Mar 03
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” was supposed to discuss her book last Wednesday evening in the large central room of the Experimental Station, but the heating went out. So instead, about a hundred of us packed tightly into a small, multi-purpose room next door, filling even the kitchen at the back of the space, piling our coats together on refrigerators and over each other’s seats. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb 18
Charles Bernstein has been a major figure in American poetry since 1978, when he coedited the influential magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. “One of the things that interested me was poetry that was eccentric, that diverged from the norms, that was weird and queer and extreme and very self-conscious about how its forms were provisional and imaginary and invented,” Bernstein said in an interview. Since the 1970s, Bernstein has published more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and libretti. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 28
“Everything I know is something I’ve repeated,” said poet Rae Armantrout, reading a line from a new manuscript on the afternoon of January 21 to a large audience at the University of Chicago.
Armantrout’s most recent book, “Versed,” is her tenth. Her poems are short lyrics that probe human consciousness and the various influences that penetrate it: “the impersonal abjection of being finite, of being created, not self-created,” she said at a lunchtime lecture on the 22nd. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 07
The journalism industry seems to be on its last legs these days, and everyone thinks they know why. Is it faulty business models? Corporate greed? An inevitable result of changing technology? Over the past year or so, as both the Tribune Company and the Sun-Times Media Group have filed for bankruptcy protection, fingers have been pointed and explanations advanced. Perhaps the debate is getting old, but here at the Weekly we thought we’d consult two groups whose opinions are often overlooked: the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a Maoist group based in Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Objectivist Club, which advocates the individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are their thoughts on journalism’s future and problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 18
(Mehves Konuk)
As the activities of Heineman and the Chicago Storytelling Guild show, this question hardly brushes the surface of the art, a skill that appeals to the young and the old through a wide variety of media and many approaches. According to Heineman, who has been named an Illinois Humanities Council Road Scholar for her craft, being a storyteller is about relating to people, becoming one with your material, and finding your voice.
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Oct 14
Jake Malone, Rory Tolan, Mikayla Lynch, and Theodore Nielsen (Courtesy of Stockyard Media)
Sitting at a back corner table in the University of Chicago’s Hutchinson Commons, fourth-year undergraduates Jacob Malone, Theodore Nielsen, and Rory Tolan are talking about how they want to make their online magazine Stockyard into the cultural voice of Chicago. Tolan continues, “We want to denude the city all the way down.”
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May 28
Illustration by Sam Bowman
Long rows of windows, which once filled large, open rooms with light, are now boarded and permanently shut. At night the alleyways, littered with trash, are pitch black, hiding loiterers who lurk in the shadows. These steel mills stand throughout the South Side, and for most Chicagoans, the abandoned lots are forbidden territory. But for Chicago crime-writers, these buildings are where their greatest stories begin.
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May 28
A Poster for The Point on the University of Chicago Campus; Sam Bowman
Rarely does the average class on Durkheim introduce a conversation about the modern phenomenon of “couch surfing,” and one just as infrequently sees an MTV program pull in references to Weber. It often seems that intellectual life and popular culture are two spheres afraid to touch, and this is what the Point hopes to address. In its first issue, an article entitled “The Withering of Narcissus” begins by ruminating on what Plato might have thought of the Internet.
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