Not the French minister of culture? Here's a book for you..

     When I conceived "Every goddamn day," I created a page called "Books on the nightstand." The idea was to share what I've been reading. But the task of shoveling words into the gaping maw of the blog's main section became such that I let the feature fall by the wayside. Nobody complained. 
     I'm nearly finished reading a particular book, however, described below, that I wanted to share, simply because I like it so much. And as I wrote my review, in a wonderful piece of serendipity, news from France came that their minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, admitted "I read very little" beyond news stories and government memos, and that she hadn't read a book in two years.
     Mon Dieu!

Fleur Pellerin

     The uproar could be imagined—there were calls for her resignation, the kerfuffle worse because a French writer, Patrick Modiano, recently won the Nobel Prize in literature. France's minister of culture not only hasn't read any of the Nobel laureate's books; she couldn't name one.
     This doesn't put her outside of the mainstream of humanity, of course. A quarter of Americans haven't read a book in the past year, polls showed. Then again, it isn't their job to promote culture, which supposedly still includes books, which still hold a special place in our view of what being cultured means. Even though culture also embraces, oh, video games, the controversy wouldn't be the same had Pellerin said she doesn't play "Angry Birds."
     There are a few ways we could go with this. Yes, at least France HAS a minister of culture, which is more than the United States could say, though I would argue that culture is the thing that the government should keep its meat hooks away from, and while authority can occasionally produce something of artistic merit, you pretty much have to go back to the 1930s and the WPA to find it. The vast bulk of government influence on creativity is pretty much limited to deadening, chilling and propagandizing. 
     But I'd like to end by pointing out that books should not be something you are shamed into reading, but a joy, something you dive into enthusiastically. You visit a world and stay there for a while. No ministerial memo can do that. Reading the book below, I savored Keith Richards' voice, the way he (or, most likely, his ghost writer) wrote. I liked hanging out with him so much, I wanted to put a bug into the ear of anyone who might enjoy it too. That's how culture works, one person sharing something that feels significant with another. I was going to quietly post this on my "Books on the nightstand" section, but worried I hadn't updated it in so long, people had gotten out of the habit of checking, and nobody would notice it. So I thought to flog it here the first day, and guide people there for updates every ... two weeks. Unlike France's minister of culture, I'm always reading two or three books at a time, and it's a tribute to Keith Richards that I let the others I'm working on sit while I focused on him exclusively. 
     Fleur Pellerin, gotta love her. Tall, slim, soignee, very French. My new favorite person.   I didn't imagine a helping hand from the French, to underscore the importance of reading. Still, your heart goes out to her, though it seems inevitable now. Of course the minister would be so busy promoting culture that she forgot to partake in it. She's not alone there. Many people who work at the newspaper don't seem to actually read it. We should embrace this episode for the teaching moment it is. The minister of culture, in France of all places, who doesn't read books. It would be trite in the fiction she shuns, too obvious in a Christopher Buckley novel. A gift really. Not the Statue of Liberty, true, but something of value nevertheless. We should be grateful for Fleur Pellerin, for teaching us all how not to be.

Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (Little, Brown: 2010)

      It might sounds strange to compare Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards to Lyndon B. Johnson, but let me make my case.
     Before the fact, I wouldn't have thought to touch a book like this. I was never a particular Stones fan, with Mick Jagger doing his rooster act, and Keith Richards stoically playing away. I recognize the power and pure rock-and-roll quality of the songs. Still, I don't love the Stones.
     But my wife does. She really likes them—we've gone to concerts on her behalf—and I got her the book as a birthday present when it came out.

