Literature and Recovery

Walt Whitman

     One way to publicize your work is to write for websites. I wrote this for Sober Nation, a popular recovery website, explaining what "Out of the Wreck I Rise,"  my new book, written with Sara Bader and published Monday, is trying to do.

     Walt Whitman volunteered as a nurse in the Civil War. Most people don’t know that. Yet you can see his passion for nurturing in his work. There are moments in Leaves of Grass when he practically pulls up a chair and tends to the reader as if comforting a patient.
     “O despairer, here is my neck,” Whitman writes. “By God! You shall not go down. Hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath...I buoy you up.”
     As a writer, words have always buoyed me up. So when I entered rehab 10 years ago, I grabbed at them like a drowning man. Certain lines were talismans I kept in my pocket and referred to constantly. Not just literature, but from movies and songs. As much as I sometimes regretted see my problem laid out so starkly, for example, I couldn’t regret it too much, not when remembering “better I should know,” a simple lyric from Sara McLachlan’s essential recovery anthem, “Fallen.”
     As the years passed, I began pulling useful thoughts about recovery out of whatever I was reading. Samuel Johnson is famous for compiling his epic dictionary of the English language. But an alcoholic wading through James Boswell’s Life of Johnson can’t help but find within it a primer in keeping on the path of recovery, such as when Johnson tries to explain to his disbelieving friends how he can possibly not drink. What do you do, Boswell asks him, when a “good worthy man takes you to taste his wine, which he has had twenty years in his cellar?” Johnson scoffs in reply: 

No good and worthy man will insist upon another man’s drinking wine . . . it is something to please one’s company; and people are always pleased with those who partake pleasure with them. But after a man has brought himself to relinquish the great personal pleasure which arises from drinking wine, any other consideration is a trifle.

     “Any other consideration is a trifle.” Exactly. Sobriety first.
     So much of recovery is focused on the early stages — giving up the substance that has enslaved you, changing your way of life—that some overlook the need to fill the rest of your life with something substantial. You can’t live a life based on what you don’t do. Literature helps embellish and strengthen recovery, making it seem, not something dreary, not the folding chairs and cinder block in the church basement, but something thrilling, even heroic. “The gates of hell are open night and day,” Virgil writes in The Aeneid. “Smooth the descent, and easy is the way. 
But to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—There the struggle, there the labor lies.”
     Don’t we all know it? There are many elements that make up a successful sober life, whether attending 12-step programs, going to group or individual therapy, forging a relationship with God, focusing on exercise, nutrition, work, hobbies, family.
     To that list I think it’s important to add literature. Not only excellent recovery memoirs like Mary Karr’s Lit or David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, but novels such as David Foster Wallace’s massive Infinite Jest, which might be the best treatment of Alcoholics Anonymous ever written. I took the quotations culled from a lifetime of reading, thoughts and words that helped me along the way, and, together with co-author Sara Bader, put them together into Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, which the University of Chicago Press is publishing in September. The quotes are not only grouped thematically, dealing with early recovery, for instance, or family, or relapse, but mortised together so they form a narrative, a kind of mosaic one leading to the next. My favorite pairing is in the chapter on time — an essential element in recovery, mastering the hours, days and years of your life.
     The first is from John Cheever’s diary:

     When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger...To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into this abyss all you find is a grain of sand.

     Followed by Emily Dickinson observing, in a letter:

     It is the speck that makes the cloud that wrecks the vessel, children, yet no one fears a speck.

     Part of staying sober is learning to recognize and fear that speck, being on guard for that first grain of trouble that could, unnoticed, bring about a storm. Part is creating a full rich life that rewards you. Great writing has always done that for me, and might for you as well.


Neil Steinberg, a columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times, is an author of Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, published by the University of Chicago Press.


                                                                                                                           

"The technology has changed quite a bit"

 
   
     Thousands of Chicagoans pass this nondescript building near the Loop every day and never give it a second glance. That is intentional. Made of beige grooved concrete, it is identified only by a single small plaque: “AT&T.” But don’t let its modest exterior fool you.
     “This building touches every single resident of the city,” said Jim Wilson, AT&T’s Area Manager Network Services.
     Those who do pause might notice something peculiar: no windows on most floors. Why build a 538-foot-tall building where only the second and the top seven floors have windows? The short answer is, because what’s inside isn’t able to look out and nobody outside is supposed to look in. Those at AT&T refer to the place only by its address, which is . . . well, they’d rather I not say. Security.

