Smile Politely. Speak Directly. A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, has generated a near frenzy of international acclaim. It spawned a critically acclaimed movie and continues to dominate best-seller lists, five years after its release. So initially, it was with great hesitation and a near sense of trepidation that I approached his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Kite Runner dazzled with its lyrical, haunting prose that captured the evolution of friendship between two boys in the changing face of Afghanistan. Could its successor, with women, as central characters no less, even come close to capturing its brilliance? Happily, I say a resounding “yes.”

Four months ago, before he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz was hanging out in my hotel room in Key West. There were a number of us there — younger, aspiring writers, lounging on the teal sofa-bed and leaning against the Formica bar, listening to Díaz tell the story about a reading with V.S. Naipaul in Australia. (“Yo, that cat hates black people,” Díaz said of the former Nobel Prize winner, who had refused to read directly after Díaz and a Russian writer, and would only come on stage after the audience had left and tickets were collected a second time.)

The radical movements of 1968 eventually collapsed beneath the weight of two competing forces; the politically radical and the socially radical. Some tried LSD, some tried SDS. Some turned to Eastern spirituality as a form of transcendence, and others turned to the decidedly visceral militancy of the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground.

And while the art of the former, in the form of acid rock and psychedelic graffiti, came to define the era, the art incorporating more of the latter faction is often unjustly ignored. One could easily make the argument that literary achievements such as the Black Arts movement presented a much more significant, resonant, and ultimately radical contribution to American culture.

Play every note loud — especially the wrong ones.
– Dizzy Gillespie

Poet Patrick Rosal visits Author’s Corner at the Illini Union Bookstore today as a guest artist in the University of Illinois’s Carr Reading Series.

Look at his website, though, and you may not be sure whether “poet” is a label big enough for Rosal. He’s authored books of poems, sure, but he’s also an essayist, a teacher, a voiceover artist, a performer and guy who really — I mean, seriously — likes music.

The Canaan Baptist Church is a fixture in Urbana. Take a leisurely stroll down Main Street on your way to Strawberry Fields or the Farmer’s Market, and you’ll see it on your left: a pleasantly weathered building that has had a home in the neighborhood for over 30 years. Don’t let the unassuming façade fool you, though. This small church is actually a large agent of social change.

The SAFE House (Substance Abuse Free Environment ) residential program has been in existence since 1984. It offers men battling addiction a way out of that vicious cycle and back into healthy, happy lives. A new facet of the program has begun this year with the inception of the SAFE House Writers’ Workshop/Literature Reading Group, which will meet tonight. The evening’s event will include public readings by group members and graduate students in the university’s creative writing program.

Back in July 2005, on an otherwise forgettable Thursday morning, a writer by the name of Oronte Churm sprung onto the national literary scene. That day, he turned up as a new columnist on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the web headquarters of University of Illinois alum Dave Eggers’ indie publishing empire. The title of Mr. Churm’s column was “Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University,” and he introduced himself like this: “I teach in the English Department of what I'll be calling Hinterland University, Inner Station campus. It’s a Big 10 school, with enough very polite (mostly white suburban) kids to form two or three infantry divisions in Iraq, which most will never have to consider.”

The article also included this disclaimer: “Oronte Churm in an obvious pseudonym.”

Will Leitch, editor of the sports website Deadspin and former sports editor of the Daily Illini, will be appearing at the Illini Union today, Tuesday Feb. 12 at 4 p.m., to speak and sign copies of his new book, God Save the Fan. He was kind enough to speak with us by phone last Friday before his book tour appearance in Seattle, Wash.

Smile Politely: How was the Super Bowl?

Will Leitch: I had a lot more fun at the tour stop. Phoenix was not too much fun, it’s like you’re at the center of the corporate beast. They’re selling the NFL and a lot of other stuff, it’s so corporate, everyone has something to sell, so it’s like a big accountants’ conference.

Although he often self-deprecatingly describes his occupation as “typing about sports,” Will Leitch has a better sense of perspective than most of his colleagues in American sports journalism. In the introduction to his new book, God Save the Fan, he lays out the uneasy line that the thinking sports fan must walk: collegiate and professional sports serve as an escape from our everyday lives, but the more you see how the machinery of the sports industry operates, the less of an escape it is. It’s a tough quandary he’s found himself in, and he fills almost 300 pages trying to work his way out of it.