Category: Article

Photos by Richard Hamilton Smith

The maples of Hillside Cemetery down the road from my house in Center City are aflame with color. October is their fiery month, when the sedate trees that shade the headstones transform from green to gold. My daily walks now skirt the cemetery so I can stand in the presence of their radiance, drink in their brilliance.

A cemetery may seem too gloomy to entertain such a riot of color. Ten miles east, in Taylors Falls, the mood is considerably lighter. In that little town beside the St. Croix river, residents are in the midst of their annual Leaf Spectacular. Legions of visitors from the Twin Cities flock to the valley each year for its glorious fall color. They visit Interstate Park by the thousands, then they walk across Highway 8 to downtown Taylors Falls. It’s by far the busiest time of year for the sleepy village of 700. It puts on its best face to greet the tourists. Round pumpkins and rustling corn stalks adorn lamp posts and street corners, scarecrows peer from shop windows and ruby-kernelled Indian corn dangles from doorways. Shopkeepers run sales and the Rocky River Bakery turns out great quantities of fresh apple pie and hot soup to satisfy appetites whetted by the cool weather.

All of this hubbub, just for the changing colors of autumn. Of course, many festivals around the planet have their roots in the fall harvest, traditionally a time of plenty and an anticipated rest from the labors of farming. By October, farmers have cut and threshed the grain, baled the last hay, and begun to fill the cribs with orange ears of corn. These days, only the gardeners among us are still intimate with the natural rhythms of the farm. Our food—green beans, sweet corn, reasonable facsimiles of tomatoes, the fresh produce by which city people once remarked the harvest—shows less and less seasonality, as the United States imports more fruits and vegetables from southern hemisphere temperate-zone countries like Chile. In the autumn, we still have the impulse to acknowledge earth’s bounty. But we focus less on food (until Thanksgiving, that is), and our excitement attaches to the abundance of color in the maples, aspen, elm, and oak.

It’s a paradox that our merrymaking has come to focus on the changing leaves. We are not a people who typically glorify death, but that’s precisely what we’re doing when we celebrate the reds and rusts of fall. Perhaps a cemetery is the proper place to contemplate the changing leaves. It’s biology, after all.

When the verdure of summer begins to drain away, and the leaves start to fall, it represents a type of death for broad-leaved deciduous trees and for the wide spectrum of seasonally green plants. Hillside Cemetery’s maples respond to the fall equinox by shutting down, their metabolism slowing eventually to a standstill. The trigger for the onset of dormancy may be one of several environmental cues, but the most reliable—the one that doesn’t change from year to year, or place to place—is the decreasing daylight. The shorter photoperiod sets in motion physiological changes in the leaf. Most important, cells at the base of the leaf stalk begin to change and die. When they die, they close off the transport of raw materials to and from the leaf. Chlorophyll, which lends its color to the leaves through the spring and summer, breaks down and isn’t replenished. Photosynthesis is less and less possible.

With the disintegration of chlorophyll, yellow and orange pigments that had been masked by green begin to reveal their stunning color. These carotenoids were present but unseen all summer. They too play a role in photosynthesis, extending the range of sunlight a plant can use. In its miraculous process of making sugars from light, chlorophyll uses violet, blue, and red lightwaves efficiently. But not green, yellow, or orange. Carotenoids absorb wavelengths that chlorophyll cannot.

When I bought a house in Prospect Park four years ago, I chose the area for the beautiful trees, stately homes, winding streets, and The Loft. Only after the papers were signed did I discover that The Loft was relocating from its long-time home in the beautiful old Pratt school building to a swanky new space on Washington Avenue under the auspices of a complete literary community center to be known as The Open Book. The slap of disappointment I felt passed pretty quickly, because, after all, it was still a great house in a lovely neighborhood, and anyway, it turned out that the materialization of a vision as ambitious as the one behind The Open Book—home also to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Ruminator Books—was symbolic of all the reasons this is a great town for writers.

Minnesota is readily acknowledged as an extremely fertile environment for writing, but not so many realize that we’re also home to a healthy handful of acclaimed literary presses whose lists have garnered the attention of critics nationally, and whose freedom to take risks and publish daring work for its own merit rather than for the bottom line has attracted writers with the muscle to interest any number of New York houses. Arguably some of the best new work in the most difficult to publish genres—poetry and short fiction, as well as the novel and memoir—is finding a home (or at least a house) right here in fly-over country.

