Chicago Underground Library

From the CUL Stacks: The Case for Socialism

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

In the United States, “socialism” or “socialist” can be a dirty word. Many people would perhaps rather admit to being a parking-ticket scofflaw, or tearing the wings off butterflies.

But not Alan Maass. In his book The Case for Socialism, published in 2004 by Chicago’s very own Haymarket Books (with an afterword by the late Howard Zinn), he proudly admits his political affiliation. And he wants you to join him.

In a slim 127-page volume (it fit easily into a patch pocket of my cargo shorts, with room to spare), Maass, a writer for the weekly Socialist Worker, pursues an ambitious agenda. He argues that capitalism has to go. It must go today.

According to Maass, not only our economy but our whole way of life is rapacious, based on the principle of winner-take-all, with only a few real winners sitting immovably at the top. The result is a kaleidoscope of destructive chain reactions for those of us farther down the food chain: declining wages, abysmal health care, famine, environmental degradation, wars.

Click here to read on.

Receiving mail from DEUSEXPAGINA

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

We received this in the Chicago Underground Library mailbox the other day and I could barely restrain myself from ripping it open (wanted to preserve the envelope) and failed miserably at keeping water off of it as I…ahem…took it into the loo with me.

Gabriel Levinson and just one of his lit-related projects, DEUSEXPAGINA, will be at the Printers’ Ball and it should be interesting to see what his “live experiment in literary quantum mechanics and wholly fabricated reviews of wholly fabricated books” should bring. Check out details here. Stay tuned for a typewritten interview with Gabriel and more about, and from, DEUSEXPAGINA.

– Thùy Ngô

DEUSEXPAGINA, 4741 N. Artesian Ave, #2F, Chicago, IL 60625;

Continue on for the literary quantum mechanics and my shame…

Left of the Loop Part II: The Bone Chute

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Hands-down, the image that haunts me most from the Post-Industrial Urban Apocalypse of Tim W. Brown’s Left of the Loop is the bone chute located across the street from the loft. While some meat distributors and restaurant supply warehouses still remain in the neighborhood these days, many of the large meat packing plants have now been converted into luxury lofts and tourist-destination restaurants. In the Eighties, however, the meat-packing industry was in full swing in the West Loop, making stray dismembered animal parts one of the notable features of Spungkdt & Stark’s landscape.

“Perhaps the best reminder of the neighborhood’s character and purpose was what Stark and I called the ‘bone chute.’ A fiberglass device sticking out of a wall of the packinghouse across the street, the bone chute’s conveyor belt ferried the spinal columns, skulls, ribcages and pelvises of countless slaughtered cattle into the back of a dump truck parked underneath. All day long the bones, still red with flesh, would drop into the truck; with each thud, the truck bed echoed through Sangamon Street like an over-sized bass drum. Then, promptly at three, the truck would pull out, empty its bones somewhere, and return for the next day’s load. Although curious, we never found out where the bones were shipped.”

Sounds like something out of And the Ass Saw the Angel. Brown was even able to dig up and scan a picture for us, circa 1985. “Notice in the background,” says Brown, “that the Bloomingdale’s/900 N. Michigan building near the John Hancock Center has yet to be built.”

Write to us at editors@underground-library.org and tell us all the ways this picture haunts your dreams!

Left of the Loop Part 1: Ish Spungdkt, Kill Your Pets, & The Strangers!

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

21o N. Sangamon Avenue is a parking lot. The address of Ishmael Spungkdt and Stark’s (no last name, just Stark) loft in Tim W. Brown’s 2001 novel Left of the Loop is a dramatically different place for visitors today than it was in the Eighties when it was Spungkdt and Stark’s post-apocalyptic urban playground. If you walk down Sangamon to Randolph, you’ll see a few holdouts from the old neighborhood — meat packers, restaurant supply warehouses, and Adults-Only shops — still there in between the Starbuckses and trendy restaurants . But SUVs and young adolescent trees line the 200 block of Sangamon now, and the parking lot at 210–walled-in, gated tight, and completely empty — is surrounded by galleries, swanky architects’ offices, and lofts. “Historic Loft Living, Great Views, 15 Floor Plans, Rooftop Sundeck, Vintage Architecture,” reads the big yellow banner hanging on the Lake Street Loft building, clean and ivy-covered on the northeast corner of Lake and Sangamon.

Historic indeed.

