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Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up to give us this two-and-a-half-hour pulp festival featuring two, count ’em, two turgid films shown back to back with faux-vintage trailers in between. The first is Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror, in which biological weapons are unleashed, sending scores of the undead to face … why, a one-legged stripper with a machine-gun prosthesis, of course. Tarantino’s Death Proof stars Kurt Russell as a gnarly stuntman who lures chicks into his car, taking them for countryside drives from which they never return. Grindhouse is gunning to be a lowbrow masterpiece. Then again, Rodriguez has proven to be an incredibly erratic director. As for Tarantino, his last work, Kill Bill, was overlong and uninteresting. And both forget that grindhouse theaters were typically drive-ins, whereat audience members could occupy themselves with groping and boozing as the third hour rolled on.

In this approximation of a true story, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, the failed writer who conjured up the scam of … if not of the century, at least of the 1970s. Irving claimed to have interviewed Howard Hughes, co-written the recluse’s autobiography, and then walked off with a mint—until the aviator called him on it, that is, and Irving was sent to prison. Orson Welles covered the same story with his 1974 film F for Fake, a bizarre, wonderful, and virtually unwatched film. But with The Hoax, director Lasse Hallström takes a more conventional and humorous approach. Gere, whose comic sensibilities have never been given their due (he was the best thing in Chicago), looks as though he’s having a ball; the rest of the film is as light on its feet as such scam-artist classics as Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight and Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.

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

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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.