July 25, 2008

Radio casts broader

Moira Cassidy's radio show, National Public Rumpus, is heading out of its first hour, with two more to go. The program broadcasts on WHPK from 9 a.m. until noon every Tuesday during the summer—during the academic year shows are only two hours long, but the paucity of summer deejays means more work for those who stick around.

Cassidy, '11, who is also WHPK's station manager, is ready to take it on. "You're listening to WHPK, 88.5 FM, the pride of the South Side. It's 9:53 in the studio, so I hope that means it's 9:53 out there as well," she quips. "Sometimes I get worried that there's this radio time warp." After a plea for requests from “the real world” Cassidy cues her next song, experimental-pop band Deerhoof’s “Kidz are So Small,” and goes to pull albums from the station’s record library.

The WHPK record library, with its thousands of vinyl records and cds, looks predictably lived-in—deejays peruse the area 24 hours a day to find tunes for their jazz, rock, hip-hop, classical, folk, and international shows (WHPK also has a public-affairs format). To fill her additional summer air time, Today has been designated for J, K, and L, so she only plays songs starting with those letters—from All Girl Summer Fun Band’s manic “Jason Lee,” about nursing a crush on the actor, to the sweet, simple “Like Castanets” by Bishop Allen. Though some deejays manage to play 20- or 30-minute tracks, the challenge for Cassidy and her pop-inclined taste is finding 50 or 60 songs a week. She says, “I’m getting through it.”

The station’s rock-devoted hours, midnight until noon on weeknights, require students to give up sleep in favor of playing music through the wee hours of the morning. The effect is a station with a diverse group of rock shows ranging from indie-pop metal to experimental stoner rock. Having so many deejays with different tastes has earned the station accolades. In June alt-weekly Chicago Reader named WHPK as the city’s best college radio station. The Reader joked that WHPK “‘broadcasts’ from the University of Chicago on 100 watts of sheer willpower.” While the 100-watt station doesn’t even reach Chicago’s North Side, the station does stream to the entire world on its Web site.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Moira Cassidy pulls albums from the library; during her show she plays a 7-inch record in the studio.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Posted by lgibson on July 25, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 23, 2008

May I have this job?

“How do you do?” inquired a man dressed in navy slacks and a striped tie as he shook my hand at the door. I was struggling to locate a response to the unexpected greeting when he asked, “Did you sign up in time for a sandwich?”

The man was Brian Flora, the foreign-service recruiter for the Midwest; the sandwiches were provided by CAPS at a July 17 information session at Ida Noyes Hall about State Department jobs. Twenty-five students, many in suits and ties themselves, attended the session. Vinayak Ishwar, ’09, admitted that he had begged his supervisor at Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office—where he has a summer internship—to allow him to attend the presentation.

“The Foreign Service is for people who are extroverted,” Flora said, “and don’t like to get stuck in a rut. It’s for people who don’t mind packing their stuff—their junk, their lives—and sending them around the world at the government’s expense.” The benefits Flora listed included good pay, health insurance, and the fact that the government will ship your dog anywhere with you.

But the jobs are easy neither to attain nor perform. “You don’t waltz into it,” he warned. He stressed the advantage of being at least 25, having graduate education, and speaking critical languages such as Mandarin and Arabic. You can take the Foreign Service exam once a year until age 58, he said, “but most people give up before then.”

The government sends first-time employees to the locations they request. But after spending time in “fun” places like Western Europe, he explained, “the computer spits out your name for hardship and danger tours,” which include regions that are isolated, impoverished, at high risk for disease, or under dictatorships. Flora, whose tours included time in Vietnam, where he’d been stationed during the war, as well as in Chad and Romania during violent revolutions, emphasized that danger and hardship tours are higher paid and last for only one year.

“Have you ever been in a position when your personal ideas conflicted with what the government told you to do?” asked Joy Wattawa, who is receiving her degree from the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences in August.

“You are expected to defend U.S. foreign policy,” Flora answered. “And usually that’s easy to do.” But, he added, “Most of us thought Iraq was the wrong thing to do.” Officers who disagree with U.S. policy make use of official rhetoric, Flora explained, pointing out that “for Vietnam and Iraq there were very good justifications.”

“And,” he said, “you always have the option of resigning.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: U.S. Department of State official seal.

Posted by lgibson on July 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 21, 2008

Be our Guest

Poet Barbara Guest’s play "The Office” uses three scenes and six actors to satirize an office environment. As the office workers are quietly killed off over the course of the 20-minute play, the characters express themselves through increasingly disturbing quips—"Memo. A skeletal staff will remain."

One of the workers attempts to compose a note to a dead coworker’s wife. “Dear Madam: the death of your late deaf husband—deaf to no one but me. Now dead to all.” A surreal work, “The Office” was staged at the Experimental Station on Thursday, at the release party for the latest issue of Chicago Review. The play was originally produced in New York in 1961 but remained unpublished until the quarterly Review printed it in this month's triple issue. With a page-count of three magazines and taking three-quarters of a year to publish, the special issue is devoted to the work of Guest, who died in 2006. "The Office" closed out the night at Experimental Station, following readings by three poets whose work also appears in the issue: Dan Beachy-Quick, Ed Roberson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The Barbara Guest edition of Chicago Review, a 62-year-old literary magazine edited by U of C graduate students, collects three of her plays and several unpublished poems along with critical and personal responses to her work by scholars and writers she influenced, including Charles Altieri and Andrea Brady. The editors hope, they write in an editor’s note, to "confirm Guest's importance to the history of postwar American poetry and demonstrate her continuing influence." Guest is one of the only women associated with the New York School of formalist, painterly poetics. She is also considered highly influential for the language poets, and her later work focuses more on the power of the word and less on Imagism.

“The Office” concludes with a conversation between the last remaining office worker, now "the boss," and a woman who heretofore had remained mute. When the woman notes, “You’re the boss,” the man replies, "Me? I've never had a glass of champagne. / I've never eaten an oyster. / I've never made a beautiful voyage…. / I’ve never seen you before.” For Guest’s work, the “never seen” can now be read, repeatedly, in Chicago Review.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: From Barbara Guest's "The Office": A strange game of tic-tac-toe; workers consult their papers.

Photos courtesy Robert Baird. See more here.

Posted by lgibson on July 21, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 18, 2008

The trouble with TV

For 48 hours Chad Broughton’s Consumerism and Popular Culture students did not watch TV, use the Internet (they were allowed to check e-mail once per day), read magazines or newspapers, or listen to the radio.

“You said there are other things to do,” said Michael Hirsch, ’11, during the class discussion after the media-starvation exercise, “but I wasn’t in the mood to read a novel or exercise after running around all day.” The eight students came to a consensus: nobody who reads for school wants to read for pleasure. Broughton, AM'97, PhD'01, wanted them to get a sense of their dependence on media through abstaining from it. “One of the criticisms of media,” Broughton explained, “is that it leads to less development of social capital and relationships.” But for Debbie Ao, ’09, who asserted that she spends time with her family while watching TV, it can have the reverse effect.

The class took an online PBS “media literacy” quiz and learned: the average American seventh-grader watches three hours of television per day, children view an average of 40,000 commercials a year, and excessive TV watching is associated with obesity. The students also took a quiz to evaluate their own relationships to media, which, in an ironic twist, turned out to be a marketing tool for a book about TV-free life. "Yikes," the site warned those high scores, "you probably have a serious addiction problem." But never fear, it continued: we have the solution for only $11.95!

