02.28.07
From our January snow tubing event: the bus boarding.
Another round of snow is on schedule for the rest of the week; the local Fox affiliate predicts 12-20 inches (of course, these are the folks who love to predict disaster); Paul Douglas over at WCCO predicts a more modest 8-14 inches; the National Weather Service appears to predict about 13 inches if I read their graphics correctly.
In any event, I’m glad I swung by REI on my way home last night to pick up a couple pairs of starter snow shoes for Jack and Peter. We tested them out on the boulevard, zipping down the block and leaping the treacherous sidewalk chasms. Should the streets be impassible to automobiles, I’m confident that we three will be able to brave the elements and come back to base with freeze-dried victuals, water-purification equipment, and toilet paper to get us through the storm.
02.27.07
Three selections for today:
02.26.07
The predicted snowy armageddon was slightly less than apocalyptic–Friday’s predicted snow turned out to be mostly sleet, and it took a while for things to turn over to the white stuff on Saturday. But it was still a good sledding opportunity.
No pictures yet of our recent blanket of snow, though–no time to play with chemicals after spending the day at Auntie Betsy’s house, sledding, playing hide & seek, and discovering the wonders of Dance Dance Revolution. So instead here’s a rather more bare picture from a January snow tube trip we took with the boys’ Minneapolis Kids gang. It was more mud tubing than snow tubing, but no one complained.
Three selections for today:
02.23.07
We’re anticipating a winter storm this weekend–5-9 inches or so, according to the National Weather Service, but the local news outlets are pounding the drums for 12-18 inches of snow, the biggest in many, many years. In any case, we’re looking forward to testing the new sled from Auntie Kathleen and taking Granddad (visiting from western Maine–I think we can blame him for drawing the blizzard down on us) to our favorite hills.
02.22.07
02.21.07
Three selections:
02.20.07
Sledding consists of hours of uphill trudging punctuated by seconds of crazy mad terror and delight.
The Twin Cities being mostly flat, there aren’t a lot of secret sledding hills around that are worth the trudge; you end up having to navigate the good slopes with a dozen or more fellow sledders who are also hurling themselves downhill on bits of plastic with no stearing apparatus. Collisions are a necessary part of the Minnesota sledding experience.
Three selections:
02.19.07
Four selections:
02.17.07
Three selections:
02.17.07
This is none of your business, and it is not finished. We are not in this together.
William Kittredge, “We Are Not in This Together”, The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge
This collection of Kittredge’s short stories from Graywolf Press makes a good Western companion to Graywolf’s Thomas Williams collection. Like the Williams stories, these are stories about men summing up their lives, coming to peace with their pasts. But where Williams’ men find themselves resolving their lives in the context of relationships with people, Kittredge’s men resolve their lives in solitude, or in relation to an unforgiving Western landscape.
The characters in these stories tend to keep their own counsel; even their internal monologues leave much unsaid. Their motivations and intentions are left somewhat mysterious. They do odd things: they shoot bears to avenge a stranger’s death, they reluctantly ride along with a crop duster, they try to teach fumbling lessons to a boy who may have committed a horrible collection of murders. The stories don’t resolve cleanly–there are no great revelations that make everything suddenly clear–but they are still satisfying in their quiet way.
Kittredge belongs to the laconic tradition of American letters, like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Maclean (indeed, Kittredge was a co-producer of the film version of A River Runs Through It). The pacing of these stories is slow, the use of words economic; Kittredge’s transparent style is perfectly suited to these quietly majestic stories.
02.16.07
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, Autumn Song
Four selections:
02.15.07
And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems–not to suffer pain?
Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, Autumn Song
Featured on the Daily Dickinson site.
Some leftovers from last autumn–the temperatures in the basement have been far too cold the last few weeks to spend any time over the sink with black and white chemicals.
Four selections:
02.14.07
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, Autumn Song
Some leftovers from last autumn–the temperatures in the basement have been far too cold the last few weeks to spend any time over the sink with black and white chemicals.
Three selections:
02.13.07
Three selections:
02.12.07
02.11.07
Three notables:
02.10.07
I’ve started putting my out-of-print stories (so far just one, Practical Haunting Considerations), on a Stories page, and I’ve updated the appropriate URLs for the on-line stories listed on the Publications page. If you’ve got a little time to spare, and are looking for something a little different (dare I say it, more literary…) than the usual “blog” fare, I’d encourage you to visit a few of these places; there are a lot of fabulous writers to discover among my stories’ neighbors.
02.9.07
I’ve started putting my out-of-print stories (so far just one, Practical Haunting Considerations), on a Stories page, and I’ve updated the appropriate URLs for the on-line stories listed on the Publications page. If you’ve got a little time to spare, and are looking for something a little different (dare I say it, more literary…) than the usual “blog” fare, I’d encourage you to visit a few of these places; there are a lot of fabulous writers to discover among my stories’ neighbors.
02.8.07
I’ve started putting my out-of-print stories (so far just one, Practical Haunting Considerations), on a Stories page, and I’ve updated the appropriate URLs for the on-line stories listed on the Publications page. If you’ve got a little time to spare, and are looking for something a little different (dare I say it, more literary…) than the usual “blog” fare, I’d encourage you to visit a few of these places; there are a lot of fabulous writers to discover among my stories’ neighbors.
