Author: Hans Eisenbeis

We tried to do our part by prying open our wallets and swabbing out the residue of our consumer confidence. We were on the lookout for cheap but meaningful gifts. We were especially interested in one stocking stuffer that was widely advertised—a faceplate for the cell phone described as “patriotic.” What makes a faceplate patriotic? Presumably it’s the colorful red, white, and blue motif—the stars and bars of Old Glory.

Oh, how few sacred symbols we have as a nation! Veneration of the flag is apparently the only thing we can agree on (though adoration of the cell phone is nearly unanimous, too), but at least we can agree on something. Agreement is suddenly chic, and dissent is déclassé. For some reason, this makes a lot of sensible people nervous.

The rest of us know that agreement at a political level is precisely what a slight majority of voters had in mind last November. A brilliant new one-party system has been devised to accomplish more than a two-party system could ever do. Later in January, we’ll get to see it in action.

It’s not entirely clear what Minnesota’s most pressing legislative needs will be with the New Year. Starting on that $4 billion state deficit without raising taxes seems like an interesting idea. At least state Sen. Mady Reiter has her priorities straight. She’ll still work hard to use tobacco funds to build new highways, stop light rail, and try to make it easier for commercial health insurers to make a profit in our state. But before she does all that work of the people, she’ll reintroduce her Pledge of Allegiance bill as soon as she can. It will undoubtedly pass, and may well be the first law Governor Pawlenty inks into existence.

The bill, which made it as far as Governor Ventura’s desk last May before getting vetoed, would require all school children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a week. This despite the fact that about three out of four schools in the state report that they’re already doing it. (Oddly, Reiter refuses to amend the bill to allow teachers to tell their students that reciting the pledge is not mandatory. She says they’re already doing that.) Ventura argued that “patriotism comes from the heart,” rather than from the moral hot-dogging of politicians. It was one of the more persuasive things he said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has upheld a man’s right to sue to get nine western states to drop the words “under God” from the pledge. The court will be deciding the case in the next months, though it’s hard to believe they’ll uphold their previous decision, if they know what’s good for them. (“Under God” was not included in the pledge until the McCarthy era, when it was interpolated by Congress—the better to mitigate against the humanist leanings of its original author, Francis Bellamy, who was a damnable socialist.)

It’s curious to see Americans and Minnesotans get so wound up about a few stanzas of Victorian prose. We are not a people who are especially fastidious about dogma and ritual. We are selective in our observance, even a little sloppy, and we are known poetry-haters. If there were any teeth in the laws governing flag etiquette, for example, most of us would be in deep trouble. According to the U.S. Flag Code, our star-spangled banner should not be printed on paper, it should never be used in advertising, and it should not be affixed to any uniform other than the military or the civil service. (It gives us pause to consider every professional athlete getting a ticket for abusing the flag since 9/11.) On top of all that, the proper way to dispose of a worn-out flag is by burning it—but with the right intentions, not the wrong ones. Which is, of course, a matter between you, your God, and your elected representatives.

As you know by now, Time magazine has, with the usual fanfare, announced their “Persons of the Year.” They’ve selected three “whistleblowers” from the past twelve months of corporate malfeasance and government ineptitude. This is troublesome stuff. Not because people shouldn’t stand up for what they believe is right, but because when they do, and they are idolized, we find ourselves on a slippery slope of demagoguery.

In the Jewish tradition, great deeds qualify for special status as mitzvot–acts of loving kindness, real karmic capital–by remaining anonymous. There is something corrupting about Time magazine putting heroes of this kind on its cover as a publicity stunt, designed first as a ploy to sell Time magazine. We’ve got nothing against making money. God knows, we’d like to do more of that ourselves. Still, it’s easy to be cynical about the phenomenon, when it’s directly connected to Time’s bottom line, while posing as something more.

Years ago, Time sold out Henry Luce’s vision for Man of the Year. Luce wished to identify the person who had the most impact on the world and news from the previous year. (Stalin and Hitler, you’ll recall, both made Man of the Year in their time.) Instead, the editors use the issue today as a cheerleading opportunity, to rile the literal-minded mob of Americans who lack the imagination to see it as anything other than a public honor heaped on a more or less deserving person, not unlike the Oscars. (Indeed, one might argue that this year’s “whistleblowers” failed to change the course of history or make news at all, until it was too late.)

