The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair

The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair was a different kettle of fish. Rain Taxi chose a new venue, the elegant St. Paul Union Depot, and it was definitely a warmer and classier spot than the previous location in the eco-building on the state fairgrounds. I was told that the depot also has better facilities for author events. I don’t know much about that because I hadn’t heard of any of the authors and didn’t attend any of those events.

There was general agreement among the people I talked to that the parking at the new site is terrible. It’s also difficult to get something to eat quickly. A third strike against the new venue is that the room isn’t really big enough to host the event. It was so crowded that as I moved down the aisles, I spent more time plotting out and negotiating a route through the throng than I did looking at the books.

Then again, maybe that’s just as well. I don’t really need any new books.

And as far as I know, the Rain Taxi folks might have been pleased as punch at how the day went.

The first person I chatted with on my stroll through the crowd was Marguerite Ragnow, whom I’d never met before. She’s the curator of the James Ford Bell Library, where I took one of my last classes before dropping out of grad school in 1978. I knew she’d know the former curator Carol Urness, with whom I reconnected recently and worked on a book with a few years ago. Marguerite proudly showed me a dazzling book that the Bell Library published just this last year, featuring illustrations from books in the collection in spectacular color. I was impressed. We discussed the work of a pioneer in digitalizing maps whose name neither of us could quite remember: David something. (It came to me just now—David Rumsey.) And that was the extent of my contact with actual books.

I spent the rest of the time dodging attendees and reconnecting with old friends. Near the far end of the central aisle I ran into Meleah Maynard, a seasoned freelance writer who introduced me a quarter century ago to Eric Loreberer, editor of Rain Taxi and impresario behind the fest, Recently retired, she told me a bit about the delights and challenges of dealing with all that free time.

While we were chatting, poet Norita Dittberner-Jax spotted us and came over to say hi. She’d recently been in Paris with her three children. “I know,” I said, “I saw the photos you posted. Hilary and I haven’t been there since 1989. I was inspired!”

I’m often in communication with Annie Klessig, who does the metadata and many other things at Bookmobile. I was impressed with her shirt, with said METADATA in fanciful white letters across the front. “I like that tee shirt,” I told her.

“It’s Metallica,” she said, grinning. I looked again.

“No. It says ‘metadata.’”

“I mean the FONT. This is the Metallica font. You know, the heavy metal band?”

“Ah, now I get it.”

I was going to tell her about the black tee shirt I have that says “bookslinger” in white letters across the front. I’m sure it’s a collector’s item, but I haven’t been able to get into it in thirty-five years, and I’m not one for black. 

Down at the Nodin Press booth, where I’d volunteered to cover for Norton during his lunch break, who should pop up but Rod Richards, recently retired from his post as a Unitarian minister. Rod and I were in the same writers’ group back in the 80s. He later took over the small-press distributor Bookslinger before moving to California with his wife, Hanje, and becoming a man of the cloth.

“Are you still writing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how I might fit into this scene again,” he said, perhaps a little wistfully.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve honed your style writing sermons,” I said.

“One a week for thirteen years.”

At one point, standing behind the Nodin Press table, I noticed two young women looking carefully at Freya Manfred’s memoir, Raising Twins. When they looked up I could see why. “We’re identical twins,” one of them giggled.

“But you’re two inches taller than your sister,” I protested.

“Yes, but my sister is two minutes older than me.”

Norton has gathered a fine collection of spirits together under the Nodin Press imprint, and I’ve had the pleasure of helping them produce their books while hovering on the fringes of the ensemble from time to time. I’m sure there were similar congeries of kindred spirits gathered here and there throughout the hall. Conventions are like that. And book people are like that, readers and writers alike, looking for recognition, perhaps, but more importantly, for a bit of camaraderie.

