Ann Kreilkamp isn't the hunched old hag most people think of when they hear the word "crone."

In fact, it's this unappealing image of aged womanhood that Kreilkamp - a spritely, bespectacled woman with short, frenzied hair and seemingly boundless energy - is bent on doing away with.

Next year, the Bloomington resident will launch Crone: Women Coming of Age, a semiannual publication dedicated to declaring and exploring the ways and wisdom of advanced womanhood.

"The crone is that part of us that is wise, and is authentic, and has learned from experience," says Kreilkamp, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University and now lives in Bloomington.

Indisputably one of the 20th century's most important literary figures, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. needed "repeated reassurance" that the batches of personal and professional ephemera he sent over a period of 10 years to the IU Lilly Library "were actually wanted," according to Seth Bowers, one of four undergraduate IU students who curated "Mustard Gas and Roses: The Life and Works of Kurt Vonnegut," an exhibit that runs at the Lilly main gallery through Sept. 8.

Even after the Lilly Library officially secured the bulk of Vonnegut's letters and manuscripts in 1997, the complex iconoclast, who many regarded as the Mark Twain of 1960s counterculture, continued feeding materials to the library until shortly before his death in April at 84.

Former Bloomington resident Anthony Arnove's latest book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (The New Press, 2006) is a bold statement of the rationale for the immediate removal of U.S. armed forces. He spoke with The Bloomington Alternative during a recent visit.

TPH: In the introduction to your book you write of the "need to transform the irrational economic and political system that led to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq and that is today very directly threatening the survival of the human species." Why is that important?

AA: The moment you start looking at the situation in Iraq, you can't escape other political questions, like what are the real interests that the United States has in the Middle East? I think a number of people see you have to talk about oil. If not for oil do you think we would have gone into Iraq?

Oil is the essential commodity for the world capitalist system. Why do we have such an irrational relationship to oil rather than developing alternative means that are more environmentally sustainable and less politically destabilizing? Because it's not profitable for those who are in positions of power under the existing profit system.