Hanging low at 6.75 inches, the cherubic cadaver is still too “little” for a little death. In the minds of these women, his luggage is larger. The luggage of Edward Cullen, a pubescent boy now dead for 109 years, is larger in these ladies’ little minds, where he has waited to join them in a little death for 109 boyish years.

Yet the evidence remains. The evidence of the remains remains.

But there is no doubt that this is the penis of the virginal vampire named Edward Cullen. The phallus is not fallacious.

The evidence of the remains emerged in the heat of summer 2009, a few months too many before the release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, at a time when the mating calls were approaching a fever pitch. From the hands of designer Jon Condit, the child’s erection was sold into the sex trade and mass-reproduced in the toy factories of Tantus, Inc. Edward’s silicon priapism soon went so viral that the producers of Twilight demanded that Tantus remove all references to the film from its dildo’s website. But there is no doubt that this is the penis of the virginal vampire named Edward Cullen. The phallus is not fallacious.

According to the manufactures, the Vamp, as it is pennamed, displays “a deathly pale flesh tone reminiscent of the moon’s soft glow.” To evoke Edward’s morgue-tepid flesh, the enthusiast should “toss it in the fridge for that authentic experience.” Finally, she shouldn’t “save this for just nocturnal escapades” but should take the “Vamp out in the sunlight and watch it sparkle.” (In the movies and so-called novels, rather than blister or boil, Edward’s sun-kissed skin is said to sparkle like so many sequins. This is to give the impression of scales, so that Edward is, in the eyes of his Jezebel junkies, nothing more than a snake.)

With this summer’s release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the Edwood has again achieved a critical mass. In a July 2 interview with Salon‘s Margaret Eby, Jon Condit revealed that “sex shops all over the world started calling us up, wanting to put orders in. It became [Tantus's] top-selling toy.” Still, he observed, legions of fanatics “write in and tell us that Edward was bigger than that.”

The Journal of Urology has shown that the average man extends a mere 5.08 inches when excited, post-pubescent, and also living. Even so, despite Edward’s 6.75, the ladies think they have been shafted. If the Vamp’s market were the middle-school girls at whom the books and movies were once assumed to be directed, one could make excuses for this kind of naiveté. But the toys a girl enjoys at the peeking of her first period can be confined to games of house, dress-up, and jump rope. As it happens, Cullen’s clientele is primarily middle-aged, which leads one to ask just how much sex these women have been having.

The word “indie” meant something important to Mr. Cobain. Short for independent, the word signified music that was both apart from and unconcerned with the mainstream; it heralded a music that was more devoted to what a band likes and can accomplish than what a label demands or the public expects. Furious or impish, sarcastic or heartfelt, “indie” music came into its own when artists like Husker Du and the Replacements married a locomotive intensity with an urge to move beyond a mere mimicry of the Rolling Stones. Cobain loved this scene, but he knew there was no way he would ever regain the credibility he enjoyed while strumming distorted power chords in near-obscurity at the turn of the 1990s—not once “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made his band’s sound, then spirited away and renamed “grunge,” ubiquitous in American pop culture.

Cobain never forgave the public for turning him into an idol, and he never forgave himself for giving them an opportunity to do so.

When most people reach superstardom, they buy cars, yachts, and mansions. Cobain bought a house, guitars, and heroin. He had no interest in notoriety, in being popular, in appearing on MTV or magazine covers, because he saw himself as being fiercely independent of the pop-culture circuit. He allowed the “indie” ethos to define himself and his art, and if he couldn’t be apart anymore, if the mainstream had become him, there was little reason left for him to live. Heroin and Courtney Love each played a role in his demise, but Cobain never recovered from the heartache of becoming famous. He never forgave the public for turning him into an idol, and he never forgave himself for giving them an opportunity to do so.