Samuel Johnson once wrote:

The transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendor, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

I haven’t found that to be true, perhaps because I’ve already gotten to know the authors I’m chatting with a little. I mentioned to poet Phil Bryant, a jazz fan like me, that I was heading down to the Dakota in a few days to hear Joshua Redman, and we discovered in the course of conversation that we share certain reservations about Redman’s sometime accompanist Brad Mehldau—a little too spacy, arbitrary, abstract?

A few minutes later, after she’d recovered from the shock of learning I was an Oxfordian (though an indifferent one, not a fanatic), Joyce Sutphen was reciting a lengthy passage from Twelfth Night. I could barely hear her over the din, but as I listened, I was reminded of how much of the richness of the Bard’s words is lost in performance. You really have to study it line by line to appreciate it fully.

Everyone knows this, I guess. But it’s also true that the dynamic impact of his dramas never comes through fully when you’re alone in a room struggling to act out the play inside your head, pondering the action line by line.

Mastering the ins and outs of the man’s work can be a lifelong task, and I simply don’t have the inclination. Give me Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamet, Olivier’s Richard III, Stanley Tucci’s Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Verdi’s Otello, and I’ll be content.

Norton was back from lunch, and I was deep in conversation with Joyce’s partner, Walt, when I suddenly remembered that I’d parked illegally. Sure, I’d paid. But the protocol required that I enter my license number into the screen at the kiosk. I couldn’t quite remember it, but I didn’t feel like walking all the way back to my car to doublecheck. I knew I was close. Would anyone really check? If so, would thy give me bonus points for effort?

I arrived back at the car twenty minutes later. My guess had been wrong—not RYJ 568 but RYJ 679. But the parking lot gods had spared me. 

The book gods seem to be in my corner, too.

Tariffs on Italian Pasta? Che Palle?

It was with great consternation that the editors of Macaroni read the headline:

        Tariffs on Pasta from Italy Set to Soar

While that primitive and classic starch, macaroni, has seldom been referred to directly in the pages of this blog in recent years, the “concept” of macaroni, elegant yet cheap, foreign yet common enough, capable of assuming a thousand unexpected shapes, foundation for a countless array of exotic sauces, is present in every issue, every blog.

Under the new Trump plan, Italian pasta-makers will face an astounding 107 percent tariff.

For American consumers, this won’t matter much. Only twelve percent of the pasta sold in the US comes from Italy. North Dakota might well be considered the heartland of durham and hard red spring wheat, the crop from which the best pasta is typically made. It’s true, the Creamettes building in the Minneapolis warehouse district is now filled with condos and apartments. But look at the shelves at Lund’s or Byerly’s and you’ll be reassured that the price of most pasta isn’t going the change much. Barilla sounds Italian, for example, but it’s made in the U.S.  

Considering the modest chunk of U.S. market share it commands, it’s hard to accuse Italy of “dumping” its pasta here. And it's also hard to imagine why Trump would play such a dirty trick on his favorite fascist colleague, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whom he recently introduced at an event as “a beautiful young woman …”. But anyone who’s trying to “understand” Trump's motives as rooted in anything other than the perverse joy of flinging large objects around the room is on a fool’s errand.

Shipments of pasta impounded in Naples

The Washington Post has reported that “the new duties would hit roughly half of Italy's $780 million pasta exports to the United States, including 90% of its more expensive premium pastas.”  So it appears that the U.S. Commerce Department is finally “putting the screws” on the American upper class for a change.

World Pasta Day, October 25, has come and gone. Unaware that a pasta war was brewing, Hilary and I fortuitously took advantage of a two-for-one sale at Byerly’s recently and stocked up. And we already had a few packages in the pantry.

Here’s a quick and easy recipe.

Pasta in Anchovy Sauce

½ lb spaghetti

salt

1 can anchovy fillets, minced

2 cloves garlic, chopped

¼ cup olive oil

3 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons dry bread crumbs

Drop the spaghetti into 4 or 5 quarts boiling water.

