The Chicago Blog

Chicago 1968 >>>>>>>> Chicago 2012

Kristi McGuire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:07:39 +0000

INTRODUCTION

We choose our aphorisms wisely. George Santayana cautioned us against our doom in repeating the past and we pushed it to the point of cliché. Let’s incant with Karl Kraus, instead.

“The ugliness of our time has retroactive force.”

BODIES

This coming weekend brings the 2012 North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) twenty-fifth anniversary summit to Chicago, exactly almost a half-century after we hosted the 1968 Democratic National Convention. We’ve traded Daleys for Rahm; our police force is run by a former football player instead of a former army provost-marshall; and the odds of inadvertently thwacking Dan Rather in the stomach have been significantly reduced by his retirement from network television—

According to NATO’s website, the organization has a threefold focus for their meeting:

the Alliance’s commitment to Afghanistan through transition and beyond;
ensuring the Alliance has the capabilities it needs to defend its population and territory and to deal with the challenges of the 21st century; and
strengthening NATO’s network of partners across the globe.

According to the Nation, Occupy Chicago’s social network and media feeds, and Timeout Chicago, those protestors native to Chicago and in town for anti-NATO demonstrations have prepared for dialogue and protests surrounding the summit with a $10,000 People’s Law Office kickstarter for anticipated bail needs; organized details for formal marches like those coordinated by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and Andy Thayer and the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda; and instituted a hopeful ten-day plan of direct action, including a march on Boeing.

The city of Chicago has recently spent $757,657 retro-fitting police helmets with face-shields and ear and neck protectors, in addition to securing the use of LRAD sound-cannons (the Daily Kos has demo footage).

HISTORY FEEDS THE PRESENT

Dean Blobaum’s site Chicago ’68 chronicles the now-familiar events of that August, including this chronology of related events before and that summer, beginning with the August 1967 “Dump Johnson” movement and ending with April 1975 final withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. The iconic footage of clashes between the police and Convention protestors is readily available on the internet (and cautiously framed by video released this week of early encounters between Chicago police and NATO demonstrators), serving as a comparative frame for the last time the city found itself as host to a political meeting capable of inspiring largescale social unrest and counterprotests. Though it’s difficult to not immediately notice parallels (and to be fair—some valid differences) between the events of 1968 and circumstances and conditions surrounding the present NATO summit, the documentation and analyzes published in the wake of 1968 grapple with some serious particulars—from from the tenuous political transformation of conservative white working-class Chicago and its effect on Daley’s police force to the judicial inconsistencies in the trials that followed indited “conspirators” from that summer’s planned protests. Reading up on the events certainly prepares us to better understand what’s at stake—historically— for all those involved in the weekend to come.

REQUIRED READING

No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, 1968 by John Schultz provides a first-hand account of the events as they unfolded by Schultz, now a professor emeritus and former chair of fiction writing at Chicago’s Columbia College—then a young writer and participant-observer of the convention week.

“John Schultz, in No One Was Killed, has managed marvelously to evoke what happened in Chicago and what it felt like to have it happen to you.”—John Leonard, New York Times

Excerpt here.

Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by Frank Kusch employs interviews with 80 police veterans to reevaluate exactly how—and why—the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention, helping to broaden our understanding of the conservative white working-class’s response to events.

“A fascinating story unfolds, of family-oriented cops recruited from white ethnic communities confronting middle-class ‘longhairs;’ of both the police and the activists able to perceive one another only as stereotypes … of the cumulative and destructive mutual antipathy between police and press.”—History

Excerpt here.

Chicago ’68 by David Farber draws on unprecedented archival sources to retell the story of the Convention from three separate perspectives: the Yippies, the National Mobilization to End the War, and Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police.

“Chicago ’68 was a watershed summer. Chicago ’68 is a watershed book. Farber succeeds in presenting a sensitive, fairminded composite portrait that is at once a model of fine narrative history and an example of how one can walk the intellectual tightrope between ‘reporting one’s findings’ and offering judgements about them.”—Peter I. Rose, Contemporary Sociology

Excerpt here.

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, also by John Schultz is a vivid account of the raw emotions and judicial corruption that came to define one of the most significant legal events in American history, articulated first-hand by Schultz, who covered the trial for the Evergeen Review.

“If Schultz has offered us a drama that is a metaphor for this society itself, then his intensive concern with the jurors and their own special agony is its climax. His probe into their consciences—the play within the play—is a probe into the American conscience.”—David Graber, Los Angeles Times

Excerpt here.

