Flashback 2011: Enjoy a local bookstore while you can

Book Bin's old location on Church Street, 2016.

     "Moonstruck" is one of my favorite movies, despite a prominent role played by Nicholas Cage. It's so well-written, with many memorable lines that prove useful in regular life. "Your life is going down the toilet," alas, has been deployed more than once.
     And a useful edict that I considered just last week, while modulating my tone about the Charlie Kirk candlelight vigil — "Don't shit where you live." 
    With that in mind, I've never posted the pair of 2011 columns about my beloved local bookstore, "The Book Bin." Mainly because the second, which I'll post Sunday, caused the then owner to give me a stink eye whenever I walked in, making me feel even more unwelcome than I ordinarily do most places anyway.
     If you don't remember the 2011 columns, you can read this and try to imagine what sparked a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. You can wonder, but you won't hit on it because, to quote a truism not in "Moonstruck," you never see the bullet that hits you.

     Most books are published on Tuesdays, the day when what few bookstores remain put them out on sale, one of those quaint traditions of publishing about to vanish along with the stores themselves.

     Jackie Collins’ 27th novel, Goddess of Vengeance, was one of the books published last Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Dillon Perlow stopped by the Book Bin in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook to pick up the copy the store had tucked away for her.
     “A girl has to have a little light reading,” explained the Glenview woman. She also bought Linwood Barclay’s The Accident on the advice of Nancy Usiak, a Book Bin saleslady.
     As the two books were being rung up, the women talked about what they were reading.
     “I just finished Language of Flowers,” Perlow said.
     “I read Story of a Beautiful Girl,” Usiak replied. “I found it more impactful.”
     “I just loved that one,” Perlow agreed.
     An average day in the life of a small independent bookstore, one with a children’s section with toys in the back, a faux fireplace with comfortable chairs in the front, a store that has been in business for 40 years.
     Meanwhile, in the city, a better-known bookstore, Borders, was marking its 40th birthday, coincidentally, by going out of business. The last day of its last downtown Chicago location, on State Street, was Wednesday.
     “STORE CLOSING — EVERYTHING MUST GO — 90% OFF” read the stark red and yellow signs in the windows of Borders. Inside, the shelves were mostly stripped. The remaining books weren’t worth the match needed to burn them: Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal. Sydney Omarr’s Astrological Guide for You in 2010 and How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green.
     Bargain hunters milled around — there was always a crowd at Borders; it was, for those of us so inclined, the place to go, to stroll after dinner and, maybe, pick up a book.
     Obviously not an experience people valued enough, as consumers learned to prefer the undeniable Christmas morning joy of receiving another smiley face Amazon box.
     Borders was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., by brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Their chain steadily expanded until, at its peak, it had more than 500 stores.
      The Book Bin was founded in 1971 by Janis Irvine and her husband Lex.
     Irvine said someone approached her about opening a second store in the late 1970s, but she turned him down — with two stores, she reasoned, she’d always be in the back room, working, and wouldn’t be out front talking with customers about books, the part she loves.
     She has no joy seeing the giant crumble.
     “It really is not satisfying,” she said. “To see any bookstore close breaks my heart.”
     And Borders once was really something.
     “You had to take an examination [in literature] before you could become a salesperson at Borders,” she said. “They were terrific.”
     Large or small, each bookstore that closes, Irvine said, means one less place “where people can go in and exchange ideas and talk about books.”
     Perhaps the most incredible thing about the Book Bin is, though small, it is staffed by four saleswomen, plus a high school clerk.
     “We never sit around reading,” Irvine said, and indeed, as frequently as I stop by, the stock always seems to have changed — Wednesday the new Jackie Kennedy interview book was published, and three copies were already prominently displayed.
     Make no mistake. Books as tangible objects are doomed. In 2011, for the first time, sales of e-books surpassed sales of adult hardback books — Amazon delivers more e-books than paper books. That’ll never change.
     People like to save money, and to do so will ditch human interaction: first telephone operators, then gas station attendants, then bank tellers and now bookstore clerks.
     I try to focus on the advantages. As a guy who once lugged around bricks of Remembrance of Things Past, I appreciate the new technology. But oh those drawbacks: I never would have read Alfred Lansing’s gripping adventure Endurance if a young Adam Brent hadn’t pressed it upon me in his father’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue. Stuart Brent’s is long gone, as is Adam’s shop on Washington Street. Someday they’ll all be gone.
     But not yet. The Book Bin, for one, remains, at 1151 Church St., and on Thursday, it celebrates its 40th birthday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everything in the store during those hours will be an Amazon-like 40 percent off. There will also be wine and hors d’oeuvres — try getting someone to squirt that into a Kindle along with your e-book.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011

How much is that doggie in the window affecting business?

