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My New Yorker Captions are Unprintable

Am I the only one who hates The New Yorker caption contest?

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (with luck), the week’s issue of The New Yorker gets shoved into our mailbox. And when my kids come home, the first thing they’ll turn to when they see the mag is the back page.

There, for the uninitiated, is the Cartoon Caption Contest page. Which I loathe like little else.

I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s the faux populism that the contest seems to exude. Here’s The New Yorker, letting all of its readers decide what the high-larious caption to the high-concept panel ought to be. It’s almost like being at the Algonquin Round Table — but more akin to yelling punchlines at George Kauffman from the next table.

In a more desperate way, the nightly TV newscast lets viewers send in pictures of cloud formations, and twitter/text their votes about whether taxes are bad or the home team is unbeatable. It’s the dialog that all established media now think will make them indispensable to people’s lives. The only problem is, most viewers can’t take a memorable picture, and most readers can’t write a caption.

Each week, a couple thousand captions are mailed in. Almost without fail, of the three finalists, one caption will be an execrable pun, one will be a play on words that takes three extra miles to get to its point (which wasn’t funny to start with), and one caption has close to the right tone — dry, multiple-layered, au courant but not cliché, and somewhat Gotham-y. By Gotham-y, I mean that it has to do with a stiff upper lip in the face of decay or danger or failure, or a smart-alecky retort that tries to wrangle the absurd to a mundane level. Anything that might refer to a shopping mall, fast food, an open space, a highway without gridlock, or Bass Pro Shops is never going to make it to the winner’s circle.

I’ve read that each of the cartoons used for the contest had already been submitted to the magazine by the cartoonist with a real caption. A caption they actually worked on and shaped with the writer’s innate skill of timing and economy. I’d really would like to know what that caption was. Whatever entries from readers are published might be close, or might be completely off-target, but I’ll never know exactly what the original caption was, and that makes me feel like I missed something. Maybe that makes me a snob, as if reading the magazine didn’t already accomplish that.

But as a professional writer and humorist, I’ve had too many instances of people in person and in print who work really really hard to prove that they are just as funny as me, even though I’ve never challenged them about it. Do people feel the need to show engineers that they know about torque and materials stress? Show dentists that they know how to administer Novocain?

It’s the whole “I crack everyone up at the board meetings — do you think I should try out as a stand-up comedian?” syndrome. If you have to ASK whether you should be a stand-up comedian, then you are sane, and ergo don’t have what it takes to be one. It’s the same with being a cartoonist. Someone is trying to make a living at it, while others are turning it into a parlor game. I feel bad for both sides.

Mostly, I fell bad reading those awful, awful puns.

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Do I Sound More Suave in French?

Like I wrote in the post below, I was interviewed by the Swiss paper Le Temps about the whole bowdlerization-of-Huck-Finn dust-up going on. The reporter didn’t send me the PDF like she promised, so I went on the website this morning and found I’d said this:

Joint aux Etats-Unis, James Finn Garner, auteur du grinçant Politiquement correct: contes d’autrefois pour lecteurs d’aujourd’hui (traduit chez Grasset, 1995), se réjouit que la décision de la maison d’édition ait provoqué une telle polémique. «Il y a un vrai débat. Les gens en ont marre du politiquement correct. Et tout colorer en rose ne change pas le fait que l’Amérique reste un pays disloqué, inégal, encore très raciste.»

Hope I come off good. I think she’s quoting my most lurid comment, like that’s surprising or something. Here’s what Babelfish says I said:

Joint with the United States, Fine James Garner, author of squeaking Politically correct: tales of formerly for readers of today (translated at Grasset, 1995), is delighted that the decision of the publisher caused such a polemic. “There is a true debate. People have some enough of politically correct. And all to colour pink does not change yet the fact that America remains a dislocated country, unequal, very racist.”

Didn’t know my book was “squeaking”, but I’ll take it as a compliment.

