Category: Article

In Boomsday, Buckley’s latest novel, the relentlessly topical humorist (and spawn of conservative doyen William F. Buckley) envisions a future in which bloggers are actually powerful enough to radically influence decisions at the highest level of American politics. Not so far-fetched, you might say, but Buckley’s penchant for taking aim at the broadest possible targets (big tobacco, the legal profession, organized religion, the generally fatuous culture of the Beltway) and blasting away until there’s not an unsympathetic soul left standing makes for merciless and often surprising satire. 651-290-1221; fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org

At the annual Upper Midwest Foodservice and Lodging Show, which convened at the Minneapolis Convention Center a few weeks back, a fellow who was willing to do the legwork could have really gorged himself on meat. It seemed like somebody was handing out samples (“The Black Angus of Pork,” boasted the sign in one booth) every twenty yards. The portions were pretty small, however, so constructing an actual dinner, or even a ham sandwich, would have required persistence. It could be done, though, and lots of people seemed intent on doing it. There were also lines for cheese curds, condiments, cake, bread, and shot-glass-sized portions of soup, wild rice, gelato, wine, beer, and espresso that exhibitors were dispensing. People even queued up for an onion ring. One company advertised itself as “the leader in East Coast Calamari processing and distribution,” which sounded like some sort of mob racket.

For somebody really serious about opening a restaurant or hotel, the UP Show (as it’s known to insiders) offered a one-stop shopping experience, showcasing everything from mattresses, patio furniture, janitorial supplies, and background-music systems, to fry cookers, ice makers, commercial dishwashers, and convection ovens. You could even buy a doddering animatronic butler for your lobby, or transact business with “the leading effervescent manufacturer in the development, manufacturing, and packaging of effervescent products.”

Those seeking a breather from the hubbub of the main hall could venture down a set of escalators to a warren of meeting rooms where there was a full slate of educational and motivational programs with such titles as “Increasing Your Bar Profit—Strategies that Really Work,” “Menu Engineering,” and “Bed Bugs and the Hospitality Industry Today.”

That last one struck something of a dissonant chord, and yet also sounded intriguing in light of the ultra-sanitary and relentlessly cheerful atmosphere in the main hall.

Fewer than a half dozen convention-goers were on hand for Ecolab representatives Terry Elichuk and Doug Gardner’s harrowing PowerPoint presentation on a growing epidemic (according to the National Pest Management Association, there has been a sixty-three percent increase in reported bed-bug incidents over the past four years, and the pests have been identified in all fifty states).

A vial full of bed bugs was passed around. These were Cimex lectularius, or common bed bugs, from the Cimicidae family, and they looked like ticks. They’re nocturnal, fast moving, and rely on human carriers—suitcases, primarily—for transport. Once established in a hotel room they’ll camp out in curtains, carpeting, mattresses, box springs, or behind headboards and picture frames and commence to hatching, breeding, and feeding.

“As soon as the lights go out, you’ve got a bed-bug party,” Gardner said. “You can have large numbers crawling on you in the middle of the night and you wouldn’t even know it.”
The video, Bed Bug’s First Blood Meal, was shown. “This is real-time footage,” Gardner announced. “This is a bed bug that’s just hatched and it’s crawling on a person—a volunteer, of course. For a two- to three-minute period, it just sits there filling up with blood.”

The audience watched in squirming silence as the bed bug did, indeed, fill up with blood. Suddenly, all that free meat upstairs didn’t seem quite so appetizing.
The bugs inject a numbing agent so that the bites are initially painless. They also administer an anticoagulant that, Gardner said, “causes blood to run on sheets and pillow cases. These are leaking bites.” The video was followed by further visual evidence—“actual shots from the field”—corroborating that statement. The still-life images on the screen looked disturbingly like crime-scene photos.

The good news, apparently, is that there are no documented cases of disease transmission as a result of bed-bug bites, and the unsightly rash caused by multiple bites is fairly harmless and quick to heal. The bad news is that there’s no surefire way to prevent the bugs from entering a facility, and eradicating an infestation is costly and difficult. The key to damage control, Gardner said, is hypervigilance through regular inspections and aggressive treatment.

Such measures might offer small comfort to anyone who’s ever sat through a screening of Bed Bug’s First Blood Meal (or, for that matter, been a bed bug’s first blood meal), but, for the time being at least, they’re the only consolation the industry has to offer.

“These things have moved from the mythical to the real in a hurry,” Elichuk said. “They’re just exploding, from five-star hotels to dormitories, nursing homes, and residences, and all of us in the business are in serious catch-up mode. And the unfortunate fact is that bed bugs are rapidly becoming resistant to chemicals, so it looks like they’re here to stay.”