Place the anchovies, garlic, oil, and butter in a skillet over low heat, stirring and mashing, until the ingredients form a fairly smooth sauce. Add the bread crumbs and cook 2 or 3 minutes longer, allowing the bread crumbs to brown.

Drain the spaghetti when done. Add it to the pan with the anchovy sauce and toss over low heat until the spaghetti is well coated. Serve immediately.

Meditation on Peaks

I suppose those maps you see in the newspapers and online showing areas of “peak leaf color” serve a purpose. But anyone who spends a lot of time outdoors is likely to notice that the show begins in early September and goes on for several months. By early November the basswood tree in our front yard is bare while the silver maple out back is still green, though it’s looking a little pale. The branches of the sugar maple nearby spread their brilliant—I would almost say buttery—yellow leaves above the garden. Meanwhile, the Norway maple that I can see from where I sit here at the computer is kaput.

The concept of “peak” color begins to sound misleading and even misguided.

I’ve raked the front yard three or four times by now. It’s an excuse to get out into the cool and marvelous afternoons, and say hi to a few passing dogwalkers perhaps. Besides, our weekly yard waste pickups run 'til Thanksgiving. That bin can’t handle everything, but it helps.

I am amused repeatedly by the fact that if I rake half of the yard one day, the next day the leaves will once again be distributed evenly over the entire expanse. How can that be? As I rake, I ponder whether the effort of raking lightly three or four times is equivalent to the effort that would be required to rake the entire yard only once after all the trees are bare. I’m not terribly interested in the answer to this question, however. The best time to rake is when you feel like raking.

I have also been in the habit of grinding up the leaves with a lawn mower. They say it’s good for the grass.

* * *

Whatever else it may be, autumn is peak walking season. Fresh cool air, low sun, few birds. And yes, the color. Grabbing the fading light while we can, then home to a fire in the fireplace, perhaps. It’s the same cozy, and perhaps slightly melancholy, feeling, year after year.

The biologist Rene Dubos explains:

On the one hand, the external manifestations of human existence change continuously and at an increasing rate under the influence of social and technological innovations. On the other hand, man’s anatomical structures, physiological pro­cesses, and psychological urges remain in phase with the cosmic conditions that prevailed when Homo sapiens acquired his biological identity.

Though we may live in cities, in other words, we re­spond to changes in our environment the same way the Neanderthals did. Nor, in Dubos’s view, are our seasonal moods driven entirely by changes in light.

The behavioral patterns associated with the sea­sons cannot entirely be accounted for by changes in temperature or in the luminosity of sky. They have their seat in the genetic constitution and originate from a time in the evolutionary past when man lived in such direct contact with na­ture that he could survive only if his bodily functions and his mental responses were pre­cisely geared to the sea­sonal rhythms of nature and the availability of re­sources.

I don’t see how genetics can entirely account for the immediate emotional impact of mer­curial fluctuations in air pressure, cloud cover, tem­perature, or light, however. When I step out onto the deck on a cool autumn morning, sights, sounds, and smells that weren’t there even a few days ago incite me to rhapsodize. Low light, frost on the deck, dew in the long pale grass, and the chrysanthemums, which the Chinese associate with the beauty and melancholy of the season:

           I remember, when I was young,

How easily my mood changed from sad to gay.

If I saw wine, no matter the season,

Before I drank it, my heart was already glad.

               But now that age comes,

A moment of joy is harder and harder to get.

And always I fear that when I am quite old

The strongest liquor will leave me comfortless.

Therefore I ask you, late chrysanthemum-flower,

At this sad season why do you bloom alone?

Though well I know that it was not for my sake,

Taught by you, for a while I will open my face.

                               —Po Chü-i, (812)

The penultimate line of this little gem, in which the poet acknowledges the radical separation between his fate and the ebb and flow of his circumstances, seals its modest beauty.