     A Tribune was accidentally delivered Tuesday along with my Sun-Times. Since there was no point in giving it back, I took a peek at what the competition is up to.
     Most of the front page was dedicated to the proposed City Council ordinance to permit dogs in restaurants. The headline, "Dogs in restaurants?" betrayed the Trib's notorious bland literality, while the Sun-Times mustered our usual flip wordplay,"DOG DAYS OF BUSINESS?"
     The Tribune's Jake Sheridan kept up a tone of solemnity throughout, indulging in a bit of levity only toward the end, noting, "Sorry, cat, turtle, bird and koala owners, the measure would only apply to pooches." (Certainly capable of my own grim literalness, I couldn't help but note it would be illegal to bring a koala into a restaurant no matter what the City Council does, as koalas are protected animals, illegal to privately own in this country.)
     My colleague, the indispensable Fran Spielman, punned right off the bat, "A City Council member from Lincoln Park wants to throw a financial bone to Chicago restaurants fighting for survival ..."
     But neither the Tribune nor the Sun-Times delved much into the key question: How's this going to work? Sure, leashes will be required, but a dog on a leash can still maul another dog. Will hot dog stands echo with the barking of hot dogs? Or will a sweetly slumbering Muffin become a welcome feature at every corner bakery?
     We don't have to guess, as I like to say: We can just find out. Plenty of Chicago watering holes advertise themselves as dog-friendly, and I set out to take their temperature. How much is that doggie in the window affecting business?
     "We love having dogs on the patio," said a bartender at the Harding Tavern, 2732 N. Milwaukee, which announces "Our Patio is Dog Friendly" on its website.
     "It's nice for the neighbors to be able to come in," continued the bartender, who did not want to give her name. "We've never had issues with any dogs."
     Chicago's most canine-welcoming bar might be Cody's Public House at 1658 W. Barry. Named for the original owner's dog — a bloodhound — the West Lake View neighborhood tavern keeps a glass jar of dog treats on the bar and prides itself on its dog-friendliness.

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New word: Chomo

 

     I was in DC recently, walking back from the Washington Monument to my son and daughter-in-law's place, when I noticed this enigmatic poster with an unfamiliar word. 
     "Chomo" sounded vaguely Spanish, like cholo, a young street gang member. No need to guess; as a fan of learning new words, I plugged it into Google even as I strolled away.
     "The term 'chomo' is a derogatory slur that means 'child molester'" Google AI began. "It originated in prison and is now sometimes used in broader contexts. It is considered highly offensive and is used to label and ostracize individuals convicted of sex offenses against children."
     A reminder that, as inclusive as many like to be, sometimes ostracization is a good and necessary thing. 

     I considered whether a photo of the poster should be shared — I would hate for this slur to be  directed unfairly at any particular individual. But it is an interesting, relatively new word, so I digitally obscured the face of the person depicted so he cannot be identified. 

     AI can't always be trusted either, so I dug into the etymology.

    "As soon as a Chomo checks into the Fish Tank, every convict knows about it," Jimmy A. Lerner writes in his 2003 "You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish," the oldest citation I could find. 

    "Chomos may be people who trafficked in children or abused children during pornography," Carmen M. Cusak writes in her 2017, "Pornography and the Criminal Justice System."

     "I simply passed it along, thinking someone in the chomo's (child molester) unit would want to know," writes  Chad Holloman in his 2022 prison memoir "Cries for Carteret: My Shot at Redemption," finding himself deemed "responsible for taking the chop out since it was me that dug up the dirt on him."

     The word is defined in William K. Bentley and James M. Corbett's 1992 "Prison Slang: A Dictionary of Words and Expressions Depicting Life Behind Bars."

     It could be argued that the word really isn't of much practical use for most people outside the prison system, thank goodness. Though that's the funny thing with new words — you don't need them until you do. I tucked it away for future reference.

