Category: Article

Denis Johnson’s new novel — his first in nine years — continues the author’s studies of sympathy and redemption as integral parts of human physiology. Still, as in most of Johnson’s work, a feeling of desolation pervades. Set in the ’60s, each segment of Tree of Smoke: A Novel follows a year in the lives of the narrative’s several characters, all of whom are either fighting in the Vietnam War or dealing with its effects. Sympathy often comes with feeling sorry for a murderer, and redemption is found in a dive bar with air conditioning. Their various plights and salvations coalesce into a single American experience that Publishers Weekly calls “a closure [on the Vietnam War] that’s as good as we’ll ever get.”

Junot Diaz’s debut collection of short stories, Drown, appeared ten years ago and drew the kind of attention usually reserved for writers with more established résumés. A big part of that was the cool intensity of the prose, which chronicled the lives of adolescent boys living in hardscrabble communities in the Dominican Republic, or transplanted to equally challenging environments in New York and New Jersey. The stories were alternately grim and funny, and Diaz never condescended, making liberal use of native dialect and slang. So enthused were editors at the New Yorker that they named Diaz one of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Something happened on the way to literary superstardom, however; a novel, A Cheater’s Guide to Love, was scheduled for release in 1997, but never appeared. Perhaps The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been salvaged from that earlier project, but who knows. Early indications are that this debut novel—a multicultural, multilingual tale of epic bad luck—more than justifies the decade-long wait. 952-920-0633; www.bn.com

An entrepreneur who sells his memories for three thousand dollars per decade, a verisimilitude inspector for a Civil War-themed amusement park, ghosts who relive their deaths every night when their son comes home from work: This is the stuff of a typical George Saunders story. What, then, happens when Saunders turns his pen to nonfiction? Consisting of essays on literature, travel, and politics, Saunders’s narratives in The Braindead Megaphone continue his explorations into the absurdities of modern life — only now his writing stems from observation. Here, his humor assumes a doleful tone, as does his subject matter. But it is undeniably real and equally intense and as disturbing as anything Saunders has conjured from his imagination.

It’s been a huge year for Norwegian writer Per Petterson. The acclaim for his latest novel ranged from Thomas McGuane’s front-page rave in the Times Book Review (“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life”) to the $135,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Award-winning author Richard Ford even chimed in with a ringing endorsement, and if you threw in a hosanna from Cormac McCarthy you’d have a pretty good idea of the sort of literary territory Petterson is exploring in Out Stealing Horses. It’s a quiet, spare, ruminative novel, in which the stoic protagonist wrestles with memory’s powerful undertow while enduring a sort of solitary confinement in a remote cabin. Petterson will spend a busy couple of days on the Minnesota leg of his tour, appearing as part of the Minneapolis Public Library’s Talk of the Stacks series (7 p.m.), and at the St. Olaf College Bookstore (4 p.m.) on September 28.

This French comedy opens with two brothers in bed with a girl. One looks at the camera, apologizes for speaking directly to the audience, and then asks, “How would someone throw themselves off a bridge for love?” Rest assured, we’ll find out. Dans Paris (Inside Paris, not to be confused with One Night in Paris) unfolds over the course of a single day, when the would-be jumper, utterly despondent over the collapse of his marriage, returns home to live with his divorced father and hyperactive, sexed-up younger brother. .

It is already being acclaimed as a brilliant character study, a love letter to Paris, and one of the sultriest, most complex comedies to hit our shores in many a year. 612-825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

These days you can’t turn on a television without encountering an advertisement for some pharmaceutical sleep aid, and sleep centers have sprung up all over the country. Yet for experts like Dr. Mark Mahowald, that explosion of treatment options—and the ceaseless wave of sleep-deprived patients seeking them—is both a blessing and a curse. That’s because the sheer range of sleep-related afflictions often still baffles even the most experienced specialists.

Mahowald is the director and cofounder of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center at Hennepin County Medical Center, and for more than thirty years he has been at the forefront of a burgeoning industry.
Back in the ’70s, when Mahowald and fellow neurologist Milton Ettinger launched the MRSDC, sleep science was still a little-understood and largely neglected field. At the time only two facilities in the country—New York’s Montefiore Hospital and Stanford University in California—were seriously addressing the subject. Faced with a growing number of local complaints, Mahowald and Ettinger began conducting studies at HCMC using polysomnographic gear that Mahowald built in his living room.

Today Mahowald is widely recognized for the MRSDC’s pioneering research and treatment in the area of REM sleep behavior disorder, an often dangerous parasomnia in which individuals act out all manner of dreams and nightmares, with often violent results—they drive, for instance, or choke their spouses, or commit sexual assaults. Mahowald and his MRSDC colleague, Dr. Carlos Schenck, recently published an article in a medical journal on one particular (and peculiar) class of these behaviors, dubbed “sexsomnia.” That’s part of the reason why the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, which attracted more than five thousand attendees to its annual confab at the Minneapolis Convention Center in June, asked Mahowald to deliver the keynote address. There, Mahowald and Schenck also received the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s William C. Dement Award.

Are we experiencing an epidemic of sleeplessness?
Well, certainly far too many people are sleep deprived today, but a lot of the things we see in the lab are really nothing new. I don’t think most of these sleep disorders are more prevalent now, just that there was such complete ignorance in the past. We frankly didn’t have any idea what we were in for.

So what do you know now that you didn’t know thirty years ago?
At that time there was very little awareness or understanding of apnea or narcolepsy—we’ve learned that apnea is actually as common as diabetes or asthma—and we hadn’t even come close to identifying the broad spectrum of parasomnias [sleepwalking, sleeptalking, teeth grinding, REM sleep behavior disorder, etc.]. Even something like Restless Leg Syndrome was barely talked about in those days, and now we know that it affects something like ten percent of the population. Essentially it’s a whole new field today. An extraordinary number of treatments have been discovered, most of which have proved remarkably effective.

