A Local Row

Emily has moved to Oregon

2009-05-04T20:38:00.001-07:00

I no longer live in Iowa City, therefore, this blog has lost most of its purpose. If you're still interested in following my work, you can read about my new adventures in Salem, OR on my new blog, Desperately Seeking Salem.

Heavenly Lit

2009-03-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

Absolutely LOVED the latest novel by Keith Donohue, which is being published this month.

I had picked up his first book, The Stolen Child, about three years ago at Prairie Lights and read about three-fourths of it before passing it along to my husband (who devoured it). Not sure what made me lose the thread in that first book, though I imagine it has something to do with it being primarily about boy's/men and men's lives. One little lost reader couldn't have hurt Donohue much, since he sold a lot of books, got a lot of attention, and quickly churned out this new one, Angels of Destruction.

And what a one it is.

The book opens with the arrival of a young girl named Norah on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn, a lonely widow whose husband has long died and whose only daughter ran away with a 1970s era radical ten years before. Materializing, it would seem, out of thin air, Norah presents herself as the antidote to Margaret’s unabiding sadness. Together, they concoct a story that Norah is her granddaughter, the daughter of Margaret’s long lost daughter Erica.

Very quickly, Norah establishes that she is no ordinary little girl. She speaks in beautifully crafted sentences, has a vocabulary to rival those of most college professors and drops prophetic bombs every time she is drawn into a meaningful conversation. She tracks animals with ease. She creates miracles that astound her classmates and anger their parents.

Is she an angel? Is she a Stepford child? Is she a demon? Angels of Destruction is a thriller wrapped in a ghost story, wrapped in a contemporary fable, wrapped in a fairy tale. One delicious Turducken.

Lovely Bones author coming to Iowa City

2009-02-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

I first read The Lovely Bones in the fall of 2002, at a time when I was living in Germany and didn't want to be. I had just fallen in love, I had just moved half a world away from my future husband, and I was really bummed out from having just read The Corrections (seriously, every time I picked it up I spiraled further into despair. So I wasn't prepared to like it. And I didn't. I hated how ubiquitous her novel was -- every store, every shelf, even in Germany. I hated the set-up: dead girl telling her story from heaven. I hated that a little girl had to get raped and die for people to buy a book.

Time has clearly weathered my feelings towards The Lovely Bones. I picked it up again, as well as some of her other books, to prepare a mini-assessment of her for corridorbuzz.com and found myself enrapt with Sebold's storytelling abilities and the power of her characters' voices.

Well, Alice Sebold is coming to Iowa City, and she's not even being brought here by the workshop. If I were anywhere near Iowa City next week I would go and see this brave woman.

Let's all read about Japanese internment

2009-02-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

Getting through Sandra Dallas's Tallgrass for my review for Corridorbuzz.com was a bit of a slog. I kept waiting for this book to take off, but it instead got boggled down in little, smalltown dramas that detracted from the main event: there are Japanese prisoners in a camp located right next to your farm!

I admire Dallas for not sensationalizing this story, though. As a journalist, I can't imagine having such weighty material at hand -- the internment of Japanese-Americans on our own soil after the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- and not delving into those gritty details. Instead, she has created a family portrait that explores how fear and intolerance of the prisoners spreads like a virus through a rural community. That's an angle that makes this a good choice for the Linn County Reads program.

I think I've waited long enough to learn about what really happened in this dark chapter. You're reading it here: I vow to read Lauren Kessler's Stubborn Twig.

More bad news for art in Iowa City

2009-02-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

Looks like the University of Iowa Museum of Art can't seem to get a break. The Chicago Tribune has just reported that about 2,400 books from the arts collection that had been in storage after last summer's devastating floods were soaked last night when a sprinkler head froze.

I'm no stranger to pipes freezing in Iowa. When I was living in the communist housing block off Lincoln Ave on the Health campus, the pipes in our first floor apartment froze for a few weeks every winter. Every February I would invite the maintenance people to come fix our drain, and one would arrive to try to unfreeze the pipe leading from our tub.

It can't be easy to take care of all that art when it's scattered in locations throughout the state and beyond. My heart clenches every time the elements destroys old books. Works on paper, even in bound form, are exceptionally fragile.

The next big thing in bookselling: Me

2009-02-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

I was hanging out at Cannon Beach Book Company on the Oregon Coast this weekend when a couple walked up to the cashier to ask about the new Widow Clicquot bio.

"Is this good?" They asked? No one had read it.

Well let me tell you about the Veuve, as we like to call her in my family. My sister Ashley is one mean champagne drinker. She's recently attached herself to a sparkling Chinese man who boasts the same. So yes, I've read The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled it.

Here's what I told them:

"If you like champagne, it's required reading. There isn't a lot of source material out there on the widow, so some of what the author writes is speculation and oral tradition, but the stories in the book are the stuff of entrepreneurial myth. It's got fantastic information about the innovations within and rise of the champagne industry." Yadda yadda yadda.

I also warned them that the book is 2/3 text, 1/3 research references. I felt kind of cheated when I got to page 198 of 300 and realized I was done.

Anyway, I sold my first hardback nonfiction at an independent bookstore. Paul Ingram would be so proud!

Clocking in near perfection

2009-02-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

As a book reviewer, I find writing raves and rants is far easier than writing middling pieces about so-so books. Call this the book-reviewer's lament: our lives would be much more fun if all books were either rock-your-face-off good or slit-your-wrists bad.

I didn't realize until I read my review of Paul Harding's Tinkers about two weeks after I had written it what a complete and utter rave it was.

Tinkers is about a man dying -- his last moments and days spent drifting in and out of delirium as he tries to piece together and make sense of his life. He revisits moments, mostly small ones, and in doing so, finds a way to reconnect with his estranged father.

I don't remember particularly enjoying the story of this book -- it's a man's book about manly things -- but the craftsmanship just blew me away. It's prose that leaves you breathless, and faceless.

Olive you.

2009-02-13T13:14:00.001-08:00

In my household, we scour consignment shops for old furniture to love and fill with junk -- and the first thing I always look for is dovetailing. Maybe it's the industrial arts student in me -- I never did get over learning how to use a miter saw -- but when I see dovetailing, my heart leaps.

I don't generally expect the same feats of construction from my literature, but I have found it in Elizabeth Strout's much-hailed new book Olive Kitteredge, a collection of thirteen interwoven stories about a small town in New England. The stories plumb the quiet dramas of several families in the town, but all have the same red thread weaving through them -- the character Olive Kitteredge.

Now, we see Olive at various points in her life, and she isn't always pretty, in deed or in character. Most of the time, she is just plain mean: a curmudgeonly, judgmental, bitter woman who engages with her neighbors and family members, it sometimes seems, just to have more to be angry about. She nags her only son to the point of exasperation, she visits a neighbor who has weathered hardship just to get a taste of some good ole schadenfreude. Anytime something happens to a character in this book, Olive acts like it's just the universe conspiring to confirm that she already knows everything.

And yet, Olive Kitteredge is almost entirely lovable. She may not have a lot of nice things to say, but what she says is generally profound and hilarious. Or as one of the minor characters in the book puts it, "she says weird things that have a lot of meaning."

My only complaint with Olive Kitteredge would be that I actually wanted more Olive.

Lovely new book set in Iowa City

2009-02-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

Just finished local author Stephen Lovely's debut novel Irreplaceable, an exploration of life and grief in the aftermath of tragedy. If you are an Iowa Cityan, you might know the lovely author from his work with the Iowa Young Writer's Studio (the book has some really hilarious jabs at the occupation of student essay grader -- anyone who's been a writer in Iowa City knows someone, or is the someone who has graded those dreaded essay portions at the ACT offices in town.