Of course, it’s a bit of a slog to listen to Bleach, Nirvana’s debut record, released on the then-small, Seattle-based, independent label Sub Pop. The album sounds as if three post-adolescents, none particularly gifted with his instrument, passed around a roach, downed a pack of Pabst, and decided on whim to take out a tape recorder as they spent another Friday shaking the rafters of their garage clubhouse with a set of amps on the verge of blowing out. It is a brutal, and brutalized, music; but the sound is nevertheless more immediate, and perhaps more honest, than that of its follow-up, Nevermind, the album that brought the band to the country and turned Cobain into The Voice of a Generation (or whatever he was supposed to be) and spawned a thousand designer flannel shirts. Bleach was in the style of “indie” rock at the time: loud, aggressive, self-righteous, and indifferent to the trends of popular digest. It was, therefore, of little use to mainstream rock fans.

On the other hand, Nevermind was accessible to a fault, slick if not sometimes glib, full of hooks, big choruses and catchy lyrics. All of this was epitomized in the songs “Teen Spirt” and “Lithium”: gems – classifiable, it seems, as cubic zirconia in the rough – that won Nirvana a generation of worshipers.

Three years later, Cobain slipped a shotgun into his mouth and squeezed the trigger.

As its title suggests, this work chronicles the finals remarks of convicts before they are put to death. Reading Elder’s apolitical work, one gets a glimpse into the last moments of Americans executed throughout the last two centuries. Contrary to my desire for a narrative, Elder’s intent is never to reflect on each circumstance and attempt insight into the crimes. It is instead to study the words themselves and ask the reader, “If these are the most outcast, reviled members of society, why does it remain a cultural value to record what they say?”

One of Elder’s most chilling curatorial decisions is to place the factual information after the quotations themselves.

Staying loyal to the conventions of journalism, the details following the quotations are well-researched, factual, and unbiased accounts of convicts’ crimes. One of Elder’s most chilling curatorial decisions is to place the factual information after the quotations themselves. The reader scans each inmate’s plea for forgiveness, political screed, valediction to his family, or acquiescence to fate and then, with a cold splash, lands face-first in the crime committed. Tone changes almost immediately, and the reaction and relationship to these words becomes rather thorny. In this way, Elder’s arrangement of the book follows the notion of “innocent until proven guilty.” The words are mesmerizing, almost inspiring, until one reads the murderous act that has incited this very death sentence.

Often, the speeches are filled with language expressing compassion and empathy, which abides Studs Terkel’s view that these last words are a kind of “poetry.” George Dolinski, who murdered his brother-in-law (He claimed it was done out of self-defense, though there remain reports of Dolinski’s infatuation with his victim’s wife), left us with this exceedingly humble, exceedingly humane phrase: “If only I knew my family would not be in want I could die in peace.” Reading this, I felt I were at the beginning of a long, tragic, Russian novel and began to crave a host of other details. How did Dolinski say this? What was the warden thinking? What was Dolinski’s race or educational background? Yet the barren, impartial, purely factual information that Elder provided forced me to answer his overarching question myself.

Why do we record inmates’ last words, and what does this mean?

To be sure, the tradition is not entirely an operation of mercy. In his final statement, Richard Cooey II, convicted of murder and executed in 2008, said, “You motherfuckers haven’t paid any attention to anything I’ve said in the last twenty-two-and-a-half years. Why would anyone pay any attention to anything I’ve had to say now?” Cooey’s statement, like those expressing a similar sentiment, suggests that this cultural practice benefits the executioners more so than the executed. To a certain extent, the system allows the inmates a voice before execution to civilize the murder and distinguish capital punishment from an inhumane killing.

Yet it remains more complicated than that. In Last Words of the Executed, I was surprised to find an empirical indication that this tradition provides a therapeutic experience for the prisoner. John Deoring, convicted of murder and executed in 1938, was “hooked up to a machine that measured his heart rate during execution proceedings…. His heartbeat fluttered wildly, then calmed after he spoke.” The significance of this detail cannot be readily determined, as it is just one incident in which speaking before one’s death calmed a prisoner awaiting execution. But it does suggest, whether the convict is innocent or guilty, that the right of speech at this time may have some capacity to help him deal with what has transpired over his life.

