Month: January 2006

The “white lie”—is there such a thing?

Good journalists, they say, have no friends. We have a few, so perhaps we’re doing something wrong. It’s true, though, that anyone who writes for a living makes enemies now and again. Writers of all types are caught on the horns of fact and fabrication. On the one hand, novelists writing under cover of fiction often get in trouble when “characters” recognize themselves in a story. Conversely, if you’re writing nonfiction, there are high expectations that everything in your account will, you know, be true and verifiable and all that. In the past four weeks, the issue has come to a boil, thanks to two memoirists who appear to have transformed their Minnesota experiences from low-voltage, real-life fluorescence into explosive, incandescent scandal. That would be Nicole Helget, the fascinating young writer of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, and James Frey, the successful but embattled writer of A Million Little Pieces. Helget’s story has been generating some static from immediate family and friends for her disturbing rural Minnesota memoir; some of the characters implicated in her tale have decided that the writer exceeded the limits of her artistic license. And Frey notoriously padded his resume as a drug addict and felon, the better to tell the story of his redemption at a Minnesota treatment center.

This all raises the question of what constitutes a memoir, and what rules must be followed. And the answer, apparently, is that there are no agreed-upon rules. While we are inclined to give all writers and storytellers the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to have them begging off responsibility due to the “subjective memory” of the writer. That is a disingenuous dodge. Should memoirists make things up, outside of their own internal states? They should not. Memoir is a fashionable genre, but it is also a chronically troubled one. Thanks to professional jealousy, almost every bestselling memoir is eventually scrutinized, weak points are identified, and the authors are dutifully rebuked. Folks from Lillian Hellman to Dave Eggers have stepped over the line of veracity into verisimilitude. There are those who are hurt by libelous narratives. And then there are the rest of us who like nothing better than to pile on an artist for taking liberties with the truth. Beyond this small epidemic of mendacity, we’re frankly more worried about the clucking, sanctimonious press. In critical circles these days, there is a strong whiff of vigilantism. It’s even stronger than the fume of victimhood that seems to be the exhaust of most popular memoirs.

Other forms of autobiographical art are given much more leeway. Consider, for example, the visual artist. In early December, local artist Gabriele Ellertson succumbed to cancer after living with it, documenting it, battling it, and exploring it as subject matter in her work. This she did for almost two decades in her elegant, disturbing paintings and drawings. It would take a very precise and jaded critic indeed to see (or even to care) where Ellertson might have embellished her own story within the parameters of her art. In the visual arts, we do not think in terms of truth and falsehood. We think of beauty and imperfection. And yet, one of the enduring precepts of civilization is that truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth. We’re not sure that lets an elegant stylist like Nicole Helget, or a successful twelve stepper like James Frey, off the hook. But there is some substance to Picasso’s idea that art is a lie that tells the truth.

And then just a week ago, Bob Feldman passed away. He was the president of Red House Records, an internationally respected folk label based here in St. Paul. Feldman, who was a gracious, funny, and authentic man, will be remembered as a publisher of great stories—though only a boor would vet the Red House catalog for historical fact. Folk music would seem to be another art form that does not truck with questions of prevarication. But then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether “Honky-Tonk Blues” is a true story, does it?

In the real world, outside the bounds of art, this imaginative approach to storytelling is often called “lying,” and sometimes “fraud.” The other day, Stillwater high school students unmasked one of their classmates as an imposter. You will recall that Joshua Gardner claimed to be British royalty, the seventeen-year-old “Caspian James Crichton Stuart IV, Fifth Duke of Cleveland.” In fact, he was merely an imaginative twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender from Winona. One can’t blame him for trying to reinvent himself—why should pop-culture royals like Madonna and David Bowie have a monopoly on self-reinvention? Is there anything more Anglo-American? But perhaps Gardner ought not to have aimed quite so high, nor insisted on being addressed as “your grace.”

More eloquent critics than us have pointed out that there is reason to worry about a culture that tolerates so much fibbing. Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has written movingly about the ramifications that Oprah’s Book Club has selected Elie Wiesel’s Night as its next title in the wake of the James Frey affair. If Oprah’s view of the Frey controversy is that it was “much ado about nothing,” what’s to prevent readers from denying that the Holocaust, at least as witnessed and detailed by Wiesel, ever happened outside the imagination of the author? And an important larger point needs to be emphasized. As Kurt Andersen has said, the climate of relativity today is a strange one in which evolution is “just a theory,” allegedly on an equal footing with the crank religious propositions of “intelligent design,” and a just war is one that can be redeemed by any number of fungible perceptions and political prejudices that trump the “reality-based community.” When we allow facts to be displaced by subjective impressions, then spin replaces the news, the globe continues to heat up, the voices of antagonism grow shriller, and our attention is diverted from real tragedies large and small.

Just around the corner from Como Zoo’s polar bears, snow leopards, and other winter-loving creatures is a Victorian-era tropical oasis. The Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park floats on the horizon like a series of great, sparkling glass beads. Up close, the building’s steel and aluminum frame and solid Ionic columns are less ethereal, but the dominating impression is of glass and light.

Call it a reverse snow globe. Outside: a winter tableau—snow falling on the rolling park’s pine, elm, and willow trees, and people wrapped in bulky coats. Inside: thousands of extraordinary palms, plants, ferns, and orchids in four different gardens; pools and fountains; and visitors disrobing, coats on their arms.

The Palm Dome is the hottest and most fragrant room in the complex, dripping in jasmine-infused humidity year-round. Each plant is carefully identified. The stubby King Sago, Cycadaceae cycas revoluta, with its coarse, woody trunk and elaborate crown of elongated green fronds, looks disarmingly like a palm. The edifying sign at its base, however, identifies it as a cycad, a living fossil that covered the earth 150 million years ago, whose closest living relatives are the pine and the spruce.