Holy Cow, New Rivers, Graywolf, Ruminator, Milkweed, Coffee House… these are not trendy herbal teas. They’re six impressive literary presses among a growing number of Minnesota book publishers whose reputations have begun to make this a destination of significant literary interest. But the Minnesota publishing scene is not limited to the literati, either. There are over 60 publishers here, churning out everything from manuals and scientific tomes to school texts. Lerner Publishing is actually one of the largest independent scholastic publishers in the country. And our market boasts a cadre of self-helpers and some impressive liturgical presses, as well as Llewellyn Worldwide—the largest new age publisher in the world, conjuring up an average of 100 titles per year.

“We’re the third largest center for publishing in the country,” says Brad Vogt, board member of the Minnesota Book Publishers Roundtable, an organization that’s been promoting and networking the industry for more than 30 years. “We have over 70 members in the group and some really passionate and respected people,” says Vogt. “You go to other places beyond New York and San Francisco and there’s nothing like what we have here.” Vogt recalls his own brief encounter with celebrity at a national book expo last year. “I was walking around a corner and suddenly there was this big picture of Fiona [McCrae, publisher of Graywolf]. She’s really known in the industry.” Now if you’re not on a first-name basis with Fiona and wouldn’t recognize her picture if it were on a box of Wheaties, you might have to stretch a bit to appreciate the point Vogt is making. But in a business where, unless you get chosen by Oprah, you work steadily along in relative obscurity regardless of whatever success you achieve, Vogt’s anecdote is worth something.

Margaret McConaghay, chair of Graywolf’s board, concurs with Vogt. “We’re probably better known in Boston and New York, but among people who really know literature, our attention is international. We have lots of people writing and we get submissions from all over the world. We’re publishing an Iraqi poet this fall. We think it’s an important role to bring new voices from all over.” That philosophy, exercised at a rate of about seven books a year, makes Graywolf Press an industry powerhouse. But it doesn’t come easy.

These local presses, like most artistic endeavors, have largely been brought to life by a solo visionary who chugged quietly—but doggedly—along for years, sniffing out talent and frequently publishing first works, nurturing authors, creating a catalog, cultivating a vision and a readership… and frequently accumulating award after award along the way.

Milkweed Editions, a unique collaboration between artist Randy Scholes and writer Emilie Buchwald, published its first book in 1984. That same year, Allan Kornblum opened the doors of Coffee House Press. He started out with a homemade poetry magazine in the 70s, a “rite of passage that everybody did,” and turned his endeavor into Coffee House. That same year, Graywolf, which had been around since 1974 in Port Townsend, Washington, moved to the friendlier funding waters of Minneapolis. Between the three of them they represent a catalog of over 500 books. “People on the coasts know we’re here, that’s certain,” says Kornblum. “There’s a real community that’s evolved.” Fiona McCrae says, “We have a sort of critical mass together. People realize across the nation that there’s something unique here.”

“Other presses around the country are jealous,” says Lisa Bullard, a writer who’s worked on and off for a number of local publishers for many years. “The fact that there’s more than one press gives us a forum to talk and get together, to figure out overlap and ways we can work together. Open Book grew out of that kind of talking.” Creative energy of this sort is crucial in a vocation as solitary as writing. “I come from New York, but being here is terrific,” says Kornblum. “I love having first-rate peers at Milkweed and Graywolf. I have the highest respect for Buchwald and McCrae. I really value giving them a call, exchanging info, bitching a little. It’s a pleasure being in a town with The Loft, the Center for the Book, Ruminator. It’s great to be a part of it.”

Lisa Bullard explains the niche these publishers have carved out for themselves as similar to baseball’s “farm leagues.” New York publishers can’t take the risk on new authors, but their pragmatism leaves a void for others to experiment. This often becomes apparent at big trade shows. “New York editors would come to our booth and practically weep, saying, ‘Oh you get to do that, you get to publish real books!’” says Bullard. “These are people who love books too, but their concerns are mostly commercial. They have to rely on us to find the raw talent and take a risk. They can’t nurture someone’s career. Editors are moving constantly, and nurturing an author is not a long-term prospect anymore.”