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E-Books Aren’t for Writers with OCD

It took me a while to get my e-books up on the system at Amazon, and then at Smashwords. It wasn’t that it was so all-fired complicated to do, although it took a few uploads before the layout and everything was to my satisfaction. It was easy enough to format for Kindle: All I had to do was convert it to an HTML document, and then follow their detailed instructions. Smashwords, which converts the books to the formats for Sony, Nook, iPad, and smart phones, as well as for their own sale, took a little more finessing with Word, but it was easy once I got the hang of it.

No, the big problem of launching manuscripts into electronic format is keeping your hands off the copy while you go over it. As Paul Valery (or DaVinci, or Truman Capote, or someone else, according to my extensive web research) once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Well, with e-books, that doesn’t have to be the case now! A writer can upload revisions to his or her ebook continually. The tweaking could be endless!

I’m lucky. I had a little guideline I could follow. Since these were ebooks of volumes that had already been released, changing much copy would put me in danger of creating a book that people wouldn’t recognize when they bought it. I could have updated some references from 15 years ago (When writing the original, I thought it was funny to make Scrooge aware of the passage of time by his buzzing alarm-wristwatch. Wow, very Dick Tracy! How was I to know that I should’ve made it his cell phone? I’m not a visionary like Steve Jobs). But most of the cultural references were still valid. I don’t think I mentioned anything that screamed “Clinton Era” too much. No talk of tech bubbles or “Celestine Prophecy”.

Worse, it was sorely tempting to heavily edit some of the stories in Once Upon a More Enlightened Time. They tend to ramble on, I think, and become shaggy dog stories. Because they had been read on stage, most of the stories in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories were shorter, punchier, and clearer in what they were making fun of. But If I had begun to edit the stories to any great extent, the e-book would probably never have made it in front of the public.

So, for better or for worse, the books in the Politically Correct Storybook are almost exactly as they were when they were published in 1994-5. I was tempted to insert a new introduction for one or all of them, but then what would I do with the original introductions, which I think are pretty funny and set the tone for the books almost perfectly? Can you insert an older introduction into an addendum? Is it still an introduction if you do that? To keep things from getting messy, I chose to keep things just as they had been. Whether the books are museum pieces or still have something to say to people, is the decision of the reader.

Of course, I still had problems tinkering with the new stories and poems I was inserting in these volumes. I even had to break out the OCR software to scan my first ever published story, “Jerry’s Last Fare”, which was published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1989. No electronic version of that one, obviously. There were certainly a few lines in that chestnut I would change, but cripes, there comes a time when a guy has to abandon some things, right? I figure the reader will be forgiving.

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Cast a Spell on Me

Last Friday I had the honor of once again being a judge for a citywide spelling bee, hosted at St. James Lutheran School. My competition was in the morning, consisting of fifth through eighth graders from the public schools in Chicago. We started out with 63 spellers and ended up with one winner who will head the the national bee in Washington in June. (The afternoon competition was among the private school students, who will also send a champeen (sp?) to Washington.)

This was probably my fourth time being a judge, and I absolutely love it. (I posted on it last year, if you’d like to read it. I put a lot of cool vocab words in it.) I may have to turn down the assignment in the future, b/c my hearing is just getting too screwy to be relied upon. Luckily I didn’t have to monitor the spelling, just give out the definitions, languages of origin, and sample sentences when asked. Also, it was pretty clear when a student spelled it wrong, usually a transposition or a false assumption that an “f” sound was spelled with an “f”.

What was astounding, however, was how many students spelled things RIGHT! In the first round, out of all 63, I think 4 kids went down. Next round, maybe 3. It was beginning to look like we’d be there all day. Still, it took us 3 hours to finally get a winner. The kids were so poised and so smart, my heart went out to every one of them. They were all great sports, too. While I saw some disappointed faces, there were no tears or anger or frustration when someone missed a word. They were happy to compete (and to have a half-day off school).

