CCLaP

Greetings, if this is your first time to the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; my name is Jason Pettus, CCLaP's Executive Director, and I welcome you. I thought I would take a moment, for all of you who are new, to explain exactly what the center is all about, and what exactly we do. This information is also laid out all pretty-like in a PDF brochure, for those who would prefer reading it that way; simply right-click on this link and choose "Save Link As..." to your hard drive.

CCLaP's mission is to connect underground artists of outstanding quality with the audience eagerly seeking these artists; we do this by maintaining a uniquely personal relationship not only with our artists but with our audience as well. It's to both groups that we seek advice, project ideas, tips on who to feature, even hosts of our live events, workshops and clubs. And instead of maintaining separate membership and artist-development programs, CCLaP combines the two into one, bringing both artists and patrons together in not only a professional but social way.

CCLaP's specific list of products and services can be broken down into the dozens, but roughly fall under one of the following groups:

Live events: Those we usually charge an admission fee for, unless otherwise noted. Includes the weekly CCLaP Slam; monthly CCLaP Showcases; monthly CCLaP Sessions; as well as special events. All events, unless otherwise noted, are $3 for the general public, free for both Members and Fellows.

Creative work: A growing collection of artistic work on display, made by both Members and Fellows of CCLaP, as well as fans and audience members. This collection will also be turned into merchandise, starting later this year, that will be sold online and in general gift stores in the Chicago area; it is the main way our for-profit center plans on paying our bills.

Community events: Those that are usually free to the general public, unless otherwise noted, most also organized and run by our Members and Fellows. Includes workshops on both artistic and business issues; a series of discussion and hobbyist clubs; an entire series of intelligent family events; as well as our special "CCLaP After Dark" series, specifically for those over the age of 21.

CCLaP Online: Special online features we offer only at our website. Includes a regularly-updated podcast; an ever-growing collection of frequently asked questions; a collection of over 30 RSS feeds; as well as a special section called the Sandbox, where artistic work is released under a special Creative Commons license, for other artists around the world to use legally in "mash-ups." This section will also eventually include the "Cafe Network," a new social network CCLaP will sponsor, linking visual artists with the cafes and other retail spaces in Chicago that feature artists, as well as the audience looking for both these artists and venues. It will also eventually include a wiki, maintained by our Members and Fellows, entitled "The CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist."

Publications: Starting early in 2007, there will also be a publications section to the CCLaP website, where you will not only be able to download the latest eBooks for free, but also directly order and pay for our latest paper books, to be FedExed or mailed straight to your home. (CCLaP is currently seeking a publications intern for the 2007 winter semester; to get an early jump, contact us now.)

Regular events start in September 2006; CCLaP is currently hosting a series of special one-time events throughout the summer. To learn more about any of these products or services, please click on their category in the sidebar menu.

Thought all of you who are interested in electronic text might be intrigued by this...

As reported by the MIT Advertising Lab, UK newspaper The Guardian has just launched a new service called G24, providing their readers a total of five different news streams each being updated every 15 minutes throughout the day. What I think is particularly fascinating, though, is that G24 will also then be publishing these regularly-updated streams as 10-page PDF files throughout the day and night as well, letting their customers not only read the updates online but print them out as elegant little paper documents.

The hope, according to the Guardian, is that this will appeal to urban commuters; that office workers will print out the latest version in the mornings and evenings, to have something to read on the train on their way to and from work. And this is brilliant, I think, because anyone who relies on public transportation knows immediately what the Guardian is getting at -- how that 30, 45-minute ride is just long enough to want something to read, often too noisy to concentrate on a full book, and usually underground so that we can't access our mobile internet.

I could easily see something like this done with an artistic online publication as well; maybe not every 15 minutes, of course, but how nice would it be to have a little four-page paper version of McSweeney's (for example) ready at the end of each work day, that one could read and giggle over on the train ride back home? If you know of such existing publications yourself, in fact, don't forget to mention them in this entry's comments.

For those who don't know, there's a great month-long arts festival going on in Chicago right now, called Music with Meaning and run by a group called the Machine Media: the idea is to produce a different event every single night for a month, with the proceeds benefiting such groups as Rape Victim Advocates and America's Second Harvest.

Anyway, on Thursday they're going to be having an event that should appeal to all you lit lovers out there; a live reading from such notables as CT Ballentine (The 2nd Hand), Emerson Dameron (New City, Wherewithal), Andrew Huff (Gapers Block), Jonathan Messinger (The Dollar Store, This Is Grand), Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life) and Megan Stielstra (Sleepwalk, 2nd Story), along with music from a band called High Hawk.

