SectionOne - Chicago Reader · — The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963 His parents divorced when he was 11, then remarried 16 years later. He was precocious, drawing and read-ing at a young

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Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4Maurice Possley versus Amy Fisher. Yes, that Amy Fisher.

The Straight Dope 5Whither Geronimo’s bones?

Chicago Antisocial 8Hanging with the hat cult

Scientists 10Maybe we really are alone in the universe.

Fall Books Special 14The childhood Edward Gorey didn’t want to discuss(starts below), Wicker Park through the eyes of an urbansociologist, kids learn free courtesy of 826CHI, punk talk-show host Brian Costello writes a novel, a newbookshop in Edgewater, South Asian writers in search of a scene, rock critics go full-length on some favorite LPs,a memoir of a landmark public-housing case, and 24 more new books reviewed in brief.

ReviewsMovies 34Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

Music 36Animal Collective’s Feels and Bell Orchestre’s Recording a Tape the Color of Light

Art 40“Into the Woods” at Thomas McCormick,Richard Mayhew at G.R. N’Namdi, andMarco Casentini at Roy Boyd

Photography 42“Stages of Memory: The War in Vietnam” atthe Museum of Contemporary Photography

Theater 46A Man for All Seasons at TimeLine Theatre

PlusInk WellThis week’s crossword: It’s a Sign

C hildren haunt the work of Edward Gorey. Lone, victimizedchildren abound, grimly abandoned or violently rubbed out.Run over by motorcars, trampled in brawls, left on stoops to

die of croup. Ever since the legendarily shy writer and illustratorpublished his first book, The Unstrung Harp, in 1953, fans andjournalists have been trying, unsuccessfully, to pry open his psy-che and explain his work—especially those beleaguered children.

Gorey was a hugely complicated man, his eccentricities the stuffof legend: the signature fur coat and tennis shoes, the dozens ofyears spent religiously attending every performance of the NewYork City Ballet, the persistently ambiguous sexuality (“I’m neitherone thing nor the other particularly”). He hated Henry James,Manet, and Barbra Streisand. He loved Ivy Compton-Burnett, TheTale of Genji, and The Golden Girls. Above all else he loved cats.

But like a lot of reclusive figures, Gorey actually gave a lot ofinterviews. He never had an explanation for “O is for Olive runthrough with an awl,” but he answered most questions in his ownintelligent, diffident way and, over time, a set of facts took shape.He was born in Chicago, the son of a Catholic newspaperman.

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears.—The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963

His parents divorced when he was11, then remarried 16 years later. Hewas precocious, drawing and read-ing at a young age.

When the inevitable question aroseas to what lurking horrors couldpossibly explain his work, he wasless forthcoming. He always politelyacknowledged that it was reasonableto wonder, but bapped away intima-tions of early trauma. “I’m sure minewas happier than I imagine,” he toldone interviewer who asked about hischildhood. “I look back and think‘Oh poetic me,’ but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everybody else.”

Still, the question endures. “Iwondered if continued on page 28

ON THE COVER: SERGE BLOCH

What’s Gorey’s Story?The formative years of a very peculiar man.

By Elizabeth M. Tamny

From The Remembered Visit; Edward Gorey in 1998

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heartbreaking character, and it’s the child’stale, not the young woman’s, that hammershome the cynicism and cruelty of “cool-ness.” It’d be unfair to dilute the novel’s sus-pense by revealing the plan afoot, but bythe end this thoroughly enjoyable page-turner has become stiffly didactic, asthough Naomi Klein had taken a stab at fic-tion. Ironically or not, the novel itself inuresone to its message. The hip marketers atHarcourt included a flyer titled “How toBecome a Counterculture Revolutionary (inTwelve Easy Steps)” with the book’s publici-ty material. I’ll take my cue from adolescentAlice, thanks: “I am weird and I am meanand if they do try to pick on me I give it backto them worse.” | Patrick Daily

PRINCES AMONGST MEN: JOUR-NEYS WITH GYPSY MUSICIANS |Garth Cartwright | Serpent’s Tail | NewZealand’s Garth Cartwright is a passionatedevotee of Balkan Gypsy music: “I chosethe Taraf over techno, Esma over Oasis,”he writes in Prince Amongst Thieves, hisnew book profiling more than 20 of itsgreatest musicians and bands, includingTaraf de Haidouks, Esma Redzepova,Saban Bajramovic, and Boban Markovich.It’s a feverish travelogue in whichCartwright eats, smokes, and, especially,drinks with his subjects. His writing favorsbluster over analysis, but the enthusiasmis completely infectious, even if his white-nigger tendencies—he goes so far as towrite, “In some crazy mixed-up way, theseare my people”—are hard to take.