During the class's second hour, students analyzed race perceptions in mass media through clips from Peter Pan, Pocahontas, and the 1986 documentary Ethnic Notions, which argues that the end of slavery led to popular-culture images of African Americans as threatening. “Psychologists say there are two primal emotions: love and fear,” Broughton said. “Love can sell some movies, some popular culture, but not as much as fear.”

He urged the class to consider today’s equivalent media images. “The constructed gangster rapper really is the polar social other” from the suburban residents who constitute a majority of rap consumers, noted Kendall Ames, ’10. Broughton pointed to connections between perceptions mass media help create of African Americans and policies regulating things like welfare and incarceration. “Conspiracy isn’t a helpful word,” Broughton said about the connections between media and policy, “but loop is. There’s a feedback loop.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: Kendall Ames, '10; Debbie Ao, '09; Liz Baker-Jennings, ‘09; and Michael Hirsch, '11, watch Ethnic Notions with instructor Chad Broughton; the film shows a popular media image of blacks from the slave era.

Posted by lgibson on July 18, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 15, 2008

Alive and kicking

“I can’t believe I just struck out in kickball!” exclaimed Cheryl Luce, ’09, as she watched her fourth foul land resolutely out of bounds. At the top of the fifth inning, Luce’s team trailed her opponents by several runs—but who’s counting?

Not most of the players. Instead, the two dozen kickballers gathered at Stagg Field were more intent on the pleasures of the game and less intent on winning. They clapped when the other team scored and high-fived as they reached bases. Low-level strategizing abounded among teammates—“Kick it slow and straight at the center.” “Try to get it down the third base line.” “Run no matter what!”

The informal summer league, which meets weekly, was organized in June by Amy Martin, Alejandra Mejia, Helen Gregg, and Luce, all ’09. They invited friends via Facebook and urged them to invite others. Mixed-gender teams are picked at the start of each game; intensity depends on who shows up and how much they remember about a game that most haven’t thought about in nearly a decade. Requiring only a set of bases and a rubber ball, the organizers realized that kickball could be played almost anywhere and enjoyed by even the least athletic college students. Mejia, who pitched for her team through several innings, claimed that she could not “run, kick, or catch.”

Around the seventh (and second-to-last) inning, after some haggling about how many innings had been played and the number of runs scored, the competition level intensified. Despite Mejia’s disavowal of athletic prowess, she made the play that decided the game. The bases were loaded, and as Bailey Scott, ’09, was speeding toward home plate to score a tying run, Mejia tagged her out. At the pitcher’s mound Mejia attempted to scoop up the ball with her foot, but instead kicked it away—and right at Scott, who looked surprised as it glanced her leg a few yards from the plate. “Does that even count?” asked Scott. It did. The game was over. The teams shook hands and headed off into the late-afternoon sun.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Cheryl Luce takes the plate.

Posted by lgibson on July 15, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Dancing with dips

"Lloro en el espejo y me siento estúpido, ilógico," Marc Anthony’s passionate cries from the song "Ahora Quien" filled the room—"I cry at the mirror and I feel stupid, illogical." But instructors Annmarie Micikas, ’09, and James Martin, ’10, looked neither stupid nor illogical as they demonstrated dipping techniques in a Latin-dance workshop. The July 7 class was part of a summer series for intermediate-level dancers, offered by the U of C Ballroom and Latin Dance Association. The series also includes lessons in Cuban salsa, Rueda, musicality, styling, and several unannounced topics.

The class began with a chance for the dancers to warm up: ten women stood behind Micikas; behind Martin were half as many men. Attendees formed couples and women rotated partners every few minutes. Micikas and Martin demonstrated the dips and explained how to do them step-by-step. "It's more of an optical illusion than anything," Martin told the men. "Make it look like you’re leaning more than you are."

But dipping wasn’t as easy as Martin made it look or sound. Most of the dancers didn’t know each other, and the teachers had to remind them to get up close and personal. "I can still see between your bodies; you’re not doing the dip right," Micikas admonished one couple. Learning with strangers comes with a risk of social discomfort—Vanessa Copeland, ’09, was initially told by one partner that she was "a below-average dancer." When she informed him that it was only her second class, he rescinded his judgment. The two even found common ground: they’d both learned to dance ballroom, not Latin, and were having similar difficulties with the transition. "Then," Copeland recalled, "he taught me a bunch of new steps."

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos (left to right): Annmarie Micikas, '09, and James Martin, '10, teach a cross-body lead and dip; math instructor Alexey Cheskidov dances with Katharine Bierce, '10; Micikas explains what not to do; IIT student Imran Bashir sends Allison Ross, '09, to her next partner.

Posted by lgibson on July 14, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 11, 2008

Students rally for labor

More than 50 people crowded the corner outside the Friend Family Health Center (FFHC) last Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. A handful of students joined union members of Teamsters Local 743 to demand a new contract and pay raises for clerical staff. Camera shutters snapped, flip-flops slapped the sidewalk, and cars and city buses honked as they passed, adding to the cacophony that filled the air. "What do we want?" shouted the group. "A contract!"

Although FFHC is only blocks from the U of C Medical Center, it has its own board, according to John Easton, the Medical Center's director of media relations. "Our pediatricians see clients there," Easton said, "but the University has nothing to do with the management."

Despite FFHC's independence from the University, some students feel connected to the situation. “The issue,” explained Robin Peterson, '11, a member of Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), “started two years ago when the contract expired.” Negotiations for a new employment contract between FFHC and the 11 Teamsters who work there have stalled, she said, over points of contention including merit-based raises and relations between supervisors and their subordinates.

Peterson has been involved with SOUL since last September. A writer for the student-run Chicago Weekly, she covered the workers at FFHC for the paper. Activism and journalism are compatible, believes Peterson, who became dedicated to the FFHC issue while reporting her article.

The workers and students marched in a mock picket line to the front of the building and then back to the corner, where speakers included Richard Berg, president of Local 743; members of the organization Interfaith Worker Justice; and former alderman Leon Despres, AB’27, JD’29, in a wheelchair and shiny black 743 hat. Despres, 100, raised the bullhorn with hands trembling from its weight. “I want to tell you a brief story," he said, "from ancient times."

The story, from the Old Testament, described a tree branch that was weak by itself but strong with six other branches. “My wish for you,” he said, “is that you be so strong that you cannot be broken.”

A week after the rally, Friend Family CEO Wayne Moyer told the Hyde Park Herald that FFHC will continue contract negotiations through a federal mediator.

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos: Students, workers, and community members rally at FFHC; former alderman Leon Despres, AB’27, JD’29, applauds their efforts.

Posted by lgibson on July 11, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 9, 2008

Quick slips of the tongue

At the start of Monday’s class, the 18 undergraduate, graduate, and visiting students in French 10100 seem nervous—they have two quizzes to take before the lesson commences, and it’s already the last week of the course. The instructor, Céline Bordeaux, also a French department program assistant coordinator, hands each student two sheets of paper, which ask questions like “Comment on dit en français?” (translate phrases like “She’s as tactful as them” into French) and “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire en anglais?” (offer English counterparts to French adjectives).

The course meets at 6 p.m. for two or three hours, four times a week. Next week French 10200 begins for most of the students, who are condensing an entire year of language lessons into the nine-week summer quarter. Their final exam is this Friday.