Other questions inevitably arise from Elder’s book. One inmate cried, “Don’t we have the right to chose how we die?” This very quickly posed the existential question of whether any of us really have such a right. When it comes to death, how much choice or independence do we have in the matter? Then there were the parting words of August Spies, who, charged with being involved in the Haymarket Massacre, said, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” He reminds us that each declaration in the book represents multiple absences of people in our society, all without choice in their death and some without remembrance or recognition.

It is a band that seeks not to challenge, enlighten, or affect its audience in any fashion save one: to make them dance. The band presents a light and fluffy stew of keyboards and falsetto backed by disco drumbeats, and Passion Pit hopes this will catch listeners’ attention, move their hips, and make them feel warmer and fuzzier inside than the drinks have already made them.

Sex and any sense of danger are wholly absent from this sound. Lead singer Michael Angelakos is too busy crying “tears like diamonds” to worry about such trivialities. Instead of blood red, Passion Pit’s music elicits visions of pastel blue and pink. This is Xanax instead of cocaine, polite girls with rectangular glasses and comfortable shoes instead of raccoon-eyed groupies in leather jackets and stilettos. This isn’t fucking in the bathroom at CBGB’s; it’s cuddling on a feather bed when your parents are out of town. Passion Pit is what the emo kids on a distant planet might listen to, ones that never heard punk rock and don’t care much for rhythm apart from 150 beats per minute delivered with unwavering devotion. It is music completely abstracted from the world we experience – music without roots, music for the ionosphere.

Adolescents dominate the live Passion Pit experience in a way that makes anyone twenty-five or older feel like the chaperone at a high school dance.

But thanks to the band’s single “Sleepyhead” popping up in an iTunes commercial (and subsequently being offered as a free digital download at the iTunes store in the spring of 2009), Passion Pit has become an enormous, of-the-moment band. The debut album Manners nearly broke the Top Fifty on the U.S. album chart—nothing to sniff at for a band barely two years old. In Australia, the record rose to #19. Three singles off of Manners have charted in the U.S. The band played Chicago alone four times in the last twelve months (not counting an in-store appearance – where else? – at the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue), and each show has been a bigger and bigger deal.

Whereas most bands toil for years in obscurity, taking their lumps while fine-tuning a unique sound baptized in fire, whisky, and broken down vans, this band played the prestigious and increasingly zeitgeist-defining Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival barely six weeks after the release of its debut full-length. Passion Pit is a young band riding a golden wave of advertising-friendly electronic pop that is absolutely crushing it right now. Odds are your teenage cousin loves this band.

Popular as they have become, one would figure Passion Pit to be amazing live, doing something right to sell tickets the way they do. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This immensely popular band’s live show, while not pointless, is severely lacking. Which is not quite the end of the world as we know it, but it does provide a window into a distressing and uncomfortable future, one in which the kids have chosen the mp3 over the concert. The dance party they imagine is better than the one that is taking place around them.

Adolescents dominate the live Passion Pit experience in a way that makes anyone twenty-five or older feel like the chaperone at a high school dance. There is a way an adolescent smiles, a way a teenager reacts to previously unknown stimuli, that cannot be replicated, an eagerness at the recognition of a world beyond a kid’s basement or backyard, a captivating enthusiasm for experience and the dissolution, in some small part, of the innocence their parents will soon miss that can be quite charming.

The by-products of this enthusiasm, however, leave much to be desired. The first time an out-of-control amateur bantamweight barrels into an unassuming stranger, or while others talk loudly throughout the entirety of an opening band’s set, or still others believe the fact that they are fucked up means anything to anyone outside their individual peer group, that novelty fades.

At the start, however, Dodson and Messinger knew they wanted Featherproof to be “the publishing arm of a community of Chicago writers who … should be as known to the rest of the country as arithmetic.” TeBordo, a Philadelphia writer, was a just a little too far outside the scope of the young indie press.