On the other hand, what makes us squirm is the real possibility that across the nation, bureaucrats are trying to figure out how to institutionalize this type of heroism. The simpleminded corporate lackey or government patriot does not understand that whistleblowers are remarkable for the very fact that they work against the grain, against the overwhelming pressure to conform in the workplace. They act out, and they act alone, and they are–under any other circumstance–the bad apple that spoils the bunch. If one wants to truly follow their example, one must first identify the overwhelming social climate against which to tilt. That climate has turned 180 degrees from what it was 18 months ago.

Recent experiments in emulating this type of behavior have been disastrous. We think of the ill-fated “TIPS” program, by which the government hoped to encourage Americans to snitch on anyone that seemed suspicious to them. And now TIA–the program for “Total Information Awareness,” overseen by Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter–has also foundered, thanks to some refreshing media scrutiny and hacktivism. When the impulse to blow the whistle is coopted by the government and converted into a witchhunt, we should all be very nervous indeed.

It’s been a tough year, to be sure. And it’s natural enough to look for heroes in the midst of so much corporate and government ugliness. It’s certainly easier in hindsight to find and celebrate the prophets in the wilderness than it is to ask why their whistleblowing didn’t effect change in time to avert catastrophe. Would FBI agent Coleen Rowley’s agitations have landed her on the cover of Time, if 9/11 hadn’t happened? Would Sherron Watkins be a Person of the Year if Ken Lay had been chastened by her warnings about Enron’s shell game? No.

And what are we to make of the fact that Time’s persons of the year are all women? First, of course, one must point out that editors love aesthetic symmetry above almost anything else. (Hence three persons of the year; odd numbers are resolved, balanced on a center point.) It’s a happy coincidence that all three are women. And yet many will be gratified by this, as if history’s dialectic is itself committed to equal opportunity. The subtle implication, intentional or accidental, real or perceived, is that men could not or would not have done what these women did.

Are women both the nobler and fairer sex? It certainly is true that they commit less crime than men. But as they achieve positions of real authority–and being a white-collar whistleblower is getting pretty close–we should expect that they are just as capable of committing all kinds of felonious acts of selfishness.

A few months ago, the local papers reported the kind of story I love to read– a delightful item about the Minneapolis street widely regarded as the finest example of an old-fashioned Twin Cities avenue. The salient distinguishing feature was the street’s towering American elm trees which had somehow survived numerous plagues of Dutch elm disease.

Then in October, I learned that Minneapolis had a rough year for Dutch elm. The park board cut down 4,000 elms in 2002. Among them was “the Sentinel,” a huge streetside attraction on Stevens Avenue near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The passing of this remarkable tree was commemorated by a white sash, a poem, and a memoriam in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities.

Now this morning in the Strib, I see where a farmer in Le Sueur county has been granted the rare distinction of owning the state’s finest American elm. The 87-foot tall tree was cited by the DNR, who keep track of more than 50 species of trees in their “Big Tree Registry.” The Strib also reports that the largest tree of any species currently in the logs is a cottonwood tree almost 130 feet tall. (The DNR has a three-point system that takes into account height, circumference of trunk, and canopy size. This particular cottonwood has the highest score of any species.)

Aside from the bizarre government impulse to record these kinds of “size matters” stats, it’s provocative to me that the Strib chose to lead this interesting story with the news about Monty Braun’s elm. Why not the state’s tallest white pine? How about its biggest poplar? I chalk it up to their desire to create a hook most readers will instantly want to read. Oddly, elms sell better than cottonwoods.

This is not as petty as it might seem; it goes to the heart of an important conversation about how we see our environment, or more accurately, what we see in our environment–and what we don’t see. More and more, environmentalists and scientists are warning us that our preferences are leading to biological monocultures. This is a fancy way of saying that we love those American elms so much, that we neglect the other species.

There is, of course, a price to be paid for this monomania. When Dutch elm disease thrived in the 70s and 80s, the whole face of Minnesota was scarred, because of a prejudice for these beloved shade trees. In 1977, 50,000 were cut down in the Twin Cities alone. That tells you not that Dutch elm disease was so much more virulent back then; rather, it tells you just how biased our arboriculture was until the 80s.