Bordeaux collects the quizzes, then turns to the day’s lesson. She cues a video showing a young French woman named Adèle on the large classroom television. Adèle begins, “J’aime bien beaucoup de choses…” and goes on to describe the music she enjoys, like jazz and French songs. The vocabulary lesson includes types of music—“le blues, le disco, la musique pop”—and before the two-hour lesson is over, students have also learned the vocabulary for television-show genres and objects one might find in a bedroom. Other topics include the difference between definite and indefinite articles, how to agree and disagree in casual conversation, and the conjugation pattern for verbs that end in “–er.” The last is important because the same pattern applies to verbs from “parler” (speak) to “trouver” (find): “Over 8,000 French verbs have this infinitive and will conjugate the same,” Bordeaux says.

Chicago’s summer language classes, offered in 17 different tongues, may be fast-paced, but they are also a draw. Ari Bookman, for instance, a graduate student in English at Northwestern, commutes from Evanston four times a week with several friends who are also taking Chicago language courses.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos: Some of Monday's French exercises in the notebook of Ari Bookman, a visitor from Northwestern.

Posted by lgibson on July 9, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 7, 2008

Three professors, three views

Ate too much over the long weekend? For some food for thought, check out these professors' opinions.

Read Geoffrey Stone's op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a "civil liberties adviser" to the president.

Listen to Jens Ludwig's NPR interview about the D.C. handgun ban.

Watch the "always entertaining" Richard Epstein discuss the administrative state at a Chicago's Best Ideas talk.

Shira Tevah, '09

Posted by lgibson on July 7, 2008 | Comments (0)

July 2, 2008

Reduce, reuse, recaffeinate

Everything starts somewhere—and in the Backstory Café’s case, almost everything started somewhere else. Opened in Woodlawn last week, at first glance the place seems like any other coffee shop around the U of C. On a Monday afternoon the shop isn’t particularly busy, but a half-dozen patrons type on laptops or murmur conversations over single-serve coffee from Metropolis (all brewed to order using a special slow-filter method—no big pots of drip in this establishment) or fresh soup. One undergraduate pores over a stack of books on the ancient Near East. Photographs depicting couples in stark landscapes from the series The Imp of Love by Rachel Herman, MFA’06, decorate the brick walls. Near a shelf in the corner, which holds used books gleaned from Powell’s and available for perusal and purchase, two other students leaf through Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2005), discussing the chapter titles. But in Backstory, the books aren’t the only things reused.

Almost everything in the café is recycled and sustainable. The interior was designed by members of the Experimental Station, which hosts the café, and Material Exchange, a collective including several recent Chicago MFAs that repurposes cast-off materials from art exhibits, museums, and other cultural venues for both functional and artistic practices. Material Exchange recycled some of the tables from a Museum of Science and Industry exhibit and built others using leftover pine panels from the Art Institute’s Sharp Building—the same pine was used for the huge storage cabinet tucked in the corner. Maple from tabletops at a South Loop factory became the trash receptacle and part of the wood trim around the windows and doors. Even the decorative blackboards—which bear the scribbles of children and phrases like “if you want to go somewhere, come here!”—are recycled from a 2007 Hyde Park Art Center exhibit.

Backstory, which bills itself as a “café, infoshop, bookstore,” offers a place to gather, eat, and learn for both Woodlawn and Hyde Park by virtue of its 61st and Blackstone location. Owners Sara Black, MFA’06, and Saadia Shah are planning events to introduce Backstory to its community, including a film series—specific details to come. In its first week, says employee Chris Willard, the shop has drawn patrons including community gardeners and construction workers on projects south of the Midway. Backstory has hosted “a mix of customers from Woodlawn and from Hyde Park,” he notes, “the most relaxed, most friendly customers” he’s ever served. Maybe it’s the sustainable environment—or maybe it’s the prospect of a steady supply of fresh-roasted, hot coffee.

Rose Schapiro, '09

Photos (left to right): Customers check out the used books; visitors have decorated the blackboard; the café offers tons of treats.

Posted by lgibson on July 2, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

Rhythm and rhymes

Hip hop filled the usually staid living room at I-House, creating the expectation of a party instead of a book reading. A hundred folding chairs, seating an audience of white-haired professors and public-housing residents, replaced the usual pianos and soft-toned sofas. Grandmaster Flash—the legendary musician and deejay who, in 2007, became one of the first hip-hop artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—arrived at I-House at 6 p.m. last Wednesday to promote his new autobiography, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (Broadway Books).

“My chronic achievement,” began Grandmaster Flash, who was born Joseph Saddler and also goes by GMF, “is being the first deejay to make turntables an instrument.”

He grew up with music in the Bronx. His father had an extensive jazz collection that he wasn’t allowed anywhere near. But when he heard the “click of the key and the bang of the door” signaling that his father had left for work, he would sneak into the living room and play music. When his father found out that his records had been touched, he began beating the young GMF, sometimes sending him to the hospital. But it didn’t quell his curiosity. “For me," he said, the question was “how does music live inside those little black tunnels?”

He discovered not only how the "tunnels" held music, but also how to manipulate them to create new sounds. Credited with inventing "cutting," an early form of scratching, GMF described himself as a scientist. He was the first to violate the rules of the previous generation's deejays, who “treated records like a child” and cleaned them with velvet cloths. GMF used his hands on the records for complete control of the sound. He would mark them with crayon to know when to turn them counterclockwise, prolonging the parts of the song he preferred. He replaced the rubber mat on his turntable with a piece of felt that he spray-starched on his mother’s ironing board when her back was turned.

During the Q-and-A that followed the talk, a Cabrini-Green resident stood to explain that he was recently released from “the penitentiary” and had started a record label. “I’ve got a track,” he said. Anywhere else, a famous musician might have been annoyed at an opportunistic fan trying to get his track heard. But the I-House living room's audience, collectively holding its breath for a moment, seemed to perceive an implied bond between the two.

“I seen that,” said GMF. “I seen the projects. And I’m gonna play that track on my radio show.”

Shira Tevah, '09

Photos (left to right): Grandmaster Flash performs briefly during his talk; afterward, he signs a copy of his autobiography and poses for a photograph with a fan.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Posted by lgibson on June 30, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 27, 2008

Crash introduction

Future MBAs from around the globe descended on the Gleacher Center this week for the 2008 start of the GSB's Executive MBA program. Wearing jeans and polo shirts (a few in slacks and Oxford shirts), nearly 300 new enrollees hauled rolling bags and laptotp cases through the building's lobby on Thursday, making their way to and from the day's lectures, group-study sessions, and a lunchtime talk by GSB professor Ron Burt, PhD'77, a social psychologist who studies social capital and competitive advantage.

By next week, two-thirds of the students will head home—the Executive MBA program draws students from roughly 50 countries—where they'll be based at the GSB campuses in either London or Singapore. (The rest study in Chicago.) During the program's 21-month curriculum, designed for working executives with at least ten years of professional experience, classmates from all three campuses gather and study together for four weeklong sessions. "Kick-Off Week is a chance for them to get to know each other and get their feet wet, and for the faculty to get them started in classes," said Deb Fallahay, associate program director. Some courses begin and end during Kick-Off Week; others continue when students return to their far-flung campuses.