Some people argue that spelling bees are a waste of time (count on the Tribune’s Eric Zorn to go off on it this spring). Certainly, the ability to spell is not a measure of intelligence, more like a unique hard-wiring that some people have to a greater or lesser degree. But I think spelling bees are useful at least for the fact that the kids prepare for it and then need the poise and self-assurance to approach the Mike of Doom. And a love of words, how they’re built and what they mean should be something to encourage in this era of glyphs, emoticons and twitter shorthand.

And where else are you going to pronounce and define a word like pickelhaube? You know you want to. (Scroll down for a picture of one, after which you’ll slap your forehead and say, “THAT’S what that’s called?”)

Words from the bee to use in everyday life, for all us vocab fetishists:

Podsnappery: insular complacency and blinkered self-satisfaction. (from the behavior or outlook characteristic of Dickens’s Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend)

whilom: one-time; former

moiety: one of two (approximately) equal parts

psittacism: speech or writing that appears mechanical or repetitive in the manner of a parrot (from the Latin word psittaci, or parrots!)

And here it is, your moment of Pickelhaube:

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Salinger Dies, Finally Gets the Attention He Craved

I know it’s been a slow news week, but I’ve been impressed with how many column inches have been printed about J.D. Salinger shedding his mortal coil this week. It speaks to the devotion so many people have about his writing, with a little dash of human interest story about the talented artist forced to become a hermit because of the demands of the public.

If I might abuse the cliche, if we didn’t have J.D. Salinger, we’d have to invent him. (In fact, he was reinvented in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and the movie “Field of Dreams” in the character of Terence Mann.) He’s the archetype of a pure artist, disgusted by the commercial demands of the marketplace and the slavering adoration of the masses. Whether this is really true of Salinger, we want it to be true. I think that’s why he’s remembered so fondly by so many. In some ways, it’s a penance that readers are paying, a guilt-ridden offering for living in the crass and conniving world and not sacrificing themselves to change it. Because of the deep mark Holden Caulfield made on them in their impressionable youth, readers have been forced to feel a little like “phonies” themselves in their lives, by doing regular things like growing up, getting jobs and raising families. To some, every little compromise in adult life is a betrayal of Holden.

Ah, but as long as Salinger was still alive, living in seclusion and too pure to share his writing with the world, there was still a connection with the hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Someone out there was still fighting the good fight for honesty and integrity and all those good things. Art will triumph over commerce! The pure soul will live on!! This is exemplified well by the legend that he kept writing these past 40 years and kept all his manuscripts in a safe. There certainly are some crazies out there that would break into a person’s house for holy-grail-type manuscripts, but a safe? A walk-in kind like Scrooge McDuck’s, with piles of papers neatly arranged for each novel and short story? Were there alarms on it like Jack Benny’s?

Now that Salinger is dead, who will be the repository of all those adolescent aspirations? Bob Dylan? Sherwood Schwartz? I can’t think of any writer who would fill the bill. We’ll all be sad when Phillip Roth dies, but he won’t be as beloved, both because his prickly personality has resulted in difficult and thorny books, and because he lacked the good sense to go into hiding when his career was taking off.

Salinger never made a big impression on me, though I certainly admired his prose. His characters and their concerns seemed too rarefied for me, too East Coast, too boarding school. His obsession with children and their inner lives also didn’t grab me, and in fact seemed a little creepy. It was all of a package: characters who were too special to survive in this crummy world, and a writer who couldn’t bear to have anyone sell his babies. You want to be left alone, Jerry? Fine by me. I was always more into Kurt Vonnegut anyway.

One big reason I never much liked The Catcher in the Rye is how I was exposed to it. In my Catholic high school in the mid 1970s, the English Department was a little schizophrenic. The younger teachers wanted us exposed to as much new and stimulating literature as possible, while the older guard was wary about getting parents riled up about “objectionable” books (some memories of the church’s official sanctioning of proper books likely stayed in these priests’ minds long past the time when it was a real concern). So for example, we couldn’t officially read Catch-22, but Mr. Witucki highly recommended we read it during Christmas break because we were likely to be discussing it for a week or two after. In this climate, Catcher was one of those objectionable books. Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was (and still sometimes is) that would get the censors into a lather. Did he visit a prostitute? Did he masturbate? I can’t remember–but I do remember members of our class sharing tips on how to get into the local strip club, the El Mocambo, with a fake ID card, and we treated it like no big deal.

