'Don Quixote,' ripped from the headlines

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, by Honore Damier

     "Self-praise is self-debasement."
     "Craziness has more companions than wisdom."
     "If a man cannot govern himself how can he govern others?"

     Now seemed a perfect time to flee into "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes, to get lost in the vast 400-year-old Spanish novel of a deranged knight and his trusty mule-borne sidekick, Sancho Panza.
     You can run but, alas, you cannot hide, and a vexing present will sneak up where least expected. I don't want to suggest that "Don Quixote" is suddenly a political novel, ripped from the headlines of 2017.
     Let's just say the tale of a delusional old man who blunders about, claiming to help people while actually attacking innocent passersby and then interpreting the resulting fiascoes as embellishing his legend of unmatched glory, well, there was a certain unexpected relevance.
     Or as the Knight of the Sorrowful Face says: "The woman they call Fortune is fickle, and blind and drunken and doesn't know who she raises up or sets down."
     Tell it, brother.
     I do have to give technology a nod. Our brave new digital world gets a bad rap for mooting books, and rightly so. But the sword cuts both ways, to offer a proverb in the spirit of Sancho Panza, that endless font of aphorisms. Technology can also be literature's friend.

To continue reading, click here.

If I don't see it, it's not there

     I wanted to share this reaction to last week's Mike Ditka column with you. No further comment is necessary. 

Hello Mr. Steinberg

     I disagree with your assessment of so-called racism and this social injustice that the Left/Progressive seemed so fond of throwing around around so much.
     Individuals you mentioned like Mohamed Ali and another one from that time frame did not suffer from Racism or social injustice.They rose to the top of their respective professions and made millions from their efforts. Jesse Owens was a classic figure in his own right and showed what a Black man could do during the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, Germany when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis held power.
     Yes in a small degree racism does exist yet you need to include some from ALL race's not just some Caucasians. This social injustice doe's not exist since people from all race's made millions and are successful in their respective fields and professions.
     There was no need to put down Mr. Ditka of his statement by saying he is not a man for saying what he did. Is not the left for dialog or his it for dialog under their own terms Mr. Steinberg ???
     Mr. Ditka right in his assessment of what was and is happening now and then.
     Hope to read your next article soon.

Respectfully yours

Joe P.*

* He signed his full name, but I'm abbreviating it, as a kindness.

Making English muffins won't add a second to the Trump administration

   

     Maybe we're doing this whole Trump thing wrong.
     Maybe liberals—horrified, rapt, gazing fixedly at each new jaw-dropper through latticed fingers, only tearing our chalky faces away from the endless slow motion train wreck to grab each other hard by the shoulders and screech, "Can you believe this?"—have fallen into a rut.
     Shock gets old. On Monday Trump lied that Barack Obama never called families of fallen soldiers. On Tuesday, trying to wriggle out of that lie—or sincere delusion, what does it matter?—Trump asked whether Obama called Gen. John Kelly after Kelly's son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, using his chief of staff's personal heartbreak as a tissue to blot the mendacious froth from his own lips. By the time you read this Wednesday, Trump will have sailed off into new territory with some unimaginable false tweet, callous remark or cruel policy.
     Must we flinch at each one?
     Maybe we need to step back, breathe, take a break, consider the big picture. Yes, this is an ordeal. We've also sailed off someplace strange and have to live there for the foreseeable future. Exiles in Crazyland. Everything this president says is still important, but not in the traditional, reflect-reality sense of importance. It's important in the yet-more-evidence-of-unfitness sense. But who really needs more evidence? At this point, either you get it or you don't. I certainly get it, and bet you do too. If you don't, well, instead of writing to me in all caps shouting how much you don't get it, consider this: just because you don't perceive something doesn't mean it's not there. Can you get that?
     For those who grasp what's happening, a ball peen hammer on our skulls, a thought: this nightmare is also an opportunity, a chance to be better people, ourselves.
     What should we do? Nurture your own non-Trump reality. Because otherwise, he can poison your whole life and you go mad, and there's too much of that already.
     Work at making your non-Trump existence richer. I did something recently that I've never done in my entire life and, I would bet, none of you have never done either, or even contemplated doing.
I made English muffins....

To continue reading, click here.

   
   

Have a nice day!

