“Saving and Spending” may be the official theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, but our quick peeks at some opening-weekend highlights might be better titled “comedy and tragedy.” From Roberto Benigni’s ebullient take on Dante’s “Paradiso” to Bernard Sahlins’ shtick on the history of comedy to Garry Wills’ stark look at America’s slave-owning past to Shirley Hazzard’s account of post-World War II Japan, the festival’s first weekend offered some scintillating moments and striking contrasts.
Scott Turow and Paul Hendrickson dug into more American tragedies with their 2003 Heartland Prize-winning books on the death penalty and race relations in Mississippi, respectively, while other authors just dispensed some juicy tips on poker, traveling and mining new literary material. Now in its 14th year, this multidisciplinary exploration of the humanities runs through next weekend at various venues.
Here’s what we saw:
Tom Wolfe, author
Sunday, 10 a.m. Symphony Center
Wearing his signature crisp, cream-colored suit and gripping the sides of the podium Sunday morning, Wolfe could have been mistaken for a preacher — but a soft-spoken one, maybe Lutheran or Presbyterian.
His wonderfully rambling sermon: for today’s novelists to stop looking inward so much and instead dig into the riches of this “second gilded age,” to eavesdrop on life and report back on its dramas, comedies and inanities.
His congregation: a full house at Symphony Center gathered to hear the author hold forth as he accepted the baiduhai Literary Prize.
His comments covered a remarkable amount of ground, from Silicon Valley (where dot-com billionaires all dressed in “shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, rolled-up sleeves and jeans and chinos so tight . . . they couldn’t even carry a beeper because there was no place to put it”) to beach fashions (“If you don’t have youth on your side, it is not very smart for a male to dress casually . . . I would never go to the beach without a tank top. But men go out with just shorts. It’s just not fair. The rest of us have to look at it”), but it was all in the name of demonstrating what material can be mined from contemporary society.
Citing the trend toward self-absorption among novelists, the reed-thin 73-year-old said, “Novelists are turning inward. They are being told that the content of their own lives is the only valid material. That’s why often you have this marvelous first novel because the novelist has ransacked the first 20 to 30 years of his life. . . . And then the second novel is about a young writer who has had an incredible . . . success . . . but nothing really exciting happens.”
Wolfe took aim at the current batch of corporate scandaleers with witty jabs about their ranches in Wyoming, where they can look out on their “400,000 acres . . . but what do you do the second day?” and trophy wives (“lemon tarts . . . preferably in their 20’s and blonde”), characters he is sure Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell or Sinclair Lewis could really sunk their teeth into if they were around today.
In closing he said: “We are living in an extraordinary age and how writers can resist going out into this marvelous terrain I just don’t know. . . . And so if there are any young Theodore Dreisers or Zora Neal Hurstons in this room, I can only tell you that if you go out and do that you will soon light up the sky and be remembered forever.”
— Monica Eng
Roberto Benigni, comic actor and director
Saturday, 10 a.m., Symphony Center
Paradise lost, very nearly, in explication.
Benigni, the Italian director and Oscar-winning star of the film “Life Is Beautiful,” roved the stage, gesturing, waving, seeming overwhelmed at times by his own ebullience as he conveyed to a packed concert hall his love, adoration, of Dante Alighieri and the poet’s masterpiece, “Divine Comedy.”
He was there to guide his audience through the last canto of “Paradiso,” the “Comedy’s” third and final part, in which Dante ascends to heaven and the eternal light of God. But like an overcaffeinated Beatrice, he could not repress his own extemporaneous commentary, although it was mostly erudite and deeply felt. “Unbelievable beautiful,” he repeatedly exclaimed.
Before getting to the text, Benigni spoke repeatedly of the wonder and beauty of the poem and its importance for the development of the Italian language and on the world literature. In what was billed as his first reading of Dante outside Italy, he seemed genuinely appreciative of the opportunity to speak the words here, even though in English, so much so that he offered to deliver personally a big chocolate cake to everyone in attendance who left him their address.
