Is there a connection between the practical politics of the New Left and the ecstatic poetics of Beat poetry? Is there a way to connect poems like Philip Lamantia’s “Rest in Peace” and “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!” to a practical political program?

Philip Lamantia, 1981.

These were the questions that came to mind when I was asked to present a paper on Beat poetry and the New Left by the Platypus Affiliated Society in 2010. I was not interested in discussing how Beat poets paved the way for the New Left by radically reorienting cultural norms in the mid-1950s. I wanted, instead, to explore how Beat poets imagined the direct political efficacy of their work. Did Lamantia have specific political ambitions for “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!”—absurd as that may sound today?

To address these questions, I visited the archives of two literary magazines housed at the University of Chicago: Chicago Review and Big Table. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the magazines were major venues for Beat writing. They were also at the center of two important censorship controversies—controversies that foreshadowed the culture wars of the late-1960s. In this essay, a revision of my original presentation, I discuss my findings. I begin with a brief history of the two magazines and then discuss the political stakes of Lamantia’s poetry.

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In 1958, Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll took over as editor and poetry editor (respectively) of Chicago Review, a literary magazine edited by students at the University of Chicago. In three consecutive issues that year, they turned a strong academic quarterly into the one of the most prominent avant-garde magazines in America. The spring issue featured new writing from San Francisco, including the first chapter of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and work by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, among others. The summer issue, on Zen and poetry, opened with Alan Watts’s essay, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen.” The autumn issue featured more Beat writing, including the second chapter of Naked Lunch.

A few weeks after the autumn issue appeared, the Chicago Daily News published a front-page story with the headline, “Filthy Writing on the Midway.” The story, which focused on Naked Lunch, concluded:

I don’t put the blame on the juveniles who wrote and edited this stuff because they’re immature and irresponsible. But the University of Chicago publishes the magazine. The Trustees should take a long hard look at what’s circulated under this sponsorship.[1]

Yielding to public pressure, Lawrence A. Kimpton, the University’s Chancellor, refused to allow the next issue of CR to be published. (It was to include another chapter of Burroughs’s novel.) The magazine was put under the authority of a faculty committee and told that issues now had to be “‘innocuous and non-controversial.’”[2]

In protest, Rosenthal, Carroll, and most of the CR’s staff resigned. They took the contents of the suppressed issue and formed an independent magazine, Big Table. The first issue appeared the following spring with “the complete contents of the suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review.” Upon publication, the magazine was quarantined by the Post Office, and the editors had to sue for its release. At the trial, the judge found in the magazine’s favor, arguing that the “dominant theme or effect” of Naked Lunch was “that of shocking contemporary society, in order perhaps to point out its flaws and weaknesses.”[3] The judge was Julius J. Hoffman—the same judge who would preside at the trial of the Chicago Eight (then Seven).

Big Table ran for five issues between 1959 and 1960, all except the first edited exclusively by Carroll. For most of the run, Ginsberg served as unofficial editor-at-large. The archives are filled with his letters recommending writers and offering ideas for special issues. He is Ezra Pound to Carroll’s Harriet Monroe—a brilliant, opinionated curator negotiating with an ambitious, yet practical editor. When Ginsberg recommends special issues on prison writing and queer writing, Carroll suggests an issue on contemporary French poetry. When he praises the young John Wieners, Carroll criticizes the poet’s “poor ear” and “inadequate technique.”[4] Ginsberg wants to revolutionize American society. Carroll wants to secure an audience. His taste is the magazine’s standard: when he rejects an idea or submission, he diligently explains that it “doesn’t get under my skin.”[5]

One of the poets most fervently promoted by Ginsberg was Philip Lamantia. Born in 1927 and raised by Sicilian immigrants in San Francisco’s Mission district, Lamantia was a poetry prodigy. His first poems were published in the surrealist magazine View when he was fifteen. Soon after, he dropped out of school and move to New York, where he spent time with André Breton, Max Ernst, and other artists, who had fled France during WWII. After the War, he returned to San Francisco, attended Berkeley, and became involved in the Beat scene. His poetry from the 1950s blends surrealism with the hallmarks of Beat writing: open forms, jazz, bohemian culture, mysticism, religion, sex, drugs—lots of drugs. He published eleven books before his death in 2005—including two volumes in 1959, Ekstasis and Narcotica, both from Auerhahn Press. The University of California Press will publish his collected poems in 2013.

After the first issue of Big Table appeared, Lamantia sent Carroll a note from San Francisco: “I had once a long letter for you before it was definitely announced, via time, inc., that your projected magazine is to be called THE BIG TABLE – wonderful title! i mean i wanted to add my suggestion, too, that it should be called that.”[6] The letter sparked a long exchange and two separate submissions, which included two poems about the current Pope: “Letter to the World Crossed by Poems for the Pope John XXIII” (which is now lost) and “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!” (which only exists in manuscript and on the linked recording).

Manuscript of “All Hail Pope John XXIII”

How should we understand the political aims of “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!”? At first glance, it seems political in a wholly negative way—political in the way Judge Hoffman thought Naked Lunch was political: a form of protest, an attempt to shock society. Lamantia’s early writings support this view. In a letter published in VVV in 1944, he declared:

[A] true revolutionary poet can not help defying every appalling social and political instrument that has been the cause of death and exploitation in the capitalistic societies of the earth […] To rebel! That is the immediate object of poets![7]

From this vantage, the poem is an act of rebellion: a hilarious “fuck you” to society and its values.

But if we look at the letters in the Big Table archives, we get a different picture of Lamantia’s aims. After congratulating Carroll on title of the magazine, Lamantia describes his plans for 1959:

my objective for 1959 is to hitch a ride somehow (do you know some happy, far out ecclesiasts???) to Rome for the Council Our Swinging Pope is going to call.

I have many suggestions for We-Him-The-Pope WHO SAYS “I” instead of “we”, first of all why doesn’t Church, Holy Roman, re instate or Invent the procedure of inviting the best, swinging poets in each nation to write poems, preferably short, for the Great liturgical feasts of the year and these poems to be painted on great banners and streamers displayed everywhere inside and outside all the major churches in each bisophric???

this would really manifest the poet’s vocation in relation to the Church—as a POINTER PROPHET.[8]

Some background may be helpful: in October, 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli became Pope John XXIII. In January, he signaled that he would call an ecumenical council, which became the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The council, which Pope John did not live to see complete, revolutionized the face of the Church, by, among other things, allowing liturgy in vernaculars and promoting dialogue with non-Catholics. This is the council Lamantia means.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Paul Carroll took this objective to go to Rome at face value. He invited Lamantia to contribute an essay on his hopes for the Church: “I got to wondering if you might not want to expand yr ideas & hopes about the Church into some kind of prose essay (it can be short): I don’t know anyone else I would rather read on the Church than you.”[9] “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!” was Lamantia’s second response to the invitation, after Carroll rejected “Letter to the World Crossed by Poems for the Pope John XXIII.” Writing from Mexico, Lamantia proclaimed that “My piece conveys a REAL ATTACK, gospel-restatement, on jansenistic, puritan – without sensational porno come-on – and yet WILD PRAISE OF MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN CHURCH AND UNCOMMON MONARCHIC SALUTE TO THE PRESENT POPE.”[10]

This context should not, I think, cause us to read the poem as sincere (whatever that might mean) or to take Lamantia’s “objective for 1959” at face value. But we should note that Paul Carroll took the poem and objective seriously—that a sober, practical reader thought that Lamantia had something to contribute to the Church and that the Church might listen. The Lamantia-Carroll correspondence, in this way, tells us a lot about the age and its sense of the  potential efficacy of poetry. There is real confidence that one of the most powerful institutions in the world might be open to advice—and advice from the author of Narcotica no less. Lamantia’s ecstatic poetics is, at this specific moment, also a practical politics.

Cover of Narcotia. Photos are of Lamantia.

In the 1950s and 60s, many writers associated with the New Left saw the Church (and Christianity, more generally) as an antidote to technocracy, to an increasingly administered world, to a world headed for nuclear war. This is not only the perspective of religious writers like William Everson (Brother Antoninus) or Thomas Merton. The sociologist C. Wright Mills presented just such an argument in his essay “A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy” from 1958—

It is as if the ear had become a sensitive soundtrack, the eye a precision camera, experience an exactly-timed collaboration between microphone and lens. And in this expanded world of mechanically vivified communications, the capacity for experience is alienated, and the individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing.[11]

This is from a discussion of why Christians should act according to conscience and dogma, and resist the nascent military-industrial complex. Lamantia’s “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!” is part of this discussion—an attempt to influence Church policy, but also to transform alienated spectators into human witnesses.

In the end, Carroll decided not to publish either poem about Pope John XXIII. Here is his rejection of “Letter to the World Crossed by Poems for the Pope John XXIII” (his rejection of “All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!” is not in the archive)—

The final decision, I am afraid, went against printing “Letter to the world crossed with poems for Pope John 23.” To say I am sorry about this would be puerile in the face of the passion & inspiration I feel went into the writing of that Letter. I must say, in honesty, that tho I was moved by the Letter, it didn’t get under my skin, which is the only test I can trust in the end. What I am trying to say is: the energy & passion which breath from the Letter are somehow mitigated, it seems, but the lack of precision in the style…[12]

Lamantia’s response was sharp:

What’s going on? Do you want “Masterpieces”, vide Artaud on “No more masterpieces”… or do you want just the sensational stuff to get the cops down on you? me thinks you want to make a thing out of the beat, but man, that’s dead DEAD DEAD ALREADY! all i can figure is No more dullbeat and Whitman-Rimbaud constipational… there IS something else!

I dunno, I’m not necessarily writing to “get under” yr or anybody else’s “skin”. other levels![13]

Carroll, in the exchange, prioritizes the values that Lamantia is trying to transcend: the personal, the private, the precise, the merely provocative. Ultimately, the efficacy of the poem proves illusory. What does this fact tell us about the specific political ambitions of Beat poetry? Not much. It simply reminds us that established institutions are resistant to change.

The fifth and final issue of Big Table included an announcement for a planned sixth issue on “Post-Christian Man,” which would have featured work by Allen Tate, Russell Kirk, Paul Goodman, and William Phillips—exactly the kind of issue that made Chicago Review into an important academic quarterly in the first place. Perhaps recognition of this fact is what caused Carroll to cease publication of Big Table.

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Joshua Kotin is assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton University.  From 2005 to 2008, he was the editor of Chicago Review.  From 2009 to 2011, he was a preceptor in MAPH.

The reason for my trip was simple enough. My cousin Matt was finishing up his prestigious Fulbright Fellowship research in Cambodia and my mom’s airline miles were about to expire.

I knew almost nothing about Cambodia. I knew about the genocide committed by the ultraviolent Khmer Rouge cadre in the 1970s. I knew about the diseases (Google “Japanese encephalitis”). I knew I would have to find a good pair of linen pants because in Cambodia a man does not wear shorts.

Cambodia is a country of 15 million people. It’s roughly the size of Missouri, but I’ve also seen it compared to Oklahoma (conveniently, Cambodia and Oklahoma are equally alien to most Americans). The country sits between Thailand to the west, Laos to the North, and Vietnam to the east. Cambodia, in particular, has been understudied because from 1975 until the early 1990s the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, made travel to the country nearly impossible. During those years the Khmer Rouge emptied cities, forced entire populations into the countryside to work on rice farms, and murdered nearly two million Cambodians (roughly 21 percent of the country’s population at the time).

They treated with special brutality anyone who bore the marks of an intellectual life. This meant artists, writers, and doctors. But also people who wore glasses or spoke French.

For a tourist, it’s impossible to go anywhere and not think about it. Or to stop thinking about the fact that the tourist economy depends at least in part on a fascination with genocide.

The author in a tuk-tuk.

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By the time I arrived in Cambodia, Matt had been living alone in Phnom Penh for eleven months. It was supposed to have been a yearlong federally funded honeymoon with his beautiful new wife, but it lasted only two weeks because of a fateful trip to a massage parlor.

It’s not what you think.

Massage parlors are everywhere in Phnom Penh and since massages cost eight dollars per hour—six, if you talk them down—they are always crowded. I don’t know exactly what happened inside that dimly lit massage room, but I do know that at some point the masseuse’s hands inched down Jes’s abdomen until coming to an abrupt stop. When Jes looked up, the masseuse smiled. “You have baby,” she said.

A few days later, Jes flew back to Illinois to prepare to have a baby. Matt stayed behind.