Near King Sago is the soaring fifty-foot Chinese fan palm with broad leaves and a trunk that looks like rough husks bound together. Next to that stands a thin cousin—the hurricane palm—equally tall, but with a smooth, narrow trunk and oval-shaped fronds.

The conservatory opened on November 7, 1915, under Park Superintendent Frederick Nussbaumer’s direction. As a young man, Nussbaumer had worked at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where ornate glasshouses like the Palm House were popular. He was hired by the city of St. Paul as a gardener around 1887 and became superintendent in 1892.

In the Sunken Garden, a balcony overlooks a long, rectangular pool full of water lilies and thick, piebald goldfish, which leads to a bronze maiden. Dozens of red, pink, and apricot-colored poinsettias—eight different varieties—are on display in the winter, ringed by blue Italian cypresses, to spectacular effect.

Most visitors enter and leave the conservatory by way of the new Fern Room, which opened in 2005. The addition’s boxy shape is at odds with the curving original, but the interior is serene. Beside a waterfall, there are wishing ponds and ferns unfurling in every imaginable way: wooly tree ferns, rasp ferns, and racks of staghorns sprout from the walls.

St. Paul, Nussbaumer believed, must always have a “recreation ground for all classes of people.” And this is it. Their voices rise above the star fruit and common fig in the North Garden. They photograph their children in the Sunken Garden. They take refuge from the cold and the wet, whale-gray winter sky, and exclaim with delight at the sight of a spider-like brown and yellow orchid descending from its stem.—Julie Hessler

ick Oehlenschlager’s office is crowded with so much unusual visual stimuli that it’s often hard for a visitor to follow the man’s enthusiastic torrent of conversation. There is a dead grouse splayed on its back on a newspaper atop a desk. There are tottering stacks of mounted plant specimens, various skeletons, and shelves jammed with obscure volumes on botany, ornithology, and all manner of biological arcana. There, too, are Oehlenschlager’s own publications, including Notes on the Prairie Vole—Microtus Ochrogaster—in Wadena County, Minnesota and something called Avian Distribution and Abundance Records for the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. Oehlenschlager mentions that his great-grandfather lived in a palace in Denmark and was the country’s poet laureate; he wrote Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, as well as the words to the Danish National Anthem. There’s his ornately framed portrait, in fact, leaning against piles of books on the floor.

Oehlenschlager is the assistant curator of biology and the manager of biological collections for the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. In the basement of the museum, in a warren of rooms that is equal parts laboratory and sprawling curiosity cabinet, he spends his days sorting and cataloging and skinning and preserving everything from insects to songbirds to bald eagles to groundhogs. The creatures he cannot skin and stuff he’ll deposit into a large tank, where they’ll be stripped down to the skeleton by hundreds of thousands of swarming hide beetles.

One recent afternoon, Oehlenschlager had his hands buried in the chest cavity of a great horned owl that was laid out on a table. The owl was a roadkill victim, transported to Oehlenschlager in the back of a pickup truck. He was making easy work of separating the skin from the carcass, but temporarily abandoned the process to give some visitors a tour of his subterranean workshop.

He led the way down the hall to the osteo room, which houses a collection of bones that includes the remains of Billy the Bison, Don the Gorilla, and Rosa, a circus elephant originally buried on a family farm. En route, Oehlenschlager admitted, “I did eat an owl once—a boreal owl—out of sheer lunacy. It was just a little experiment on my part, and I can tell you that an owl tastes like nothing else.” He has also, he said, eaten all sorts of other animals it wouldn’t occur to the average person to put in his mouth, including crow, boa constrictor, and groundhogs, which he claims are mighty tasty.

Oehlenschlager is pretty much a one-man gang, and the enormity of his task was apparent as he hustled through the various collections he presides over—the fluid room, where various specimens are preserved in jars; the bird and mammal banks, whose morgue-style cabinets are crammed floor to ceiling with stuffed creatures; and the bug room, with its hundreds of drawers of beetles, butterflies, moths, and other insects.

“If I live forever, I’d never run out of things to do down here,” Oehlenschlager said. “And I don’t have any intention of retiring. I’d rather keep working, working, working. There’s always something strange and challenging coming through the door. I recently had somebody bring me a black widow spider that they plucked off the luggage carousel at the airport.”

—Brad Zellar

British playwright Caryl Churchill weighs in on the subject of human cloning with her deliciously absurdist and a-tad-bit feminist commentary on the great debate. Set in the near future, A Number is about a man suffering the loss of his wife and son. In his grief, he arranges to have his boy cloned–times three. But thirty years later, those triplets come back mad and kicking. This is a dark drama of devil’s advocacy, in which Churchill imagines the emotions and environmental influences a cloned human might face. During its 2004 premiere, New York critics called the show “Beckettian” and compared it to Harold Pinter’s Theater of Menace. That’s big league! 528 Hennepin Ave., eighth floor, Minneapolis; 612-339-4944; www.illusiontheater.org

Along comes the smokin’ hot younger sister to Azia, the reigning diva of Eat Street. Though it’s housed inside Azia, Anemoni has its own distinctive lime-green vibe, as well as a deejay spinning seven nights a week. The stunning raw seafood offerings include traditional sushi and rolls, but that’s not why you go. You go for the Azia Roll with four kinds of fish and an aioli vinaigrette, or the shizushi with tuna, salmon, and shrimp pressed on layers of sushi rice and snow crab. The comparatively sedate oyster bar offers a fine array of East and West Coast beauties. The sampan seats by the window are a great spot from which to take in the scene. 2548 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis; 612-813-1200