Category: Article

Melody Gilbert has always considered herself a global citizen of sorts, having worked in television and film everywhere from Wisconsin to Romania. But in 2001, her sportswriter husband Mark Wollemann landed a job at the Star Tribune, and the couple settled down in Minneapolis. That was when her work as a documentary filmmaker started to assume Midwestern tones. Projects such as Married at the Mall [of America] and A Life Without Pain are anchored by Minnesota characters, and her latest, Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness, was inspired by her nights out with a group of local rogues who navigate underground drains and abandoned buildings for sport. The film features an indigenous soundtrack as well, with excellent tunes from such favorites as The Owls, Dave Salmela, and Kid Dakota. Beyond the Minnesota streak, though, what truly unites Gilbert’s work is an interest in members of fringe societies, and in “humanizing the outsiders,” as she said in a phone interview. And what if she herself were banished to the fringes—the very outer, uninhabited edges of society—say, The Rake’s desert isle? Which books, CDs, and DVDs would she require to hold up?

1. Dark Days—an incredible documentary, available on DVD, by Marc Singer. It’s about a group of homeless people who lived under the Amtrak train station in New York City. Singer documented a handful of troubled, endearing people with a humbling ability to survive and create their own subterranean society that—for better or worse—mimics the above-ground world. I could learn a few things from them while I’m stranded.

2. Fargo, because I would need to remember where I came from. And it makes me laugh … every time!

3. Carole King’s Tapestry, because if I’m stranded on an island, it’s “Too Late Baby.”

4. Candide, because I better get optimistic about where I am. As Voltaire writes, “All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”

5. History of Art by Anthony Janson. This is the textbook you get in college Art History 101. It gives written and visual meaning to the captivating story of what artists have tried to express—and why—for more than thirty thousand years. I could sit on my island and ponder this for years to come.

Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness premieres at Walker Art Center on March 16 & 17; for more information, call 612-375-7600 or visit www.urbanexplorersfilm.com or www.walkerart.org

Dan Slager was a wide-eyed college graduate when he moved in 1989 from his home state of Michigan to Manhattan with a futon tied to his car and “a sense that New York was where you went if you were interested in literary books.” He landed a job as an editorial assistant at William Morrow but “hated the commercial scene” and washed out after six months. Like many young idealists, Slager’s brush with the real world sent him scrambling for the cover of graduate school. He enrolled at NYU and began working as a German translator for the lit-mag Grand Street. Within two years Slager was sitting in the editor’s chair and working alongside venerated contributors like Drenka Willen, one of the world’s most esteemed literary editors. When Slager and Grand Street parted ways, Willen offered him a job at Harcourt working with her list of prized authors (including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and four Nobel laureates: Günter Grass, José Saramago, Wislawa Szymborska, and Octavio Paz). In September 2005, after five years under Willen’s tutelage, Slager relocated with wife Alyssa Polack and their two sons to take the helm as editor-in-chief of Minneapolis’ Milkweed Editions, a leading independent, nonprofit literary publisher.

What did you learn from working with Drenka Willen?
Here was this incredibly venerable woman who had been in the business thirty-five years when I started working with her, who still did all the editing herself, still saw the books through each step of the process, and was a fiercely protective advocate for her authors. I’ll never forget what she said to me the first day I was there: “You probably think working in book publishing is very glamorous, right? It’s not. It’s just hard work. We’re in the service industry. We’re working for these authors, to publish these authors well. I just want you to be mindful of our place in the process. The author always comes first.”

In which direction do you plan to take this house?
I plan to continue to establish Milkweed as a significant player in terms of books exploring the human relationship to the natural world. Those kinds of issues are becoming more mainstream—in a sense tragically—because the climate is changing and no one can ignore it. There’s been so much environmental degradation. How we become a more sustainable civilization is an urgent question; we want to be part of that conversation.

Does Milkweed have a particular commitment to local authors?
It’s not part of our stated mission. Both idealistically and pragmatically, however, it makes sense for us to be publishing local people because it’s much easier for us to find an audience for these writers here, and publish them well here, and then establish them nationally.Talk about the role of agents in the work you’re doing at Milkweed.
I get plenty of submissions from agents, but I take very seriously direct submissions from authors. We’re open to everything here. We take the slush pile seriously, which was not the case where I worked in New York. In fact they wouldn’t look at anything that was unagented. Since I’ve been here, out of maybe twenty or so acquisitions, there have been several outstanding manuscripts that were discovered in slush.

What are some of the earmarks you look for in a publishable manuscript?
Not everyone would agree with my decisions as to what meets a certain threshold of quality. We’re looking for books that are not just outstanding, but that are also particularly engaged with the world regarding questions of human rights, the human relationship with the natural world, and social justice; books that are not merely beautiful aesthetic objects, but that actively address what’s going on with the world around us.

What are some of the similarities and differences between operating in the Minneapolis and New York literary scenes?
There’s a little less glamour here, a little less of a cocktail-party scene, a little less bling. But Minneapolis is a great book town. There is no shortage of real books and real work and interesting thinking and people trying interesting things.

What do you miss about living in New York?
I like nightlife. I do have a young family so I’m not out all the time, but I miss being in a city that’s very much alive well past midnight. I know there are things going on here, but it’s a different level of vitality at night.