When I met up with Matt in Cambodia, his beard ended well below his chin. He rarely wore a shirt indoors; and when outdoors, he wore one of two pairs of cargo shorts and an army-green boonie hat with a “Nixon’s the One!” pin. He embodied the role of a deranged historian, deployed on a mission he no longer remembered signing up for, who missed his new wife and the child he hadn’t expected.

He speaks Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and by the end my trip he had taught me to say beer, ashtray, check, hello, and thank you. Every day Matt would video chat with Jes and his baby boy, Marko. The rest of his time he spent in the national archives in Phnom Penh searching for documents, piecing together Cambodia’s past, biding his time, waiting to go home.

Matt (left) and the author.

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As if to get it out the way, on my first full day we went to the killing fields, located about seventeen kilometers outside of the capital city of Phnom Penh. Although there have been hundreds of mass grave sites discovered throughout the country, the killing fields outside of Phnom Penh have become the primary site for remembering and reflecting upon the Cambodian genocide. When you enter the grounds, you find a series of paths twisting around sunken graves. They look like craters. During heavy rains, pieces of clothing and fragments of bone still wash up on the paths. In the center of the grounds, a Memorial Stupa houses 5000 skulls, ordered by age and sex, behind glass panels. To the left, tourists take photographs of a tree. A sign in broken English explains that the Khmer Rouge saved bullets by smashing baby skulls against it. Next to the tree is the pit that the babies were thrown into. Australians, Koreans, Chinese, me—there were no Cambodians around. We stood there in silence listening to our audio guides on our headphones in our respective languages, staring at nothing.

I felt uncomfortable. The audio guide headphones stuck to my ears as I tried to ignore the horrible things it told me. Standing in an empty field among shade-bearing trees, the horrors were invisible. Signs and markers stick out everywhere, but it seemed clear that no single thing could contain or capture genocide. Only an empty field might come close to symbolizing the horror of something so lacking in exactness of time and place.

Matt and I walked back to our tuk-tuk—an open-air carriage attached to a motorcycle and the primary mode of transportation for tourists. Our driver, Mr. Vannak, who drove us just about everywhere, lost family members to the Khmer Rouge. Did he mind ferrying tourists to and from the killing fields?

Vannak smiled when he saw us. “You like killing fields?” he asked.

I equivocated.

My discomfort disappointed him. Mr. Vannak pulled out a laminated brochure with photos of all the popular tourist attractions. The killing fields sat snugly between the Riverside Restaurant District and the royal palace. But he pointed at a picture of a shooting range that for $300 lets would-be commandos blow up cows with a bazooka. I shook my head to indicate that I wasn’t interested.

“Bang-bang!” he said.

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Today my trip exists as a collection of scribbled notes, crumpled receipts, countless tweets (nearly every bar and restaurant offered Wi-Fi), 1,095 photographs, and five postcards that have long since posted. I try to reduce; I try to reconcile, but I still don’t have a reasonable response to the question: “how was your trip?” Cheever famously said that to “admire the color of another sky draws us deeper into the mystery of our condition.” If we think about why we actually travel, we travel because we believe, at some level, that it will be good for us. We travel because we hope that by searching the horizons of another country, we search the contours of ourselves.

But what does that even mean? How exactly does one find an experience that “draws us deeper into the mystery”? At best, travel increases our capacity to linger in anxiety, discomfort, and uncertainty—with ourselves, with our ordinary surroundings, with our companions. Or maybe it encourages us to stare at the empty space between our expectations of an experience and the thing that actually happens. To stew in our inability to give an account to some of our experiences.

To give up and say, “I had a great time.”

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Near the end of my trip, we hired a driver to take us on the 200 kilometer overland journey to Prasat Preah Vihear on the border of Thailand. Preah Vihear is just one of the hundreds of 11th and 12th century temples that dot the Cambodian landscape. Nearly everyone who travels to Cambodia will see the temples of Angkor Wat, and I certainly encourage this, but Preah Vihear intrigued us because the US State Department’s website explicitly advised against it.

It sounded like good news when our driver told us that he had been a driver for the UN in the early 1990s. The roads in Cambodia require a particular kind of confidence and derring-do: buses passing motorcycles with entire families riding on them, cars squeezing through impossibly tight spaces while traveling in the wrong direction, potholes the size of cows, actual cows.

A typical Cambodian highway

Much like a New York taxi driver, the line between a good driver and a bad driver depends on whether you arrive at your destination on time and in one piece. For every close call (and there were many) our driver would lay on his horn, look at us with a deep smile, and simply say, “crazy.” Like two vehicles colliding, his car horn combined the throb of a squad car siren with the honk of a ‘97 Buick. We could tell how close to death we came by how much he elongated the first syllable of “crazy.”

“Crazy” meant a dog ran in front of the car, or that a tuk-tuk veered in front of us. No sweat.

“Craaaaazy,” operated on an existential frequency that I am sure only our mothers can hear.

After three hours, and a little luck, we arrived at the base of the mountain below Preah Vihear. To get to the top we paid five dollars each for a seat on the back of a motorcycle—the road was almost suicidally steep for cars. My motorcycle driver’s shocking pink helmet reinforced my own lack of one. I distracted myself by trying to remember the number of times my Lonely Planet guidebook emphasized that medical emergencies in Cambodia typically require an airlift to Thailand. I wondered about the inadequate availability of reasonable healthcare in Cambodia. The motorcycle jerked suddenly as the driver shifted into a lower gear to begin our ascent. The gentle switchbacks had turned into nearly perpendicular inclines. The physics of the situation didn’t make sense. I tightened my grip. The tires slid on the loose gravel. The driver tried to stave off head-on collisions around blind corners by beeping his meek motorcycle horn. I wanted to look at Matt, but I couldn’t.

When we got to the top, Cambodian soldiers ran around and pointed at the Thai side of the border where a brigade of Thai soldiers conducted a military exercise. Every day around noon the Thai soldiers march in formation as a show of force, which, to the Cambodians, seems more like entertainment. As recently as 2011 Preah Vihear was an active war zone. It’s quiet now, but walking around the foxholes, signs warning of landmines, and sandbagged machine-gun positions, it felt as though things could turn hairy pretty quickly.

Cambodians watch a Thai military exercise

When we approached the first part of the temple, I found the ruins underwhelming. The heat shocked me more than the pile of rocks. It had only been twenty minutes, and I had already soaked through my shirt. Behind the temple we found a walkway and ascended another 100 meters. At the top we found another temple and then another walkway. And then another. And then another. With each new path, we laughed like little shorts-wearing boys.

Just behind the fifth temple I followed a small dirt path that led to a large rock ledge. Directly below me the green lowland plains of Cambodia stretched out forever into the horizon. Except for a light wind, I heard nothing. The clouds descended around me. “Matt, you have to come see this,” I yelled.

We both stood there, inches from a 2,000 foot cliff, clouds at eye level.

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Tyler Jagel (MAPH ’10) splits his time between the Catskills and Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. He’s on Twitter at @tylerj. He’s still not sure he was actually in Cambodia..

“Perhaps it is one of the great mercies of God that es lasst sich nicht lesen.”
—Edgar Allen Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”

 

Introduction: The City Meets the Cinema

To talk about “the city” after the rise of modernity is to confront the problem of vastness, of a scale so large as to render futile any individual attempt to apprehend the city in its totality.  Indeed, we might substitute Poe’s resigned observation of the urban “man of the crowd” for the city itself: it does not permit itself to be read. Instead, the urban experience becomes a process of making sense from within a vast sea of potential meanings. Georg Simmel stressed this in his defining work on “metropolitan life”: for him, the modern city was differentiated from everything before it by the “intensification of nervous stimulation” – in short, the preponderance of sensory information that urban dwellers are presented with in the course of their everyday routines.[1]

Coincident with the rise of the modern city has been a new way of looking at that city: the perspective afforded by the cinema. Bearing in mind that our understanding of city space is informed to a large extent by the paths we travel along through that space, how do cinematic representations of those paths – that is, filmic depictions of movement through the city – affect the way that we perceive urban space? In order to consider this question, I turn to the work of pioneering urban theorist Kevin Lynch, and in particular his concept of legibility. As I discuss below, legibility provides a useful prism for us to consider cinematic representations of cities, and is especially useful in thinking about how filmmakers choose to organize and construct urban space within their films.

By looking at a trio of films, all produced in Chicago, I propose to take a very narrow horizontal cut across the history of cinema’s relationship with the city. In reading these films with an eye toward their engagement with and representation of urban space, I aim to demonstrate the transformative impact of cinema’s engagement with the city.

The first of the films that I will consider is the most recent, Michael Schultz’s Cooley High (1975). The film, a coming-of-age drama set in and around the Cabrini-Green housing projects on the Near North Side of Chicago, is easily the most widely seen of the group. For my purposes, Cooley High is useful in its illustration of the dominant conventions of city cinema. I discuss these in some detail below, using the film to establish the tropes and themes of the conventional approach. The other two films I will discuss are Conrad Friberg’s Halsted Street (1934) – a documentary portrait of Depression-era life in Chicago – and an amateur film produced by E. Hector Coates, an untitled work referred to in collection materials as Chicago River (1955).[2] These three films represent a variety of modes of cinema – amateur, documentary, commercial – and are, additionally, historically and stylistically diverse. Taken together, however, we can draw some meaningful conclusions about the way that film functions to inform our understanding of urban space.

Cooley High: The Conventional Approach to Urban Representation

In the introduction to their book on “urban cinematics,” François Penz and Andong Lu stress the cinema’s transformative potential for urban space.

Indeed, through the framing process and the subsequent screening, even the most anonymous and banal city location will be transformed from an unconsciously recorded space – or naive space – to a consciously recorded space that becomes an expressive space.[3]

As will become immediately apparent, the cinematic representation of urban space compounds the problem of vastness introduced at the outset of this article. Over time, filmmakers have developed an entire vocabulary of cinematic shorthand for depicting urban environments. They rely on specific technologies of motion picture photography, perhaps most famously the aerial shots often used during the opening montages of city-set films. As viewers, we observe familiar recurring visual tropes; the visual synecdoche in which the skyline stands in for the city as a whole illustrates a classic form of this cinematic shorthand. Likewise, iconic landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the White House function metonymically as New York and Washington, respectively; an establishing shot of one of these buildings cues the viewer’s assumptions about film location. A film shot entirely on studio backlots and soundstages reads instead to the viewer as a “city film” by virtue of the inclusion of these geographically-specific signifiers.

But Cooley High, a film that in many ways functions conventionally with respect to the various devices identified above, complicates our notions of this cinematic shorthand. It opens with a pan of the skyline of Chicago’s iconic Loop district, cutting from there into a montage of mostly aerial shots of the downtown area, featuring architectural landmarks of the city like the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, and Lake Point Tower. In the next sequence of shots, the camera turns its attention away from the majestic skyscrapers of downtown Chicago and moves down out of the clouds. Even when the camera moves to ground level, however, it betrays no sense of the city as a space inhabited by people. The aerial montage by design reduces a city to its built environment, but the shots at street level here depict a city in which the only motions are the conveyances of the motor age–automobiles and L trains traveling about the streets of an otherwise desolate downtown. The camera follows one northbound L train over the Wells Street Bridge as it disappears beyond the Merchandise Mart, symbolically departing the iconic downtown of Chicago and leaving it for another world beyond. With a series of cuts, the camera continues to follow what is presumably the same L train until arriving, via an exaggerated camera motion, at the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago’s Near North Side. As the opening montage concludes, we see our first real live human being, a young man – whom we are soon to be introduced to as Cochise, one of the protagonists of the film – running through an alley adjacent to the projects.

Still from Cooley High

In point of fact, Cabrini-Green sat one mile – and two L stops – north of the Loop, but part of the work of Schultz’s montage here is to suggest the psychogeographic distance and emotional boundary between downtown Chicago and its most notorious ghetto.[4] (I am adapting “psychogeography” somewhat loosely from Guy Debord, who defines the “charmingly vague” concept as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”[5]) Here, Schultz relies on the device of the elevated train to transport the audience across this boundary zone. But the success of the sequence hinges on the elision of the train ride itself. The journey between downtown Chicago and Cabrini-Green is a five-minute trip, but by cutting away after the opening aerial montage and only returning as the train is passing by Cabrini-Green, Schultz is able to implant in the viewer’s mind an exaggerated sense of distance between the settings of the first two scenes of his film.