I responded most to the author's empathy for his characters -- all people left behind and forced to go on after a young woman dies in a biking accident and her heart gets donated to a stranger in Chicago. Lovely even had me feeling bad -- if only kind of -- for the pretty unlikable guy who hit her with his truck. Also, kudos to me for avoiding any puns about this book being all heart in the review I wrote for corridorbuzz.com.

Once Upon a Tile

2009-02-06T14:57:00.000-08:00

The tiles created by Iranian-American artist Jafar Mogadam are exploding fractals of color, gigantic puzzles of competing symbols and forms drawing on artistic traditions from around the globe.

But compared to their creator, his works border on the staid.

Mogadam is a hybrid of Iowa and Iran. He wears a trucker’s cap. He listens to mystical Sufi music. Together with his wife Lynne, he restores prairie on their Riverside, Iowa farm. But he spends most of his time painting tiny worlds of geometric shapes and lines, meticulous Persian and Islamic designs on tiles, sometimes taking half a year to complete one work.

Mogadam will be speaking about his work at a free event at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art on February 28.

There are few artists working in Iowa that would compel me to drive an hour to see them in person, but Mogadam is one of them. Don't miss seeing this little firecracker of a man. You can see a slideshow I created a few years ago of him and his art here.

Have you heard the joke about the Pollock?

2009-02-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

Word at CityView is that Iowa legislators are once again throwing around the idea of selling Jackson Pollock's seminal work "Mural," in the permanent collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Let's hope that quiet muttering becomes open discussion involving everyone in Iowa who cares about art.

Or may I suggest having fans of "Mural" stage an art-in at the museum? Oh wait, it was flooded out last summer. So selling the mural would be akin to throwing out a flood refugee in addition to plundering your state heritage. "Mural" is the only piece of art in Iowa that draws visitors from around the world.

Sorry, that wasn't actually a joke. These are serious times when university art museums are closing to bolster dwindling endowments.

Paul on Last Night at the Lobster

2009-02-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

Worst. Week. Ever.

2009-01-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

As if news about the economy weren't bad enough. As if the stories of the paradigm shifts in book publishing weren't bad enough. As if the possible demise of my favorite books publication weren't bad enough, John Updike died yesterday.

Let me tell you a little of what John Updike means to me. My mother took me to my first-ever author reading at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA in -- I think -- 1995. Updike was soft-spoken, strangely charming, and had obvious skin problems (he suffered from psoriasis his whole life). That night, he read a short story about a swimming pool that filled with dead dragonflies with neglect. But it was actually a story about a waning marriage, the metaphor being apt but not obvious.

My mother had been taking me to lectures for years -- including an infamous attendance at a talk on France's Chartres cathedral in which the lecturer illuminated EVERY SINGLE STAINED GLASS window while I fell asleep on my mother's lap (I was 12). I'd been to some real winners since then -- shark lady Eugenie Clark, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey -- but Updike, man, he had me at "The Orphaned Swimming Pool." I sat in the audience enrapt. As I looked out over the crowd, I saw my 11th grade English teacher Mr. Sclichter, one of the most miserable men I have ever known, a man so lazy as to use the same lesson plans from 1978, a man so contemptable that he believes no good literature was written after Bech is Back, a man who came this close (fingers pinched) to turning me off books, an impossible curmudgeon who was convinced that no interpretation of Winesberg, Ohio was acceptable but his own. Our eyes met. In class later that week he looked at me, smiled, and said: "wasn't Updike GREAT."

Yeah. He was.

Story in the Iowan

2009-01-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Here's an image of the print layout of the labyrinth story that was just published in the Iowan. I'm loving the pic of Stan and Man, my retirees who built the labyrinth in Waterloo:

Picking a quote with mentor Robin Hemley

2009-01-06T11:01:00.001-08:00

Last spring I worked with writer and Nonfiction Writing Program Director Robin Hemley of the University of Iowa. I had interviewed Robin in the spring of 2007 for a forthcoming profile in Poets & Writers magazine and was impressed with the way he talked about his life and his writing projects. So I took nonfiction writing with him.

Before the semester ended, our class met at the UI Center for the Book and learned how to use one of the center's printing presses. We each chose a quote to typeset. I chose the above quote from a Mitch Hedberg comedy routine about koala bears.

"My apartment is infested with koala bears. Its the cutest infestation ever. Much better than cockroaches. I turn the lights on and the koalas scatter. I'm like, come back! I want to hold one of you, feed you a leaf." (My quote is a paraphrase).

For my birthday this year my husband decided to illustrate all of the quotes.

Here's another one that turned out great, from my fellow writer David Peters:

Labyrinth photos up

2009-01-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

Some of the images that accompanied my article on labyrinths in Iowa are up on the site. All of them are copyright Davenport photographer Shuva Rakim.

#1 Thing I Like Best: Older Iowans

2009-01-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

I like a man who can look at a patch of dirt and see the potential for something great. I like a man who can joke about death and manure. Mostly, I like retired Iowans and the crazy, inspired ways they spend their time.

I've written about labyrinths in Iowa before, but you can consider this my magnum opus on the subject, a six-page glossy spread in the January issue of The Iowan, framed around two retired Iowans, Manley Orum and Stanley McCadam. If you can't pick up a copy, you can read the online version of "Contemplating the Landscape," with pics forthcoming.

All you need is love... to create great stories

2009-01-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

Siberia is nobody's idea of a destination — not now, and certainly not in the 1920s, though that's where Amy Bloom's main character is trying to get to in her latest novel "Away." Bloom loosely based the character of Lilian on a historical record of a mute immigrant woman who walked through Alaska's wilderness determined to get home to Russia.

You can read my full review of "Away" at Corridorbuzz.com.

Away makes a literary leap uncommon to most novels about the American experience: that there is no greater reason than love to give all that other stuff up.

You Will Enjoy Great Book.

2008-12-31T08:12:00.001-08:00

Not sure how I missed the publicity blitz surrounding the publication of one of my favorite New York Times' reporter's first book. As my features writing students will remember, Jennifer 8. Lee is also author of my favorite example of a trend piece, "The Man Date."

Her new-ish book is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, and it begins, fittingly?, in Iowa, home of the Powerball, with an anecdote about an unprecentedly high number of winners for an interstate lottery a few years back. The mathematically improbable number of winners perplexed many -- until those winners cited a fortune cookie as their key to windfall.

Gotta take some umbrage at Lee's clever but false turn of phrase. "No one cares if [Powerball] is located in Iowa. No one's feelings are hurt," she quotes a lottery official as saying. Then adds: "Iowa is as inoffensive as it is flat."

Inaccurate Iowa stereotypes aside... this book is a rollicking journey through the world of Chinese food and culture in America. While Lee is clearly not a food writer, she's a whiz at explaining cultural phenomena. I'm finally getting a clear picture of why my hometown of Lancaster, PA, with its sitdown Tiki Tavern and Peking Palaces, was overrun with takeout China Kings in the late 1980s.

One question for the book's designers... How can you name a book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and have a packet of soy sauce on the front? I get it graphically, I really do -- the fortune cookie is just the lynch pin among many American-Chinese hybrids, but why not put it on the cover?

Hallo Mutter, hallo Vater

2008-12-11T10:31:00.001-08:00

My husband and I met as camp counselors at the German language immersion camp Waldsee in the summer of 2001. Since then, he's been back five times (and has the plaque to show it) and I've been back three times, most recently as writer-in-residence last summer.

The fruits of all that fun are finally beginning to show in the form of some clips about the camp and summer camp experience. My piece for the Des Moines Register's Midwest Traveler column just ran in the Iowa Life section -- you can check it out here.

