Literary Chicago: Colson Whitehead - "The Underground Railroad"

 It's been awhile:

"It was late, but a bone expert from Chicago had presented that night and they might still be carousing in the local saloons."

"Many of the farm's leaders were out of town. Valentine himself was in Chicago meeting with the banks, his two sons in tow now that they were old enough to help with the farm's accounts."

"A prominent abolitionist stopped for a day en route to Chicago and stayed for a week."

"A little boy blew the whistle and the shucking began in a frenzy. This year's prize was a large silver mirror Valentine had picked up in Chicago."

"They put up a library next to the smokehouse. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine's books. Royal said it was the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago."

"Cora spent most of the day in her bedroom with the latest almanac Royal had given her. He'd picked it up in Chicago." 

The stakes of the plot are much more grave than anything I want to pontificate about on why Chicago is mentioned so many times, even if only in passing, particularly given our city's complex racial history and the context of the novel.

The city is portrayed in a mostly positive light, as these references describe Chicago as a city with bone experts and books (the city is educated),  with banks (it is wealthy), it has mirrors (it has material goods), and people go there (it is a destination).

Literary Chicago: Ploughshares Winter 2016-17

As in past editions of Ploughshares, Chicago makes quite a few appearances in the most recent edition, although in subtle ways this time (by the way, you should support them; their one of my favorite journals). 

Beth Ann Fennelly recalls her time living abroad in "When Dusk Fell an Hour Earlier."

When I left Silesia, on the Czech-Polish border, I never imagined it would take me so long to return. But after I flew home to Chicago, then loaded up the car and drov 55 South to Fayetteville, Arkansas, I entered a graduate program in creative writing.

After I returned to Chicago in '94, my Czech year grew very distant very quickly.

"Don't you remember your nickname?" one asked.
"Yes," I sighed. I still hated it. "Američanka."
They laughed. "Oh yes, that's right." They laughed again. It was funny to them. "But don't you know your other nickname?"
I shook my head slowly.
"Ah. We called you 'Sunny Chicago.'"
Sunny Chicago? We were speaking English, but I felt lost. They'd had this adorable nickname for me? Sunny Chicago? Really?

While this is a work of non-fiction that doesn't really take place in Chicago, it does show the place our city has for those in between, on the move, a passing through point, whether it's between Silesia or Arkansas.

Daniel Lawless describes the monkey house at Lincoln Park Zoo in The Dean Has No Comment. You should just...just read that one for yourself. 

Chicago doesn't enter into the actual poems by these next two authors, but I feel it is necessary to point them out, being written by two of the most distinguished writers in this city. Enjoy.

Stuart Dybek - Moderation

Christina Pugh - The Social Fabric

Literary Chicago: Ernest Hemingway - "The Snows of Kilimanjaro And Other Stories"

Sigh. Some things never change.

"Listen," the detective said. "This isn't Chicago. You're not a gangster. You don't have to act like a moving picture. It's all right to tell who shot you. Anybody would tell who shot them. That's all right to do. Suppose you don't tell who he is and he shoots somebody else. Suppose he shoots a woman or a child. You can't let him get away with that. You tell him," he said to Mr. Frazer. "I don't trust that damn interpreter."

"I am very reliable," the interpreter said. Cayetano looked at Mr. Frazer.

"Listen, amigo," said Mr. Frazer. "The policieman says that we are not in Chicago but in Hailey, Montana. You are not a bandit and this has nothing to do with the cinema."

"I believe him," said Cayetano softly. "Ya lo creo."

 - from The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio

"What's he going to do?"
"Nothing."
"They'll kill him."
"I guess they will."
"He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago."
"I guess so," said Nick.

- from The Killers

Literary Chicago: Jack Kerouac - "The Subterraneans"

" - returning to the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos - " 

This is the third work of Kerouac that I've read and the third that has a Chicago reference (previously: On the Road / The Dharma Bums). Although this is a peculiar inclusion in the literary Chicago encyclopedia, as it doesn't say much about Chicago itself, rather the narrator is reminiscing back to other nights, other clubs, other cities, and picks Chicago in particular to call out.

The Bird in question of course is Charlie Parker, who while he played here, isn't as assoicated with Chicago as he is with other cities, particularly New York City. And the story itself, inspired by Kerouac's nights in NYC, is fictionalized to take place in San Francisco.

I'm reminded of Sarah Ruhl's play "The Clean House" which takes place in a "metaphysical Connecticut." I think Kerouac uses this phrase in a similar vein, that maybe Bird noticed the narrator from a night club in another city, and perhaps that city was Chicago, and perhaps it was another Chicago. Is Chicago ever the same place twice or even to two different people? Consider Heraclitus.