Awful Possibilities is a polarizing collection of stories, one that will not appeal to some people—murder, assault, and theft of both personal property and internal organs are common themes.

To deliver on its promise of making local writers accessible to a national audience, Featherproof has become in the last five years an innovator among small publishing houses, reaching its audience through every available medium—print, web, and mobile. From its free printable mini-books to its TripleQuick fiction app, each venture is undertaken with the same painstaking attention to detail, cleverness, and personality that has earned the publisher a loyal following.

Ultimately, Featherproof Books expanded its commitment to “the small press ideals of finding fresh, urban voices ignored by the conglomerates” to authors outside the city limits. While he’d published two more novels since his debut in 2005, TeBordo had been working for years on short stories. The timing was right, and the long-awaited collaboration between TeBordo, Dodson, and Messinger is the author’s first short-story collection, The Awful Possibilities. “It’s something of a dream come true,” Dodson says.

Now, Featherproof is using the experience it gained over the last five years to deliver The Awful Possibilities to the entire country, presenting the paperback at promotional events and making it available to far-flung readers through its web-subscription service. Still, no matter how easy it might be to gain access to The Awful Possibilities, the book itself remains entirely inaccessible.

Reading The Awful Possibilities is uncannily like clicking through those websites one finds in the wee hours of the morning, the kind with erratically varying font size and color—the kind written by men who live in bomb shelters. To TeBordo’s credit, this is intentional, as nearly every figure in the book is certainly insane.

It’s evident from the first few paragraphs that TeBordo’s narrators are dangerously unreliable, each presenting a decidedly personal, edited story, told in the rambling, unselfconscious language of the deeply pathological. While the pitch-perfection of the mad raconteurs impresses, the artifice distracts from the content of these confessions.

The result is a polarizing collection of stories. This book will not appeal to some people—murder, assault, and theft of both personal property and internal organs are common themes. Because TeBordo presents this content unapologetically, some will say this book is offensive. Because he does not make clear his authorial purpose for including this content, some will say this book is not art.

“What will we be doing?” they asked with arched eyebrows, contemplating a social calendar chockfull of other prospects.

“Listening,” I responded, trying to convince even my own bookish self that watching unknown readers recite lines of their fiction would be an auspicious start of the weekend.

We hopped in my minivan to drive thirty minutes from suburbia to 1854 North Avenue in Chicago’s Wicker Park. There, we sat on folding chairs in the back of the one-room bookstore, behind a man who effused a musty odor and sipped a dark ale through a matted beard.

I hadn’t associated beer-drinking with literary readings, but then again the bookstore in my hometown didn’t have exposed brick walls covered with original artwork or racks filled with Xeroxed sheets of hard-to-find stories. To be frank, I had not even heard of a “zine” at that time. Even in my unfamiliarity with the place, I was not astonished when the reading started and the bearded man put down his beer to grab a guitar and sit on a stool up front to begin the show.

Still, I found myself more lost in this one-room bookstore than in a multi-level Barnes and Noble.

After a comedic acoustic routine, he introduced himself as Al Burian and read off a printed piece of paper, amusing the audience with a story about an occurrence with teenage boys who taunted him about his retro clothes. He concluded that, even with his seniority, he couldn’t shake off the shame that resulted from the harmless teasing about his hippie facade. Burian’s musical interruptions and evident drunkenness only added to the comedy and introspection of his writings, so much so that after the reading I found myself searching through the racks of zines for Burian’s own Burn Collector.

After my trip to Quimby’s, I spent countless nights in the two subsequent years refusing sleep, jacked up on words rather than caffeine, sifting through zines that talked about spending months on Greyhound buses rather than school buses and going to basement punk shows instead of high-school talent shows. Quimby’s led me to Burian, who led me to Aaron Cometbus and Dave Eggers and Joe Meno, all of whom pushed me to a new world of modern literature that was exciting both for its content and its obscurity. Although I’ve made an effort to balance this passion with an intimate knowledge of the literary classics, I’ve never drifted too far from Quimby’s.

