Literary Chicago: Capturing the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in the city.
From Chelsea Girls:
“After dipping the frames into vats of stain and lining them up in rows of twenty on the sticks overhead, bundling them, and putting the plastic tape around each bundle and stacking them in the truck to Chicago or wherever, at the end of the day I’d be covered from head to foot with brown stain, Dickensian-looking I thought. I usually didn’t bother to get the stuff off before I got drunk. With me sloppy has always been good, meant sexy.”
Chicago is just a place like any other wherever in the grand ole USA.
From Inferno: A Poet’s Novel:
“One time Rose and her friend Tim Milk admittedly a couple of weirdos from Chicago agreed to take part in something called New Wave Vaudeville which was happening over several nights at Irving Plaza.”
Sometimes the city is used to build out something in a story, but where I’ve encountered it in Myles’s work so far, it’s only used in passing. These don’t merit too much more to comment on except to say that Chicago is a city full of weirdos [complimentary].
Glad Eileen Myles could share that with the world.