Humboldt Park native Michael Mann’s new film Public Enemies, which portrays the life and death of one of the Chicago’s most notorious criminals, John Dillinger, premiers in theaters this weekend. And in all likelihood, similar to last year’s summer blockbuster Batman, you can be sure that thousands of Chicagoans, eager to see their city—or at least bits and pieces of their city—up on the big screen will be packing the theaters.
In light of such predictable crowds most reasonable people will choose to pass on Public Enemies in favor of some more edifying cultural experience this Fourth of July weekend. But, as David E. Ruth’s Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 demonstrates, with the right frame of mind—and the right book—Public Enemies might be as edifying as it gets. In Inventing the Public Enemy Ruth scrutinizes innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels, and hundreds of Hollywood movies, to show how the media’s “gangsters” are less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans’ values, concerns, and ideas about what sells.
Ruth takes us through a media landscape filled with efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters . . .
Twitterature from the University of Chicago
No, this isn’t a post about Tweety’s reading habits, but close. This morning’s Tribune as well as the Chicago web publication Gapers Block both picked up on an item previously posted to the New Yorker‘s Book Bench Blog about the University of Chicago and a new book being written by two of its students. The book, Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less, is the brainchild of college roommates Alex Aciman and Emmett Rensin, both 19. According to the Tribune the book is the authors’ attempt to rewrite (mangle?) “classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dante and other greats in 20 or fewer 140-character tweets.” The authors have signed a publishing contract with Penguin, known for its excellent editions of the classics.
The reaction so far from the book world seems to be of two minds with the Gapers Block undecided whether to label the news “sad or ironic” and the Tribune anticipating its reception by book lovers as “a mixture of horror and why-didn’t-I-think-of-that jealousy.” But, the Tribune article continues, literature professor W.J.T. Mitchell seemed to give “the project his backing recently, telling the Tribune, ‘this is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect University . . .
Read more »