Happy Halloween + HUMAN MICROPOEM @ #OccupyChicago

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!Be safe and have fun if you trick & treat tonight!***(Since Shakespeare didn't create the word and apparently no one else has either*, I am going to: embogment. That is my state these days. In a bog of competing deadlines, responsibilities, layers of materials to read--and thus, the paucity of new blog posts. It's always hard to convey how the quarter system's pace creates ever new layers of tasks more quickly than some of us...

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Cardinals Win World Series!

World Series MVP David FreeseThe Saint Louis Cardinals, Major League Baseball's most improbable post-season team, has won the 2011 World Series! This is the Cardinals' 11th Series win, second only to the New York Yankees' 22, and their second in the last 5 years, when they defeated Detroit in 4 games in 2006. As I previously wrote, the Cardinals listed through most of the regular season, until righting themselves in the final two months to come back...

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Murakami's 1Q84 + New Lispector Translations for ND

Once upon a time, when I was younger, and certain writers published new books, if I could afford to, I would rush to the nearest bookstore to purchase the books as soon as they hit the shelves. I grew out of that around the time I went to graduate school and found myself with little money for anything beyond rent, food, basic clothes, and so on, and in the years since that kind of attentiveness to favorite writers' new works has never returned,...

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Fiction's Psychocognitive Effects, Part II + Toibín & Eugenides in Conversation

Last month I posted a little musing entitled "Can Fiction Improve Empathy and Provoke Aggression," which focused on some of the more recent findings by psychological researchers, cognitive scientists, and communications scholars on the neurocognitive effects of fictional works of art and entertainment, which, as I was mentioning to a colleague recently, suggest that at least on these and similar accounts, and despite lacking our extensive contemporary knowledge of how the brain functions, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and a few other past thinkers...

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Claudia Rankine @ Chicago Humanities Festival

Rankine (l) & attendeeIt's been a tough few weeks--such are our quarters!--but I have a little breather today, so I thought I'd post on the Chicago Humanities Festival presentation, this past Sunday, of Claudia Rankine, one of the more original and to me, compelling, creative minds working today.  Rankine, a native of Jamaica, longtime resident of New York, and now the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College, originally gained...

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Quote: Charles Yu

"I am editing this book even as I write it, writing it as I read it, now I am repeating myself, even as I create it, I know it is flawed and possibly even inconsistent, and yet all I can do is to go forward and see where it takes me, all I can do is go backward and see where it takes me, all I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to...

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Remembering Piri Thomas

Piri ThomasWhen I was growing up, the division of reading in my home went like this: my father read newspapers, and my mother read books. (Both read magazines.) My mother read all kinds of books, but especially novels, most of them romances after a certain point, but among her non-romance stash my favorites were novels by Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, William Styron, and Kyle Onstott. Roots, by Alex Haley, whom my mother says is a...

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Claudia Roquette-Pinto & Goldie Goldbloom Readings @ NU

Claudia Roquette-Pinto, at the P&PCW workshopBack in July I posted an entry on the contemporary Brazilian poet Claudia Roquette-Pinto (1963-), a Rio native, author of five books and one of the most acclaimed writers of her generation in Brazil.  I also translated one of her poems, "Space-Writing," which I'd found in a different translation by Charles Perrone in the collection Outras Praias*/13 Poetas Brasileiras Emergentes - Other Shores/13...

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Reggie H.'s "Visionaries" + Kameny & Ettlebrick, LGBTQ Pioneers

Over at the Noctuary, Reggie H. posts a very thoughtful entry on "Visionaries" that includes tributes to civil rights pioneers Derrick Bell and Fred Shuttlesworth, whom I did not get an opportunity to memorialize, as well as to Steve Jobs. The post also includes an encomium to our dear now deceased fellow poet James Richardson, with one of his sharp, powerful poems, a sonnet to our ancestor Phillis Wheatley. I recommend it.It feels like a season...

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Occupy Chicago + Poem: Carl Sandburg

One of the signs from yesterday #occupychicagoI've posted a few times about the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) and other Occupy Financial Districts protests, but I had not been able to get down to the Occupy Chicago gathering until yesterday. (Today participants will join the Mass Mobilization to Take Back Chicago by marching from their main site at Jackson and LaSalle across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Board of...

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Cardinals Advance + Rugby World Cup Update

 Chris Carpenter #29 of the St. Louis Cardinalsafter final out (Rob Carr/Getty Images)They did it again! The St. Louis Cardinals, behind last night's extraordinary 3-hit, 9-inning shutout by ace Chris Carpenter, defeated the Major League Baseball best-record holding Philadelphia Phillies, who'd won 102 games, to advance to the National League Championship Series! The Cardinals managed just six total hits and one run, in the first inning, on...

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