We still read Catcher, but no one could take a book home. Father Enright had 30 copies of the book in his room, and we all read it together in class. Out loud. Paragraph by paragraph. You want a surefire formula for sucking the life out of a book? This one worked like a charm.

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Henry Louis Gates: Scholar, Freedom Fighter, Potty Mouth

Henry Louis Gates’ recent dust-up with the police, and today’s historic beer reconciliation (who’ll bring the pretzels and mustard?), have brought to mind the time about 14 years ago when I met Prof. Gates.

He and I had contributed essays to a marvelous collection called HOME: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own. Assembled by my friends Steve and Sharon Fiffer, the book was built like a fictional house in which different writers chose a room (mine was “The Work Room”, Gates’ was “The Living Room”) and wrote a reflection on the personal meaning of that space. A portion of the book’s profits were given to homeless charities.

During the book’s launch, a reading was arranged at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, and somehow I was in town to participate. I met Prof. Gates and a couple of the other writers, whose names escape me now. When my slot came, I read the first three pages of my essay, explaining my new-found appreciation of the wisdom of the Three Stooges that had arisen upon the purchase of my first house.

The reading went pretty well, and when I returned to my seat, Gates leaned over to me with a wide smile on his face and whispered:

“You are one funny motherfucker.”

This was one of the most thrilling asides I’ve ever had in my life. A Harvard professor and international scholar not only thought I was funny, but also that I was cool enough to be called a motherfucker. I’ve often thought of how I could get away with using this endorsement, on a book jacket or play poster or something. Imagine how cool that would look on the back of a book: “James Finn Garner is one funny motherfucker”–Henry Louis Gates.

When Gates said this to me, I asked him to send me a letter with his opinion in writing. He must’ve thought I was kidding, but I really wanted a copy of this, especially on stationery from the chairman of Harvard’s African-American Studies Department. How cool would THAT be? A week or two later, I sent him a letter at the school, hoping I could josh him into it, but I got no response. Apparently the exchange was meant to be private. Well, until now.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Neighborhoods

Yesterday I attended a business-group luncheon on the North Side to talk about Boy Scouting. Afterward I met an older man in the group, and we chatted as we walked to our cars. He asked me what neighborhood I lived in, and I told him Lincoln Square.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “that neighborhood had a lot of Koreans there years ago. Do they still have a lot of Koreans there? Koreans and Greeks.”

These types of frank comments are not uncommon when you talk to Chicagoans of a certain age. He wasn’t being racist or exclusionary, as far as I could tell, but often the first thing some older people will say about a neighborhood is the racial makeup they remember. Of course, racists say these kinds of things too, but their intent is usually betrayed by a sneer or a slight lift in the voice. But this old duffer, IMO, was just reaffirming his mental map of the city. Such comments might be right or wrong demographically (from what I know, he was right about the Greeks but notsomuch about the Koreans), but in our “enlightened” age, assigning races to neighborhoods is completely bad form. Brings up images of redlining, ghettos, and the boundaries “that everybody knows about” that can result in ass-kickings for those who cross them.

Enlightened types like yours truly don’t chop up the city that way. We do it by subtle comments about socioeconomics and class. The operative phrase is “So, Is that neighborhood nice?”

“Nice” can mean many things. Sometimes it means, friendly neighbors who watch out for each other. Lots of trees. Good looking buildings. Maybe parks and a library.

Other times, by “nice”, people mean, has it been gentrified enough to be safe? Does it still have some ethnic flavor so I can feel superior to the “whitebread” suburbs? Are the other homes fixed up so I won’t lose the value on mine when I sell? Is it full of college grads from other midwestern states that I can chat with while I’m walking the dog? Are the fences in the front yard wrought iron (good) or cyclone (bad)?