   A bit of online sleuthing will turn up the Holabird & Root-designed building easily enough, but you can understand their caution. Not only does this center handle much of the city’s phone and internet traffic, but all the 911 calls come through here. Pressed for something to call the place, AT&T officials say they refer to it as an “Office” or a “Mega-Office,” one of three in the city.
     “This is one of the key switching stations for AT&T,” said Warren Salek, assistant vice president of the company’s Radio Access Engineering division, guiding a tour of the facility never seen by the public. “Some of the first electronic switching systems were installed right here in this building.”
     Built in 1970, the building actually has just 27 stories, though it is tall as a 50-story building because each floor is double height, built to accommodate enormous banks of telephone....

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Maggie the cat

     Maggie was a cat, I suppose, based on a jury-rigged shrine I noticed at the corner of Ashland and Pratt a week ago today. My wife and I had visited the Glenwood Avenue Arts Fair, had fun, as we always do, and were walking back to our car, waiting for the light, when I saw these sad decorations festooned around the bottom of a light pole.
     The cat vanished from this vicinity more than a month earlier, I gathered, from a sign on the pole. The burnt out votive candles and general decay of the thing led me to believe that a lonely vigil had taken place here, that time had passed, as time does, as hope gave way to disappointment and despair.
    You see these tributes to people, mostly, white crosses beside the highway where people died in accidents, garlanded with those horrible plastic flowers which, far from being an approximation of actual flowers, are more the opposite, a kind of mockery of the whole idea of flowers. The authorities tolerate these shrines, for a respectable period of time, then sweep them away, lest our landscape become too studded with poignant tributes to the dead. There is something so pitiful about them.
    Still, you can't criticize these memorials either, whether for humans or for animals. The grief is so much, the loss so big, that something has to be done, though there is little to do beyond this. 
     Why is it done? Not to seek permanence, obviously. The memorial to Maggie was already starting to fall apart. Maybe to extend their presence just a little longer, to manifest the beloved on earth in some small way, for some small time, beyond the tragically shortened lifespan. 
      So let us lend our shoulder to the task, and raise a little electronic cairn here to Maggie, a lost cat, a beloved comrade, we am told, who disappeared July 17 from the corner of Pratt and Ashland, under circumstances I cannot speculate upon.
    There is a lesson here. Each of us in turn will disappear and sad as that is, if we are lucky, we will leave someone heartbroken over their beloved comrade. Sad as it is to imagine, that person who misses us will clutch at the space where we had recently been, and maybe decorate the void with a few meager trappings of our former presence. As sorrowful as that tribute might be, it is also a reminder that much happiness was had, for years and years, each day a loan, a withdrawal from the immensity of life, a promissory note that death calls due the debt we can never repay. What they are remembering, and what we must try to remember is that though we will be gone, one and all, in the time that we were here, when we forestalled the ache of loneliness for others, whether human or animal.  They will miss us, and none of us would have it any other way. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     We focus so much on intolerance—and rightly so, particularly during this memorably awful presidential campaign of 2016—that we forget just how compassionate people can be. Despite the goal line stance that certain Southern states are making regarding toilet use — they just can't move from one room into the next without leaving claw marks on the doorway, can they?—in general the mainstream seems to be not making quite the huge honking deal over transgender people as it did over other minorities.
     Maybe it isn't compassion, but Repression Fatigue. 
     Anyway, I don't know that this prominently displayed and charmingly amateur portrait is a transgender woman. It could just be a blonde gal with broad shoulders and a five o'clock shadow. But I've always considered it such, displayed prominently in a place where I go as often as I can.
    Where is it? Shouldn't be too difficult, I imagine. Notice, if you can—I didn't focus on including them when I took the shot—what the light fixtures are made of. Creative. But there you go.
     Winner receives one of my endless store of blog posters. Place your answers below. Good luck. 

Review #4

     Online etiquette demands that you do not steal the copy of other publications, even your own. So I post the first four paragraphs of my Sun-Times column here and link back to the paper, so as not to drain away their all-important readership. 
     But this review, in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, is just four paragraphs long, so I'm posting only the first paragraph and linking to the rest, and using their lovely graphic. I hope that's okay. 
    It isn't a review so much as a notice, but given that the Sunday Book Review is the epicenter of literary America, just being on the field is a great boon. The shout-out not only speaks well of the book, but of the team behind it—this was no accident, but the result of in-the-trenches effort— and I am grateful to everyone at the University of Chicago Press, who worked hard to make this happen. 

     “Alcoholics Anonymous,” commonly referred to as the Big Book, helped to establish the 12-step program. It’s been an indispensable guide for millions since it was published in 1939. A new, very different kind of book, “Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery,” by Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader, aims to be a complementary comfort.