In Marnita Schroedl and Carl Goldstein’s Kenwood home it can be hard to decide where to sit. The living room contains a plush couch, a large oak dining table lined with a bench and six solid chairs, and a low table encircled by five squat stools. The sunroom in back has another couch, while still more chairs are tucked into every corner. More amazing than the abundance of seating is that Marnita and Carl actually need the surplus for the twenty to a hundred guests who visit their home thirty times a year. They are the founders of Marnita’s Table, a non-profit whose mission is to “ignite enduring cross cultural connections,” which they strive to accomplish by having people over for dinner.

Marnita and Carl believe that diversity is not about simple racial, religious, or economic demographics, but about individuals whose differences may not be based on appearance. One man may seem like a dapper gad-about, yet devote himself to philanthropy; a young woman who looks like a college student might spend her days working as a liaison for the Mexican consulate in St. Paul. Marnita and Carl realize most of us “live such segregated existences,” easily staying within familiar networks of people similar to us. So they create a forum, pick a theme (as varied as “Democracy: Here and There” and “Light Bulb: What Turns You On”), and invite an eclectic group for dialogue.

Walking into their crowded house for a recent dinner, it seemed like the chatty guests already knew each other, but it was quickly apparent few were acquainted—they were simply in the process of introducing themselves. This rapid meet-and-greet continued until Marnita emerged from the kitchen to begin the meal. A short woman with a shaved head, Marnita’s considerable presence owes much to the exuberance with which she speaks; she is, as her business card says, the catalyst. Her welcome was expansive, her hands and arms accompanying the words with vigorous, all-encompassing gestures.

Although Marnita’s Table officially began in 2002 in conjunction with Social Venture Partners, a philanthropic organization working with at-risk youth, Marnita has been hosting her whole life. From her first Thanksgiving living on her own in the Bay Area to dinners for her black and white friends who survived the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Marnita has honed her natural generosity with a serious intent: to make a place where everyone is welcome. Trans-racially adopted by a family in Washington, Marnita was the youngest of eight and the only adopted child. Not white enough for the white kids or black enough for the black kids, she says, the community never accepted her. At sixteen she’d had enough and transplanted herself to California, where she worked in offices and took community college classes until she could attend UCLA. Upon graduation she began work on a PhD in philosophy, but soon decided she was better suited to living life than analyzing it.

During a recent meeting, Carl sat calmly at the table while Marnita was rarely still, constantly getting up to make tea, type at her computer, hunt down a memento—all the while contributing to the conversation. Carl’s deliberate, modulated words contrast starkly with Marnita’s effervescent speech. He does not gesture as she does, but his eyes sparkle, surrounded by smile lines. As the couple speaks it’s clear they occupy common ground. They have spent their lives examining communication, he as a journalist in Asia for nearly fifteen years, she working for a PR firm in California and Words on Fire, her consulting business that provides communications, marketing, and research services. Each has experienced what it is to be the other, Carl in Asia, Marnita in the Pacific Northwest. Having lived in some of the largest, most diverse cities in the world, today they strive to infuse Minnesota with some of that cosmopolitan flavor. Shortly after moving here in the late ’90s they met at an event for their sons’ kindergarten, and over the next couple of years, Marnita says, they realized they “wanted to walk through the world the same way.” They married, established Words on Fire, and began Marnita’s Table as a way to “live what they believe.”

“The work comes naturally,” Marnita says, speaking for the couple; enjoying the impact takes more practice. Guests leave the table nourished and stimulated, with a sense of “not just gratitude, but liberation,” she says, sifting through the pile of thank-you notes they have received over the years. Marnita says guests are “charged by the mixing and mingling” and “smitten by the connection and humanity” displayed at each event. It’s the basic recipe, really, for any good party: Bring interesting people together in a warm place, give them food and drink, provide a topic of conversation, and stir.

You can find Mt. Holly on Google Maps, one lonely dot near the center of Shakopee. Zoom in and see that the city resides entirely on the corner of Third Avenue East and Holmes Street, across from the Scott County Jail. The town consists of a tidy 1940s bungalow and a single pine tree. Until very recently, Mt. Holly had but one resident: its mayor, Mike Haeg.
The minuscule municipality experienced a three-hundred-percent population increase when Haeg’s wife and two children were granted citizenship by the mayor, also the town’s leading advocate of population control.

“People often ask, Why your own town?” Haeg says. “I always tell them I want an elected official who shares my interests.”

Haeg is a gregarious man, tall and eager to shake hands, a proud member of Mensa who works with an advertising concern in downtown Minneapolis. He and his wife Tammy and their two children, Jackson and Autumn, live, to all appearances, a normal life, except that every night they come home to the smallest town in Minnesota.