Cartwright is a purist in his interests(though just about everyone in the bookhas relied on a western European produc-er), but he’s able to appreciate new devel-opments, like the freakish, androgynous

something bad happened to himonce that he never told us about, thathe never told anybody about,” saidhis cousin Ken Morton in a 2002Boston Globe article. His own com-ments even leave the door open a lit-tle. “When I look back on my child-hood,” he once told another inter-viewer, “I have an extraordinarilywarped view of it.” At times he evenseemed to challenge the reader tofind out more. He told theWashington Post, in 1997, “[I] wasprobably fully formed by the time Iwas twenty-one or twenty-two.”

Since his death in 2000, at the ageof 75, more information about hispast has begun to come out. The lastfive years have seen the reissue ofClifford Ross and Karen Wilkin’s TheWorld of Edward Gorey, plus therelease of a collection of interviewsand a photo essay of his Cape Codhome shot the week after he died.(The home itself was opened to thepublic in 2002 as the Edward GoreyHouse, after its finials, iron imple-ments, stuffed Figbashes, and45,000 books were tidied up.) Twoprojects slated for the future includethe final Gorey anthology,Amphigorey Again (the publicationof which Harcourt keeps pushingback), and an examination of Gorey’scareer as a book designer forDoubleday’s Anchor Books in the1950s by designer and former col-league A. Christopher Simon.

What still remains unexplored isGorey’s Chicago childhood, the earlyyears of an artist who was always insome ways writing about or for chil-dren, despite his oft-expressed disin-terest in the creatures. What follows,as far as I know, is the first close lookat it. Gleaned from old yearbooks,census data, newspaper clippings,and conversations with his family andfriends, the particulars of his youthbring an understanding to his workthat can’t be found in his later life.

You might link the lonely fates ofGorey’s children to his experience asan only child, especially as a child ofdivorced parents. But there’s also a lotof family in his books, in the back-ground, like all that patterned wallpa-per. More often than not the socialcontext of his work is the family,extended and undifferentiated, suchas the large Edwardian household ofThe Doubtful Guest or the familyrushing to the boy’s bedside in TheStupid Joke. Who are all these people,alternately protecting and desertingthe central offspring, and sometimesjust milling around like penguins?

Gorey’s family provided him with aphalanx of uncles, aunts (including anun), and cousins. And cousins arethe most commonly identified rela-tive in Gorey’s work, usually travelingin packs of three, as in The DerangedCousins, which Gorey told DickCavett was inspired by the relation-ship between him and his two closestmaternal cousins. He was also quiteclose to his maternal grandparents,

28 CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER 11, 2005 | SECTION ONE

continued from page 27 Goreycontinued from page 1

Gorey’s eighth-grade yearbook photo

Gorey, known to intimates as Ted,was born Edward St. John Gorey

on February 22, 1925, the only childof Helen Dunham St. John Garveyand Edward Leo Gorey. Though he’soften mistaken for being English, hisancestors were primarily Irish. TheGarvey side of his mother’sEpiscopalian family came fromIreland in the 1850s; his grandfatherwas a financial executive at IllinoisBell who began his career in the rail-roads and had a summer home inWinthrop Harbor. Both of Gorey’sCatholic paternal grandparents emi-grated to Chicago from Ireland in thelate 1880s, his grandfather a city“street laborer” for many years beforesettling the family in Forest Park.Family lore tells of warriorlikeGoreys exiled to Europe for fightingwith the British government, andGorey was built like his relatives: talland thick, with big hands. Therearen’t any short humans in Gorey’swork; they’re all long limbs and tor-sos topped with small bulblike heads.

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according to yet another Garveycousin, who I spoke with via e-mailin 2004. They were the source of afamily scandal that has the hushed,darkly veiled air of a Gorey tale.Shortly after their marriage, hisgrandparents took in his grandmoth-er’s orphaned niece, known as Prue.Though only ten years older thantheir eldest daughter, Prue acted as asurrogate mother to Gorey’s motherand her brothers and sisters, as hisunstable grandmother Garvey would,in his words, “go insane and disap-pear for long periods of time.” Shewas institutionalized several times,and eventually Gorey’s grandfatherdivorced her and married Prue: hewas 68, she 49. Few Goreys appear tohave known Prue was his niece untilafter the marriage.