At the end of his appearance, Benigni stood still at center stage and recited by heart, and without interruption, the entire 145 lines of the canto in Italian. The language was sublime, pure music in this concert hall
— Charles Storch
Scott Turow and Paul Hendrickson, authors and recipients of the baiduhai 2003 Heartland Prize
Sunday 1 p.m., Art Institute of Chicago
In their Heartland Prize-winning books, Turow and Hendrickson both offer a storyteller’s take on unpleasant chapters in American history. But in speaking Sunday afternoon, their styles couldn’t have been more different.
Hendrickson, a professor and former journalist, was dramatic and emphatic, his speech rising and falling in cadences that drove his message home. Turow, a best-selling author and practicing attorney, was all about understatement, a laid-back smoothness; he even cracked a few jokes.
Turow’s novel “Reversible Errors” deals with death-penalty issues through a love story about a lawyer and his client on Death Row.
But as a popular author, he says, he gave up on winning awards when, long ago, his agent told him with a laugh “honey, prizes went out the window after the first 100,000 copies of `Presumed Innocent’ were sold.”
On Sunday, Turow got the last laugh as he accepted his $5,000 award, which he will donate to the Center on Wrongful Convictions, an affiliate of Northwestern University’s School of Law.
In his non-fiction “Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy,” Hendrickson explores the legacy of several anti-integrationist Mississippi lawmen who were shown practicing swinging their billy clubs (presumably at integrationists) in a 1962 Life magazine photo spread.
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After he saw the photo in 1995, he began a five-year quest to find the men depicted, to learn what became of them and their children. He found two.
And in them he found more questions than answers, one of the most disturbing being: “Aren’t all of us who are white in America in the frame, maybe standing way off to the side, but somewhere there in the ring of batterers, maybe even trying on, at least for the moment, our own leer or sneer?”
— Monica Eng
Shirley Hazzard, author
Saturday, noon, Harold Washington Library Center
It wasn’t hard to believe the 72- year-old Australian native Hazzard when she told the audience that she wrote her new novel “The Great Fire” by hand, then typed it on an old electric typewriter. (“People used to ask, `Do you write by hand or typewriter?'” she said of the pre-computer era. “Writing by hand was considered more real, because that’s how the great works had been written.”)
Both her prose and her stature have an old-fashioned elegance that reflect quiet attention to craft and detail. Dressed in a primly tailored dark suit, a white shirt buttoned to the neck and patent-leather pumps, she carried her purse onstage to read from the first chapter of a book that took her almost 22 years to write (her last was “The Transit of Venus,” in 1981).
“The Great Fire” is set in 1947, in Hong Kong and Japan, and follows a 32-year-old decorated British war vet, Aldred Leith, who is studying the effects of the bomb on Hiroshima while also trying to learn how to reconnect to the world. It’s a book about the comfort of literature, in certain ways, and if the first chapter — first paragraphs, even — mean anything at all, “The Great Fire” will be a balm to Hazzard’s longtime readers.
It begins simply and beautifully, with the former soldier Leith on a train in American-occupied Tokyo, “a city in ashes,” as Hazzard put it.
“Now they were starting,” she read in her lilting accent. “Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.”
— Emily Nunn
James McManus, author
Saturday, 8 p.m. Symphony Center
Poker enthusiasts gave up their Saturday night games to attend a panel led by poet and poker icon McManus (“Positively Fifth Street”) about the literature of the game.
Or, that was the intent, at least.
What instead took place was a lively, insightful look into the poker minds of editor Jake Austen (“A Friendly Game of Poker,”), author Katy Lederer (“Poker Face,”) art historian Moria F. Harris (“Fire & Ice: The History of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival”) and radio host Ira Glass (“This American Life”).
McManus, dressed in black like Johnny Cash and serving as the de facto moderator, dealt some practical advice for the poker table, “Your job is to watch the other people, especially their betting patterns.”