      

Blue Moon – the Film

The last days of lyricist Lorenz Hart weren’t pretty ones. He’d penned the lyrics for numerous Broadway hits including “Blue Moon,” Ship Without a Sail," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Falling in Love with Love," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "He Was Too Good to Me," "I Could Write a Book," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "Isn't It Romantic?" "It Never Entered My Mind," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Thou Swell" and "With a Song in My Heart." He was overflowing with ingenious phrases, tending toward the humorous, the satirical, and the self-depreciatory, making him the perfect collaborator for the often shmaltzy tunesmith Richard Rodgers, six years his junior. 

But Larry was unreliable, difficult to work with. He drank, he slept in, he missed appointments. When Rodgers proposed a new musical called “Oklahoma!,” Hart rejected it, considering it utter cornball. So Rodgers moved ahead with a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who hadn't written a hit since Showboat, a decade earlier.

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater focuses on one particular evening: the opening night of Oklahoma! Hart attends the show with his mother, then hurries down to the bar nearby where the reception is set to take place. In the course of the evening he chats with the worldly-wise bartender, the young soldier at the piano, and E. B. White (who happens to be sitting at a table nearby.) He tells the bartender about his “girlfriend,” a attractive coed twenty years his junior, and the language gets crude. She’ll be arriving soon. Hart has promised to introduce her to Rodgers.

Guests start to trickle in from the theater, including Hammerstein and Rodgers himself. By this time Hart has had a few drinks, and he’s getting slightly manic. He congratulates Hammerstein, then Rodgers, things remain cordial, and Rodgers even goes so far as to suggest a new collaboration with Hart, an update of the duo’s first show, now fifteen years in the past.

OK, Hart replies, but why not do a new show? A satire about Marco Polo. Four hours long. “We’ll skewer everything and everybody …. “

It’s painful to watch the evening unfold. Ethan Hawke inhabits the role of Hart with all the exuberance and pathos he can muster, but it’s never fun to watch an alcoholic head down that slippery slope to inebriation. Andrew Scott, in the role of Rodgers, nails the complex blend of gratitude, affection, courtesy, and distaste that the songwriter feels for his one-time mentor, collaborator, and friend. And Margaret Qualley is perfect as the worldly-wise yet strangely innocent ingénue who’s truly fond of her much older and much more famous friend, though she doesn’t care for him “in that way.”

It isn’t difficult to guess who’s going to get the girl.

But that's not the point of the film. Linklater wanted to bring to life a fascinating and dreadful moment in the history of American popular culture, and in that he's succeeded. 

It almost makes you want to stream Oklahoma! again. 

___________________

For deeper insights into the art and milieu of the Great American Songbook, I would highly recommend Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. For an almost academic look at the lyricists of the era, including forty-odd pages on Hart himself, it might be worthwhile checking out The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia.   

 

Limits of the Known: David Roberts

The cover of the book shows us a megalith sticking up into the sky with snow-covered peaks dimly visible far below. It looks almost fake; something out of Photoshop by way of Lord of the Rings.  It happens to be the Great Trango Tower, a peak in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. (I looked it up.) At first glance we might fail to notice the two tiny men standing on the narrow patch of flat rock on top. When we do, our attention is likely to be drawn immediately to the almost sheer walls dropping away on every side. How did those guys get up there? How are they going to get down? Call it a moment of minor frisson.

The book’s publicists have made an effort to characterize it as a tour de force of derring-do on the order of John Krakauer’s best-selling Into Thin Air. But in Limits of the Known journalist and self-styled “adventurer” David Roberts blends three or four elements into a robust if uneven whole.

In the early going Roberts shares stories of his youthful climbs in Alaska, which have become legendary, emphasizing how remote and daring they actually were. He more than occasionally compares these “light and fast” expeditions, during which he and a small group of friends were often out of communication with the outside world for weeks at a time, to more recent expeditions that are logistically complex and almost invariably rely on contact with support teams­­—and sometimes the world at large—on a daily basis.

“It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor,” he writes, “a stage on which latter-day imposters try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery.”

