THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB
Summaries of
Papers 2000 - 2001
Ray Greenblatt opened our season at
The Fortnightly on October 2
with The Vanishing Trove: Reviled Heroes, Revered
Thieves. This was a fascinating account of
the route of the Silk Road in western China in the Taklamakan
Desert, the art and artifacts of that route and the
cultures it brought together, and most of all the adventures of
those explorers who brought them to light in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.
William Barnhart presented Our
Fellow on October 9.
This was a biography of Arthur Baer by a fellow Beverly resident,
recounting his early years, education at the
University of Chicago, business career, and his long association
with the Club. The fellowship bearing his
name was established by the Club in recognition of his quiet
efforts over many years on behalf of the Club.
Robert Carton, on October 16, gave us Leadership, based
on the pioneering explorations of
Alexander MacKenzie in the Canadian West and Arctic. From
MacKenzie's exploits he developed examples of
the leadership and character MacKenzie so evidently displayed.
Roger Ball explained the Chain of Chains, the Viniculum
Viniculorum, on October 23. In this
wide-ranging paper, Roger explored hermetic magic, the power of
the occult, and much of medieval occult
magic, and its influence down to the present day despite the
debunking of scholars.
Anthony Batko treated us to the delights of military training,
specifically Air Force flying school, in
Your Tax Dollars at Work, Part I on October 30.
Gayle Guthrie gave us A New
Creation on November
6, in which a fictional account of Biblical creation was given
through the eyes of a female narrator.
Rebecca Weber tackled the oeuvre of Marshall McLuhan on November
13 in A Heap of Broken
Images, recalling to mind his observation that "the medium is
the message," the global village and the
electronic age, and astutely surveying his work and comparing him
most notably to T.S. Eliot.
Dennis O'Dea gave us another realistic account of life in the
legal profession on November 20 in Political
Science. In Dennis' absence the paper was read by Ray
Greenblatt.
David Zucker described, in "A Familiar Chicago Street" the life
of the namesake of Clark Street, George Rogers Clark,
Revolutionary War hero and the man who secured the Northwest
Territory, on November 27.
Todd Parkhurst presented a biography
of Clarence Darrow in Revolutionary Remarks on December 4.
The meeting of December 11 was cancelled due to a heavy
snowstorm.
Lester Munson presented the Arthur Baer Fellowship Address,A
New
Genus of Jock Brahmins, at The Chicago Historical Society on
January 8. The subject of the talk was Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of
the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox, real estate developer,
lawyer, and general all-around deal-maker.
Kelly Warnken gave Vocation,
Avocation, on January 15, a description of the pursuit of
hobbies.
Theo Green delivered a heartfelt ode to
the emotional and other stresses in the life of a policeman in
Bluesfor a Polilceman on January 22.
The meeting of January 29 was cancelled due to a fire at The
Cliff Dwellers.
Stephen Thomas presented his
snow-delayed paper, Surveying the Scene on February 5.
This
was a description of the life and contributions of the original
surveyors of the Northwest Territory as directed by Jefferson,
and their influence in land transfer.
James Thompson presented City Hall and Other Stories on
February 12. This group of three stories started with the
Bureau of Marriages and a young man's thoughts while
waiting for
a license; Wade involved a business associate of the name,
an
old lady and her gin on an airline flight; Golden Times
related
the father's habit of taking movies and his family's reaction.
Edward Quattrochi presented Utopia in Chicago on February
19, a
description of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, three Renaissance
Italian scholars who influenced the work, and a list of books
essential for those who settle Utopia. Those books are all to be
found at the Newberry Library; the author also brought two of
them from his own collection.
Tony Batko delivered the concluding segment of hius two-part
paper, Your Tax Dollars at Work, Part II on February 26.
This
completed the tales of high-flying hi-jinks in his years in the
Air Force in the 1950s that Tony started earlier in the season.
Yolanda Deen delivered one of the two CLC papers on March 2 at
the joint meeting with The Fortnightly, Confucius Says, in
which her old friends, Kant, Nietzsche, and Confucius helped her
make a decision about Buddy, an old class acquaintance and
general cut-up.
Manly Mumford delivered the other
paper at The Fortnightly, To Cross, a soliloquy by Julius
Caesar as he contemplated whether to cross the Rubicon and thus
change history. The topic for this evening's papers was Moral
Dilemmas.
Francis H. Straus II, on March 5, presented an analysis
of witches in the course of history in A Witch or Not,
progressing through England and then to the colonies. At Salem he introduced his sixth-great
grandmother,
Elizabeth Jackson, convicted at the Salem witch trials, together with evidence that she was, in
reality, a highly
educated woman of the time, a leader in the community and of her family due to the illness
of her husband.
Nelson Borelli gave us Alice on March 12, a psychologist's exploration of Alice in
Wonderland as related to
the scientific community and psychiatry.
Hugh Schwartzberg delivered Mercy's Revenge
on
March 19. Mercy Otis Warren, a leader of the Revolution
but an opponent of the new Constitution, wrote one of the first histories of the Revolutionary
period. An
intensely personal history, Mercy "got even" with her Constitutional opponents by simply
leaving them out.
Thus Francis Hopkinson and James Wilson have virtually disappeared from current versions
of revolutionary
history, while Alexander Hamilton was only narrowly rescued by others in the mid-19th
century. History is
sometimes written by the losers!
Patricia Ann Nell presented The "A" Word on March 26. The A is anthrax, and her
essay
described the
dangers of that deadly and highly contagious disease, some of its biological warfare
implications, and her
efforts to vaccinate US armed forces personnel against it.
Philip Liebson, in A Pleasure Dome Decreed on
April
2, took his title from Coleridge, and explored the
travels and apparently fantastic tales of Marco Polo to Kublai Khan's court, their relations, as
well as the tales
of Nestorian Christians and Prester John.
Malachi Flanagan gave us Rush Medical College of the University of Chicago,
1898-1942
on April 9, in
which he explored the alliance of those two institutions in the years indicated, and the
ultimate severing of their
ties.
Teresa Conway gave us Beside the River on April 16, describing the life of Rosalia
de
Castro, 19th century
orphan, a poet who celebrated the Saar River, the people of Spain's Galicia, and one of the
leaders of the
rebirth of Galicia's culture.
John Notz delivered A Beginning, an End, and Another
Beginning on April 23. John, as a member of the
Society of Architectural Historians and of the Trustees of Graceland Cemetery, had become
aware of the
interment of Marion Mahoney Griffin in an unmarked site at Graceland. This essay was a
description both of
his journey in finding an appropriate resting place for her and a testament to her origins in
the Hubbard Woods
area of the North Shore, and her career with her husband Walter Burley Griffin, spanning
work in Chicago, in
designing Canberra, Australia, and work in Lucknow, India.
Ray Greenblatt presented a Classic Night on April 30, his own Black as Bat Wings,
a life
of Nabokov.
Frank M. Covey, Jr. delivered The Roman Autumn of Il Professori on May 7,
describing
his love of the Eternal City, several visits there since 1958, and many features of interest.
Several of his visits have been extended summer tours as a member of the faculty of Loyola
University.
Joel Dryer presented the address to the Closing
Meeting on May 14, The Story You Don't Know About a Place We All Love. This
was
the story of a group of Chicago artists following the Civil War who managed to obtain a tax-
free charter from the Illinois legislature as the Chicago Academy of Design, their financial
plight following the Chicago Fire, and the manner in which the Academy and its valuable
charter were assimilated into the present Art Institute of Chicago.
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