I've come to think there is no better place to meet a life partner than summer camp -- no better setting to see what a person is truly capable of. In Adam's case, that meant that I got to see him making pottery, working with kids, singing, speaking German, testing himself, working and playing harder than he ever had before, and all the while dressed like a bum, no pretenses there. You get paid very little to do a lot of what you love. Want some wine with that cheese? We got a summer fling that lasts forever.

2008-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

I've had a copy of Kurt Friese's book Slow Food in the Heartland for about four months and just got around to writing about it. Friese's restaurant Devotay isn't my favorite local food haunt in Iowa City -- that honor goes to the Motley Cow. But no one has been a greater local foods booster in this area than Friese. His book features mini-profiles of farmers and food artisans in the Midwest who follow sustainable practices, and it's the first book to make any assessment of the Slow Food movement in the Midwest. Despite its unfortunate cover, which printed a little dark and could have used some better fonts, Slow Food in the Heartland is worth checking out, if only to familiarize yourself with the Midwestern products you should be incorporating into your diet.

UPDATE: Obama trading at 91.6 cents on IEM

2008-11-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is trading at 91.6 cents to John McCain's 8.6 cents on the Iowa Electronic Markets. To understand how they work -- and why you should care -- check out my story here.

Fantastic Filigree

2008-10-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't read the reviews of Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home yet since I've been writing one myself for corridorbuzz.com, a new(ish) arts and culture website run by Iowa City publisher Loren Keller. Loren has been so kind to let me write about books for the site, and has started me off with Iowa City's grand dame of fiction, who has written a follow-up to her Pulitzer prize-winning epistolary novel Gilead.

Robinson's books are small on plot, large on revelatory detail, which makes reading them a slog if you're not into that kind of thing. What I responded to most in the book were the scenes in which the family suffers through dinners as polite strangers tainted by familial closeness. Here's an excerpt from the review:

"She deftly strings up scenes of familial tension, as if they were pants on a clothesline, playfully stringing more dirty laundry up in one scene while letting the line wave free and lax in the next."

My new Robinson rankings are 1).Housekeeping 2). Home 3). Gilead.

Burrito Westerns

2008-10-20T16:18:00.001-07:00

I came across a few truly outstanding student ideas while I was teaching features writing in the journalism department of the University of Iowa last summer. One of those stories just got published this month -- Mike Brownlee's "Burrito Wars," a no-holds-barred, double-pistoled lowdown on the brand wars between hometown chain Panchero's and national burrito behemoth Chipotle.

Who doesn't love a good brand war? Cue the Ennio Morricone score, this one has it all: local vs. national, dated Mexican imagery vs. industrial chic, homemade vs. outsourced tortillas, the little guy vs. the Man...

I wish all the best to both of the contenders, but everyone who knows me knows who packs my burrito.

Chipotle.

I base that decision entirely on their irreverant marketing and guacamole.

The Gospel According to Paul

2008-10-07T09:09:00.001-07:00

I've said it once before but it bears repeating: Paul Ingram is the world's best bookseller. If you don't believe me, check out what he's been doing in and around eastern Iowa to introduce lesser-known titles -- Paul's Picks -- to communities without access to independent bookstores. He calls it his "Ministry of Books."

As my parting gift to him I have written a bookbuyer's lament for the back-page of Publishers Weekly about his Ministry of Books and his uncanny ability to judge a reader by her cover. It's a little over-the-top, but hey, that's how much his spirit moves me.

Here's another place where Paul announces his current picks. He recently started writing a column for the local rag the Little Village as well, but the writing there doesn't really capture who Paul is. For that, check out the videos he has started putting on YouTube.

Imagine what would happen if one bookseller from every independent bookstore did even half of what Paul is doing.

Spotlight on Oxford, IA

2008-10-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

My man Hank Stuever of the Washington Post -- by far the best visiting professional to visit the University of Iowa J-school during my time there -- did a great write-up of the Oxford Project traveling exhibition in this week's Sunday paper. My mentor Stephen Bloom once said that newspapers from the coasts want two things from their stories about Iowa. 1. A story that turns the reader's view of Iowa on its head and 2. A story that completely reaffirms the reader's understanding of Iowa. And they need to do both at the same time.

I think Stuever's piece does even more -- it imagines a new way for people from the coasts to understand who Iowans really are, outside of the cornfields and caucuses. In other words, it is one of the first pieces of journalism that actually GETS the Oxford Project.

Here is some of Stuever on the OP:

"But this project is not precious. It is stark, almost to a point of severity. It is the Iowa that certain reporters try to bring to life every primary season in an election year, and of course fail to exactly portray while writing on the fly."

Let me gaze into my crystal ball: The Iowa Electronic Markets

2008-10-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

Last summer I spent some time interviewing day traders on the Iowa Electronic Markets, a political prediction market run by the University of Iowa whose track record in predicting presidential winners easily out-trumps traditional polls (sorry Gallup...). The story just appeared in the October issue of the Iowa Alumni Magazine.

In other words, if you want to check the real pulse of the election, check out the current IEM market standings here. It is a winner-takes all market, with each share measuring a fraction of a dollar. When I wrote the story Barack Obama was trading at 57 cents a share to McCain's 43 cents. Obama is now (today, October 3) at 74 cents to McCain's 26, meaning traders think he has a 74% chance of winning the election.

Tiny House, Big Message

2008-09-11T13:54:00.001-07:00

I've written about Iowa City message man Gregory Paul Johnson and his Small House Society before. Now it seems he is taking his show on the road with his tiny-house bromantic partner Jay Shafer, who's been on Oprah talking mini-mansions. The New York Times just did a write-up of their road trip. Author Steven Kurutz says they look like tiny birdhouses. I said they resemble a child's playhouse. I think that means that Steven Kurutz is probably 80 at heart and I'm 4.

Everyone Loves Magical Sarah

2008-09-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

My story on Sarah Prineas got reprinted with some updates on the cover of the latest issue of ArtScene Iowa. By the time I caught up with Sarah again, she was just delivering the manuscript for the second novel in her children's fantasy series, The Magic Thief. She had lost her editor and had gained a new, illustrious one at HarperCollins. I wonder if her kids know how cool their mom is. It's been my experience that they won't figure it out until they're about 26.

Notes on Camp

2008-08-30T08:36:00.001-07:00

Bad Blogger. Bad, bad blogger.

I do have a good excuse for being so lazy. I have spent the last three weeks working on assignment at a German summer camp in Bemidji, MN where I had little access to the outside world. I'm working on a major piece of reporting about the camp, where kids ages 8-18 learn German in an immersion setting that is one part Germany, one part Minnesota's North Woods, and one part fantasy world.

The above images shows a Des Moines, Iowa family choosing their German names from a name line spanned between two trees in front of the camp's "Bahnhof" or train station. (There's no actual train, but it is the equivalent of the camp's border crossing, and the place where "villagers" (no campers here) shrug off their American identities and take on a German one).

I'll post links to the stories I wrote there once they appear, but in the meantime, here's a link to the flickr site with images from the camp.

Here's the other news. We're homeless.

Husband Adam and I both graduated last spring, he in dentistry and I in journalism. I took a job as adjunct faculty in the journalism department teaching features writing for the summer. I've spent the last two years working during holiday breaks and freelancing part-time, teaching half-time and going to school while he plugged away at dental school, a place which by all accounts is the eighth circle of Hell. So we are taking a few months to travel. I know what you're going to say: in this economy? Well, we are still working out the appropriate narrative to explain to people that we want to see a little bit of the world before we tie ourselves down geographically.

So we have moved our stuff to storage, the two cats are getting shuttled to my mother's home in Lancaster, PA in a few days, and then we're off. First stop is Panama, where Adam's twin brother Jeff and his wife Foy are in their second year as Peace Corps volunteers. Their village, set in a jungle a few hours east of Panama City, is about as remote as they come.