In the autumn of 2004, Mike and Tammy were renting in Minneapolis and seeking to buy a home, but couldn’t afford property in the city. While visiting Tammy’s parents in Shakopee, her father nodded toward the future Mt. Holly and said, “Watch that house, the owner’s going to die any day.” Sure enough, the elderly owner expired within twenty-four hours, and, soon after, the Haegs purchased their first home.

Mt. Holly came into existence about a year later, when Haeg was beginning to feel the malaise of a man who’d moved from the bustle of Minneapolis to the sleepy commuter paradise of Shakopee. One night, while reading a book about homesteaders, it occurred to him that he should try to make his own city. “Nowadays, you really can’t just go somewhere and start a town—but I was tired of saying I was from Shakopee,” he says.

After nearly a year of trying to get Mt. Holly recognized by the state, Haeg was about ready to give up. “Nobody could get past the why to tell me how,” he says. “People thought I was one of those crackpots trying to avoid taxes.”

Haeg recalled, from a class on the history of marketing he’d taken years ago, that the first man to sell advertising was from the pleasant-sounding Mt. Holly, New Jersey. So one day, when renewing his driver’s license, he simply wrote ‘Mt. Holly’ as the city. A flustered clerk allowed the heretofore fictitious locale on state-sanctioned paperwork, making the little village official: On October 27, 2005 (recognized by the four citizens of the new town as Founder’s Day), Mike Haeg’s new driver’s license read “Mount Holly, MN.”

For Haeg, Mt. Holly is not a mere novelty. He has a vision. He wants to see it grow into a cultural center for Shakopee’s youth. He’s planning on opening a silkscreen studio in his attached garage and constructing a stage where local bands can play.

“Kids in the suburbs can’t always get to Minneapolis,” Haeg says. “I want them to have a place to express themselves.” He’s seeking grants to offer workshops in photography and art as well.

Mt. Holly’s civic ventures are already becoming a vital part of the local scene. There’s Hi-Billy Days (Mt. Holly celebrates its Hi-Society and Hillbilly roots), the annual Soybean Feed (ten bucks gets you a seven-course vegan meal from traveling chef Joshua Ploeg, and all the euchre you can play), and camping trips organized by Mt. Holly’s own Fraternal Order of the Sasquatch (F.O.O.T.S.).

The mayor has ambitious plans for Mt. Holly’s infrastructure, as well. By this summer there will be a “Welcome to Mt. Holly” sign in the front yard, city-limit postings, a unique Mt. Holly zip code, and certified status as a Tree City, USA.

“I think you need a ratio of one planted tree per ten residents. We’ll plant four and skewer the whole thing,” the mayor says.

Kierkegaardians can have a mysterious sort of appeal, especially when you see some fifty of them gathered atop a windy hill on the southern Minnesota prairie. That was the situation a few weeks back, when a group of the world’s top scholars of the nineteenth-century philosopher converged to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the nearby Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library. Known as the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, a hunchbacked, crooked-legged Danish aristocrat, wrote more than thirty books during his life (1813-1855) on topics ranging from faith to seduction. That’s a lot of ink for a man whose favorite thinkers, Socrates and Jesus, never penned a word.

Tucked deep in the bowels of St. Olaf College’s Rolvaag Memorial Library in Northfield, the Kierkegaard Library houses all of the philosopher’s works, as well as a host of texts by related thinkers. What began as the Hongs’ personal collection—they’re known for their acclaimed English translations of the bulk of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre—has become the greatest center for studying the philosopher’s ruminations on this side of the Atlantic. At any given time, an international cadre of Kierkegaardians makes Northfield its home. Recent resident scholars hailed from Argentina, Australia, India, Japan, Norway, and Winona. Bill McDonald, the Australian, was laboring over Kierkegaard’s constellation of concepts, compiling a dictionary bit by bit while preparing for a sojourn into war-torn Tibet. Toshi Hachiya, from Japan, had recently published his German-language dissertation—a ten-year project—and had just begun another project, in English, on Kierkegaard’s social ethics. He estimated that this one, too, would take about ten years to complete. Narve Strand, a full-blooded Norwegian night owl, was known to haunt both the library and the Contented Cow, a nearby pub, into the small hours. His mission was to figure out how to apply some of Kierkegaard’s precepts to contemporary politics.

Johannes de Silentio, one of the names Kierkegaard wrote under pseudonymously, liked to hint that the Kierkegaardian looks like anyone else on the street; these living, breathing followers of the philosopher, however, proved otherwise. Though outward signs like facial hair (one gentleman wore a salt-and-pepper mustache, Narve, a rocker’s goatee) and style of slacks (jeans, mostly) varied by nationality and personality, they all seemed to share a relaxed and even good-humored sort of inwardness.

