Author Archives: Lester Jacobson

My falling out with fall

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Evanston RoundTable, Sept. 20, 2023 I have a problem with autumn. And that’s too bad because for many people, it’s the nicest time of year: beautiful days, crisp nights, lovely colors. The air has a bracing tang and the light that diffused quality artists love. So what’s my problem? Winter. Fall is the gentle foothills, winter the dreaded mountain. Crazy, right? Just stay in the moment, I tell myself: appreciate the certain wonders of the present and forgo the possible misery of the future. My wife counsels me not to worry until I need to, adding with a laugh that she doesn’t always follow her own advice. And anyway, Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring? as Steve Winwood sings in one of my favorite Traffic songs. We may flit lightly through winter like a butterfly on milkweed plants. But such transcendence isn’t my strong suit. Instead, I imagine the biting winds, fixate on the frigid temps, anticipate the snow and slush, the split fingertips and aching hands. There’s the trivial aggravation of having to pile on six layers of clothing just to take out the garbage. And the existential danger of falling on ice, which for us seniors is a … Continue reading →

Toots and the Brummie

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Note: The travel part of this story is true. I’m not so sure about the Brummie’s tale. In the spring of 1968, a junior year abroad university student in London, I decided it was time for my real education to begin. I packed a backpack, took a train to the south coast, and crossed the English Channel on a boat from New Haven to Dieppe, a four-hour, 90-mile crossing. I had no responsibilities and four hundred bucks in American Express Travelers Cheques, which I figured was plenty for eight or ten weeks of cheap youth hostels and free transportation. America’s problems – King’s assassination, ghetto uprisings, the war in Vietnam, campus riots – seemed insane and far away, and the lovely Old World beckoned. In my backpack was everything I needed: a passport, three pairs of clothing, a sleeping bag, a few toiletries, a Hallwag map of Europe, a directory of European youth hostels and some guidebooks. The general idea was to stick my thumb out and go wherever the rides took me. I would travel six days a week – and then, like God, rest on Sunday. That was the chief advantage of hitchhiking, in my opinion. Against the … Continue reading →

52 books

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Evanston RoundTable, Sept. 6, 2023 A few weeks ago my 14-year-old grandson, Ben, started Lane Tech in Chicago. It’s one of the best public high schools in the nation. We’re all very excited for the four-year adventure he has ahead of him. He described the first week as “10 out of 10,” and unless you’re the guitarist for Spinal Tap, it doesn’t get any better than that. But it also means the end of our amazing seven-year reading journey. In July of 2016 I joined Ben and his parents on an Alaskan cruise. The ship left from Seattle and since our first port of call was Juneau, the better part of the first three days was on the ocean, sailing hundreds of miles, skirting Canada. Open sea isn’t particularly interesting – wow, look at all that water! – and Ben, who was then 7, and I were sitting up in the front cabin, looking out at … not much. There were some books shelved along the wall behind us and I idly picked one out, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first in the famed series by J.K. Rowling. We started to read together, or more accurately, I started … Continue reading →

Summertime, and the weather is easy

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Evanston RoundTable, Aug. 10, 2023 Is it immodest, unbecoming and possibly imprudent to brag about this summer’s local weather? Probably, but…. While the rest of the world bakes, floods and/or burns, the Midwest is experiencing seemingly endless mild weather: Sunny skies, low humidity, not-too-hot days and pleasant nights. The living, as Porgy and Bess sing, is easy. Which isn’t to say we haven’t had our share of serious heat, dirty air, damaging storms, torrential rains and basement floods. Average temps in July were in the low 80s during the day and low 70s at night ­– a little on the warmish side but nothing to get in a sweat about. Let’s agree it’s silly and even tempting fate to gloat about this. Instead, we should be commiserating with our western and southern state neighbors about their extreme heat and our friends to the east over their worsening and lengthening hurricane seasons and coastal floods. Even San Diego, that mildest of urban climates, experienced a winter and spring of extreme weather. Part of our knee-jerk boosterism here in the Midwest stems from the Second City (now the third, actually) syndrome, lagging behind both coasts in population, notoriety and recognition. After all, … Continue reading →

AI rewrote my novel – and it was awful!

