Just as the trees are beginning to bud again, spring brings a flowering from Minnesota’s local authors and independent presses, including several notable debuts. From Coffee House Press comes The Grasshopper King, Slate columnist Jordan Ellenberg’s wryly funny Boyle-cum-Borges satire about a crabby, untalented, yet mysteriously important Kafka-like poet and the two academics who wreck their lives trying to explain him. We laughed more than a few times, and crown King the best thing we’ve read all month. P. J. Tracy, a pseudonymous mother/daughter writing team from Minneapolis and L.A., has a breakout first novel with Monkeewrench, a comic police procedural/ serial killer thriller that sites one of its murders at the Mall of America. Two from Graywolf Press: First, much-published poet Albert Goldbarth switches to the novel for Pieces of Payne, a wild and freewheeling thing that manages to combine the Legion of Superheroes, quantum physics, Dickens, Moby-Dick and Victorian-era mastectomy surgical practices. In a much more somber vein, Patricia Seraffian Ward draws on her girlhood in Beirut for The Bullet Collection, a passionate tale of the corrosive effects of the Lebanese civil war. And last but not least, New Rivers Press celebrates its rebirth out west in Moorhead with several new publications, including Daniel Bachhuber’s melancholy memoir Mozart’s Carriage and short-story author Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls. Bacchhuber and Abartis read at Open Book April 4; P.J. Tracy at Borders in Woodbury April 18, Barnes & Noble Eden Prairie April 19 and Once Upon a Crime April 21. Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., (612) 215-2575, www.openbookmn.org; Borders, 8472 Tamarack Bay, Woodbury, 651-578-2931, www.bordersstores.com; B&N, Eden Prairie Center, (952) 944-5683, bn.com; Once Upon a Crime, 604 W. 26th St., (612) 870-3785
Blog
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Catch as Catch Can: Collected Stories and Other Writings by Joseph Heller
For Joseph Heller, there was only one catch, and that was Catch-22. Although his blockbuster first novel catapulted him to lifelong prominence as one of the century’s most important novelists, its very success would haunt him for the rest of his career. Because he was only important for the one novel. Everybody loved the crazy WWII satire, but about the rest of his writing, you heard words like “tepid.” As time went by, even he grew to accept his fate as American letters’ jack of one trade. When he came to Minneapolis a few years back for a book signing, he seemed genuinely surprised when I asked him to autograph Good As Gold, the lampoon of Washington politics and American Judaism that’s generally considered his second-best book. “I haven’t seen this in a while,” he said. This posthumous collection of short stories and miscellanea is no exception. Though it features several pieces of fiction from early in his career, it’s dominated by the presence of The Book. Outtakes from Catch-22 are followed by outtakes from the ill-remembered sequel, Closing Time, and four behind-the-scenes essays on Catch-22’s creation and later adaptation into Mike Nichols’ 1970 film. Still, better one catch than no catch at all.
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Mcsweeney’s Mammoth Treasury Of Thrilling Tales
Staggering Genius golden boy Dave Eggers’ journal swells from magazine to full-fledged 478-page paperback book for its tenth issue. The breathlessly pulpy title is only a little tongue-in-cheek. Mammoth Treasury, guest-edited by Michael Chabon, sets loose its writers on the plot-driven adventure story, the idea being that maybe they can help recapture the ripping yarn’s place of honor alongside what’s usually regarded as Serious Literature. After all, genre fiction was good enough for Hemingway and Poe, so why shouldn’t Nick Hornby spin a sci-fi tale about a VCR that warns of a coming apocalypse? And so here’s 20 tales of sharks, mummies and murderous elephants by such critical darlings as Eggers, Chabon and Sherman Alexie, alongside writers like Elmore Leonard, Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman who’ve been hammering out quality writing in oft-disrespected genre ghettos for years. Treasury doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but there’s plenty of fun to be had here. Chris Offutt’s submission has a particularly neat hook: He gets involved in a scheme involving time travel, ghosts and alternate universes in order to break the case of writer’s block that’s preventing him from finishing his story for this book.
