Essay: Fast Food Community
A couple years ago, I met my friend Thomas at the McDonald’s on Broadway, near Loyola University’s lakefront campus on the Far North Side. As we sat down, Thomas said [...]
Book review: “Death in Chicago: Winter” by Dominic J. Grassi
Cosmo Grande moves awkwardly, humanly, through Chicago, looking for clues and epiphany. Grande, a fiftyish private investigator who drinks too much and smokes too much weed, is the central character [...]
Essay: Ben the barber’s light touch of love
We live in a corrosive age, characterized by bitterness, rancor and fury. Loud voices of rage drown out the quiet virtues of calm and broad-mindedness. My friend Ben wasn’t rageful, [...]
Book review: “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve” by Stephen Greenblatt
An early carving of Eve At the end of the 19th century, Mark Twain had fun with the story of Adam and Eve, writing in “Adam’s Diary” about [...]
Book review: “Mort” by Terry Pratchett
There is an awkward disconnect toward the end of Mort, Terry Pratchett’s 1987 Discworld novel, the fourth of 41 in the series. It has to do with Albert, Death’s manservant [...]
Essay: Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait” (1887) at the Art Institute of Chicago
It was one of those joyous moments in life when, at my home computer with its large, wide screen, I was able to look at a photo that I had [...]
Book review: “The Art of Biblical Narrative” by Robert Alter
The writers of the Hebrew Bible, when they’re telling a story, they’re like Homer with the Iliad — they’re omniscient. They know the story as if they’ve watched it unfold [...]
Book review: “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene
He is a priest who has been on the run for eight years in a state in Mexico where authorities have leveled all churches in an effort to root out [...]
Poem: “Four percent pantomime
Beethoven’s Symphony #7 In A, Opus 92, Allegretto, is dread and endurance, deepening in intensity with each new phrase. down into the core. And, for just a few beats, somewhere [...]
Poem: “Goddess boulder”
In Boston, at the MFA, the faith, love and hope of the Della Robbia family art, glazed terra cotta, one hundred and fifty years of saints and Madonnas with their [...]