One wonders if this is the kind of phenomenon we can expect to see more of in the future. Is nature, biologically speaking, trying to regain its own balance in spite of its human stewards? This is where ethics and biology intersect. The growing gospel of ecology and the interconnectedness of all life throws cold water on some age-old philosophical and scientific questions. For example, if we somehow managed to eradicate small pox–because it was a scourge to human beings–is there some other price to be paid elsewhere on the circle of life? If we successfully killed all the mosquitoes, how long would the dragonflies survive? And then the songbirds? And so on.

This is tricky territory, of course. One can come dangerously close to making repellant, Malthusian kinds of pronouncements– that plagues of disease and famine are “nature’s way” of responding to overpopulation and its imbalances. It would be inhuman to believe that, particularly since the weak, infirm, and impoverished are inevitably the first to expire. This is a truism for all species, but we like to believe that humans–ethical ones, anyway–will take care of the neediest first.

If these kinds of change are, in fact, the planet’s way of trying to regain some sort of balance, then it might be wise to consider what we can do to help, rather than hinder. In recent years, the environmentalists have been touting the esthetic of biodiversity as a good first step. This line of thinking argues that if we want nature to thrive (so that we might survive), we should try to make sure that the widest possible range of the natural is given the opportunity to renew itself.

This seems like sound advice in any case. No matter what you might believe about “the greenhouse effect,” it certainly won’t hurt the planet to entertain the idea that it is changing, and that we may have a hand in it, for better or for worse. The alternative–to go on pretending that environmental problems like global warming are the fictions of those who only want to damage American business–is to risk considerably more than just our “way of life.”

Here in the Twin Cities, the old monoculture of public plantings is hopefully a thing of the past. We learned the painful lesson of Dutch elm disease, when hundreds of thousands of our stately streets were razed by a simple little beatle. A healthy mix of trees, including old favorites like maple and oak, along with modish species like ginkgo and linden, would have saved us the sorrow that we now prudently bank against.

Veneration of the “stately elm” is, to be sure, one of the prerogatives of our pride of place. The elm is as central to the Minnesota identity as lefse, Lake Wobegon, and driving in the left lane. As with so many other things in life, though–politics, art, society, biology–we must evolve to embrace new realities, or our traditions will end up in the wood chipper.

About a year ago, we recall reading several pieces on “war chalking,” a trend in San Francisco, L.A., and New York, where electronic freedom fighters were developing a system for letting each other know where to find wireless interent access out on the street. They developed graffiti symbols akin to the mythical code of hobos from a bygone era.

Well, no code is necessary here, because the Strib has broadcast the names and locations of a half-dozen businesses that give it up to anyone with a wi-fi enabled laptop–and do so more or less willingly. (The 8th Street Grill, which hiply offers wireless DSL to its customers, seems sensible enough to realize this: Why would you sit outside in your cold van to “hack” into their wi-fi, when you could do it inside, over a nice turkey sandwich?)

As everyone knows, the news is not really news until someone gets hurt. And throughout Steve Alexander’s engaging article, you can feel editor and writer straining together to try to make this story somehow scandalous.

Let’s acknowledge here that most Americans can barely find the on-switch and the AOL icon. That being the case, the only real potential culprit in the mix is that old bugbear, the computer hacker. Since any phreak can already launch a nuclear missle by simply whistling into a payphone, why would anyone bother with the 8th Street Grill’s wireless port to the web? There is nothing a hacker can do with free wi-fi access that he can’t do at the public library.

Still, even with so many other pressures on our collective psyche, paranoia about cyber crime continues apace. Witness The New York Times magazine’s interview yesterday with uberhacker Kevin Mitnick–still so feared that he’s not allowed to take a crap alone, if there’s a circuit-board anywhere in the room. Mitnick will have paid his debt to society at the end of the month, after five years in the clink. And what he’s always said–and is still saying– is that serious, high-powered hacking has always depended on “social engineering,” that is, good old-fashioned human-to-human confidence games. (Forgot your password? Mother’s maiden name?) If anything, con artists are up against significantly more challenges in the online world, due to technology. Every digital transaction leaves a deep footprint in the six-inch snow of networked cyberspace. If Mitnick is so goddam smart, why did he get caught? Instead of hacking computers, he should have stuck to dumpster-diving for credit carbons.