Roberts gnashes his teeth a little at the fact that later in his career he more than occasionally earned his living as a journalist providing copy for these transmissions.

Subsequent sections are devoted to the history and current state of different realms of exploration: mountain-climbing, river-running, caving, Arctic exploration. Roberts draws here on his years writing for Outside and other magazines, but he also spends considerable time detailing the early history of these “sports”: Shipton in the Karakorum, Mick and Dan Leahy in New Guinea, Nansen in the Arctic. For a reader like me, who reads a mountaineering yarn only occasionally, these straight-ahead historical overviews are among the best parts of the book.

In the midst of these overviews, Roberts punctuates his memoir with a blow-by-blow of his battle with throat cancer, describing each phase and issue in excruciating medical detail, almost as if the illness were an indominable mountain peak to be faced and somehow overcome. It’s not a pleasant picture.

Only in the last few pages of the book does Roberts say much about his domestic situation. It seems he and his wife led independent lives. At one point he writes:

“I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my effort to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.”

Though many parts of the book are engaging, it strikes me that in his attempt to get at the “core” Roberts has failed. In the book’s final pages he uses phrases like “vocation” and “ultimate things” in passing, but he shies away from probing what those concepts might mean. (Well, it isn't a theology text!) (Well, why not?) Nor does he give sufficient emphasis, in summing up his life and career, to the value of the pleasure he’s brought to the thousands of readers who, sharing his love of adventure, have relished his many popular articles and books.

What, in the end, is the value of adventuring? It can hardly be merely to bring back a report of a place no Westerner has visited before. It needs to be a good story, involving risk, and effort, and fear, and fortitude as well. This tussle of emotions is a critical element no less that a heart-expanding view from a lofty peak.

Though I haven’t read it, I suspect that Roberts’ first book, the now classic The Mountain of My Fear (1968), covers this ground admirably.

Does such adventuring bring us closer to the divine? Maybe so. But it’s usually a fleeting sensation, devilishly difficult to capture in words.

Those who can do so have reaffirmed the value of art.

No Kings

Yes, we went down to the “No Kings” event downtown yesterday, and it was awesome. Colorful, peaceful, joyous. The speakers were slightly rousing—with the exception of firebrand Keith Ellison, who was in a position to say “We’re suing the government and will meet them in court on November 5 —and the music was ho-hum. But the vibe was tremendous.

The space never got claustrophobic, yet there were so many people there that a half-hour after the actual march started, no one in our line of sight had moved, simply because they had started the marchers from the other end of the park.

I will be the first to admit that I was lukewarm about attending the event, out of laziness and the thought that “one person more or less won’t make a difference.” I know, I know. If everyone said that there wouldn’t have been a march.

Our plan was to park on the north side of the Mississippi in old St. Anthony and walk across the stone arch bridge to the gathering site. Hilary and I often park there during the film festival, but we drove down in the morning to double-check the parking signs on University Avenue and the side-streets nearby.

Back home, I went so far as to pay in advance for parking at the St. Anthony Ramp, just in case all the on-street parking was taken.

A friend of ours stopped at our house and rode down with us, and we met other friends at a coffeeshop two blocks from the park. By the time we reached the park, it was jammed with people as far as the eye could see. The weather was stunning. The signs were clever and also heartfelt. It was encouraging to see so many young people amid the crowd.

Marxists and terrorists?

Did our presence there make a difference? Did the march itself make a difference? Who’s to say? In his Substack column this morning economist Paul Krugman, my guru on all things political, had this to say:

“There is a solid body of research by political scientists like Erica Chenoweth about the effects of civil resistance -- nonviolent shows of opposition to those controlling or attempting to control the government. The clear answer from this research is that demonstrations like No Kings Day can make a big difference. They are a show of the depth and popularity of a movement, reassuring those who are opposed to a nation’s direction that many, many others share that opposition.