Even at the best small presses, the commitment to cultivate talent over time is no small task. But slowly, against the tide of chain stores, return contracts, and limited advertising budgets, rewards can eventually emerge. After 18 years of effort, Emilie Buchwald received in September the McKnight Foundation’s annual Distinguished Artist Award, which recognizes “those individuals who, individually and collectively, laid the foundation for the rich cultural life Minnesota enjoys today.” Buchwald says, “It’s quite wonderful. They do it simply to make the point that in different areas of the arts there are contributions that call attention to many art forms. This award is something that brings Milkweed into prominence, but it also shines a light on all literary publishing activity. I’m delighted to be the first in local publishing and also the first woman to receive the award.” We can surely expect similar things from the local coterie of true literati.

On a related note, RainTaxi’s “Twin Cities Book Festival” takes place October 12 at International Market Square in Minneapolis.

Jeannine Ouellette is the associate editor of The Rake.

Let’s begin at the beginning, even if it’s a little obvious. The classic road movie almost always involves a road trip—that is, a journey by highway. That’s where the word “road” fits into the name, y’know. The road movie is also deeply concerned with freedom—how people die inside without it, but risk getting killed trying to get it. This is a fairly simple blueprint, to be sure, but it allows everything from the earnest social-justice drama The Grapes of Wrath (screening in the series Oct. 27) to Russ Meyer’s deliriously perverse Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Oct. 19). You have to love a genre that does that.

The road trip epic has roots in some of the world’s oldest literature—the Odyssey , the Exodus, “Gilgamesh” are all obvious precursors. Spanish picaresques like Don Quixote were episodic stories of wandering rogues, and they anticipated our latterday obsession with antiheroes. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn brought that motif to the great highway of his time, the Mississippi, and nailed down the basic form that road movies would later adopt—two wayward people make an illegal flight from a corrupt society, and find emancipation (literally, in this case) on the open road.

Social criticism is a vital element here. Contrast that with Westerns, which grow out of the American myth of manifest destiny. You know, taming and colonizing the wide-open spaces. But that’s an essentially optimistic genre. Consider the classic Western hero: the sheriff who brings peace and imposes order on the lawless frontier town. The hero of a road story, on the other hand, is often the guy the sheriff arrests. He rejects society, if it hasn’t already rejected him.

These darker, more cynical tales flourish in the worst of times. The 1930s were especially fertile days, and the road movie evolved into its modern form then, in the midst of socialist grumblings, massive population movement, and a little thing we like to call the Great Depression. It was also when the Western’s central premise/promise failed, in a tectonic cultural shift that divided the Old West from the modern age—the rise of the national highway system. That’s the moment when, spiritually speaking, we ran out of frontier. (Until the Space Race, of course, but that’s another chapter.) By the time highways connected everything, American civilization had achieved a decisive domination over the New World wilderness. The American dream of endless expansion wasn’t endless anymore. The teeming masses yearning to breathe free, who used to just pick up and move when times got bad, were more mobile than ever, but with nowhere left to run and hide. The road movie was what happened when the desperate refugees in The Grapes of Wrath followed the tried-and-true advice to Go West and discovered, with a rude shock, that California was already full of Californians.

We should say here, too, that there is also an inherent connection between the road movie and the coming-of-age story, with its themes of finding one’s true nature and place in life. It’s the common ground between, say, The Catcher in the Rye and Easy Rider (Oct. 28-29). And the road movie often shares film noir’s most defining aspects: the deep pessimism and paranoia, the anti-authority complex, the realistic depiction of violent crime, and the creeping sympathy for the outlaw and the derelict. The road movie is the most anarchistic of genres, embracing rebellion for its own sake.

The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath go through five flavors of hell before they find their promised land, but they get there more or less intact. Most road-movie protagonists have a rougher time, especially at the hands of people who are jealous of their autonomy, or fear their long hair. Hippie-hating townies have murderous contempt for the Easy Rider trio simply because they exist. On the flip side, Robert Blake’s careerist cop in Electra Glide in Blue (Oct. 28-29) finds that corrupt authority is just as soul-corrosive even when you’re on the “right” side of the law. Of course, even when you know the characters are hurtling toward certain, bloody destruction, the trip is often exhilarating; it’s that whole live fast, die young thing.

