Upcoming
Chicago Underground Library celebrates the Science of Obscurity!
The Science of Obscurity! It lives!
The Chicago Underground Library celebrates the return of the “Science of Obscurity,” our annual lead up event to the Printers’ Ball featuring new, unpublished, and in-progress works presented as science fair experiments. The night will also feature a public “book launch” via catapult, scientist speed dating, and digital readings to warm your hardened techie heart. Left and right brains come together, print <3s digital, everyone wins when the laws of physics and literature collide.
If you’re a writer, publisher, bookmaker, or booklover of any stripe who has recently finished writing a book, has published a book in the past year, or just feels like taking out some aggression on a publication of your choice, we invite you to celebrate by participating in our public reading and launching your work into space--or at least halfway down the block. We define "book" broadly, so zines, magazines, chapbooks, textbooks, and more are welcome. Read a paragraph, then release! And if you want to donate your book to the collection of the Chicago Underground Library after it’s caught some air, we’re here for you.
While we're busy launching texts outside, we'll be dissecting the mysteries of the literary universe inside. Join an awesome line up of writers, designers, and publishers as they intricately explain the scientific principles underlying their work, real or imagined. Reading experiments with Jen Karmin! Storigami with Zach Dodson! Distress charts with A D Jameson! Teenage taxonomies with Mairead Case! Curmudgeonly cuttlefish with Libby Walker! Hand-cranked projector mad libs with Two With Water! All participants will also have work for sale.
Special projects from the Society of Furthering Truth (SOFT), The Book Bike, readings from Featherproof Books’ iPhone application TripleQuick, surprise musical guests, video interviews with the CUL crew about your favorite forgotten and under-recognized Chicago publishers and writers, and Scientist Speed Dating! Yes! We said Scientist Speed Dating. You’ll have two minutes to ask real honest-to-goodness scientists any burning questions of your choice like why recycled paper tastes better and how quickly to induce vomiting after consuming The Christmas Sweater.
This event is free and for all ages.
Logistics
Saturday, 10 July 2010, 7–10pm
Jupiter Outpost (1139 W. Fulton Market, Chicago)
Food and drink will be available for sale
Printers’ Ball July 30
Late Bar Fundraiser August 27
Ongoing
Pan Dulces Work Sessions
Next session: Check back for June dates or email info@underground-library.org
1. All writers really need is to read and to know some good readers.
2. Writing can be practiced with strong roots in the city.
The Pan Dulces Work Sessions intend to support all writers— those emerging, still in their larval state, or who have already transformed into magnificent butterflies— without fees, with food, and with new frameworks taking aim at the anxieties and exclusions of creative writing culture. We will meet at Chicago Underground Library near the books and fireplace every other month.
Writers should bring seven copies of works-in-progress to swap. Details and cover sheets are available at http://www.underground-library.org/assets/PD_COVER.pdf
In addition to manuscript swaps, the sessions will include reading list compilations, revision lock-ins, assigned writing practices, and experiments of our own devising. Sessions are open to anyone with an interest in writing poetry, fiction, drama, comics, graphic novels or inter-genre work at any level of education and experience. No hero-worship, no taking sides, no feeding frenzies. We welcome the occasional constructive hand grenade, but we ask that it be directed at institutions and assumptions, not individuals.
Later in the year we will plan a three-day Writers’ Retreat-Into-The-City to draw on the genius surrounding us and connect the practices we develop with the place itself.
If you would like to meet and learn from other writers in the city, if you believe the most valuable part of any writing class is the folks you meet, if you are looking for new ways to think about your work, you will find this useful. Between sessions, writers are welcome to meet informally to use the resources and workspace at CUL during our open hours.
Cataloging Socials every Tuesday 6-10pm
Join us for our weekly Cataloging Social in which a group of librarians from diverse disciplines gather together with diversely undisciplined non-librarians to enjoy snacks, libations, and argue about meta data. We alternate between Tuesdays and Mondays each week. All socials take place at the Chicago Underground Library.
Volunteer Meeting and Orientation
Check back for June dates: We meet monthly to catch up on all the goings on at the Chicago Underground Library and to acquaint new volunteers with the project. This is the perfect way to get up to speed on what we’re working on in our programming, collection development, community outreach, cataloging, and, most importantly, to find out how you can make the CUL your own.
Let us come to you!
The CUL’s foremost duties are to encourage collaboration, dialogue, and the creation of new work informed by our local histories. We want to make it easy to work with you, and are always open to your ideas. Here are just a few ways we’ve come up with to get things started:
Pop Up Library
The Chicago Underground Library has access to an amazing amount of seldom seen resources for the Chicago community. We want to supplement your cultural event by setting up materials from our collection that directly relate to and help cast new light on your subject from a local perspective. (Any subject! Really! From skateboarding to pie recipes to performance art!) And you can help us by getting these works a wider audience. Everybody wins. The Pop Up Library can come to you as a self-contained suitcase or as table top book displays. You provide the table, we provide the conversation starters.
