For Joseph Heller, there was only one catch, and that was Catch-22. Although his blockbuster first novel catapulted him to lifelong prominence as one of the century’s most important novelists, its very success would haunt him for the rest of his career. Because he was only important for the one novel. Everybody loved the crazy WWII satire, but about the rest of his writing, you heard words like “tepid.” As time went by, even he grew to accept his fate as American letters’ jack of one trade. When he came to Minneapolis a few years back for a book signing, he seemed genuinely surprised when I asked him to autograph Good As Gold, the lampoon of Washington politics and American Judaism that’s generally considered his second-best book. “I haven’t seen this in a while,” he said. This posthumous collection of short stories and miscellanea is no exception. Though it features several pieces of fiction from early in his career, it’s dominated by the presence of The Book. Outtakes from Catch-22 are followed by outtakes from the ill-remembered sequel, Closing Time, and four behind-the-scenes essays on Catch-22’s creation and later adaptation into Mike Nichols’ 1970 film. Still, better one catch than no catch at all.
Month: March 2003
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Mcsweeney’s Mammoth Treasury Of Thrilling Tales
Staggering Genius golden boy Dave Eggers’ journal swells from magazine to full-fledged 478-page paperback book for its tenth issue. The breathlessly pulpy title is only a little tongue-in-cheek. Mammoth Treasury, guest-edited by Michael Chabon, sets loose its writers on the plot-driven adventure story, the idea being that maybe they can help recapture the ripping yarn’s place of honor alongside what’s usually regarded as Serious Literature. After all, genre fiction was good enough for Hemingway and Poe, so why shouldn’t Nick Hornby spin a sci-fi tale about a VCR that warns of a coming apocalypse? And so here’s 20 tales of sharks, mummies and murderous elephants by such critical darlings as Eggers, Chabon and Sherman Alexie, alongside writers like Elmore Leonard, Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman who’ve been hammering out quality writing in oft-disrespected genre ghettos for years. Treasury doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but there’s plenty of fun to be had here. Chris Offutt’s submission has a particularly neat hook: He gets involved in a scheme involving time travel, ghosts and alternate universes in order to break the case of writer’s block that’s preventing him from finishing his story for this book.
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Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo
DeLillo’s last book, Underworld, was one of those seasonal doorstops that the cognoscenti gets in a lather about—you know, the 800-page tome that everyone talks about and no one reads, the one that ends up atop a growing column of hardcovers in the basement, the last addition to which was Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, or perhaps Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Well, DeLillo had it coming—it’d been 20 years since his seminal novel White Noise came out, establishing him as an important voice in the world of white guys ruminating on technology and its discontents. He’s essentially been writing the same book, more mood than plot, ever since then—and every time, we love it. This novel is about a 20-something dot-com millionaire trying to make his way across Manhattan in his limo. Angst ensues.
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Inter-Squad Squabble
Craig Cox’s analysis of light rail was shallow and poorly researched. His most glaring omission was his failure to consider the issue of “capacity.” A single track of transit can carry 40,000-50,000 people per hour. A dedicated busway can carry just 20,000 people per hour. A car lane can carry an absolute maximum of 4,500 people per hour, and that’s with three people per car! Clearly, light rail transit has the greatest peak-demand hauling capacity. With no more room for highway lanes downtown, the only way to significantly increase capacity in the long run is by building a light rail transit network. Secondly, Cox doesn’t consider regional air pollution which frequently exceeds safe levels during the summer months. While diesel trucks and buses account for only 2-3 percent of highway vehicles, they are responsible for 25 percent of the smog-forming pollution and over half the particulate matter in our city’s air. Only electric rail (or electric buses) would significantly improve regional air quality. Finally, Cox makes some historical errors. The Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company was forced to share much of its right of way with cars, eliminating its potential advantage in speed and peak capacity. More importantly, Fred Ossanna was in the pocket of General Motors, whom he hired as “consultants” to rip up the TCRT and convert it to buses. GM repeated this process in hundreds of American cities, using front companies like National City Lines and Yellow Bus Company, to purchase and destroy trolley systems. A good account of all this can be found in David St. Clair’s book The Motoriza-tion of American Cities.
Andy Singer, Rake contributor,
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Trails to Rails
Terrific article on the history of TCRT and the light rail system [“Get Rail,” March]. Best researched in the last 30 years. A nice postscript would be totaling up the cost of all the light rail studies that have been done over the last 40 years.
Richard Landry, Minneapolis
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Later, Tater!
I greatly enjoyed Stephanie March’s “Taters!” in the March 2003 issue. However, I believe that the potato is heading once again for Cinderella status. If you have a look at the new U.S. Government “Food Pyramid,” the potato is now considered a most unfortunate form of carbohydrate.