If there’s anyone that can tell you about Historic Loft Living in Chicago’s West Loop, it’s Tim W. Brown. Left of the Loop is the fictionalized account of Brown’s years spent living in a barely-habitable artists’ loft in the bombed-out wasteland that was the West Loop in the Eighties, the only permanent residents for several square city blocks of broken-down industrial scrabble peopled by hobos, smacked-out ragtag punk outfits, sometimes-identifiable animal parts that found their way out of trucks and dumpsters behind meat packing plants (see: bone chute), and lots and lots and lots of broken glass. (more…)

From the CUL Stacks: Muldoon, more than just a Chicago ghost story

Monday, July 5th, 2010

When Rocco Facchini was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1956, he was charged to uphold the teachings of the Catholic Church. According to those teachings, ghosts don’t exist.

But then, Facchini hadn’t lived at St. Charles Borromeo, yet.

His first job was associate pastor of St. Charles, a Near Southwest Side parish. There, Facchini watched mysteriously blinking lights and listened to inexplicably shrieking radios. Sonic booms jolted him and a fellow associate out of their beds late one night.

And then there were the guests who wanted to know who that nice old priest was who sat in a back parlor, near the bathroom, smiling cheerily as they went in to do their business, and then disappearing.

It bore the imprint of the Right Reverend Peter James Muldoon, builder of St. Charles, and first bishop of Rockford, Illinois. Life took him far from his old parish, but his death thirty years ago must have brought him back. That was exactly when the weirdness started.

Want more? Click here

From the CUL stacks: NOMMO: A Literary Legacy of Black Chicago (1967-1987): an OBAC Anthology edited by Carole A. Parks

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) workshop was founded in 1967, initiating the greatest collective force in Chicago literary history. OBAC (Oh-bah-see) referred to Oba, the Yoruba word for king. Workshops ran from 1967-1994 and readings were staged as recently as 2007; “art for the sake of black empowerment was the principle.”

OBAC aimed to both increase positive acceptance of black culture and develop new standards capable of judging black cultural creations on their own terms. These goals were realized through creative work, starting entirely fresh so that the new approaches and theory could grow intertwined. “Recognize that in beginning something new, we must inspect and project new themes, heroes and attitudes;” poets experimented with local focus, speech and dialect, and concrete poetry, and the workshop supported some of the most honored poets of the time: Angela Jackson, Carolyn Rodgers, Sterling Plumpp. The workshop continued for over 30 years, drawing hundreds of participants over the years and nurturing the works of Nikki Giovanni, Alex Haley, Sonia Sanchez among others.

Nommo is a bantu word that means “the magical power of the word to make material change.” For OBAC, process and practice were transformative – they wanted a product that embodied its creation and diffused the power of the white value system by providing a robust internal audience.

“What of our goals? We have to be concerned with an end result which includes the art produced, the artists involved, the people involved, and the context within which everything happens.”

Publications coming out of the group mainly furthered the sense of collectivity and inclusiveness — they included Newslettah and NOMMO and featured mostly current workshop material. The workshop’s function was distinct from that of a press – this was an internal operation not concerned with broadcasting widely.

“For publishing new Black poets’ poems, essays and pictures, there were Don L. Lee’s Third World Press and Johnson Publishing Company’s Negro Digest (later Black World). For their artistic practice, they turned to the Organization of Black American Culture” (Maria K. Mootry).

OBAC’s impact was self evident, especially as its aims were so explicitly put forth and wholly realized. Its residual effects are also evident in local word work, and I find this local trace especially encouraging: it’s there in the joyous and exact rhythms that still characterize Chicago spoken word, and in the self sufficiency that still drives Chicago’s autonomous literary groups. An unapologetically independent, self-contained entity, OBAC triumphed. There’s no question these poets altered the trajectory of English language poetry in the 20th century.

Additional Resources:

Nommo entry in the Encyclopedia of Chicago

OBAC’s listing on the Featured Organization page of the Black Arts Interactive website

The Wall of Respect and the Black Power Movement Essay, pdf
Third World Press

The OBAC Statement of Purposes:

To work toward the development and definition of a Black Aesthetic
To encourage the highest quality of literary expression reflecting the Black Experience
To establish and define the standards by which that creative writing which reflects the Black Experience is to be judged and evaluated
To encourage the growth and development of Black critics who are fully qualified to evaluate and judge Black literature on its own merits while, at the same time, cognizant of the traditional values and standards of Western Literature and fully able to articulate the differences between the two literatures
To encourage an atmosphere of brotherhood and tolerence within the workshop, so that criticism and be both given and accepted as being constructive in intent
To work toward the establishment of a regular publication – in the form of a newsletter, journal, or newspaper, or in whatever form the workshop members choose – which will make available to the Black community the creative products from the workshop, ideas relative to Black Experientialism and OBAC, and news and announcements
To work toward the periodical publication of books and anthologies containing the literary work of workshop members, plus, if desirable, creative work from other OBAC workshops
To provide a forum and community of hospitality for local and visiting writers