You can get all the details at the MWM blog, but in a nutshell it's at 8:30 pm, costs $5, and is at the California Clipper at 1002 N California Ave. And by the way, two of the writers featured that night (Huff and Messinger) are already confirmed guests for our own CCLaP Sessions, a monthly series starting this fall featuring on-stage interviews with local editors, critics, columnists and more. I'll be at the Clipper on Thursday, and hope to see you there as well.

Good news from Lake Claremont Press, an excellent small publishing company here in Chicago; their newest book, A Field Guide to Gay & Lesbian Chicago, by Kathie Bergquist and Robert McDonald, is now out. They're going to be holding two release parties for it as well: one on Thursday, June 29th at Women & Children First in Andersonville (a great bookstore, if you've never been); and another on Tuesday, July 11th at Big Chicks in Edgewater (another really fun place, for those who have never been). You can get all the details at Lake Claremont's original blog post, linked there at the beginning of this paragraph.

Don't forget, CCLaP would love to publish a review of this book, if any visitors have an interest; doing so helps qualify you for our free Fellowship program. Please feel free to send it our way if you end up writing one, or really any contemporary book review you'd like to pen.

As reported by Gapers Block, the beer company Red Stripe is sponsoring an awfully intriguing-sounding event tomorrow, Friday June 23rd; a beer and screenprinting event to be precise, where you can not only watch the LA t-shirt crew Hit&Run work their magic, but also design and print your own custom shirt, all while getting half-lit off all the Red Stripe being handed out. The whole thing's taking place at All Rise Gallery (1542 N Milwaukee), and you'll need to RSVP beforehand to stubbychicago@thefader.com.

This looks like a lot of fun! I hope one of our readers will go to this and send us some photos and a field report!

As reported by Bookslut.com: Pitchfork, the insanely popular indie-rock website (and also organizers of Chicago's insanely popular Intonation Festival), has published a summer reading list for all you music/lit nerds. Included are biographies of such college-radio staples as the Flaming Lips, Guided By Voices and the Pixies, as well as a memoir by Courtney Love's mom and all kinds of other interesting-sounding stuff. Go check it out!

A great blog on electronic text that I read every day, Teleread.org, pointed out a really intriguing new social network today that I had never heard of. Called LibraryThing, it allows random members to find each other easily through the use of shared interests and hobbies; in this particular case, though, the effort is mostly filtered through the books these members choose to read.

So for example, right now here in Chicago I am just finishing up Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first third of his massive historical series "The System of the World." Looking the book up at LibraryThing, then, not only returned 13 reader reviews of the book, but also a list of related recommendations (including The Illuminatus! Trilogy, an inspired comparison that I wouldn't have thought of myself), as well as direct profile links to the 126 people there who also loved the book (just like me -- I'm a bit of a Stephenson junkie, in fact).

Pretty cool! And certainly a lot better than the wicked-ugly layout and blaring MP3s of most pages at MySpace and other traditional social networks. Anyway, I highly recommend all you fellow lit geeks checking it out sometime, if you have a few spare minutes.

I wanted to mention that a friend of mine here in Chicago, a cartoonist and animation professor named Gretchen Hasse, has been running this really great video screening series on Wednesdays this June (sponsored in part by Chicago Living Arts), over at Davenport's Piano Bar in Wicker Park (1383 N Milwaukee, about halfway between Division and North). The evening takes place in two parts: in the first half, traditional short pieces from a variety of amateur filmmakers are shown; while in the second, these videos are edited together into a more experimental longer piece, with a live jazz combo providing an improvised soundtrack to the whole thing.

Mash-up heaven, I'm telling you! I went to the first screening of this series, in fact, and had just a blast; and the last one is coming up tomorrow, in fact, on June 28, from 8 to 10 pm. There's no cover to attend, although there is a two-drink minimum. Gretchen's a pretty great artist herself, by the way, the author of an absurdist webcomic I'm a fan of called Freaks' Progress. Hey, Gretchen, maybe we could get you signed up as a CCLaP Fellow soon, what do you think? Anyway, those who enjoy short video and live jazz should definitely make it out to Davenport's this Wednesday; you won't regret it.

