Tag: Event

On October 7, The Week Behind will celebrate its 17th anniversary as the oldest online magazine in America. Before Slate, before Salon, and almost 10 years before the invention of blogs, The Week Behind was entertaining Chicago audiences with its lively coverage of the arts, culture, politics and technology.

Join original founders Scott Jacobs, Marilyn Wulff and Bob Brink discuss how The Week Behind evolved from the in-house newsletter of IPA, The Editing House into an Internet sensation (Cool Site of The Day on December 31, 1992.) Meet current contributors and find out how you can write for today’s magazine.

On hand for this special celebration will be Stump Connolly, chief political correspondent of The Week Behind, reading and signing his recently released book about the 2008 Campaign The Long Slog: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The White House.

The Long Slog is Connolly’s irreverent account of his 20 months following the presidential campaign. Read his first hand reports from New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, see how he sneaks into the Republican and Democratic conventions, and join him for Barack Obama’s triumphant Election Night rally in Chicago.

Rick Kogan calls Stump “as clear-eyed and sharp-eared a reporter as there is in the land.” Tom Geoghagen says he is “a modern day Poor Richard, a witness of uncommon good sense to the nonsense of our presidential elections . . . an American Original.”

“I don’t think anyone had more fun covering the campaign than Stump, or reading him than me,” adds Bill Kurtis. “You laugh and learn at the same time.”

For a lively evening of fun, politics and surprise guests, don’t miss The Week Behind Birthday Bash at Quimby’s. The first 20 people in the door are eligible to purchase the last 20 original copies of the 1992 classic “The Week Behind: A Year in the Life of Small Business.”

For more info: www.theweekbehind.com

Various works meant to warp your world view. Wither its laughing at the bizarre, reaching for the steak knife under the weight of melodic verses, or simply trying to contain a shiver, you will find yourself left slightly askew. Fresh from his stay at the psych ward SEAN FELIX exposes fragments of his mind without requiring the tokens usually necessary for a peepshow of this caliber. Subjects ranging from battles against a twisted god to the murder of a girlfriends mother will leave you wanting to reread the fluid narratives. Little girls with knife fixations, critiques toward the art world, man’s murderous narcissism, and the slow death that encompasses so many relationships are just pieces of a whole. Come hear a verbal menagerie of morbid curiosity, YOU ARE INVITED.

NAMELESS FACES is a collection of short stories, excerpts, poetry, and rants. Inspired in part by actual events and also by events only taking place inside the authors head, distinguishing the two is a constant challenge. Sean Felix reflects on the abstractly complex as well as the absurdly apparent which binds us all. You will be only spectators awaiting the ambulance to arrive at the scene of the collision.

SEAN FELIX is a resident of Chicago, is fascinated by pork products, hates electrical engineers, and is plotting to destroy straight leg pants (ladies, your feet look like elephant ears because of them, get a clue). This is the first of his viral distributions.

Written by Marine Corps veteran Tyler Boudreau, Packing Inferno (Feral House) traces his 12-year career as a Marine, from boot camp in South Carolina to the first siege on Fallujah in 2004.  Boudreau’s transformation from eager recruit, to a professional-minded Marine torn between an intense desire to experience combat and a growing skepticism about the  operations in which he is participating, and finally to a Commanding Officer who lost faith in the mission, is told in deeply personal detail. Boudreau, an Iraq war veteran grappling head on with the psychological trauma left by war, refuses to be silent. His transformation is reflective of the broader American discontent about a war and occupation with no end in sight, and no moral compass left to guide it.

Packing Inferno digs deep in to the morass of the Iraq war as only a veteran of the conflict can. With rare candor, Boudreau’s account takes readers into the experience of war and all its contradictions. Early in his tour he embraced the call to win “hearts and minds,” politely waving at each Iraqi he met. Yet he confesses that, “most of the Marines, like me, were hungry for blood,” and recounts the unbridled joy he felt after he first saw combat. Eventually Boudreau relates the creeping skepticism that set in at the impossible task of distinguishing civilians from combatants.