Approximately three minutes of screen time elapses before we arrive at the first inhabited space of the film. This postponement, taken together with the camera movement through such starkly contrasted spaces – from an aerial perspective in the former, at ground level in the latter – echoes Michel de Certeau’s notion of the spatial “practice” of urban life. He evocatively describes the “voluptuous pleasure” derived from viewing a city from above; though he speaks specifically of the observation deck of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, I think we can easily draw analogies to the perspectives of downtown Chicago that Schultz affords us.[6] From one hundred ten stories above ground level, de Certeau finds that we are able to “totalize the most immoderate of human texts,” referring to the contemporary metropolis. The experience of viewing the city from above, he contends, is that of Icarus being lifted above the world below, and with such elevation comes a profound sense of pleasure.

Yet as with Icarus, the spectator raised to such heights is set up for an inevitable fall back to the “practice” of urban life, and, in particular, to the experience of traversing a city at ground level. For de Certeau, the urban text is “written” by these practitioners of city life – the pedestrians – who labor to create the urban text all the while unable to “read” it. This speaks to the inherent paradox not only of de Certeau’s observation deck, but also of the cinema’s attempt to represent urban space more generally: in order to capture some sense of the totality of the city, we must remove ourselves from the practice of city life. Not coincidentally, we hear echoes of Poe here: the impossibility of the totalizing perspective ensures that the modern city does not permit itself to be read.

Psychogeography: The City and its Image

This disconnection between our lived experience and the mental pictures we have of cities was a primary interest of Guy Debord. In his essay “Theory of the Dérive,” he recalls Chombart de Lauwe’s admonition that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” De Lauwe sought to illustrate this process of imaging by mapping an individual city resident’s experience of the city. Debord describes the process thusly:

[de Lauwe] diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.[7]

Debord would take inspiration from de Lauwe’s investigations creating one of his most well-known works, the Guide Psychogéographique de Paris (1955). The guide represents an alternative mapping of Paris that divides the city’s neighborhoods up into discrete units. The neighborhoods are repositioned and links drawn between them (represented on the map below with red arrows) based on inhabitants’ emotional experience of the city – what de Certeau would call the spatial practice of city life.

Guy Debord, Guide Pychogéographique de Paris, 1955.

For Debord, this reconfiguration of urban space was equal measures avant-garde aesthetics and radical political practice. But he was not alone in embracing psychogeography. Denis Wood chronicles the emergence of the concept during the 1950s and 1960s, when the term came into use on both sides of the Atlantic, apparently independently of each other.[8] Within a decade of Debord’s seminal essay on psychogeography (“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”), a group of American university professors had begun to employ the term to describe a new set of methods for urban study that they were developing. Associated most closely with faculty at Clark University, psychogeography first made its way into an American classroom in 1967, according to Wood.[9]

For five years the field flourished, producing a number of theses and dissertations, but it mutated fairly rapidly into environmental psychology, environmental cognition, environmental modelling, participatory design, and other splinters.[10]

Wood, who was a student at Clark under David Stea during this time period, credits Stea with introducing Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, published in 1960, into the emerging discourse on psychogeography.[11] Lynch’s seminal work on the questions of urban form and mental mapping form a frame of reference and a point of departure for this paper; specifically here I look to the ideas of legibility and imageability developed in The Image of the City. Lynch offers us a vocabulary and a theory of spatial and temporal representation that has a special resonance for media scholars interested in urban environments. Those who have taken up Lynch’s work, including Karen Voss, Richard Koeck, and François Penz, emphasize the utility of Lynch’s notions of legibility and imageability to media studies.[12]

A main thrust of The Image of the City is to establish a methodological framework for studying legibility. Lynch proposes a two-pronged approach to evaluating a city’s environmental image; data gleaned from detailed observations of the urban area made by researchers is analyzed alongside interviews with city residents about their individual mental images of the city. Study participants would typically be asked to describe or sketch locations in the city, or to describe a route from one location in the city to another. Using these interviews, Lynch was able to demonstrate that there were appreciable differences in the way that urban residents constructed mental images of their cities, such that Bostonians were much more able to recall specific details of the urban environment than were Angelenos. He uses the results of his case studies (in addition to Boston and Los Angeles, he conducted fieldwork in Jersey City) to argue for a revised approach to urban planning, proposing a model for identifying and combining elements of urban plans in such a way as to maximize legibility. 

Halsted Street: Imageability and Urban Form in the Cinema

But why introduce Lynch into a discussion of the cinema? By now, it should be clear that motion pictures offer us a unique view into how residents render the city legible. In more specific instances, we can see how individual films function in an analogous fashion to Lynch’s own observations of urban form. Halsted Street and Chicago River are two such instances of the kind of methodologically rigorous approaches to urban representation that evoke Lynch’s studies. Each film presents a cinematic study of “paths,” one of the essential building blocks of urban design. For Lynch, paths were the “channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally or potentially moves.”[13] As such, they are one of the most important determinants of legibility; the “blurriness” of the environmental image of Los Angeles, for instance, was attributed in large part to the disorientation caused by the crisscrossing freeways that dominate the city’s transportation scheme.

Still from Halsted Street, 1934

Both Halsted Street and Chicago River deal strictly with the way an individual observer perceives a path through the city. By thinking about these films in terms of legibility, we can begin to elucidate a specifically cinematic mode of perception as it regards depictions of urban environments. Superficially, the two use similar methods to present their sketches of urban life; in each film, the most important decision was made before the camera started rolling, when the filmmakers decided to pick a direction and start moving. The paths taken by each filmmaker through the city determine to a large extent the image that he portrays. However, the methodological similarity that the two films share masks a divergence between the ways each filmmaker constructs the urban environment in his film.

Whereas Coates’s film is concerned primarily with how the natural paths of Chicago come to shape the image of the city, Friberg presents a vision of urban life that is largely alienated from the natural environment. Halsted Street opens with an initial title card, which announces that “This Film Presents a Cross Section of Chicago As Seen on Halsted Street—from the City Limits on the Southern End to Lake Michigan on the North.” Already we are faced with several layers of meaning. Halsted Street is a main north-south artery in Chicago, running parallel to and one mile to the west of State Street, the y-axis in the city’s Hippodamian grid system. While the geometric precision of Halsted Street’s location is the result of human artifice, the bookends of the film are significant in their relationship to natural boundaries. Not only does the film conclude in a park adjoining Lake Michigan, but its point of embarkation, at the city limits of Chicago on the South Side at Halsted Street, is marked by the Little Calumet River.[14]

Halsted Street opens with a shot of a farmer tilling his land on the southern outskirts of the city. In juxtaposition, the film concludes with shots of elites riding their horses for leisure in a park. The contrast is stark; while the farmer relies on his horses to maintain the land, the elites can afford to keep horses as instruments of pleasure. Despite the parallels between the bookend shots of the film, much of the rest of Halsted Street emphasizes the built environment of Chicago. The film proceeds in a linear fashion, moving steadily north along Halsted through the various districts of the city that the street traveled through.

Friberg moves the viewer through the South Side of Chicago, focusing his camera on the shopping district at 63rd Street in Englewood, the Union Stockyards between 39th and 47th Streets and the massive street markets on Maxwell Street. In addition, he depicts the diversity of the population on the South Side, shooting among the various ethnic neighborhoods along Halsted, including those of the Swedish, Italian, Polish, Mexican and Greek immigrants to the city.[15] Continuing past Maxwell Street and the Hull House, Friberg takes his viewers through the vice district that then covered the city’s West Loop. Moving onto the North Side, the camera passes through the slums that would later be razed to make way for the same Cabrini-Green housing projects featured in Cooley High. Moving steadily north, we move into more affluent quarters in Lincoln Park and Lakeview, culminating with the horse-riding scene mentioned above.

Throughout the journey, Friberg carefully delineates between separate districts in the city, usually by marking the boundaries that he crosses. We can read Friberg’s Chicago as exceptionally legible, a successful effort to control the settlement and cultural activity of residents through the gridded street system. Not only does the film follow a clearly-demarcated path, but it moves through a number of well-defined and discrete districts on the way. The traveler along Halsted Street is able to recognize and order these districts according to a number of different visual criteria. Most obviously, there is a series of local landmarks designating the district (ethnic grocers in the immigrant neighborhoods, cattle pens in the stockyards, the movie marquees announcing erotic films in the vice district). In addition, the ever-present visual reminder of spatial organization, the street sign, included in the film at regular intervals by Friberg, indicates how blocks are created as discrete units of city life.

Chicago River: Nature’s Pathways

Chicago River marks a different kind of exploration of legibility. Whereas Halsted Street is primarily concerned with demonstrating the diversity and imageability of the population along Halsted, Chicago River, filmed in 1955, instead explores how natural paths (in this case, the river and the lake) give shape to the way humans interact with the urban environment. Coates’ film follows a trip down the South Branch of the river from the Loop to the Calumet-Sag Channel, then east through the Channel to Lake Michigan, before proceeding north again, through the Lake, to downtown Chicago.

Postcard of Chicago River in downtown Chicago, c. 1960

Coates’s film documents a moment of transition in the use of the city’s waterways. None but the bravest would have volunteered for a pleasure cruise down the South Branch of the Chicago River twenty years before this film was shot, during Friberg’s era. Just south of the point where Halsted Street crosses the river is the notorious “Bubbly Creek,” the longtime dumping grounds for the Union Stockyards – a witches’ brew of a waterway that bred odors and gaseous emissions for decades.[16] Chicago was a very industrial city during the first half of the twentieth century, and the South Branch of the river was a critical conduit in getting the goods produced in Chicago out to the world, as the never-ending flow of barges down the river would testify.  Around the time that Chicago River was filmed, the city was working to improve the harbor at the Port of Chicago in order to make it more easily accessible for oceangoing vessels. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway several years after this footage was shot reduced the amount of time it would take for a ship to get from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean, encouraging additional freight traffic by ship.

The relevant questions to ask here concern how Coates’ vision of Chicago differs from Friberg’s, and how those differences might be related to the larger ideas of legibility that I have been discussing. Coates explores Chicago’s relationship to its waterways, historically the single most important relationship the city has had to the natural environment. And yet the depiction of Chicago made by Coates is largely illegible, by Lynch’s standard. While the river does constitute one of the most significant paths through the city, it is one that few of the city’s residents take with any regularity. The opening scenes of Coates’s film, as the boat moves through the Loop area, are easily the most legible, given the presence of so many landmarks – defined by Lynch as city elements that serve as shared and fixed points of reference for its inhabitants. In this case, we see familiar structures like the Wrigley Building or the bridge carrying elevated trains over Lake Street, as recognizable to Chicagoans in the 1950s as they are today. Once the boat moves further south along the river, though, space becomes abstracted; each passing barge serves as a floating point of reference for people trying to make sense of their surroundings.

Friberg, on the other hand, was able to establish a concrete sense of spatiality without having to depend on landmarks for visual cues. In Halsted Street, he relies on the viewers’ familiarity with Chicago’s grid system to achieve this effect; though the corner store at 59th and Halsted may look very similar to that at 35th and Halsted, we are able to differentiate between the two because the presence of street signs facilitates mental mapping. This approach to legibility allows for a kind of random access memory – we are able to conjure up images of particular districts of the city based on their coordinates.

But the depiction of the river that we get in Coates’ film suggests a different kind of perception at work, one much more reliant on the linearity of space and memory. That is to say, the traveler of this particular path will have no problem identifying the order in which particular scenes were encountered along the way. However, given the paucity of landmarks along the river and the absence of a scheme for organizing its space, it is comparatively more difficult to speak with specificity about an individual location along the river. In a certain sense, Chicago River argues for a mode of perceiving the city as a stream of images, rather than a series of discrete pictures plotted along a grid. Lynch would contend that this distinction has profound consequences on the legibility of the resulting images of the city; by fixing the scenes of his film to specific and well-traveled geographic coordinates, Friberg creates a mental map of Chicago that is easily apprehended by the viewer. Coates, on the other hand, relies on a crude sort of vector navigation – the viewer knows where the journey through the city started, in which direction it is headed, and how long it has taken. This strategy results in a blurry mental map, in which the viewer can only generally ascertain her place within the city.[17]

Conclusion

Each of these films reflects a particularly cinematic expression of the process of mental mapping. In each case, filmmakers collect images from “the field” and compose them into meaningful sequences that represent some kind of a coherent whole, using a process not entirely dissimilar from that advocated by Lynch in his discussion of cities. Despite significant variations in the approaches and outcomes of the respective films, both Halsted Street and Chicago River argue for a kind of city film grounded expressly in the lived experience of that city’s inhabitants. This stands in distinction to the way Cooley High envisions the city. The aerial shots of that film’s opening montage function in the same way that views from an observation deck or skylines on a souvenir postcard do: they teach us what the city looks like, but from a perspective that none of us will typically attain in the practice of everyday life. While this view certainly constitutes an image of the city, Lynch would argue that we need to design cities to be equally imageable at ground level for their inhabitants. Halsted Street and Chicago River suggest ways that the cinema can function to advance that very goal. Insofar as they are successful, they help us to render more transparent the opacity of the modern city by making it more legible. After a trip up Halsted Street with Friberg, even Edgar Allen Poe might conclude that, despite protestations to the contrary, the city can be read after all.

