Ambassador from poetry land
Almost no one reads poetry anymore, which means that you probably haven’t read Actual Air, one of the very few poetry collections written by a working singer/songwriter that’s worth a damn (sorry, Jewel). Praised by former poet laureate Billy Collins and The New Yorker, the book proves that David Berman isn’t just another singer/songwriter with delusions…
War, thrice
More than 50 years have passed since the last movie based on H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and now, in 2005, there are three new versions. This is a rare opportunity to compare the visions of three filmmakers, or perhaps one with a vision and two in different stages of blindness. The first…
The play’s the thing
“My radiation oncologist cruelly resisted my pleas. I begged him to irradiate the unaffected breast so it would be big and perky and glow in the dark like the one they zapped.” — “Degrees of Lucky,” Judith Schlessinger Dyer Judy Dyer, who died of breast cancer earlier this month, left behind a one-act drama about…
Wanted: More dead presidents
Hopes were high five years ago, when some of the biggest names in Illinois formed the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Foundation. The foundation expected to rake in as much as $20 million a year from donors during its first three years of existence and to have $50 million in the bank by the…
A Thanksgiving connection
It’s Thanksgiving Day — have you hugged a farmer yet? Actually, we need to do a lot more than hug those family farmers who bring us such a bounty of good food, for they’ve become endangered species in the Brave New AgWorld of industrialized, conglomeratized, and globalized food production that our policy-makers are pushing. Thanks…
“I am not a prostitute”
I have two George Ryan-related stories for you this week. First, the irony of former Gov. Jim Thompson’s decision to defend former Gov. George Ryan seems pretty obvious up front, but there’s more than first meets the eye. Thompson was the U.S. attorney who put former Gov. Otto Kerner behind bars for corruption and was…
Big name, big money
Richard Norton Smith doesn’t come cheap. Besides heading the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Smith is director of the nonprofit fundraising foundation for the museum. Between his state and foundation salaries, Smith doubled his income when he came to Springfield from the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, where…
Letters to the editor
Letters policy We welcome letters, but please include your full name, address and a daytime telephone number. We edit all letters for libel, length and clarity. Send letters to: Letters, Illinois Times. P.O. Box 5256. Springfield, Illinois 62705. Fax: (217) 753-3958. E-mail: editor@illinoistimes.com LAW COULD STIGMATIZE CHILDREN One of the most disturbing pieces of legislation…
Freddie’s ready. . .
Preparing for an overseas trip, Freddie L. Lambert looked at his birth certificate and noticed that his race was listed as “Colored” but that his wife’s birth certificate said “Negro.” “So I used to tell people I’m in mixed marriage,” says Lambert, a 20-year Springfield resident now living in Durham, N.C. Such observations provided the…
American Life in Poetry
Descriptions of landscape are common in poetry, but in “Road Report” Kurt Brown adds a twist by writing himself into “cowboy country.” He also energizes the poem by using words we associate with the American West: Mustang, cactus, Brahmas. Even his associations — such as comparing the crackling radio to a shattered rib — evoke…
Spreading a Backyard Tire Fire
When Ed Anderson disbanded his successful Chicago roots-rock outfit Brother Jed in 2000 after five years of hard work, he knew what he was doing and where he was going. He joined up with his best pal, drummer Tim Kramp, and together they became Backyard Tire Fire, beginning a march toward success and recognition. After…
Jacqueline Jackson
kinquote poem # 5 colleen eight having just played some mozart and a bit of vivaldi polishes her new fiddle lays it in its case thank you daddy for getting me this violin — the sound! when I vibrato I can hear my heart beating in the strings we too dear colleen oh we too…
The longest dream
Summer 1959. I’ll refine my first-baseman skills here at the semipro level, forget college, and go straight to the major leagues. The old, grizzled, arthritic pitcher throws some chin music. I jump cat-quick out of the way, trip, and fall on my back, arms and legs kickin’ like an upside-down dung beetle. The ball breaks…
Girls gone wild
A few years back, Octava Augspurger returned from her annual pilgrimage to the Sunshine State with more than a healthy tan. She arrived home with a plan — one that would involve a red-hot phenomenon, a flamboyant fashion statement, and her fun-loving friends in Lincoln, Ill. While dining out in Florida, Augspurger had seen a…
Work in progress