IN SPIRIT

Studs Terkel (1912–2008), legendary oral historian, broadcaster, author (WPA-sponsored writer), citizen-journalist, and notable Chicagoan would have turned 100 years old tomorrow, just days before the NATO summit begins. Fitting somehow? “Curiosity never killed this cat,” was the epitaph he suggested for himself.

“Logistically, practically, spiritually, poetically, in every way, Chicago has to be the city for the 1968 Democratic convention,” Terkel ominously remarked just days before the ’68 Convention began (weeks later serving as “Our Man in Chicago” during Haskell Wexler’s cinéma vérité-syle documentary of events Medium Cool). We wonder what he would say today (Happy birthday, Studs).

Roman numeral C, reinforced by (the) Latin centum: Part II

Kristi McGuire — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:37:31 +0000

In which we continue to promote The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine by considering what exists outside its daunting canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century giants. Part I here.

Oh, Mari’bn: You’re kiddins

Our remix of Anne Carson’s “A Detail from the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum 500–453 BC) Second Detail” (after a reading of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, in which we channel Caroline Bergvall and Tan Lin)

A Dtret rnou rrn Tolas or rHE dr\,ER

(PAiliruM

Joo-451

BC) SEcoND DrTdr

Art..tr Ccx-soN

Swinhine at noon alwaF ftninds me

-Fn,@

s,tug

The Eruscos: true you blue, MaritFrl

lou rc btuc?

MarnJyn: Co undervr aLer.

The Etruscans: Wlry?

Maribn: Slowwortd, I like thar

The Etruscms: Slow bodies?

Mrlp: Bodes pulled amond by faces.

The Etruscans: Momentary faces.

Marilyn: Acutally, alldle same face.

The Etruscans: Irigfi renhs? Seduftive?

Marilyn: No. Sr.-nge. Beautitul.

The Eduscans: Odd son ofbeauty.

Mrill,n: Uke r new brasie.e

The E*uscans: Or a ery u$al erb.

Ma.itp: Wharl.

The Etruscals: For insraace the verb !s,.

Madbn: I didn’t know

is,was a ve$.

The Etruscans: What did you ftrink it was?

Marilp: A light for dre otho verbs.

The Eo-uscds: tn wrinen Cuuscd ( s rhe only vcrb
we hare.

Mdilyr: You’re kiddins.

Th{ Emiscansi:

ts,Ms. hasbeen. had beerl wilt be. mish t be.
shou.ld be, ro bc. to tuve been-

ro oe aDour ro have been. being. beins abour ro
be. And of (-oure de nesarives

of rhese.

Mmjn: no$ do you gf| maried orgo ro Lhc beach?

I ne Luuscans: we do such rhng5,

iusr done, rwrite abour rem.

Marnllrr: No novelsJ no scre.npla}s?

The Druscms: No lircracure.

Deciphernent ol Lineat x

Marilyn: Why bother wirh witing ar all theD?

The Etruscms: Itn needed on tonbsrones.

Marib’n: Oh I see.

The Ernscds: Now therek a slow world-

Marilyn: You gor that right.

The Etnscms: Now you’re sad asair

Mdlyn: No

just

thinling. My pain self etc.

The Etruscms: If,s choses derriere les choses.

Maril1rr: l

sres.

The Etmscas: Getting colder now.

Mdilln: Time to go in.

The Etrusans: And tomorow?

Mril)n: Tomorrow wil cdtainly be.

The Etruscans: You are very tunnv.

Mdi\r: So I’mtold.

ETissure 32: Anothcr rin{r x sire.

The Open Door doesn’t anthologize this. But it does anthologize all of this. Coming September 2012.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

Kristi McGuire — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:08:02 +0000

So much Hemingway, so little time. So little Hemingway, so much time? Something about little—not literal size; something about Hemingway—Hemingway and. . . . Hemingway and. . . . Hemingway and . . . Gellhorn?

James Gandolfini—indomitable analysand and crime boss Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, Patricia Arquette-beating goon Virgil in True Romance, and producer of more than one documentary on war veterans for HBO—signed on in June 2010 to serve as executive producer of a then-untitled biopic centered around Ernest Hemingway’s sojourn during the Spanish Civil War with Collier’s Weekly correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Fast forward to 2012: the film Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, Henry & June), will premiere on HBO on May 28th. Another tough-guy with a (tortured) pen of gold tale? Not quite.