No, the most serious electronic mischief has been perpetrated by Steve Case and AOL/Time Warner. Securing mediocre internet access for 12 million Americans, at $21.95 per month each, may be the greatest feat of “social engineering” ever. The true evil genius of AOL is that it’s a backstop–your permanent email, your last-resort ISP when everything else has gone fubar. There is undoubtedly a special term the industry has for retaining customers through neglect–thanks to that automatic debit every month, until you go through the considerable trouble to close your account. Why do it? Holding down this little escape costs a virtually painless $270 a year.

Then there’s the natural decline in the quality of content that comes with opening the door to the masses. We’re not sure about the full extent of AOL’s crime, but judging from our inbox, the world is a more exciting place, what with all those hidden Nigerian bank accounts, penis enlargement pills, and Tiny RC Race Cars! (Completely sold-out in stores!) We feel sure that we have the info-architects at America Online to thank for lowering the bar so far that even Dr. Laura has figured out how to put together a web site.

Given that tremendous contribution to human progress, no one could have known that a company as pragmatically arrogant as Time Warner would chafe under so much pragmatic populism. These are, after all, the people who publish People, the most widely read periodical in the country.

As anyone who has ever spent a half hour in a dentist’s waiting room knows, tight control of information is no guarantee against crime in any medium–particularly violations of good taste and the assault on your intelligence. Seeing AOL pull this off just as well as People must be very irritating indeed. It’s no wonder they’re looking for a concrete parachute for that little weasel.

Last week, the whole office adjourned to the Walker to see the British TV advertising awards. It got me wondering, among other things, whether somewhere in Great Britain , there was a crowd of urbane hipsters gathering to see the American TV commercial awards. Probably not.

Which is not to say that we can’t make great ads here too. I don’t doubt that there may be such an awards screening for our own TV commercials. (The Superbowl functions in this way, I suppose, but the high entry fee–up this year to something like $4 million per minute– insures that these are merely expensive ads, not necessarily artful ones.) It’s been said many times that the best minds of the present generation are working in advertising, rather than writing novels or making films or painting masterpieces or any of the other things brilliant people are supposed to be doing with themselves. As I tried to think of a few good examples of the American art form, I didn’t have much trouble. In other words, great British TV commercials don’t necessarily asperse their American counterparts. Buck up, friend–we have some great ads here too, for what it’s worth.

No, the real attraction is in the exotic otherness, the subtle differences in what’s allowed and expected in TV abroad. The nifty thing is that Brits, having sent most of their Puritans to America hundreds of years ago, treat themselves to more nudity and swearing. That salaciousness adds up to more than just fart jokes and bare breasts, though–it cultivates a permissiveness throughout the whole medium, and that means TV will occasionally be challenging and even artful in ways you never see here. (The artful and the challenging tend to find a home here at HBO–where there are no commercials per se.)

Humor of course is almost as effective as sex as a selling device—and it’s much more difficult to do well. As you might expect, most of the best ads in this year’s awards are laugh-out-loud funny. But the relative freedom of the British medium also pushes the envelope in disturbing ways. British public service announcements, for example, tend to be shocking beyond description. In particular, there are a series of highly graphic car-accident PSAs this year, including a heartbreakingly realistic reenactment of a car colliding in slow-mo with a child crossing a street. This ad has already given me nightmares—and I’m a guy who’s fully versed in Unreal Tournament, Wes Craven, and all the other signifiers of red-blooded American violence-as-entertainment.

The main distinction in British and American advertising, from my point of view, is the same distinction that exists between good and bad advertising in any culture. Like anything else in media, we remember the good and forget the bad—the average being perhaps the most forgettable of all. Good advertising works the way a good book or movie or CD works—it stands out, you remember it, you talk about it with your friends. And if the advertisers are lucky, you associate it with whatever brand it is that they’re peddling.

One can only hope that the capacity audience at the Walker last week was filled with Twin Cities advertising professionals (there are as many here as practically anywhere, as a matter of fact) walked away with this endorsement: The finest ads in the British TV commercial awards are powerful and funny and sexy and mighty creative in themselves, as miniature movies. “Extending the brand” of their bankrolling advertisers is, though certainly not accidental, almost incidental.