This time last year, I devoted a column to my son Evan. Actually, I spent the first four paragraphs hemming and hawing, apologizing in advance for delivering mush when you have every right to expect something spicier in this space. My excuse was the convergence of three signs: that November is National Adoption Awareness Month…
A ray of hope
Joe Wright’s masterful new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice engages the viewer from the very first scene to the very last in such a way that you will begin missing the characters as the final credits roll. Such experiences are becoming all too rare at the movies, given that so many of today’s…
Politics of the dinner plate
Archer Daniels Midland Co. has many people to thank this year. First, of course, the Decatur-based agribusiness giant can thank American Indians. They taught white settlers to grow corn — and corn is a major contributor to the ADM’s success. No other company in the world processes more corn. ADM uses the crop to make…
Global warnings
Having already run through our own alphabet and now just into the Greek alphabet, more hurricanes have been named in 2005 than any other year since the naming system started in 1953. And while politicians may be blamed for their aftermath, some scientists postulate that the storms themselves are the manifestations of global warming. Others…
Letters to the editor
Letters policy We welcome letters, but please include your full name, address and a daytime telephone number. We edit all letters for libel, length and clarity. Send letters to: Letters, Illinois Times. P.O. Box 5256. Springfield, Illinois 62705. Fax: (217) 753-3958. E-mail: editor@illinoistimes.com END FOR TRAIL FOR WESTFALL? You may be one of the many…
True Britt
The brush Chris Britt uses to draw editorial cartoons is so fancy, it can’t be bought in Springfield. It’s a Winsor & Newton Series 7, and the bristles come from the soft tail hair of the kolinsky sable. Britt buys one or two of these brushes a year from an art-supply house for $26 apiece.…
A spoonful of sugar
Unless we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, Ken Mehlman’s sex life, there are no guilty pleasures. If pleasures could induce guilt, confessing them wouldn’t be the hipster’s favorite parlor game, the subject of so many self-aggrandizing/self-effacing conversations in which Totally Unique Rockdudes strive to outdo one another by professing/confessing their not-so-secret love for Hall…
And the band plays on
Julie Wilkerson doesn’t like to toot her own horn. Less than two years ago, Wilkerson was earning slightly less than $40,000 a year as a band director and associate music professor at Rend Lake College, a two-year school near Carbondale. Today, she earns $65,000 a year as an assistant warden at Big Muddy River Correctional…
American Life in Poetry
Many of you have seen flocks of birds or schools of minnows acting as if they were guided by a common intelligence, turning together, stopping together. Here is a poem by Debra Nystrom that beautifully describes a flight of swallows returning to their nests, acting as if they were of one mind. Notice how she…
Jacqueline Jackson
hodgepodgepoem #1 they’re probably written up in some linguistic something or other but consider echoic h pairs how many there are of them more than any other letter and know what they’re seldom hotsy-totsy for instance humdrum that’s blah while all disorderly like the catch-all kitchen drawer are higgledy-piggledy helter-skelter derogatory ones try hocus-pocus hoity-toity…
Future shocked
To mark Centralia’s 150th anniversary two years ago, community leaders installed a big metal sign on the rooftop of the historic Frost Building. It declares: “Centralia Your Opportunity.” The sign, which overlooks the old Illinois Central railroad tracks, is a replica of one erected in the 1920s by the local Rotary Club and taken down…
Reporting on Kinsey
When I worked at Appletree Records, in the Chatham Square Center off Wabash Avenue, in the late ’80s, the Kinsey Report was a hot new band with a debut release on Alligator Records that was the talk of the town. They were stretching the limits of blues music with a rock attitude and a funky…
No gap, no letting go
A veteran Springfield teacher expressed frustration as she left the Nov. 14 forum on “Closing the Achievement Gap”: “We’re already doing so much of what they suggested, but we’re not closing the gap.” A school official was defensive, claiming that the district is already doing what it needs to do to close the gap between…
Sticking to her guns
Renatta Frazier, the former Springfield police officer who won a $650,000 settlement in her racial discrimination suit against the city, found herself on the defending end of another lawsuit this week, this time accused of libel by a former leader of African-American community. “I regret that it has come to this, because I think it’s…