Martha Gellhorn married Hemingway in December 1940, after the pair lived together off-and-on for four years, which the movie charts from an initial holiday encounter in 1936 Key West. Beginning with those early contributions to Collier’s, Gellhorn followed reportage during Franco’s protracted war with the Spanish government with a trip to Germany that chronicled Hitler’s rise, before she moved on to Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the UK, among other locales, alongside the unfolding of World War II. She witnessed D-Day on Normandy Beach without a set of press credentials, posing as an impromptu medic, though Hemingway had earlier tried to block her flights to the Italian Front and later France, delivering the oft-cited line:

“Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?”

Gellhorn was perhaps a badass at both pursuits (She demurs, “I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”), but definitely the former. A lifelong leftist, after she divorced Hemingway in 1945, she went on to cover wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Central America, penning nearly twenty books, and making her home in more than nineteen international locations before her death by self-inflicted overdose at the age of 89 in 1998.

One of those books is A Stricken Field, which fictionalizes a journalist’s return to Prague after its annexation (1938), in a narrative voice both frustrating and futile, as the main character struggles to assist its refugees and make sense of the once-proud democracy’s difficult plight under the Gestapo. Here, Gellhorn’s voice is both clear and forceful, more reliant on journalistic observation and political reflection than Hemingway’s staccato figures of speech, but still shaped by the years they overlapped as lovers and correspondents to war and second-wave modernism. In many ways A Stricken Field is a fine follow-up to Hemingway & Gellhorn, showcasing Gellhorn at the height of her powers, self-helming a fictionalization of her life as a correspondent under critical regime changes and conditions of duress.

No comment on Nicole Kidman (the vehement atheist Gellhorn, who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, wrote a NOVEL about McCarthyism, and slept with a Major General on Hemingway’s watch might have reason to turn over about that particular casting choice).

Marc Bekoff on the sentience of animals

Kristi McGuire — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:41:10 +0000

Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is an internationally acknowledged expert on animal behavior and cognition. In 2009, the University of Chicago Press published Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a book he coauthored with Jessica Pierce, which uses cutting-edge developments in psychology, biology, and cognitive science to demonstrate the broad repertoire of moral behaviors and nuanced emotions exhibited by animals.

Recently, Bekoff was a guest on ABC News with Diane Sawyer, where he contributed to a feature about service veterans reuniting with their companion animals. The juxtaposition of Bekoff’s commentary, which was fed into the segment via video chat, with the documentary footage of dogs greeting their returning owners in backyards, airports, and living rooms, illustrated another angle of Bekoff’s research: animals are sentient, social beings, capable of developing deep bonds—the experience of which clearly transcends even technological mediation.

Bekoff recently commented on Pierce’s forthcoming book The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives, which combines wrenching personal narratives and scientific research to consider a wide range of questions about animal aging, end-of-life care, and death. “Decisions about how to treat an animal toward the end of her or his life are among the most difficult we have to make and it’s our responsibility to do the best we can. Our companions trust that we will have their best interests in mind,” Bekoff said. Lucky for the rest of us that Bekoff and Pierce have dedicated their lives’ work to helping us recognize our relationships with—and responsibilities toward—our fellow animals.

Marjorie Perloff, American Philosopher

Kristi McGuire — Thu, 03 May 2012 22:07:40 +0000

The University of Chicago Press extends its congratulations to our own Unoriginal Genius Marjorie Perloff—whose astute exploits in literary theory, criticism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics, and consideration of the visual arts we’ve blogged about before, now and again. Why raise another glass to Marjorie?

Well, the American Philosophical Society—the nation’s oldest and most esteemed scholarly organization (founded in 1743)—whose mission is to “promote useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach,” just called her a member. Among her cohort of those inducted with distinction in the humanities? Mary Beard, Marjorie Graber, Wu Hung, Rosalind Krauss, Brent D. Shaw, and Salvatore Settis, in a class of 2012 inductees that extended its reach through the arts and public affairs (along with the physical, natural, and social sciences) to include such luminaries as Jill Abramson, William Kentridge, Cormac McCarthy, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Serra.

We’ve been lucky enough to shepherd several of Perloff’s books into publication, and though the list only reflects a portion of her overwhelming scholarship, it’s nothing to shake a stick at. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, John Cage: Composed in America, Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, and Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century are all typical Perloff: comparatist and complex, her works have long broken new ground in our understanding of serious and experimental aesthetics, both before and after the postmodern moment, but never at the expense of readability and Perloff’s genuine delight in art and language.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to her about her achievement and the company she’ll keep. Cheers to Marjorie!