Professor Linda Ginzel's Essentials of Effective Management is one of those all-in-a-week classes. On the agenda for Thursday afternoon's three-hour session, Ginzel announced as students filed into their seats and put up cardboard nameplates bearing appellations like Sergey, Chee Han, Yetunde, Stefan, and Vijay, was "group process and team decision-making." But before diving into the lesson plan, she offered what she called an "editorial" on working with others: "There are two ways to rise in this world," she said: step on other people, or lift them up and rise with them. The latter is much harder, Ginzel said, but "you should always leave people with the same dignity and sense of self that they had when you began the interaction. You will do better in life." And with that, she directed the class to a teamwork exercise involving a hypothetical plane crash in the Canadian subarctic and a list of survival items to rank in order of importance: among them, a flashlight, a compass, matches, snowshoes, sleeping bags, a shaving kit (with mirror), water-purification tablets, and a fifth of rum. Said Ginzel, looking at the clock at the back of the room, "You have 15 minutes."

L.G.

Photo: This week the Gleacher Center hosted Kick-Off Week for the Executive MBA program.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Posted by lgibson on June 27, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 25, 2008

Art will move mountains

The smell of raw lumber greets pedestrians strolling down Cornell Avenue outside the Hyde Park Art Center. Inside the building’s open doorways, two 16-foot-tall wooden skeletal mountains sit on a divided stage, linked to one another by ropes attached to pulleys. The piece, ‘Olympus Manger,’ Scene II, is “an investigation of scale, landscape, the built environment, and its relationship to the body,” according to artist Kelly Kaczynski’s exhibit notes. The piece allows viewers to remain a “spectator,” or assume an “actor” role by climbing on stage and partaking in a tug-of-war with the ropes dangling off the towers. Pulling the ropes results in a slow joining, and eventual collapse, of the towers.

Kaczynski calculated that the two stages’ collision should last the duration of the exhibition’s 13-week run, according to notes by Allison Peters, director of the art center's exhibits, thereby mimicking the slow pace of natural phenomena like plate tectonics. But just as earthquakes can suddenly rattle or volcanoes can erupt, Olympus Manger is prone to bursts of activity, based on the number of visitors to the gallery who choose to participate. Eventually the two stages will be fused together and the structural debris from the two mountains will transform into a single mass.

The exhibit runs through July 6.

Z.S.

Photo: Kelly Kaczynski, 'Olympus Manger,' Scene II, 2008, wood, dry wall, rope and glue.

Photo courtesy the Hyde Park Art Center.

Posted by zstambor on June 25, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Taking it to the street

In the early 20th century, urban photographers such as Walker Evans and Paul Strand used only a camera and modernist techniques (like abstraction and fragmentation) to capture daily city life in New York City, Chicago, Paris, Havana, and Moscow, among others. With "an aesthetic unique to the camera," argues the Smart Museum's exhibit Street Level: Modern Photography from the Smart Museum Collection, their work "demarcate[d] a space for photography as an art form in its own right." The one-room show mirrors the theme presented by the Smart's six-gallery special exhibit, Seeing the City: Sloan's New York, which features artist John Sloan's early 20th century paintings and drawings of street scenes and cityscapes.

Curated by Rachel Furnari, AM'02, a PhD candidate in art history, Street Level is divided into three sections. Furnari starts with "On the Street," images of working-class immigrants next to shop windows: evidence, she writes in the exhibit notes, of "a new acceptance of camera's accurate, narrative scenes and abstract, aestheticized versions of 20th-century urbanity." The next stop is "Above," where the photographer's angle is "only made possible by modern technology like airplanes and skyscrapers." In one picture, Flying in Red Square, photojournalist Georgy Zelma shoots Moscow's Red Square from above through scaffolding, fragmenting the crowds of people gathered below. Finally, Furnari takes us "Below," back to the "more intimate scale encountered in 'On the Street,'" but this time, the subjects are "pressed in by tall buildings, elevated train tracks, and long, high bridges."

Street Level runs through September 7.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Nathan Lerner, Cigar Store, 1934, gelatin silver print; bottom: Ben Shahn, Untitled (New York City), 1932-1935 [c.?], gelatin silver print mounted on heavy paper, vintage impression .

Photos courtesy the Smart Museum.

Posted by rekott on June 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

The rest is history

The year is 1976: Jimmy Carter defeats Gerald Ford in the presidential election, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak develop the Apple Computer Company—and at the U of C, British-history PhD candidate Mark Horowitz prepares for his oral exam.

"To say I was nervous is an understatement," Horowitz wrote in a Winter 1976 Magazine article, "Fear of Failing." "It was soon determined that on February 6, from 1 to 3 p.m., the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' would join the head of British history for my Exam. I had been taking the Orals in my head nightly since December; by January I was reciting it. [My wife] Barbi couldn't even fix a skirt without a comment from her hebephrenic husband ('Did you know that worsteds like that skirt didn't really get going commercially until the sixteenth century? Why, in the West Riding of Yorkshire...!')"

He passed his orals but never completed his degree—the need to support his family pushed his studies aside, so he began a marketing and consulting career in Chicago. But on April 29, 32 years after taking his exam, Horowitz defended his 276-page dissertation, "Law, Order, and Finance: The Development of Statecraft in the Reign of Henry VII," in front of professors Adrian Johns, Steven Pincus, and John A. Guy. Last Friday, under the pretense of giving a history talk on campus, he surprised his family by inviting them to Hyde Park, where they watched him (finally) receive his PhD at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

R.E.K.

Photo: According to a 2007 study by the Council of Graduate Schools, fewer than 50 percent of history PhD candidates finish within ten years.

Photo courtesy the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted by rekott on June 20, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Shedding light on dark matters

Bucktown's Map Room bar was unusually crowded for a Monday evening, with people crammed into every table and leaning against the map-covered walls. The attractions weren't only organic pizza and international beers but also a discussion with astronomy & astrophysics professor Michael Turner, focusing on dark energy and dark matter. The event, part of the Cafe Scientifique series, drew both U of C and unaffiliated listeners, who turned their ears to hear Turner's baritone voice—even with a microphone he was sometimes faint amid other patrons' conversations across the bar.

We're in "the golden age of cosmology," Turner said, on the verge of answering "questions that Einstein and Newton couldn't answer." Cosmologists are close to sorting the puzzle of dark matter, which makes up 25 percent of the universe and holds it all together—"universal glue," he called it. "We think it's just particles," he said. Dark matter's particles are lighter than neutrinos and are called neutralinos. While he'd like to produce a neutralino at Fermilab, the particle accelerator there probably isn't strong enough, so later this summer he and other scientists will travel to Switzerland to use the machine at CERN.

Next up is figuring out dark energy, which makes up 71 percent of the universe (the other 4 percent is atoms) and has been battling the dark-matter glue by driving the universe's expansion. ("Who came up with the term dark energy? That's dumb," he joked before raising his hand and laughing: "That's me." Turner coined it in 1998.) Unlike dark matter—and everything else—dark energy doesn't seem to be made up of particles. It's more like "a sheet that's so elastic it can't be pulled apart." While Turner discussed dark energy, the microphone blew out, leaving some listeners in the dark. Then the mic came back. "OK," he said, "we're talking about the fate of the universe."

