new poll

yeah, I know the previous sports polls didn't exactly take off. I'm just expressing my pessimism about this upcoming Bears season, which I will write precious little about, unless there's another Tank Johnson type situation of social interest.
For the record, I'm not expecting a ton from Illinois this year. I think we're good for 7 wins, whether or not we make a bowl game-- I'd expect a loss in any good bowl, a win in any substandard bowl. And, yes, I don't expect better than 6-10 for the Bears. 5 wouldn't shock me. 7 would be a bit of a surprise, even considering our really weak division. If I were a bookie and wanted to set up a wins total prop bet for people like me, I'd set it at Illinois +.5 wins. If a bookie were sitting next to me and offered it and I wasn't totally broke, I think I'd take it.

RIP Kevin Duckworth

I don't usually feel the need to post when a famous person I like has just died, but reading about Harvey, IL native Kevin Duckworth today reminded me that I always liked him, and it sounds like he deserved his good guy reputation.

"When the curtain fell at last, it was an act of mercy."

So I've been reading, finally, the above-pictured book, Revolutionary Road. (Yes, reading a very depressing novel which relates to my research topic is my current means of relaxing. [Yes, I need to find other hobbies.]) OK, I'm about to finish it, and I'm remembering that a movie starring Leonardo "Dee" Caprio and Kate Winslett or whoever was in the works, and I'm thinking that there's no way I'm going to like the movie. Part of what I like about Yates (I'm no literature expert and have only read this and his collected short stories, so, yeah) is how brutally unromantic his characters are, and I don't know how that works in a movie, in anyway other than some sort of ham-fisted "ooh look at me I'm dark" kinda tripe. One of my favorite things about RR is how clearly it shows that the quest to be some "authentic, sophisticated, unique individual" is useless by its very premise (Yes, I'm probably projecting. I said I'm not a literature critic, so boo) , and I just don't think that contemporary movies are equipped with the tropes and symbols to convey this in an elegant manner.

My other favorite thing, as someone who likes to read critical histories of the family and all that, is how we are shown that the archetypal 50s "traditional" family was, far from the natural ordering of human life, something that resulted from very particular historical, economic, geographic, and psychological circumstances, that had to be worked at and all that. This way of life was new and strange to its participants, neither the default way of being like in so much Republican propaganda nor the Well Of Emptiness And Source Of All That's Wrong With The World that many "critical" looks back on the era present. The gender division of labor within the household, Frank's need to feel like a man, the figuring out of class and social positions in a new and growing geographic space, all took a lot of work, like all living does. It just seems like it will be so hard, through the medium of major American film, to show this. To the contemporary reader there's something surprising and remarkable about how the era that, in nostalgiast propaganda and entertainment ever since then, has been portrayed as "when things were normal," was so clearly to its participants an unusual, difficult time, with social and psychological demands that often felt novel and, to the Wheelers, excessive. I'm worried that the nuance and pain of the novel will turn into nothing but "the 50s were bad because people had to CONFORM, man," or that the Wheelers are going to come off as some romantic figures representing our quest to find our true selves, or some other common story that is boring to me.

I think I'm going to feel like I did when I saw the film version of Ask The Dust, but even worse, because Yates seems like a harder writer to put to screen then Fante, and this movie will all but certainly not feature a naked Selma Hayek.

YOU ARE AN IDIOT

No, not you, gentle reader. "You" as in:

• these "scienticians" who think that Phrenology is an exciting new idea:

"When boys reach puberty, testosterone often lengthens and enlarges their jaws and makes their brow ridges more prominent. The hormone also increases their facial width-to-height ratio, a comparison of the distance between the cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and brows. Last year, paleontologist Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London concluded from an analysis of skulls that this ratio is larger in males and that the difference is independent of the male-female inequality in body size. Intrigued by this finding, behavioral neuroscientist Cheryl McCormick and psychologist Justin Carré of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, decided to see if the ratio correlated with aggressiveness, which also depends on testosterone levels....

To find out, the researchers first measured facial width-to-height ratios in 88 male and female volunteers. They then gave the subjects a test that involved pushing buttons ... 15% of the individual differences in aggressive behavior could be explained by individual differences in facial ratios, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society

Moving the experiments to the real world, the researchers plotted face ratios for college and professional ice hockey players from their photos on the Internet. .. This time, the researchers found that 30% of the aggressive behavior exhibited by males could be predicted by their facial morphology.

The team concludes that this aspect of male facial structure may convey an "honest signal" of propensity for aggressive behavior."

Let's see... Facial feature A correlates with B, which is also found to correlate with socially-loaded construct C. Hey, I know, let's see if A and C correlate, without bothering to see if it's all about B!!! Since we're SCIENTISTS, we've thought of everything and haven't even thought of the fact that in doing this we're basically just resurrecting discredited racialist bullshit! This is fun!!

• Also an idiot is IOC president Jacques Rogge, who saw fit to publicly single out, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, chastising him for like celebrating or something. I loved this response, even though I don't buy into the idea that the US, Europe, and Russia have any business shaking their fingers at China.
  

Donuts

All my writing, reading, and internetting time has been devoted to working on my dissertation proposal, with the occasional burst of writing poems here and there, but I wanted to make a quick comment about the play Superior Donuts, showing at the Steppenwolf. I'm far from a theater critic, but I really, really liked this play.

It's set in a donut shop in Uptown, run by an old Polish-American Vietnam war resister/stoner/etc, played by David St. Hubbins. I'm not going to summarize the play or review it or anything, but I wanted to share that I thought it was awesome.

More specifically, I was worried that it was going to traffic in overblown old Chicago nostalgia, and self-righteous commentary about gentrification in Uptown, which would be pretty rich coming from a well-established theater company. (I'm not saying that artists, even/especially middle-class ones, shouldn't address gentrification, and I'm also not saying that the play dodges the issue at all. But it does so in a much more nuanced, thoughtful, etc way than I had anticipated.) Anyway, you get your Magikist and Starbucks riffing, but not in a nauseating way at all. The sense of nostalgia and awareness of change shared by the playwright and the thoughtful characters really suits how I understand it: they use nostalgia as a way to tell their stories and express their feelings about the world around them. It's done really, really beautifully. And if you're a softie like me who thinks that realistic, unromantic human kindness and love is often underrepresented in the arts, I dare you not to cry at the end.

The play, written while playwright Tracy Letts was dealing with the attention and massic success of Ausust: Osage County, is not perfect. I generally like its sociology but found Franco a bit of a "magic Negro," and I have a hard time believing that a Black cop working an Uptown beat is gonna flinch at a Russian business owner referring to "black sons of bitch." What I'm saying is occasionally the writing shows a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of relying on easy archetypes and sight gags like eastern Euros in tracksuits and the word "douchebag," but you all know I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.

PS- When on the southside and looking for a donut, eat at Dat's. 83rd and Cottage. Open all night.