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  • Royal Hanneford Circus

    While the British royal family may have closets full of tantalizing scandal and deceit, the “Royal Family of the Circus” continues to live up to its sterling reputation for perfection in the circus arts. Ah, the bore of the privileged life. Maybe fewer heads would have rolled through history, if the circus had been in charge. The Royal Hanneford once amused the likes of King George III—that means nearly three hundred years under the big top, although this incarnation, run by scion and former clown Tommy Hanneford, has been around only since the sixties. This time around brings a program of all-new acts to downtown St. Paul, featuring horseback rider Mark Karoly, Mongolian contortionists and Chinese aerialists, elephants and big cats, and much more. Ringmaster Billy Martin, we will point out pedantically, is not the late Yankees manager, although that Billy also knew a thing or two about circuses.
    Xcel, 199 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 726-8240, www.xcelenergycenter.com

  • Alice Sebold

    A very impressive first novel, Sebold’s The Lovely Bones deals with the grief, self-destruction, and eventual healing of a suburban family after daughter Susie is brutally raped and murdered. What saves the book from drowning in its grim premise is her deft choice of narrator—the murdered girl herself, who watches from the afterlife with sadness, love, and pity for those she left behind. If you haven’t yet sampled Sebold’s artfully constructed prose, do so now before the movie version coming next year inevitably colors any future discovery of the book.
    Adath Jeshurun, 10500 Hillside Ln., Minnetonka, (866) 468-3401, www.hclib.org

  • Neal Pollack

    Now that Neal Pollack is past the indignity of being widely suspected to be Dave Eggers’s pseudonym, he’s been able to get down to the business of being his own pseudonym. As fans of his 2002 Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and his consistently funny weblog know, in “Neal Pollack,” the real Pollack has engineered a pitch-perfect parodic voice–a pompous, wildly egocentric buffoon of celebrity journalism. He wields that voice like an oaken club of comedy in his debut novel, Never Mind the Pollacks—a rolling-thunder revue through rock history like Forrest Gump with Hunter S. Thompson as the main character. The novel runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages, one problem being that music mytholology becomes more depressing and less fun the more you move from Elvis to Kurt Cobain. That said, Never Mind contains some terrifically funny stuff, especially the mystical old bluesman Clambone Jefferson. (If you’re one of those crazy types who likes listening to rock as well as reading about it, know that the Neal Pollack Invasion has released a CD and plays at the 400 Bar October 20.)

  • Jonathan Lethem

    Most of Jonathan Lethem’s early writing career consisted of science fiction novels that leaned toward the Philip K. Dick side of the genre—experimental, unorthodox and pounding on the door of literary respectability. When he finally got that door open, though, it was with a postmodern take on a different genre, Motherless Brooklyn, a detective noir full of sadness and ruin, narrated by a Tourette’s-plagued loner struggling to make sense of his world. Lethem stays in that New York borough for Fortress of Solitude, a semiautobiographical novel about two boys growing up in the 1970s, one a nerdy white kid, the other the black son of an embittered, alcoholic soul singer. It’s a sprawling story—at 500 pages, longer than any of his previous books, encompassing race, friendship, comic books and graffiti artists, childhood alienation and the slow gentrification of Lethem’s boyhood neighborhood, rendered a nearly foreign land in just a couple of decades.
    Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

  • Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain

    If the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons picked up a genie’s lamp with three wishes, he might turn himself into Richard Dawkins: Celebrity scientist, bestselling Oxford evolutionist and atheist, inventor of the concept of memes, close personal friend of author Douglas Adams and husband of an ex-Doctor Who actress. He is one highly evolved geek. This collection of short essays is often insightful, but as a grab bag of book reviews, opinion pieces, and other miscellany, it’s not the best introduction to his work—begin with The Blind Watchmaker instead. Good moments here include his jabs at the pretensions of academic postmodernism, eulogies for the late Adams, and a few selections from Dawkins’s longtime battles with colleague Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins has his faults—the harshness of his antireligious stance is offputting to some, and his prose can be somewhat stiff. But he’s earned his position as our century’s equivalent of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley for his take-no-prisoners defense of science against the forces of ignorance.