Ad people undoubtedly fight this battle every day—convincing advertisers that good advertising needs to innovate, and in some cases that may not mean hiring a supermodel to scream a brand name and a price for 30 seconds. They should approach their clients with the rare attitude of the wisest writers—that good writing flatters all writers. Good ads are not nearly as pernicious as bad ones.

There’s an interesting flip of the script going on here. Movies, books, CDs are increasingly driven by bottom-line formulas. It’s the advertisers who are, in many cases, given more freedom to explore creatively and artistically. It’s no accident that some of our most artful and credible musicians, movie directors, actors, and writers are working in advertising. And even if they never come back over from the dark side, we can still take a moment to appreciate it when they use their powers for the attenuated good of a memorable commercial.

It’s easy to be cynical about certain holiday traditions—especially the one where we’re expected to buy presents for a list that begins to read like the phone book. What’s more, we must stay ahead of increases in the cost-of-giving index by which we quietly measure ourselves each year. (What is the minimum expected for a present between adults? Do I stop at second cousins twice removed? Will I still respect myself Christmas morning?) In this contrarian household, there are strange fellows all snug in their beds—religious fanatics and secular cranks, visions of charcoal dancing in their heads. They complain in unison: Isn’t the holiday about something more than crass consumerism?

It is not. Or at least it shouldn’t have to be. Ever since the babyboomers were in diapers, consumerism has slowly but surely replaced the isms of a more traditional confession. Shopping has become our civil religion. True, many of us still go to church, synagogue, or mosque. Eight in ten Americans still express a preference for some specific denomination, while five in ten are dues-paying members. But if spirituality is about putting your most sacred beliefs into action, we spend a lot more time with the gospel according to Visa and Master Card than we do with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

It’s no great paradox that our spirituality, our patriotism, and our consuming habits are so tangled. Just a year ago, we were measuring both our economy and our spiritual health by how many big-ticket items we could afford. Success in life is measured not by calculating the distance between our moral goals and achievements, but between our financial ones. In a foot-race with human nature, idealism is easily lapped every time. We don’t mind boosting the underdog, but we do get tired of booing the capitalist spirit. For better or worse, buying Christmas presents is not antithetical to American spirituality. It’s critical to it.

We don’t need Max Weber to tell us that financial worries today sting worse than the prospect of Hell’s fire tomorrow. Last year was the worst in a decade for holiday revenues. This year, consumer confidence is once again clanking around in the empty tin bucket. Do Americans stop buying and start praying when times are tough? Probably. Then again, we doubt that a reward in the next life really trumps one in the next recovery.

This year, the downtown council is promoting its 11th annual Holidazzle—the daily parade on Nicollet Mall from Thanksgiving to the New Year that crassly celebrates the glory of Christmas consumerism. Sure, it’s populated by storybook characters, and Disney-like artifice. Sure, it generates as much as 4,000 pounds of food charitably donated to local food shelfs, and as much as $30,000 for good, if seasonal, causes. On top of all that, shoppers who spend at least $150 downtown will be rewarded with tickets to the “Hot Seats” section, the heated grandstand at Orchestra Hall. It doesn’t exactly count as a trip to church. But in the American context, you can scarcely find a better way to prove your mettle.

For a half-million locals, there is no more fitting ritual than Holidazzle. No matter what you think of it, or how you pronounce it, the word is etymologically perfect. Holidays are holy days, but the gods don’t dazzle the way they used to—or if they do, then they’re not in Heaven but downtown.

The life of a publishing professional is not as glamorous as it might seem. The nights are frequently an extension of the days, which are an extension of the mornings—which is to say, lots of burnt coffee, dull pencils, and hectoring phone calls. The editor of this magazine occasionally slips out for a drink, it’s true, maybe a bit of dessert. If babysitting works out, the wife of the editor may come along. (Although crème brulée is outlawed from the pages of the magazine, it is welcomed at the table.)