Slowly he comes to believe that American military forces are only creating more insurgents with each attack, and that the war’s inevitable consequence is irreversible turmoil in Iraq and even civil war. Back in the U.S. in 2005, preparing for a second tour in Iraq, Boudreau realizes he loves his Marines more than the mission, and feels professionally obligated to relinquish his command and resign his commission. Boudreau’s final assignment as a Marine is not on the battlefield, but as the OIC of 2d Marine Regiment’s rear echelon, assigned the unenviable task of alerting the families of wounded Marines.  It is during this time, in what he describes as the most difficult job he’s ever done, that Boudreau notices the overwhelming numbers of service members returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress. Boudreau starts to wonder why it is never part of his script to tell a mother or a father that, “Your boy is coming home with a broken heart.” If Boudreau left the Marines in 2005, his battles had only begun. From chronic insomnia to sudden bursts of rage, Packing Inferno takes us inside the mind of a soldier struggling to make peace with the demons of war. Boudreau calls on readers not to avert their eyes from the ugly psychological wounds carried by many veterans and to declare loud and clear, “War did this.”

Tyler Boudreau, a twelve-year veteran of the Marine Corps infantry, was deployed to Iraq in 2004 as Assistant Operation Officer for an infantry battalion. Following the deployment he was assigned as the Commanding Officer of a rifle company and was preparing to return to Iraq when he resigned his commission because of his growing reservations about the war. He is the founder of Collaborative Revolution, a new not-for-profit humanitarian project to assist Iraqi refugees and immigrants resettled in the US. He maintains a blog at: www.deeperthanwars.blogspot.com

A Dual Release Party For THE2NDHAND broadsheet no. 32,

featuring a short story by Patrick Somerville

& Greg Gerke’s There’s Something Wrong With Sven

Patrick Somerville is the Chicago-based author of a novel, “The Cradle,” out this year, and the “Trouble” collection of shorts. His “A Game I Once Enjoyed,” a short about a chance chess match between two neighbors during the biggest snowstorm of the year, is the featured piece in THE2NDHAND’s 32nd broadsheet, released here. Somerville has been widely reviewed and praised. “The Cradle” even showed up earlier this year in the staid New York Times Book Review, yet he remains true to the roots of his work’s genesis as a mainstay of Chicago’s indie-lit scene. To read selections from his work, interrogate some of the reviews out there, and get in touch, visit his website, www.patricksomerville.com.

THE2NDHAND contributor Greg Gerke lives and writes in Buffalo, N.Y., where he penned the flash-fiction collection “There’s Something Wrong With Sven” — out this year from BlazeVox Books. His work in fiction has appeared variously in several mags, including Rosebud, Fourteen Hills, Pedestal Magazine, Pindeldyboz, and THE2NDHAND. Writing in the Buffalo News, journalist and book critic R.D. Pohl described the new collection as “a picaresque gambol through many of the leading tropes of contemporary American storytelling from the manic to the gothic, absurdist romance to mock epic parody, Rashomon-effect reverie to tavern patron’s tall tale.” This versatile writer brings his bombast to Chicago in a stop on a multicity tour in support of the book. Visit www.greggerke.com for more.

Spencer Dew, based in Chicago, authored the 2008 “Songs of Insurgency” collection, out from Vagabond Press, and his shorts have appeared in great frequency in some of America’s best online and print lit mags, included, meagerly, THE2NDHAND. Amy Woods Butler (also, incidentally, more recently a contributor to THE2NDHAND) last said the stories in Dew’s collection “pound through the apathy and delusions of our post-9/11 world with the force of a jackhammer.” His delivery, too, honed through regular readings in Chicago and around the country, is unparalleled in its energy. Visit www.spencerdew.com for links to pieces of his prolific online lit presence. (Dew authored THE2NDHAND’S 30th, Winter 2008-09 broadsheet, “Gives Birth to Monsters.”)

C.T. Ballentine, THE2NDHAND’s Chicago editor, will host. Ballentine’s the creator of several one-off and short-run zine projects, including an audio zine (“Radio Plays”) and the occasional “Aftercrossword Special” for his own work. Prior to joining THE2NDHAND as an editor, the mag published his serialized novella “Friedrich Nietzsche Waits for a Date.” Visit www.the2ndhand.com/archive/fried1.html for the first installment.