Category: Columns

  • Heavenly Drinking

    Heaven, said the Regency wit Sydney Smith, is eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. It sounds pretty piggy if you ask me, all too like the fellow who said that you should decide what to do in life by following your bliss. And rather odd doctrine for S. Smith, who made…

  • Giving It Up

    Losing weight and quitting smoking are always the top two New Year’s resolutions for us Americans. Not to brag, but I’ve done both—quitting a twelve-year, pack-a-day smoking habit and losing (and regaining and relosing) a rather substantial amount of weight in my life. I did neither by making a New Year’s resolution. Like most really…

  • Busted and Disgusted

    — People are talking about whether Rev. Randolph (Randy) Staten will run for his old seat representing North Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If he did, and won, he would become Minnesota’s version of former Washington mayor and convicted felon Marion Berry: a political player who went through a very public crash-and-burn, followed…

  • In the Bleak Mid-Winter

    Our century has been remarkably efficient in the manufacture of wastelands. In Uptown you can still experience the sort of passageways down which Mr. Eliot smelt steaks, but nowadays they seem to have almost a period charm. It is the same reading about the Algiers described by Albert Camus; the delicious colonial loucheness of the…

  • A Working Christmas

    Pat was my boss at the diner. I’d say she was around fifty years old, but I don’t know for sure. That’s just not the kind of question you ask your boss. Donnie the dishwasher was thirty-five, with the mental capacity of an adolescent. Then again, how many teens do you know who could work…

  • A Jury of One's Peers

    Sitting on my desk is the final “absolute, no kidding, no extensions possible” request for my submission to the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1981 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report. After twenty-five years, Harvard wants an accounting of what I have done with my life. I ignored the three or four previous requests because I had trials…