-Denise Dooley

From the CUL Stacks: Greg Holden’s “Literary Chicago”

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Greg Holden’s 2001 book “Literary Chicago” is a great jumping-off point in the search for hometown literary identity — he’s sensitive to the exact Midwestern “Aw Shucks” Chicago roughness and avoids a direct answer to the lit-scene question. Holden offers some good non-glittery tours of lit landmarks in Chicago neighborhoods (oh boy, Carl Sandburg’s apartment!) and strong lists of Chicago Authors, Trivia, and Great Chicago Literary Put-downs. A printed book wouldn’t ever be the ideal place for up-to-the-minute info on readings and events, but it‘s a great introduction to the local institutions and on-the-ground history.

Holden asks all writers he interviews to respond to Nelson Algren in “Chicago, City on the Make”:

“You can belong to New Orleans. You can belong to Boston or San Francisco. You might conceivably – however clandestinely – belong to Philadelphia. But you can’t belong to Chicago any more than you can belong to the flying saucer called Los Angeles. For it isn’t so much a city as it is a drafty hustler’s junction in which to hustle a while and come on in out of the draft.”

Chris Mazza slices up Algren’s hustler, but she holds on to his draft. I think it’s the single best description of the current Chicago sensibility that I’ve read:

“While it might not have been hackneyed at the time, if anyone attempted to write a ‘Chicago story’ now which offered the wind and a hustler as the two major tokens, I suspect the writer would be accused of not being Chicagoan but a poseur. This would be akin to someone writing about my native San Diego using palm trees and surfers as symbols of the place’s personality, not realizing it’s an ecologically delicate semi-arid coastal scrub where coyotes, who live in natural but urban canyons, outnumber surfers. Nelson Algren not only comes from a different era of Chicago history but from a different era of American literature as well, an era, in both cases, dominated by boastful, posturing men. Even the prose style is bombastic and self-aggrandizing. Writers of this sort didn’t put forth questions, perceptions, or slices of human nature to ponder, but statements of ‘truth’ and self-assured answers I’m glad Chicago is no longer anything like this quote suggests, either in the personality of the city the selection aims to describe or in the personality of the writer that the selection puts in-your-face.

Among its actual virtues, Chicago is a fragile last-bastion of business independence, where, for example, non-corporate bookstores still cling – most of them successful – to existence. The same is true of neighborhood hardware and appliance stores, non-chain bars and restaurants, and even a few pharmacies. Maybe it takes a non-native to notice, but I don’t know of many other places where independently owned – not to mention visually funky – hot dog stands and fast food restaurants flourish in the face of corporate chains. What does this have to do with a writing community? It does seem that the community itself, its varied parts, embodies individual identity. Not just writers, but literary magazines like ACM, Other Voices, TriQuarterly, and Fish Stories; organizations like River Oak Arts, the Guild Complex, and various long-lived writing groups; publishers like Tia Chucha and the university presses; and collegiate writing programs at the Art Institute, UIC, Columbia, ad others – each seems, in its own way, particular and standing apart from corporate or national character trends and literary cliques. Maybe breaking free of its old stock image, created by macho swaggerers for the city to live up to, whether it be windy, mob owned, big shoulders, or city-that-works, was a first step that allowed the now robust, diverse, and vehemently autonomous Chicago literary community to exist in the first place.

I guess what I’m saying is that the city described in Algren’s poem doesn’t exist, so it can’t claim to either own or not own anyone or anything. Yet did the literary community that developed here require Chicago as fodder in order for it to grow and survive? It’s people who characterize and form Chicago, not the other way around. But it does seem that Chicago is sort of a self-sufficient island, not relying or linked inexorably to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, or any other “center of the world.” That quality it seems, admittedly an un-researched observation from a non-native, has to be significant to Chicago’s cultural life, including but not limited to visual art, music, theater, and literature.”

Chris Mazza is a novelist and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has lived outside Chicago since 1993. Info on Mazza is available at http://www.cris-mazza.com

Check out CUL’s copy of “Literary Chicago: A Book Lover’s Tour of the Windy City” for more.

–Denise Dooley

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