     She raved about it, which still wouldn't have been enough.
     But Sara Bader, my co-author put a quote from Richards' in our new book, a literary companion to recovery, a subject Keith Richards knows something about. Writing the endnotes, I of course looked at the book, read around the quote.
     And that was it. I was hooked.
     It reminded me—and I know this sounds like a wild comparison—of nothing so much as Robert Caro's Path to Power. Like most people, I didn't give a rat's ass about Lyndon Johson. But Path to Power is the sort of book that you open the cover with a "Hmm, what's this?" and then next thing you know you're standing in front of the bookstore, waiting for the next volume to be published. When I talk about it, I feel like a drunkard recounting his sad story in front of a Salvation Army band. Someone handed it to me. It looked interesting. I thought I would give it a try...
    Life is like that. Richards just has such a wonderful, compelling voice (I assume his coauthor Fox had a role here) that he could be writing about literally anything and you just want to hear him talk more. About his mom and dad, Burt and Doris. About his pets—a cat named Toaster, wonderfully.
     The odd thing is, the parts you think will be most interesting—tours, fame, wealth, groupies—are the least interesting parts of Life. He makes groupies seem like concerned neighbors who bring you by some soup, check up on your welfare and, sometimes, if you're not too stoned, sleep with you.
     It's his worldview, his mentality, his love of blues (and, I'm proud to say, Chicago). Indeed, I only learned three incredible things about Keith: that he was a proud member of the Boy Scouts. That he once moved into a suburban Australian woman's house for a week and cared for her baby while she was at work and, most of all, that he sometimes goes camping out West in a Winnebago.
     Picturing Keith Richards in that Winnebago in Oklahoma will make whatever low-budget cheeseball vacation I take next far easier to bear.
     He is also very candid about his famed drug addiction. "Most junkies become idiots," he writes.
     The book is worth reading for its keelhauling of Mick Jagger alone. It's masterful. Up to now, I would have thought the most gorgeously skewered character in all of literature was Serr Bruno, Dante's old teacher, whom he hoists out of his pool of bubbling lead, or whatever, in Inferno, just long enough for the poor guy to babble why he's in Hell—a sodomite, apparently—then Dante drops him back in, all the while cooing with such sympathy you forget that Dante is the one who created the Hell and put his old friend in it.
     Keith is so complimentary of Mick, so careful to give him credit, and strains never to tar him as the self-absorbed asshat he so obviously is. In fact, for the first few hundred pages, Richards gives Jagger various slightly amazed little nods and compliments, all the while setting up when his full infamy will be laid out later in all its operatic glory.  It's majestic, and really the plot line of the book. Mick Jagger is the White Whale we've been waiting to crest the surface, spouting vanity like plume. Just the fact that Keith gives big half-page blocks of testimony to everyone from his kids, his wife, even Tom Waits (who tosses off a delightful phrase, the "deficit of wonder.") But never Mick, the assumption being either he was too arrogant and self-absorbed to offer commentary on another person, even his old pal, or that he's a constitutional liar and nothing he would say could have any value, or both. 
     Celebrity biographies are typically about finding fame, the moment when the Big Break happens. But that's sort of a given here. Richards has been famous so long—50 years—that it's a condition of nature, like breathing.  His glory is, Richards never seems to care. No knighthood for him, but another delightful put-down when Mick goes crawling for his, in front of Prince Charles, mind you, not even the queen. 
     If I had to pinpoint a flaw, he does go on a bit about open chord tuning—perhaps musicians appreciate that, but I sure didn't.  I'm on page 532 now, almost at the end, and I just don't want the thing to be over, though when it is, I'm going to do something heretofore unimagined: download some Keith Richards songs. If listening to them is half enjoyable as reading about how they were recorded, then they'll be enjoyable indeed.

Galway Kinnell: Wait, for now

Galway Kinnell

    With posts on the centennials of John Berryman and Dylan Thomas (two, really, if you count the one on his fudged age) a third (or fourth) threatens to veer into Too Much Poetry (not that I believe such a thing exists, but the desires of the readership must be considered).
     Still, when I heard about the death of Galway Kinnell, I had to mention the poem of his that my co-author, Sara Bader and I reprint in our literary companion to recovery, that the University of Chicago Press is publishing in 2016. Not only do we use most of "Wait" to convey the healing power of time in our chapter on the role of time and recovery, but the chapter is called "Wait, for now," the opening line from the poem. 
     Kinnell wrote the poem for a student who was considering suicide after a love affair gone awry. It begins:

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now? 

  Good advice. Kinnell promises that life will become interesting again, from minor accoutrements like gloves, to buds that open early, to the very quality of pain itself. I'd reprint the entire poem, but many websites already do that, and if nothing else, writing this new book has made me keenly aware of copyright law. You can find it online easily enough.

     The concluding stanza begins:

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.   

    True, and a good thought to tuck into your pocket for future use. I've known people who've failed to grasp that essential point: whatever bad is happening right now will pass if you only let it, and life will get better once again. Not understanding that leads to tragedy, for them and everyone they know.  I was grateful that Galway Kinnell wrote this poem, and grateful he allowed us to use it in our book, and wanted to pass his timeless sentiments along.

Rowing in Chicago, "a beautiful sport."

Ann Kinnealey goes for a row.

     Fishermen are known to be wise, sometimes uncannily so — even the urban anglers ringing Lincoln Park Lagoon.

     “It amazed me that the fishermen started calling ‘Annie! Annie!’” said Ann Kinnealey, recalling herself rowing past them. “I wondered: How do they know who I am?”