     

     

Trump prescribes lethal advice for American parents

     It's been a year since I came down with Type I diabetes, and everything is butter. The Dexcom G7 rides on the back of my upper arm, a smooth high-tech medical barnacle, whispering my blood sugar data to my cell phone, which reports a healthy 5.7 average blood sugar. The insurance kinks have been worked out. Now CVS and Walgreens send me chirpy little texts announcing it's time to collect bottles of pills and injector pens of insulin — those pens are a marvel, with their 4 mm lubricated needles. You don't feel them going in.
     But technology, no matter how wondrous, cannot conquer human blundering. Last week, for the first time, at bedtime I picked up the orange NovoLog Flexpen instead of the gray Lantus SoloStar for my nightly insulin shot. Twenty units of the long-acting Lantus insulin is just right to tuck me in and keep my blood sugar steady. Twenty units of the short-acting NovoLog could send me to the hospital.
     Fortunately, I noticed the pen color as I was swabbing its tip with alcohol, put it down, and picked up the proper pen. But it was a sobering moment — no matter how finely tuned these systems, carelessness can still mess things up, big time.
     The United States is enduring a master class on how human error can undercut quality medical care. Our secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been clawing at the American system of vaccination, based on his unsupported folk beliefs that vaccines cause autism, which they do not. Calling Kennedy a "vaccine skeptic" is like calling an arsonist "flame curious."
     The damage has already begun. West Texas reported 762 cases of measles, and two deaths since January. In 2024, there were no cases in the entire state of Texas — which can be expected, since vaccination rate has gone steadily down across the country. The "herd immunity" that protects the unvaccinated is eroding.
     On Monday it was the pain-killer and fever-reducer acetaminophen's turn to face baseless government censure.
     “Taking Tylenol is not good,” President Donald Trump said repeatedy during a briefing at the White House. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.”
     He was referring to pregnant women taking Tylenol, but that detail kept being dropped. He did not cite research but a gut feeling.
     "We understood a lot more than people who studied it," Trump said, praising Kennedy, to his right and and — in one of those surreal notes found in nightmares — Oprah's Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, nodding to his left.
     Acetaminophen doesn't cause autism — studies that suggested it might were confounding taking Tylenol with the conditions that Tylenol was being taken to treat. It was like saying white canes cause blindness.
     Trump shifted from Tylenol to vaccines.
     "They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies it's a disgrace," the president said. "I think its very bad. It looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little fragile child and get a vat of 80 different vaccines, and they pump it in."
     In Monday's most reckless moment, Trump urged parents not to give newborns their routine hepatitis B vaccinations because "hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. There's no reason to give a baby who's just born hepatitis B. I would say wait until the baby is 12 years old."

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Flashback 2009: Are we really this shallow?

      Fall began Monday at 2:19 p.m. I was looking for old columns that greet the autumn when I stumbled upon this. The opening segment pushes back against the identity-based politics that over the past decade and a half have come to dominate our world, both in the left sanctifying it and the right demonizing it. Let's just say the "happy future" I refer to must be dragging its feet. I kept in the correction just because it captures a moment in history — the police censorship of movies using its "widow's board" that will be unfamiliar to many. It was back when the column filled a page, and I've retained the original subheadings.

Opening shot

     Ever wonder how people in the future will view us? I do, especially this week, pawing through the coverage of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
     There was a certain theme, a leitmotif, if you will, a focus, an element of the story given an awful lot of emphasis.
     Did you notice it too?
     She's Hispanic.
     And yes, I understand that having a Hispanic Supreme Court justice would be historically significant, a milestone in our steady march from a racist, slave-owning past to the happy, everybody-in-the-pool future that we expect to arrive any moment now.
     But did Sotomayor's ethnic background really deserve the big blast of ballyhoo it received, going so far as to exhume poor old Benjamin Cardozo to determine whether he too was Hispanic (his family came from Portugal in the 1700s)? 

"Mona Lupe," by César Augusto Martínez

     

     There was something unhinged about it all ("Latina Justice" blares the cover of the new Time), something deeply ironic in our marking this sign of racial progress by going gaga over ethnicity. If society were actually as tolerant as we believe this latest advance indicates, would we really be fixating on the Hispanic angle?
     Imagine a similar response in private life. You are considering going to a new doctor  — Dr. Sotomayor — and tell your friend about her.
     "My God, she's HISPANIC," you gush. "Her parents were PUERTO RICAN! Which means, if I go to her, she'll be the FIRST HISPANIC DOCTOR I'VE EVER HAD...."
     At that point, your friend would be edging away from you because it's racism — not the extreme, Bull Connor racism, but racism nonetheless — the softer, gentler harping on irrelevant differences. Society dislocates an arm patting itself on the back for letting one of a heretofore-loathed minority sit at the dinner table, while the honored group celebrates as if they were a fungible mass and the accomplishment of one is the accomplishment of all. Are we not better than this?
     Not yet. Someday, a future scholar writing about our woeful early 21st century race relations will be at his datascreen, smiling and shaking his head at what oblivious goofs we all were, and I want to wave over your heads at him and say, "Hey Phred2047 — don't feel so smug. It wasn't unanimous."