  • David Foster Wallace, Everything and More

    It’s not like we sit around holding our breath waiting for whatever’s next from the desk of David Foster Wallace, but we do take notice. In a way, we’re gratified that it appears to be dense work of nonfiction dedicated to hard science—that way we won’t feel guilty about keeping our nose to the grindstone with Infinite Jest, his 1997 masterpiece that we still haven’t finished (but we’re loving every sentence of it). It was probably inevitable that Wallace waded into the incredibly complicated world of higher mathematics—a kind of precise language about intellectual abstractions that has always been his argot. Here he explores the whole idea of mathematical infinities, relying on a competent interpretation of Georg Cantor’s groundbreaking theories (or so our mathematically inclined friends tell us) and, yes, reams of playful footnotes.

  • Defend Your Life

    “Is 911 a Joke?” [August] was not fair to Fire Chief Rocco Forte. He has been given a raw deal by both the governor and the city fathers and mothers. They cut his budget and told him to deal with it. He has done his best to keep suppression forces adequately staffed. There is much more to running a fire department than many realize, particularly with prevention, education, investigation, and code enforcement along with firefighting and EMS duties. He has made several solid appointments and raised the level of cooperation with the police department. During the last several years, the arson squad, comprised of four Minneapolis firefighters and two Minneapolis police sergeants, has made a significant number of arrests. We ended the run of the Hodgeman brothers’ serial arson spree and resolved the twenty-four-year-old murder of two Minneapolis firefighters. This is an area of the fire department where Forte deserves credit.
    Sgt. Sean McKenna
    Arson Squad
    Minneapolis Police Department

  • Mad About Sex & the Married Man

    I enjoyed reading your new column “Sex & the Married Man” [“Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?,” September]. I couldn’t agree more with you, and I’m tired of my fellow Gen X males pooh-poohing strip clubs as if they were interactive tours of livestock slaughterhouses. Sure, we all went to the Alan Alda School of Sensitive Men back in the eighties, only to find that women still need us to kill spiders in the house. What a shock! Women want us to be sensitive, but macho enough to make them weak in the knees. Welcome to the Love Lottery! Oh, yes, here come the admonitions from women. But I find among my friends, and, frankly, in myself, men’s ability to accept the faults and shortcomings of a mate more than women. After the “honeymoon” phase comes the ever-present mental check list of every little personality quirk that sends you off the deep end. Unfortunately, one of those quirks we have is enjoying the sight of a beautiful woman. Every beautiful woman. But it doesn’t keep us from massaging your feet, making you dinner, and yes, killing those damn spiders with our big manly shoes.

    Evan Halquist
    Shoreview

    I beg to differ with Stuart Greene’s opinion that all married men just want to see more naked women. Granted, some men are just not cut out for marriage, and for those men, who cares how many strip clubs they go to? But if a man is happy with his marriage and his sex life, he shouldn’t have any need to go to a strip club (my husband agrees). And if he’s married and does go to these places, it’s my observation that these types of men usually have a lot of baggage and other issues that no marriage could fix by itself.  

    Amy Farrar
    Mound

    Stuart Greene’s column filled me with frustration. I feel like he missed the point in his attempt to break down the issue from a man’s perspective. If a woman has a negative reaction to her husband going to a strip club, then he has a choice to make and consequences that follow it. Stuart has chosen to honor his wife’s feelings (admittedly only because he’d suck at covering up a trip to the club), which is good for his marriage, but it seems he’s fed up with the other consequences—unfulfilled desire and the accompanying guilt. If we follow Stuart’s logic, the stress caused by guilty desire must be alleviated by going to the source of the problem: wives. After all, men’ s lust for endless naked women is a biological inevitability. If only the wives could understand and drop that priggish judgment. What a cop-out! Sometimes in a committed relationship, out of two things you want, you can only have one, because of an ultimatum one of the partners has made. You have to choose what your partner wants, let go of the other thing, and move on. So to all the married men out there, the next time your wife crumbles or angers at the image of you soaking up a lap dance, don’t take it as an attempt to squelch your animal instincts. See it as a challenge to take your relationship to the next level and to explore all the mysteries in her you have yet to uncover!