Or maybe I'm overthinking a speed-induced ramble of one of America's great writer's lesser works. (Not to mention that cover; it wasn't enough to put one photo of the author on the cover but we need to get his good side too?)

The most interesting thing of this novella overall is the character of Mardou, inspired by Kerouac's real life girlfriend, Alene Lee, who protected her privacy. I stumbled across her biography, written by her daughter and posted in 2010. Certainly worth the read to learn more about the inspiration for one of the period's more complex and entirely underwritten characters.

Literary Chicago: Edward Albee - 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Martha:...and she wants to go to Chicago all the time, 'cause she's in love with that actor with the scar...But she gets sick and she sits down in front of her dressing table...
George: What actor? What scar?
Martha: I can't remember his name, for God's sake. What's the name of the picture? I want to know what the name of the picture is. She sits down in front of her dressing table...and she's got this peritonitis...and she tries to put her lipstick on, but she can't...and she gets it all over her face...but she decides to go to Chicago anyway, and...
George: Chicago! It's called Chicago!
Martha: Hunh? What...what is?
George: The picture...it's called Chicago...
Martha: Good grief! Don't you know anything? Chicago was a thirties musical, starring little Miss Alice Faye. Don't you know anything?

This dialogue happens in the opening scene in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It doesn't really say much about Chicago itself, although the film Martha is trying to think of is Beyond the Forest (1949). Although I guess it says something that we are introduced to two characters that express such disdain towards each other while mentioning our city.

Literary Chicago: Jeanette Winterson - "Gut Symmetries"

"When Mama and I left for Berlin, Jove was about to go to Chicago to study. He was nineteen, a dark teenage hero to a girl in old-fashioned clothes and dreaming about James Dean." (pg 126)

Like in many works of fiction, Winterson's characters go to school in Chicago. While this reference is as vague as Jhumpa Lahiri's Chicago school reference, the context implies the school to be the University of Chicago (see Tender is the Night) although Alaa Al Aswany's Chicago is primarily set in UIC. I don't think I've read any fiction that pays much attention to DePaul or Northwestern though I'm sure it's out there. Any fiction about Chicago State? My alma mater Columbia College? Northeastern? I'm curious...

Literary Chicago - Joan Didion "The White Album"

I wrote this post a few months ago. Not sure why I never uploaded it. I was planning on originally trying to find somewhere else to publish this, but I never really expanded on it in any meaningful way. I still think it's worth posting based upon the connection between the writer, the artist, this city, and my experience.

(via the Art Institute)

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgie O'Keefe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O'Keefe "Sky Above Clouds" canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

Joan Didion wrote this in 1976 in an essay titled "Georgie O'Keefe". It was released in her collection called The White Album, chronicling the death of the sixties and the uncertainties of the seventies, covering everything from the Doors to dams to horticulture to Hawaii, Bogota to bureaucrats, to the women's movement and how an artist creates.

I've gotten into the habit of marking whenever Chicago is mentioned in fiction. This year however, I've been a bit out of character. I've read less fiction, and more non-fiction and, especially recently, poetry. I've read Didion in the past, and as I began reading this collection, I'd wondered if she would mention Chicago.

This essay was a pleasant surprise. It got me to rethink my previous notions of O'Keefe. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of her work (nothing against her personally, the works of European artists and authors have always appealed to me more). I've probably walked by these clouds dozens of times.

But last Thursday was different. I wanted to see what Didion saw and what her daughter saw in these clouds.

Literary Chicago: Ruth Ozeki - "My Year of Meats"

"I had a lover in the Year of Meats. His name was Sloan and he was a musician from Chicago."

"Sloan lives in the penthouse of one of the high-rise apartment buildings that cluster along Lake Shore Drive as it winds around the southern perimeter of Lake Michigan. From his vantage, the horizon line is negligible, obscured by smog and slatted blinds. Floor-to-ceiling windows from the gray lake and the steel waves that lap the concrete shore. The carpet is gray and mimics the water."

This description of Chicago reminds me of Martin Amis's character riding the Blue Line from O'Hare in his book The Information (coincidentally, in that post, I reference Ruth Ozeki as well). Writers love to make this city sound bleaker than it actually is. It is setting the mood for a single scene, but it's interesting when it becomes a trend. Algren of course wrote about the roar of the L and the seedier parts of Wicker Park but he is probably most remembered for his over-quoted "never a lovely so real" to define the city.