Gorey’s parents, who married in1921, were a study in contrasts. Hismother “smothered” her only child.

According to Gorey’s childhoodfriend Betty Caldwell, who I alsospoke with last year, she was “sweet,”and a beauty, with eyes as blue as herson’s. She was also six years olderthan her husband, and considered tohave married down. AndreasBrown—proprietor of the GothamBook Mart and a director of theGorey trust—says she recognized thetalent and smarts of her only childearly on (he skipped two grades inelementary school). She documentedhis development with regular photo-graphs and filled boxes with all hisartwork—he started drawing whenhe was 18 months old. She said in aninterview in the early 1960s:“Everybody asks me how Edward gotthis way, and my only answer is thathe was always drawing pictureswhen he was a little boy and he wasan omnivorous reader of Englishauthors. Other than that, I really

don’t know. . . . I still don’t knowwhere he gets his ideas. . . . Tedalways did puzzle me.”

Gorey apparently saw much less ofhis father in his youth. The elderGorey spent his childhood as a stu-dent at Saint Malachy’s and QuigleySeminary, then a serious minor semi-nary designed to train young men forthe priesthood. While still in highschool he began reporting for theCity News Bureau, and eventuallydropped out before graduation tobecome a crime and police reporterfor the Chicago Evening Post, theHerald-Examiner, and other papers.By 1920 he was regularly coveringpolitics for the Chicago American—in those days of aggressive Chicagojournalism, the most aggressivepaper in town. Gorey alwaysdescribed his father as a Hearstnewspaperman, but in fact he was

Bulgarian chalga singer Azis, who incorpo-rates bhangra and electronic production.He details the ongoing exploitation andabuse of the Gypsies—from Goran Bregovicstealing songs for Emir Kusturica films topoliticians keeping the Rom population iso-lated in filthy ghettos. But when it comesto contextualizing the institutionalizedpolitical mistreatment of the Rom,Cartwright doesn’t have a sure enough his-torical grip to add anything new; Princehas nothing on Isabel Fonseca’s masterfulBury Me Standing. Still, it’s the firstnonacademic English-language book tomake sense of the panoply of sounds pro-duced in Romania, Bulgaria, and the for-mer Yugoslavia, and its colorful charactersmake it a hoot to read. | Peter Margasak

THE 13 1/2 LIVES OF CAPTAINBLUEBEAR | Walter Moers | Overlook |All hail Captain Bluebear, the blue-furredbear raised by minipirates until he grewtoo big for their little pirate boat, educat-ed by Professor Abdullah Nightingale atthe Nocturnal Academy deep in theGloomberg Mountains. It was he whotrekked with the Muggs through theDemarara Desert until trapping the mythi-cal city of Anagrom Ataf. Thereafter hedwelt in Paradise, the city inside theEternal Tornado. Did he not reign for ayear as the King of Lies? Was he not thenthrown into the bowels of the S.S. Moloch,stoking its vast furnaces until . . .

And so it goes in this sprawling yetsimple tale set in the imaginary land ofZamonia. Each chapter is one ofBluebear’s lives, this volume covering thefirst 13 1/2. (“A bluebear,” you know, “hastwenty-seven lives.”) It isn’t so much anyparticular episode, as sparklingly imagina-continued on page 30continued on page 30

From The Unstrung Harp and The Fatal Lozenge

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tive as each one is, or Walter Moers’smany evocative illustrations, but themomentum of its 700 pages, one damnthing after another with no ebbing ofinvention, that makes such a marvelousread. Holding it all together is the charac-ter of Bluebear: self-effacing and polite,prone to diplomacy and ingenuity in theface of certain disaster. His head contains,after all, a full copy of ProfessorNightingale’s The Encyclopedia of Marvels,Life Forms and Other Phenomena ofZamonia and Its Environs—a handyresource for any situation in which ayoung bluebear may find himself.