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Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo
DeLillo’s last book, Underworld, was one of those seasonal doorstops that the cognoscenti gets in a lather about—you know, the 800-page tome that everyone talks about and no one reads, the one that ends up atop a growing column of hardcovers in the basement, the last addition to which was Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, or perhaps Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Well, DeLillo had it coming—it’d been 20 years since his seminal novel White Noise came out, establishing him as an important voice in the world of white guys ruminating on technology and its discontents. He’s essentially been writing the same book, more mood than plot, ever since then—and every time, we love it. This novel is about a 20-something dot-com millionaire trying to make his way across Manhattan in his limo. Angst ensues.
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Inter-Squad Squabble
Craig Cox’s analysis of light rail was shallow and poorly researched. His most glaring omission was his failure to consider the issue of “capacity.” A single track of transit can carry 40,000-50,000 people per hour. A dedicated busway can carry just 20,000 people per hour. A car lane can carry an absolute maximum of 4,500 people per hour, and that’s with three people per car! Clearly, light rail transit has the greatest peak-demand hauling capacity. With no more room for highway lanes downtown, the only way to significantly increase capacity in the long run is by building a light rail transit network. Secondly, Cox doesn’t consider regional air pollution which frequently exceeds safe levels during the summer months. While diesel trucks and buses account for only 2-3 percent of highway vehicles, they are responsible for 25 percent of the smog-forming pollution and over half the particulate matter in our city’s air. Only electric rail (or electric buses) would significantly improve regional air quality. Finally, Cox makes some historical errors. The Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company was forced to share much of its right of way with cars, eliminating its potential advantage in speed and peak capacity. More importantly, Fred Ossanna was in the pocket of General Motors, whom he hired as “consultants” to rip up the TCRT and convert it to buses. GM repeated this process in hundreds of American cities, using front companies like National City Lines and Yellow Bus Company, to purchase and destroy trolley systems. A good account of all this can be found in David St. Clair’s book The Motoriza-tion of American Cities.
Andy Singer, Rake contributor,
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Trails to Rails
Terrific article on the history of TCRT and the light rail system [“Get Rail,” March]. Best researched in the last 30 years. A nice postscript would be totaling up the cost of all the light rail studies that have been done over the last 40 years.
Richard Landry, Minneapolis
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Later, Tater!
I greatly enjoyed Stephanie March’s “Taters!” in the March 2003 issue. However, I believe that the potato is heading once again for Cinderella status. If you have a look at the new U.S. Government “Food Pyramid,” the potato is now considered a most unfortunate form of carbohydrate.
Richard Webb, Minneapolis
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Dead Letter Office
Usually I enjoy your “letters” from far-flung places. They give insight into what’s going on on the ground. That said, what the heck were you guys thinking when you published Wade Savage’s “Letter from Baghdad” [The Rakish Angle, March]? Is the fact that a Minnesotan was there, like a Kilroy on the wall, more important to your editorial needs than the accuracy of the facts asserted therein? Good grief, people! Just because a local yokel travels to a particularly verboten portion of the Middle East does not mean he is qualified to judge what goes on there. If Mr. Savage had managed to read a history book published after 1930, he would have known that pan-Arabism, which is what he says is most Arab’s profound dream, was given a whirl by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 60s. He began the Ba’ath Party in Egypt, and while it had limited organizational success, spreading to Syria and Iraq, it failed miserably because they could not unite under the common goal of one Arab nation-state. Why did it fail, you ask? Perhaps because, while the goal was noble, the cultural differences from one country to the next were insurmountable in practice. For Mr. Savage’s information: there is an Arab EU: it’s called the Arab League. There’s also OPEC, if you really want to delve into economic cooperation issues. Mr. Savage, despite his travels to Iraq, would be well served by sitting his butt down in a college level Middle East History class.
Kathleen Nelson, Edina
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Highway Helpers: The Next Generation
Let’s all do our part to make sure the state can afford its single most important obligation to the people: building new highways and adding lanes out to Eagan, beloved constituency of our Governor and State Auditor. Sacrifices must be made, of course, and we’re ready. In these troubling times, Minnesota families must assume a bigger share of the state’s highway work. It’s not just picking up empty beer cans, abandoned shoes, and ditch-porn anymore! Those Adopt-a-Highway folks have practically been getting away with murder—all that free publicity for a monthly stroll down the median with a trash-stabber. No! We wholly support Gov. Pawlenty’s proposed Foster-Highway program, to ensure that regular Minnesotans are now responsible for paving, plowing, and striping existing roads. We know not every family can live in Eagan, or afford to buy heavy machinery, snow plows, and hot-topping equipment. Foster-Highway has a heart, after all. Participants in the program (mandated by Patriot Act II, by the way) will be assigned a manageable half-mile section of road (half the usual Adopt-a-Highway segment!) as near to their home as an indifferent bureaucrat cares to make it. Non-participants will be jailed and charged with terrorism. Thank you, and God Bless America.