02.7.07
I’ve started putting my out-of-print stories (so far just one, Practical Haunting Considerations), on a Stories page, and I’ve updated the appropriate URLs for the on-line stories listed on the Publications page. If you’ve got a little time to spare, and are looking for something a little different (dare I say it, more literary…) than the usual “blog” fare, I’d encourage you to visit a few of these places; there are a lot of fabulous writers to discover among my stories’ neighbors.
02.6.07
I’ve started putting my out-of-print stories (so far just one, Practical Haunting Considerations), on a Stories page, and I’ve updated the appropriate URLs for the on-line stories listed on the Publications page. If you’ve got a little time to spare, and are looking for something a little different (dare I say it, more literary…) than the usual “blog” fare, I’d encourage you to visit a few of these places; there are a lot of fabulous writers to discover among my stories’ neighbors.
02.5.07
The U-505 U-boat at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Two cullings for today:
02.3.07
The Foucault pendulum at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Three cullings for today:
02.2.07
If you need chocolate chip pancakes and a coloring page after a long day at the Museum of Science and Industry, there’s no better spot than the Golden Nugget.
02.1.07
The
19th Annual Minnesota Book Awards nominees have been announced. This year, the somewhat-beleaguered awards are sponsored by the
Friends of the St. Paul Public Library; from 1999 to 2006, it was sponsored by the
Minnesota Humanities Commission. This has been an era of funding cuts across the arts world, and I’m very grateful to the St. Paul Friends for picking up the unsexy book awards.On the list of nominees this year are a couple of writers with whom I’m familiar: Eleanor Arnason, a writer of speculative fiction in the tradition of James Tiptree and Ursula K. LeGuin, for a story printed in a fine press edition by
Minnesota Book Arts; and Alicia Conroy, for her collection,
Lives of Mapmakers, a story from which I read in Ploughshares a couple years ago. The other fiction titles nominated look intriguing, and I find it interesting that the MBA breaks out a “genre” category (the genre this year being, apparently, crime/mystery). I plan to put these titles on my reading list, and to comment on them here before the May 5 awards ceremony. I already have some thoughts forming about Ms. Arnason’s haunting story,
The Grammarian’s Five Daughters, that I hope to whip into shape for tomorrow.
Another nice feature of the MBA is a “readers’ choice” award: “[b]etween March 1 and April 15, readers will be able to visit twincities.com to vote for one of the Minnesota Book Award finalists in 7 categories (excepting Fine Press).” Maybe not quite so democratic as the Million Writers Award, but it’s nice to see the reader acknowledged as the other half of the conversation.
My great disappointment right now isn’t with the MBA at all, but rather with the horribly wan shelving at the chain bookstores. By day I’m out in the suburban boonies, so my choices for book shopping boil down to two spots: Barnes & Noble or Border’s. Since the temperature the last couple days has hovered around 0 degrees Farenheit, I decided to give up my walk around the pond and instead went to the bookstores–B&N yesterday, Border’s today–to track down the nominees. And what did I find? Well, none of the above.
When I worked at B&N a decade ago, we had a halfway decent “local writers” shelf–it was too bad that books from Graywolf or Coffee House or Milkweed, by writers with a good local following and a distinctive local flavor, were put into the ghetto, but at least they were there. No more; the local shelf at B&N was made up of coffee-table picture books of the North Shore, and I couldn’t even find a local shelf at Border’s. And none of the books could be found shelved with the rest of the fiction–I even checked the genre shelves. Unless there’s been a sudden run on them–which, in Eden Prairie and Bloomington, I find somewhat unlikely–I’m suspicious that the Minnesota Book Awards nominees have never graced the shelves of the big chain stores in Minnesota. And that’s really a shame.
There’s been a run of high-end restaurant closings in Minneapolis lately. In her article on the situation, Dara Moskowitz of the City Pages muses that these restaurants “have been engaging in an experiment to pay the full, real, unsubsidized costs for food, and it killed them”–by buying local produce and paying a living wage, these restaurants couldn’t compete on price with the “Quick Cafe” national chains, even if they could compete (and win handily) on quality. And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that something of the same thing has happened with the loss of independent booksellers, at least in this metropolis: Bound to Be Read and Odegard’s devoted a good amount of space to high-quality, locally-grown literature, but they couldn’t compete with the economy of scale the megastores could do on the bland fare everyone else is eating from sea to shining sea. The MBA is a way to, just maybe, make good local authors a little better known, but if a bookseller can’t place their books in the hands of someone ready to read them, the opportunity is lost.
But I won’t despair, nor be deterred. There are still some great little independent shops (emphasis on little–that may be what keeps them alive): Common Good Books, Micawber’s, and BirchBark Books are all likely to carry a couple of these titles. And I’m hopeful that the library will have a couple on the shelf (what with the Friends supporting the awards and all). Books this good are worth the extra effort needed to find them.
Three cullings for today:
There’s a new on-line lit mag in the neighborhood! Check out TorkStar–you won’t be disappointed.