•

As I write, I’m sitting in Advocate Health Center in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, struck by the Warean aesthetic of my circumstances. Alone in a now-closed “Courtyard Café” I’m surrounded by vibrant ochres, deep denim blues, and rusty oranges.  Echoing the primary colors of Building Stories’ cover, it’s an oddly cheerful, faux-Tuscan scheme in which to pursue my solitary work. I picture a bird’s eye view of repeated square tables, me with my Mac in the lower left, Ware’s graphic novel next to me, one of the booklets fallen to the floor. I’m living in an image that resonates with Ware’s characteristic tension between scenes of perfunctory conversation, boredom, and reminiscence and the beauty of the smooth lines, draftsmanlike precision, and blocks of unmodulated color, both muted and vivid, that he renders them in.  And this is an in-between time consonant with the small moments of the mundane he takes pains to portray: I’m waiting for my friend Corrine to come with a caffeine-free Diet Coke so we can take it to our friend James, who had a stroke almost a month ago.[1]

The contents of Building Stories exposed

Pantheon’s recent release of Chris Ware’s Building Stories has prompted a flurry of reviews, “like a flock of tiny birds, taking off.”[2]  As an object, it’s an unwieldy genre-bending thing: as one reviewer charmingly announces, “Chris Ware has published a box.”  Building Stories comes housed in a large cardboard box, indeed, and as the Library of Congress classification states on the inside cover, it’s comprised of “14 easily misplaced elements.”  True to his reputation for self-deprecation, Ware has worried that the book will come off as gimmicky, but the format, designed to be readable in any order, is nothing short of truly important.  I was at the Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference[3] when Ware first showed a preview of the project.  There was a collective gasp when he revealed that it would be composed of multiple pieces: a large format newspaper-style comic, a game-board, tabloid-sized papers, posters, diminutive booklets, double-sided panorama strips, and two bound volumes.  His peers on the panel, most memorably Canadian cartoonist Seth, uttered expletives and feigned paroxysms of despair.

Building Stories is kind of a big deal.  It’s literally large and literally hefty, a particularly material printed object.  Many of Ware’s reviewers have commented on the way in which it’s “not Kindle-able”, heralding it as “one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print.”  There’s no small amount of irony, here: for comics—traditionally printed on the cheapest and most disposable paper, reviled as trashy, mere entertainment, kid stuff—to be an ambassador for the bookish, the “lofty and the beautiful,” for serious art, is, well, funny, but it’s also totally warranted.  Because of their history as a mass medium with its origin in advertising freebies, comic books with serious aesthetic and literary aims have had to negotiate a by-now tiring sense of conundrum between highbrow and lowbrow in mainstream press coverage.  Art Spiegelman’s Maus managed a major shake-up of mainstream conceptions of comics when it took on the sobering subject matter of Spiegelman’s parents’ experience of the Holocaust and its aftereffects.[4]  It appears that while mainstream media still has the high-low tension on its radar, it’s become very comfortable with labeling Ware’s graphic novel highbrow, a comfort aided and abetted by the fact that avant-garde pieces such as Marcel Duchamps’s Museum in a Box and Joseph Cornell’s shadowboxes are among Ware’s chief inspirations. Maus, especially as compared to Spiegelman’s work in RAW, is formally more conventional, parceled out for the most part in regularly-sized and regularly-paced square panels. Its subject matter, for the medium at the time, was what experimental. That Building Stories’ form is experimental is easily recognizable to his readers—it’s a book in parts, with no clear beginning and no clear end, much of which is recounted in ways that betray how the scenes are filtered through the protagonist’s narrative memory.  I’d like to briefly suggest, though, that his subject matter—the everyday life of a young, disabled, lady Chicagoan and the other, everyday lives in her orbit—is experimental, radical, in ways that seem to be going under-recognized in the generalized excitement about the novel’s peculiar constellated form.

Excerpt from Building Stories

Building Stories includes earlier versions of itself: its subject matter is composed as materials added to extant subject matter.[5]  The game-board’s panel images appeared in the back pages of the 16th issue of Ware’s comics periodical, Acme Novelty Library, and both of the bound books in the box have appeared earlier—one, bound to look like a Little Golden Book, appeared in the New York Times magazine in 2005-2006, and the other, an olive green and linen bound book, appeared as Acme Novelty Library 18.  In the New York Times run, we are introduced to a 3-flat apartment building located somewhere around Division and Damen, by my estimates (the protagonist lies at a dinner party, saying she lives at Division and Sacramento in the much scrappier Humboldt Park neighborhood—and must confess she was pandering to her friend Cary’s militancy about gentrification when a boy, Phil, gives her a ride home.  In the expanded, extended version of the story, Cary later directs programming for the Frank Lloyd Wright Unity Temple in Oak Park).  Each page-length installment depicts one hour in a 24-hour cycle, in which the woman on the top floor of the apartment clogs her toilet with a tampon and must notify the landlady and then wait around for a plumber.  The story focuses on her loneliness and boredom in waiting around, as she attempts to draw or journal but actually naps, mopes, and calls everyone she knows.  Her scenes are intercalated with glimpses into the lives of the other floors’ inhabitants: a dysfunctional couple on the second floor, and a spinster landlady on the first.  Acme Novelty 18 gives us a complex, memory-mediated backstory on the protagonist: we learn that in art school, she had her first serious boyfriend, became pregnant, had an abortion, and was then dropped by him, suddenly, when he went on a backpacking trip to Europe and never returned.  These events are narrated from a present that roughly coincides with the present of the New York Times run, where the protagonist lives in the same three-flat and works at the same flower shop.  The story—and the protagonist—lives in the hangover of these art school events, along with a storyline in which she works as a nanny just after graduating (she’s fired when she becomes the object of her charge’s sexual desire, only to find that she had been hired in part because his parents had hoped that her short leg and prosthetic would make her undesirable).  The other pieces in the novel-box add stories from the protagonist’s later marriage and family life to the “methodical drip, drip, drip of Chris Ware’s characterizations, slowly building the prosaic lives of characters one small or larger incident after another over time,” as was beautifully articulated in Publisher’s Weekly.  Ware’s work is technically beautiful, to be sure—but to my mind, this accretive, slow, immersive rendering of ordinariness is what is radical and exciting.  I’ve argued elsewhere that Ware’s narratives of noticing, the slow pacing of much of his comics storytelling, and the iconicization of extremely particular details (crumbs on the floor, fuzzy toilet seats) create a certain aesthetic of ordinariness in which the extraordinary body can be enfolded or encountered in counter-intuitive ways that still feel like realism.  In a more generalized sense, I think that Ware manages to deliver on the transformative potential of fixing on the ordinary that other genres fail to realize (I’m thinking of reality TV)—in holding us close to these mundane pile-ups of history and routine, Ware’s comics give us practice in tolerating the affective weightiness of the everyday.

Excerpt from Building Stories

An extended aside: Ware’s novel is coming out at the same time that there’s been a bubble of alarm masked as ridicule concerning TLC’s reality TV show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Honey Boo Boo is a child beauty pageant contestant, and her self-declared “redneck” family has elicited giggles for their idiosyncratic use of language and metaphor and unabashed disregard for normative body practices or lifestyle regimes. Their family recipe for spaghetti sauce is ketchup mixed with melted butter, they claim farting aids in weight-loss, and they liken the vulva to a Hardee’s biscuit—unashamed. This makes people very nervous. I taught a course on reality TV, and one of the most useful concepts for our analysis of the genre’s normativities came from an essay by Lauren Berlant, a concept I affectionately dubbed “the feeling fart.” In “The Subject of True Feeling,” Berlant argues that public spectacles of vulnerable, infantilized subjects can serve as lightning rods for national sentimentality: a worker, for instance, gets spectacularized as an isolated crisis, a particular circumstance in need of concern and care from privileged citizens, when in fact that worker’s situation is resolutely ordinary, absolutely everyday. The emergency spectacle of the worker takes “a visible sign of what is ordinary and systemic amid the chaos of capitalism” and mobilizes an individualized solution. “The problem that organizes so much feeling,” Berlant elaborates, “then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure of feeling dissipates, like so much gas.”[6]  This sort of affective management of ordinary attrition happens everywhere in reality television (think of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), substituting spectacles of livable, even miraculous individualized everydayness for any sense of systemic injustice.  Part of that release, like the dissipation of so much gas, depends upon the spectacularized subjects’ orderability into norms.  This is what I’d argue creates the anxieties surrounding Honey Boo Boo—a lack of appropriate shame, one felt by “classically privileged national subjects” with ridicule providing the only release.

To return to my earlier claim, I’d argue that what is readily recognizable as formal experimentation in Building Stories also does the work of immersing its readers in a 21st century, middle class, Chicagoan ordinary in a way that doesn’t offer any easy affective pressure valve, either.[7] If I’ve argued in the past that Ware gives us conceptual training wheels for thinking disability as something other than a condition of radical otherness or radical lack, what I’m suggesting here is that his work may also give us affective training wheels for sustaining an engagement with the ordinariness of contemporary life—insofar as it’s life lived under certain political-economic, and certain ideological, conditions. My use of the word “weightiness” in saying that Ware makes us tolerate “affective weightiness” is perhaps melodramatic, but is suggested to me by the title of Pierre Bourdieu’s edited volume, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. As Building Stories expands the protagonist’s story line into her middle age in Oak Park, she is riddled by anxiety about what she and her husband would do if rising oil prices caused an economic crash and groceries suddenly became unavailable, a worry that pushes its way into the surface of the story elliptically, via Google searches for generators and NPR-prompted fretting.  It feels a little amiss to be talking about social suffering in this narrative of (self-consciously) first-world problems like smartphone disconnection and abandoned dreams of writing and painting. This kind of narrative, though, is something you might say resists figures of infantile citizenship: the protagonist is really worried for herself, not her daughter, and it’s a worry of disappointment, not raised alarm over fetus-like fragility. You might say that what we are made to encounter and move through are the mnemonic resonances and quotidian events of a plodding middle-aged citizenship—one that for all its mortgage-having privilege, is no less subject to the precarities of neoliberalism, and one that doesn’t operate by galvanizing crises that can be dissolved, but by immersing readers in unspectacular scenes of life making, under ordinary circumstances.

Now perhaps I’ve gotten a bit heavy—Ware’s interviews corroborate my claims insofar as he says he wants to get at “an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.”[8] While reviewers without fail make some general characterization of Ware’s stories as “depressing,” characterized by melancholia, ennui, and awkwardness, moments of real loveliness abound. The protagonist and her husband look up from the glow of their iPhones as their daughter chases lightning bugs, window squares of light travel across apartment walls as an afternoon passes, Miss Kitty stretches on various beds at various moments. And, predicated on working the way memory works, according to Ware’s interviews, these booklets and posters as an ensemble create pleasurable resonances with one another and our own mental image archives, as with the pages that represent the protagonist as if she’s on the acetate overlays of an encyclopedia’s anatomy section.

Excerpt from Building Stories

 •

I leave you with five reasons to get your hands on this box ASAP:

1.) Per Louis Sullivan’s edict “form follows function,” the format of the pieces contribute to what they express in delightful ways: a panorama strip, double-sided, recounts a time when the protagonist is feeling particularly depressed and desperate: in reading across the strip and flipping it over to continue reading, one could keep going interminably around and around, creating the sense of being mired in an intense feeling.  As Jeet Heer has observed, “One of the largest broadsheets deals with death, which is both big news and physically hard to handle.”

2.) Two of the pieces follow the misadventures of an adorable bumblebee, Branford, who also happens to queer gender norms and ridicule all of human theology, philosophy, and art!

3.) The novel is best read at a large table or on the floor, and a first encounter is like rifling through someone else’s keepsake box.

4.) You will feel less alone in moments where you have indulged in internal, vitriolic rants that soon prove to be entirely unjustified.

5.) As the protagonist exclaims at one point, it’s a nice to have a break from the “criminals or perverts” of literature in the style of Nabokov and Dostoevsky. But Building Stories is still very serious, thought-provoking, usual-reading-practice-defying. It’s experimental—it pushes the boundary of what comics as a medium can do, and by extension what any sort of aesthetic production might hope to do.