On Friday, April 16 of this year, another ill-weathered spring night, I decided to make another trip out to the bookstore. While I walked in less soaked than on my first visit, the natural eagerness to immerse myself with people crazed about the written word remained. A group of teenagers stumbled in behind me, and an unoffended smirk formed on my face as one guy looked at the rack of zines and exclaimed, “Hipster throw-up!”

To be sure, Quimby’s lies in an enclave of pretension, next to expensive thrift stores and concert venues where one can hear bands too progressive for commercial success. Features of the bookstore fit the mold of the neighborhood. Quimby’s takes its name from the mouse “Quimby,” a character of the graphic novelist Chris Ware, and dedicates an entire bookshelf to McSweeney’s publications. (Both of these are celebrated in hipsterdom.) While the zines that cover the shelves range from political, mostly liberal, writings to porn, the quality of some may be more representative of verbal vomit than, say, Voltaire.

Yet sometimes you want to steer clear of this mess. Despite your need for a night out and a drink or two, you don’t want to put on your slickest clothes to endure the detached ridicule of high-heeled, miniskirted princesses and the tiresome buffoonery of former fraternity boys. You don’t want to spend a hundred bucks just to have a good time, and you don’t want to wait six deep at the bar for every drink, frantically trying to get the attention of a bartender more concerned with how beautiful she is than with the beer you are trying to order.

The bathrooms are like those you may find in a movie about heroin addicts—but these are more disarming than frightening, more charming than offensive.

On nights like these, you may journey to the city’s West Side, which teems with a bevy of laid-back, cash-only establishments that exist more for the low-key enjoyment of a glass of suds than for the expensive, life-changing experiences purportedly found in rage fests. Gold Star Bar, Innertown Pub, and Rainbo Club are three bars just south of the Wicker Park clusterhump that cater to this kind of evening. An Andrew Jackson in the wallet (or better yet, two) is all you need to have a good time at these places, and there’s little chance you’ll have to walk past a twenty-two-year-old puking in a street-side garbage can to do it.

As far as décor and smell are concerned, Gold Star Bar, on Division Street just east of Wood, doesn’t have a lot to offer. Although it doesn’t smell of urine, it does smell aged—as if the dusty footprints of decades of patrons, perhaps of Algren himself, remain on the floor. There’s only one window, up next to the front door, and it doesn’t open; but the bartender is always smiling, and the beer is both tasty and cheap.

Bars go the cash-only route to keep prices down, and Gold Star Bar has a wide selection of microbrews and specialty beers available for five dollars or less. A bottle of Pabst will run you two and a half, but Rogue Dead Guy comes in at only double this. Signs hand-drawn in marker on computer paper are taped across the bar-backing mirror, promoting two-dollar Hamm’s and four-dollar Bell’s Amber and lending the place a lived-in, domestic air that you won’t find in a club whose patrons can dance on tables while silhouetted against bright pastel lighting.

Music plays, but it doesn’t mean much. There are a couple of televisions on display, but Gold Star Bar most definitely does not have “the package,” regardless of the sport in question. Most often, whatever channel someone was watching however long before you got there will be running an infomercial or a police procedural, with nobody paying it any attention. There’s a pool table way in the back, intricate molding on the oil-painted ceiling, and interesting paintings on the otherwise drab walls, but you won’t be blown away by anything you see or experience at Gold Star. You will, however, feel like a person. A person with no imperative to get any crazier than he damn well pleases. And, when you’ve had enough, you can always hoof it to another nearby cash-only, with plenty of money still stuffing your wallet.

Yet we owe this last character a debt of gratitude: after all, who else could have proposed an episode as charmingly titled as “Backdoor Space Sluts 9″?