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Jell-O Salad or High Art?
The sun is peeking out, the snowman who stood sentry in my neighbors’ front lawn has surrendered, and though some of us will get itchy eyeballs and stuffy noses, we’re all going to get a present soon: an extra hour of daylight. I can’t help but get mushy like Mr. Snowman this time of year. I’m springing ahead.
This surge of goodwill usually bubbles inside me until I’m compelled to do something nice. Last year, that meant volunteering to help at the annual Ladies Aid spring salad luncheon fundraiser held in my church’s basement. You might be thinking, “Hey, church basements are usually the most un-spring like environments in the world!” Well, gotcha! Because when I showed up ready to be put to good use, Nettie and Helen had already made and hung the construction-paper daisy decorations.
Now, I don’t know Nettie and Helen. I’d seen them before, of course, but not in a social situation outside of chapel. And I’m sure that one doesn’t just step off the mean streets into her first guild event and snag the plum decorating job either. So I marched off to the back kitchen, where I met the head lady, Adele. Silver flip ’do, steely green eyes, and a fuchsia stain on her lips, cheeks, and nails. Ninety pounds of will, and at least 20 pounds of that had to come from the shoulder pads that were sewn into her sequined, exotic animal-print cardigan sweater. Think “Cher’s Grandma.” She was too small to be a tackle, but definitely could be a tight end.
“You!” she commanded, looking up at me as though I weren’t fit to spit-shine her rhinestone mules. “Get over to the prep table and start cutting squares and plating the salads.” In the distance, I saw a trembling mass of jewel-like blocks, molds, and towers. A skyline, for all its rubbery backbone, that shouted “Doubt!” And “Hope!” Some slabs were plain, but I could tell in a glance that others held petrified chunks of sugared pineapple, and various canned fruits. Some were mysterious, boasting tiny celery smiles. And—egads!—some even had pink chunks of what could only be described as meat, lurking in Kool-Aid tinged psychedelic freak out, man, daring you to guess fish or fowl, beef or pork.
If we were downtown, Adele would have been awarded a Bush grant and been the toast of the avant-garde community. Note to Matthew Barney: To hell with sculpting in tapioca and Vaseline. Gelatin is the new (old) medium.
The glistening molds were a Mondrian-style feast, more of a commentary on food than actual food. Genius. When fruits and vegetables have been manipulated that way, can you still call them “salad”? The only unsullied vegetation in the room was a head of romaine lettuce, which was to be arranged around the chunks and blocks and slices to soften the edges—a little like lingerie for Jell-O.
I smiled to introduce myself, and suggested that, with my extensive service-industry background, I might be better suited to rolling the coffee cart and pouring. Adele shot me a withering glance. “Not dressed like that, you won’t. You’ll stay in the back.”
I looked down at my T-shirt and Indiana Jones cargo pants. Not my best effort, but honestly, not my worst. Peeking out to the dining room, however, I saw that Adele was right. A thousand twinkling lights bounced and scattered off the overhead fluorescent tubes. The ladies from the guild wore their sweaters like armor. Scaled with doodads and ditsys. Floating slowly and regally past the cafeteria tables like great exotic Technicolor fish. Peaceful as prayers, offering napkins to sticky sweet fingers. Murmuring low and husky reassurances to the congregants.
Next to them, I was no lady. I would have looked fine handing out samples at Home Depot, but this was a feast of celebration. Good intentions notwithstanding, I would have been as jarring as arugula in a bowl of shredded iceberg. Sometimes you’ve got to do a little extra work to make things easier to swallow. Call it the Parable of Jell-O.
Lesson learned, I turned to the prep table and tried to slice the particolored salads as perfectly as possible. My internship with polite society had begun.