Rest Day, Tuesday, May 28, 2024: Chicago

Carnegie libraries visited: none

Days sober: 341

I had the real hostel-in-Chicago experience last night. It’s nice: my ten-bunk room has its own bathroom and shower. Once again, I’m assigned the top bunk. In the second floor lounge, a couple of guys were sipping matte through their bombishas. Love the Uraguyans/Argentinians, bringing part of their culture to Chicago. In the middle of the night I woke up to loud snoring coming from a couple of the beds, and oh well the snoring masked the sounds of the “L” train that was visible just outside my window. Fortunately, I had a blissful sleep.

Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend, did not have a blissful life. This novel is semi-autobiographical – addiction memoirs were not yet a thing, so they appeared in novels instead – and Jackson struggled with addiction issues on and off for the rest of his life. He had sobered up while writing that book – unlike Birnham, who only dreamed about writing a great novel, Jackson actually did it – yet after it became a surprise best seller he again took to the bottle. It’s mysterious to me how it became a bestseller. Alcoholics might find it too painful to read, and I wonder why non-drinkers would be interested in reading it. After the book became a success, Jackson resumed drinking and taking pills; he continued to publish while repeatedly encountering writer’s block. He attempted suicide in 1952 (Lost Weekend was published in 1944). In 1953 he checked himself into an alcoholic clinic and joined AA. He was active in AA throughout at least through the remainder of the decade. Prior to his death by suicide in 1968 he had again resumed drinking. 

I love Chicago. It’s one of my favorite cities, along with New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Houston and Dallas are definitely not, I’m ‘meh’ about Los Angeles, and I haven’t spent enough time in Miami to have an opinion. My architecture lecture class at the UofA gave me an appreciation for all the fascinating architecture here. I was hoping to take a graffiti tour, but none are offered on Tuesdays. The most popular tour, apparently, is labeled an Instagram tour. I can appreciate why an Instagram tour was created – hey, a business has to make a buck – yet the values of Instagram (see ME!) are diametrically opposed to those of the graffiti artist (see my art!). I’m not sorry to miss it.

The hostel is a few blocks from the Palmer House Hotel with its marvelous rococo frescoes topping the domed lobby. It’s the oldest hotel in Chicago, the first Chicago building to have elevators, and the first hotel to bill itself as fireproof. The original Palmer House, just across the street, was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

The Palmer House was given as a wedding present from rags-to-riches Potter Palmer to his wife, Bertha Honoré. Bertha herself was a woman of great accomplishment. College educated and talented, in 1893 she was appointed head of the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In that role she hired Sophia Hayden, one of America’s first licensed female architects, to design the women’s building. Bonus: Bertha directed the Palmer House chefs to create a dessert for the Exposition that could fit into a boxed lunch and still feel like a real dessert. The winner? The brownie, which is still available in its original recipe at the Palmer House’s restaurants.

The Palmer House hosts the Midwest Political Science Association’s (MPSA) annual research conference, which I first started attending in 1984 or 1985, when I was in graduate school (as I recall, my major professor allowed his graduate students to sleep on the floor of his room). Over the past forty years I’ve easily attended that conference some thirty times. 

Since the beginning, I’ve detested the conference part of political science conferences. In retrospect, this should have been a sign that I might have heeded. I found them alienating and boring. They often featured graduate students desperate for a tenure track posting, half-finished research papers, often unreadable PowerPoints, and typically desultory oral presentations. One of my scholarly articles that I’m most proud of was “Academic Conferences Suck: Here’s Why, and How We Can Fix Them.” (Note: the formal title was ““The Scholarly Conference: Do We Want Authority and Tradition or Markets and Democracy?”) I was not especially good at academic research unless I had a dog in the hunt. In that paper, I offered suggestions for making conferences less alienating and boring. It’s a solid piece of research and writing. (If you want, you can find it here: https://www.academia.edu/2540789/The_Scholarly_Conference_Do_We_Want_Democracy_and_Markets_or_Authority_and_Tradition

I usually attended two or three such conferences each year. So, why did I keep going, given how much I loathed them? It’s pretty simple. I attended conferences in cities I wanted to visit. I saw the conferences as an opportunity to see friends, stay in a cool hotel (I rarely stayed at the hotel hosting the conference), explore a city (its architecture, theaters, neighborhoods, and museums), eat at interesting restaurants on Georgetown’s dime (in Chicago, I always dined at The Berghoff), and so forth. True, I generally presented my own research (with well-designed PowerPoints and carefully prepared and impassioned presentations!) and several times I served on planning committees. I’ve missed the last two MPSAs, and didn’t miss them at all.

I met my cousin Kathy for lunch. I’ve met her and her husband Howard several times over the years, and I was glad for their company. I had neglected to contact Kathy until just this past Sunday, and she was gracious enough to meet me for lunch. While dining she said “Hey, why don’t you come spend the night with us? We can also do some touring while you’re here.” My MO would be to say, “Thanks, I’ve already got a room at the hostel” while thinking, besides, I need to do my own thing. I’ve signed up for a yoga class here tonight. I don’t want to be a bother. Instead, I said “That would be delightful. I’d love to join you. Thanks.”  

We had planned to tour a couple of Chicago’s many neighborhoods after I arrived. Sensibly, we canceled: too much traffic. So for the afternoon and into the evening we just talked. Just talked. And ate pizza and cupcakes. Before dinner, they asked me if I wanted wine, and they looked surprised when I said no. A beer, then? Again, I demurred and again they seemed surprised. When I said “please, go ahead” they responded that they rarely drank wine and it could be weeks before they finished up a single bottle. When I had visited them in the past – likely, I had pre-gamed before the visit – I had eagerly accepted, and so I guess they assumed that I would always want to drink like that. So we discussed how alcoholism can run in families. Kathy took a different path, winning a national medal in synchronized swimming when she was in college.