•

Margaret Fink graduated from MAPH in 2007, and is currently working on a PhD in English, also at the University of Chicago.  Her research focuses on American prose and graphic after WWII, representation and realism, ordinariness, and the non-normative body. 

The Drop

We climbed into the hottest bush in that warzone
on a day when clouds and parachutes were indistinguishable,
believing we’d found another clue to this game,
but all we found were a few forlorn berries
and a three thousand square foot mansion haunted by a black leotard.
Next, we penetrated the thick forest, hacking away the brush
with the edges of our hands until the blood hardened
into little red protective gloves.
Soon we arrived at a clearing
where a pot of beans was boiling rapidly
and a sign beside it read: “Do not touch. Back soon.”
We stood under a waterfall until we felt ourselves
slowly being erased, and then, capping our canteens
and retrieving our clothes from a nearby rock,
we set off again with the long day ahead of us.
Tall grass gave way to short grass and short grass to a lost city of gold.
The professor told us that he had dreamt of this moment all his life.
He was sad to leave it behind and would have stayed
had we only said the word, but we could not.
I would have missed him the most.
Later, when we’d finally found our way back,
we combed that same bush for signs of meaning in this exercise
and when we could find none we simply threw up our hands,
formed an orderly line, and started all over again.

City Lights

When City Lights was made, I was a sparrow on a branch
and my great grandfather, Andreas, was bending
steel rods into the shape of pretzels.
Back then I cavorted in neon-green puddles
outside the padlocked factory gate.
I held the block hostage with the sound
of crashing marbles, and once my mother
dropped her funnel cake on the floor.
After school I hiked the mountain to its amazing peak
and watched blind deer shoulder the slanting rain,
and fire ants spill out of a lightning-blasted stump
and hail fill a gaping cockpit that once held the sky.
Descending that steep hill, the wind wrote its name
on my back, waited for it to dry, then
dropped me in a patch of hospitable clover.
The silver strip of highway flashed
through the trees like a showgirl’s leg.
It was there that I would stop my galloping feet,
shorten the straps of my backpack, and start the long
journey home, reciting Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”
in the lost language of daffodils, which sounds
a lot like pidgin English to me.

Patron of the Arts

No, sir.
This world is not the veil of tears you say it is,

for in the night I can hear the policeman
planning his retirement dinner;

“pigeon pie” says the drainpipe;

“veal” says the sewer grate;

“ratatouilles!” suggests the madman on the corner.

If there are metals in the water we drink,
I have not tasted them.

If you say my body
is caked with microwaves
and secret military communications,

I believe you, sir.
You are the expert here, not I.

But there is something troubling about
that orange hen in the foreground

and those two young reapers
leaning on their scythes
in the field in front of the schoolhouse.

How long has it been, I wonder,
since they were inside that schoolhouse?
A year? A century, maybe?

They look as if they have a bone to pick with me.

You will have to paint this same scene next year
after I’ve knocked down that monstrosity of a barn
and planted a garden as big and as bountiful
as the Garden of Earthly Delights.

•

Andreas Britz (MAPH ’12) was born in Cooperstown, New York and grew up in West Cork, Ireland.  He earned a BA in English from Ohio University before enrolling in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.  His MA thesis, “Profoundly Felt Truths,” contains eleven poems (three of which are featured in this issue of Colloquium) and a brief essay on the poetry of John Berryman.  Andreas is a Delta SkyMiles Frequent Flyer member and an only child. 

(photos by Maren Robinson; MAPH ’03, MAPH Associate Director)

61st and Blackstone is an industrial place. To the east looms the smokeless spire of a closed glass plant, to the north the flat, forgotten remnants of the 61st Street gardens. It is quiet now. It is morning and this hard place is softened. So separate from the gothic labyrinth of the university’s quadrangles, it sits across the midway—a solid span of green that marks the end of green. Slanted light pours through the angular spaces between buildings. In the middle of the street these lines stream like tight rows of soil, a potential sealed by cement. It is here that the didactic worlds of urban and rural are on a collision course.  A chain-link fence is held together by vines that protect a brick and metal building partially hidden by the spire, the chains, the vines. This is the Experimental Station. The farmers have come. It’s market day.

Sign at Experimental Station

Chicago’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood is defined by a varied ethnic demographic and an income disparity that ranges from affluent to impoverished. Home to the University of Chicago, Hyde Park has become an island amidst two of the city’s worst neighborhoods—Woodlawn and Washington Park. The historical boundaries of 60th to the south and 47th to the north have been etched into the land by the traced racial and economic marks of unchangeable routes. Ken Dunn, the director of the Resource Center, the man responsible for implementing the city’s first recycling program, and his business partner the artist Dan Peterman would call the Experimental Station a “border institution”—a place that breaches the 61st Street divide.

He fits in this room. Chairs crafted out of scrap wood fill the front parlor of the Southside Hub of Production (SHOP), a cultural center in Hyde Park. The building is 150 years old. Curtains in street-facing windows billow out contained only by black wrought-iron bars. Ken Dunn hovers his hands over the eccentric, almost deformed woodwork of one of the chairs and you can see the tough, tanned skin of a farmer. Dirt. Soil. Fences. Water. Outside has come in.

Creaking up to the second and third stories of SHOP, Dunn’s excitement grows as single bulb lights, hanging from thin wires, illuminate each of the workshops. It is clear that this is a space of dreams he’s wandering through, in a project still dark and full of potential like a tilled, late winter field. This is where he tells his story—in a place where he fits—in this room, in this house, on this side of this particular city.

•

In the late 1960’s, a year into Ken Dunn’s PhD program at the University of Chicago, he hadn’t yet chosen a specific dissertation topic. Filling his Volkswagen bus with empty barrels, Dunn decided to conduct  an experiment to test the theories he had been working on about local resources. Unemployed men who buzzed around a liquor store, sitting outside reading the paper, looked up when the van sputtered to a halt on the corner. The lot adjacent to the store was piled so high with bottles that the land was consumed. He asked a few of them if they would help pick up and sort the bottles into the barrels. He would drive down to the glass factory six miles south, cash them in and split up the money. They spent the rest of the day working, and each went home with a good amount of cash.

Ken considers the story to be the genesis of the Resource Center, his non-profit recycling program, and explains further, “I took this as kind of a demonstration of a concept, that if one discovered value where nobody else saw it, and combined the overlooked human potential with the overlooked material potential—brought those two together—you would have a self-supporting, value creating system…and you’re not going to get opposition from anybody because you’re not taking what they thought of as rightfully theirs.” The concept would turn into his dissertation, “Resources in Discontent,” and would eventually become the Resource Center itself. He reflects: “A society must be judged by how well it uses its resources, not by any other standard. Understanding resources is understanding what is occurring within a society.”

That day, after he came back and split up the profit, as he was walking away, Dunn couldn’t wait to get back to his desk to take notes and document what had happened. He thought, “This will be my PhD!” It would be a project about valuing things at the most local level, building economies that could positively affect quality of life. His train of thought was interrupted. One of the guys shouted out “Hey man! Where do we work tomorrow?” He turned around and almost said “Oh you don’t get it I’m a student, had an idea — you’ve helped me prove it. I’ll bring you the book when it’s published!” He almost said, “I’m an academic. It’s not my job or your job, it’s just a demonstration.” Turning, he shrugged, calling back: “I don’t know. But I’ll be back within a week or two and give you the plan.”

A new graduate student in the University of Chicago’s art department, Dan Peterman arrived in Chicago in 1983. Peterman spent time rummaging through Dunn’s southside haunts for materials, and the two men eventually met. He came around enough that Ken asked to hire him at the new Resource Center location. Peterman was fast becoming a popular artist in the environmental art movement. The space at 61st and Blackstone, the original drop-site for the Resource Center that Dunn later purchased, was an almost abandoned relic by the time the artist wandered through it. Used at one time as a library, a bakery, a clothing exchange, the spot’s layers of material history fascinated Peterman, who asked to use a part of it for a studio. There he was able to work on his own recycling project—the manipulation of objects and trash, of forgotten resources into works of art.

The Tribune came and took a muddled photo. At 61st and Blackstone, a bus was buried in compost, the deep black pile set off by the contrasting sky, broken by the force of a line of trees assaulting the light. In the early eighties, Dunn and Peterman spent a great deal of time at the place still referred to as 61st Street, creating an office out of the old Volkswagen bus that they buried in compost for natural insulation. It has now formally been named the Experimental Station after Frank Lloyd Wright’s speech “The Art and Craft of the Machine”, in which he wrote: “The fire of many long-honored ideals shall go down in ashes to reappear, phoenix like, with new purpose.” But back then, before purpose or structure, it was two men in a makeshift office, a place where they talked, schemed, laughed, discussed, and dreamed. On the fate of objects. The nature of borders. An obsession with recovery. Collectors. These subjects were real, understood in the company of the other. It was art, what they were doing.

Ken Dunn

Dunn and Peterman both held a strong, singular interest in “border institutions”—an attempt at reconciling the division between southside communities. In a University of Chicago Magazine article in 2000 Peterman explains: “The Resource Center was unique. It was one of the only entities operating across the border. Nothing else was moving across 61st Street other than the postal service.” They have spent the last three decades wandering between worlds, building spaces, bridges between. It has been a defining feature of their life work. Dunn says, “It occurred to me that there could be a significant impact on the city, if we had projects on the boundaries between affluent and underserved areas. The wealthy communities could provide the materials and the neglected communities could provide the manpower. Surplus materials collected from Hyde Park could provide jobs for people in Woodlawn.” The Experimental Station, perhaps even more than the Resource Center, would become an institution capable of bridging the socio-economic, cultural and racial divide—a place of art, music, and food. Ken recalls: “Dan discovered a way of being an artist that was intensely local. He made me understand the power of art. Taking sludge, garbage in society, distilling it all to find quality. Every fact we encounter validates our opinions. This is only broken occasionally, when we don’t have to defend ourselves, when ways of looking are obscured and suddenly possible, open. Art holds what reason cannot. Art allows people to conceive of other ways of being in the world.”

The cleaning of abandoned lots—the project of the Resource Center—was a natural catalyst for the start of dozens of community gardens in these areas. Two city development plans were being undertaken around the same time as the Resource Center’s fruition. The Chicago Transit Authority had just finished constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway, a highway that essentially sliced the southside down the middle. As a result, it forced the Chicago Housing Authority to tear town four miles of housing projects including Stateway Gardens and Robert Taylor Homes, which ran on the highway’s eastern side from Cermak to Garfield Blvd. Also, the Kenwood Branch, the Garfield Park Line and the Stockyard Branch southside “L” stops that serviced three major neighborhoods were abandoned and demolished. This was Chicago transportation at its apogee, and mistakes were made that caused insurmountable geographic isolation for these communities. An expressway that was meant to provide access, to connect southside neighborhoods to the city center, in fact made it an “out-bound” space, defined by its incongruity: a wasteland to be moved through.

Looking through the city’s tax rolls, Dunn discovered that more than half of the lots in the southside neighborhoods were city owned properties. These “soft-sites” are parcels of land that developers have received approval to build on, but which, due to a down-turned economy, loan rejections, or failed funding, are reclaimed by the city and consequently lie fallow. Dunn initially checked on getting permission to garden on the abandoned lots, but it would have been impossible. So, they just started using the land. And it happened again and again.  Dunn explains the start of this new project: “For these neighborhoods to go out, to assert themselves; taking possession of a space that someone else had left, that was injuring their community. That made the project very popular. There’s something about being on the edge, something right about it, even if you can’t articulate it. It really took off. We got a lot of gardens started that way.”

Ken Dunn was the first to initiate both a household and commercial recycling program in the city of Chicago. The original drop-off site, where he had continued to pick up collected materials since the fateful success of that first experiment soon expanded to over sixteen sites throughout the southside. At East 87th and South Kingston, Dunn had knocked at doors, but no one had answered. After years of working the recycling program, word had caught on and men had to walk for miles to find glass, paper, scrap metal that they could drop for cash. Picked clean. There were blocks where half the lots were vacant, and for the first time in a long time, you could see the ground, the dirt. He went out one Saturday with a rake and a shovel. Curtains breathed deeply, billowing out against rib-caged, first floor windows. Curious silhouettes moved in and out of frames and eyes stared down from safe back porch nests, from Chicago’s wooden labyrinths attached to the backs of brick buildings.

