Chicago, Chicago, That Clean, Beautiful Pristine Town
Yesterday we learned that esteemed novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, recently relocated to Chicago with his wife and young daughter, is making it his personal mission in life to revive the culture of The Drake Hotel's Cape Cod Room. I'm not one to criticize a writer's quirky dream of reviving the dying culture of a bygone age. Lord knows I spent enough time trying to do that in the 1990s, when I worked at a reporter at The Chicago Reader, with absolutely no luck whatsoever. But I managed to conduct my manic-depressive, quixotically hopeless campaigns without saying anything like the following, which Eugenides uttered to a reporter with no apparent irony: "I view it as a Denmark kind of place. Cold, well-run--a clean, beautiful, pristine city where you can have a nice life and bring up kids and not have a lot of stress. After living in Europe, Chicago reminds me of some of those cities."
Chicago is "well-run," in certain ways. And it's definitely cold much of the time. But the Chicago I knew was more like 1950s Krakow than Denmark. Week after week, I saw working families getting kicked out of their apartments or longtime businesses so they could be replaced by the types of people who want to "have a nice life and bring up kids and not have a lot of stress." Check that. Everyone wants those things. They were evicted in favor of people who can actually have those things.
I guarantee there are people in Chicago, lots of people, probably even the majority of people, who have plenty of stress in trying to bring up their kids, and not only because they're trying to keep them away from R. Kelly. Jeffrey Eugenides' kid is probably never going to enter the Cook County Juvenile Justice system, for instance, and his family probably isn't going to be evicted from public housing. I wax didactic, but Eugenides, who grew up in Detroit, for pity's sake, should know that cities may have mythical elements, but there's always an arsonist behind the scenes at Fairyland who wants to burn it down for the insurance money.
Did that make any sense at all? Anyway, this book that I edited, Chicago Noir, featuring more than a dozen original short stories about the real Chicago, will be published in September. There's nothing clean or pristine about this town. But there's boxing and cab drivers and itinerant jazzmen and semi-homicidal repair-shop owners. I would read it if I were you.
This weekend, the New York Times Book Review will publish a back-page essay by me that reveals, for only the third time, the true story of how my excessive drug use and penchant for rock-n-roll iconoclasm got me expelled from the McSweeneys empire, while also having nothing bad to say about Dave Eggers whatsoever. And I'm hosting a big left-wing hoo-ha in Austin on Saturday night. They're not letting me introduce Howard Dean--that would be dangerous--but I am introducing his brother. Gee! Maybe next week they'll let me introduce Joe Biden's daughter!
Aloha,
NP