Richard Webb, Minneapolis
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Dead Letter Office
Usually I enjoy your “letters” from far-flung places. They give insight into what’s going on on the ground. That said, what the heck were you guys thinking when you published Wade Savage’s “Letter from Baghdad” [The Rakish Angle, March]? Is the fact that a Minnesotan was there, like a Kilroy on the wall, more important to your editorial needs than the accuracy of the facts asserted therein? Good grief, people! Just because a local yokel travels to a particularly verboten portion of the Middle East does not mean he is qualified to judge what goes on there. If Mr. Savage had managed to read a history book published after 1930, he would have known that pan-Arabism, which is what he says is most Arab’s profound dream, was given a whirl by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 60s. He began the Ba’ath Party in Egypt, and while it had limited organizational success, spreading to Syria and Iraq, it failed miserably because they could not unite under the common goal of one Arab nation-state. Why did it fail, you ask? Perhaps because, while the goal was noble, the cultural differences from one country to the next were insurmountable in practice. For Mr. Savage’s information: there is an Arab EU: it’s called the Arab League. There’s also OPEC, if you really want to delve into economic cooperation issues. Mr. Savage, despite his travels to Iraq, would be well served by sitting his butt down in a college level Middle East History class.
Kathleen Nelson, Edina
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Highway Helpers: The Next Generation
Let’s all do our part to make sure the state can afford its single most important obligation to the people: building new highways and adding lanes out to Eagan, beloved constituency of our Governor and State Auditor. Sacrifices must be made, of course, and we’re ready. In these troubling times, Minnesota families must assume a bigger share of the state’s highway work. It’s not just picking up empty beer cans, abandoned shoes, and ditch-porn anymore! Those Adopt-a-Highway folks have practically been getting away with murder—all that free publicity for a monthly stroll down the median with a trash-stabber. No! We wholly support Gov. Pawlenty’s proposed Foster-Highway program, to ensure that regular Minnesotans are now responsible for paving, plowing, and striping existing roads. We know not every family can live in Eagan, or afford to buy heavy machinery, snow plows, and hot-topping equipment. Foster-Highway has a heart, after all. Participants in the program (mandated by Patriot Act II, by the way) will be assigned a manageable half-mile section of road (half the usual Adopt-a-Highway segment!) as near to their home as an indifferent bureaucrat cares to make it. Non-participants will be jailed and charged with terrorism. Thank you, and God Bless America.
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Jell-O Salad or High Art?
The sun is peeking out, the snowman who stood sentry in my neighbors’ front lawn has surrendered, and though some of us will get itchy eyeballs and stuffy noses, we’re all going to get a present soon: an extra hour of daylight. I can’t help but get mushy like Mr. Snowman this time of year. I’m springing ahead.
This surge of goodwill usually bubbles inside me until I’m compelled to do something nice. Last year, that meant volunteering to help at the annual Ladies Aid spring salad luncheon fundraiser held in my church’s basement. You might be thinking, “Hey, church basements are usually the most un-spring like environments in the world!” Well, gotcha! Because when I showed up ready to be put to good use, Nettie and Helen had already made and hung the construction-paper daisy decorations.
Now, I don’t know Nettie and Helen. I’d seen them before, of course, but not in a social situation outside of chapel. And I’m sure that one doesn’t just step off the mean streets into her first guild event and snag the plum decorating job either. So I marched off to the back kitchen, where I met the head lady, Adele. Silver flip ’do, steely green eyes, and a fuchsia stain on her lips, cheeks, and nails. Ninety pounds of will, and at least 20 pounds of that had to come from the shoulder pads that were sewn into her sequined, exotic animal-print cardigan sweater. Think “Cher’s Grandma.” She was too small to be a tackle, but definitely could be a tight end.
“You!” she commanded, looking up at me as though I weren’t fit to spit-shine her rhinestone mules. “Get over to the prep table and start cutting squares and plating the salads.” In the distance, I saw a trembling mass of jewel-like blocks, molds, and towers. A skyline, for all its rubbery backbone, that shouted “Doubt!” And “Hope!” Some slabs were plain, but I could tell in a glance that others held petrified chunks of sugared pineapple, and various canned fruits. Some were mysterious, boasting tiny celery smiles. And—egads!—some even had pink chunks of what could only be described as meat, lurking in Kool-Aid tinged psychedelic freak out, man, daring you to guess fish or fowl, beef or pork.
If we were downtown, Adele would have been awarded a Bush grant and been the toast of the avant-garde community. Note to Matthew Barney: To hell with sculpting in tapioca and Vaseline. Gelatin is the new (old) medium.
The glistening molds were a Mondrian-style feast, more of a commentary on food than actual food. Genius. When fruits and vegetables have been manipulated that way, can you still call them “salad”? The only unsullied vegetation in the room was a head of romaine lettuce, which was to be arranged around the chunks and blocks and slices to soften the edges—a little like lingerie for Jell-O.