Adrian Johns, derived from the Latin pirata

Kristi McGuire — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:11:02 +0000

Adrian Johns is having a pretty good series of weeks. Earlier this month, the intellectual property specialist was named a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. The chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the Allan Grant Maclear Professor in History at the University of Chicago, Johns plans to use his Guggenheim funding to study the intellectual property defense industry.

Johns is no stranger to prizes. His earlier work The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, his most recent volume, won the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Book of the Year Award and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Just yesterday, Johns was feted in a ceremony bestowing yet another honor on his work with Piracy, the Gordon J. Laing Prize for best faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the University of Chicago Press the greatest distinction.

A review published in the London Review of Books finesses Johns’ redress of the vitally linked histories of piracy and printed matter:

In Adrian Johns’ account, intellectual property rights have always been precarious. According to him, the concepts of intellectual property and intellectual piracy arose as delayed responses to the advent of printing and the development of a commercial book trade, around the year 1660, in London. ‘To find the origins of intellectual piracy,’ he writes,

stand at the main door of St Paul’s Cathedral. Facing west, walk away from the Cathedral, heading down Ludgate and toward Fleet Street. After about a hundred yards you come upon a narrow alley … Entering the alley, the din of the traffic quickly fades, and you find yourself in a small courtyard. A doorway at the far corner leads into a building of indeterminate age with a stone façade. You pass along a brief, twisting entranceway and into an elegant antechamber. But then the passage suddenly and dramatically opens out, leading into a vast, formal hall. It is richly decorated with 17th-century panelling and arrayed flags, all illuminated by stained-glass windows portraying Caxton, Shakespeare, Cranmer and Tyndale. You are in Stationers’ Hall, the centre of London’s old book trade. And here, beyond all the elegant joinery and ceremonial paraphernalia, lies the key to the emergence of piracy. It sits quietly in a modest muniments room. It is a book.

Piracy posits the phenomenon at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and much of Johns’ work seeks to understand this as part of the nature of print culture.

Something tells us he must be on to something. Or maybe we’re just looking for innovative intellectuals whose smiles light up a room:

Alan Gilbert, a man of (many) words

Kristi McGuire — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:21:01 +0000

What follows below is a list of proper nouns mentioned by Alan Gilbert, author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, during an interview with 3 AM magazine:

Richard Gilbert, United States, Harvard, World War II, Wobblies, Schenley Industries, New York, Ayub Khan, Pakistan, Little Rock, Central High, New York Times, South Africa, Emma, Democrats, Taj, Americans, Adamjee, East Pakistan, West Pakistan, Ashraf Adamjee, Wouter Tim, Marx, Indian Ocean, Chestertown, Maryland, Freedom Summer, Walden School, New York, Andy Goodman, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Vietnam War, Bernard Fall, Denis Warner, Jean Lacouture, Stanley Hoffmann, Barrington Moore, French, German, English, Government 1a, Carl Friedrich, Max Weber, Adam Smith, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, David Hume, I. F. Stone, Herbert Marcuse, McGeorge Bundy, May 2nd Movement, London School of Economics, Ralph Miliband, Labour Party, Ecole Normale, Paris, Althusser, Montesquieu, Das Kapital, England, Michael Walzer, Dita Skhlar, Artistotle, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, Dick Boyd, SDS, Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation, Norm Daniels, Cornell, Nick Sturgeon, Richard Miller, David Lyons, American Council of Learned Societies, Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Leo Strauss, Karl Loewith, the Right, Adolf Hitler, Plato, Thomas Hobbes, J. J. Rousseau, Alex Rosenberg, the Iliad, Simone Weil, Chicago, Africa, Obama, Bin Laden, Goldman Sachs, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Occupy, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Karl Loewith, Constitution, Bob Goldwin, Mike Malbin, Dick Cheney, Scott Horton, Eugene Shepperd, Michael Zank, William Altman, Shylock, Fagin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Brown vs. Board of Education, Charles Percy, Cuba, the American President, Bradley Manning, Iraq War, Americanism, Evangelicism, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Awlaki, Jack Balkin, Ron Paul, British Tories, Andrew Sullivan, Bob Barr, Condi Rice, Democratic Individuality, Magna Carta, Law Lords, Catholic Church, Spirit of the Laws, Gilbert Harman, Socrates, Meno, American South, Ku Klux Klan, John Woolman, John Laurens, Thomas Peters, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, Lincoln, Thomas Hobbes, George Washington, Gabriel Prosser, the Republic, Thrasymachus, the Adamjee Jute Mill, Brian Leiter, Bangladesh, Hilary Putnam, Democratic Individuality, Martin Luther King, Thich Nat Hanh, Vienna, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Taylor, Vichy, the Riviera, G. A. Cohen, the Communist Manifesto, Engels, the Eighteenth Brumaire, Genealogy of Morals, Politics as a Vocation, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Mayor Bloomberg, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, National Labor Relations Act, Flint, San Francisco, Harry Bridges, National Guard, Wisconsin, May Day, the Second International, Haymarket, Civil Rights Acts, Vincent Harding, Memphis, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy, International Working Men’s Association, Hans Morganthau, George Kennan, Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Foucault, A Theory of Justice, Rupert Murdoch, Jacopo Arbenz, Guatemala, ITT, Salvador Allende, Law of Peoples, David Levine, Blackwater, Xe Corporation, Yitzhak Perlman, Stradivarius, C. P. Snow, Henry Giroux, Max Planck, Denver, Koch Brothers, National Public Radio, Mitt Romney, Michigan, Libya, Hilary Clinton, Class Struggles in France, Gaza, Tom Farer, J. J. Cohen, Edward Said, Desmond Tutu, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, the Alien and Sedition Acts, French Revolution, Saint Domingue, Bordeaux, Jacobins, Patriot Act, Andrew Goodman, Freedom Summer, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Toussint L’Ouverture, John Woolman, Quakers, Geneva, Continental Congress, Michelle Alexander, Samuel Hopkins, First Rhode Island Regiment, Moors, Federalist Papers, Shays Rebellion, Gary Nash, Race and Revolution, Barrington Moore, Robin Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Noam Chomsky, Diane Coyle, Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, Barbara Deming, Revolution and Equilibrium, Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Eyes on the Prize, Youtube.