This isn't to say that I think grittiness is an insult. But maybe perhaps the romanticiziation of the idea is a bit outdated. Then again, this story was taking place in 1991 (and The Information was written in 1995). This was a time when the murder rates and overall crime rates were even worse than in this year, which itself has seen a spike in murder and crime. So maybe the romanticiziation is appropriate, that things may have appeared to be too good in this city over the past decade, and now the ugliness is starting to rear it's thorny head again.

Or maybe I'm just trying to make the city sound worse than it actually is. 

Literary Chicago: F. Scott Fitzgerald - 'Tender is the Night'

via Calumet 412

If I knew this book was going to have so many great references to Chicago, I would have read it sooner. The city can be both stuffy and vulgar. Interesting to read about the North and South Sides in literature, particularly from 80 years ago.

"Once in his youth he could have gone to Chicago as fellow and docent a the university, and perhaps become rich there and owned his own clinic instead of being only a minor shareholder in a clinic. But when he had thought of what he considered his own thin knowledge spread over that whole area, over all those wheat fields, those endless prairies, he had decided against it. But he had read about Chicago in those days, about the great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of Chicago and New York." (126)

"Well there's a North Side and a South Side and they're very much separated. The North Side is chic and all that, and we've always lived over there, at least for many years, but lots of old families, old Chicago families, if you know what I mean, still live on the South Side. The University is there. I mean it's stuffy to some people, but anyhow it's different from the North Side. I don't know whether you understand." (152)

"Suddenly Nicole interrupted in succinct Chicagoese: "Bull!"" (154)

Literary Chicago - Phillip Roth 'Portnoy's Complaint'

"I pledge allegiance to the twat of the United States of America - and to the republic for which it stands: Davenport, Iowa! Dayton, Ohio! Schenectady, New York, and neighboring Troy! Fort Myers, Florida! New Canaan, Connecticut! Chicago, Illinois! Albert Lea, Minnesota! Portland, Maine! Moundsville, West Virginia! Sweet land of skikse-tail, of thee I sing!"

Literary Chicago - Jennifer Egan, 'Emerald City and Other Stories'

From 'Emerald City':

"So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he'd never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn't count)."

From 'The Watch Trick':

"They'd been hearing the story for years in various forms - from the Hawaiian tour guide Sonny fell in love with while gazing at the view from Kaala Peak, threatening to jump unless she agreed to come back to Chicago with him;"

"Sonny would squire them from one Chicago nightclub to the next, and each time they went inside she felt they were expected, that the party could really begin now that they had arrived."

From 'Puerto Vallarta:'

"While her father was in Australia, Ellen went with her friend Renata to Mama Santos, a Mexican restaurant in Glencoe. It was a train ride outside Chicago, but Renata's brother, Eric, was a bartender there and had promised to serve the alcohol."

"Her father explained that Ed had owned a company in Chicago that went bankrupt three years before. Now he was being sued by his former investors."

...For The Time Being

This phrase. "For the time being."

It's all over literature. I first noticed it from the book A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki a couple years ago. Ever since, I think I've come across this phrase in nearly every book I've read. I thought this was just a coincidence at first. But it's almost like the real version of Stranger Than Fiction's "little did he know." As Hoffman's character wrote papers and taught a class on "little did he know," so too will I conquest to create a tundra-like database of "for the time being." There's so much I've lost. But I might as well start now, if not never.

Martin Amis - The Information

"Her mother was still around for the time being, fat and falling apart and still mountainously pretty somehow, in a bed somewhere."

So. Much like my Literary Chicago project, I'm going to try to keep track of this phrase being used and how authors use it. Do they actually reference what their 'for the time being' foreshadows? Or is it a throw away? A red herring?

Speaking of that other project, this novel is ripe with Chicago references. For a taste:

"He reread:

To recap: The itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver?"

Literary Chicago - Jesse Ball, 'The Way Through Doors'

(via Calumet 412)

"Her fame grew. Her drawings sat upon walls of the Metropolitan Museum, of the MoMA, of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern, the Musee d'Orsay, the National Gallery, the Museo Nactional del Prado, the Smithsonian."

Considering Mr. Ball teaches at this school, this feels a bit obligatory. But for a surreal tale that keeps settings and timelines and much else vague, it's nice to see this little bit thrown in here with such a prestigious crew. 

And on the different topic of coincidences: I recently read the short story 'Lush' by Bradford Morrow in the 2003 O Henry Prize Stories collection. The story is about an alcoholic couple. The woman in the couple is named Margaret. The man, James, nicknames her Margot, after one of their favorite reds, Chateau Margaux. At a restaurant in The Way Through Doors, two characters drink a bottle of wine from Chez Margot in a Tunisian restaurant. I read 'Lush' on the way to San Francisco last week, and bought Ball's novel at Alley Cat Books in the Mission. An interesting coincidence, I couldn't help but notice.