University of Chicago Steam Plant at 61st Street & Blackstone

A man came out and asked Dunn what he was doing with the land, what was going in. “I said, ‘It doesn’t seem like these lots are helping anyone who lives around here. I’m just here cleaning up. I was hoping somebody would help.” The man was surprised, expecting a catch. Ken asked him what he thought should go in. The man said, “I’ve always wanted to put a garden in here, but I couldn’t find out who owns it.” Whoever owns it was not putting it to proper use. It didn’t matter who owned it. In Dunn’s opinion, the land should be reverted to the commons. There are over 50,000 abandoned lots in the city, over 10,000 acres; some are being productively used, most are not. They are haunting places, vacant except for the traces of material lives used then abandoned. Here was a plot of land, cleaned and ready. Dunn thought this neighborhood had a right to take it and use it.

On a plot north of the Experimental Station the land is flat and empty. In 2009, just three years ago, this space was the site of the 61st garden that included 143 plots, supporting 130 households. In 1995, Peterman and his wife Connie Spreen purchased the Resource Center-owned 61st Street land, which did not include the garden, and took over as garden coordinators. The garden land, owned by the university, had been used for over twenty years as a community space. The Experimental Station had a tight, symbiotic relationship with both the garden and the community of gardeners, co-evolving in a mass effort of reclamation and transformation. They had created beauty and kinship in a void. Jamie Kalven, a former 61st Street gardener and a teacher at the Experimental Station, asserted in The Huffington Post: “these linked initiatives have enlarged the ground for civic integration. They constitute welcoming and convivial public space where those long kept apart by fear and folklore can become in the deepest sense neighbors.”

The university had made a deal with the Chicago Theological Seminary to build a new “green” facility in exchange for their historical building on the corner of 57th and University Ave. They would need the garden space, adjacent to the building site, for construction work. The construction of a green seminary building that would require the avoidable destruction of a local garden teemed with irony. Adding fuel to a fire that tore through community meetings and Hyde Park Herald editorials, the former Chicago Theological Seminary building would become the future location of the Milton Friedman Institute.

With the understanding that the land was provisional, the community was forced to capitulate and the garden was torn down. Ken Dunn, who was more and more removed from the work at the Experimental Station, has a respect for the transience of land tenure, believing that the debate over the garden got out of hand. The work he does depends more and more on the support of the city, which gives him temporary control over vacant lots, and, since Rahm Emmanuel’s election the city finances the clearing, initial soil costs, fencing and irrigation for his garden projects.

The sun is setting into SHOP sending filtered, musty light into the ground floor studios. He’s excited as he turns a corner, pushing apart two French doors. A little room, with floor to ceiling book shelves envelope a small fireplace with thin black bricks. The space has been obviously transformed, even to new eyes. “The artist is my old friend Dan Peterman. What you’re looking at is plastic wood—one of his main mediums. In the early eighties a company on the southside invested in this stuff, made millions of pieces from recycled plastic products and went immediately out of business because the planks shrunk in the sun. They gave it all to me, and I gave it to Dan.”

Each piece is approximately five by eight inches, the size of a book, in every shade of blue and green, speckled with the faded memory of melted objects. Peterman reconstructed the floor of the room into a plastic parquet design and lined up the remaining pieces to fill the empty shelves. Dunn stands in this blue dream quietly. He turns, shrugs, hands-in-pockets, looking at the fake plastic books.

61st Street Farmer’s Market

He had worked with Peterman most of his life, on a project that would never be complete. “This exhibit makes me nostalgic.” He pulls out a cornflower blue plank, holding it tightly between farmer fingers. “Dan and I have always talked about writing a book about our work on the southside. Our story. But the leisure time has never been there; the work is never done. And look at what he has made—a library full of empty books.” Putting back the piece, fitting it in line with all the rest, his eyes are clear as he turns away to leave. “It’s appropriate isn’t it? But very sad.”

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The lot is still vacant. The sun has just come up and bars of light playfully mimic the forgotten garden rows at 61st. Now trucks are pulling in, white tents reach for the blue sun and bloom like gardenias. Farmers stack themselves in rows side-by-side and wooden tables with produce; from far away the fruits and vegetables, meats and cheeses are colors off set in sharp contrast to the white of the tents and the grey of the streets. The doors of the Experimental Station have been thrown open. The gates are untangled and even the lot looking on in earnest is fecund, full of a dormant potential. This is a place of transformation, of experiment, and even of revolution. And it is most apparent on market days.

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Marlee Prutton works for the Chicago Humanities Festival and is an urban farmer for the Resource Center. She graduated from MAPH in 2012. A native west coaster, she misses the Pacific and the Sierra Nevada, but is slowly succumbing to this city, the prairie, and the blue inland sea. 

(photo of Ken Dunn by Matthew R.F. Balousek, all other photos by Eric Allix Rogers)

ON CLIMATE CHANGE by Ingrid Haftel

I was about eleven when I imagined climate change for the first time. I was up either too late or too early, watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. The episode that left its indelible mark on me opens with a young woman, alone in her apartment.

First we see an unforgiving sun shining outside her window; next, her long, lustful pause over a small glass of water. By the time Rod Serling steps onto the screen, the situation has revealed itself: in this alternate universe, the Earth is moving closer to the sun. “All of man’s little devices to stir up the air are no longer luxuries,” Serling intones, “they happen to be pitiful and panicky keys to survival.” The physical discomfort I imagined watching that episode left the strongest impression; it’s the same anxious feeling I get walking to the L on particularly merciless summer mornings.

Still from The Twilight Zone, 1961.

Serling’s story might not have the science right, but the value of his storytelling is evermore relevant. At the time of my fateful viewing, the clarion call of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been sounding for seven years, since 1988. Twenty-two years later, weary from decades of governmental inaction and the outright impudence of corporations toward the idea of man-made climate change, activist Bill McKibben let the thermometer break: “What I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.”

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It took me a long time to get mad, and even longer to get busy. Getting busy has been harder. As a curator and writer committed to the idea that critical interpretation and artistic inquiry shape the world around us, I have no doubt that the humanities will play numerous critical roles in determining the climate of the future. But I imagine I’m not alone when I struggle to envision what these roles should look like. Part of the difficulty stems from the gravitational pull of the politics and passions that continually tug us in so many directions. But another challenge—the challenge that I’d like to explore here—is categorical: the crisis of climate change demands new modes of interpretation. “To call human beings geological agents,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, “is to scale up our imagination of the human.”[1] How to exercise this imagination is a question that deserves our attention.

I recently worked on an exhibition designed around the goal of getting people to understand and care about basic sustainability issues: energy consumption, water use, food production, air pollution, waste, and—most importantly—climate change. In one section of the exhibition, we explored what the climate of a future Chicago might look like. In this city, we’re particularly lucky to have the Chicago Climate Action Plan, a comprehensive report from 2010 that outlines current climate scenarios and strategies for future planning. (What will become of this report under the Emanuel administration, however, remains to be seen.) We borrowed the plan’s clear language to describe the summer of the future under a high carbon emissions scenario: by the end of the century, a Chicago summer could feel like Mobile, Alabama, with an average heat index of 105 degrees. We ask our visitors to imagine a future with frequent heavy rain and more heat waves. A sump pump stands on display as a metonym for increased flooding––an easy image to conjure for Chicagoans used to flooded basements.

These are small attempts at making climate change real for people, and I’m not yet sure how successful they are. In many ways, the uncertain future we face confounds interpretation. In his essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty writes: “It is not surprising [that] the crisis of climate change should produce anxieties precisely around futures that we cannot visualize.”[2] One of Chakrabarty’s theses is that man-made climate change represents a “breach” between the modern separation of human and natural history.[3] This breach demands new modes of inquiry and imagination: “[the] ensuing crisis for humans is not understandable unless one works out the consequences of [global warming]. The consequences make sense only if we think of humans as a form of life and look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet.”[4] For Chakrabarty, this situation requires nothing less than a new concept of history—one that stitches together the “recorded” history of human culture with the “deep” history of mankind as one species living on a very old and changing planet.

Much of my own thinking on how to imagine and interpret this new history has been shaped by looking at photographs. One comparatively popular model for representing and addressing our relationship to environmental crisis is well represented by The Altered Landscape, a recent exhibition of the Nevada Museum of Art. Each photo in the exhibition—and in the museum’s larger permanent collection bearing the same name —offers up evidence of the Anthropocene: unprecedented, man-made environmental devastation and the uncannily “unnatural” environments we humans have constructed for ourselves. Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_NYC 07 (1) tilt-shifts a bird’s eye view of New York City, transforming real bricks and mortar into a scene resembling a child’s model set. Images from David Maisel’s Terminal Mirage series turn the Great Salt Lake into a work of abstraction, morphing the natural and man-made processes affecting the lake and its environs into startling canvases.

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_NYC 07 (1), 2005.

David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 13, 2003.

Both as documents and artworks, the images in The Altered Landscape are an invaluable resource. Yet for the most part, it’s only the evidence of human presence that dominates this work; few people show up here. The perspective adopted in many of these images replicates a divide between the human and the natural, wherein the photographer’s lens bears witness to a subaltern environment. In this way, The Altered Landscape—and other projects like it that have emerged over the past decade—operates as consciousness-raising effort. This is a critically important role to play. But it can be very hard to tell where we are implicated in these images—or how we might create active and affective relationships from them.

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In 1972, a newly formed Environmental Protection Agency launched Documerica, a project that charged 70 photographers with documenting “subjects of environmental concern.” More than 22,000 images were produced over the course of 115 unique assignments, documenting every state in the United States. While many of these images would look at home in a collection like The Altered Landscape, the ones that continue to confront me—continue to challenge me to consider what humanities-based inquiry might say to a matter of concern like climate change—are of a very different sort.

The best of Documerica reflects the new ecology of a shrinking and shifting planet. We are everywhere here: crammed onto crowded beachfronts, negotiating traffic, trashing things, caring for things, making things, finding moments to catch our breath.

To pick one: a woman, short hair glistening with sweat, sitting on a pier. A bike is lying on its side next to her. She’s shown facing outwards toward, the caption tells us, the Hudson River, on what looks like a remarkably warm day. The trash and chrome fenders in the background provide the soundtrack: horns, talking, scraping, a low din that ebbs and flows like a wave over the hot pavement. Nature in these images is right where it has always been, at the edge of our own existence, waiting to be fixed by our perception like a photograph.

Wil Blanche, Pause for relaxation on a pier overlooking the Hudson…, US EPA Documerica project, 1973.

David Falconer, The Gas Shortage in the Pacific Northwest…, US EPA Documerica project, 1973.

Documerica has been interpreted as the stylistic and ideological heir of the Farm Security Administration’s photography program of the 1930s and 1940s—Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange in Kodachrome.But as Barbara Lynn Shubinski notes, it’s the very fractured and complex nature of the environmental degradation depicted that sets Documerica apart from the so-called “straight photography” of the FSA era: “In visual terms alone, the environmental crisis was difficult to depict. [Images] of oil spills and smog offered not so much portraits of recognizable ‘national character,’ but an almost insurmountable rupture between content and meaning.”[5] However, for me, it’s precisely this rupture that makes the photos so powerful: it symbolizes a breach between inside and outside, us and it, we humans and our environment. The rupture is less apparent in Documerica’s solemn (and beautiful) images of pollution and environmental disaster—it is most overpowering in the project’s complex collage of bodies, land, and infrastructure. It’s the hybrid portraiture that Documerica achieves—something between social documentary and landscape photography—that makes it worth pausing over.

Paul Sequeira, Calumet Park on Lake Michigan (far South Side), Commonwealth Edison Stateline Plant in Background, US EPA Documerica project, 1973.

One final image, with a prelude attached: I’m a relative newcomer to Chicago. I’ve been here for three years, a transplant from the humbling scenery of the Pacific Northwest. While I miss the stately mountains next to which I grew up, Chicago continues to surprise me with its own topography––smokestacks, skyscrapers, and power lines included. The overlapping of histories here is palpable; brownfields and industrial spaces abut beaches and parks, all of these written atop a great glacial retreat that began 10,000 years ago.   Documerica photographer Paul Sequeira’s 1973 image of the Lake Michigan shoreline provides a compelling visual companion to this layered history. People wander in the middleground, exploring a beach on Chicago’s far south side. In the background looms State Line Energy, a coal-fired power plant built by electricity magnate Samuel Insull in 1929. At the time it was built, State Line was the largest electric-power generator in the world. The size of the plant’s generators matched Insull’s maxim for Chicago and its burgeoning suburbs: more, more, more power. So does its environmental legacy—State Line quickly became one of the largest single-point polluters in the Chicago region.