Whew. For more Gilbert, listen to a strreaming audio interview with Denver’s KGNU and be sure to visit Black Patriots and Loyalists on Facebook.

W. S. Di Piero wins the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Kristi McGuire — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:04:40 +0000

For the second year in a row, a former Phoenix Poet has taken home the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—and, for W. S. Di Piero, the legacy is a long, tall glass of water. He joins the company of twenty-six fellow poets who have soldered the experience of working class lives into indomitable verse, like Philip Levine; those who, like C. K. Williams and Adrienne Rich, have championed social issues and countered injustice; and those, like John Ashbery, who also deal in the criticism of the visual arts.

What makes Di Piero unique, in a body of work conjures the presence of divinity in everyday life, redresses the grievances of a working-class South Philadelphia upbringing, and moves with effortless comfort from plain-style speech to bold translations from Euripides and Giacomo Leopardi, is exactly what doesn’t. He tells the truth, and I think it’s fair to say, it’s not slant. Di Piero questions poets and the quotidian equally, and what he arrives at is often something close to a sense of permission.

As Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine stated the Foundation’s official announcement:

“R. P. Blackmur once said that great poetry ‘adds to the stock of available reality,’ and that’s certainly true of W. S. Di Piero’s work. He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He’s a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves.”

In 1992, we published Di Piero’s fifth collection The Restorers, as part of the Phoenix Poets series. In one of the book’s opening poems, “The Early Part of the Day,” Di Piero evokes the persons who inhabit a morning, with his trademark plain speak:

“They take their daily exercise walking the street/down from the rehab center, past my house,/unrighteous, ignoring the sluice of cars/schoolkids on bikes/buses heaving people/from the cinderblock slum two blocks beyond the center/to gardens, pools, and kitchens one suburb away.”

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, W. S. Piero has authored ten books of poetry, including, most recently in 2011, Nitro Nights, as well as five essay collections. Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, Di Piero writes a regular column on the visual arts for the independent newsweekly the San Diego Reader and contributes regularly to The Threepenny Review. His poetry and translations have been published widely, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and Agni, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the American Scholar, Commonweal, Bookforum, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he won the California Book Award in Poetry for Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems in 2007. He lives in San Francisco, California.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine.

The prize will be presented to W. S. Di Piero at the Pegasus Awards ceremony, along with the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award, at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 11, 2012.

Announcing the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows

Kristi McGuire — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:56:34 +0000

The 2012 class of Guggenheim Fellows was announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inciting some exuberant responses on the part of several winners (check out Terry Teachout’s Twitter feed). The Guggenheim has long been hailed as the “mid-career award,” honoring scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, who have likely published a book or three, professed a fair amount of research, and are actively engaged in projects of significant scope. The fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic).