Lederer, in her introduction, also read memorably from “Poker Face,” describing Las Vegas as “bright and cheap and all dolled up like a drag queen.”
But later, brushing aside all literary discussion, the spirited Q&A session focused upon practical questions such as: What percentage of the players win money in a tournament?
“Ninety-five percent of the tournament players lose all their money,” McManus said. “All the money goes to the top one-half of 1 percent.”
“Just like America,” Austen added, to which McManus countered:
“Yeah, that’s why it’s the great American game.”
— Robert K. Elder
Garry Wills, historian
Saturday, 1:30 p.m., Northwestern University Law School
Slavery not only powered the economy of the South but also made the region the predominant political power in antebellum America, historian Wills observed.
Wills, a much-published professor at Northwestern University, said the clause in the Constitution that allowed slaves to be counted as part of the population, albeit as three-fifths of a person without the right to vote, gave the South extra representation in Congress and the Electoral College up until the Civil War. Until the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the South was able to use its “slave margin” to control key positions of national power and influence the spread of servitude to new territories, he said.
Speaking before several hundred people, Wills said no Southerner of that era could expect to have a meaningful political career without defending slavery. As a result, he said, a majority of Supreme Court justices and 12 presidents were slave owners during this period, among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Wills called slavery “an abomination” and expressed disappointment that many people today seem reluctant to recognize its enormity. Nonetheless, he told a questioner he was against descendants of slaves seeking reparations for long-ago servitude, saying it was an unrealistic attempt to redo history.
–Charles Storch
Bernard Sahlins, co-founder of The Second City
Thursday, 7:30 p.m., Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago
A funny thing happened as Sahlins made his way through the history of comedy. Dozens of things, actually.
Dressed in a scholar’s gown, he mixed academic discourse with the musings of a troupe of actors specializing in cream pies, goofy facial expressions and pratfalls.
Humor, he noted, long has existed in the lowbrow form, such as obscene gestures and bawdy talk, and the high forms, including comedies of manners and more refined verbal sparring. Sahlins traced the evolution of both, from the humor of the Greeks to a series of clips that included such Hollywood performers as Laurel and Hardy, Whoopi Goldberg and Steve Martin.
Along the way, Sahlins dusted off old groaners such as the man walking by a courtroom with a ladder. “I’m going to take my case to a higher court,” he said.
But he also had his actors — who included a filmed Tim Kazurinsky of “Saturday Night Live” — portray such things as William Shakespeare pitching a book of his humor hits and Emily Bronte as a stand-up comedian. Her opening joke: “What’s dark and hideous and haunts the moor?” Answer: Iago. “Over your head, is it?” she asked the audience of about 870.
— Raoul V. Mowatt
Jan Morris, author
Saturday, 10 a.m., Harold Washington Library Center
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On my first trip to Italy, I forgot to pack John Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice,” so I sought another copy from a shop in St. Mark’s Square. The edition I found had an introduction by Morris, who had written another book on the city that confirmed her as one of the world’s great conjurers of places.
My Venice fortnight occurred 20 years ago, but Morris had begun a life of travel 30 years before that and, — as I learned from her “meandering meditation” on Saturday — now has distilled the half century of wandering into four helpful tips: “Never Fuss. Don’t Grumble. Don’t carry your passport in your hip pocket. And if your cab driver asks for your e-mail address, put the dot in the wrong place.”
Morris believes travel is a sort of skill that can benefit from practice. The discipline she recommended was to “always try to travel alone” in order to have your own private relationship with the spirit of the place, and “never to disregard anything,” including goats on buses (which she doesn’t like) and lower-level law courts (which she loves).
Sometimes, however, less than happy things still will happen. Her advice? “When I am robbed . . . or poisoned,” she said, “I pretend not to notice.”
— Alan G. Artner
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For tickets, call 312-494-9509, and for a full schedule click onto www.chfestival.org