Bookslut.com let me know today that the UK newspaper The Guardian has a great article up right now, examining some of the best inspirational poetry to read at all these new-fangled gay weddings and partnership ceremonies taking place around the world these days. Included on the list are such smart choices as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes; it's both a funny and touching article, for anyone who feels like checking it out.

As reported by GapersBlock.com: Time's almost up to get your application in for this year's Renegade Craft Fair -- the deadline is July 1. Founded and run by two DIY crafters named Sue Blatt and Kathleen Habbley, the event is a bit of a dream for all of you who enjoy making cool things at home; previous events have featured homemade comics and other books, customer-created knitting projects, all kinds of silkscreening examples and much more. The actual event, then, will be on September 16th and 17th, all day long in the actual Wicker Park that the neighborhood is named for. I'll be there for sure; hope to see you there as well.

Science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, also one of the founders of must-read online magazine Boing Boing, has an incredibly smart essay up right now, over at the SF trade publication Locus. In it, he argues that authors mostly benefit by releasing free electronic copies of their books online, despite so many writers assuming that this will lead to widespread piracy and decreased sales of the paper edition. The article's full of great things that you should be listening to (as is typical with Doctorow); the snippet that struck me the most, however, was this:

Amen, Cory! This is a debate I've seemingly had many times over the years with various writers and other artists, both in Chicago and elsewhere; their fear that if a free electronic version of their work was to be made available on the web, the first thing that would happen would be a dramatic drop in the number of paper versions being sold for a profit. As Doctorow reminds us, in reality such a thing often produces the opposite result: that a reader might not know about an artist's work at all until stumbling across the free electronic edition, but then become so enamored with it that they run right out and purchase the paper version because of it. (After all, according to Doctorow, his first novel has been downloaded for free over 650,000 times now, yet the paper edition is in its sixth printing and is still being purchased daily.)

That's why, for example, CCLaP will be offering free electronic versions of our own paper books, starting in early 2007 when our publishing program kicks into gear for the first time, and why we also publish online the work that Fellows donate even at this date. (And just to remind all you undergraduates out there, by the way, we'll be in need of a publications intern for the 2007 winter semester as well; you'll get not only college credit for such a thing but also actually paid [er, not a lot]. Just contact us to get an early start on the application process.) We at CCLaP believe what Doctorow does -- that the real fight for many artists is to simply get their name and work known, and to increase awareness among the general public, which is why the center is geared the way it is.

Anyway, like I said, it's a great article; I encourage you to check it out yourself.

As reported by GapersBlock.com: A collection of eight Chicago-area crime authors (my favorite easily being Kevin Guilfoile) have recently teamed together to start a new group blog. Entitled The Outfit: A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers," the group promises in their first entry that the blog will be mainly devoted to stories -- stories about "crime and justice and revenge," about "the highs and lows of writing for a living," and about "Chicago, glorious and soiled city of bright marquees and dark divisions."

Hey, sounds great to me! I'll be reading along daily, and I'm sure many of you will as well. It's always great, I think, to see a team of creative professionals band together for the common good, and especially when it happens right here in Chicago.

Did you know that the University of Chicago Press maintains their own blog? They do; today, for example, they let me know about a new article up right now at the digital magazine Inside Higher Education. Penned by academic writer Scott McLemee, based on a talk he recently gave for the Association of American University Presses, his main argument seems to be that his fellow academes simply don't see the purpose of publishing their work online; that they can't imagine much interest for the dry, dissertation-like subjects they and their peers follow. As an argument against that mindset, for example, McLemee mentions a group academic blog about history called Cliopatria, which has now been visited by 400,000 unique people in the last three years.

I couldn't agree more with the things McLemee is saying here, and love to encourage academic writers to get their work out into the general public as much as possible. After all, that's why CCLaP accepts both critical essays and book reviews as part our Fellowship program, and will feature both types of work regularly here at our website; no need to let that dissertation or academic review sit on some dusty shelf, when you could whip it up into a smaller and more appealing cultural essay for the general public. We here at CCLaP encourage not only poets and other experimental artists to submit work for featuring here, but also all you philosophers, sociologists, economists and others in the academic community.

Anyway, the article also goes on to talk about how to best set up online publications under the rigors of academic peer review, for those of you in that world who are worried about such subjects when it comes to blogging. It's a quite informative and eye-opening article; I encourage all of you with the time to check it out to do so.