      We were dockside at the Lincoln Park Boat Club on a recent Sunday, admiring her sculling shell, resting upside down on a pair of slings, its hull a shade of rich nail polish red that glowed in the morning sunlight.

     The answer was apparent: “Annie” was painted on the hull. A tipoff. Other answers about rowing were not so easily obtained.

      “Use your imagination,” said Lev Sklyanskiy, an instructor at the club. “How much does that boat weigh?”

        I scrutinized the long, thin craft. Factored in that it was probably very light, so the polite person would err on the heavy side.

     “Ahh ... 100 pounds?” I guessed.

     “And how long is it?” Kinnealey chimed in.

     “It’s ...” I stalled looking at the thing. Easily two stories tall. “Fifteen feet long?”

     “Now try to lift it,” Sklyanskiy said.

     Together, we raised the boat easily off its rests: “29.9 pounds,” he said. And 26 feet long. Ouch. At its widest, 14 inches — no estimation there; I used a tape measure.

     To continue reading, click here.

Flash: Steinberg endorses Rauner (regarding ketchup on hot dogs)

    All campaigns have their moments of idiocy; hell, you can argue that the entire electoral process has devolved into one continuous bleat of idiocy, punctuated by ever more rare flashes of sense.
     So I don't want to treat seriously something which doesn't deserve serious treatment.
     That said.
     Not being a hypocrite, I could not silently watch political sorts snicker over Rauner ordering a hot dog with ketchup during a campaign stop at Portillo's Tuesday. The Sun-Times of course fully covered the episode. You can see by the video that the loathsome Republican plutocrat orders three hot dogs: one with everything, one plain, and one with ketchup and mustard.
      His campaign later claimed, rather despicably, that the hot dog with ketchup was for a female campaign worker. No "The buck stops here" with Rauner. No chivalry either. 
      Still, he's off the hook.
      But I feel obligated to point out that he shouldn't have been on the hook in the first place. Even Bruce Rauner is allowed to have ketchup on his hot dog. Ketchup and hot dogs go together. I've eaten them that way all my life, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just aping an old joke—the clueless patron puts ketchup on a steak, the incensed chef comes out with a cleaver—that somehow escaped a Bugs Bunny movie and latched itself onto hot dogs. 
    It isn't even funny anymore. It's just dated and dumb.
     I order hot dogs with ketchup and mustard all the time. So Bruce and I have that in common, or would, if he actually put ketchup on his hot dogs, which I doubt, since I'd be surprised if he had the guts to do anything so edgy. Given what a farrago of poll-tested nothing his campaign positions are, he'd never take a bold stand like eating a hot dog the way he likes it.
     There are many reasons not to vote for Bruce Rauner. My colleague Mark Brown deftly summarized a key one in the paper Tuesday. His insisting on the folly of travel bans in the face of the Ebola crisis shows his tin ear and lack of reality-based thinking. I myself emphasize something Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said of Rauner: "The truth is, I don't think he's a good person." That's the bottom line for me: Bruce Rauner is a bad man, trying to buy a job he isn't qualified to perform and will certainly fail at. If Rauner is elected govenor, he will hurt the state he's claiming he will help. 
     So yes, let's all have fun with ketchup, for a moment. But remember. There are many reasons to look askance at Bruce Rauner, and his choice of condiments on hot dogs is not one of them.  