He looked to the far future: billions of years from now the universe might "stop expanding and fall back on itself," or, according to string theory, it could "collapse and then start over again." After audience questions about black holes, government science funding, and the big bang, the event was over. But many people waited for a chance to talk with Turner one-on-one, hoping to get more answers about the cosmos.

A.B.P.

Photos: An SRO crowd listens to Michael Turner at the Map Room; when the microphone went out, Turner stood on a table so the group could hear.

Posted by abraverman on June 18, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 16, 2008

How to get from MBA to CEO

Storm clouds threatened, but rain never fell on the GSB's convocation Sunday afternoon. Umbrellas at the ready, families and friends of soon-to-be graduates began lining up outside Harper Quad more than an hour before the ceremony's start time, hoping to snag a good seat when the gates opened.

After the U of C pipe band led a cap-and-gown procession of more than 700 graduates and faculty to their seats, Steven Kaplan, the GSB's Neubauer Family professor of entrepreneurship and finance, offered what he called a "PEP talk." Pressing one last lesson on the graduating class, Kaplan explained that PEP was an acronym he used for "persistent, efficient, and proactive," the three qualities that, according to his research, make for the most successful CEOs. Almost all of those with PEP succeed, compared to fewer than half of those without it.

Kaplan also offered graduates a brief pep talk: "You are not the first class to graduate in an economically unsettled time," he said. The GSB classes of 1989 and 2001 found themselves in similar straits. Yet no matter how the economy fluctuates, he assured them, "your abilities and talents are constants."

After the ceremony ended, the newly minted alumni headed to Ida Noyes to pick up their diplomas, which University officials were keeping safe and dry indoors. As they had walked across the stage, President Robert J. Zimmer had handed them empty diploma covers.

L.G.

Photo: Professor Steven Kaplan addressed GSB graduates at Sunday's convocation.

Posted by lgibson on June 16, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 13, 2008

A woman of substance

At last Saturday's alumni convocation, Alumni Medal-winner Mildred Dresselhaus, PhD'58, noted that it was 50 years ago this month that she defended her physics thesis at Chicago. Now she was back—after a career at MIT conducting groundbreaking research in condensed-matter physics, encouraging more women to enter science and engineering, and directing the federal Office of Science under President Bill Clinton—to receive the University of Chicago Alumni Association's highest honor.

Speaking on "my University of Chicago roots," she told the audience gathered in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel—including other award winners and Alumni Weekend visitors—that her education had been broad. Physics professor Enrico Fermi believed graduate students "should learn the fundamentals of all subfields of physics," she said, "so when they decided somewhere during their graduate studies to pursue one type or another of physics, they would be able to do that." That breadth came in handy as she moved to new research topics, directed a lab "where I had responsibilities for many different areas," served on company boards where "I was the only scientist," and in the Clinton Administration was "able to ask people in other fields specific questions."

Another valuable lesson she learned at Chicago: "get up early in the morning and get my work done before everybody else arrived." Otherwise you spend your day in meetings or on things other than your own work. "Even when I was working in the government I used to arrive before any of the staff so I would have everything ready when they arrived."

Hard work was also a theme later in the ceremony, as professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics Peter Vandervoort, AB'54, SB'55, SM'56, PhD'60, shared some personal anecdotes about the medalist. As his teaching assistant, Dresselhaus "scolded me for neglecting to work as many physics problems as she knew I should," he said, drawing laughter from the crowd. As President Robert J. Zimmer placed the medal over Dresselhaus's head, the chapel audience applauded.

A.B.P.

Photos (left to right): Dresselhaus tells the group what she learned at the University; the Rockefeller crowd listens to her speak; President Zimmer awards her the Alumni Medal.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Posted by abraverman on June 13, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

The ringing, ringing, ringing of the bells, bells, bells

Some dressed in suits and ties, others in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of students, faculty, and alumni packed Rockefeller Memorial Chapel this past Saturday for a concert to rededicate the chapel's E. M. Skinner pipe organ and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller carillon. Listeners, many of them children, stood pressed against the building's walls or sat, legs folded, on the stone floor. More than one audience member remarked that they'd "never seen the chapel so full."

The weekend performance constituted a coming-out party for the two instruments, following a three-year, $3 million restoration project that gave each a more powerful, more nuanced sound. Calling the event "a celebration of two University gems," Vice President and Dean of Students Kim Goff-Crews welcomed several special guests, among them former Rockefeller dean Alison Boden and former University president (and musicologist) Don Randel, who helped spearhead the restoration.

Kicking off at 4:40 p.m., the concert stretched past nightfall. Four University choirs accompanied organist Thomas Weisflog, SM'69, and carillonneur Wylie Crawford, MAT'70, and the program included organ pieces commissioned for the event from William Bolcom and Chicago music professor Marta Ptaszynska. Audience members had planned to assemble on the lawn after the organ performance to hear the carillon, but just after 7 p.m., as the final notes of "I was Glad When They Said Unto Me" faded from the organ's pipes, rain began to fall. When the downpour let up 15 minutes later, the bravest listeners made their way outdoors as Crawford warmed up the carillon and dusk began to fall.

Listen to the restored organ.

Laurie Jorgensen and Lydialyle Gibson

Photos (left to right): Carillonneur Wylie Crawford crouches beneath one of the carillon's restored bells; Crawford and organist Thomas Weisflog smile in front of the organ, which now includes 8,565 pipes; after the rain stops, listeners gather outside to hear the carillon.

Left and center photos by Dan Dry; right photo by Laurie Jorgensen.

Posted by lgibson on June 11, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 9, 2008

In the neighborhood

"Is that Jimmy's?" asked Leong Tan, MD'58, as he looked out the tour-bus window at the more-than-50-year-old Hyde Park watering hole. Now there's a Starbucks next door, noted Tan's classmate Robert Weiler, MD'58, who sat with his wife across the aisle. Driving through the streets of Hyde Park, the 12 or so alumni on the Alumni Weekend UnCommon Tour (part of the UnCommon Core program organized by the University's Alumni Association) remembered those days when "the Tiki" sat at 53rd and Cornell (it closed in 2000) and were relieved that Harold's Chicken and Orly's were still up and running.

Amid nostalgic sighs, the group also observed the neighborhood's change. Sonya Malunda, assistant VP and director of community affairs, narrated the tour through Hyde Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Kenwood and Woodlawn. Having lived in the shadow of the campus since 1984, Malunda has experienced its ups and downs and seen a lot of changes.

As the tour headed west, she pointed out the area just beyond Ellis, where over the last 20 years the University has expanded its "medical and science enterprise." And where the Ida B. Wells public-housing project once stood at 37th and Vincennes, she told the tour-goers, there now are mixed-income condos. "Years ago," said Malunda, this was a "haven for all sorts of negativity," but in recent years that community has become safer.

The entire South Side is in a period of rebirth, Malunda said, partly thanks to the University of Chicago's "civic involvement," which includes four University-run charter schools. The University of Chicago, she said, is of Chicago, not just of Hyde Park. With that title, she explained, "comes obligation to be of the city."

R.E.K.

Photo: Assistant VP and Director of Community Affairs Sonya Malunda narrates a tour around campus and its neighboring communities.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Posted by rekott on June 9, 2008 | Comments (1)

June 6, 2008

Benched for the season

Where the "leaning tree" (removed in 2005) once stood on a patch of grass between the Oriental Institute and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel—its low-lying bough providing a natural perch—now there is a sitting area with several benches, lampposts, and greenery. The benches form a circle at 58th and Woodlawn and also line up toward the OI and south along Woodlawn.