From the blog of Ben Ortiz, a Chicago writer and friend of CCLaP: the newest issue of Uptown Exchange, the quarterly student newspaper from Truman College that Ben is the academic advisor for, has been released for free download along with its usual paper version. You can download it at Ben's original blog entry on the subject.

The paper is a great example of providing both an academic assignment and a legitimate community service; in fact, I believe that for several staff members, this is the first professional journalistic publication they've worked on. And it's full of great articles too, about the Uptown community where I myself live. Definitely go by and download a copy, if you have the time; and Ben, will we be seeing you at our weekly open mic and poetry slam come September? Hmm!

One of my most absolutely favorite photographers in Chicago, Devyn Caldwell, reminded everyone at his blog "Looper" today that it actually changed locations not too long ago; it inspired me to help him get the word out a little too. Caldwell actually lives down in the actual Loop, which for those who don't know is the big downtown square in Chicago where most of the skyscrapers are located. What he does, then, is just carry his camera around everywhere while he's living his life downtown, capturing some of the most stunning formal compositions of urban detail that you will ever see.

The thing I like about Caldwell's work so much is in how sharp his eye is; of how he can naturally find and capture the beautiful, wonderous minutia that's around all of us in a big city at all times, but that most of us choose to mainly ignore. Caldwell's photos remind us of what a complex, sophisticated machine a large urban area like Chicago really is, and how underneath the glittering steel buildings lies a foundation of human touches, human toil, and human living. As you can tell, although I've never met him, I'm a big fan of his work (and even won his "What In the Loop Is This?" contest one week, a-ha); I highly encourage you to go check his photos out soon yourself, and especially now that he has the much nicer interface. Keep up the good work, Devyn!

The New York Times has an interesting article up right now, overviewing the various collective organizations out there creating free audiobooks of public-domain works. It's definitely worth a read, especially if you didn't know of this underground phenomonon already; of the countless literary lovers out there, volunteering their time to both type out and read public-domain books, for such organizations as Project Gutenberg and LibriVox.

But hey, why stop at public-domain books by a bunch of dead people? You're a writer; you've got two lips and a tongue! Why not make an audiobook out of your own work, then release it for free as a series of MP3s? This is a perfect thing for an underground writer to release at a personal website or blog; a way to stand out from all the mainstream writers out there, and to build a larger fan base who will take a greater interest in your entire ouevre. And if you don't have your own site, might I humbly suggest releasing it through us? We'd love to post audio versions of writers reading from their work here, and would be happy to count it towards the work donated in return for a free Fellowship.

Anyway, some food for thought. And definitely check out the organizations mentioned in that article; all of them are definitely worth your time.

The city of Chicago just announced their latest pick for the 'One Book One Chicago' (OBOC) program, and it's a doozy; it's the short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies by Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri. An Indian-American who hopped between Boston and Calcutta during her childhood, Lahiri's book is full of ambiguous, intriguing stories about the immigrant experience, both from the perspective of America and other countries; I've already read several of these stories in the past, and am looking forward to sitting down and reading the whole book.

For those who don't know, by the way, the OBOC series is a pretty cool thing, and something that's been perpetually popular here since introduced. The brainchild of the Chicago library system and our mayor, Richard Daley, about four times a year the city picks what it thinks is an intriguing piece of literature, then throws massive government resources into convincing the entire city to read the book at the same time. The series started off with a bang several years ago, with the selection of To Kill a Mockingbird, and has continued to be popular since; it's not unusual at all, for example, to ride a random el here and see five to ten people all reading the current OBOC selection at the same time.

By the way -- why yes, CCLaP would love to host a discussion club or other event concerning this book! If you're interested in hosting or organizing such an event yourself, with the center picking up the publicity costs and even helping you find a venue, by all means let us know. We're also very intersted in posting reviews of this book here at the website; those of you who are interested should feel free to contact us as well.

The excellent "web 2.0" site TechCrunch let me know about a new article in the New York Times, announcing just a bit early Google's new News Archive Search. Just like it sounds, the new service will basically let you do Google searches within news publications on any subject you want; but in this case, with those searches being stretched back to the beginning of that publication's existence, which Google is promising will eventually reach 200 years or more. And they've got some impressive people signed up already too; the Washington Post, legal database Lexis Nexis, the New York Times themselves, even Time magazine (who, for those who don't know, already have all 300,000 articles they've ever published online and searchable, dating all the way back to 1923), with more coming every day.