Now to find a bottle of the stuff for myself. 

Literary Chicago: Ploughshares Summer 2015

Ploughshares, the collection of fiction and poetry put out three times a year by Emerson College (of which Denis Leary is a council member of the non-profit publication), was capaciously endowed with scenes from a Literary Chicago. Four stories mentioned this city, and at least three of the authors in the collection have called Chicago home at one point or another (Osama Alomar, Jesse Ball, Rebecca Makkai, and Alex Shakar). One story mentioning Chicago in a collection isn't particularly noticeable, but seeing the name of this city in four out of eighteen stories called for some attention, even if just a coincidence. Here's how a few contemporary writers fictionalized Chicago:

"That fall, she was starting graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. "Chicago," I said later that night, after our date. We were in bed; we'd just had sex. "You know, I've been a Cubs fan since I could stand on first base.""

"Later, we joked that the only reason I came to Chicago was because she needed someone to carry her paintings."

- Kevin A Gonzalez, Palau

"My racial color code as established by the Chicago Bank of Life is white...When I am donating to the Chicago Bank of Life, I do not think of her." 

- Fiona Maazel, Dad's Just a Number

Ron Currie Jr. - 'Everything Matters!'

I had high hopes for this book especially after how much I gushed about God is Dead. I don't know, even though I finished this book within 36 hours, I wasn't as blown away as I expected to be.

On the plus side, there was plenty of Literary Chicago, since one of the main characters plays for the Cubs.

"Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out. Uncle Rodney explained this to me. It's a band and a city and when I'm older he'll take me to Chicago to see Chicago play, he says."

"Chicago is not the ideal place to go to when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."

"...except this time you were not a toddler but a twenty-year-old man, lying on a bench near the Dearborn Street bridge, staring straight up to where the stars would have been were they not  obscured by the megawatt towers..."

Jack Kerouac - 'The Dharma Bums'

I read this book even though I had no intention of doing so. It was sitting at my girlfriend's apartment. I'd just finished reading Italo Calvino's munchkin sized yarn Marcovaldo and needed something new. I started reading and just couldn't stop. The only other book I've read by Kerouac was On The Road, and that one is truly a masterpiece. To cover so much ground, the descriptions of so many settings in one narrative is quite impressive, and even though its primary focus on drugs and woman are certainly more appealing to an adolescent andhertz, they'd probably still resonate with a slightly older / still not fully matured andhertz. So maybe that's why I haven't read anything else by Kerouac, because I knew I would like it even though I didn't want to. Oh well. Pigeonholes be damned. I flew through this thing and found some great segments for Literary Chicago along the way. 

"That's Rhonda, my sister, I grew up with her in the woods in Oregon. She's gonna marry this rich jerk from Chicago, a real square."

"Japhy and I were sitting around in the shack in a drowsy afternoon and suddenly she was in the door, slim and blond and pretty, with her well-dressed Chicago fiance, a very handsome man."

Literary Chicago - Gabi Gliechmann, 'The Elixir of Immortality'

Literary Chicago is series where I try to capture the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in Chicago.

"Shortly after the death of my mother I traveled to the United States. While I was changing planes in Chicago I happened to catch sight of an article in the city's leading newspaper, The Morning Star:"

pg 174 The Elixir of Immortality by Gabi Gleichmann (2013)

Literary Chicago - Jhumpa Lahiri, 'The Lowland'

Literary Chicago is series where I try to capture the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in Chicago.  

via Calumet 412

"In the second year of his Ph.D. Subhash lived on his own, now that Richard, who'd found a teaching job in Chicago, was gone."

pg. 62 The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

Literary Chicago - Maxine Hong Kingston 'China Men'

Literary Chicago is series where I try to capture the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in Chicago.  

"Ed's legs ached. At about eleven o'clock, he spoke the bitter verses of "The Laundry Song" by Wen I-to of Chicago:

          A piece, two pieces, three pieces - 
         Wash them clean, 
         Four pieces, fives pieces, six - 
         Iron them smooth, "

pg 63. China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston (1977)

Literary Chicago - Bonnie Jo Campbell, "Women and Other Animals"

Literary Chicago is series where I try to capture the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in Chicago.  

via Calumet 412

"Hal always said Chicago didn't have anything that mattered. The Sears Tower is there, Bess had said, and Hal said the Sears Tower was just another tall building."

pg. 44 "Women and Other Animals" short story collection by Bonnie Jo Campbell. (1999)