Press agentry bobs to the surface

     This Internet machine is popular and there's a lot of interesting stuff on it.
     But not everything is online.
     For instance, last Friday, when I realized that the centennial of Dylan Thomas' birth was coming up Monday, and that he had done readings in Chicago, I thought it might be fun to find out what one of those readings had been like.
     Easier said than done.
     "Dylan Thomas in Chicago" on Google turned up pretty much nothing. Checking books like Thomas in America on Google Books merely confirmed that he had been here, and coughed up a quote of him referring to it "bitterly snowing" in Chicago in a letter to his parents. Not much to hang your hat on.
     Phone calls to the Arts Club and the Newberry Library came up empty. The Poetry Foundation president offered some thoughtful, big picture stuff, but nothing about the events themselves, which took place before his birth. The Northwestern University archive shared a Daily Northwestern story in advance of Thomas' reading in Evanston. But no reporting on what happened there.
     For a moment, I flashed on Terry and Judith and Virginia and Connie and all the Sun-Times librarians of the past. Once upon a time I'd enlist them to help me. All long gone.
     So I tracked down the key to the  basement stacks—for an awful moment I thought it had been lost in our big move. But it was finally located, in a box of junk. Down into the basement of our building, past the offices of Comcast SportsNet, where I always crane my neck and look through the windows and have the same 12-year-old's thought: "I wonder if Stacey King is in there?" The Bulls broadcaster, nearly a poet himself, brimming with all sorts of rhymes and colorful Red Barber locutions. "Heart hustle and muscle!" 
     Down the long fluorescent hall. Past the sad little office holding the last of the Andy Frain empire. To the unmarked door containing the newspaper's dusty, decaying, neglected and haphazard morgue, as they called it, our collection of clip files—drawer after drawer of thick beige envelopes, jammed with yellowed newspaper stories, assembled for decades by our team of patient, slightly crazy librarians. They are called "clip files" because they were clipped from newspapers; the librarians would spend their days ripping apart newspapers, circling key words in china marker.Now we have no librarians. The assumption—assuming that anyone cares or gives this issue thought, which is a stretch—is that online contains multitudes, and good enough is a feast.
      Wandering among the jumble of randomly placed metal cabinets. Locate the "Ts." Where two envelopes with Dylan Thomas were right where they were supposed to be, and in them exactly one story about Dylan Thomas reading at the Arts Club.
     Take that, Internet.
     Van Allen Bradley's brief story had a lot of verve in it, particularly his phrase about expecting Thomas to look like an "unmade bed." I loved that. 
      There was one mistake in it, though I believe it is a telling mistake.
      "Something's wrong with the math you posted," Al Yellon wrote on Facebook after my column on Thomas ran Monday. "The Daily News article you cite seems to say that he was 35 years old in 1952 -- which would mean he was born in 1917, but obviously that isn't right."
      Well, not so obviously. I hadn't noticed anything wrong or thought to check it. Busy being my own librarian. In my rush, I missed that someone sliced three years off the age of Thomas, who obviously was born in 1914—that was the whole point of bringing him up, 100 years, not 97, since his birth.  The story had him as 35 years old, not 38.
      Which made me smile, because I realized what had happened.
      Yes, Van Allen Bradley might have made a mistake. Hit the wrong key on his manual typewriter.
     But dimes get you dollars, this error, this artifact, is the 62-year-old echo of a sleight of hand or a bit of press agentry. Just as the bad boy of modern poetry's reputation made the Chicago Daily News critic expect someone more disheveled, so I bet Thomas fibbed, or his handlers decided to shave a few years off his age, the better to draw in the customers at $2 a pop.  I can't be certain. But things don't change all that much. Youth sells, then and now, even in poetry. Maybe especially in poetry. Everybody wants to be Lord Byron, who died at 36. And it's comforting to remember that even the greats—maybe especially the greats—had all the worries and challenges that we regular schlebs have, if not more so. 
     The lie exposed—an apt, brief definition of poetry. That's why I never fudge my age—I was born June 10, 1960. Because the truth will out. I know guys who do, and it adds to the unspeakable sorrow of being a B-list quasi-celebrity in a Midwest town. And as Dylan Thomas himself said: "Youth calls to age across the tired years." I have no idea what that means but, like so much in Dylan Thomas, it sure sounds swell. 
     

      

Fear trumps science, as usual

     So ... half the government is telling us that Ebola is very hard to catch, which seems to be true, in that you have to actually handle the bodily fluids of the infected. You can't breath it in on the subway.

     Meanwhile, the other half of the government is calling for travel bans and quarantines and military involvement, and medical care workers who come back from Africa, even if they seem to be a little sick, or not sick at all, are being forcibly quarantined, despite the fact that the only people who are really at risk of catching the disease are the people caring for them.

     Which is it? 

     To me, the really bad thing about the Great American Ebola Scare of 2014, beside the fact that it happened and is still happening, is that next time some genuinely contagious disease occurs, our country will be less ready to cope with it, because people will look back at this enormous to-do over nearly nothing that we put ourselves through over Ebola, the little virus that cried wolf. (Not that it isn't a serious problem in Africa. But we aren't in Africa). 

     The top of the news just now was a nurse who apparently never had the disease is now coming out of the quarantine she never should have been put under in the first place. And of course she might sue. I have a hard time believing that that is really the most important thing going on in the world right now. We should be so lucky. Deep breath time.

Dylan Thomas at 100: "just one of the boys"

     The odd thing about this column is that I don't particularly like Dylan Thomas. I have many favorite poets and he isn't one of them. But with the centennial upon us, I realized he had gone through Chicago on his readings, and wondered, provincially, what that was like. Thomas fits into a list I think of as "People You Never Think Of As Being in Chicago."