Correction

     Last week, I wrote that Mayor Richard J. Daley didn't allow movies to be shot in Chicago because of "The Man with the Golden Arm," the 1955 Frank Sinatra film.
     It was a good guess, but printing that as fact was like grabbing a container at the back of the refrigerator and gobbling what's inside without first checking to see if it's still good.
     The error — no, let's make it a "probabilistic fact later proved untrue" in honor of Topix* — prompted a phone call from Michael Kutza, founder and longtime director of the Chicago International Film Festival. He remembers what happened.
     "It was 'Medium Cool,' " he said, referring to the controversial 1969 film set against the riots at the Democratic National Convention. "It put a stop to everything. Every script had to be read by somebody at City Hall, and they didn't allow anything to happen."
     The Sun-Times regrets, etc.
     That out of the way, we fell into talking about the censorship board, which Kutza had to appear before when the festival began.
     "A feature film was in two very heavy metal cans whose combined weight was 100 pounds," he said. "In 1965, I had to drag my movies down to the old building where we used to pay our parking tickets.
     "You went in there -- it was a leftover courtroom -- and they had actual judges, these nine ladies --they had to be widows of policemen, that's what gave them the right to be on the censorship board. I was too young to think it was funny.
     "I had to drag these things in there and leave them overnight," he continued. "I took maybe 10 feature films there -- they had a 35mm projector, and any film shown in Chicago had to pass by these people."
     "Pass by" should not be taken to mean they actually watched the films, not all of them.
     "Our films were immediately made X-rated because they were from foreign countries," Kutza said. "When I dragged in a Swedish film, it was rated porn immediately, without looking."
      This was a problem for a film festival, so Kutza struck on the solution of making the event "adults only." Eventually, he did what all who wanted to get something done in that long-ago era did -- he appealed to the mayor.
     "I worked with Frank Sullivan, the press secretary to Mayor Daley," remembered Kutza. "He took me to him, and Daley said, 'Give the kid what he needs, but don't tell anybody because the stuff you show could lose me votes.' "
     The 45th annual festival takes place this autumn.
     "The nicest thing about doing this so many years is you have a chance to outlive your critics," Kutza said.
     I will look forward to that.

Today's chuckle...

"I was reading the paper, and it said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Don't you think we should stop calling them minorities when they hit 80 percent? You could put one white guy in a room with 50,000 black people and 20,000 Puerto Ricans, and he'd still be going, 'Look at all these minorities! I'm the only majority here.'" Louis C.K.
                      — Originally published in the Sun-Times May 29, 2009

* Topix, the country's "largest local forum site," was being sued by a Texas couple for posting unsubstantiated rumors that they were child molesters and drug-dealers. A jury eventually awarded them $13.8 million in damages.

Mona Lupe, by César Augusto Martínez

HIV care navigates Trump order roadblocks

Dr. Brandon Hill

     How does a trans person changing their name help fight the spread of HIV infection?
     The answer is simple: Studies find that a person whose ID lines up with their current gender identification is more likely to successfully navigate the complexities of health insurance than someone whose driver's license seems to show a different person.
     So instead of, say, taking hormones offered by a friend, maybe using a shared needle that can transfer blood-borne illnesses like HIV, they will get medication from a pharmacy, along with a clean needle.
     Of course, this is not a concern to a federal government that doesn't want trans citizens to serve in the military, never mind have their medical needs addressed.
     Neither is it a concern for a government that doesn't want to pay for research into children's vaccines, let alone take into account the unique demands of being a person born to a gender they cannot happily live with.
     But it is a concern to Dr. Brandon Hill, co-author of the aforementioned study of how name change affects the well-being of Black trans women. He's president and CEO of Vivent Health, which began 40 years ago as the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin and now is one of the nation's largest providers of HIV healthcare and social services.
     "HIV stigma is still a real issue in Chicago," Hill said in the lobby of Vivent's bright, airy, art-filled and meticulously clean Edgewater clinic on Broadway. "Even as an acceptable chronic disease, there are still challenges in getting the care that they need."
     Has the shift in government policy away from learning stuff and helping people affected front-line caregivers like Vivent Health?
     "A little bit," Hill said. "Of course, the changes in government and government policy don't often take an immediate effect. So we're planning for things that roll out in 2027. It will both impact the organization but also impact the client base covered by Medicaid and Medicare."
     If mention of Medicare surprises, remember HIV infection is no longer just a young person's concern. People with HIV have been surviving since the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in the 1990s. Vivent has a client who is 90.
     Whether those living with HIV can continue to age depends, in part, on whether networks like Vivent manage to stay afloat during the anti-Black, anti-trans flood.
     In August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order "Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking" that denies federal money to research directed at a specific race or acknowledging the existence of non-binary people.
     "A lot of the grants that were frozen included language like 'HIV outreach for transgendered people,'" Hill said. "Because of the executive order, we can't give you money if that's what you're going to do. It created this weird limbo."
     But science, like water, finds a way, and skilled grant writers are already accustomed to jumping through hoops.
     "A lot of folks ended up having to de-specify the work — I call it 'neutralizing,'" Hill said. "So while you might have had a grant for 'HIV testing for LGBTQ youth,' you just have a grant for 'HIV testing for youth.' Those type of maneuvers that are made to comply with the executive order actually make it ... almost not legible to the individuals who need it."