The metabolism of this magazine’s editor is not what it used to be. This is the self-evident conclusion to be drawn from the infrequent occasions when he has a few beers and takes in, say, a rock ’n’ roll concert. It’s a simple consequence of aging. Most of us can’t handle the excesses we once could. Surely it’s a survival mechanism, the difference between burning out and fading away. The fact is, most of us are for fading away, and it’s a good thing. A generation of Sid Viciouses would be the end of the race. Anyway, the point is this: Nobody hates a hangover the way we do, and we now know that the worst hangovers have nothing to do with the beer, or the scotch, or even the champagne. It’s the cigarette smoke. Whether times have changed, whether people in bars are smoking more than ever, we can’t say. But we do know that your average gin mill today is an intensely aromatic experience. By the time the editor gets home, the dog won’t come near, the kids resist affection, and the wife just points at the shower or the couch.

Earlier this month, Michael Bloomberg proposed a rigorous ban on smoking throughout New York City. Yes, the ban would apply to bars and restaurants. Needless to say, excitable New Yorkers converged on City Hall. It’s unthinkable! It’s an outrage! What’s next, banning cell phones in public places?! (Oops, already working on that. No kidding.) But anyone who has traveled to California in the last five years can report that this type of law is not only possible, it’s terrific. Californians have embraced the ban, they self-police, they stay out later, they feel better. No one smokes in the bars, and yet the bars continue to thrive! The eyes don’t sting, the throat doesn’t burn, the hair doesn’t feel tacky as flypaper. The band is visible in living color from as far away as 50 feet.

(Just to be clear, let’s just say this: The editor actually enjoys a civilized smoke now and again. A Winston Light, an American Spirit, even a Fuente Hemingway. But we’ll gladly take it outside, if it means we don’t have to wash our clothes and person in tomato juice every time we want to rejoin genteel company. Hey, we’re all about social responsibility.)

Has this kind of thing been tried in Minnesota? Yes. Has it succeeded? Not really. Eden Prairie recently passed a weak version of an antismoking measure that pretty much just guarantees that addicted Eden Prairie civil servants will be freezing their butts off this winter. And the good people of Cloquet and Duluth have been fighting tooth-and-nail over their aggressive anti-smoking statutes for more than a year. (One might say that many of these local efforts in outstate Minnesota are doomed to failure, for the simple reason that there isn’t much to do other than smoke and drink. But that wouldn’t be nice.) There is one legitimate complaint: Business owners say smokers will conduct their affairs in that booming, smoke-choked town down the road. The obvious solution is to pass new statewide standards—hell, let’s make them national.

Why can’t I be Dave Eggers? It’s a question every writer between the ages of 20 and 40 has been asking for the last five years. An understandable question. The 32-year-old Chicago native has been blessed with two rare gifts: the ability to compose hilarious prose about virtually anything, and an uncanny knack for self-promotion. Together, these gifts have made him the Vin Diesel of literature, if that’s not too ridiculous to say.

It all reached critical mass two years ago, when his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was published. It didn’t matter that he was about 30 years too young to pull off a credible memoir. The book was great and annoying at the same time, filled with touching personal anecdotes and history, long passages of self-conscious musings, highly inventive narrative gymnastics. In terms of the literary canon, it planted a flag in the heart of the memoir form, claiming it as safe territory for a generation (his and mine) most often noted for its cover-all-flanks irony, its nothing-is-sacred cynicism.

Whatever else it might have been, Staggering was the culmination of a short but spectacular rise through the ranks of popular publishing. The book itself told the first half of Eggers’ story, as a superstar journalist: When he was in his 20s, both his parents died within weeks of each other. Underwritten by their generous life insurance policies, he moved to San Francisco, parented his younger brother Toph, and launched a magazine that was the Gen-X equivalent of Spy—a hilarious and smart monthly magazine with no real readership beyond the magazine industry itself. It was a project that was doomed to failure, but the best kind of failure. Every self-respecting magazine editor in the country was an avid fan—if only because Eggers knew precisely where to send complimentary copies, and hilarious press releases. It didn’t hurt that the whole thing happened in mid-90s San Francisco, just at the crest of the Internet boom. Eggers was a part of that Soma coterie of the time—the flourishing publishing scene centered on Wired magazine, Suck.com, Salon, and all the other storytellers and ringleaders of the digital revolution. After Might was shuttered (nothing becomes a publishing legend more than premature death), Eggers was summoned to New York City, where he was enrolled as an editor at Esquire magazine. He spent some unhappy months there, and got out after he sold his idea for a memoir to Simon and Schuster. At the same time, he founded McSweeney’s, first as a glorified blog for him and his small entourage, then as a quarterly journal of growing reputation and substance, and finally as a publishing house with such notable authors on the rolls as Stephen Dixon, Jonathan Lethem, and Nick Hornby.

