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book talk: the new city lit 50 list

Book Talk: The New City Lit 50 List by Vittorio Carli

 

June 9, 2009

 

I read the “Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago,” which presents a list/pecking order of the most important writing/publishing related figures in Chicago. The list ranks its figures in order of importance. You may want to check it out if you are feeling listless (sorry bad pun). For the literati, it’s the equivalent of the Village Voice’s annual Jop and Pazz Survey for music aficionados or Maxim’s hottest women list for arrested adolescent males.

 

Unlike most people, I am not going to bitch about how my friends and acquaintances were not included. Everybody does that, and all of us have our idiosyncratic, individual reading preferences which often include guilty pleasures. Also, I did not expect the actual top 10 to include mostly poets, considering that about .000000008 of our population reads poetry every day (before you send the police dogs after me let me make it clear that I am using hyperbole here.)

 

But is it too much to ask to actually pick a person in the number 1 slot that is known primarily for writing? The list puts Oprah Winfrey in as number 1, but she is known primarily for being a talk show host/media personality. Sure, she has written some books (which I admit I have not read), but I am fairly certain that she isn’t another Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison or Milan Kundera. She might be the new Chuck Barris (I have to admit that I got a big kick from his kitschy conspiratorial autobiography “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”, and I admired the stylish film version of it even more.)

 

Oprah has a decent middle brow talk show (I liked the Prince episode in which he performed from “Sign of the Times” and announced that he had married a reincarnation of a sister in another life the best) which plays well to its demographics, but her main contribution to the literary scene is that she promotes reading through her book club. Whenever Oprah endorses a book, her fans run to the book stores like a bunch of sheep on their way to the meadows and gobble her recommendations up. Her endorsement alone is enough to put a book over. Don’t get me wrong. Encouraging reading of any kind in this techno obsessed age is a positive thing (one of my poet friends on facebook went so far as to write she “is looking forward to the death of all print media” on her status report.)

 

But Oprah is valuable to Chicago lit primarily as a promoter of serious books or reading. I know she has tremendous influence, but giving her the number one position on the list is like crowning Don King the heavy weight boxing champion of the world because he promotes good boxers (Please forgive my antiquated sports references, but I haven’t followed a sport regularly since the Blackhawks reigned in the ‘70s.)

 

There are some significant poetry related authors on the list such as John Barr, the publisher of Poetry magazine; Christian Wiman, the editor of “Poetry” magazine; the respected Third World Press poet with a hard to pronounce name, Haki Madhubuti; Cris Mazza, the experimental writer who edited the boldly anti narrative and transgressive, “Chick Lit;” plus some notable Indy poets/poetry publishers such as Brandi Homan (of Switchback Books), Jonathan Messenger and Zach Dodson (of Featherproof Books), and Kristie Bowen (of Dancing Girl press), and the alt publishers, Ray Bianchi and Bill Allegrezza of Cracked Slab books. But for my money there were too many book chain managers and book administrative types on a list, especially when you consider  that it was put out by a paper that is supposed to be a big city alternative weekly (but I am still quite fond of Ray Price’s meaty film reviews). An alternative weekly that doesn’t help publicize Indy lit would be as bad as a poetry examiner that spent half of his or her blogs discussing film (ouch).

 

 

 

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