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Evanston RoundTable, July 26, 2023 The humor magazine National Lampoon published a cover story in 1971 headlined “Pornography: Threat or Menace?” Today they may want to rephrase it: “AI: Havoc or Chaos?” That mock hysteria sums up a lot of recent scare stories regarding artificial intelligence, which last year gave us the intriguing ChatGPT. You can try it yourself here. Currently ChatGPT and its counterparts – Bard, Bing and other language processing tools – are in bad odor. “The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT has harmed people,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “by publishing false information about them, posing a potential legal threat to the popular app that can generate eerily humanlike content using artificial intelligence.” On Friday, July 21, seven major tech companies – Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and OpenAI – meeting at the White House agreed “to put more guardrails around artificial intelligence, including the development of a watermarking system to help users identify AI-generated content, as part of its efforts to rein in misinformation and other risks,” the Journal reported. Judging from my own experience, these risks are pretty minimal – at least for now. I know because my web guy recently sprang a … Continue reading →

Ava at the bat

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Evanston RoundTable, July 6, 2023 Somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out. Ava Bellis struck out too, and for a few minutes there was no joy on the Evanston Orange Cats. The team was participating last month in the annual All-Star Village tournament in Cooperstown, New York, for 12-year-olds from around the country. The Cats, part of the Lake Shore Feeder Baseball League, are currently 8-1 against North Shore teams with seven more games to play. But they were winless in six tournament appearances leading up to their final game on Sunday, June 18, against a team from Hudson, Ohio. They were behind by one run with two outs in the last inning and the tying run on third base when Ava, like Casey in the famous poem, strode to the plate. One of only two girls out of more than 750 tournament players from 64 teams, Ava admitted she was “a little nervous” in the batter’s box, especially after the ump called what she thought was an outside pitch a strike, forcing the count to 3-2. The next pitch seemed low, but the ump called … Continue reading →

Anniversary

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Evanston RoundTable, June 21, 2023 Last week we celebrated the 52nd anniversary of the day we met. We did it the way we always do, by reenacting the moment. It was a fleeting moment – a minute or two either way and our lives would have been altered irrevocably – but we grabbed it and turned history our way. The details are simple. June 12, 1971, was a beautiful Sunday in Chicago. Sometime midday I made my way to the tennis courts by the Waveland Golf Course at Irving Park Road and the lake. Racket in hand, I was hoping to find a game. But the top of the hour came and went, and no one seemed to be looking for a doubles partner. Ronna lived in a large high-rise a block away and had wandered into the park with her new Pentax camera to give it a try. I saw her walk by. She looked like a dream, like a starlet, like Audrey Hepburn. I found myself walking as if in a trance in her direction. I had the presence of mind to think, “I’ll need a line.” She sat down on a bench in front of the tennis … Continue reading →

Leading NU scholar on great Russian literature

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Evanston RoundTable, June 7, 2023 Gary Saul Morson’s latest book examines life’s great questions as explored in the classic Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, in novels and short stories by such masters as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak. Morson, the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author or co-author of 13 books (including two with former NU President Morton Schapiro) and the editor or co-editor of another eight. He’s also written some 200 full-length articles, another 50 op-eds and short interviews and 35 book reviews. His extensive CV lists scores of honors and prizes, including the Career Outstanding Scholar Award of American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages; the LeRoy Hall Award for Teaching Excellence, Northwestern University; and the Sidney Award for Best Long-Form Essays of 2017. “Morson is the most outstanding current critic and appreciator of Russian history and literature. His wit and insight are incomparable,” said Irwin Weil, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern and founder of the American Council of Teachers of Russian. Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers … Continue reading →

Lilac season: A delightful few weeks of garden splendor

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Evanston RoundTable, May 24, 2023 Bitter cold winters seem to be shrinking, getting warmer and less burdened with snow, dreary as ever but a pale reflection of the fierce winters of half a century ago, which was the subject of my last column. This year’s usually splendid spring season seems to have shrunk too, a few nice days mixed in with weeks of rain, gray skies and cool temps, threatening to bleed directly from drab winter to a blazing Chicago summer without so much as a proper how de do. Then there is lilac season. It lasts just a few weeks – but how the lilacs sanctify and endow this time of year with their sublime beauty and rich aroma! No surprise that lilacs have a revered place in literature. Perhaps the best known is Walt Whitman’s poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d that mourns the assassination of Lincoln (“O powerful western fallen star”), which took place during lilac season 1865. Whitman wrote: “In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With … Continue reading →

Vanishing winter

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Evanston RoundTable, May 11, 2023 The season between fall and spring, formerly known as winter, is due for a reassessment. That’s because there hardly is a winter anymore. We need a new name for it: maybe drabby (which it is outside) or crabby (which we are inside). My friend Judy suggests doldrums. I hate to sound like those geezers who put their grandkids into a state of stupefying boredom with memories of bygone hardships (“You should’ve been here the winter of ’67!”), but you should’ve been here the winter of ’67! A winter storm dropped 23 inches of snow over Chicago in 24 hours, starting on Thursday morning, Jan. 26. By Friday afternoon traffic had ground to a halt. Cars everywhere were immobilized and abandoned, even on Lake Shore Drive. “We walked past the Edgewater Beach Hotel to the Outer Drive,” wrote a blogger on the Chicago History Museum site. “We stood in the middle of the Drive and all we could see was snow and bumps in the snow where cars were buried. On the way back we passed a snow drift that was 15’ high covering a bus.” At the time I was living in Hyde Park and … Continue reading →