Eggers was anointed a curly-haired Adonis of literature long before he published Staggering. But don’t blame him for a system that tends to fixate on one person at a time, making superstars of some, while ignoring legions of others who are just as deserving. Most reporters and critics prefer to cover someone who has already been written about at length. (Here we go again, right? Well…) It makes our jobs so much easier, it protects us from looking silly, and we get to interview someone who is already positioned as a celebrity. Okay. But who gets to be famous? In the end, of course, there is no single answer. From the outside, it looks like the equivalent of winning the lottery, and the only real obscenity about the whole process is how many dozens of truly deserving artists lose the war of attrition, and never create the masterpiece that is in them, or reach the audience ready to receive them. That, in a nutshell, is why so many people find Eggers so annoying.

It’s not his fault, of course, and to his credit, Eggers really has used his powers for good. Money is power, but more important, it’s freedom, and there’s nothing as sad as a successful artist who doesn’t use his freedom to push his own creativity forward. Eggers, by contrast, has spent most of his adult life in a position of financial comfort and creative agitation. Perhaps his most ambitious, and reckless, pairing of the two is his new novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Growing the McSweeney’s operation to the point where it now publishes a handful of hardcovers per year, he walked away from million-dollar contracts with the big publishing houses of New York, and decided to publish Velocity in his own house. This, of course, allows him to do precisely what he wants, while getting in his licks about how screwed up the book industry is today, and probably keeping a bigger slice of the pie for himself and his projects. On top of all that, every move he makes seems to incite more publicity and interest. He is having his cake and eating it too. Another reason people find him so irritating.

There are downsides to his go-it-alone approach, of course, some of which may come back to haunt him. The first edition of his new book was limited to 10,000 copies, available to readers exclusively from McSweeney’s web site; Velocity starts, for no apparent reason other than the novelty of it, right on the front cover, and there are no end papers; publishing information and acknowledgements are printed on the inside of the back cover. But these are all trivialities. Most serious, from a reader’s point of view, is that the novel could have been better edited. Typos proliferate, and design elements are capricious. (Random images appear in the text, neither often enough nor rare enough to create any sense of purpose at all.) The last 100 pages are redundant, and would have made the novel better in their absence.

This is generally what happens when the owner of a book company writes a book. He is the boss of his editors, and even if he’s a benevolent dictator, they will inevitably become proof-readers and rubber-stampers, instead of collaborators the way great editors are meant to be.

The bottom line, of course, is that Eggers is incredibly gifted. It occasionally happens that a complete moron achieves this kind of acclaim—often enough, I guess, to make it possible to say that it doesn’t matter whether a person has any talent or not, just whether they have the connections and the marketing muscle. But it’s not really like that in the rarified world of hardcover literature, and it still takes a very special person to come up with 300 pages of publishable material and call it, without smirking, a real contribution to literature.

That said, You Shall Know Our Velocity is a problematic work. It’s the story of two young men who attempt to fly around the planet in a week, looking to get rid of about $30,000 by giving it away personally to people they think can use it. A clever enough premise, but pretty lightweight. Eggers leavens that basic reworking of On the Road with a familiar backstory: Will and Hand are driven and haunted by the memory of their third musketeer, Jack, who was randomly and cruelly killed in a car accident a few months prior to their misadventures. Though Eggers has written much short fiction over the years, he has never written anything of this length and scope that wasn’t based directly on experience. (Indeed, the most convincing moments in the book are the ones that are apparently scribbled directly out of first-hand experience.) He falls back on a few well-used tools: You can see his magazine instincts at work, hitting on a great idea for a magazine story—two twentysomethings try to fly around the world in one week! Giving away thousands of dollars in cash!—and then translating that to novelistic form. The beauty with this approach is that you get to make it all up. The problem is, you have to make it all up. And where he has to invent whole episodes and narrative devices (Will and Hand on the top of a cold, dark, silent mountain—death! Get it?), you can definitely see the man behind the curtain. His account of the fatal car accident is car
dboardishly two-dimensional, and the whole narrative accounting for the title of the book—a faux history of a flight-obsessed primitive people, who ran around with their mouths open—is lazy and unlikeable.