"It's nice to have a place out here to sit down and relax that's outside the main quads," said Tom James, the OI Museum's curatorial assistant, having a mid-morning snack on one of the benches Thursday. He noticed the new amenities, which had been surrounded by work fences for several months, early this week. He especially appreciates the added lighting. "Last night I was here until 9:30, and afterward I came out and sat for a while."

ABP

Photos: Tom James enjoys the new benches near the OI; two students sit in the circular area.

Posted by abraverman on June 6, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 4, 2008

Career advice for would-be profs

Inside a second-floor Ida Noyes meeting room, Lesley Lundeen urged an audience of about 20 graduate students in baseball caps and blue jeans to do a little soul-searching. "Who are you?" she asked. "Where do you fit in?" An assistant director for the University's Career Advising & Planning Services, Lundeen led an hour-long information session Tuesday afternoon to help would-be future professors prepare for the academic job market. The presentation and others like it are part of several services CAPS offers to graduate students looking for jobs both inside and outside academia.

Applicants should start the process, Lundeen said, with some deliberation. At what kind of institution would they be happiest? In what type of city? Do students consider themselves researchers who teach, citizen scholars with an activist bent, or teachers who also do research? "It's all about the match," she said. "Often an applicant who looks like a shoo-in on paper doesn't end up getting the job, and almost always that's because the fit wasn't right."

Dispensing handouts and recommending guidebooks, Lundeen also offered immediate advice. First, she said, make sure your dissertation is nearly finished before embarking on applications—which can consume considerable hours over potentially a year. A good curriculum vitae, she said, is the "cornerstone" of the application, often the first thing selection committees read. Proofread carefully, she added, and don't pad: better to leave off academic-journal articles still "under review." In the cover letter—simultaneously a writing sample, personal statement, and critical argument—"any jargon has to go. If you didn't know a term before you got here, think about whether somebody else would either." The same goes for research statements. "Give it to someone completely outside your field," Lundeen said, "and then ask them to tell you what your research is about."

Finally, Lundeen reminded graduate students to stay abreast of their online presence. "Google yourself and Facebook yourself" to see what information turns up, she said. "If you keep a research blog, make sure it's honest, critical, that it's kept current, and not gossipy. ... Everything you do, even in the early stages of your application, is making an impression."

L.G.

Photos: Despite taking place at the end of a workday during the spring quarter's final week, an information session on the academic job market drew a sizeable crowd of graduate students.

Posted by lgibson on June 4, 2008 | Comments (0)

June 2, 2008

A seat at the table

The Saturday afternoon conference, Teaching the Humanities in Difficult Times, was running a few minutes late, giving the 50-some people waiting in the pews at the Hyde Park Union Church time to notice that the four chairs at the maroon-clothed table didn't match with the eight advertised speakers.

The conference—coordinated by the Humanities Division's Civic Knowledge Project and cosponsored by, among others, the Illinois Humanities Council and the University's Darfur Action and Education Fund—focused on an educational project that had been hard to orchestrate: a Clemente Course in the Humanities being run in Darfur/Sudan for people who have been displaced by the conflict there. But it turned out that making it to the conference proved equally difficult.

Socratic seminars bringing literature, philosophy, and art to the poor, prisoners, and other distressed people in the hopes of transforming how they view the world and their role in it, the Clemente Course program was founded in 1995 by author Earl Shorris. The 110-hour courses are offered in Canada, Mexico, South America, Asia, Australia, and—since February 2008—for men and women in refugee displacement camps in Khartoum.

Shorris began his remarks by explaining that Cairo's U.S. Embassy had denied or delayed visas for some key people involved in the project, including Ismat Mahmoud Ahmed, a member of Khartoum University's philosophy faculty: "So we have a problem."

Denied a visa because, he was told, his English wasn't good enough, Ahmed wrote a letter about the philosophy course he taught, which Civic Knowledge Project director Bart Schultz read aloud. In his letter Ahmed outlined the curriculum (readings that began with Plato and ended with Islamic texts that "urge dialogue and call for openness").

"At first," Ahmed wrote, "I was much afraid to depend only on the Socratic method." In explaining how he would teach to his students, many of whom were used to rote instruction, he compared his role to ta traffic manager, theirs to the drivers, but confessed: "Mainly I was concerned that there would be no cars in the streets." Instead, he found, "there was a traffic jam."

M.R.Y.

Posted by mry on June 2, 2008 | Comments (1)

May 30, 2008

The city that never sleeps

From the turn of the century through the 1930s painter John Sloan captured Manhattan’s mundane occurrences: a housewife hanging laundry out to dry, a couple sunbathing on their roof, a subway updraft lifting a woman’s skirt. Part of the Ashcan School of realist artists, Sloan based his work on observations—from the street and from his Greenwich Village studio’s windows.

The Smart Museum’s new exhibit Seeing the City presents that work alongside the artist’s diaries and letters to explore how Sloan made sense of his rapidly evolving city. In a 1922 diary entry about The City from Greenwich Village he wrote, “Looking south over lower Sixth Avenue from the roof of my Washington Place studio, on a winter evening. The distant lights of the great office buildings downtown are seen in the gathering darkness. The triangular loft building on the right had contained my studio for three years before. Although painted from memory it seems thoroughly convincing in its handling of light and space. The spot on which the spectator stands is now an imaginary point since all the buildings as far as the turn of the elevated have been removed, and Sixth Avenue has been extended straight down to the business district."

Curated by the Delaware Art Museum, the show is the first major traveling exhibition of Sloan's New York images. Seeing the City runs through September 14 at the Smart Museum, stopping next at Winston Salem, NC's Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Z.S.

Photo: John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922, Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Smart Museum of Art.

Posted by zstambor on May 30, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Breath of fresh air

When The First Breeze of Summer premiered in 1975, it was the one of the first Broadway shows performed by an all-black cast. Since then few companies have produced it—"there simply aren’t enough venues that consistently produce African American playwrights," said playwright Leslie Lee in an interview with the Court Theatre's director of marketing and communications, Adam Thurman. But this spring the Court stepped up to the challenge.

In First Breeze, which runs through June 15, three generations of an African American family navigate racial and sexual boundaries. Gremmar (Pat Bowie), the family matriarch, looks back on her youth in the segregated South, where she was known as Lucretia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and her affairs with three different men, including the white adopted son of her employer.

The Tony-nominated play is "semi-autobiographical," said Lee. "The character of Lou [played by Calvin Dutton] is loosely based on me. My grandmother had children by different men. It was a family secret that went hidden for years."

As the Court's 2007–08 season concludes, First Breeze continues the theater's tradition of "taking risks to make the theatre evening special," says director Ron OJ Parson in his director's note. Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones writes that, at the same time the play embraces the forced, obvious family conflicts of the typical 1970s sitcom, Parson also provides a "a richly complex experience that sparks a lot of different feelings in the viewer."

R.E.K.

Photos (left to right): Lucretia with one of her lovers, Sam Greene (Taj McCord); Gremmar (middle) with the family's minister, Reverend Mosely (wearing the suit), and Gremmar's son Milton Edwards (A.C. Smith); Milton and his wife Hattie (Jacqueline Williams).

Photos by Michael Brosilow.