As of yesterday, we are innoculated against typhoid, yellow fever, Hep A, and malaria. Unfortunately, there is no antidote to the scorpions as big as a fist that hide in the bedsheets there.

Update: smalltown hero Jim Hoyt

2008-08-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Got an email from Peter Feldstein, the photographer and artist who conceived the Oxford Project and whose idea it was to photograph all the residents in his tiny town. One of the subjects, Jim Hoyt, was the last living of the four soldiers who liberated Buchenwald. The story got a lot of play on cnn.com. The above photo shows a monument in Germany honoring Hoyt.

Peter Feldstein writes:

"You'll be interested to know that I received an email from a fellow in Germany who is a member of a group that researches the history of World War II. They contact veterans, meet them, and honor them. They had been looking for Jim for many years. It turns out that his records were destroyed years ago in a fire. Unfortunately they found him through his obituary on CNN.com. They sent me a picture of the monument with the names of the four men, including Jim, who were the first Americans in Buchenwald."

Oxford Project

2008-08-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Sad day. Just learned that the last living of the four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald died this week at the age of 83. James Hoyt, of Oxford Iowa, a tiny town about 16 miles west of Iowa City, never talked about the experience until my journalism professor/mentor Stephen Bloom interviewed him as part of the Oxford Project.

You can read about the project in the latest edition of ArtScene Iowa. A book on the project is coming out in September from Welcome Books.

A big piece of history died with him.

Paring down -- starting with the Pollock

2008-08-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

It's that time again -- time to throw around the idea of selling the single most expensive item in the state of Iowa: Jackson Pollock's "Mural."

Former UI Museum of Art director Howard Collinson floated the idea last fall, drawing the ire and finger wags of many people around town. Now the idea is on the table again -- this time to pay for the millions of dollars needed to restore the UI Arts Campus, which was all but destroyed in the flood last June.

Only one thing owned by the state of Iowa -- the road system -- costs more than this Pollock, which languished in the museum's basement until the late 1960s, when some enterprising curators rolled it out of storage. Over a decade before, Peggy Guggenheim, who had it hanging in her New York apartment, packed up her things and her poodles and moved to Venice, at which point she gifted it to the then president of the university.

See that painting off to the right of the Pollock with the big red dot? That's Adolph Gottlieb's Edge, my favorite work in the museum.

But let's be real. People come from around the world to Iowa to see the Pollock. It sounds a little melodramatic to say so, but to lose it would mean dooming most of the rest of the collection to obscurity.

It takes a city -- Iowa City

2008-08-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

I don't generally take on feel-good stories. As an arts and culture reporter, I like places where people collide, art that makes something happen, books that transform -- and not in the way an Oprah's book pic transforms. I like discovering who people are and why do they do what they do. I favor obsessives. I'll take funny and sad over uplifting any day of the week.

Well, have I got a feel-good story for you. For this month's Iowa Source I wrote a piece about the new documentary on Bill Sackter, the real-life character whom Mickey Rooney played in the 1982 made-for-TV movie Bill (he won a Golden Globe for the performance).

A Friend Indeed: The Bill Sackter story could easily be written off as a advocacy piece for the mentally disabled. It tells the story of a man who spent over four decades in a Minnesota mental institution before a young couple decided to adopt him and integrate him into a college town -- Iowa City, IA. This young husband was Barry Morrow, a young sociology student who eventually went on to win an Academy Award for the screenplay for Rain Man (1988).

But the film is very much a portrait of Iowa City, a place I have found to be uncommonly accepting of fuzzy-bearded, frazzled-looking homeless men who sit on the Pedestrian Mall and talk to students all day long. I don't think I've ever before felt the pride of place I had after watching this film's premiere.

I hope the film finds national distribution. It's playing at the Tipton Hardacre Film Festival this weekend, where it just took the prize for best documentary.

Mamma(s) Mia!

2008-07-21T15:34:00.001-07:00

While everyone else in the world was watching The Dark Knight, I went with my mom to see Mamma Mia. Well, sort of. See, my mom's never been to the movies by herself in her life, and I go all the time, so I suggested a date to ease our Midwest/East Coast divide. I went to Iowa City's Sycamore Mall at 1:30 Sunday afternoon, and she attended a showing a 2:30 at Penn Cinema in Lancaster, PA. So, we were watching the movie together. Kind of.

I was envisioning her sitting next to me until a cancer patient came and took her seat -- even in Iowa Mamma Mia! drew a strange crowd of young women, older couples, older women, and gay men.

Which leads me to a major problem I have with films like this. Why do they get reviewed so badly? Judging by the Tomato-meter at RottenTomatoes.com, all the middle-aged white men hated the film. Well, it turns out most of the major reviewers in this country are middle-aged white men who hate fun. Don't be hatin' on fun, A.O. Scott!

I think the last time I saw a film that was so gloriously fluffy I was in High School and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion was in the theaters. Great art? Perhaps not. But we need films we can drag our best friends too.

Here's my mom's take.

Me: Man, Pierce Brosnan can't really sing.

Mom: Well, I don't care, he can sing at me!

UPDATE: Turns out my mother-in-law was seeing Mamma Mia! at a theater in Ames at the same time.

Magic with words

2008-07-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

Sarah Prineas gave a reading to a packed room at the Iowa City Public Library today. She was a complete doll -- really connected with the audience and kept them on their toes while reading parts out of two chapters, the beginning of her book The Magic Thief and the chapter where he main character, Connwaer, turns himself into a cat. She served biscuits, which play a prominent role in the book. I spoke to some adults on my way out who seemed rather taken with her and the book. One man spoke of being particularly fascinated with the way she explains how magic works. This pic shows her writing secret messages in a Rune alphabet she created with her daughter, Maude, in some of her fans' books.

The New Yorker Writes

2008-07-14T15:34:00.001-07:00

Got this email from the New Yorker today after sending a comment about their current issue's cover (Barack and Michelle Obama as a Muslim and a Black Panther). It really lifts my spirits to see intelligent people reasoning their way out of running images that are flagrantly distasteful. Satire of satire, it seems, does not good satire make.

Writes The New Yorker:

Thank you for writing. We appreciate your comments and, if you have a question, we’ll do our best to respond. However, owing to the volume of correspondence, we cannot reply to every e-mail individually.

About this week’s issue: Our cover, “The Politics of Fear,” combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall — all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover. In this same issue you will also see that there are two very serious articles on Barack Obama inside — Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/21/080721taco_talk_hertzberg), and Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word reporting piece on the candidate's political education and rise in Chicago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza).

Salad fit for a queen

2008-07-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

The season of eight weddings has begun. And while we still have no Internet at our place, we do have a stove, and stock and stomachs. We have spent the past two weeks starting a new job (I am teaching features writing as an adjunct at the UI), packing up our stuff for our big move (into our friends' basement until we decide where we're going -- hurrah!) and finishing off all of the old canned and frozen food we've been hoarding for two years.

As with all archaeological digs, this process has yielded some discoveries: an old scrapbook I created for my husband in which I mythologize the story of our meeting and long-distance relationship and... ta da! A recipe that approximates the Red Avocado's Queen's Salad dressing, which I created through alchemy and trial and error:

Queen's Salad dressing (for two)

Juice from one lime
1T walnut oil
1 T soy sauce

Toss with quinoa, lettuce and raw veggies. So amazing, you'll never have to spend $12 bucks on salad at Red Avocado again. Instead, you can get the sweet potato gnocchi!

Every Day a Sunday

2008-06-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

Things are looking up. The downtown of Iowa City is bustling today, as if the floods had never come. Riverside opened sometime this morning -- it runs past my favorite Dairy Queen in the world, a little 50's era drive-up that was all but smushed in the tornado of 2006 (they can't seem to get any luck).