There’s an unusual subtype that pops up with surprising regularity: the pair of lovers who go hell-bent on a violent cross-country crime spree. The French, with their effete way of inventing a foreign phrase to describe every little thing, call this subgenre amour fou . It first shows up in road movies’ first wave during the 1940s in movies like Gun Crazy (Oct. 21-22), and They Live By Night (Oct. 30-31), and reaches its zenith in Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde (Oct. 14 and 17), rocketing Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty on a wild bender of bank robberies across the Depression-era Great Plains. Later, the amour fou incorporated psychos and serial killers with Terence Malick’s Badlands (Oct. 14 and 17), and, more recently, Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers .

The divisive chaos around the Vietnam War fueled a renaissance for the road movie—this time typified not by Robert Mitchum’s felonious bootlegger in Thunder Road (Oct. 21-22) but by the Merry Pranksters’ acid tests and day-glo psychedelic school bus. It captured the widespread distrust of authority, and the new tribalism that flowered at Woodstock. Jack Kerouac and his countercultural heirs were big believers in the open highway as a means of rejecting the old society and creating a new one—it’s integral to Beat literature and all that followed it. That’s why the disaster-fated motorcycle trip in Easy Rider works so well in exploring how the innocent dreams of the hippies had, by 1969, gone bad. It is also the quintessential example of the form. When I say “road movie,” you think of Peter Fonda roaring down a desert highway as Steppenwolf erupts from the soundtrack. Despite its disjointed plot and 60s indulgences (like the tiresome LSD sequence) it’s probably the most incisive critique of American culture the genre’s given us since Henry Fonda, Peter’s dad, took his turn as Tom Joad.

That second heyday faded by the end of the 1970s, though the form has never died away completely. New subspecies have developed, like offbeat send-ups such as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Oct. 25-26) and Raising Arizona (Oct. 18-20), and the nightmare surrealism of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Oct. 18-20).

In these days when creeping authoritarianism is (allegedly) the less distasteful alternative to terrorism, and the new information culture trades the car in for the modem as a vehicle for journeying into self-discovery, the road movie is mutating again. But it will never lose its relevance. It too perfectly encapsulates that ornery American belief in the primacy of personal freedom—and that spiritual place where the rubber hits the road.

“Road Reels” screens at Oak Street Cinema, October 11-31.

Christopher Bahn is a contributing editor at The Rake.

It’s not as if I wasn’t expecting it. With tall genes scattered on both sides of the family, my kids were bound to surpass my (almost) 5’3” status eventually. But still it gave me a jolt to see my daughter Sophie’s shoulder edge above mine by a good inch when she sidled up to me before the full-length mirror. Sophie is also about my weight and build, and has been hearing every day of the 12 years since she was born that she looks just like her mother. But this has never been quite so striking as now.

The other day after school, exhausted and buzzing with the energy of the day, I walked into my classroom and was shocked to see myself sitting at my own desk. It was Sophie, of course, but with her hair piled loosely atop her head and her face angled against the muted northern light, I could have sworn she was my grown-up look-alike.

It’s the weirdest thing how the more she looks like me, the less I recognize her for herself. For example, Sophie flew to New York in August to visit my sister, and when I picked her up at the airport, her siblings Max and Lillie in tow, I stood at the gate perplexed as Max cried out, “Sophie!” “Where?” I asked, not realizing the lanky adolescent in the fur-lined vest and hoop earrings six feet in front of me was my daughter.

It wasn’t the fur or the hoops that threw me off, although they didn’t help (thank you, Auntie). It’s simply that when I’m looking for Sophie, I’m expecting to find a familiar little girl who I fail to believe exists only in memory. The girl my daughter has become is as much woman as child, and to further complicate things, she is utterly unlike the girl I was at her age. (Sophie: beautiful, smart, confident, conversant, and an ardent fan of the classics in literature and theater. Me at 12: awkward, smart, roiling pit of insecurity, perpetually tongue-tied, and an ardent fan of Gilligan’s Island and The People’s Court).

