Welcome Back, Welcome Back

One of the things we discussed in class about Fire Sale is V.I.'s implacable rationality. We agreed that Peretsky paints an exceedingly practical character who seems unruffled and capable in most situations, and we mused that this may be her feminist response to the stereotypically "hysterical" female character. Nevertheless what stood out to me in reading this novel were the rare instances when V.I.'s emotions take over; perhaps because of the purview of this course, but these instances seemed often to be associated with her relationship to the South Side of Chicago. For example, early in the book, she admits that she cried when she drove by her boarded up former family home. This sadness for the depressed condition of the old neighborhood, its schools, its homes, its abandoned industries seems to manifest itself in a certain form of guilt.

V.I.'s guilty associations with the old neighborhood are critical to the trajectory of the novel. It is her guilt that brings her to the South Side in the first place-- her former coach pushes all the right buttons when she mentions V.I.'s new neighborhood: Lakeview. It is this guilt that keeps V.I. working hard for the girls she coaches-- bring her to Buy Smart to ask for assistance etc. It was this return to "old the sod" aspect of the novel that most intrigued me and seemed to resonate strongly as an aspect of its Chicago-ness. V.I. hasn't moved away-- her whole career has been based in the city of her birth-- yet this novel has a strong sense of nostalgia and feeling of debts owed and repayments made. She is in her old high school-- named, which interestingly recalls another "old Chicago" as its named after the old baron Palmer Potter's wife--walking the beat so to speak on her old streets. It is this pull home--this collision between all that has changed since she left and all that still contains her memories and her heart-- that created a most palpable energy in the novel. And also lodged an old TV theme song in my head:

Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Back....

Fire Sale

Sara Paretsky’s Fire Sale is an entertaining novel. From the beginning, I knew to read it the same way I would read any other type of popular fiction. I don’t think too much about it and just let the story happen as the author intended. It is relaxing to be able to read a novel quickly and not have to worry about every little thing like I do when I read literary masterpieces. I was worried that the story of V.I. Warshawski would be a little confusing because she has had so many earlier adventures, but it was easy to figure out who Warshawski was. As a new reader to her series, I felt that I could understand Warshawski enough to enjoy the story. Paretsky’s character represents the good that always works for the best interest. She is similar the other good characters that are in media and other popular fiction.

What I found most interesting about the story was the picture of Chicago that Paretsky was able to draw. She makes Chicago feel like this whole new world of mystery and corruption. Half the time I was reading it, I forgot that it was taking place in Chicago.

You could definitely see Partesky’s politics in her novel. I wonder why she does not try to make a novel that would be considered more literary. I believe she easily could, especially after we read some of her autobiography. I think a more literary novel would make her beliefs stick out more. By hiding them in a mystery thriller, she is not going to open too many people’s eyes. When people read her book, they are looking for suspense, murder, action, not society’s ruthless hold on the lower class. I never felt like Paretsky was overbearing with her beliefs. Honestly, I think she is a wonderful storyteller, and sly in the way she inserts social problems in a mystery novel. It is not your normal testosterone pumped action mystery thriller. Warshawski will work for anyone if they are in desperate need of her help. She, like Paretsky, works with the poor and needy, except Warshawski probably gets involved in more interesting situations.

I didn’t really like any of the side characters in the story. I was never able to get a grip on who they were. This might be, because they are more described in greater detail in previous Warshawski novels, or Paretsky doesn’t feel they are really important. They move the story along, and that’s about it. The reader never learns more about them, especially Warshawski’s boyfriend. I feel that I know more about the girls on the basketball team and their parents than Warshawski’s boyfriend.

The Actual

When I first started reading Saul Bellow’s The Actual, I thought, at first, Bellow was talking to the reader. I was unsure if he was creating a character or if it was he himself talking to his audience. I checked if I missed an author’s note or prologue heading but there was and still is none. I felt pretty sure that Bellow was creating a character, but there was a small part of me that felt I was going to be surprised to find that it was the author actually talking. When Harry Trellman told the audience he looks Chinese, I looked at the picture of Saul Bellow on the back cover trying to see if he looks Chinese, while still unsure if he is creating a character or talking as himself. I have no experience with any of Bellow’s books, so while I was reading him for the first time, I tried to get some sort of feel for him.

That is where much of my confusion was floating as I began The Actual. I kept reading, and I felt pretty sure Bellow was creating a character who was talking to an audience, but this character felt so real. There is an incredible honesty that Harry Trellman possesses that allows him to view his life and the life of others in a very particular way. There is something about Bellow’s writing that has an intense directness and powerful use of language that allows this character to come into being within the novella’s first paragraph. Both Bellow and Harry know people better than they know themselves. I believe this is truer for Harry, because I don’t know much about Saul Bellow. There is a deep trust that Harry has in his readers. He clearly explains his orphan-like up bringing, his small successes, his feelings on Chicago and it’s “emptiness”, and the beginnings of his relationship with Adletsky. I find this stuff important, because Harry does not seem to like to talk about these personal things, especially when it comes to Adletsky who, Harry says, “had been so fully briefed that there would be no talk abut my origins, education, accomplishments – thank God.” Harry is no simple kind of man. The rest of novel revolves around him and some of his complicated relationships especially that with Amy Wustrin, a woman he briefly dated in high school, but is still madly in love with her in a very human way. Human because its not like the romantic comedies or dramas. It isn’t sentimental in any way. It is odd and, in the end, that is what love ends up being.

Hidden Chicago 2

Found this WTTW video just put up as part of the Hidden Chicago 2 series that is coming Monday, November 30 at 7:30 pm. This particular video gives some very interesting history of Chicago's theater including the Oriental, the Congress, the south-side Regal Theater, the Uptown theater (built for $4 million in 1925 with 4,300 seats), and the Rialto. It also mentions many of the abandoned theaters throughout Chicago.