Still, all is not well.

At home, we still have no Internet, which is driving us crazy. My husband has barely been getting dressed and we have both finished yet another set of 400+ page books yesterday. We've made it through yet another season of Meerkat Manor but are missing our Netflix Watch Instantly on the net. We make long, leisurely breakfasts that stretch on through the afternoon. Our naps are too long to be refreshing anymore. Basically, we're ready for the world to start up again.

Oh, and my favorite baby blogger gave birth while we were without Internet, live-blogging all the way, and I missed all the action.

Let's face it. We're lucky not to have lost anything but time in this mess.

Iowa River bathtub

2008-06-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

Here's Coralville, just a five minute walk from us. This tree-lined boulevard runs right past my house.

Move over J.K. Rowling

2008-06-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

Let the race to fill J.K. Rowling's shoes begin!

The University of Iowa Alumni magazine just ran my profile of debut novelist Sarah Prineas, author of the just-published young adult fantasy novel The Magic Thief.

The Magic Thief tells the story of Connwaer (Conn for short), an orphaned street thief with a fierce independent streak who picks the wrong pocket in the novel's first pages. He apprentices himself to a curmudgeonly wizard named Nevery, a brilliant fellow who returns from exile to study the depletion of magic in the city of Wellmet. Much of the book hinges on Conn's harrowing search for his locus magicalicus, a special stone all wizards need to focus magic and create spells. Conn's sense of magic is exceptionally strong, but so are the evil characters—among them the thief lord Crowe—who thwart him at every turn.

Among all of the authors I've interviewed, Sarah Prineas has to be the most forthcoming and spunky. She keeps a spirited blog on LiveJournal where she writes about being a young adult fantasy author and a working mom (in addition to writing, she also works part-time as an honors adviser at the UI).

When I began this profile, I was more interested in Sarah's story -- the behind-the-book narrative -- than in the book itself. Sarah told me a lot of stories about what it is like to be a children's author in a town where children aren't valued as readers.

But then I read the thing. Let's just say, eat it HP!

(The pic above is of Sarah in her dining room looking at the long scroll she used to outline the book after it was written).

High and Dry

2008-06-13T18:55:00.001-07:00

When we first moved to Iowa City I chided my husband for choosing a home that resembled a communist housing block. Well... let me eat my words. Let's just say I am happy to be living on stilts. We returned yesterday after a vacation to Galena, IL, to find our beloved Iowa City all but disappeared into the Iowa River and many of its inhabitants furiously filling sandbags to save buildings and homes. This image shows Arts Building West, the most beautiful building on campus located right across the street from the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Let's hope they rolled up the Pollock!

Labyrinths in Iowa -- creepy faun sold separately

2008-06-02T16:35:00.000-07:00

Last fall I spent a couple of weeks driving around eastern Iowa to visit half a dozen labyrinths that have cropped up in the past decade or so. The one pictured above is located at Prairie Woods, a Franciscan spiritual retreat just outside Cedar Rapids.

In Iowa, labyrinths are just about at the point of cultural crossover from mythical New Age practice to standard fare for the conscious-minded. I've met quite a few writers who walk the labyrinth to work through writer's block, and have encountered a handful of Iowans who regularly go on labyrinth travel to places throughout the Midwest.

Happening on a labyrinth is a little like walking into a crop circle. Someone put it there for sure, but without any signposts or enlightened farmers to explain their existence, most people just marvel at their bizarre beauty and step in. That seems to be the lingering mystery about them -- how they just invite you to walk into them.

Read more about them in my cover story in this month's Iowa Source here.

I took following shots at various labyrinths throughout eastern Iowa including at the Cedar Valley Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, and in Davenport at the Quad City Labyrinth Project. I can assure you, these labyrinths are no place to hide from your menacing Franco-supported fascist stepfathers.

Shear Joy (sorry, I couldn't help myself)

2008-05-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

Here in Iowa we read books no one else reads. Our amazing local independent bookstore Prairie Lights and its even more amazing bookseller Paul Ingram ensure that we have a lot of quiet little books that end up having legs -- or in this case, many, many legs.

I finally picked up Leonie Swann's sheep murder mystery (baaa!) Three Bags Full last weekend and grazed through it over the past few days while accomplishing a lot of nothing in my first post-graduate school week. This is one of two under-the-radar books that have sold a couple hundred copies locally just by word-of-mouth.

Only one thing speaks against this book finding success in the marketplace. It is a translation from the German. Normally that would be enough to damn it to obscurity, but this one has a lot more going for it, namely:

Who: A flock of sheep, each with its own carefully drawn personality.

Where: A Irish rural town named Glennkill (also the name of the original German novel).

What: A murdered shepherd, his sheep set on solving the mystery. And lots of wooly puns.

How: The shepherd used to read some novels about a women named Pamela to the sheep. Not only do they understand English, they have a bizarre conception of how humans work based on Pamela's melodramatic exploits. Their detective work involves standing around, chewing the cud, and listening to people in the town talking.

Why: This book probably should have had a subtitle that read Three Bags Full: An Existential Comedy, for sheep who dabble in matters of life and death, however stupid they may seem, confront the same existential questions we all face when circumstances lead us astray.

I'll give Ms. Swann some bonus points for capitalizing on the vastly underutilized sense of smell throughout the book. Not since Patrick Sueskind's Das Parfum have so many players in one book been characterized by their scent. Also, I don't know who designed this book at Random House, but there's a flip book in the corner of each page of a sheep running through a pasture. Brilliant.

Next... in TIME magazine...

2008-05-19T11:07:00.001-07:00

My husband Adam and I have been crazy about This American Life for about 7 years now. When we were living in Germany, we often curled up and snuggled to hours of the show. How crazy are we? Sometimes, a moment occurs in our day that is so odd, so wonderful, so embarrassing, so worthy of a story, that one of us will chime in as Ira Glass, the host, and say:

"Next, on This American Life... "

Well, TIME magazine recently decided to run a Q & A with Ira Glass and I posted one of the hundreds of questions that got asked by fans. They picked mine!

Here's my question and Ira's answer, which has obviously been edited for space:

Me: What's so American about This American Life?

Ira: There's a story that shows up a lot--of people who have some scheme or some way to invent a new life for themselves. Those stories seem to me to be very American. I say that not knowing much about people in other countries.

UPDATE: It turns out the questions have been posted in their entirety in a podcast on the site.

Brian Andreas and the Story People, cont'd

2008-05-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

There's only one Story People video up on YouTube, but here it is. The video shows what you might see if you visited the Story People studios in Decorah, Iowa. The voice track consists of studio artist reading Brian Andreas's stories.

All the World a Story

2008-05-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

My story on Brian Andreas and The Story People ran today in THE RAKE, the Minneapolis alternative weekly. The above image is from the Decorah sculpture studio where Andreas's team makes the company's line of furniture and sculpture products.

Here's an image of Brian Andreas in the loft above the print studio in Decorah, Iowa.

And here is an image I shot of the Story People graphics studio on Water Street in Decorah last winter.

And here is an image of an artisan in the Story People woodshop finishing one of the company's most popular designs, made of wood salvaged from barns in Minnesota.

The Gospel According to Paul

2008-05-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

I've been accompanying Prairie Lights bookseller Paul Ingram on trips to Legacy Pointe Retirement home and other venues where he has been reading to audiences and practicing the fine art of the hand-sell in towns that have no independent bookstores. It's amazing to see him in action. Here he is catching a resident up on the latest pioneer drama in Willa Cather's My Antonia. I thought about posting a list of his favorite recent publications, but then I thought... hey! I'd become part of the problem! So... take a trip to Prairie Lights in Iowa City and find Paul. He will take one look at you and tell you what book you absolutely have to read.