(Image courtesy University of Puget Sound)

Well, hooray to that, I say! And here above is why! Don't recognize what we're looking at? Count yourself incredibly lucky; for this is what my friends and I used to call "Microfiche Hell," back in our undergraduate days at the University of Missouri - Columbia. For about half a century, this was the defacto way that most learning institutions and public libraries maintained archives of serial publications; it was the cheapest option, the option that took up the least amount of space, the one at the time that was most durable for archiving purposes. I mean, never mind that it was such a maddening process, you would end up cursing the need to ever know anything by the end of it all; this is simply the best option there was.

Remember the twenty minutes of looking up an article by hand in a paper book, then hunting down the appropriate reel in a vast, dusty, windowless Citizen-Kane type nightmare of heavy steel shelves? Just to discover that some hippie stole the reel you needed in 1972 on an acid-induced dare, and that the library has still never had the chance to replace it? Arrgghh! I remember that! Google's News Archives Search does away with all that, lets you instantly and elegantly sort through the news right from your home, in an electronic format that lets you instantly cut and paste the text right into an academic paper (unlike us, who had to make weirdo thermal printouts, then go home and retype it all into our TRS-80s).

I for one applaud Google for taking this on, and for plainly stating in that NYT article that they haven't even begun figuring out how they can make money from it, simply that it seemed like a cool thing to do. On a whim, by the way, I decided to test it out myself, so randomly typed in "1929 stock market crash;" one of the first articles it pointed out was this fascinating one from Time, examining the insane changes that happened in the diamond industry just a mere month or two after crash itself. And that was cool, because it was just what I was looking for; some article actually written back then, in the middle of it, sorta dryly examining just the crazy, surreal things that were going on right at the beginning of the Great Depression. It's definitely a cool thing to check out even at this early date; and it will be really cool, needless to say, when their archive goes back the full 200 years they're promising. Definitely check it out when you have a chance.

Moleskinerie, the official blog of the Moleskine notebook company, let me know about this interesting organization called SketchCrawl. A loose coalition of artists and fans of the arts, basically about three times a year they try to convince as many people as possible to sketch in their notebooks on a given day, and then to share the images afterwards (at a blog, at a Flickr account, giving them to friends, etc). They run a blog, for example, linked to above, where random sketchers send them random things they've been doing; it's a nice little collection of random doodlings, definitely something fun to check out.

Anyway, their next one is September 23rd, and I think I'm going to participate; in fact, I might do the entry for my personal site that day as a series of scanned sketches, instead of writing it out. Ultimately SketchCrawl is after the same thing we here at CCLaP are; to convince more and more people to add at least a little direct arts in their lives on a regular basis, to remind themselves of what's so great about the arts in the first place. And if you haven't been by before, by the way, the Moleskinerie blog is another great one to check out. Makers of the notorious little black notebooks used by famous and infamous artists around the world, their site is a group effort of the entire small Italian staff, simply pointing out interesting things that people are doing with their own Moleskines around the world. I know that RSS readers can sometimes be an endless litany of news and weather updates; that's why I love adding feeds like these every so often as well, simply delivering fun and cool visual work to my reader on a regular basis too. I recommend both.

Just a small note for you literature fans, and especially those of you here in Chicago; that the Gapers Block Book Club, a side project of the insanely popular online arts-and-entertainment guide, has decided to add weekly content to their club's website, along with the monthly physical meet-ups they had been doing. Their first, for example, is an excellent review of their current club selection, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, a must-read for anyone interested in Chicago's sordid past.

Don't forget, by the way, that Andrew Huff, Gapers Block's founder and editor-in-chief, will be a guest of the center's own CCLaP Sessions on Friday, November 19th. I'll be talking with Andrew on a stage in front of a live audience for about an hour, concerning all kinds of random subjects -- his background, the trials and tribulations of running a commercial website, his thoughts on citizen media and citizen journalism, just all kinds of other interesting things. I encourage all of you to become regular visitors of their site, if you aren't one already; and I especially encourage Chicagoans to make it out to their monthly social events, because they really are quite fun.

Productivity site Lifehack pointed me today to this crazy-long and useful guide for self-publishing writers, over at a place called the Self-Publishing Blog. It's a great, great entry, too, one that seemingly never ends, giving writers advice on everything from the creative process to which printing plant to eventually pick.

By the way, that entire site is a pretty great one; I've just subscribed to its RSS feed, and I encourage you to do so too. Anyway, just a small heads-up for those of you in the middle of the self-publishing process yourselves.