Posted by rekott on May 28, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

The dig in the White City

Rusty nails, white plaster, and bits of glass: potentially dangerous debris to most of us, but this past Saturday such materials constituted buried treasure to a group of undergraduates excavating in Jackson Park near the Museum of Science and Industry. Conducting the first archaeological dig of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition site, the students may have found evidence of the buildings that formed the White City—and bottles of soda or beer that visitors consumed.

Back in a University lab, the students—taking part in the College's Chicago Studies Program—will further examine the artifacts, which also include bricks, ceramic pieces, and a streak of black soil that may be a foundation's decayed remnants. Teacher Rebecca Graff, AM'01, an urban-archaeology graduate student, is writing her dissertation on 19th-century American tourism habits and consumption, using the Columbian Exposition as her prime example.

Graff and the undergraduates hope to add to existing knowledge about the fair, which comes from photographs, pamphlets, and souvenirs. "We have the plans for the fair, for instance," she said, "but we don't have a map that shows exactly where the buildings were. This will give us some idea where they were actually built."

Photos (left to right): Students dig right outside the Museum of Science and Industry; they arrange and record some of the recovered materials; this piece of glass may have been part of a tonic bottle.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Posted by abraverman on May 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

Expanding rates

Even though the price of a first-class stamp rose to 42 cents in early May, you might want to consider buying some one-cent stamps—to use with the 41-cent stamp that honors U of C alumnus Edwin Hubble. Ninety-nine years after Hubble, SB'1910, PhD'17, helped the U of C capture a national basketball championship as a third-year physics major, and 85 years after he proved the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way, the U. S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp in Hubble's honor in early March. At the astronomy & astrophysics department's weekly colloquium on April 30, James Mruk, public-affairs manager for the postal service's Great Lakes area, presented Rocky Kolb, the department's chair, with an oversized reproduction of the stamp, one in a series honoring four American scientists.

"Hubble’s accomplishments in the field of extragalactic astronomy make him the greatest American astronomer of the 20th century," Kolb told the gathering of faculty and students. "About the only thing Hubble didn’t do in astronomy is to construct the Hubble Space Telescope."

Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda Nebula was actually the Andromeda Galaxy profoundly changed cosmologists' understanding of the universe, and today no fewer than ten astronomical concepts bear his name. Perhaps most famous is the Hubble Constant, a measure describing the universe's age and expansion rate. After his studies at Chicago—where he not only played basketball but also was a gifted boxer and high jumper—he took a job at California's Mount Wilson Observatory, where he worked until his death in 1953.

L.G.

Photos: The Edwin Hubble commemorative stamp; James Mruk (left) presents the stamp to Chicago astronomer Rocky Kolb.

Photos by Lloyd DeGrane.

Posted by lgibson on May 21, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

Fly marks the spot

Etched in each of the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol’s urinals, just to the left of the drain, is a black housefly, noted Richard Thaler Friday during the GSB’s 56th Annual Management Conference 2008 keynote address. The reason? It gives men a target. Since its introduction, restroom spillage has decreased 80 percent.

While dirty bathrooms may be a relatively minor issue, said Thaler, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller distinguished service professor of behavioral science and economics, the etching illustrates a "nudge," an environmental feature that attracts attention and spurs a particular behavior. In his new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press), he and his coauthor, longtime Law School professor Cass Sunstein (who's bound for Harvard this fall), argue for policies that guide people toward making decisions that serve their self-interest while preserving their ability to make a choice.

For instance, the book advocates that companies automatically enroll employees in retirement-savings plans unless they opt out. In companies that have such programs, enrollment has jumped 40 percent. “Humans are imperfect,” Thaler said. “We need all the help we can get. Choice is good … but the idea that people will always make the correct choice is ridiculous.”

Z.S.

Photo: The housefly etched in an Amsterdam airport urinal gives men a target.

Posted by zstambor on May 19, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 16, 2008

Cast in stone

Growing up in Kenwood, young Walter Arnold roamed the University of Chicago campus to admire the gargoyles. Now, when Hyde Park visitors stroll by the Laboratory Schools' Kovler gymnasium or the Medici's facade—note the coffee-drinking and pizza-eating figures—they can see Arnold's stone-carved grotesques. As part of the annual Festival of the Arts—a ten-day, student-run event that transforms the campus into an art gallery and performance space—Arnold gave a talk in Bartlett on gargoyles, followed by a three-hour stone-carving demonstration on the main quads.

Arnold started sculpting in stone at age 12. At 20 he apprenticed in Italy, and upon his return to the States he worked for five years on the Washington (DC) National Cathedral before returning to Chicago to start a private studio and gallery in 1985. Spending part of each year in Italy and part at his Fox River Valley (Illinois) studio, Arnold often shares his craft with the U of C community: in 1993, for example, he demonstrated Egyptian carving techniques for almost 600 people during June's Oriental Institute/Smart Museum Family Day.

Festival of the Arts 2008 runs through Sunday.

R.E.K.

Photos: Top: Walter Arnold whittles a grotesque in a stone-carving demonstration; his wife and business manager, Fely (bottom, in beige blazer), leads onlookers through a photographic tour of Arnold's work.

Posted by rekott on May 16, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

The art of the rewrite

Writing, Jonathan Harr explained to the two dozen students and faculty gathered in Rosenwald 405 Tuesday evening, "is, thankfully, one arena in life where you can perform badly and then take it all back and do it again. It's not done until it's done."

That moment of completion, it seems, can't be rushed. It took Harr, an author, journalist, and the University's 2008 Robert Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence, eight years and five publishing-contract extensions to finish his first book, A Civil Action (Random House, 1995). When it finally came out, his account of a Massachusetts town's legal showdown with industrial polluters won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award—and spent two years on New York Times best-seller lists. In 1998 it became an Oscar-nominated movie.

At Rosenwald, Harr read a few scenes and vignettes from a partially written New Yorker article. This past fall he spent six weeks in eastern Chad, along the Darfurian border, where tens of thousands of people fleeing violence and genocide have settled into sprawling refugee camps. Harr talked to international aid workers from Africa and beyond, refugees living in a camp called Farchana, and missionaries and residents in towns nearby. The story he ended up with, he said, is "a jigsaw puzzle" that he's still trying to shape into a coherent whole. Every few weeks he receives an e-mail from his New Yorker editor: "Any progress?" Harr's answer so far: "It's not done yet."

L.G.

Photos: Jonathan Harr (photo by Sandro Cutri); a refugee camp in eastern Chad.

Posted by lgibson on May 14, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

The gift of books

By 2010 the University will have a new library just west of the Regenstein, thanks to a $25 million gift from Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80, and his wife Rika, AB'91. Patrons will read and lounge beneath an elliptical glass dome reaching 35 feet high, while millions of printed volumes will live 50 feet underground, called up by an automated retrieval system.

The Mansueto Library, announced yesterday by President Robert J. Zimmer, provides space for the University to keep its ever-expanding collection local—and for the collection to grow another 22 years, says library director Judith Nadler. The Regenstein reached capacity in 2007, and while universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown have moved materials off-site, Chicago went a different route, maintaining its entire print collection on campus.

Designed by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn, the Mansueto Library will contain a conservation and preservation facility; an area for Special Collections staff members to pick up requested materials and bring them back to the Reg's Special Collections Research Center; an 8,000-square-foot reading room; and the capacity for 3.5 million volumes of print material. Library users will request a source through the online catalog or search engine (Lens), and a robotic crane will retrieve it within a few minutes.