Things You Might Ask David Lynch

2008-05-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Insa and I once concocted an elaborate plan for a performance piece in which we would attend lectures and readings by famous writers and intellectuals and would stand in line at a mic for the Q&A portion of the event. When we got to the mike, we would ask three possible types of questions:

1. A Question that Isn't A Question, but A Long Story about ourselves

2. A Question that Isn't a Question but a Fawning Praise of the Speaker (wrapped in a long story about ourselves)

3. A Question that IS A Question, but is So Obscure and Meaningless that it Causes the Audience to Contemplate their Own Morality as They Sit Waiting, Desperately, for a New Question

Needless to say, we never performed the piece. Why not, you may ask? Because every Q&A I've been to already has these three characters. I guess we could have exaggerated it a bit for affect, but I'm no performer. I prefer to be present in my words.

So here are some of the questions that DID get asked in Fairfield at the David Lynch weekend, where the venerable filmmaker spoke at TM, or Transcendental Meditation:

Q: (Incomprehensible question about TM and filmmaking), I would like to make a film about TM. Do you have any suggestions for people who want to make the transition to film.

David Lynch: (Long rambling answer with no suggestions)

Q: I've been trying to think about something that is closer to my own understanding that could have a similar effect to the type of meditating you're talking about. And I thought, well, what about napping? I do it for 15-20 minutes, and I wake up really refreshed and ready to take on the world.

David Lynch: Meditation is lively, it's not like sleep. Napping doesn't engage your whole brain the way meditation does. Napping won't make you reach a state of infinite bliss. If a nap could unfold your entire human potential, it would be the same thing.

Real Important Question: Mr. Lynch, with all of the problems in the world, political unrest, genocide, people starving, how can one person meditating in Iowa help foster world peace?

David Lynch: You have to envision the world as a tree. Our world has drooping branches and lots and lots of dying leaves. Right now, we are going leaf by leaf by leaf. You get a green leaf and 30 other leaves are brown behind you. The experienced gardener doesn't worry about the leaves. He waters the root. We always say water the root and enjoy the fruit. In the root being watered, the root is transcending.

Q: I'm a theater student at the University of Iowa. (Long story about his experiences as a theater student at Iowa). Could you give me some limitations that I could use as a writing prompt for my next play? I know I'm putting you on the spot here.

David Lynch: Huh?

Q: Limitations, like things that have to appear in a scene.

David Lynch:

Blue Electric Clouds
Bowling Ball in Space Filled with Red Ants
Opossum with a Clown Nose
Buick with 15 16-year-olds
Roy Orbison on the stage with Moby, Donovan, and Christobel

Q: (Incompressible story about how the practitioner came to TM) Mr. Lynch, I want to make a film about TM.

David Lynch: That's just beautiful.

Special thanks to Dave Henderson, who contributed this TMZ-worthy photo of David Lynch passing in front of his own event sign.

Coming to the Rescue: David Lynch

2008-05-03T20:28:00.001-07:00

And now, coming to save education in America, the only man who can make television scary -- but in a good way -- a man whose reputation is preceded only by his hair: The brilliant DAVID LYNCH!

I finally made it to DAVID LYNCH WEEKEND at the Maharishi University of Management (MUM), in Fairfield, Iowa last weekend. I had been to Fairfield several times before, to swing dance with Frankie Manning, as a stopover on the way to the Grant Wood American Gothic House, and to drink warm green goo at MUM (as I see it, one tiny step on the way to enlightenment, and a step I am willing to try).

This year, the weekend attracted the general mix of budding filmmakers, transcendental meditators, some that fell into both groups, and me and my friend Dave Henderson, the awkward third party of befuddled watchers. Most people there were students and practitioners of TM (Transcendental Meditation), not just a holdout from your parents' hippie days but a thriving movement in itself. Ostensibly, the weekend event is designed to introduce prospective students to the benefits of TM in the education setting, but it is quickly becoming a Midwest cultural event: MTV and Rolling Stone showed up this year, and if that's not legitimization from the coasts...

We couldn't afford the entire weekend package but slipped in with the $10 Saturday ticket, which got us into the event where Lynch answered questions about filmmaking and TM for an hour and a half and for the hour-long presentation by quantum physicist John Hagelin -- whom you might know from everyone's favorite stoner comedy What the Bleep Do We Know.

I've had my doubts about TM. I don't think that a single writer who has attempted to jump down the rabbit hole that is Fairfield has come close to explaining the place for what it is (although Gary Lee in the WP came close). For what is essentially a peace movement, TM is closely linked to entrepreneurial spirit. They'll teach you how to engage your whole mind, reach infinite bliss, and foster creativity in the farthest realms of your being -- for thousands of dollars!

BUT!

I have to admit, that while listening to Dr. Haglin, I was moved to contemplate a laundry list of old projects that I just haven't gotten to yet. I might not have reached the universal field at which an individual can tap into a creative bursts of energy, but I was, in an instant, suddenly inspired to do some things I have put off for a long time. I'd even pay $12 for that.

We lunched at Revelations, almost hit Donovan while driving through town, and barely made it to the showing of The Straight Story at MUM. Now that I've been living in Iowa for two years, I understand that film so much better than the first time I saw it, in German, in a Munich theater, in 1999. Ironically, I hit a deer while driving the exact same highway (Rt. 18 West towards Fredericksburg) as the woman in the film.

And although it wasn't required for admission, here is David's new haircut, a la Lynch:

The Tastemakers

2008-04-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

I've got a short piece on page 9 of this month's ArtScene Iowa (pdf) about AKAR, an architecture and design studio here in Iowa City that holds regular ceramics shows. Every time I go to this place I end up spending 50 bucks or more. The Jani's really do have one of the coolest gigs around -- bringing tasteful modern design to the Midwest and selling some of the most useful toys I've played with. Our kitchen is currently home to two ridiculous and wonderful things bought at AKAR -- an artfully designed pie server and the squid masquerading as wire whisk. For Christmas, we bought five German-designed notebook satchels that fold out into green-friendly grogery bags on wheels. I can almost forgive one of their staff for talking to me like I was an idiot the first time I visited the store two years ago. Sanjay Jani, above, is one of the best talkers I've ever encountered.

Red Letter Day

2008-04-16T08:11:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I defended my master's project AND got to attend the reading by Ann Patchett here in Iowa City. Elizabeth McCracken, a friend of the author and one of the workshop instructors here at Iowa introduced her -- by far the nicest, funniest, and most glowing introduction I've experienced at one of these events. McCracken is Patchett's first reader, meaning she gets to read what the author is writing as she is writing it. McCracken said: "If you come across an Ann Patchett at your time here at Iowa, hold tight to her."

Patchett read for about half an hour from her new novel Run, with a voice so clear, crisp and evocative that I wasn't surprised to learn that she was a state debate champion as a young woman.

Later I went up to have my copy of Truth & Beauty signed and outed myself as the writer of the column in PW that complained about how she wasn't coming to Iowa. Apparently, the last time she was scheduled to read at Prairie Lights, she threw up before the event and vowed never to set foot back on Iowa soil.

Coming Soon?: Literature-themed amusement park

2008-04-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

One more reason to love Iowa City! A group of developers is working on a project to bring an amusement park-like "attractor" to Eastern Iowa. Tentatively called "Stories," the project is an adventure land for book lovers with a book museum, a book-on-demand machine, a book shop, and a 120-seat theater to screen videos on the power of story. Local writers have already started chiming in on the subject, making even better suggestions than the planning committee, including young adult writer Sarah Prineas, who suggested a cafe where they serve foods from favorite children's books. I'd take a dumpling from The Funny Little Woman by Arlene Mosel. No word on whether they can actually get those book lovers to leave their reading chairs to come to Iowa.

