Talk about love — Toni Morrison did on the final weekend of the 14th annual Chicago Humanities Festival. Talk about money — that’s something poets rarely do, noted Joseph Parisi. Talk about discrimination — that’s what a panel of three real-life judges did during a mock trial on whether the Titanic captain’s cry of “women and children first” violated the rights of the men on the ill-fated ship. That’s some of what we heard and saw at the festival’s last two days. Here’s our report:
Mock Trial: DiCaprio v. R.M.S. Titanic
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Saturday, 10 a.m., Art Institute
A three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court of Public Opinion ruled Saturday that Capt. Edward J. Smith of the doomed R.M.S. Titanic was innocent of sex discrimination in ordering lifeboats filled with “women and children first.”
Attorneys, seeking damages from the successor owners of the Titanic, had argued before the panel and a 450-member Chicago Humanities Festival audience that, as a result of Smith’s order, 678 men perished in the April 15, 1912 disaster.
They contended the captain could have used alternative methods of selection, such as first-come, first-served; a lottery; or “rock-paper-scissors.”
The ruling, on a 2-1 vote, came in a mock trial case brought on behalf of the estate of a Leonardo DiCaprio, identified as a 72-year-old star of Italian stage and silent movies who went down with the “unsinkable” ship.
Judge David H. Coar dismissed the alternatives suggested by lawyers for the DiCaprio estate as unworkable and noted that “women and children first” had long been a widely accepted selection criterion. In addition, Coar said, “Unless you protect the women and children, the alternative is to allow brute strength as the way it’s decided.”
In an earlier lower court ruling, Judge Bianca Winslet had ruled in Smith’s favor, characterizing his order as an act of chivalry.
However, Fay Clayton, one of the DiCaprio attorneys, asserted that discrimination on the basis of sex is indefensible. “Even if it is true,” she said, “that men commit most of the crimes, start most of the wars and cause most of the traffic accidents, it’s no reason to discriminate against them. If sex discrimination were permitted, men couldn’t get jobs at Hooters. They’d have to take sedentary positions like head of the New York Stock Exchange or Enron.”
— Patrick T. Reardon
Toni Morrison, writer
Saturday, 11 a.m. First United Methodist Church
Surrounded by stained glass and packed church pews, Nobel Prize-winning author Morrison read bits of her latest book, “Love,” in a setting that seemed not only appropriate, but inevitable.
Morrison’s sold-out interview with Illinois State Representative and Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie took on the tone of a church service, with many patrons quietly affirming Morrison’s views with a whispery “Amen!” or spontaneous “um-hum.”
The equation made itself more apparent when Morrison talked about the opening of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” during a scene in which Uncle Tom’s wife “throws her children food.”
“Who throws food at their children?” Morrison asked, underlying an underlying narrative ignorance.
But Morrison’s comments weren’t confined only to race, rather, she spent most of her hour talking about the nature of love.
Morrison also focused on the word love itself, stating, “I wanted to stretch that word. We often think of it in carnal terms or most of the time, putting up with someone.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author said she wanted love to become recognized as something one earns, an intellectual decision.
“You can’t spend your life figuring out who is to blame,” Morrison said, in reference to her character’s obsessions with the past in “Love.”
“I wanted to show the wastefulness of that” — a remark that drew another quiet chorus of “Amen!” before a final, respectfully raucous standing ovation.
— Robert K. Elder
Joseph Parisi, editor and writer
Saturday, 10 a.m., Newberry Library
“Money is a kind of poetry,” wrote Wallace Stevens. Perhaps because Stevens also had been an insurance executive, other poets could forgive him for breaking what Parisi calls “the last taboo,” making money a topic in poetry.
Parisi, who resigned this year as editor of Chicago-based Poetry magazine after 20 years in that post, said there has been scant good poetry written about money — even though poets very much have on their minds what’s in their wallets. To illustrate, he read excerpts of letters to Poetry’s founder, Harriet Monroe, in which such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay and William Carlos Williams spoke unashamedly of their need for and delight in receiving just compensation.
But even the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who like Robert Lowell put down on paper the most personal details of their lives, shied from the topic of money, Parisi said.
He believes one of the reasons is the persistent influence of the Romantic poets, who, like Wordsworth and Shelley, reacted against materialism and greed. Even today’s verse, he said, “reminds us constantly, if it is good poetry, of the values that make life worthwhile, the things money can’t buy.”
— Charles Storch
Oscar Hijuelos, author
Saturday, 4 p.m., NU School of Law, Thorne Auditorium
Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” has always been inspired by nostalgic memories of growing up the son of Cuban immigrants in New York City — a life in which worries about getting ahead were less a concern than a way of life.