A.B.P.

Photo: An architect's drawing shows the future Mansueto Library from the south; a cross-section rendering shows the automated shelving and retrieval system.

Images courtesy Helmut Jahn.

Posted by abraverman on May 12, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 9, 2008

The wonderful wizard of Scav

If it's the Thursday before Mother's Day, it must be Scavenger Hunt. The 2008 version of the University tradition got under way at midnight when team captains "ransomed" their Scav Hunt lists. As the May 6 Chicago Maroon reported, "[E]ach team was given a list of demands to be fulfilled, including bringing the judges a black light, a toothpick, and a hula skirt. After each five-minute lapse, the judges burned a page of the list." Not to worry: the first pages contain the standard rules, and the list is online.

As usual, competing teams have until Sunday afternoon to produce as many of the list's 260-plus items, each with its own point value, as they can. They'll also participate in Friday night's Scav party and Saturday's Scav Olympics—where the sporting events range from "1. Finnish style wife-carrying competition. Must provide certified married couple (bonus points if marriage is still on after the race!)" to "11. Knife skills! Bring your Top Chef with a good set of cooking knives, and get ready to slice, dice, mince, and prance."

As usual, there's also a road trip. This year's (Item 23) twisted the Frank Baum classic:

“'Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.' No, but you will be before the end of the day. At 9:00 AM Thursday in Hutchinson Courtyard, present your team of Wayward Sons: Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Bat. They must be ready to travel over the rainbow in a flying house featuring a storm cellar door, chimneyed roof, picket fence, and the legs of that wicked witch you just ran over... ."

In a new twist, Item 20 commanded the teams, "Have your pre-selected Scav Warrior outside the Reynolds Club at 3:30 a.m. Thursday morning. They must be alone and they may not have any extraneous packages, bags or accessories. And, since it will be late into the evening, the attire for this event is evening-wear. Evening-wear with a bathing suit underneath." The solo warriors—who also were asked to come with IDs and $200—were blindfolded and driven to O'Hare, where they were presented with a ticket to Las Vegas—and a 46-item "ScavAir Addendum: Vegas, baby. Vegas."

M.R.Y.

Photo: With shoes painted red, this Dorothy is ready to follow the Yellow Brick Road, as the Scav Hunt road trip heads to Kansas. Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

Posted by mry on May 9, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 7, 2008

Pond patrons

Brisk winds and cloudy skies were not enough to deter a few dozen guests from gathering to dedicate Botany Pond this past Friday. Acknowledging Julie and J. Parker Hall III’s (X’54) support to restore the pond to its original marsh-like splendor, a new plaque stands at the pond’s north side. President Robert J. Zimmer read the inscription to the crowd: “Botany Pond and Hull Court Restoration / In Grateful Recognition / Julie & Parker Hall / May 2, 2008.”

Joined by family and friends, the Halls were on campus to receive the University of Chicago Medal for distinguished service of the highest order later that evening. The family has a history of service to the University: Parker Hall is a life trustee, his father (PhB'27) served as University treasurer, and his grandfather was the first full-time dean of the Law School (1904–28).

In addition to serving on several campus boards and committees, Julie and Parker Hall have made gifts to the Division of the Humanities and the Laboratory Schools and established the James Parker Hall distinguished service professorship in law and the Julie and Parker Hall endowment for jazz and American popular music.

Through their botanic-garden endowment fund, the Halls supported Botany Pond’s restoration, which began in 2004. Now visitors can enjoy a pond similar to the one seen in pictures from 1910, when it served as an outdoor classroom and laboratory, in addition to being one of the most tranquil and picturesque spots on campus.

Charlotte Robinson

Photos: Parker and Julie Hall enjoy the dedication on Friday; Botany Pond in 2006; The pond in 1910.

Top two photos by Dan Dry; Bottom photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center.

Posted by abraverman on May 7, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 4, 2008

Invitation to help

Setting up a tent on the Quads for three days last week, Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) closed out April—Sexual Assault Awareness Month—by giving away water bottles, popcorn, copies of the Women's Guide to the University of Chicago, and blue ribbons for passersby to honor victims they've known.

"A lot of people stop by and say, 'I never knew you were on campus,'" said RSVP peer educator Emily Tancer, '08, who staffed the booth with fellow fourth-year Liz Litchfield on Wednesday. The tent, Tancer said, helped spread the word about the organization, housed in the Administration Building basement as part of the Vice President and Dean of Students in the University's office. Professors, staff, and students had all stopped by that day.

Tancer and Litchfield attended a weekend training retreat earlier this year and now give workshops on "acquaintance rape and rape culture," Tancer said, for houses, RSOs, and other groups. Part of the reason for the tent, she said, was to recruit more peer educators for next year.

A.B.P.

Photos: The RSVP tent offered both popcorn and blue ribbons; images in popular culture, Tancer said, often portray women's bodies as objects and men as "hypersexual aggressors."

Posted by abraverman on May 4, 2008 | Comments (0)

May 2, 2008

I pledge allegiance...

Early American citizenship was about more than formally separating from England, argued Stanford professor and president emeritus Gerhard Casper Thursday at the Law School’s annual Fulton Lecture in legal history. Rather it represented “a renunciation of the old monarchical world in favor of a new order.”

In his lecture, “Forswearing Allegiance,” former Law School Dean and University Provost Casper discussed the complicated history of American immigration law and concepts of citizenship. The Founding Fathers were anxious about incorporating European immigrants, long the subjects of sovereigns, into the republic. While Thomas Jefferson, for instance, “had a dim view of integrating” foreigners, Casper said, pamphleteer Thomas Paine “believed democratic principles of American government [would] take care of heterogeneity.” Consequently, for more than 200 years naturalization laws have required new citizens to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty.” Such requirements, Casper noted, no longer make sense in an age of increasing cosmopolitanism, globally shared values, and dual citizenship.

In a question-and-answer session, Casper remarked that his talk had a crucial autobiographical component. Born in Germany in 1937, Casper came to the United States in 1964. He waited many years to change his citizenship, not for lack of feelings for America, he said, but “because Germans of my generation have such a difficult time with national identity.” They “identify as citizens of the world…not detained by national elements.” Casper naturalized in 1979, when he became dean of what he called one of the country's "premier legal institutions.”

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: Former Law School Dean and Provost Gerhard Casper addresses friends, former students, and the curious in the Law School's Kirkland Courtroom.

Posted by efrenchman on May 2, 2008 | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

I've made a kluge mistake

Can't remember what you had for breakfast yesterday? This common situation is not a result of poor memory, says Gary Marcus, an NYU psychology professor, but rather a poorly organized memory. In a Tuesday night talk promoting his new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Marcus explained that your brain translates the question, "What did you have for breakfast yesterday?" into "breakfast, kind of recently," which then turns up a "whole bunch of breakfasts that blend together." We rely on clues to remind us of particular details but need the right cue to pull up the correct fact. People may not immediately recall who the 16th president of the United States was, Marcus said, but if reminded that he helped free the slaves, Abraham Lincoln immediately jumps to mind.

This imperfect filing system of a memory, Marcus said, comes from an "evolutionary kluge." An engineering term, a kluge is "a clumsy or inelegant—yet surprisingly effective—solution to a