I've affected change!

2008-04-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit... but a month and a half ago I published a column in Publisher's Weekly that reflected on my obsession with book signings. My jumping off point was a conversation I had with Prairie Lights bookseller Paul Ingram that Ann Patchett wasn't coming to read there, but had sent a stack of signed copies of her new book Run. As of today, she's coming! But to the Pappajohn building. More space I guess. Also, they're still kind of mad at her at PL since she mentioned stealing books from them in her memoir Truth & Beauty. I have class that night, but I am so there. Doesn't Ms. Patchett look both beautiful and smug in this picture?

Writing Lives

2008-04-06T16:11:00.001-07:00

So I've been finishing up my master's journalism project this week. It's a collection of four profiles -- of writers Robin Hemley, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Brian Andreas, and Sarah Prineas -- set against an overarching trend piece about the state of books coverage in U.S. newspapers (it's abysmal, if you haven't guessed that already). I printed out some proofs today and am doing final editing. I got a little weepy today when I wrote the acknowledgments. So many people to thank! Most people thought I was crazy for going back to school in a field that is dying. Well, maybe not dying. Journalism is alive and kicking, it's just not paying very well. But I like to think that an enterprising spirit can lead you to water wherever you may land. I sold every single profile in my project--naysayers be damned!

Yep. Crazy-eyed middle-aged redhaid

2008-04-02T11:52:00.001-07:00

This is how the illustrators at Publishers Weekly envisioned me in the illustration that accompanied my column. I can't fault them for getting me totally wrong, but Jonathan Safran Foer? He looks like he's been Rick-rolled! Awesome.

It's confirmed: Book Signing Junkie

2008-02-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

Crazy book nut! Last fall I wrote a little first-person piece on my obsession with book signings. It ran today on the back page of Publishers Weekly in the magazine's Soapbox Column. I've been waiting all my life for a soapbox to stand on!

I hope Paul Ingram over at Prairie Lights doesn't mind the shout out. I really do love that guy. The editor at PW cut a lot of good stuff for space, including the part where I wrote of Paul as being like a Mexican jumping bean.

Putting the CIALIS back in SoCIALISm

2008-02-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

I don't normally read Fort Dodge Today -- it's just not a site on my regular troll through the interweb. So you'll have to thank my friend Eric for alerting me to this hilarious comments page connected to an otherwise sad economic blurb on the layoffs of 78 production workers at Electrolux. The jobs are going to Mexico.

A commenter calling himself "booknerd" mentioned Sweden's social market economy and the word "socialism" got starred out. Nazism, fascism, and marxism all got through.

We blame the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis for keeping socialism out of public discourse. SoCIALISm.

But how cold is it?

2008-02-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

It is so cold in Iowa that you can leave a few pieces of La Quercia's green label artisan-cured prosciutto americano in your car by accident for a week and it is still good!

It is snowing again: giant flocks that are falling almost sideways. I am just emerging from about 13 days of some kind of super rhino flu that's been going around the UI campus. So I am relishing in the pleasures of hearth and home, which has included finally tasting La Querica's prosciutto, which is made on a farm south of Des Moines. My friend Nick visited the owners Herb and Kathy Eckhouse a while back for a story he wrote as part of his master's project. He has been raising a pig on a farm near Iowa City since last summer and will finally slaughter her on February 28th. I want everyone to know that date because if everyone knows, then he actually has to do it.

If you haven't checked out his blog Death of a Pig, in which he talks about his project, blogs on food, and waxes poetic about the long and venerable tradition of literary pigs, you should. Good luck Nick!

The Rural Incident

2008-02-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

Last summer, Sarah Clunis, former curator of African Art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and Katie Roche, cultural animator extraordinaire and all-around culture vulture started a series of art events in Oxford, Iowa called "The Rural Incident." In her academic work, Clunis studies rituals and their portrayal in art. She decided to host her own art salon in her town of 800 as a way to celebrate local art and also display the works of artists who might not otherwise see their works exhibited in eastern Iowa. Let's face it. There's a lot of people making art out here and what actually gets shown is generally pretty crappy. My profile of Clunis just ran in ArtScene Iowa. Beware -- it's a pdf and you have to scroll through the mag to find it.

Robert Wilson is not an actual human being

2008-02-03T07:46:00.000-08:00

Robert Wilson's VOOM: Portraits just opened at the UI Museum of Art. The museum paid an estimated $150,000 to bring the exhibition here, about three times what it normally pays for its big shows. And is this show big. To mount it, they had to take the museum's whole permanent collection out and put it in storage. I'd had to be the person traveling to Iowa City from Chicago to see the museum's Pollock only to find out that there is a video portrait of Robert Downey Jr. on a cadaver table in its place. It would be really easy to take a cynical view of this show, after all, it was commissioned by a HDTV company. The whole thing could function as the sexiest tv commercial you've ever seen. But it's probably one of the most exciting things to happen in Iowa since I've been here. Nothing really goes on in the portraits, but there is something happening that compels you to stand and watch.

Oh, and now heard Robert Wilson tell the same three stories about four times -- the one about being in the Berlin zoo and listening to the wolves with his body, the one about his deaf son Raymond, the one about filming the panther that appears in the show. He used the same exact words every time. I'm pretty sure every human interaction is a performance for him.

Oxford Rising

2008-01-26T08:36:00.000-08:00

Two couples who got pushed out of New Orleans by Katrina just opened a restaurant in the tiny town of Oxford (800 people), about 15 miles east of Iowa City. They're serving Cajun/Creole and American fusion at lunch prices. I've been twice and had the grits and grillades as well as the shrimp po'boy, which was so good it made me close my eyes. Last summer, one of the couples also started a series of art salons in their home. I don't know how the locals are embracing all this strange action, but for me, all I can say is that I've got a lot of new reasons to leave town.

Meet DeKooning!

2007-11-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Well, we got another cat. A kitten actually. His name is DeKooning and we adopted him from Pet Central Station, where we got our other cat, Mooney. He's an affectionate little bugger, running around like a crazy cat and always crying when we leave. He's got cute little white feet and tufts coming out of his ears. Before he came to live with us, he was a farm cat down in Kalona, Iowa. I'll try to post more pics when we get them, but in the meantime, what a happy little boy this is.

Register launching new site

2007-10-15T12:46:00.002-07:00

Online entertainment editor Kyle Munson of the The Des Moines Register gave students at the University of Iowa last week a sneak peak at the beta site of the new Register Site. It's the next in a series of non-too-early changes the DMR is making to try to ensure their print product doesn't die and the paper has some kind of position in the emerging convergence media society. I'm not impressed ... yet. The content still seems the same. Worse yet, taking a cue from Facebook and other social networking sites, the DMR is asking visitors to the site to create their own content and upload it in various multimedia sections. I'm guessing this doesn't bode well for reporters.

Savannah Cats!

2007-10-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

Adam and I spent the weekend in Chicago attending a cat show in the suburb Franklin Park. We met four show cat Savannahs and countless kittens, including one that boxed with a tassel toy for about fifteen minutes. Savannahs are the most dog-like of cats -- they play fetch, they go for walks, they like to play in the water. Most don't weigh much more than regular cats, but what they lack in girth they make up for in length. This cat, owned by Donna Lawver, didn't place in the competition but I liked it for its emerald eyes and fantastic posing style. I'll post the article if and when it gets published.

I'd rather wear out than rust out!

2007-09-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Today I tagged along with Paul Ingram, the Midwest's most famous bookseller, to a reading by Mildred Armstrong Kalish of her memoir, Little Heathens. Millie's amazing. She's sharp as a tack, and has this great storytelling voice. She read to a group of about a dozen residents at Legacy Pointe, an assisted living facility in Iowa City. The room was filled to capacity -- mostly because of all the posh walkers everyone brought with them. Here's more about her book.