“Moreover, if a broad cross-section of society is represented in the demonstrations — and the crowds I saw consisted of a mix of seniors, middle-aged liberals, families with children, students and other unthreatening types — they can induce defections from the ruling regime, because the protestors can’t easily be ‘othered,’ portrayed as strange and alien. So protests with a wide base of support can ultimately pierce the regime’s bubble. In fact, in the aftermath of the massive scale and breadth of the demonstrations, the MAGA propaganda machine has gone remarkably quiet, although Mike Johnson has claimed that the demonstrators were all Marxists.”

You can read the entire column here.

 

The Nobel in Economics – Creative Destruction?

Reading over descriptions of the discoveries on which the newest Nobel awards were based, I was struck by two things. 1) The “discoveries” were pretty obvious. 2) The frequent use of the term “creative destruction” in describing those discoveries was a mistake.

As to the first point, let me hasten to add that economists often win awards for nailing down with mathematical precision the necessity and significance of things that are obvious. There’s nothing wrong with that. The publication being cited as critical to the current argument appeared in 1992. It's been around for a while, and has proven its worth..

But my dad, who spent almost his entire career as an analytical chemist at 3M, told me decades ago that 3M envisioned a three-year window of profitability for the new products it developed. From that point on, the Japanese or the Chinese would have figured out how to make the same thing cheaper. Hence the need for ceaseless innovation. In the business world, it falls under the category of "common knowledge."

On the other hand, the application of the term “creative destruction” to this process is simply a mistake. New products don’t “destroy” older products. They merely render them less popular, and sometimes obsolete. In many cases the older products retain a niche market among those who are nostalgic, or more interested in quality than in saving money.

The phrase “creative destruction” has a long history. Schumpeter popularized it in the field of economics almost a century ago. But the first time I can recall hearing it was in an episode of Northern Exposure (1992) during which Chris in the Morning hatches a plan to fling a cow. He later wimps out on the project and Maurice (the astronaut) gives him a dressing down for doing so. In the course of the discussion, Chris is reminded of Picasso’s oft-quoted remark: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

And that’s about the level of culture at which the phrase should remain, I think. It sounds bold, and the idea of destroying things appeals to many, especially those who aren’t very creative.

But what’s really going on when things develop isn't destruction but transformation.

It’s too bad Marx so badly misunderstood, sullied, and besmirched the concept of dialectic, because that’s the concept at work here. Maybe it's time we revived the associated concept, so dear to Hegel, of “aufheben.” Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Aufheben  or Aufhebung  is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate." The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend". In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel in his exposition of dialectics, and in this sense is translated mainly as "sublate."

One analysis of the recent Nobel’s laureate’s work that I read goes like this:

 Economic growth in industrialised nations such as Britain and Sweden has been remarkably stable in recent centuries. However, below the surface, the reality is anything but stable. In the US, for example, over ten per cent of all companies go out of business every year, and just as many are started. Among the remaining businesses, a large number of jobs are created or disappear every year; even if these figures are not as high in other countries, the pattern is the same.

Aghion and Howitt realised that this transformative process of creative destruction, in which companies and jobs continually disappear and are replaced, is at the heart of the process that leads to sustained growth. A company that has an idea for a better product or a more efficient means of production can outcompete others to become the market leader. However, as soon as this happens, it creates an incentive for other companies to further improve the product or production method and so climb to the top of the ladder.

The process itself is easy enough to understand. The fallacy here is in imagining that things are being destroyed to make room for new things. Yes, people lose their jobs, companies go out of business. But the important thing—the expertise those workers possess—remains alive and active in the workers themselves, who make use of it when they get rehired at the start-ups that have been driving the less innovative firms out of business.

As Hegel envisioned it, this is a process of negating and rising above, while retaining and expanding on whatever remains useful of the older process or vision. Plenty of other phrases could be used, and would be more appropriate, than "creative destruction," to describe this process, though they would have quite the same journalistic zing. 

I suspect our newest Nobel laureates would agree.