Chicago Underground Library Roadshow
Are you a teacher, artist in residence, or workshop leader who wants your students to have access to the collection, but doesn’t want to deal with getting them on the train or finding funds for transportation? Spring, summer, fall, or winter, we can come to your classroom during or after school, in the morning, evening, or whenever you need us. One of our volunteers will curate a selection of materials tailored to your curriculum, your students’ neighborhoods, or just show up with a general (and age appropriate) assortment. We can talk about: Chicago, independent media, technology, art, zines, Creative Commons, writing, collaboration, and/or anything else you can throw at us.
Past
Libraries in the Community/Communities in the Library
May 26 7-9pm
Cafe Ballou, 939 N. Western Avenue
with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and Chicago Underground Library
Join educators and librarians from around Chicago to learn how two unique libraries respond to the needs of their communities and how you, your students, and researchers can use their resources. Nell Taylor, founder and director of the Chicago Underground Library, and Daylily Alvarez, research assistant at Andrés Figueroa Cordero Memorial Library and Community Informatics Center at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center take you through the histories of each of these collections and their present roles in the city’s culture and in the rapidly changing media landscape. The evening is free and open to anyone, but librarians and educators serving early childhood through adult learners are particularly encouraged to attend and add to the conversation. There will be a Q and A and informal discussion following the presentations to hear your feedback and ideas for using these resources and what needs you have in your own classroom or community that we could address with our collections or programs.
Loud Library #2
Street-Level Youth Media
Street-Level Youth Media
Street-Level Youth Media artists will be ratcheting up the noise level for the next Loud Library at Chicago Underground Library. A singer, a poet and a few video artists are just a sampling of the talents showing at our space on Tuesday, May 11th from 7-10pm. Their personal music and stories bring about change through the empowerment of storytelling. Come witness the making of the next generation of ground-breaking artists.
Loud Library events are an extension of the Chicago Underground Library’s mission to be a new model for open, location-specific archiving of independent and small press media. We help to give voice to groups that need to be heard and simultaneously put to rest that image of the quiet librarian. We have a No-Shush Zone and are proud to be collaborating with other noise-makers and ground-shakers.
About Street-Level Youth Media
Street-Level Youth Media educates Chicago’s urban youth in media arts and emerging technologies for use in self-expression, communication, and social change. Street-Level’s programs build critical thinking skills for young people who have been historically neglected by public policy makers and mass media. Using video and audio production, computer art and the Internet, Street-Level’s youth address community issues, access advanced communication technology and gain inclusion in our information-based society.
Loud Library #1
Loud Library.
Because not only do we not care for bestsellers, we’ll toss aside those pesky rules forbidding you to speak above a whisper.
Bringing the loud will be The Data and the Lore and VAD. Chicago Phonography bring the less-loud with field recordings and improvised soundscapes, making you more aware of the tingly environment around you. (Yeah, our library tingles. Got something to say about it?)
Charlie Universe conducts and Rachel Shine, Kaitlin Kruse and Ted Tremper will interject throughout the event with their soaring Simul-Reads.
Among the performances, there will be a Free Loud, so come prepared with instruments, portable stereos, balloons, cookware, or your own set of pipes. You might even win the prize for our Loud Outfit contest, to be decided by dB meter. So bring your friends and get them to shout, stomp their feet, shake their music makers and cheer you on to your grand prize.
The Chicago Underground Library is a new model for open, location-specific archiving of independent and small press media and this is just the first of many creative collaborations that we have planned for the year. Stay tuned in for more and do join us on February the 25th and help us to ring in a new year of innovative programming - bridging various artistic disciplines - with a clash, a bang, and a kazoo or two.
We will not be shushed.
Free, all ages, BYOB (and pans)
The Year Underground
We're back!
The Chicago Underground Library is open and taking your orders.
What can we get you? A place to share your passion for the written word, the hand-bound artist book, the photocopied travelogue? Communal working space? Research on innovative distribution models? How about an inclusive social catalog that traces connections between every book in our collection and every user who wants to read them, complete with maps and the ability for users to add their own historical notes? Yeah, we’re working on that, too.
Come out on Saturday, January 30th for a community meeting to learn more about the Chicago Underground Library and let us learn from you. Tell us what we can do for you, what we can be doing better, and what you need from your local archive. Chicago Underground Library volunteers will introduce you to our upcoming programming for 2010, fill you in on what we did last year, and preview our new catalog.
We invite you to get involved and especially to bring your own work to get cataloged. Our library gathers everything with a connection to Chicago. Whether you’re 13 or 35, a small press or self-published, or if you just have boxes of other peoples’ work taking up space in your basement, you have something we want and it deserves a larger audience.
We’re excited to open in a brand new space with Red Tape Theatre Company (http://www.redtapetheatre.org) and to launch our Storefront Theater Project, a collection-within-a-collection devoted to scripts and documentation from Chicago’s vibrant storefront theater community. So bring those, too.
If you can’t make it on the 30th, join us for our new Tuesday night Worklucks, open creative work sessions where everyone is welcome to come and work on your own projects, hang out as long as you like, and share ideas and food. Enjoy free coffee and Wi-Fi while you draw, knit, write, or help us catalog. It’s your archive, it’s up to you.