Bluebear was originally published in1999 in Germany, where it was a cult hitselling more than 200,000 copies. All hailtoo, then, Overlook Press and JohnBrownjohn, who translated every back-ward title, nonsense term, and silly scien-tific theory into a bright and clear Englishthat never fails to delight. | Patrick Daily

VERONICA | Mary Gaitskill | Pantheon |As in Mrs. Dalloway—or even Ulysses forthat matter—not much happens outwardlyin Veronica. A woman, Alison, wakes aftertoo little sleep, drinks a cup of coffee, thenwalks to the office she cleans; later shetakes a long mountain hike. Throughoutshe reflects on her past—a former model,she had glory days in Paris and New York—and on her unlikely friendship withVeronica, a big, raucous, bleached-blondproofreader who’s died of AIDS. Alison her-self has hepatitis C and a bad arm thatkeeps her gobbling down codeine.

The similarities to Gaitskill’s Two Girls,Fat and Thin are obvious: unhappy womenwith thwarted lives, a charged friendshipbetween opposites. “It is a credit to Ms.

more than just a reporter. In 1928 heran, unsuccessfully, as theDemocratic candidate for state sena-tor in the Sixth District and in themid-1930s was publicity director forthe Drake and Blackstone Hotels.For the last 20 years of his career hewas an aide-de-camp to AldermanP.J. Cullerton, of the 38th warddynasty; Cullerton eventuallybecame Cook County Assessor.

Gorey Sr. constantly moved his fam-ily about, though it’s not entirely clearwhy. Gorey’s peripatetic childhood isthe one fact he always offered upwhen probed for unhappy storiesfrom his youth. By the time he leftChicago for Harvard his family hadhad at least 12 addresses: two in HydePark, five in Rogers Park, two inWilmette, one in Evanston, one on thenear north side, and one in Lakeview.

Edward Leo Gorey, a joiner in theextreme, appears to have been theantithesis of his fitfully reclusive,eccentric son. According to his step-daughter, Kiki Reynolds, who lives inLas Vegas, he was a “very bigCatholic” who “knew everybody”—hewas even an honorary pallbearer atMayor Cermak’s funeral. He comesacross as a hard-drinking Hechtiancharacter who would’ve had to haveknown everybody to have the jobs hedid. Gorey, on the other hand, cam-paigned once for Adlai Stevensonthen gave politics up completely. Hewas a Taoist who claimed churchmade him throw up. His father was asports fan, but the only aspect of ath-letics his son appears to have enjoyedwas a vague appreciation of sportsphotography. He shrank from any-thing smacking of PR. Gorey does not,however, give the impression of some-one who flung away the Babbitty trap-pings of his youth in avant-garde dis-gust. He seems more like a cat whosniffed them and wandered away toits own interests. However, the manwho hated sports did actually draw a

couple of sports cartoons when he wasa kid, and his father got them placedin the paper. They were among hisfirst published work.

His father’s personality echoesthrough Gorey’s later work. BettyCaldwell told me male characterslike Earbrass in The UnstrungHarp—men with folded-over headslike otters—remind her of how she

remembers her friend’s ruggedlyhandsome, mustachioed father. Andit’s probably worth noting that, otherthan the opera-themed The BlueAspic, there aren’t more than a fewpanels in any Gorey book where acharacter ever opens his mouth.Gorey’s cats have bigger facial fea-tures than his people; the men, withall their mustaches, usually don’t



A sports cartoon Gorey did for the Chicago Daily News circa 1938


even have mouths. Even at theirmost expressive his humans are pup-pets, speaking only through theirassociation with the text. The staidbut muted social order they conveymakes them both powerful and fun-damentally foolish.

When asked once (again) why“stark violence and horror and

terror are the uncompromising focusof his work,” Gorey famously replied:“I write about everyday life.” TheGoreys lived in Hyde Park at thetime of the Leopold and Loeb trial(Gorey was born while it was underway), and Gorey’s father coveredcrime for the Hearst papers at theend of the Chicago newspaper wars.It’s not so farfetched to argue thatboth he and, later, his son just wroteabout things as they saw them.

Gorey’s use of language is a kind ofsubversion of journalistic who-what-where-when; while sometimesrococco it’s also telegraphic, commu-nicating much with one carefullychosen sentence. Of course, thattechnique could also derive from hisfondness for the interstitial titles inearly French silent films, but thepossibilities are suggestive.