You’re a big Detroit Tigers fans. Is there a contradiction between being a literary editor and a baseball fan?
I’m passionate about baseball. I always have been. I’ve tried to rid myself of it at times, but I can’t. I’ve stopped trying and I’ve embraced it. For me baseball is baseball. It’s beautiful as such and I love it. I have eclectic interests, put it that way.

Would you like to describe some of your others?
(Laughs … )

Will Black Book mark Paul Verhoeven’s triumphant return? The guy behind such gut-wrenching “classics” as RoboCop, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers seemed to have the potential to become one of our most talked-about directors, a bastard hybrid of Sam Peckinpah and Fellini at his most indulgent. Then, however, his career slipped into the toilet with two bombs, Showgirls and Hollow Man. With Black Book, Verhoeven has abandoned Hollywood, returning to Holland and a subject that has been on his mind for seventeen years: the Dutch resistance. The story of a Jewish woman who uses her sly sexuality to infiltrate the Nazis and pays the price, Black Book is all Verhoeven—bloody, erotic, and filled with loathsome characters. Here, the Nazis and the Resistance men are equally brutish, and only our heroine emerges from the fray with anything resembling dignity.

Imagine that your casual evening walk has suddenly landed you in a minefield. That’s the kind of tension radiating from this acclaimed thriller, in which an unnamed woman is spirited off to a hotel room to wait (and wait some more) for orders—which are to detonate a bomb in Times Square. With tiny yet terrifying clues to compel you through long scenes of waiting, phone conversations, and bystanders strolling blithely past the heroine (if you can call her that) on what might be their last day on earth, director Julia Loktev nonetheless manages to grab you by the throat. Exploiting her camera and your imagination, she’s made a film that provokes both thought and fear. Part of the Women With Vision 2007: Mirror Image film festival at Walker Art Center, which runs March 2–17; 612-375-7633; www.walkerart.org

In what many will call a “searing drama,” a dentist rekindles his friendship with a college classmate who lost his wife and child in the September 11th attacks. Don Cheadle plays Alan, a stable fellow who, like his suffering pal Charlie, has lost something of himself on the road to success. The two men play guitars, go to bars, and enjoy a variety of touching moments with one another. All sounds good—but wait … Is that Adam Sandler as the tragic Charlie? Indeed! And yet another manic comedian (predecessors include Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey) tries to bribe tears and understanding from his followers. An almost-guaranteed craptacular.

Joe Boyd had his fingers in all sorts of music-history pies. While still in his early twenties and freshly graduated from Harvard, he served as Muddy Waters’ tour manager. Then, when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, it was a young Boyd who performed the fateful (and, some would claim, sacrilegious) task of plugging in the guitar. He later went on to produce records for, among others, Nick Drake, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, REM, 10,000 Maniacs, and Billy Bragg. He even produced soundtracks for films—most notably, for A Clockwork Orange. But it was the 1960s folk scene that left the deepest impression on Boyd’s character. In his recently released autobiography, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, Boyd not only captures his own experiences, but also paints portraits of many of the other key players of the era and ponders the consequences of white folks’ appropriation of black people’s music. 416 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-2674; www.thecedar.org

We’ve long suspected that Kurt Andersen is a fictional character, or rather, a consortium of writers and raconteurs doing business as Zeitgeist, Inc. How else to explain this purported Kurt Andersen’s cutting-edge sensibilities and sheer ubiquity? Surely no one man could juggle so many chain saws. According to the bio that accompanies Heyday, his latest doorstop of a novel, Andersen was the co-founder of Spy magazine, currently hosts a Peabody Award-winning public radio program (Studio 360), writes a column for New York magazine, and previously did stints as a columnist for both the New Yorker and Time. Somehow he occasionally finds the time to write novels like Heyday, a broad historical tale of “America’s coming of age” in the mid-nineteenth century. Did we mention that said novels are long? They are. Very long.

Some of our best storytellers served childhood apprenticeships sitting at the feet of master raconteurs. Rick Bragg’s familial memoirs—1997’s All Over but the Shoutin’ and 2001’s Ava’s Man—are nothing if not evidence of one such early initiation to the oral tradition. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his “elegantly written” New York Times features, Bragg’s résumé is impressive, though not without scandal: In 2003 he resigned from the Times after controversy arose concerning his use of unacknowledged stringers. Regarding his ability to spin a yarn, however, there is no question regarding his sources. Raised in the foothills of the Appalachians, Bragg says of his family, “They taught me, on a thousand front porch nights, as a million jugs passed from hand to hand, how to tell a story.” A million jugs? Apparently one thing Bragg learned from his forebears was the value of hyperbole. 1111 Mainstreet, Hopkins; 651-209-6799; www.hclib.com www.hclib.com

Pop culture has always played a huge role in Jonathan Lethem’s invented—and wildly inventive—world. He’s sort of the house DJ for a stable of like-minded contemporary writers, offering deft literary mash-ups of science fiction, hard-boiled detective stories, magical realism, and comic-book mythology. Lethem’s first novel since 2003’s Fortress of Solitude is a bit of a departure, at least from a geographical standpoint; set in Los Angeles rather than the author’s usual Brooklyn stomping grounds, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a comic novel steeped in the world of alternative rock, hipster drones, and the culture of complaint. While early reviews have called it slight, at least by Lethem standards, we’re betting it’s still a whole lot more readable than most of the other stuff clogging the new-arrivals section at Barnes & Noble.