CUL pumpkin, later smashed by Juggalos.
Six Feet Underground Library
Join us on Halloween from 1-7pm for an extended day at the Chicago Underground Library. We’ll be handing out candy and reading from some of the more frightening (to use the term loosely) items in our collection, all while in costume, of course.
Want to read your work? Just show up!
We’re doing this for the neighborhood trick or treaters, so please be mindful of your impressionable audience.
Prizes for best costume and best scary story!
Fifth Annual Printers’ Ball
Printers' Ball poster by Dan MacAdam
Founded by Poetry magazine with other independent Chicago literary organizations, the Printers’ Ball is an annual celebration of print culture, featuring thousands of magazines, books, and broadsides available free of charge; live readings and music; letterpress, offset, and paper-making demonstrations; and much more. This year’s Printers’ Ball is co-produced with Columbia College Chicago and the Center for Book & Paper Arts, and is set to take place in the landmark Ludington Building, former home to the American Book Company. Select events during the Printers’ Ball are being recorded for Chicago Public Radio’s Chicago Amplified.
Major collaborators for the fifth annual Printers’ Ball are the Alternative Press Center, the Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Amplified, Chicago Underground Library, CHIRP (Chicago Independent Radio Project), MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Newcity, Opium Magazine, Poetry magazine, Poetry Foundation, and the Student Affairs Offices of Columbia College Chicago. The Printers’ Ball extends special gratitude to Louis Glunz Beer, Inc and Lagunitas, Hofbrau, Chimay, and Founders breweries for their generous support of the evening’s festivities.
More than 1,500 people annually attend what has become one of the largest celebrations of print culture in the country. This year, for the first time ever, the Printers’ Ball features publishers outside of Chicago, showcasing more than 200 local, national, and international literary organizations and the various ways they bring print to life.
Find us at Printers’ Ball Library, hosted by the Alternative Press Center and the Chicago Underground Library, which invites you to spend quality time with quality print. Visit the library to browse all publications; learn more about your discoveries, what you might have missed, and where to find it; and connect directly with publishers and organizations through our one-stop mailing list and subscription kiosks.
Chicago Underground Library celebrates the Science of Obscurity!
The Science of Obscurity! It lives!
The Chicago Underground Library celebrates “The Science of Obscurity,” an evening of new, unpublished, and in-progress works presented as science fair experiments. The night will also feature a public book launch via catapult and the mass purging of rejection letters–community literary rituals in need of revival!
If you are a writer, publisher, bookmaker, or booklover of any stripe who has recently finished writing a book, has published a book in the past year, or just feels like taking out some aggression on a publication of your choice, we invite you to celebrate by launching your work into space–or at least halfway down the block. We define “book” broadly, so zines, magazines, chapbooks, textbooks, and more are welcome. Read a paragraph, then release!
And while we’re busy launching texts outside, we’ll be dissecting the mysteries of the literary universe inside. Join a dozen local, national, and international writers as they intricately explain the scientific principles underlying their work, real or imagined. Dioramas! Volcanoes! Colorful graphs! Higher mathematics!
We’ll cap the remarkable evening with the shredding and launch of your collective rejection letters, so take them out of storage and cart them along to hand over to our nurturing, accepting staff at the Rejection Table.
This event is free and for all ages. Its other attractions will include the dazzling debut of the Chicago Underground Library’s artist-designed drop boxes, debutantes, prizes, and a raffle!
This is an official Printers’ Ball lead up event. Save the date for the Ball on July 31st at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts!
Logistics
Friday, 10 July 2009, 7–10pm
Jupiter Outpost (1139 W. Fulton Market, Chicago) Map
Food and drink will be available for sale + BYOB
Free, all ages
Orphan Works: The Anatomy Collective Presents “Sad Sullen Girls and Other Such Squid”
Friday, June 12th, 2009: Orphan Works is a nomadic performance series with a literary flavor, and sometimes a literary series with a performance aftertaste, presented by the Chicago Underground Library. Short-lived but well-loved in 2007, this re-interpretation event will be resurrected on June 12th at the appropriately named TEMPLE. The Chicago Underground Library brings a variety of the most creative minds in Chicago to locations all around the city to share with you the fruits of their forays into our collection of orphan works-_ anonymous works or those for which no further information on the author can be found. With the help of our intrepid explorers, these lost publications will be brought back to life: read, reinterpreted, and reunited with the audience they’ve been missing. Each Orphan Works night will feature re-interpreters performing, displaying, singing-sawing, reading or otherwise sharing their creations.This season of Orphan Works will celebrate the “self-made”: the reinvented and repurposed, the handcrafted, the DIY, the willed into-being-with-grit-and-elbow-grease. This month, we’re piecing together our identities (and the zines with which we construct them) in a one-night only performance by the Anatomy Collective: Sad Sullen Girls and Other Such Squid “The side effects of a broken heart, the benefits of spooning, the emotional collateral of wasted time and the addiction of insomnia weave together in a satire that follows the misadventures and disenchantment of young women in America. Through a series of snapshots, Sullen Girls compiles the musing of several women fighting and failing to create original portraits of themselves during prolonged adolescence.”