Apparently there were more then 350 theaters in Chicago by the mid 1920s.



Here's a link to the WTTW Hidden Chicago 2 website.

Sara and the socialists

I couldn't read Fire Sale.

I realize that people have agendas, and authors being people also have agendas, but Sara Paretsky is pushy and distracting with hers and it took away any credit I had given to her work. Fiction is absolutely a great vehicle for the establishment of ideas and ideals but...genre mysteries? Perhaps not.

But if nothing else, Paretsky's (tame by former standards) socialist leanings are what authenticate her as a genuine Chicago author.

I happened on Paretsky's blog today and saw first hand the full force of her views.

In a post from November 6:

"I believe that Beck uses the same tactics that worked so well for the National Socialists in the 1930’s. He repeats slander and inuendo, loudly, and repeatedly, and takes advantage of a part of the population that is terrified already by change, by the economic meltdown, and the threat of terrorism, and plays on their fears. Like the National Socialists, he finds scapegoats that his listeners can blame for their own fears. When I see a ragtag group of poor people protesting health care reform, I know he’s been a success: these are the people who will become homeless if they have a catastrophic illness, but they are sure that Beck, and his cronies like O’Reilly and Hannity, are right to oppose government-sponsored health care, because all of these broadcasters have identified the real problem as belonging to feminists, or Muslims, or blacks, or President Obama, or all of the above. These broadcasters have persuaded a significant fraction of America that President Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist, that he wasn’t born in the U.S., and even that he has set up concentration camps in Arizona."

It's sad, I think, that a writer should sink to such levels, to join in with the media squabbling, the bickering. That's why she became an author in the first place, no? To eloquently show what's wrong in our country, to convey through story what the real problems are, and to illustrate with words what needs to change, that is why authors are great.

But Sara is only vindicated in her outspokenness. The great Chicago writers: Sandburg, Sinclair, Richard Wright, Algren, and Bellow all share a common bond of sympathy for the working class and of writing on their behalf.

Milwaukee had a socialist Mayor (thanks Wayne's World); Chicago never did. The culture of the working class is so evident in our literature, and I just can't figure out why.

The Other Half

Certainly we had a glimpse of the other half in Devil in the White City, but it is easy to identify what makes Saul Bellow's The Actual a true representation of the upper classes-- it is his ease. Lacking in the grandiose descriptions of Larson, eschewing the preaching of Sinclair, dismissing the rhapsodic lyricism of Algren, Bellow chooses a minimalistic approach for his representation of Chicago in this slim novella.

Bellow does not wrench us into the world of mega-money Chicago in the five-dollar word style of Larson. Instead, his economy with words sharply carves us out a place, to stand and assume a blase attitude like the characters. We don't stand with our mouths-hanging open at the lake view or try unsuccessfully to imagine ourselves inside the limo cruising the city. We step right in; we casually accept this image of Chicago as our own. It is as sharp as the carefully crafted sentences allow, as blurry as the scene on Lake Street when Harry runs into Amy when it needs to be. We see the details of this Chicago-- but not so many it feels like bragging and not so many as few as others start to intrude, "There was no occassion to look outside-- to see the people whose mad doings the papers are always report..." (Bellow 60). This nonchalance, this masterful way of Bellow's, not just for representing the rich, but well exemplified in this instance marks a change from our other books of the semester.

Does this characteristic ease that even Algren in his heart-pumping high-energy can't slow down verse can't replicate mark a shift in aesthetics? Is this a Chicago that doesn't feel the need to respond directly to Sandburg? I see what our pal Leigh was saying about the content of the book working through a little intellectual inferiority or anxiety-- but not its form. Its form is smooth. It's form is rich. It has no complexes-- no chip on its "Big Shoulders. "

Otters, Sting-Rays, and Whales-- Oh My!

I'm going to take a leap now out of my usual pounding-the-pavement-neighborhood exploration and venture into some fishier waters, specifically those of the world's first inland aquarium, Shedd. How's that for a factoid? Before 1930 when Shedd Aquarium opened, other such facilities pumped salty ocean water out of their backyard and into their tanks. The first salty tanks at Shedd were filled with seawater trucked in on a railroad car. One of the first star exhibits featured a single neon tetra-- a tiny fluorescent fish now common to many home aquariums; in this pre-television era, Chicagoans, and other visiting Midwesterners lined up by the thousands and waited for hours to catch their first glimpse of ocean life. It's a long way from beluga whales-- but it was quite a feat at the time.

Just like many Chicago buildings, if you pull open the doors of this place, a slew of Chicago stories pour out. The building's namesake himself is his own Chicago tale. John G. Shedd started as a stockboy at Marshall Field's, and eventually grew to become the company's second CEO, after Marshall Field himself. Shedd didn't live to see his fabulously ornate Neptunian Temple (look for Neptune's trident on the top of its dome) erected, but there is some speculation that the level of detail work on the building was meant to be in direct competition with Field's own legacy to Chicago-- The Field Museum, which sits next door. Built during the height of the depression, Shedd cost approximately 3 million dollars to build. Looking at its intricate details which all reference the building's contents--such as specially cast conch shell light fixtures andwave-like marble lining the halls, makes it clear that that kind of money wasn't chump change.

Today, Shedd's the most visited cultural institution in the city, and its easy to be lost in crowds of kids crowding up against the piranhas in the Amazon exhibit or the the eels in the Wild Reef, but for me, I still run into the ghosts of Chicago when I walk around this magical little ocean in the prairie.