In its best sections, all of Eggers familiar conventions come into play: the pitch-perfect dialogue between young males of a certain time and place; the ugly duckling narrator—a stand-in for himself; the autodidactic, undependable Neal Cassady character—Hand. There’s the essentially superficial plot, lent seriousness by guest appearances by the Grim Reaper. There are the author’s personal obsessions, lightly veiled discomfort with money, the demise of his parents and (more recently, tragically) his sister. It’s all well-traveled stuff, in some senses covered more honestly and directly in Staggering.

The chronically envious should know that Eggers is not getting a free ride from critics this time. What looked like a real lovefest in the case of his first book is not happening with Velocity. The Time magazines of the world will continue to fawn, focusing more on the phenomenon of Dave Eggers than on the work itself. But the Roger Ebert of the literature world, The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, hated it. Kakutani concedes, at least, that Eggers’ real virtue is that he can write about anything, and make it sing. I imagine he can spin golden prose out of his grocery list, and here he “turns somersaults” on almost every page. More to the point, what attracts readers to Eggers’ work is Eggers himself, and this can be a problem for someone who wants to write fiction. What made him a great memoirist may become a liability as a novelist—an inability to imagine realities, characters, situations outside his own head and his own experience. But his dazzling gifts as a writer, and his honorable efforts as a publisher, will forgive a multitude of youthful sins.

We are flat-landers in fly-over country. There is nothing spectacular about the geography of Minnesota. Sure, we have our granite-rimmed lakes and our occasional tracts of pine, aspen, birch, and oak. We even have the relatively inspiring North Shore, Taylors Falls, the bluff country of Winona, and Cabella’s. But there is nothing here that compares to the grandeur of, say, the Rocky Mountains or the Maine coast. Instead, the geography of Minnesota is a thing of subtlety, its beauties not particularly lavish. Big Blue Stem and Norway Pine? Let’s not kid ourselves. Our natural attractions are as understated as we are.

If you need to be reminded, consider the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s staggering American landscape show, currently in progress. Aside from the remarkable fact that “American Sublime” came to our humble burg at all, we note that Minnesota was never a huge inspiration to the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, or Frederic Church. Which serves to remind us that we often cling to the slimmest references to ourselves in American arts and letters. A Thomas Moran painting in this show depicts “Hiawatha,” one of our more durable local myths (a myth which, incidentally, has no grounding in reality or history). At least Moran traveled to Minnesota in 1861, researching his painting on the shores of Lake Superior. The poet who inspired him, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, couldn’t be bothered to set foot anywhere near here. (In composing “The Song of Hiawatha,” he was provoked by photos and descriptions of Minnehaha Falls.) No wonder we suffer from low self-esteem.

This perennial inferiority complex fits so well that we barely notice it anymore. If people start to look like their pets, then why shouldn’t they start to take on some of the qualities of their natural environment? In these parts, there are notable similarities between the people and the plains, a notion that dates back at least as far as Ole Rolvaag. We are not a loud and gregarious mountain people, nor are we mysterious and complex like desert dwellers. We are not expansive and dramatic like people who live near the ocean. Essentially, we are farmers and freshwater fishermen—in spirit, at least—and those with other pretensions move to New York or L.A., where they are praised for their work ethic and mocked for their hard R’s.

Those of us who remain, of course, are modest and stoic, and we like our natural surroundings that way too. Autumn is as spectacular as it gets around here. That’s pretty spectacular, to be sure, but it’s fleeting. The landscape artists of the 19th century might have been inspired by our favorite season, but they were frightened off by the inevitable intimidations and depredations of winter. No, if we want to believe that the clouds have parted and the hand of God has lighted permanently on our fair state, we’ll have to look for more mundane evidence, like the arrival of West Nile and the immutability of KQRS Classic Rock. God is in the details, right? Or is it the Devil?