     The smiley face, a graphic low-point of the 1970s, if not of all time, has had its iconography thoroughly documented already, by Smithsonian magazine among others. So I won't bother rolling it out here, except to note that for some reason the smiley face is less objectionable when  shrunken to an emoji at the end of a sentence. 
     Why? Perhaps because it is so very small. Or, more likely, because the internet is a cold medium, nuance is often lost, and if there weren't a way to telegraph that we are speaking in jest, well, we would all be forced to slit our wrists in a warm bath. 😊
     Or maybe we just got used to it, our standards of communication worn down like a rock under a waterfall. OMG.
     Then again, "Have a nice day!" the one-size-fits-all blow-off vale we tossed at each other for decades, wasn't exactly the Sermon on the Mount either. Let's not blame technology for reflecting our flaws.
     On Sunday, in Evanston, before we slipped by the offices of Legacy.com for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers breakfast, my wife and I killed time by stopping in that mecca of all things baked, Bennison's, where we picked up a laudable baguette for dinner. I noticed that their creative bakers had augmented smiley faces with, for want of a better word, frowny faces.
     "Which sell better?" I asked the clerk, who indulgently pulled their tray out of a case at my request so I could photograph them properly. She said that the smile faces are more popular—I guess all is not darkness quite yet, or else people are trying to cheer themselves up however they can, allaying this Trumpian gloom with simpering sweets. 
     Although some people, she continued, will specify the frowns. "They'll order four at a time," said the clerk, who reluctantly agreed to be included in the shot, and I didn't want to push my luck by asking her name. You can't be too careful in this world. No wonder we're so glum. I didn't have the presence of mind to buy a cookie, so I can't say whether I went smiley or frowny—the latter, definitely. Besides, they are a better value: you get extra chocolate icing, in the form of of those vexed eyebrows. Next time.

Christine Goerke: "You can't do this if you're not healthy and strong"

Christine Goerke, right, rehearsing with Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid.

     If you are daunted at the prospect of sitting through five hours of Wagner, imagine performing it on stage.
     Picture leaping from rock to rock, dressed in armor, crying "Ho-yo-to-ho," then singing, in German, in tune, and loud enough to be heard over a 93-piece orchestra all the way in the back row of the Civic Opera house 212 feet away.
     Contemplate doing what soprano Christine Goerke does night after night in "Die Walküre," which opens Nov. 1 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
     "It's very much like running a marathon," said Goerke, relaxing after a recent rehearsal for the second part of Richard Wagner's epic "Ring Cycle" that Lyric began last year. "I will be on stage about three hours. It's very physical."
     Described by one top critic as "now arguably the finest Wagnerian soprano in the world," Goerke in person is whatever the opposite of a diva is: warm, easy-going, quick to laugh, a reminder that when she isn't traveling the world singing opera, she is a New Jersey mother of two girls, married to a construction superintendent.
     "They are the love of my life," she said.
     Goerke sings Brünnhilde, the most recognized character in opera. When Bugs Bunny dons a winged helmet with braids, he is parodying Brünnhilde.
     "The huge lady with the braids," as Goerke describes her. "A stereotype we are fighting right and left."
     It's a stereotype that, like Bugs, is 75 years old, harkening back to the "park and bark" days when enormous sopranos stood on one spot and belted out arias. While Wagnerian singers can still be large — Goerke is 6 foot and generously proportioned — they also must be fit. Goerke bristled only once in our conversation, when I suggested that her character evokes the adage, "The opera ain't over until the fat lady sings."
     "No. Absolutely not," she said. "I am busting my ass to try to be healthy."

To continue reading, click here.

Encounter with an owl

     If human eyes were as big as owl eyes, relative to our heads, they would be the size of oranges. Then maybe we, too, would be able to swivel our necks 270 degrees, the way owls can—out of necessity, since their eyes are not mobile eyeballs, like ours, but tube-shaped, like a pair of binoculars, ideal for hunting small animals from the air at night. 
     This is an Eastern Screech-Owl—the hyphen looks odd, but if it's good enough for Sibley's, it's good enough for me— encountered Friday on the south bank of the Chicago River, just west of Orleans. 
     I was hurrying to catch the 5:12, noticed a group of city dwellers along the riverbank, fishing—the Friends of the Chicago River, having an event—and then saw this fellow perched on the leather gauntlet of Natalie F., who works for the Brookfield Zoo. I detoured down the stairs to the river bank to take a closer look.
     Eastern Screech-Owls range across the entire United States east of the Rockies. Screech-Owls west of the Rockies are Western Screech-Owls, aptly enough, and almost identical, except they have no red varieties. Their loss, as the red is quite pretty.
      This owl, I was told, is named "Weasley," obviously a nod to the red-haired Weasley clan in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, whose use of owls as messengers has to count as one of the more creative uses of owls in fiction.
     Though not the only one. The best magic-based kids book series before Harry Potter also prominently features owls. In fact, chapter four of C.S. Lewis' "The Silver Chair," the fourth book of his Chronicles of Narnia, is called "A Parliament of Owls," his description of a gathering of owls to discuss their business of the day (and itself a pun on Chaucer's allegorical poem, "The Parliament of Fowls"). The term stuck as a collective noun to denote groupings of the bird.
     When our boys were growing up, my wife and I read them "Owl Babies," an excellent picture book by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Patrick Benson. It has a very simple plot. Three owlet—the term for young owls— siblings, delightfully named Sarah, Percy and Bill, wake to find their mother gone, and the entire plot is their fearful wait for her. (Though I'm not an expert, mom looks like a Spotted Owl to me).