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Which is kind of the point.

Clematis redux

     Perhaps lazily, I considered the woody vine growing before my front porch as the "clematis," not really caring which of the nearly 400 species of clematis it might be.
     But when I paused, admiring the particularly lusty bloomage this week, I decided to pin down its exact variety. So I plugged a shot of the little white starbursts into Google Image, and, after an initial scare that it might be a Confederate Jasmine Vine ("the past isn't history, it isn't even past...") decided mine had to be either a Virginia Bower or a Sweet Southern Clematis.
     My initial inclination was to pull for the former, as my son is a loyal Wahoo alumnus. And while the flowers look almost exactly the same, the Sweet Southern is considered invasive, because the seeds get everywhere, though they're so similar it seems almost a silly distinction.    
     The difference being the leaves. Serated = Virginia Bower = good. And smooth = Sweet Southern = bad.  Of course I have the bad variety, though it's been there for years, doesn't seem to be spreading and while I cut it back every fall, I'm not about to dig it out. Let the Invasive Species police come get me.
     I was more interested in the literary ramifications of "clematis," which comes to us unchanged from ancient Greek, κληματίς, meaning "a climbing plant." My assumption was that pickings would be slim — my Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" has no entry for "clematis" ("rose" has 79). 

     Because what rhymes with "clematis"? Arthritis? Bursitis?  That's the making of a lovely sonnet for sure.

     Plug "rose" into the Poetry Foundation web site and you get over 10,000 results. Plug "clematis" in and you get 63, and upon investigation, not all of those actually contain the word.
      Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile"  does. Here he comes upon a neglected store of firewood, set aside by someone long ago, Clematis are part of nature reclaiming its property"

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

In a more recent poem, "America," German-born Aria Aber is trying to adjust herself to a "country of cowboys and fame" that tells her, "to keep quiet about certain things." And that was four years ago. To her:

I feared what had happened in your forest, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders
The verbs were naturalize, charge, reside
The nouns were clematis, alien, hibiscus

     If Aber's scared of considering the past of America's forests, she ought to visit Germany's. She's at Stanford now, so I hope feels more sanguine about the place.

     The classics never let us down. The word's Greek origin made me suspect I'd find it there, and I wasn't disappointed. Pliny the Elder — who we saw being killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius after saying, famously but incorrectly, in his case, "Fortune favors the brave," gives the flower an in-depth consideration in his "Natural History."

     Old Pliny finds the leaves are good for cleansing leprous sores, and the seeds cure constipation. The Greeks, he notes, eat the leaves as a vegetable, with oil and salt. They must have been hungry.

     I was just about ready to wrap this up and call it a day, when I decided to do the Full Boy Scout Try and check Shakespeare for clematis. Coming immediately upon this piece, written exactly two years ago. 

    Two few things stand out — first, the author, delving into clematis in a fashion identical to my own, comes up with material entirely different from what I found, including the plant that inspired his rumination, which belonged to a neighbor. 

     And second, I am the author. 

    Which is vaguely terrifying. Usually I snap to recall something I wrote 40 years ago. Or at least to consider the possibility and check. Yet I could plunge into clematis without a shiver of reluctance that I afflicted you with the topic a scant 735 days ago. But also comforting in that, given the entirely different result, I can still post this. Answer me honestly: how many of you began this piece and thought, "Heyyyyy, wait a minute. Didn't we read about clematis in 2023?"