We make our own best parodies

2007-09-10T07:25:00.000-07:00

I met this couple from St. Louis while working on a story about the American Gothic house in Eldon, IA for Iowa ArtScene. They had forgotten their camera and wanted to pose for a parody a la the Grant Wood classic, so I took some digital shots of them and sent them via email. Dorothy was so surprised that she sent me a thank you gift -- thank you cards (I think the irony might have been unintended). But the big surprise was yet to come. She and her husband, who is from Wales, ended up on the cover of the latest ArtScene. You can read the story by clicking on the cover.

Good Pig

2007-08-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

Weeeeee! Who let this suburban, farm-deprived hipster hold me!

The Best State Fair in the State!

2007-08-13T08:37:00.001-07:00

We held a baby pig. We pointed and guffawed at the world's largest boar. We cut in line to see the (underwhelming) butter cow. But most importantly, we shared our first deep-fried Snickers bar. Some say going to the Iowa State Fair is one of those experiences you just have to have. I agree. It is a beautiful celebration of life, this kind of strange old-timey carnival that is half harvest festival and half amusement park. We braved the heat and crowds last Sunday to see it, and although we didn't run into any presidential hopefuls, we did do a lot of people watching. At the end of the day, we took the skyline ride across the fair in an homage to my mom, whose favorite ride at Hershey Park was the one meant for perpetual observing. By the way, that pig I am holding hated me. He squealed so loud he had to be put back in the pen with the sow.

Stuck on Sticks

2007-08-10T13:29:00.001-07:00

In July I reported on a story about Sticks, a Des Moines-based fine craft furniture studio that employs over 150 artists. The piece just ran in the August issue of ArtScene. About five guys from the Sticks studio take a truck down to the river a couple times a week to pull out driftwood for use in the studio. Eventually, the design team sketches a theme on the wood items. The company works closely with galleries around the country to create the works, which all have the same folksy Sticks aesthetic and which reflect a certain pride of place (ie. the Vermont items have maple syrup and blueberries on them). In this image, the painting lead Ericca Davis exercising her discerning eye as she surveys the works in progress. Adam's friend Allison, an ISU alum, is the blond in the background.

Anamosa - Where gossip becomes myth

2007-08-08T16:18:00.001-07:00

Talk to the locals in Anamosa, birthplace of Grant Wood, and you'll hear a lot of stories about the painter, some true, some lovingly extrapolated fables. As local tourism officials struggle to bring people to the town by playing up Wood's connection to it, they find themselves at the generational juncture where local gossip becomes myth. Most of the people who actually knew Wood are long gone and those remaining are retiring or retired. Still, there is a lot to see, most of it in Stone City, a quarry town four miles north of Anamosa where Wood ran an art colony in 1932, and a whole lot of stories to hear.

Volver Review

2007-08-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Nick Bergus used a review I wrote to showcase his web design talents. Don't be fooled by the toolbar, this is the only content on the site, but he did a great job (except for the lame-o editorial additions and the text cuts which have left the review a mere vestige of my original. You can check at his work at his monstrously colorful webpage. Nick can steal content from me anytime.

Gothic Me

2007-08-02T15:44:00.001-07:00

Big day in the House of Diesburg. Adam passed his dental boards with flying colors (or with hues as varied as the dental community allows...) and I traveled to Eldon, Iowa, population roughly 950, to visit the American Gothic House. I didn't expect it to be big or thrilling or extraordinary in any way, but I had perhaps the most bizarre day of the entire summer there. The concrete circle set directly in front of the house -- the place where you stand to get your picture taken -- is actually larger than the house itself. The whole town is jumping on the Grant Wood gravy train, with locales such as Julia's American Gothic House Cafe, American Gothic gifts, and American Gothic Grub & coffee. I'm compiling my experiences touring the Grant Wood sites in the state for a cover article for ArtScene Iowa.

Birdhouses in their souls

2007-07-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

Purple martins! My story on Amish barn builder and electrical engineer Evan Gingerich and his martin colony made page one above the fold of the Daily Iowan today. The picture was taken by one of my former students, Ben Roberts. I took Ben down to Evan's farm about a month ago and we cranked down Evan's purple martin house and pulled out a baby. Ben said: "He even looks like a "Martin!" People who have martin colonies call themselves 'landlords' and get pretty obsessive about their tenants.

Goodbye to All That

2007-07-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

One man. One tiny, tiny house. You may have heard about Greg Johnson, the president of the Small House Society. I interviewed him in May for a story about authors who are limiting their ecological footprint and writing about the process. Greg's like a prophet. He's got this weird way of talking complete nonsense and getting you to believe it. I think it has something to do with his ecumenical worldview -- the guy goes to church, synagogue and mosque as part of his plan to change the world. Anyway, here is the Daily Iowan article in which Greg features prominently. To learn more about his project in small living, visit his website, Resources for Life.

Why "A Local Row"

2007-07-14T08:29:00.001-07:00



Epic

By Patrick Kavanagh


I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffeys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel --
"Here is the march along these iron stones".
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Hick

2007-07-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

I read Hick a few weeks back to prepare for an interview with the author, Andrea Portes. My mini-profile of her ran in the Daily Iowan about a week ago. Maybe because she's young, maybe because I liked her book, maybe because she is actually an interesting person and not just a good writer, the interview went well and the piece turned out great. Andrea's been traveling around Iowa this week doing readings. I've read my share of novels by first-time authors and she's one that deserves the praise. She stopped at Prairie Lights, the best little bookstore in the Midwest, in July.

Culture Clash in in the Heartland

2007-07-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

Pow Pow Pow! The UI Museum of Art has an exhibition of Plains Indians Ledger Drawings on view through September. Months ago, I interviewed the owners of the drawings, who recently gifted them to the museum. They told me that very little was known about ledger drawings, which were a transitional medium Plains Indians used after the whites killed off all the Buffalo. Man, were they wrong. I ended up writing a cover story for Art Scene Iowa that ran in June. The file is a PDF, so the link goes to the archive page.

Lust Highway

2007-07-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

This is the real field of dreams. In June, I wrote a story on Iowa Drive-In culture pegged to the opening of a new Drive-In in Grandview, Iowa, a fading town about 45 minutes southeast of Iowa City. Not sure what happened to my photos, but this is apparently an artist's rendering of the field. The road in cuts through rows of corn and soybeans and opens up onto a terraced diamond. By far my favorite story of the summer.

Waterloo, Iowa

2007-07-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

Here's my first article for the Daily Iowan this summer -- a travel piece centered around Paco Rosic, a Bosnian-American graffiti artist who is almost single-handedly reshaping Waterloo from a "smokestacks and beer-belly city well past its prime," as my friend Steve would has put it, into a bit of a destination. The restaurant where he painted a replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling is still pretty kitschy, but thankfully, there are other things to recommend Waterloo. The picture is one I took of the Lost Island's newest ride, the Molokini Crater.

A Cure for What Ales You

2007-07-13T16:26:00.001-07:00

That was the title of my story about beer brewers, which you can read here at the Daily Iowan site. I'm going to be posting all of my stories here so I can cease my occasional self-promotion emails. The image is one I took of Travis Savchenko in his man-playground in his basement. He's got a kegerator that holds four kegs and an old pop machine that dispenses Pepsi for a quarter. I would have liked to have written the whole piece about this guy. He was by far the most interesting person I talked to and had a really creative attitude towards brewing.

I'm going to be posting all of the other stories I've written this summer, but I'm still getting over the deer I hit while driving to A's grandparents' two days ago, so give me some time.