Joining the Kierkegaardians was Friis Arne Petersen, the Danish ambassador to the United States, who had flown in for the occasion. After his address, everyone consumed the requisite pastries—Danishes. He later presided over a luncheon dominated by the colors of Denmark’s flag: alternating red and white napkins, a centerpiece of red roses and white snapdragons, and a dessert of red strawberries and milky white panna cotta. Rumors had been percolating that the ninety-four-year-old Professor Howard V. Hong would make an appearance, and when he did finally arrive, silver forks were put down and everyone stood up. A whiz of a wiz if ever there was one, Hong was a small man with white hair cascading to his nape, and he was as nimble a nonagenarian as you’re likely to encounter. He accepted the applause and fanfare (which surpassed that bestowed upon the venerable ambassador) with neither pride nor overdone attempts at humility—but rather something more like genuine affection.

For the day’s crowning event, the Kierkegaardians reassembled on the lawn of St. Olaf’s Finholt House and dedicated it as a residence for Kierkegaard scholars. Comb-overs fluttered in the wind. One by one, the internationals—Maria, Bill, Gabriel, Toshi, Narve, and John—heard their names and stepped forward to shake the ambassador’s hand, and then, amid all the circumstance, Gabriel began to speak. With charming earnestness, he delivered a soliloquy of gratitude, offering up the scholars beside him as a sign of hope for human kindness in our increasingly impersonal age, as ambassadors from the Kierkegaard Library to their far-flung homes, and as humble practitioners of the Kierkegaardian magic. The conclusion of his remarks was met with the sort of spellbound silence that sometimes precedes applause.

A rare opportunity to see one of America’s quietest—or at least lower-profile—literary lions. And judging from the man’s eclectic body of work, distinguished by its broad historical sweep and social criticism, it’s likely that Doctorow will have something of substance to say. Over a career that’s now spanned almost fifty years, Doctorow’s writing has consistently garnered critical hosannas and literary honors alike: He’s got a National Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a couple of National Book Critics Circle Awards under his belt. His last novel, 2005’s ambitious The March, offered plenty of evidence that he’s still got stories he wants to tell. 612-624-2345; http://tedmann.umn.edu

Here’s a pairing with a curious backstory. Galway Kinnell, whose 1980 Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was touring in Northern England when he found himself at a reading by Josephine Dickinson, a deaf Oxford-educated poet, musician, composer, and teacher. More than a decade earlier, she had fallen in love with and married a sheep farmer more than twice her age. So struck was Kinnell by Dickinson’s poetry, most of which is set in England’s rugged Pennine Mountains, that he wrote an introduction for her American debut, Silence Fell, and helped get it into print. He’s also got his own new collection, Strong is Your Hold, and the duo will read from and discuss their work as the Talking Volumes program celebrates National Poetry Month. 651-290-1221; fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org

You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of international awards and acclaim. The story of an unemployed professor of literature who has been reduced to selling dog food for a living—how’s that for metaphor?—and is trying to pinpoint the origins of his wife’s sudden and mysterious descent into madness, Delirium is a literary mystery steeped in the crime and corruption of modern-day Colombia. Saramago has called it “one of the finest novels written in recent memory.”

Orson Welles did it, and Laurie Anderson, too. Now local director Jon Ferguson—best known for his 2005 hit, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban—has taken up the challenge of adapting Melville’s epic for the stage. This is an undertaking that, he admits, could elude, haunt, and/or—much as with Captain Ahab—swallow him whole. Ferguson’s project got under way with the casting of clowns and dancers from physical theater circles as well as actors from more text-based traditions. With this range of performers, the show aims to capture both the powerful physicality and the amazing prose of the story. Intriguingly, a fully functional set involves ropes, planks, canvas, and pulleys, meaning that as the play production builds, so too will constructed images of the sea, the ship, and even the whale. 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

On the occasion of its fifth Walker-commissioned production, Britain’s Improbable Theatre abandons the relative safety of such lavish puppetry spectacles as Shockheaded Peter and The Hanging Man (performed here in 2000 and 2003, respectively) and instead harks back to its roots in scrappy, improvisational object theater. Animo, therefore, is not so much a play as it is a series of spontaneous performances. With no script—not even predetermined characters—Improbable will invent its show anew, every night; found objects collected from nooks and crannies around the Twin Cities will serve as puppets. Local performers are pitching in, too: The Animo cast includes Minneapolis’ master puppeteer Michael Sommers, Jeune Lune co-founder Barbra Berlovitz, Bedlam Theater’s Julian McFaul, burgeoning puppeteer Lindsay McCaw, and percussionist extraordinaire Aaron Barnell. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org