"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hall

     Publisher's Weekly called the book "hauntingly lovely," and years ago, when I went over for tea and chocolate cake at Ann Lander's East Lake Shore Drive condo, I brought her a copy of "Owl Babies" as a present, knowing she collects owl figurines and images. She was pleased with it.
      I'm tempted to sail off into owls in art, where they represent everything from the devil and madness, such as in Frans Hals "Malle Babbe," a 1630s painting of a drunken madwomen, to wisdom and calm. In ancient times Athena, the goddess of wisdom was often depicted with an owl mascot. 
    Well, maybe just a little side trip. The most famous ancient Greek coin, the tretradrachm, featured Athena on one side, and an owl on the other, starting the tradition of putting animals on the backs of coins, and in ancient times the coins were referred to as Owls. 
     Coveting the thing and wondering how available they are, I went on eBay, and was surprised to see specimens of the 2500-year-old silver coin for as little as $400. Then again, the owl tetradrachma is perhaps the most forged coin of all time, so buyer beware.
    I think I'll do without. Besides, there is no need to spend big bucks and reach back into antiquity to find what may or may not be an authentic  Greek owl coin. Greece struck a number of modern versions, including 1 and 2 drachma coins, issued by the military junta in 1973, a nice example of which can be had on eBay for $4.
     

Obit Week #3: "The conscience of the council—Leon Despres

      With the Society of Professional Obituary Writers in town for their annual convention this weekend, I thought I would reprint a few of my own obits from over the years. This is perhaps my favorite.
  
