Young, a poet and contributor to the catalog for the ongoing Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibition, is appearing as part of the Rain Taxi/Walker Art Center Free Verse series. You hear too much nonsense about poets whose work is steeped in jazz or the blues, but Young’s work is … Read more
About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of … Read more
Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults … Read more
It’s dusk, and there’s an unmistakable whiff of charcoal in the air. It’s the sign of the outdoor cooking season, and is as eagerly awaited as the return of the red-winged blackbirds to the tree by my driveway. I look at my own shining, gray monster on the deck and I start thinking of the … Read more
“Mom and I are standing in front of the Church on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia,” wrote Ann Bernstein of Minneapolis. “The church was built on the very spot where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated on March 1, 1881. The Literary issue was a perfect travel companion in this country, where things seem familiar … Read more
Fifty years ago I was a young bride planning to rent an old Iowa farmhouse. My rural mother-in-law shared her successful bedbug remedy [“A Bedtime Preyer,” April]. She said: “Wash and air-dry all bedclothes. Center the bed in the middle of the room. Put each leg (bed leg) in a pail of turpentine. Don’t smoke. … Read more
There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment. To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper … Read more
I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second … Read more
“When you wake up in the morning, don’t kvetch! Say ‘Yippee’!” So suggests the wisdom of this happy collective of Hasidic Jews in this delightful, if somewhat workmanlike, documentary from Paul Mazursky. Mazursky, once a presence in Hollywood (he created the outstanding Enemies: A Love Story before flushing his career down the toilet with some … Read more
François Pignon (the Moroccan-born Jewish actor Gad Elmaleh) has it pretty rough. He’s a good-natured but horse-faced valet who can’t convince the love of his life to marry him. Out moping one afternoon, he is caught on film while standing on a street corner, by chance next to a supermodel who’s out on a romantic … Read more