Among this year’s crop (we dare say more forward-leaning than previous years?) is a roster of standout “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” affiliated with the University of Chicago Press:

Creative Arts

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of three poetry collections, coeditor of The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (forthcoming Fall 2012)

History of Science, Technology, and Economics

Matthew L. Jones, James R. Barker Associate Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Harvard University, author of The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (2006)

Humanities

Jonathan Lamb, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, author of Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (2001, winner of the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies) and coeditor of Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900 (2001)
Elisha P. Renne, professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, coauthor of Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (2001)
Lisa Saltzman, professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College, author of Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (2006)
Lynn Spigel, the Frances E. Willard Chair and Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2009) and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992, shortlisted for several awards)
Ramie Targoff, professor of English and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, author of John Donne, Body and Soul (2008) and Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (2001, winner of the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award)
Luise White, professor of history at the University of Florida, author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990)

Intellectual & Cultural History

Adrian Johns, Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2010, winner of several awards) and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998, winner of several awards)

Social Sciences

John H. Aldrich, the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University, author of Why Parties? A Second Look (1995, 2011) and Before the Convention: Strategies and Choices in Presidential Nominating Campaigns (1980)
John H. Cochrane, the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a member of the University of Chicago Press Faculty Board of Directors
James N. Druckman, the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, coeditor for the series Chicago Studies in American Politics
Steven Epstein, professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (2007, winner of a hearty set of awards!)
James B. Jacobs, the Warren E. Burger Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law, author of Drunk Driving: An American Dilemma (1989) and Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (1977); coeditor of The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective (1996)
Don Kulick, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (1998)

And finally, congratulations to Kirin Narayan, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012) and My Family and Other Saints (2007), who joined the Guggenheim Foundation’s Standing Committee for the Educational Advisory Board (here’s to picking some winners!)

OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS

Kristi McGuire — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:27:06 +0000

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama staged a series of happenings. Situated someplace between the physically participatory (be-in) space of protest culture and an Art Brut magick ceremony, Kusama’s polka-dot drenched performances saturated the conventional landscape with an extraordinary reality. By 1968, Kusama had begun to formalize these happenings under the name The Anatomic Explosion, accompanying each performance with a series of manifestos-qua-press-releases whose tone echoed the wild conviction of her art.

“Burn Wall Street. Wall Street men must become farmers and fisherman. Wall Street men must stop all of this fake ‘business.’ OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS. OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS ON THEIR NAKED BODIES. BE IN … BE NAKED, NAKED, NAKED.”

As critic Andrew Solomon writes in a 1997 Artforum profile of Kusama:

[Kusama] began issuing hundreds of press releases, and her performances became steadily wilder. In the first of her Anatomic Explosion series, Tomii and Karia write, “across from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, four nude dancers gyrated to the rhythm of bongo drummers, while Kusama, accompanied by her lawyer, spray painted blue polka dots on their naked bodies.” The police closed it down fast. A second such performance took place at the Statue of Liberty; a third one happened at the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, with Kusama declaring that she was the “modern Alice in Wonderland.” The performances came thick and fast after that.

What seems striking in our own moment—in a year already marked by the presence and legacy of the Occupy movement and the inspired, occasionally insipid fantasia of Mayan End Times, is Kusama’s archive: a primal and technicolored futureworld that literally danced on the grave of (capital) establishment politics. The theatrical—again, conviction—that another world is possible.

In Kusama’s autobiography Infinity Net, she reprints “Open Letter to My Hero, Richard Nixon,” which she first made public at the November 1968 happening in front of the New York Board of Elections:

Our earth is like one little polka-dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb gull of hatred and strife amid the peaceful, silent spheres. Let’s you and I change all of that and make this world a new Garden of Eden.

Let’s forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the Absolute, all together in the altogether. As we soar through the heavens, we’ll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in timeless eternity, and finally discover the naked truth:

You can’t eradicate violence by using more violence.

That closing line, especially, feels apt, a dream-barb for burgeoning movements. You can’t eradicate capital by using more capital, the placard read. Lately it seems that so many commendable, alternative venues champion Kusama’s art historical contemporary, Rosalind Krauss. Publication in the Expanded Field; Social Media Art in the Expanded Field; Architecture in the Expanded Field.

Let them eat cake with Kusama, instead?