For this reason, the rarefied show of two Saturdays past was an even greater shock to me. That evening, before an audience of fifty, a troupe of bravely voyaging iO comedians presented a performance called the Improvised Star Trek. By necessity, the patrons included the gentleman who laughs a little too emphatically at parts no one else does, the people who dress in costume to save five dollars (and so pay with their dignity), and the drunken lout in the front row who believes he is comical. Yet we owe this last character a debt of gratitude: after all, who else could have proposed an episode as charmingly titled as “Backdoor Space Sluts 9″?

As it turned out, this performance was actually the twenty-first installment of the series. And so my mind immediately turned to Spock and forced the following question: It has lived long, but does it prosper?

After I entered the theater to retrieve my ticket, delighted to be indoors after the cold walk, I was directed to bide my time in the cozy, designated waiting area. This was outside, where politely early patrons shifted their feet and tried not to perform too awkward of a chill-killing dance (Mine’s been called the “Freeze Bop”). The ticket vendor told me that guests would be seated around midnight, which was the start time for the show.

He lied, however. At midnight they accepted our crowd, only to direct us to wait in the club downstairs, where a male usher with shoulder-length hair and rainbow braces told us we had no right to loiter and shooed us up the steps once more. The vendor forced us down again, the teenager forced us up again, and this happened two other times until the legal liability of a clusterfuck and stampede convinced the oddly authoritarian beach boy to humor us. I sat among this sad corral of refugees for twenty minutes until the ebbing flow of human beings signaled that it was time to return upstairs and be seated. Thank goodness there’s a bar to the right of the stage.

Half of the seating area, which amounts to fifty seats, was full by the time Chief Science Officer Crick Watson (played by Sean Kelley) arrived to consult the audience on the title of tonight’s Star Trek episode. When the besotted jester of the front row shouted “Back Door Space Sluts 9,” a name that any pornographic feature would be ashamed to bear (I mean no harm to the fans of “1″ through “8″), the troupe responded creatively. Kelley told me later that he “likes the challenge” presented by some of the “rude, lewd, drunken people” who attend. When one audience member called out during the performance, for example, Kelley asked the ship’s computer if the rodent problem had been taken care of; all “sound issues” were subsequently attributed to the infestation of mice, which had received miniature communicators from Captain Baxter because he thought they were “so adorable.”

The oversize television in the gallery’s lobby is spectacularly large and a scant couple of feet from the front doors. It brightly displays a slick slideshow promoting the installation, a Digger-style give-away shop. At Gallery 400, there are no guards or clerks to take payment, issue a gallery pass, or even check for a UIC student I.D. Access to The Free Store is, in other words, free.

The origins, whether art-student or street-lunatic, of the plastic baby doll face with a swastika scrawled across its forehead are anyone’s guess.

Once inside, however, The Free Store is decidedly difficult. The installation is a study in things both perplexing and complicated, not least of which are its self-proclaimed wranglers Melinda Fries, Salem Collo-Julin, and married couple Zena Sakowski and Rob Kelly, curiously dubbed “Biggest Fags Ever.” Sakowski and Fries are genial and forthcoming, with a casual air that is hardly reflected in the installation itself, which is at first too overwhelmingly busy to look at.

No solace is found by directing one’s attention to each item in the exhibit at a time, either. The varied and often incomprehensible nature of The Free Store‘s goods is certainly migraine-inducing. Some of the gallimaufry predictably reflects a large collegiate influence: bric-a-brac like acne wash, glow sticks, a deck of playing cards, and suspect-looking, small aluminum tins. On closer inspection, however, the breadth of objects for the taking at this freeshop cannot be explained by student contributions alone: among the miscellany are also pill-organizers, an industrial-size container of turkey gravy powder, hospital-issue slippers, an entire box of business cards, and a lovingly inscribed 2004 Christmas card complete with uncensored Chicago-area phone numbers. The origins, whether art-student or street-lunatic, of the plastic baby doll face with a swastika scrawled across its forehead are anyone’s guess.