State Line shut its coal operations in March of this year; plans to demolish the plant are in the works. Residents, developers, and urban designers will no doubt debate the site’s future. But as an artifact, State Line brings together two histories for the Anthropocene era: the story an unbounded tide of consumption, paired with our urgent and complicated retreat to the shore.

Even though it was taken in the 1970s, Sequeira’s photo captures the cognitively dissonant space we must work through––and create, interpret, and critique out of––today. By collapsing the human and the natural, this image allows us to imagine a human presence that at once transforms and is transformed by its environment. Another photographer, Richard Misrach, captured this situation beautifully when he observed “a simple, if almost incomprehensible equation.” In it, “[the] world is as terrible as it is beautiful, but when you look more closely, it is as beautiful as it is terrible. We must maintain constant vigilance, to protect the world from ourselves, and to embrace the world as it exists.”[6] It’s time to get busy.

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Ingrid Haftel (MAPH ’10) is a curator and writer originally from Purdy, Washington. She is currently an Associate Curator at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Ingrid is especially grateful to Nicholas Fraccaro for the conversations that led to this article––and for welcoming her to Chicago.

Shot over a year ago at Harold Arts Residency, this video will accompany a collaborative installation with Anneka Herre.

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Young Joon Kwak has exhibited and performed her art at venues including Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Roxaboxen Exhibitions, ACRE Projects, Hyde Park Art Center, and the MDW Fair in Chicago, NP Contemporary Art Center in NYC, Verge Art Fair in Miami.  As Xina Xurner, she has performed in cities including Minneapolis, MN, Milwaukee, WI, St Louis, MO, and New Orleans, LA.  Kwak received her BFA in Painting & Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MA in Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2010.

If there had been more distance between him and it, roughly the same stretch of space between inspiration and poetics, writing the story might have been simpler. But, be that as it may, with that part of the journey ongoing, Van Moon had some time ago scribbled an undone sentence (three tenses, a sophistry, are, were, will be…) which, he freely admitted to himself, could not fully be conceived as part of the nebulous whole that existed in his brain, or if it would eventually join some other work, another story, or novel, or perhaps an unrhymed poem—finished or otherwise.

He placed down his pen, a retractable roller ball that dispensed bold, wet lines of black gel, onto his notepad parallel to its blue lines then pinched his creased glabella. Van Moon, who signed his name in two letters so that the V disappeared into the diagonal strokes of the M, rose, hesitated—he saw the story’s valedictory sentence perch itself on a thought’s ledge, but not leap—and walked away from his desk. The notepad was, in fact, a legal pad, with a quarter of its yellow pages tucked behind its cardboard back. Not each of those furled pages contained a record of his unfinished letter, however. Some were covered with unrelated doodles; others with bits of works more complete than his letter. But as a matter of record, a recording of a man’s mind and habit, a perceptive person could easily trace the journey to its beginning along the path of unhardened footprints. As cathartic matters he held other creations dearer; as works of art he held others even dearer, but none had combined heart and art in this manner before. He returned to his desk—beneath his final step a floorboard screamed—leaned forward and wrote almost illegibly, A stronger man would—, then expunged “stronger” with a straight black line; for a moment “better” filled the void, jotted above the excised word, but was similarly crossed out. I wish this letter were unnecessary, he thought, then scribbled the line triumphantly. I wish this letter were unnecessary, he rethought, and continued, as much as I wish regret hadn’t compelled me to write you; but these are twin, mutually dependent truths, and I can negate their veracity as easily as I can move heaven and earth, which I would do if doing so would…What I must say has been rehearsed and rehashed and replayed in my head countlessly. There it is complete. A final leg I have to bear it…My handwriting is legible, hopefully: if it isn’t, I will rewrite the letter, word for word, automatically, so that each sentiment is unchanged. Not the heart, or the soul, rather the little spark beneath your navel is your truest north. I now rely on it unreservedly. Why a letter?

If something cannot be said, it can, with near certainty, be written. Libraries teem with emotions that were too intimate to speak. Hatreds, petty jealousies, long-recalled slights, and what were called unrequited loves, though nowadays there may not be a name for it that isn’t an acronymic disorder. Some states of being, against all self-flagellation, cannot be uttered and remain unsaid. Volcanoes erupt, people consider. Humans are luckless in this regard. But there are cases, too, when a verbal shelter is not enough and one grasps for another layer. Here is the deception, the artifice without which there is no art. Van, after overmuch consideration, conceded to himself that he would never send the letter. Even though he craved to do so; even though he ordered himself to do so; even though he could see it being read and starting a pleasing chain of inevitabilities in some definite point in the future, he would not do so. It would be tucked away—folded perpendicularly and placed in a never used dictionary—where its warning light would go dim then dark…unless, unless there was another way. A short story, an epistolary one in which the details would be chosen and presented so particularly she, and only she, would recognize herself; to capture its obsolete mood, he’d write its first draft longhand. It was, he knew at conception, his greatest idea. And a beautiful, audacious idea it was, fitting his talent and her worthiness. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he thought, a muse must have coined the phrase. An artist can express himself sufficiently one way. Non-artistic modes are imprecise and leave undercurrents unmentioned. As the saying goes, I began with a problem and ended with a plea like an old love song. More than that, a letter is a perfect anachronism, one which allows you to read my thoughts as well as see the state of mind with which I wrote them—my hurried, hunchbacked Fs; the way my letters lean rightward, nearly parallel to the paper’s lines, when I’m writing excitedly; the ovalet of black ink where I paused, reflected. Letters arrive singly, each in his own vehicle, self-contained and untainted by the one read before it. Choosing to open it is a commitment to its contents. Emails are bars of pale glow organized by time of arrival; labeled with just a name, skimmed and deleted summarily. This purpose deserves better than to travel with a crowd of coupons and trifles.

He sat, easily guiding himself onto the taut cushion of a cobalt office chair. His desk, filched from an alleyway, had been the middle section of a winged kitchen table. On its rectangular top was a laptop, shut and nudged to his left side, a pocketsize notebook on the twentieth page of which he had written “billet doux,” and a pump bottle of lotion. Van rolled the pen between his lips, which tasted like the aloe vera cream he was squirting into the palm of his hand. As is lotion’s wont, little was much, and it spread past his wrists, up his forearms, and was enough for an elbow. Beneath his fingertips the final traces were disappearing, where he had similarly rubbed a bump and bruise. A patch of ice and a carefree step, he would now take the bus. A still warm seat next to a man who dozed off when they moved and awoke with a lurch into Van’s healthy arm when they stopped.  He massaged his elbow with soft, circular motions; she swore she would never ride the bus again. There was the smell of wintry sweat, she recalled, the type that seeps from beneath overcoats and sweaters. A child, who could have sat in his mother’s lap, instead had the final seat, and she stood with her hand clutching the rail above her head between a man with bushy, uncombed hair and another in a suit. After a single stop, the suited man casually turned toward her and as casually introduced himself, supplely erect, to her hip. The worst part, she said: having to maneuver by him to the door.

This is how I think of you. By happenchance I befriended someone you were close to. When our paths crossed, this was not my intention. But, for once, it was possible to flirt with opportunity without betraying another vow. On her kitchen wall is a cork board with pictures posted to it. Some are pinned atop one another by twos and threes, others hang insecurely by a thumbtacked corner. There is one of you I always search for, and each time I fear it won’t be there, and each time I find it—the self-taken picture of you riding shotgun during a road trip with a backseat passenger’s plumpy gut partially in frame, remember?—your image, the one time has dedicated itself to erasing, is revivified, and I’m fully relieved, elated you still exist. An equal fear, which appears each time I leave, is that? I know the picture will eventually be lost to fire or spring cleaning or some other human vagary, but I can never will myself to take it, to slide it so safely into my pocket, to save it from a fate I know is its. Perhaps next time…

And sometimes I can see us clearly, cinematically sitting in a pink train car with blue cushions, possibility in every corner. Your eyes are closed to not see the evening’s demon-like shadows. A tiny kiss scratches your cheek, and like a spider softly traverses your neck. You bend your head and whisper to me “find it, find it,” and we patiently search for it because it travels a lot.

There are instances, too, when I mistakenly believe to have seen you. Crossing an intersection with his arm circling your waist: Thankfully it was not her, I thought, but had it been, they would not last. It could not be otherwise. Hope whimpers loudly!; pushing chubby, toothless, sleeping twins in a two-tyke stroller, which had caused me to sweat with fear and envy; or snatching a weed from the driveway of a house with rust-colored siding. She does not resemble you in any way, as a matter of fact. She is what you are not—shapeless as an empty pillow case with a tinge of idiocy in her eyes—but sometimes I walk by that house regardless, wanting to feel the electricity of false hope.

She looked away as he laughed, a jugular snicker that then billowed from his mouth, as though his reaction was a detail in her story: then Van laughed. This isn’t funny, she said, turning toward him. I know. I know it isn’t, he said, but you have to admit and she turned her head away once more. What he retained from that conversation, however, was not her turning away. That was a simple reflex, a response to a reaction, a detail in his story. Van harbored an invention. In retrospect, he had imbued their exchange and her little gesture with trepidation which had not existed then. She looked away a little disappointed he had not disappointed her expectations, and he could now see her never turning back. An auspice overlooked; the regretful are always psychics in reverse. A flashlight portended a death, a clogged toilet predicted a divorce, and she diminished against a vaporous skyline. From the present’s limitations, moreover, without the ability to see any part of the here and now as a sign, he viewed his past self with unfamiliarity. This person was unconnected to the current man. He was a copy playing a character, a strange and perplexing one who looked and spoke as him but did not act as he would. Various things might have changed the shape of time, the contemporary Van knew; the regretful are also revisionists. Taking her hand may have molded a sphere, an embrace made its area solely for two. The actor saw her to the door that opened to a staircase to her third-floor walkup. I really liked the story you read, she said, even if I had to get harassed to hear it. An iota of pink lint from her scarf was in her hair. The actor’s arm flinched infinitesimally to remove it, but his hand never left his side…I’m glad you liked it, he said, and that you were able to come: then Van apologized. I committed a false start, I realize, and have said some things too soon. Cruel irony. Sense and sentences are arriving haphazardly, not in the order they were assigned like kindergarteners in lunch line. Rather they are rushing forward like kids at Christmas. My preface was supposed to be an admission I am irreligious and have never experienced before, and therefore lack a means to rightly explain the unmitigated emotion I feel, which can only be truly comprehended through a divinity which tells us we are not piteous specks in an empty universe. A secular vocabulary is insufficient. Existence’s magnitude, its supernovas and bumblebees, cannot be defined by the words that delineate it. You’ve heard a morning chorus and felt the inadequacy of calling it chirping. So, if this letter means anything to you, know it cannot mean everything I want it to.

When one is honestly, utterly open to possibilities, it is possible to recognize an element of life that is measured by its inability to be compared with anything else. Not in its totality, or objectively, but through a blinkered aspect that offers the impression of a full view, as an oceanfront deceives its admirers. Van smiled when he recognized this notion, unaware his happiness was not the product of creative excitement and rightness of cause as he believed, but was an apprehension of the precursor to both. But beginnings are rarely noticed, and afterward it’s impossible to discover the spark inside the flame. Her habit of answering questions before they have been entirely asked, he thought, she is not perfect. Although the depth of my affection would lead you to believe otherwise, honesty compels me to say I don’t believe you are perfect. I merely believe you are perfectly wonderful. If now is too late, so be it. I’ll live with having lost what I never had…and the faithless can ask for miracles as well…Three or four years ago, I discovered the forgettable early work of a forgotten dead poet on a used bookstore’s remorseless bottom shelf. None of his poems made an impression on me, I believed. Amateurish stuff—all of it. As had each person before me, I assumed his work had crept through my head without its feet making a sound, until you began to echo throughout my days. Then one stanza floated to my mind’s forefront, where it shimmers steadily:

In time you will return,
like the past as possibility.
Present as though you had never gone,
and what will we make of our assembly?
Memories must be earned
in the reimagined past called dreams.
Together again, though not for long,
and what will we make of our assembly?…

•

Shaun Rouser (MAPH ’11)  was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee.

