenses — topping $1 million with Lolla —but that adds to the already astronomical ticket prices. One assumes a dedicated festival space would suffer less costly damage.
     The devil is in the details. The question is where to put such a venue. The traditional Shangri-La for land-hungry dreams was U.S. Steel's abandoned South Works, 600 acres of windswept nowhere. I've been there; the skyline glimmers waaay in the distance, across the lake, an unreachable Oz.
     But the future Illinois Quantum and Micro Electronics Park was somehow gulled into exiling itself there, and could fill half the site. Would the other half be enough? Grant Park is only 319 acres. I can see a series of fun stoner buddy movies about glitter-spangled concertgoers sloppy on ketamine trying to get home to Buffalo Grove from East 87th Street.

    Which should give pause — the assumption is that attendees of festivals would relocate to whatever permanent ground is settled upon, convenient or not. That might not be the case. One reason Lollapalooza is so successful is that concert goers like the nearby hotels and public transportation. Nobody wants to have their afterparty on Avenue O.

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You must keep my kitsch forever!

     Occasionally, an unrepentant Trumpie will write in, their message plopping into the Spam filter, because they've been writing for years, and at some point I blocked them.

     Being a curious sort, I sometimes click on their email, just to see what they have to say, even though, almost inevitably, it is, "Aha! More Trump derangement syndrome! You HATE him!!!!"
     And if I am feeling energetic, I might send a link to this 2018 column, "Hate Donald Trump? No way. It's more a sense of luftschlossmoddermüde," where I explain that I certainly don't hate him, and for an obvious reason: he's beneath hatred. "Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?" Then coin a compound German word to describe the weary disgust he engenders, in me and I'm sure in many others.
     The column spends quite a while pulling the matter apart. He's president and rich and famous but clearly, it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough, a grotesque Midas breaking his teeth on the gold junk he shovels into his constantly flapping maw. Who can honestly say they would be him? Donald Trump makes austerity seem enviable. 

     Then, last week, the realization hit me after Trump took an unusual step: it's even more complicated than that.

     I have sympathy for Donald Trump.
     Truly. I really do. Bear with me. He's so wounded, so needy, so fragile. I started to feel that certain tingle of pity in 2018 when I drove downstate to Granite City to watch him reopen a blast furnace.
     I remember some readers being shocked by my lede sentence:
     " Donald Trump is a charming man, and people like him."
     But it was true. He was charming. The guys at U.S. Steel loved him. Why would I drive across the state just to disgorge the prejudices I'd left with?
     "... he knows how to relate to an audience, to feed their sense of being menaced by outsiders, of being betrayed by a government too stupid to live in the real world, like they do. Fifty-three minutes of praise, exaggeration and braggadocio, sprinkled with half-truths, non-truths and the occasional fact tucked in for variety's sake."
     And ... for want of a better word, vulnerable. Maybe even "broken." I wrote:

     You could feel Trump’s neediness.
    “How am I doing?" he asked, and the crowd roared.

     He had been president for over a year, yet still had to point out that he was getting all this attention.

    "Look at the cameras! It’s like the Academy Awards.”

     He reached out to the gathered steelworkers, who came in on their days off to be there with him.

    But hearing him, I better understood his appeal. He has a vulnerable charm, at times a humanity. He pandered shamelessly to his audience.“We need steel,” he said.        “We need steel plants. And to see an old, big monster plant like this re-opening — that is an honor. I look at the faces of you people; I could be one of you. I like you guys. I could be one of you.”

    Yeah, if steelworkers were rich real estate developer spawn who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
    That sense came back a few days ago when he made the Oval Office a National Historic Monument, so nobody could ever change it. A truly unhinged act. The whole White House is already a National Historic Monument, and that didn't stop him from impulsively tearing down the entire East Wing. And now he thinks the cheap Home Depot shiny gold-colored tat he's stuck up over all the walls, the line of gold loving cups, are going to be preserved past the first day his successor is in office? 
     That IS delusional. He goes around destroying what others have created, to further his own self-assigned glory, then panics at the prospect that others who follow will do the same to him. So typically Trump: every accusation a confession.

     Pressed on the issue, Trump admitted that the designation wouldn't preserve the decor. He pretended he's trying to keep anyone from — what? — making the Oval Office into the Hexagonal Office. When really, he's pleading: "Don't forget me."

     If only we could...

     That desire, that fear, so clearly motivates him as he defaces Washington piecemeal, to leave his mark. To not be sucked into the void he sprang from.

     I ... actually get that.
     Looking around my own office. At all the books, all the beloved mementos, prints and familial stuff, I can't help but relate to him. Nobody's going to want this. Not the boys. Being a journalist of minuscule reputation — to borrow Chekhov's spot-on phrase — sure won't do it. No museum here. Someday, maybe someday soon, this is all stripped out, sent Goodwill bound, or trashed, the house no doubt torn down to make way for another white farmhouse on steroids.

    To think otherwise is pure ego. And truly, when the entire arc of the Trump era finally reaches its crashing bottom most point, that is what will stand out — as always. Enormous self-regard, the great engine of history. You need some vanity to get out of bed in the morning. To fill that void on page two three times a week. So it's a balancing act. I'm proud that, finally, I learned to manifest myself while at the same time realizing, it's not all about me. None of it is about me.

      Because it's so easy to submit. Saddled with a little too much ego and suddenly you are Joe Biden thinking, "Heck, maybe I will run again." And far too much, you end up Donald Trump.  A monster. Blinded by it. Made stupid by it. Mad Midas pissing his initials on the carpet. Completely undone. 

     Though never forget, the poison that ruined him — that ruins guys like Elon Musk who accomplish something great and then make that leap to decide that, therefore, a) they are great and b) everyone else is shit — is found, diluted, in every vein. I have more than I'd like. And probably you do too.