I smiled to introduce myself, and suggested that, with my extensive service-industry background, I might be better suited to rolling the coffee cart and pouring. Adele shot me a withering glance. “Not dressed like that, you won’t. You’ll stay in the back.”
I looked down at my T-shirt and Indiana Jones cargo pants. Not my best effort, but honestly, not my worst. Peeking out to the dining room, however, I saw that Adele was right. A thousand twinkling lights bounced and scattered off the overhead fluorescent tubes. The ladies from the guild wore their sweaters like armor. Scaled with doodads and ditsys. Floating slowly and regally past the cafeteria tables like great exotic Technicolor fish. Peaceful as prayers, offering napkins to sticky sweet fingers. Murmuring low and husky reassurances to the congregants.
Next to them, I was no lady. I would have looked fine handing out samples at Home Depot, but this was a feast of celebration. Good intentions notwithstanding, I would have been as jarring as arugula in a bowl of shredded iceberg. Sometimes you’ve got to do a little extra work to make things easier to swallow. Call it the Parable of Jell-O.
Lesson learned, I turned to the prep table and tried to slice the particolored salads as perfectly as possible. My internship with polite society had begun.
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Basting Tape
Here’s my favorite line from First Comes Love—Marion Winik’s horrific yet touching memoir of marriage to an openly gay man who, between being diagnosed with AIDS and his eventual death several years later, stops working and starts skimming cash from Marion in order to support his drug habit: “There was a letter from the bank saying I should come in immediately and deposit $999,744.26 to cover my recent withdrawals. I reread this astonishing sentence several times . . . [and] arrived at the bank shortly afterward sans the requested million.”
I read Winik’s book when my own life was teetering, and I laughed so hard at parts I lost my breath and tears rolled into my gaping mouth. When you’re down and out and a little bit ragged, somebody else’s unthinkable misfortunes can seem hysterical from a safe distance.
The distance is what’s key. The rutted, weedy stretch of dirt road between my life and somebody else’s is often the geography I find most interesting, most inspiring. The company of others whose realities are starkly different than mine is revelatory and oddly motivating. That’s part of what I love about Julie and Sean, two of my closest friends. Both are single, childless, never been married, and also smart, attractive, educated, employed, and hilarious. Julie’s about my age, and Sean, since he is a man and can have his exact age revealed, is a crisp 39. I’ve tried all sorts of voodoo to get them to fall in love—since both of them really ought to, and besides, Julie longs for children—but so far, no dice. Fortunately, though, they enjoy each other’s company enough to hang out with Jon and me and the several thousand children who populate our blended family most Saturday nights.
Coming over here is for Julie and Sean something like riding a unicycle on a congested street in India. There are big kids with filthy socks wheeling back and forth on the Total Tiger abdomenizer on the living room floor and pounding up and down the stairs and listening to music, and there are small kids with filthy socks toting rodents in pockets and begging the grown-ups to play Twister and have a disco party, and there is chaos and noise in wild excess. But it’s the contrast we revel in on Saturday nights as the kids drop off to bed and we sit around the dining table, talking over wine, laughing at ourselves and each other, swapping genuine secrets, and huddling in a weird helpless way against the menace of this awful war slithering under the locked door, unstopped by our protest signs and pink buttons and marches.
The balm of shared history is powerful at these times, especially since Jon and I face the awkward and often funny task of sewing together biographies that were well into adulthood before they merged. Julie and Sean are a bit like basting tape, criss-crossing the widest seams and filling in historical gaps with fresh perspectives. Jon’s known Sean since junior high, they went to college together and remained friends through all of the years since, while Julie and I go back a decade and a half. We’ve watched each other’s lives unfurl in opposite ways, nonetheless beset with the same essential challenges of ambition, loneliness, stagnation, and change. You can’t hide yourself from someone who’s studied you for so long.
I met Julie 14 years ago, when I was practically another person, a classified advertising sales manager at a weekly paper. Two or three months after returning from my maternity leave, baby Sophie in tow, I hired Julie to sell ads in my department. She was highly caffeinated and articulate and awfully pretty.
On her first day, I was showing her around the office, when suddenly her face squished up into this horrible expression. She was staring straight at my breasts. What could I do but carry on? But when Julie’s face didn’t unsquish and her eyes kept returning to my chest, it struck me that something terrible was happening, because I was thinking of Sophie, asleep in the vinyl port-a-crib in my office across the hall. I looked down, and there was a dark wet spot the size of a half dollar slowly expanding around my nipple, as leaking breastmilk turned the crimson fabric of my dress a dark burgundy. What could two women do but blush, laugh, and become friends?
Since then, several million other things have happened to each of us. And on Saturday nights, in a house warm with kids and candlelight, we open the wine and spill the events of the past week and year and lifetime onto the table and pick through the curious contents, laughing and commiserating over the serious hilarity of it all.