What Is a Publisher? or, Changes in Scholarly Publishing

Work, and not post-turkey recovery keeps me from these pages. We're now in reading week, which means conferences with the undergraduates, honors and theses manuscripts and other program and departmental materials to read, and final preparation for next quarter, which begins January 3, 2012. Brief indeed will be my break.  I am trying to complete a syllabus for a new course, one of three I'll be teaching come January, which falls under the department's...

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Happy Thanksgiving!

A happy Thanksgiving Day to all, and I wish the best to all J's Theater readers. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, try to take time out to consider what you have to be thankful for, as tiny or tremendous as it is, and also consider how you might help someone else out there who might be struggling in some aspect of life.For those who are preparing holiday meals, if you want a thorough and easy-to-read guide to holiday cooking with a soulful...

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Chicago Book Expo in Uptown

This weekend I popped by the pop-up Chicago Book Expo, sponsored by the Chicago Writers' House, which took place in what was once a book-filled Borders' store, and the building across the street (the Uptown Broadway Building) and the Goldblatt's Building, in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. As with most things occurring in this city, I didn't hear about the event until the last minute, when the university, seeking to staff a table, put out a call for...

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The Music of Roberto Sierra

Roberto SierraEarlier this year I came across a contemporary classical music composer whose music I wasn't previously familiar with but which I've been returning to of late, Roberto Sierra (1953-).  Born in 1953 in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, Sierra studied composition in Puerto Rico and in Europe, including at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg with György Ligeti. Sierra has since gone on to compose in a range of forms, including opera (El mensajero...

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Occupy: Images Worth 99% of 300 Million's Words

"A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound." - Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862Tuesday, Police assault on Zuccotti ParkYesterday, Police attack on peaceful students at the University of California, DavisUC Campus Police pepper-spraying peaceful studentsUC Campus Police Pepper-spraying peaceful studentsToday, Newt Gingrich: "Go get a job right after you take a bath."Why are people protesting? Why can't...

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Resurfacing + More Brown & Black Brazilians + DR to Change Racial ID Categories + Rita Indiana's "Da Po La Do"

Surfacing finally and temporarily, from the bogs or thickets or trenches, or whatever is lined with pages and pages of prose! Today was the first day where I could actually take a long, deep breath and inhale the now chilly Chicago air. Over the next few days I'll try to finish the few stubs I began over the last few weeks, on many different topics, ranging from Christian Bök's visit to the university, to the most recent gathering of the Human Micropoem...

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National Book Award Winners Announced!

Last night, the National Book Award Foundation announced the winners of the 2011 awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and young people's literature, while also honoring poet John Ashbery, who received the National Book Award in 1976 for his masterpiece, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and Mitch Kaplan, founder of the Miami Book Festival, with the Literarian Award for Outstanding...

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Recipe: Acorn Squash Curry

One of the things I've begun to do since becoming a vegetarian that I used not to is more cooking integrating multiple vegetables at once, creating dishes that taste delicious and last for several days, rather than my old approach, which I grew up with, which entails cooking several different things separately and then putting them on the plate. The old pattern entailed cooking a piece of meat (say a lamb chop), a vegetable (say, spinach), and a starch (say brown rice).  This is how my mother cooked and still does; my late maternal grandparents,...

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Human Micropoem 2 @ OccupyChicago

The Human Micropoets met up again, this past Friday, on Veterans Day, for another round of HUMAN MICROPOEM public poetry recitation, in support of the Occupy Chicago and Occupy Together movements.  This time the organizers aimed to convene performers during rush hour, in part to reach the large number of workers finishing their day near and those commuting past the base site.  The crowd was, unsurprisingly, larger, and as before, passersby...

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Christian Bök Reading/Xenotext @ Northwestern

As part of its exhibit Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917 (September 23-December 11, 2011), the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University hosted "Beyonsense," a reading of early 20th century and contemporary Russian and trans-linguistic sound poetry.  The university's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures served as co-sponsors, and the event...

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