Gorey’s father broke up his family ina shattering way the summer after hisson finished eighth grade, leaving hiswife and son for the nightclub singerCorinna Mura, whom he met at theBlackstone. Mura was promoted dur-ing her short wartime film career as aSouth American singer of exotic origin,but she was in fact from Connecticut,the daughter of a Spanish-Englishfather and Scottish mother. She wastrained as a coloratura soprano butabandoned opera for pop and radiosinging, specializing as an interpreterof Spanish songs. She’s universallyreferred to in articles about Gorey as“the woman who sings the ‘Marseil-laise’ in Casablanca” (although thewoman people usually think of whenthey hear that is the young French-woman, Yvonne; Mura is Andrea, the

Gaitskill’s prose . . . that we are drawnalong, loath to abandon this grim story,”New York Times critic Ginger Danto wroteof the earlier work, and that too is the casehere. Bitter, narcissistic Alison, with hersad tales of self, tempts you to throw thebook aside, but Gaitskill’s prose is tantaliz-ing: “Her rage was like gentleness trappedand driven crazy with sticks,” she writes ofanother sad-sack character. Still, genuinecharacters get you a lot farther than sharpsimiles, and there are no memorable oneshere (though someone disagrees with me,as the novel’s shortlisted for the NationalBook Award in fiction). Even Veronica isleft unrealized, a lumpy woman in an uglysweater who irritatingly calls everybody“hon.” | Kate Schmidt

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING |Joan Didion | Knopf | Joan Didion’s newmemoir, nominated for a National BookAward, is among her finest work.Continuing in the autobiographical vein of

her last book,Where I Was From,she lifts the curtainand exposes theraw workings ofthe year in whichher life cameundone. At the endof 2003 her hus-band of 40 years,writer JohnGregory Dunne,died suddenly of a

heart attack. Their adult daughter,Quintana Roo, at the time hospitalizedwith septic shock, listed in and out of acoma and life-threatening illness for thefollowing year (she died in August). continued on page 32

Joan DidionWHEN 11/12, 2:30 PMWHERE HaroldWashington LibraryCenter, 400 S. StateINFO 312-661-1028PRICE $6 (sold out)MORE Interview withMara Tapp, part ofthe ChicagoHumanities Festival

From The Gilded Bat; Gorey’s stepmother, Corinna Mura, in the 1940scontinued on page 32

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uncredited band singer). There areobvious connections to Mura’s dis-tinctive vampy, campy look in Gorey’swork. His friend Alexander Therouxwrote in The Strange Case of EdwardGorey (his own posthumous Goreymemoir) that “most of the women inhis books, the elegant ones certainly,are as identifiable for their black eye-liner as Claudia Cardinale,” and it’s alook Mura affects in all her photos. InGorey’s “pornographic” novel, TheCurious Sofa, all the men have black-rimmed eyes as well, lending them acertain dissolute quality. There areechoes of Mura in the opera singerOrtenzia Caviglia of The Blue Aspic,with her obsessed fan Jasper Ankle(they are “married” through their lastnames; caviglia is “ankle” in Italian),and maybe even something of hercareer in Maudie Splaytoe, the com-mon little girl who transforms intoprima ballerina assoluta Mirella Spla-tova in The Gilded Bat.

A fter Gorey’s father left, Gorey’smother took her son on a car trip

to visit family in Ohio and New York,eventually dropping him off with rel-atives in Miami, where he went toschool for a few months and even

had a pet baby alligator—an animalthat turns up later in The EpiplepticBicycle. Gorey was 11, the same ageas Drusilla in The Remembered Visitwhen she’s sent abroad with her con-spicuously absent parents.

Once back in Chicago Gorey and hismother moved from Wilmette to theMarshall Field Garden Apartments, aprogressive experiment in moderate-income housing built by MarshallField III on the near north side. Thedivorce may have actually broughtGorey some stability. Beginning inninth grade he went to Frances Parkerand for four years stayed at oneaddress, an apartment in Lakeviewwhere his mother would live until the1970s. (Gorey’s parents eventually rec-onciled, a few years after Gorey grad-uated from college. His father’s mar-riage to Mura appears to have dis-solved by the 1940s when Mura,according to Kiki Reynolds, herdaughter from her first marriage,was back in Hollywood on her own.)