Despite our differences, I can keenly relate to many of Sophie’s experiences as she encounters and endures the rites of passage en route to womanhood. For example, Sophie has now reached the exciting age where she can earn some money of her own through babysitting. Having spent several of my own adolescent summers running from one babysitting job to the next, I appreciate the enormity of what Sophie is undertaking as she assumes responsibility for unrelated children and gains entree into the private lives of friends and neighbors. When Sophie told me that at one job she spent the evening singing the four children to sleep one by one, it made me love her fiercely and reminded me just how indelibly the babysitting experience impresses itself upon young girls.

I remember a powerful essay I read in an unassuming little newsletter for parents of girls. I felt a tingling chill of recognition as the writer spoke plainly about the age-old rituals of babysitting—gorging on potato chips and ice cream after the kids are in bed, watching too much TV, gabbing on the phone all evening, and, the guiltiest pleasure of all, snooping. I didn’t know back in my babysitting days, as I searched cupboards and rifled through a drawer here and there, that I was doing more than passing time and assuaging boredom. It took a sharp essayist to point out to me so many years later, when I was hiring babysitters of my own, that a babysitter’s stolen peeks are haphazard attempts to pry into the mysteries of her own future: marriage, motherhood, sex.

By the time a girl is of babysitting age she knows about as many of her parents’ secrets as she can tolerate. But the fresh material inherent in unfamiliar households—the food in the cupboards, the bills stuck to the refrigerator, the photographs on bureaus, and the contents of drawers—is the possible key to understanding what it might mean to grow up.

As for Sophie, she’s Red Cross certified and super competent, and since I’m generally only a few doors away if she needs me, I feel pretty good about her babysitting commitments. Of course, I hope she behaves herself when she’s out there, and I would certainly never condone her snooping around, although I’ll probably never know. And the truth is she hasn’t had much chance to slack on the job, since in her short career she’s navigated one real fire, one false alarm, and a short-circuited kitchen timer that caused the buzzer to blare for about three hours. The relentless noise drove the youngest child to melt down and the oldest child to predict Sophie’s likely firing. Ahh, Sophie. You’ve only just begun.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

It’s been 20 years since Milan Kundera first published The Unbearable Lightness of Being and became literature’s equivalent of a rock star. It was the kind of book that American college students thrive on—Eurotrash romanticism, haphazard pop-philosophizing, and lots of adulterous affairs with mysterious Women of the Warsaw Pact. If you wore black back then, and fantasized about booking a flight to Prague—oh romantic city!—you read Kundera. Well, we’ve all grown up since then, and the Czech writer has too, but maybe not quite as much. He still lectures his readers every other chapter, on the etymology of the word “nostalgia,” on the Odyssey , on Icelandic myths—on anything he damn well pleases. He’s not the world’s most complex thinker, nor its most poetic novelist. But this novel, about two Czech expatriates making their way back to Prague to rediscover their past—typical fare, really—is another light-handed page turner. If nothing else, Kundera will get you in touch with your own past—as a college student in black jeans, excited for the first time in your life about the passions that can be cultivated by something as simple as an earnest European hardcover.

It’s fittingly ironic that Umberto Eco finds such rich soil in which to plant his postmodern mysteries back in the Middle Ages. In his fourth novel, 12th-century Italy is a backdrop for the tale of Baudolino, an Italian peasant who becomes the adopted son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa. Mixing fiction with meticulously researched history, Eco inserts his imaginary rogue deeply into some of the 12th century’s most momentous events. Unlike Forrest Gump, Baudolino’s no passive fool, but a clever, spontaneous liar who uncorks a scheme that could change the course of European history. The plan: to perpetrate a massive hoax on Frederick’s enemies by forging a letter involving the Holy Grail and the mythical utopian kingdom of Prester John. It may not be as compelling as The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum , but if you’re looking for more of Eco’s mix of political conspiracy, abstruse theology, and murder mystery you won’t be disappointed here. Eco makes the 12th century spring to life, setting his story in the fascinating larger framework of how the Renaissance grew out of the Dark Ages.