For reasons like this, I generally don’t challenge comments like the old man made at the restaurant. Correcting a 75-year-old about “proper” race relations would only result in high blood pressure for the both of us. And we still have plenty of versatile ways to map out the city in our minds. I wanted to tell him Lincoln Square is now full of yuppies, but the term wouldn’t have meant much to him. So I told him there were a lot of Germans here, but didn’t mention that they were all pushing 80.

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Spell WHAT Now?

The Trib’s Eric Zorn has repeatedly said that spelling bees are a waste of time, an unreliable measure of intelligence, an exhibition and exaltation of a specialized memory quirk. But that didn’t stop him from posting some very cool videos taken at the National Spelling Bee in Washington. This one is my favorite. Can any of us imagine we’d retain the composure this kid did in this situation?


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“Whatsis, a Dagger I See Before Me Here or Whaaat?”

Today was William Shakespeare’s birthday, and there were festivities throughout the cultural landscape. You might have had some thespians traipsing through your downtown spouting iambic pentameter while wearing baggy shirts and tight hose, all nonny and such. But here in Chicago, Da Mare (give Chuckie his due) went everyone one better: He made today in Chicago Talk Like Shakespeare Day. While many of you may have thought Chicagoans possess mellifluous speaking voices anyway–full, resonant, with nary an “A” held too long or nasally–the proclamation should put to rest any lingering doubts that The City That Works is also The City That Iambs, and the average cop on the street sounds like Sir Ralph Richardson.

But those cadences don’t satisfy me. I had the idea last week, after watching “The Ten Commandments”, that we need to talk more like Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner did in that movie. You know, full of metaphors, ominous portents, and ageless prophecies.

For example, when a waitress asks you if you’d like coffee, you’d respond, “It would take a river of coffee to rouse me from contemplation of your beauty.”

If a cop pulls you over and asks you if you knew how fast you were going, you’d answer, “Fast or slow, someday we must face our maker with the deeds of our existence.”

If your friends ask you out for a beer, you’d say, “I respect jollity and comradeship. The night is long that contains no laughter.”

Try it yourself, but I think it would be good to wait until next Passover/Easter season, or else no one’s going to get the joke. Unless you already shave your head but leave that goofy ponytail on the side, “like a true prince of Egypt.”

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Final Spelling Bee Vocab Words

zymurgy – a branch of applied chemistry that deals with fermentation processes (as in wine-making or brewing)

embosk – shroud or conceal, esp. with plants or greenery

dirhinic – affecting both nostrils alike

peroration – a flowery, highly rhetorical speech

pendeloque – a usually pear-shaped glass pendant used for ornamenting a lamp or chandelier

vitraillist – a maker or designer of work in stained glass

anastrophe – inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

callidity – craftiness, cunning shrewdness

kakistocracy – a government by the worst individuals

meliority – the quality or state of being better

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More Spelling Bee Vocab Words

Work these into your conversations this weekend. IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER!!

turgescent – becoming swollen, distended or inflated

sesquipedalian – characterized by the use of long words

percipience – capacity to sense or come to know or recognize mentally, esp. something that is hidden or obscure

insurrecto – a person who rises in revolt against civil authority or an established government

pecksniffian – hypocritically devout; displaying high-mindedness with intent to impress

nugacious – trifling, trivial

sanguivorous – feeding on blood

exaugural – occuring at the close of a term of office

deglutition – the act or process of swallowing

ramage – the boughs or branches of a tree

(And out of all those words, the only one that was accepted by the WordPress spell checker was percipience. Go figure. If you have percipience, you probably already have.)

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Spelling Bee: It Pays To Increase Your Word Power!

Last Friday I was back at it, serving as a judge in the citywide Scripps Spelling Bee. I served as a judge last year, and remember sitting in the audience when my son competed four years ago. Also on my panel was newshound extraordinaire Carol Marin, who is a neighbor of the school–St. James Lutheran–that hosted the bee. Oh, it was a time for five-day deodorant pads. The tension was so thick in that room we had to take extra time to tell the kids to get up and shake their arms.