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"Alt-right" — because "mean crazy neo-Nazi online bully trolls" is such a mouthful

     Blinking red light on the phone. A message.
     “Neil, this is Arlene K—, I live in Oswego. I really enjoy your columns. Would you please do a column on alt-right and explain it? I don’t know what that’s about, and I’m starting to get worried about it.”
     This column is not a lounge band; I don’t take requests.
     However, in this case: an excellent question, Arlene, one much in the news.
     “Alt-right” is the new, sanitized term that includes a rogue’s gallery of haters, loons, tinfoil-hats, bullies and misfits, united by unmerited self-regard and a contempt for modern American life and most of the people who comprise it. They are a far right fringe, have always been with us, and surged into the public eye lately thanks to the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump, who used the rock they live under as the cornerstone of his campaign.
     When Trump says “America is a hellhole and we’re going down fast” or when he says political correctness is “killing” America, he is speaking alt-right, or a more formal version, like “vous” versus “tu” in French, the plural, polite form more suited to a national political election.

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Another milestone in the newspaper death march

It's in the middle, to the immediate left of the square dark brown building.

     How much do I hate the Tribune Tower? When I went to post this assignment, I realized, to my amazement and chagrin, that I have never taken a photograph of the building, not one, in all the years I've been wandering around, downtown, snapping. I can see the logic: "Eeeyew, yuck. Why take a picture of THAT?!" But that is overstating the case. To be honest, I never considered the possibility. But I did finally find it peeking out of this group shot.

      The Tribune Tower is a gothic horror show of a building, a retro throwback that bucked every trend in 20th century architecture when it was designed in the mid-1920s. While the Bauhaus was conjuring up streamlined structures in Germany, the Midwestern burgermeisters in Chicago held a widely ballyhooed architecture contest for the new headquarters of their self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper. Batting aside progressive blueprints from the likes of Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos, they chose a New York firm’s vision of what is in essence a 36-story medieval cathedral skyscraper, complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles and fleurs de lis. All it lacks is a crypt and a nave.
     Despite being all wrong, it was the perfect choice. The Tribune Tower somehow seemed to fit the newspaper within—mighty, unsubtle, backward-looking, with chunks of ancient buildings seized around the world by the newspaper’s far-flung foreign correspondents brought home as prisoners, in tribute to American exceptionalism.
     Walk into Tribune Tower, and along with the bromides to freedom and the supremacy of the press was an enormous map of North America, as if the rest of the world didn’t matter, which it largely didn’t. With WGN—“World’s Greatest Newspaper” don’t you forget—adding first radio, then television to the mix, the Tribune Tower was meant to exude permanence, power, authority, control, with a bomb shelter in the basement, just in case.
     As the building fit the fat, Republican avatar of the status quo for decades, so its sale, announced Tuesday, to a Los Angeles developer for $240 million, also seems apt for the current journalistic moment: Gut shot by the Internet a decade ago, tumbling for years in free fall and retreat, finally hitting the hard bottom with a splat, shaking itself back to life like a cartoon character, and crawling off to some obscure place a lot less public than the corner of Michigan and Wacker Drive, if not to die, then to morph into whatever decimated, enervated, shadow of its former self that daily journalism is well on the way to becoming. The amazing thing is it lasted this long.
     Tribune Media CEO Peter Liguori, a former entertainment exec for Fox, explained the move with characteristic lack of sentiment: "Monetizing the significant assets of Tribune Media's real estate portfolio is a strategic priority for the company," he was quoted saying in the Tribune press release, "and we are extremely pleased with the outcome of this sales process."
     I bet they are. Grandeur is not a significant asset anymore, at least not in the communications biz. As long as three bulleted headlines squirt into your phone on command, you don't care where they come from. Downtown Chicago, downtown Mumbai, it's all the same. Heck, half the country doesn't even care if they're true.
     No gloating here. No working journalist can take pleasure in this sale. "The end of an era," television reporters will say, unaware of the threadbareness of the cliche.
     A better metaphor would be a milestone on the newspaper Death March. We are having our fingers pried off the tangible world, the world of buildings and offices and desks and paychecks. All cooking in the same pot. The Sun-Times sold its less iconic, but equally hideous building to developers a dozen years ago, and Trump Tower went up on the spot where we once stood. Future home of the Midwestern White House, perhaps.
     Newspapering has moved to the margins of our cultural conversation, and whether the Tribune is produced in a tall thin version of Reims Cathedral, or out of the giant windowless box of the Freedom Center printing plant on West Chicago Avenue, or in Naperville, or not at all, hardly seems to matter much at this point.