CHICAGO HISTORY by Paul Durica

If you’ve spent any time in Chicago, chances are you’ve come across traces of what is now called the Battle of Fort Dearborn, which marked its 200th anniversary this past August. Not material traces, unless you’ve visited the Chicago History Museum, but the various memorials, so much a part of the everyday landscape as to be barely noticeable. In 1939, the city added a fourth star to its flag to commemorate the Fort, although the Tribune suggested it was meant to honor the battle, not the fort itself. At the southwest bridge house of the DuSable Bridge on Michigan Avenue sits one of four carved reliefs depicting scenes from the city’s founding. The sculpture, created by Henry Hering, is titled “Defense” and depicts an officer from the Fort fighting with some Potawatomie warriors while an allegorical angel surveys the scene from above. Glance down at the sidewalk near the corner of the Michigan and Wacker and you’ll see several strips of brass inset at ninety-degree angles to mark the original corners of the fort—but, of course, given the elevation of the avenue, you’re standing on what would be the top of one of the blockhouses rather than the foundation. Thousands of people pass by these memorials everyday without a thought about Fort Dearborn or its history. Millions recognize the city’s flag but can’t say what the four stars represent. The 200th anniversary of the battle passed without much acknowledgement from City Hall. Chicago has never been completely at ease with what many regard as a founding event.

Henry Hering, Defense, 1928.

Fort Dearborn was built on the southeast bank of the Chicago River, close to where it empties into Lake Michigan, in 1803. It was named after the Secretary of War, Henry Dearborn. Its first commanding officer was John Whistler, grandfather of the painter James McNeill Whistler. Fort Dearborn had been built at the request of General Anthony Wayne, who had secured the present-day states of Ohio and Kentucky, as well as parts of Indiana, for American settlement in a series of skirmishes and battles with native tribes in the last decade of the eighteenth century. In an era of state boundaries and interstate highways, it is difficult to imagine how this region was perceived by the communities who lived here at the turn of the nineteenth century. Around the Great Lakes were scattered a number of nomadic tribes—the Potawatomie, the Fox, the Sauk, the Shawnee, and the Ho-Chunks, to name just a few—as well as some French trading posts and a few American forts. There were also the British, with their own forts just north of Detroit, in Canada, as well as traders and subjects of the crown living throughout the region. Kinship relations mattered far more than nationality or the place where one was settled, which was usually temporary. Native Americans and European traders tended to be highly mobile, using the network of rivers and lakes for transport and commerce. The American government referred to the region as the Northwest Territory, but Ann Durkin Keating in a recent history on Fort Dearborn, restores the name applied to it by its European inhabitants, Indian Country.

With Fort Wayne, the closest garrison, sitting a long 150 miles east, Fort Dearborn was very much alone on the edge of Indian Country. In 1810, Nathan Heald, of a distinguished New Hampshire family, became the commanding officer. He found the garrison so isolated and dull that he insisted upon taking a nine-month furlough before assuming command. When he returned to Chicago, he brought with him his new wife Rebekah Wells, whom he’d met while  stationed at Fort Wayne. Heald was thirty-seven, and his wife was twenty. The other officers and the majority of the soldiers were also in their twenties. These young people experienced a life that was rough and, as a result of military regulations, fairly routinized. Diversions were few and included trips to Lee’s Farm, on the site of the present-day neighborhood of Bridgeport, for fresh produce and game-hunting in the fall. Outside the fort sat the factory, a government-run trading post, and the office of the Indian agent, a sort of bureaucrat on the prairie, which was in charge of dispensing annuities to the various tribes as payment for ceded lands. There was also a cluster of cabins, including one belonging to John Kinzie, a British-born trader turned American citizen. Kinzie was once regarded as the “Father of Chicago,” before being replaced by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who had actually settled in the area earlier and sold his operation to Kinzie (DuSable now has the bridge named after him, but Kinzie gets a street a few blocks north of the river). Small as the community around Fort Dearborn was, the surgeon Isaac Van Voorhis wrote to a friend back East of the site’s potential:

In my solitary walks I contemplate what a great and powerful republic will yet arise in this new world. Here, I say, will be the seat of millions yet unborn; here, the asylum of oppressed millions yet to come. How composedly would I die could I be resuscitated at that bright era of American greatness—an era which I hope will announce the tidings of death to fell superstition and dread tyranny.[1]

A portion of the surgeon’s wish would come true.

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In June 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain, which at the time was preoccupied fighting Napoleon. Even so, the United States was woefully underprepared for the conflict. What had in Washington been envisioned as a swift conquest of Canada ended with the capture by the British of Fort Mackinac, without a shot being fired, and later the fall of Detroit. Isolated on the frontier, Fort Dearborn received orders to evacuate from General William Hull. Heald was to march his men and as many settlers and traders as wished to accompany them east to Fort Wayne. The orders to evacuate contained a curious provision, instructing Heald to empty out the government factory, giving the Potawatomie goods in exchange for safe passage but not ammunition or alcohol, which were to be disposed of in the river. Heald followed his orders and prepared to depart on August 15th.

Even before the inhabitants at Fort Dearborn learned that war with Britain had been declared, they were on edge. In April a band of Ho-Chunks had murdered two tenants at Lee’s Farm. Then in June, John Kinzie killed Jean LaLime, Fort Dearborn’s interpreter, after a heated exchange. A man of social position and influence in Indian Country, Kinzie was absolved of any responsibility in the murder and, as a confidant of Heald’s, would urge the commanding officer to follow his orders exactly. Two events of significance occurred in the days before the evacuation. Mucktypoke, called Black Partridge, a Potawatomie leader and friend to the Americans, warned Heald that the young warriors who had agreed to provide safe passage had been angered by the destruction of the ammunition and alcohol (they were also, understandably, annoyed by the continual encroachment of American settlers upon their land and the destruction of peaceful villages, such as had occurred at Tippecanoe the previous year). Then, on August 13th, the uncle of Rebekah, Captain William Wells, arrived at Fort Dearborn in the company of an officer from Fort Wayne and thirty Miami warriors. Wells and his contingent were the only outside assistance Fort Dearborn would receive.

William Wells

If the story of Fort Dearborn has a character equivalent to a Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, it would be William Wells. At fourteen, while playing along the Ohio River, he had been kidnapped by the Miami. They made him one of theirs, giving him a name that translated as “carrot-top” on account of his red hair, and used him as a scout and decoy in battle. He fought against the American generals Harmer and Sinclair and even his own brother Samuel, a member of a Kentucky militia, in the 1790s before changing sides and working as an interpreter for General Wayne. After the conclusion of the conflict, he took up the position of Indian agent at Fort Wayne. As the son-in-law of the great Miami leader Little Turtle, he was respected by Native Americans and invaluable to Anglo-Americans (Wells Street in Chicago is named for him; in the mid-nineteenth century, when it had become a center of vice, shame-faced city fathers renamed it “Fifth Avenue,” but the change was only temporary). He came to Fort Wayne of his own volition, in order to protect his niece. A popular legend maintains that Wells, like Black Partridge, sensed the impending danger and, on the morning of the evacuation, blackened his face in preparation for war.

Around 9:00 AM on the morning of August 15, 1812, Captain Nathan Heald led from Fort Dearborn a group of 54 soldiers, 12 militiamen, 9 women, and 18 children. They were accompanied by Wells, Corporal Walter Jordan, the Miami warriors, and about 300 Potawatomie. The caravan headed south from the fort, following the coast of Lake Michigan, today’s Michigan Avenue. Two hundred years later, on the anniversary of the battle, I retraced their path, which now takes one past numerous civic monuments and institutions, including Millennium Park and the Art Institute. Along the way, one comes across Lorado Taft’s “Fountain of the Great Lakes” and Ivan Mestrovic’s “The Bowman and the Spearman”, public sculptures that, like Hering’s “Defense”, were funded by the estate of Benjamin Ferguson, a man who’d made his money in lumber. Michigan Avenue reflects the collective vision of men like Ferguson, Aaron Montgomery Ward, and Daniel Burnham—a grand thoroughfare, lined with parks and dotted with neoclassical ornaments, befitting the Paris of the Midwest—so it takes a bit of an imaginative leap to see the site as the Fort Dearborn refugees did, barren and sandy, scoured by winds off the lake. Immense dunes, like those still found on the Indiana shoreline, divided the beach from the prairie. Not long into the march, the Potawatomie warriors split from the Fort Dearborn party and began to ascend the dunes. Near today’s Roosevelt Road, the battle began.

It didn’t last long. William Wells, riding near the front, observed the warriors laying in wait and turned around, holding up his hat and waving it in a circular motion to indicate that the caravan was surrounded. The Potawatomie warriors descended from the dunes, and Heald ordered his men into firing lines. Toward the back of the train, the twelve-man militia, made up of farmers and traders, as well as the surgeon, Van Voorhis, and the ensign, George Ronan, attempted to protect the women and the children. The militia and officers quickly fell, while a single warrior killed twelve of the eighteen children. Two of the women, fearing capture, fought back and were also killed. Wells rode to the back of the caravan to protect his niece, Rebekah, and had his horse shot out from under him. Pinned beneath the horse’s body, he continued to fight until a bullet to the head ended his life. Some warriors, knowing Wells’ history and impressed by his fighting, carved out his heart and ate it in order to ingest his courage. Heald and his men managed to fight their way to the top of one of the dunes, where they surrendered, having lost almost half of their number. Fifteen Potawatomie warriors were among the dead. Heald agreed to terms in which the survivors would be taken prisoner and ransomed for $100 each. Both the commanding officer and his wife were badly injured. John Kinzie, who had witnessed the battle but was protected by his friends among the Potawatomie, would later help the Healds escape into British hands.

Edgar S. Cameron, 1911.

The victorious Potawatomie burned Fort Dearborn to the ground. Prisoners whose wounds were too severe to permit travel were tortured to death. After a few days the others were taken in captivity to the warriors’ villages. One woman, Susan Simmons, who had witnessed the death of her husband, a soldier, and her two-year-old son, traveled with her six-month-old daughter on foot as far as Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the conclusion of her journey, she was made to run the gauntlet—the inhabitants of the village had lined up in parallel rows, brandishing sticks and clubs with which to beat her—all with the infant still in her arms. After this ordeal, an older woman, whom Simmons called her “Indian mother,” nursed mother and daughter back to health. Even before the conclusion of hostilities between the United States and Great Britain in 1814, Simmons and many of the other Fort Dearborn captives were ransomed back into American hands. Simmons and her daughter eventually made their way to family in Ohio before venturing west again, to Iowa, where large bands of the Potawatomie, displaced through a series of treaties, tried to survive as subsistence farmers. Simmons’s daughter, also named Susan, moved farther west, to California, where she died on April 27, 1900, the last Anglo-American witness to the Battle of Fort Dearborn.

In the 88 years between the battle and the death of Susan Simmons, Chicago grew to become the second largest city in the country, a center for trade and commerce, the great metropolis of the Midwest as imagined by Surgeon Van Voorhis. At the time of Simmons’s death, the battle was still referred to as a “massacre.” Simon Pokagon, the Potawatomie leader whose father had not participated in the battle and had aided the Fort Dearborn prisoners, once said that “when whites are killed, it is a massacre, when Indians are killed[,] it is a fight.”[2] Pokagon had a point. Anniversaries of the battle were rarely marked in Chicago. Acknowledgement would require addressing the city’s role in displacing native peoples, and the event wasn’t exactly a victory for Anglo-American forces. If Fort Dearborn was recalled at all, it was in connection with large civic events, like the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1933-1934 Century of Progress Exposition, for which a scale-replica of the fort was built and occupied by Boy Scouts. The replica of Fort Dearborn stood at where 26th Street meets the lake until 1939, when it was demolished. That same year, the City Council added a fourth star to Chicago flag, raising Fort Dearborn to the status of the Great Fire and the two World’s Fairs.

Replica of Fort Dearborn at 1933-34 Century of Progress.

At the 1893 World’s Fair Simon Pokagon had been invited to reenact his father selling the land upon which Chicago was built to the federal government. That same year a statue titled “The Fort Dearborn Massacre,” paid for by palace-car magnate George Pullman, was unveiled near his mansion on Prairie Avenue, southwest of the city center, at the time believed to be the site of the conflict. The statue depicted a somewhat fictionalized scene from the battle in which Black Partridge intervenes to save the wife of one of the officers from a fatal tomahawk blow. Sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith used as models for the Native Americans, attacker and protector, two Sioux warriors who’d been taken prisoner at the Battle of Wounded Knee, a last act of resistance by the Plains Indians, which was, in fact, a massacre. The statue was later displayed at the Chicago History Museum before being removed from public view. Wherever it appears next, it awaits new and nuanced interpretation.

Carl Rohl-Smith, Fort Dearborn Massacre, 1893.

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Paul Durica is a graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature. His writing has appeared in The Chicagoan, Poetry, Tin House, Indiana Review, and other places. His Pocket Guide to Hell tours and reenactments have been written about in the New York Times, Huffington Post, The Atlantic Cities, and Vice.