One might think that the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular would be a disorienting experience for someone with eighteen years of sobriety under his belt and only the haziest recollections of unnumbered adolescent evenings spent hunched over a power-hitter and listening to Dark Side of the Moon on the eight-track player of a 1972 Cougar. That … Read more
These past harrowing weeks, we’ve heard a lot about the “Culture of Life.” Perhaps it would be edifying to take a closer look at the Machinery of Death. Sometime in the coming weeks, we may hear more about reinstating the death penalty here in Minnesota, a favorite subject with some of our legislators. Regardless of … Read more
Here in the city, one of the more delightful rites of spring is the University of Minnesota’s annual release of injured birds that have, over the winter, recuperated at the Raptor Center. This gala happens May 21 at Battle Creek Regional Park—just in time for the great raptor migration back north. Serious raptor enthusiasts all … Read more
One day each spring, thousands of partygoers descend on St. Paul’s West Side to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. On the other 364 days, the parade route along Cesar Chavez Street—including the business district branded and marketed as District del Sol—is something of an urban hamlet. Geographically protected by the Mississippi River from years of downtown … Read more
The entire apartment, which can’t be more than fifteen feet by fifteen, is visible from the front door: the makeshift sofa, the kitchen, the workshop, the “bedroom.” In fact, Dick Donovan’s apartment, where he’s lived since August, more closely resembles a fort. “On the second morning I lived here,” he recalls, “I fried eggs from … Read more
King Charles I of England knew how to throw a feast. After one particularly sumptuous meal, the king’s French-born court chef debuted a new dish, a magical confection the consistency of fresh-fallen snow, yet uncommonly sweet and creamy. Charles, quite delighted, summoned the chef and requested that the recipe for the frozen delight be held … Read more
I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever … Read more
While Jonathan Safran Foer just made New York Press’s “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” list, Ms. Krauss would likely beg to differ; she married him. What does this have to do with Krauss’s The History of Love, published just a month after Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Quite a bit, it turns out, when … Read more
A new Ann Beattie book is no longer the event it once was, which is something of a shame. She’s been kicking out such consistently accomplished fiction for so long now that it’s become easy to take her for granted. When she first made her name with a series of New Yorker stories in the … Read more
Year after year, this lecture series brings in some of literature’s heaviest hitters, and yet somehow maintains a surprisingly low profile. Isabel Allende, May’s featured author, is a former journalist and the niece of slain Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a CIA-assisted coup in 1973. Since her first novel, 1985’s The House … Read more