Of course, these items, and this particular “free store,” can only exist on this day, during these few hours. The exhibit necessarily changes over the course of each day, and most of its wares are like sand on a beach, moved this way and that by its frenzied tide of visitors, many items disappearing for good. “Ninety-five percent of this stuff was not here when we opened,” Fries says.

While she’s been putting on free stores for years, at six weeks, this one is Fries’ longest-running and most exhausting. At least two of the four artists are always on-hand to answer the phones, see to the installation’s visitors, and not least of all accept and organize new contributions. People often drop bags of clothes and other items outside the The Free Store‘s doors overnight, resulting in a small mountain to be reviewed and sorted each morning. While the experience is demanding (“It’s great exercise, I’m telling you, man,” Sakowski says), both artists insist their physical presence is “absolutely integral” to the success of the installation. The Free Store is described as performance art; and while the mundane details of running the shop could easily be handed off to a few of the group’s enthusiastic fan-volunteers, they must be performed by the artists themselves.

At this point, you may be wondering whether I spent my Sunday evening at a hockey game, or perhaps on my sofa indulging in a pay-per-view wrestling match. Although the energy and spectacle of both were well-represented, on this particular night I had eschewed the ice and the cages in favor of a trepid venture into the world of women’s roller derby. Tightly clutching my general-admission ticket, I entered the UIC Pavilion, navigated through the crowds attacking the abundant rum-and-margarita stands, and made my way to the orange-seated expanse that surrounded the eighty-eight-foot track, whose boundaries were marked only by brightly colored plastic ropes. Any seat close enough to the edge might result in a hands-on – or, shall we say, skater-in-lap – experience of the sport, so I selected a seat midway up the stairs, settled in, and steeled myself for the carnage of the evening (This competition enjoys a rather naughty reputation).

After a musical nod to Old Glory dangling above the center of the rink, the Double Crossers and Manic Attackers sized each other up for the first match of the evening. Sunday’s bout was a doubleheader, with the Hell’s Belles and the Fury waiting in the wings to take their bloody turn on the floor. The announcer, roaming the sidelines with a microphone and a robin’s-egg-blue zoot suit, riled up the already rowdy crowd as the ladies of the Windy City Rollers, Chicago’s all-female, flat-track derby league, warmed up around the rink. The heat was on.

Aaaaaaaare you ready to talk derby to me?!” the man in the zoot suit screamed. For uninitiated patrons like myself, he then shouted out the rules of the game. This may be an unusual experience for a spectator at a sporting event, but it is less surprising when considering the youth of roller derby’s revival: the movement began its most recent reincarnation in Austin, Texas, only nine years ago.

Damon Runyon decided to emphasize the more spectacular elements of the speed-skating races of the 1930s: coordinated strategies in teamwork and, of course, violent girl-on-girl action.

Yet it originated first in the Windy City, when promoter Leo Seltzer and sportswriter Damon Runyon decided to emphasize the more spectacular elements of the speed-skating races of the 1930s: coordinated strategies in teamwork and, of course, violent girl-on-girl action. Rather than the traditional male-and-female pairs of the races, derby law calls for five players on two all-female teams—four blockers and a jammer. The blockers line up on the pivot line with the jammers stationed twenty feet behind. Once the whistle blows, the blockers take off counterclockwise in a pack formation and the jammers fight their way through the pack with the first one out gaining lead-jammer status. The jammers speed around the track and are eligible to rack up points once they’ve completed their first clean pass; this occurs when they legally pass a member of the opposing team (within bounds, without fouls), earning a point per skater. Meanwhile, the charge of the blockers is to expedite the safe passage of their own jammer through the pack while impeding that of the opposing team’s jammer by almost any means necessary.

Derby through the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s rapidly became a fixture in American popular culture. Yet the roller days had all the athletic legitimacy of the World Wrestling Federation. Much of the audience-pleasing bashing and smashing was choreographed, with the outcomes often predetermined in order to elicit the largest number of gasps and thrills.