Menace on the Mound
You can’t take the New Yorker out of Society of Midland Authors’ recent award-winning biographer and St. Charles resident Judith Testa, and you certainly can’t wash out the dirty mouths of trash-talking baseball players. "Fucking cocksucker this and fucking asshole that—that’s the kind of language that baseball players actually use," proclaims Testa, who remembers, at age 7, watching Dodgers’ feared pitcher of the 1940s and 1950s and subject of her latest book, Sal Maglie, commonly known as "Sal the Barber." Testa, a retired NIU art history teacher and author of "Rome Is Love Spelled Backward," has clearly strayed away from her expertise to delve into her favorite childhood pastime and focused on "the one sport she always truly understood or cared about." She says of Maglie, "He was really scary—not just to batters but to his audience, even watching him on television," she says. "He was very sinister, he just conveyed an atmosphere of menace."

The War in Words
Five years have passed since the United States first invaded Iraq, and recently the American death toll passed 4,000. "It’s difficult to think about," says Jennifer Karmin, who is collecting 4,000 words, ten words at a time, for the 4,000 dead in Iraq from authors, friends, strangers and anyone who will send them in. "I want to have a public memorial and bring the war physically back to Chicago. I think that the number 4,000 is shocking, and I’d really like people to ponder it." Karmin will be reading the 4,000 words and another war-related poem entitled "Revolutionary Optimism" May 2 during Looptopia beginning at 5pm in front of the Vietnam War Memorial at Wabash and Wacker. "We haven’t been seeing images of the dead or any sort of body bags or caskets," Karmin says. "Perhaps when some people hear the number 4,000, it will hit home for them." The sobering exhibition may seem strange for the celebration that is Looptopia, but Karmin says that goes with the territory of art. "Art isn’t always about pleasure and beauty," she says. "Sometimes you have to think of the difficult things. It’ll be interesting to see the response."

(2008-04-29)

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