Category: Columns

  • Sweet and French

    Who now reads Charles Morgan? Some years ago there was a revival of his novel The Gunroom, which proved to anyone who was interested that the middle one of Churchill’s three Traditions of the Royal Navy (Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash) was a living reality for young officers of the Edwardian Era. Morgan’s masterpiece is…

  • Refugees at Home

    I swear to heaven that it sounded like a good idea at the time. Hypnotized by HGTV, we took a perfectly good kitchen (if not our aesthetic ideal), ripped it out by the seams, and have for the last four months given a painful, bloody Lamaze-style birth to the placement of each pantry cupboard, each…

  • Who’s in Charge Here?

    Remember those low-budget horror films from the 1950s? Other-worldly music would play, and then a creepy creature would land its spaceship in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, slither out, and tell the first startled Earthling, “Take me to your leader.” Now, as then, we laugh at the idea that there could possibly be…

  • Gratification for the Patient

    I like starting novels in the middle. By skipping all those establishing shots, which exclude as much as they reveal, you’re able to catch the author and the characters off their guard. Also, once you have finished, you can start again at the beginning and have the paradoxical pleasure of reading the book for the…

  • Alma Mater? Don’t Know Her.

    Aw, hell. You won’t believe what I got myself into. So I’ll just tell you. I’m going to be a guest speaker at my old high school for career day. Delicious irony #1: I never completed high school.Delicious irony #2: Either they never bothered to check this fact, or they don’t care. My dilemma came…

  • Take No Shorts

    You may shoot me with your words,But still, like air, I’ll rise.-Maya Angelou Ever since she toppled incumbent Jackie Cherryhomes in 2001, Minneapolis Fifth Ward council member Natalie Johnson Lee, the council’s lone African-American woman, has continued to rise. She has successfully deflected and deflated those wanting to blow her off-especially the North Side wannabes…