In his senior year at Parker Goreywas editor of the yearbook and had22 works in the annual art exhibi-tion, serving on the jury with anotherlater-famous classmate, painter JoanMitchell. Gorey is generally consideredto be self-taught; he liked the “Irishromantic” idea, says Andreas Brown,that he got his talent from his Garvey

great-grandmother, who designedChristmas cards for the McClurg fam-ily in the mid-19th century. He did,however, acknowledge one high schoolart teacher as influential, though neverby name. He was Malcolm Hackett, apainter and WPA muralist who hadtrained and exhibited at the ArtInstitute. Mitchell, who often cited himas a significant influence on her work,says, “I was crazy about Hackett. Hewasn’t much of a painter. But he wastalking about [Oskar] Kokoschka in1939.” Hackett was indeed a friend ofKokoschka and another Art Institutegrad, Ivan Albright, and, despite thefact that Mitchell also described himas “angry,” seems to have inspiredstrong loyalty in the students whoselives he touched. In painter DonaldVogel’s The Boardinghouse, a memoirof his years at the School of the ArtInstitute during the Depression,Hackett is cast as a rock-solid sageand mentor, “simple, sturdy, quizzi-cal, shrewd, fearless and unpreten-tious.” The one course of Hackett’sthat the Art Institute has a record ofGorey taking is the Saturday summerclass Costumed Figure Drawing.

Though his senior yearbook bioreads in part, “art addict, romanti-cist, little men in raccoon coats,”Gorey’s drawings from this perioddon’t look particularly Goreyesque.



Didion employs her economical proseand scalpel-sharp reporting skills toattempt to understand a grief that isbeyond her understanding, a mourning so great it blurs the contours of her life.Like all her best work it’s a brave andstraightforward examination of—as in the line from Yeats she famously onceappropriated—what happens when thecenter refuses to hold. But while much of the book is on death and what it leaves in its wake, it’s also a passionateaccount of her marriage to Dunne, theirfamily, and their partnership as writers. |Jessica Hopper

ZIONCHECK FOR PRESIDENT: ATRUE STORY OF IDEALISM ANDMADNESS IN AMERICAN POLI-TICS | Phil Campbell | Nation Books |Phil Campbell’s satirical memoir is threestories for the price of one. On its face it’sthe story of his personal odyssey into the


Until his archives are opened and wecan fill in the blanks, it would appearhe fully arrived at his visual stylewhile at Harvard, where he landed in1946, after a three-year stint in theArmy—in the words of Brad Gooch,biographer of Gorey’s roommate,Frank O’Hara—a “precociously full-blown eccentric” at the age of 20. Hisearly jackets for Anchor Books,where he started in 1950, are distin-

guished by meticulously drawn handlettering and long lanky figures.

More than many people, Gorey maywell be fundamentally unknowable. “Ihate being characterized,” he oncesaid. “I don’t like to read about the‘Gorey detail’ and that kind of thing. Iadmire work that is neither one thingnor the other, really.” But while theremay not be something horrible lurkingin his past, of a straight-up Beastly

Baby variety, his embrace of ambiguitycreates enormous space to pokearound. After the death of Princess Di,as reporters kvelled about the oceansof flowers left around KensingtonPalace, Gorey mused on the strange,unwanted, even alarming items thatmight be hidden in the glorious dis-play: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised ifthere weren’t some very peculiarthings left in those heaps.” v

underpaid, understaffed world of localpolitics, when—after being fired fromhis job as a reporter at the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger—he signs on tomanage the campaign of GrantCogswell, a thirtysomething punk rock-er and public-transportation activistmaking a quixotic run for city council.

Campbell’s mordantly funny accountof the erosion of his youthful idealsplays out against a reluctant powerstruggle with one of his housemates, aparanoid, gun-happy drunk who breedspiranhas in his room. But Campbellsweetens the pot by returningrepeatedly to the cautionary tale oflegendary Seattle congressman MarionZioncheck, a Depression-era leftistwhose brief political trajectory took himfrom starry-eyed radical to insane,suicidal alcoholic.

Running underneath it all is thestory of Seattle itself. Campbell nailsthe peculiar pathology of my home-town, a place whose liberal politessemasks a neurotic fear of conflict.Seattle may have been the media dar-ling of the 90s, but Zioncheck forPresident offers a peek at its shell-shocked citizenry after grunge and thenew economy moved on. Campbell andCogswell weren’t alone in 2001: anentire can-do city was left coping withthe sting of failed promises and unful-filled potential. | Martha Bayne

From The Epiplectic Bicycle

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SectionOne - Chicago Reader · — The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963 His parents divorced when he was 11, then remarried 16 years later. He was precocious, drawing and read-ing at a young

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