    Lisa Watson
    Minneapolis

    Stuart Greene’s snickering about young women strippers—many of them teenagers battling addiction and depression—made me heartsick. I hope Greene grows to care more about other people’s children, and less about his poor buddies who are “tired of feeling guilty.” I’m sorry to see The Rake publish this sort of heartless drivel. I want to encourage Greene to truly educate himself about what circumstances drive young women into those jobs.

    Leslie Ball
    Minneapolis

    Married guys? They have the best chance of enjoying clubs, not blowing their money, not getting hung up on the dancers or confused with the relationship, and best able to act later on the arousal with a partner. Married men prove their commitment every day, and there should be no delusions about men’s arousal patterns. Biologically, we are meant to mate with any healthy woman of child-bearing age we meet. All who don’t accept this are in serious denial. Noticing a beautiful body is being human, not being a slobbering pig.

    Name Withheld by Request
    Brooklyn Park

    I must say I am relieved at Stuart Greene’s honesty. As a happily married Gen X woman, I agree with your take, and I am not at all offended that my husband finds pleasure in looking at perfect strangers, perfectly naked. I joined him once for an outing to a strip club and actually found myself just as aroused as my husband. I think women should learn to embrace their sexuality instead of bashing men for being so comfortable with theirs. Of course, I understand that years of social differences must be overcome first. I hope women read your articles and gain a greater understanding of their significant others. Keep up the honesty, some of us are not afraid. I’m happily married and looking at porn myself.

    Jenn Stone
    Minneapolis

  • Caught, Red-Handed!

    A popular myth, perpetuated even in China, is that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure that can be seen from outer space or, some will say, seen from the moon [“Red-Handed,” Letters, September]. For an object to be visible from a distance, it needs both size and visual contrast with its surroundings. The Great Wall has neither. As for size, at the most it is only twenty-five feet wide; many four- or six-lane highways are far wider. As for visual contrast, the wall is made of mostly gray stone surrounded by gray rock and brownish vegetation. Many highways are whitish concrete passing through green farm fields and no one claims to see them from space. If there was a man-made structure visible from a great distance, it would more likely be something like the space shuttle assembly building in Florida, the Superdome or the Metrodome, or even a large airport. While I’m at it, my bet is that reader Sam Woelm is a better Photoshop artist than traveler. I’ll take his T-shirt.

    Tom Peterson
    Edina

    A number of readers wrote to correct us on the Great Wall paradox. Science tells us that many man-made objects are visible from outer space, while none can be seen from the surface of the moon. And we think Peterson is onto something with the Photoshop conspiracy theory, too. That photo is looking more fake every time we look at it! But we’d still send Mr. Woelm a T-shirt for his industriousness.—Editors

  • Double Bogey, Indeed

    I read Frank Jossi’s piece on the golfing industry [“The Missing Links,” September] with particular interest in the “Youth Only” or “Youth With an Adult” facility at the National Sports Center in Blaine. That is what we were promised back in 1998 by proponents of the project. Yes, a “youth only facility,” which was to potentially host a PGA Tour event by the year 2002. I would ask Jossi if he is certain this eighteen-hole facility is for youth only. According to the MASC, the eighteen-hole course is their “Events” course. Three years ago, the First Tee people described the nine-hole course as the “youth only” course. However, according to the EIS report on the Anoka County Airport released earlier this year, the MASC dropped that nine-hole course back in 2000, citing wetland issues. I have been involved with this sham since 1998. Representative Phil Krinkie did the right thing by asking for an investigation into this matter. After all, if you had 450 acres to build a 270-acre project, why would you spend $2 million to buy up a 75-acre sod farm nowhere near where the golf course was being built? Especially when there already was a $1.7 million appropriation to purchase the same land?

    Bill Folkes
    Coon Rapids