     Few things are sadder or more haunting than to imagine what Chicago might have been like had anyone listened to Leon Despres.
     For two decades, he stood virtually alone in the Chicago City Council and called upon humanity's better nature, only to be ignored or ridiculed.
     Mr. Despres, 101, who died at his Hyde Park home Wednesday morning, was the alderman representing the South Side neighborhood's 5th Ward from 1955 to 1975 and "the absolute conscience of the city," as former congressman and judge Abner Mikva once dubbed him.
     In retirement, he remained active and was involved in fighting a high-rise condo in his neighborhood.
     His son, Robert, said Mr. Despres' mind was very sharp until recently, and that one of the secrets to his longevity was having an "army of friends."
     Mr. Despres battled, unceasingly and eloquently, against Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Democratic Machine. He tried to make Chicago a more decent and fair city than it became, and though he seldom won, he never gave up.
     He fought racial repression at a time when bold action might have prevented incalculable suffering and loss.
     "The Board of Education is shortchanging the children of Chicago," he told the City Council on Jan. 17, 1963, asking that it "electrify the world" and "vote for the greatness of our city" by withholding tax funds until the board ended segregation. "It is educating nearly all children in damaging racial isolation. Separate education is never equal education, and, in addition, the board is providing inferior facilities and teaching staffs for most Negro children."
     The measure was resoundingly defeated.
     Often, the only vote cast for his resolutions was his own. Alone, he voted against the council's ban on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s open-occupancy marches in August 1966, while Daley's black aldermanic puppets denounced him for dictating to blacks where their best interests lay.
      When Mr. Despres opposed the construction of new Chicago Housing Authority high-rise buildings, just one alderman sided with him. The buildings would become a monumental failure, sinkholes of crime and despair that plagued the city for decades.
     The City Council of Mr. Despres' day was a tempestuous body of colorful figures, most of them slavishly loyal to Daley, whom Mr. Despres called a dictator and wasn't shy about castigating to his face.
     "One of the prime attractions at any Council meeting is watching Despres lecture the mayor, his finger wagging practically under Daley's nose, pouring out a dazzling array of statistics and studies and sociology and sheer guts," longtime Chicago reporter Lois Wille wrote in 1970.
     Such antics bewildered and angered aldermen who unwaveringly toed the Daley line. The late Ald. Vito Marzullo once called Mr. Despres "wholly irresponsible, a nitwit, a vicious person and a menace to the City Council and the public at large."
     "Sit down before I knock you down," said Ald. Thomas Keane, one of several aldermen to physically threaten Mr. Despres.
     "Despres has been told to shut up—in one form or another—more than any grown man in Chicago," Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Daily News in 1972.
     Even his attempts to foster the barest civic decency were quashed.
     When he introduced a resolution decrying the bombing of a black family's house and reaffirming "the fundamental right of all law-abiding citizens to purchase and occupy homes anywhere in Chicago, regardless of ancestry or race," the Council voted 38-4 against the measure.
    Mr. Despres fought against discrimination in hospital staff appointments, cemeteries and housing. Sometimes, he even won. The day in August 1967 that Mr. Despres and two others called a special session on fair housing, Daley suspended the licenses of three real estate brokers for refusing to show homes to blacks. It was the first time the federal Fair Housing Law of 1963 was enforced in Chicago.
      He was the first to raise an alarm about the dangers of lead paint.
     He drafted the city's first ordinance establishing a landmarks preservation commission and led the fight to save Frank Lloyd Wright's extraordinary Robie House after the Chicago Theological Seminary announced plans to demolish the peerless architectural treasure to build a new dorm.
     Along with Ald. Charles Chew (17th), Mr. Despres chartered two airplanes to take 184 people to Alabama to participate in King's voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965.
     He fought official artistic censorship, once a notorious Chicago hallmark. When the City Council voted its "unqualified condemnation" of Wright Junior College for putting James Baldwin's Another Country on the required reading list of a contemporary literature class, Mr. Despres called the resolution the "most degrading kind of censorship. This body will make Chicago the laughingstock of the country by lynching a book," he said. Only two other aldermen voted with him.
     He also fought to abolish the police department's secret spying unit.
     On a variety of issues, Mr. Despres expressed a vision approaching prescience. In 1965, he urged the CHA to consider low-rise, scattered-site housing. When fire destroyed McCormick Place in January 1967 -- a building Mr. Despres once called "a damaging monstrosity" -- he declared, "This is a marvelous opportunity to rebuild it somewhere else." It was rebuilt on the same lakefront-hogging site.
     Mr. Despres' vision was not clear on every issue, though. His sensitivity to the problems affecting the urban poor, for instance, initially blinded him to the threat posed by street gangs, which he called "very important manifestations of urban life" in 1970.
     "It's very important to realize that along with the pathology and the criminality of extortion, killing, beating and violence, there are also positive elements of association that ought to be developed," he said.

     He was born Leon Mathis Despres on Feb. 2, 1908, the son of Samuel and Henrietta Rubovitz Despres. Most friends called him "Len." The family moved to Hyde Park when he was 3. He started at Hyde Park High School, but his mother decided he wasn't working hard enough, so she sent him to boarding school in Rome and then Paris, where he saw—he would later say—James Joyce's Ulysses, newly published in the window of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on rue de l'Odeon.
     Mr. Despres returned to Hyde Park to attend the University of Chicago. He received his undergraduate degree in 1927 and his law degree in 1929. On Sept. 10, 1931, he married Marian Alschuler. She died in 2007 at 97.
     Tall, slender and scholarly, Mr. Despres set out on a career of improving society through law. From 1935 to 1937, he was a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board. He also became a socialist, and visited exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in Mexico, a trip that saw him escorting legendary artist Frida Kahlo to the movies while her husband, Diego Rivera, painted a portrait of Despres' wife.
     "She was very attractive, very pretty," he said years later of Kahlo. "We had a good time. I had no idea she was an icon."
     He was general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Illinois division, from 1948 until 1955, when he was elected to the City Council. He fought bitter election battles in 1955 and 1959. Then the Machine swung around and gave him a kind of tacit approval -- in 1966, he was the only aldermanic candidate endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans.
     Mr. Despres served as Council parliamentarian from 1979 to 1987. He also served on the Chicago Plan Commission during that period. Over the last decade, he returned to private practice.
     His memoir, Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman's Memoir, written with Kenan Heise, was published in 2005 by Northwestern University Press. "I expect defeat," he once said, referring to a certain city budget battle, but also, in a way, to his entire career. "Nevertheless, I have to make an effort."
     Paddy Bauler, the famously corrupt Chicago pol, put it to Mr. Despres this way: "Len, the trouble is you think the whole thing's on the square."
     In addition to his son, survivors include a daughter, Linda Despres Baskin, and a grandson, Frederick Despres. Services are pending.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 7, 2009