Lincoln's nomination, Chicago

Winston Churchill, for instance. Or Col. George Armstrong Custer. Golda Meir lived here. For some reason I include Abraham Lincoln, because even though we know that he was HERE—heck, he got his first nomination at the Wigwam, which was located at Lake and Wacker Drive—we associate him with Springfield or Washington, and you just don't think about Lincoln trodding these streets. At least I don't. We do know Oscar Wilde was here, because of his famous crack about the Water Tower looking like a "a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it," which sounds about right. Rudyard Kipling was here, too, and said, less famously:

I have struck a city--a real city--and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon. This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.

Anyway, raise a glass to Dylan Thomas, born 100 years ago today.

     Dylan Thomas surprised Van Allen Bradley.

     Based on the Welsh writer’s reputation, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News had expected the 35-year-old poet to resemble “an unmade bed.”

Dylan Thomas

     Instead Thomas, who appeared at Chicago’s Arts Club, then at 109 E. Ontario, for a reading April 23, 1952, was dapper, “handsome in his dark suit and blue polka-dot tie,” though he insulted “the bunch of eccentrics” who ponied up $2 apiece to hear him.

     Thomas, whose 100th birthday is Monday, made some memorable appearances in Chicago on his way to becoming among the best-known poets of the 20th century.

     “Dylan Thomas loved Chicago,” Jo Furber, literature officer of the Swansea Council in his birthplace, told WalesOnline.

      And Chicago, like America and the world, loved him back. To many readers, Dylan Thomas is the embodiment of poetry.

     “For a lot of people, he was synonymous with poetry,” said Robert Polito, president of Chicago’s Poetry Foundation. “If you’re an American of a certain age, it’s very likely either   Robert Frost or Dylan Thomas was the first great poet you encountered as a kid."
     Frost had his woods, both snowy and yellow. Why Thomas?

    "I think Thomas' vatic qualities," Polito said, referring to his peering into the future. "The intensity of the writing, and the flamboyance of the personality, plus the whole myth of him."
     Thomas' ethnicity also is very important.
     "Growing up in Wales, everyone, every school-age kid, has taken a field trip," said David Parry, founder of the Chicago Tafia Welsh Society. "Wales is only a country of 3 million people; every time someone from Wales is on the international stage, it just stands out a little more."
      Parry, who organized a celebration of Thomas' works Sunday at Woodlawn Tap (including hauling out the cherished bar books that Thomas signed during his visits there), said it is his life as much if not more than his writing that makes him so beloved.
     "The poems and the man himself, I think," Parry said. "He was the embodiment of a Welshman: a carousing, boozing womanizing sort of reprobate. There's something about those characters in Wales. He was famous but still one of the boys."
     Thomas famously drank himself to death at age 39 - 18 whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York City. No commemorations are planned at that bar, it seems.
     "There's nobody here who knows anything," said the bartender taking my call.
     For his 1952 Arts Club reading, Thomas was introduced by Karl Shapiro, a poet of no small renown himself, then editor of Poetry Magazine, who called Thomas "the greatest lyric poet now alive." Bradley, the Daily News critic, sniffed at that introduction as "too generous, perhaps, in view of the selections from his own work Thomas read." Though in Bradley's defense, Thomas was a controversial "ultramodern" poet whose poems were being praised as "the most absolute poetry that has been written in our time," which fairly screams for disagreement, which others provided, damning his work as "an unconducted tour of bedlam."
     Bradley enjoyed it when Thomas read Yeats, and British poet Edward Thomas, but found Thomas' own poems obscure.
     "His verbal pyrotechnics are pleasant to hear, but their meanings sometimes are quite unclear to his listeners."
     Which, Polito observes, was a good thing.
     "Thomas' poems epitomize the sounds of poetry while also resisting the intelligence," he said. "It's part of what makes them still seem modern to us. You really have to puzzle them out, line by line, word by word. At the same time, as you're trying to figure them out, it just sounds like this tremendous clanging music and sonic clamor."
     Although Bradley did appreciate one of Thomas' poems, with its unambiguous refrain, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," enough to mention it by name.
     "The best of his own poems heard Wednesday night were 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night' from his new book."
      The next night Thomas recited, for free, at Northwestern, though coverage of his appearance at Tech Auditorium was dwarfed in the Daily Northwestern by news that red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy would be packing them in the next night at Patten Gym.
      Chicago made the expected impression on Thomas. "In Chicago it was bitterly snowing," Thomas wrote his parents, complaining that he never knew what to wear on any given day. "In Florida, the temperature was 90." But Thomas did not love Florida, a reminder that sometimes it's the hardest roads that make for the most memorable journeys.