“Whenever people visited, the conversation was always about how to get more money to make ends meet,” he said. But Hijuelos, whose charmingly self-effacing, intellectual demeanor was accented by his rush-and-tumble delivery, was somehow worried that his prepared talk was not relevant to the theme of this years festival, “Saving + Spending.”
“It was so dry and boring, I’ve decided to wing it,” he said. And then he rambled entertainingly about his characters’ unrelenting struggles with money and the material world, where people buy things they don’t need in order to get a bargain. He also read passages from his first book, published in 1983, the dreamlike autobiographical “Our House in the Last World” (whose title, in fact, came to him in a dream, he told the audience).
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Mother and son “Mercedes and Hector walked into yet another store. The word Bargain had lured her off the bus. They were standing in a stifling room, surrounded by tables and tables of haphazardly strewn socks and shoes, T-shirts and pants. It was hard to move. Human breath was thick in the air. Women kept pushing at each other to get a hand on a few lousy items on the table, pushing to find a bargain. . . `Look for your size,’ she told him, throwing him a handful of underpants.”
Hijuelos annotated the readings with vivid recollections of his past (“Immigrants always look back,” he said of his preoccupation), apologizing more than once for his “digressions”; these were more than welcome — evidence that the writer is never separate from his work — but the author seemed oblivious to this fact. “I’ll be taking questions later, if there are any psychiatrists in the audience,” he said at one point.
— Emily Nunn
Nan A. Talese and Alex Kotlowitz: By the Book
Saturday, 2 p.m., Newberry Library
“You’re on the verge of retiring before they know you’re there,” said famed editor Talese about the low-profile lives of editors.
Nevertheless, Talese and author Kotlowitz (“There Are No Children Here”) attracted a nearly sold-out crowd to hear their stories about editor/writer relations and publishing war stories.
Talese offered not so many blood-and-guts tales (except for a passionate anecdote about bidding on Kotlowitz’s book), but a rather refreshing affirmation of literature as a human art form.
“I really do believe books can change the world,” Talese said, offering the example of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” as a work that changed the way people thought about ecology. She similarly thought Kotlowitz’s book about children growing up in an infamous Chicago housing project could change public policy.
Talese said the most important components in selecting a writer are the author’s storytelling ability and his or her passion for a subject. She then proceeded to take questions from the audience.
It’s not surprising how many aspiring writers attended a panel starring a renowned editor. What was alarming was the degree to which they inserted themselves into questions and offered long anecdotes about F. Scott Fitzgerald before arriving at an actual question.
Anyone who raised a hand and began with, “As a writer myself . . . ” received soft moans from a segment of the audience.
The handful of remainders, after clapping loudly for the two speakers, rushed to the stage in an attempt to hand Talese a manuscript — a professional hazard, but a sign of literary passion nonetheless.
— Robert K. Elder
Reporters’ Perspectives on the Iraq War and Its Aftermath: A Panel Discussion
Sunday, 10 a.m., Chicago Historical Society
Glimpses of the Iraq War from three baiduhai reporters and an editor during their appearance before 400 festival-goers:
Kirsten Scharnberg, an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne Division, on once needing the help of a solider to carry her equipment, “It does still bother me. Had we gotten into a situation where we were taking enemy fire, and this soldier couldn’t get his weapon up to fire . . . it bothers me to think I could have compromised these people because of my presence.”
William K. Glauber, on visiting the private zoo of one of Saddam Hussein’s sons immediately after the fall of Baghdad: “A soldier from Chicago said he’d show us around. All of a sudden, this guy draws his gun. `We can’t find the cheetah,’ he says. They did find the cheetah. They were feeding the animals live sheep.”
Glauber, on the scene that day at the elegant Republican Palace: “The roses were in bloom. You could smell the roses. You’d head a little closer to the bushes, and there were bodies there.”
Deborah Horan, on reporting recently from an overcrowded regional hospital in southern Iraq without working plumbing: “It’s an example of how much Iraq — it needs everything. The quality of life there — after 12 years of sanctions and war and 35 years of dictatorship, the place is pretty much a mess.”
James E. O’Shea, the Tribune’s managing editor, on complaints that the news media has been too negative in its reporting of the war: “It’s not my job to sell this war. My job is to cover it. We have to cover the bad and the good.”
Glauber, on the future stories to come out of Iraq: “It’ll be much of the same. The final story will be: `U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq under gunfire yesterday.’ That’ll be five years from now or 10 years from now.”
— Patrick T. Reardon