My hardest job up at the table was holding my emotions in check. When a kid has been trying very hard for a couple of rounds, and succeeded in spelling all the ridiculous words that have been thrown at him, it breaks your heart to watch him or her stumble over a word for a hard German cheese (Backstein), or a mountain village in the Caucasus (aul). I recognized one girl from another year when she competed. A dead-ringer for Drew Barrymore, she was probably a fourth grader when I first saw her, and was now a poised sixth grader. She lost in the later rounds, and kept a stiff upper lip, even with her whole family right there in the front row. Almost all the kids tried really hard (some were completely expressionless), and it was wrenching to watch them go down, but there has to be a winner. WBEZ was there covering it, and they’ve posted a slideshow of the day. Click here if you want to see that.

This year I was struck by the timeliness, or lack thereof, of some of the words. For someone who grew up in the 1960s like me, a muumuu is not an exotic item (a faux-exotic one, sure, but hell, Totie Fields used to wear them). Whether that would make it easier to spell or not, I don’t know, but certain words I feel familiar with (struedel, parfait, lariat, wampum) were probably very foreign to these kids. And while I shouldn’t make generalizations, I wonder if city kids have any idea what a paddock, a wiseacre, a cadenza, or a babushka is. The kids showed us that familiarity isn’t crucial for spelling, but I think it would have to help at least a little bit.

Eventually we were down to two kids, a fifth grader and a sixth grader who went back and forth with correct spellings, obviously having memorized the list of 250 words that everyone had been given. As a judge’s prerogative, we turned to another list of 250 words that the contestants had never seen before.
We got through about a dozen more words, back and forth, but eventually the champion spelled two words correctly in a row. (One more word trapped in time that a late contestant didn’t know: McCoy, as in “the real McCoy.”) This second list had some terrific words that I intend to use in my everyday conversation, just to keep people on their toes. As the Reader’s Digest used to say, It Pays To Increase Your Word Power!

graphospasm — a hand or finger cramp brought on by excessive writing.

flurriment — a state of being agitated

spilth — something that has been allowed to pour, splash, or fall out (as of a container) and be wasted, lost or scattered

frigorific — causing cold (not “Friggerrific!”, though that might become a favorite expletive)

Yiddishkeit — Jewish way of life

rantipole — characterized by a wild unruly manner or attitude

succivorous — feeding on the sap of plants

fanfaronade — empty boasting, bluster

quodlibet — a subtle or debatable point, often a question posed for argument or disputation

breviloquence — shortness of duration of speaking.

And with that, I will save the rest of the list for another day.

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Used to Be a Sin — Now, It’s a Win !!

I haven’t been on the intertoobs much today, but I can’t believe I’m the only person who read this headline in the morning Tribune and found it funny:

Just proves that, sometime or other, we’ve ALL been winners!

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Momentous Inauguration, but Occasional-ly Lousy

That was quite some inaugural yesterday. Hope you had a chance to see it as it happened. The TV was on CNN almost all day around here, and I sat down to watch more than I should of parades and balls. I haven’t watched that much TV in a long time, and I was beginning to feel it by early evening. Bloated, unmotivated, a little down–this must be how couch potatoes always feel, but some of it was also due to the passing of the moment. The glitz and glamor will dissipate as our long time of rebuilding begins. Obama might be ready to roll up his sleeves, but I’m always a fan of the interim, the suspense, the what if. It’s safer than commitment.

But the event was a marvelous thing to see, even if W failed to fall down the steps or grab the microphone for a few “clairifcatures” like I hoped. At least Cheney had the sense of theatricality to show up in a wheelchair. I just couldn’t tell if he reminded me of old Mr. Potter, some Bond villain, or Joe Flaherty doing Guy Caballero. (“The wheelchair is for RESPECT!”)