Are we primarily talking about pharmaceuticals?
Drugs, yes, but also things you can address with simple behavioral modification. And CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] machines to treat apnea. I mean, this is a serious disease that wreaks havoc on people’s lives, and all you have to do is pump air into the nose and it’s gone. Fifteen thousand people have come through our labs who are now wearing CPAP masks at night and getting restful sleep.

We heard recently of some guy who allegedly stabbed his wife to death in his sleep. As someone who has extensively studied the forensic ramifications of parasomnias, do you really believe that a person can commit a crime while asleep—and retain no memory of having done so?
I do. And although it’s very difficult to prove, the defense has held up in a number of court cases.

Have you witnessed these sorts of violent parasomnias in the laboratory?
Unfortunately, they show up very infrequently in the laboratory.

Then how do you prove that someone was sleeping when they committed a crime?
You don’t. You can’t. The forensics are very difficult, but there are ways to evaluate these cases. You have to take a very careful and thorough look at a person’s medical history and determine whether there’s any background of violent or seriously disordered sleep. But there is, of course, no way to tell after the fact what exactly was happening at the time these things occurred, and we obviously have to be careful that we don’t get some character scheming to get a diagnosis of a dangerous parasomnia so they can go home and kill their spouse.

It seems like sleep science is a pretty contentious and increasingly competitive field. You’ve got so many types of doctors—psychiatrists, neurologists, pulmonary physicians—treating patients with sleep disorders. How can people be sure they’re getting the best treatment for their particular problem?
The increased awareness of sleep disorders and the societal costs of sleep deprivation are a good thing, but the business of sleep medicine—and I emphasize the business part—poses concerns. At HCMC we were interested in studying sleep from a medical and scientific standpoint. We didn’t think there was going to be much money in any of this. Now people are realizing that there is. I divide the field into givers and takers. The givers are giving back to the field through research and education; the takers are making money but not giving anything back. To the best of my knowledge we’re still the only sleep lab in town doing any research, not to mention education. A large percentage of medical schools still don’t address the issue of sleep.

What bothers you about this apparent divide?
Again, it comes back to the money, and the conflicts of interest that introduces. Obviously drug advertising is out of control; you’ve got physicians doing consulting work for pharmaceutical companies and serving on speakers bureaus that essentially promote these drugs. Stuff is being overprescribed. And a lot of these other centers generate revenue by dispensing CPAP machines—which we don’t do—so people who’ve got barely more apnea than a cadaver get sent home with a CPAP.

Do you think there’s still a lingering belief in the medical community that many sleep disorders—insomnia, primarily—are rooted in psychological causes?
That’s been a big change. Once we were all taught that most disordered sleep had a psychological component, or was an indicator of psychological problems. I think there’s pretty universal agreement now that the majority of these disorders are entirely unrelated to psychological disease. If anything, untreated insomnia is a risk factor for the development of depression and anxiety. It’s difficult when someone’s sitting in your office to know what came first.

Is there a sense that sleep deprivation is sort of a societal canary in the coal mine?
It extracts a huge toll, on the highways, in the classroom and workplace. People endure voluntary sleep deprivation for social and economic reasons, and we’ve come to view that willingness to sacrifice sleep as a sort of badge of honor, an indicator of dedication and hard work. Few people brag about how much sleep they get, and all these places are now open twenty-four hours for no real reason. I know that I would not want my car fixed by someone at three o’clock in the morning. I always tell people that if they have to use an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, they’re sleep deprived.

“This is city girl meets country boy,” quipped Cheri Peterson, pointing a finger between herself and her husband, Kevin. However, such a coupling can work swimmingly when the pair gets to share a sophisticated yet bucolic life as owners and operators of the WineHaven Winery and Vineyard, outside Chisago City. The Peterson partnership, which manages to be simultaneously complementary and polar, works like this: Cheri, born on the East Side of St. Paul to world-traveler parents, loves art and functions as the winery’s hostess and curator; Kevin, on the other hand, is a Chisago City native and veteran beekeeper who now spends much of his time working the Peterson’s fifteen acres of six vineyards (he and son Kyle share the “winemaker” title). Cheri’s prized possessions include the painstakingly detailed, grape-patterned quilt from Pennsylvania’s Amish country; a custom-made wrought-iron trellis; a collection of wine-themed paintings on display to the public in the tasting room; and her brand-new trio of bronze deer sculptures, which were commissioned from the Napa Valley artist Miles Metzger and now welcome visitors to the Peterson’s Deer Garden vineyard. Although Kevin plenty appreciates Cheri’s art collection, his taste tends toward utilitarian and agrarian objects such as a vintage bee smoker (used to distract the workers while humans steal their honey) and especially the expensive Kubota tractor he recently picked up, but only after trading in a forklift and his ’40 Ford pickup.

You know what printmaking is: creating multiple copies of an image, by any means possible. Print is a parallel art-world with its own histories and propensities. Some techniques are ancient, like woodcuts; some are former industrial processes, like stone lithography or screenprint; some are intimately allied with books and illustrations, like intaglio. Print is a fairly democratic medium, too: If you have some skills, you can join Highpoint as a co-op member and work in its fabulously well-appointed studio. The work of the current co-op is notably wide-ranging, with many artists in this exhibition (Clara Ueland and Nick Wrobleski, for example) transmuting the living world into more iconic, resonant forms. (Much as good illustration does, and that’s no insult.) Prints are affordable; go shopping. And maybe think about becoming a printmaker yourself—Highpoint has adult classes. 2638 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-1326; www.highpointprintmaking.org