While Obama’s swearing in was thrilling, and his speech pretty darn good (I liked his victory speech in Grant Park a little better), I think everyone would agree that the occasional poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander was a waste of time. (I joked to my wife that it was a surefire way to get 1 million people off the mall quickly, and by gosh if Jon Stewart didn’t use the same joke last night. I still got it!) Of course, it’s no picnic following a speech by the new president, but her “Prasie song for the day” sounded like a laundry list of “Dumb Things I Gotta Do.” The delivery was flat, the words limp, the sentiment mundane. Other than that, it was great. (For more comments, check out the forum at the Poetry Foundation HERE.)

It’s a challenge to capture the spirit of a momentous occasion in a few lines of poetry. Few in history have ever done it well, and the pressure can be taxing. An article caught my eye last fall about the British Poet Laureate, who in his tenure has felt his spring of inspiration dry up. In sympathy for Andrew Motion and the difficulty of poetizing for state events and special occasions, I wrote the following sonnet:

On the Occasion of a New Shopping Center

From Cairo’s souks, the alleys of Tibet,
The saffron-flaked bazaars of Bangalore—
This HyperMart, tho’ newly opened, yet
Does put to shame all those that went before.
In all of England stands there not a shop
To match its offerings in magnitude:
Such produce fresh, such lean and meaty chops,
A deli counter of such plentitude.
In contrast does my soul constrict from want
Of any inspiration, hope or spark,
An empty cupboard, dusty, full of….ants
And metaphors that somehow miss their mark.

Such bargains here, a shopper can’t refuse,
Yet none can match how cheap I sold my muse.

Maybe some zoning commission needs a laureate?

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Come Out For a Reading Tonight

Well, THAT was a fun couple of weeks! Scraping the hard drive, reinstalling backups, getting the same errors, stumping the guy at the repair shop, scraping the hard drive again, backup, backup, backup…..

I just get the sinking feeling that payback will eventually come for all the productivity computers have given us. The amount of time saved now will be wasted either in reboots and tech support stasis, or in life spans shortened by aggravation and high blood pressure. On the plus side, I filed all my utility bills and finished the Sunday crossword. Seven times over.

So here in the Mezzanine Level (my fancy word for basement office), after weeks of hanging out on the lake in Michigan, we’re trying to get back on track with the whole big city thing. This year has been tougher than others, for some reason, prompting images of retreating to the wilds, starting a winery (and selling honey by the roadside!!) and giving the Windy City a flip of the finger. One contributing factor to this mood might have been the fact that some crackhead kicked in our back door a few weeks ago and rummaged around the place a little bit. That’s always a nice homecoming, even though my brother-in-law actually discovered the break-in. (Here’s a hint for homeowners: hide your valuables in your teenage son’s room. Most crooks won’t have the stomach to venture in.)

This mood will probably pass. These transitions happen every year, getting used to the noise and the crowds and the inches that often pass between your body and a moving SUV on the sidewalk. We’ll tough it out, I suppose, and soon I’ll get all excited about nice dinners at little out-of-the-way places and all that stuff. Or have I squeezed all the enjoyment out of this city that I can? Time will tell.

So, one thing that Chicago provides that smaller towns don’t is good reading series, in bars that serve good food. Monday night’s event might be the thing to get me in the Chicago groove again. That and beer. Lovely, lovely beer.

The Loveable Losers Literary Revue has been meeting monthly since April in this, the 100th anniversary of the Cubs’ last World Series triumph. Held in the side room of El Jardin (at Clark and Buckingham) and hosted by Donald Evans, this series has hosted many great writers expounding on the Cubs’ wretched existence in these ten decades.

On Monday, May 8, the evening’s theme will be “Curses.” I’ll be reading a new story and poem, and will be joined onstage by the Tribune’s Rick Kogan, WXRT’s Lyn Brehmer, whiz kid Stu Shea, poet Sid Yiddish, and many others. There will be songs, trivia contests, giveaways, and Ouija board readings. So saddle up the goat and head on down. It’ll be a lot of fun. For more information about the series, check out their website: http://www.lovablelosersliteraryrevue.com/home-base/