What the Curators Do

Common Good Books
38 Snelling Avenue South
Saint Paul
Opens April 9th

While the rest of the staff opens a newly arrived shipment from Random House, David Enyeart, Assistant Manger of Common Good Books and former events coordinator at Magers & Quinn, points to the street outside. “What was the estimate? Thirty, thirty-five thousand cars each day?”

“That’s about right.” You can tell Martin Schmutterer, the store manager, is pleased when he says this. “It’s a busy street.”

Until recently, Garrison Keillor’s bookstore lived below Nina’s Café on Selby and Western, not far from Moscow on the Hill. As reported in the Star Tribune late last year, they’d outgrown their space. All jokes about Saint Paul aside, Selby and Western is a great location for a literary enterprise, especially with Nina’s just upstairs, where any hour of any day you’re guaranteed to see at least two writers at work. The new location, however, on Snelling and Grand Avenues, goes beyond that. After an interview with Enyeart and Schmutterer on a Thursday evening, four days before the store’s opening, MCB can vouch for that. In forty-five minutes, MCB lost count of the curious passers-by. Even those not brave enough to step into the store and ask if it was closed for the evening felt no shame in cupping their hands around their eyes to peek through the windows. With those tens of thousands of cars, not to mention Macalester College directly across the street, as well as five other major colleges or universities within walking distance, 38 Snelling Avenue South promises to be a superb location.

Whatever Happened to Masculinity?

Cul de Sac
Scott Wrobel
Sententia Books, 2012

Cul de Sac Release Party
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
April 20, 7:30 p.m.

A month after AWP 2012, MCB still recalls its high points. For inspiration and motivation, there’s much to gain at AWP, despite the beginning writer’s despair at vanishing in a crowd of 10,000. Of course MCB never left Minneapolis, experiencing AWP through the lens of social media. Whether or not it happened the way MCB images is unimportant. It’s what’s taken away that counts, including the laughs. The image of Jarrett Haley, for example—editor of Bull: Men’s Fiction—defending his enterprise of masculinity against a rightly suspicious crowd of authoresses and editrices, conjures a fast-talking high-voiced politician who can’t quite make eye contact with a contracting circle of thoroughly pissed voters.

In reality it isn’t that funny. Nor, however, is it that one-dimensional. In an industry dominated by male authors and supported by female readers, a magazine promoting “men’s fiction” seems at first glance unnecessary and insulting, like tax breaks on the wealthy. Yet, as a male reader, Haley’s defense is provocative. The heart of his goal is to change publishing’s dynamic, at least in the sense of the men-don’t-read myth. While the real solution would start with an entire redesign of society, addressing gender inequality, empathy, all those wonderful things, and end with something like a book review publication geared more toward masculine sensibilities, Haley’s attempt is at least admirable. More importantly, it hints at something missing. While masculinity certainly exists in contemporary fiction, it seems polarized. Speaking purely in the realm of literature, you have hyper-masculinity as an exclusion of all else—something like McCarthy or Roth, if you want to go after the heavyweights—and the hyper consciousness of masculinity that portrays it as something in need of suppression and refusal (often portrayed ironically, with brutal, sociopathic narrators). This reflects our culture’s view of masculinity itself—as a joke, an exaggeration, or an intrusion of base animality into our thinking, feeling society. While the work and ideas of men are taken seriously, men themselves are not. There’s been a reduction of the male complexity, and masculinity has been relegated entirely to the realm of sex.

Before this descends into a chauvinist manifesto, let’s talk about books.

Take a Chance on the Open Mic

Words at WAM
Hosted by Hazel & Wren
Weisman Art Museum
February 22, 2012, 6:00 – 8:30

It is a truth impossible to acknowledge that open mics, even in possession of a good audience, always get off to a rough start. Whether it’s with an awkward poem about the speaker’s fascination with starvation in Africa, or, in more general settings, a man who produces an electric razor and removes his beard¹, it’s hard to know how to gauge the night after that first performer. Thankfully, at Minneapolis lit-loving duo Hazel & Wren’s first ever corporeal open mic (ie: not online), that awkwardness was semi-dispelled when the first reader, who, according to the one-line bio lottery, “just purchased a Rainbow Brite lunch box,” didn’t come to the stage when announced. It calls to mind the sacrificial slam poet in the days of old—a reader who won’t be scored and reads purely to prime the audience. We loosened up a little after that, and welcomed Becky Liestman to the stage, whose poetry explored the heart² as tied to landscape. Even though this hasn’t been a real winter, Liestman’s conjuring of Austin and its heat made even those of us who’ve never been there miss it.

Words at WAM is a collaboration between Hazel & Wren, of hazelandwren.com and @hazelandwren fame, and WAM Collective, the Weisman Art Museum’s student group at the University of Minnesota.

The Rise of “un Autre”

New Shoes on a Dead Horse
Sierra DeMulder
Write Bloody Publishing

At the end of 2011, as if to round out the year, someone named @criticmichiko joined Twitter and began posting scathing, pretentious reviews of household objects, pizza crusts, and baby names: “It is with frustration that the reader tries to affix the new Swiffer pad to the Swiffer base. The user’s manual is self-indulgent blather.” A parody aimed at the scathing, pretentious New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, @criticmichiko now has nearly a thousand followers. After another account, @ActualNYTMK, joined Twitter and demanded that the parody take the account offline, and then proceeded to accuse @colsonwhitehead of masterminding the whole thing, the Twittersphere was too amused to care whether or not @ActualNYTMK was, indeed, the actual Michiko Kakutani or simply another parody account.

In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books published last weekend, novelist Matthew Specktor examined not only this specific phenomenon but its ramifications—the fruits of social networking itself. Our identities, with few exceptions, are filtered through this media: “On Twitter, or Facebook, we serve ourselves up in miscellaneous detail, presenting our epigrams and aphorisms and photographs, our urbane or intemperate responses to others… Consciously or otherwise, we stretch ourselves into flattering (even if, at times, deliberately ugly) postures: We spend time trying to curate, to use that buzzy term, ourselves. Or ‘selves.’” It’s this other “self” that interests Specktor, and he goes on to admit that, despite the extent to which we’ve taken it, it’s nothing new: “Je est un autre. Rimbaud’s notorious observation has become a prescription. Every last one of us has become someone else, at least one person, by now.” For an artist, there has always been un autre—the fragmentation of the person who calls herself an artist and the artist herself who creates the art. Art itself—even our most personal art—is filtered in a far more meticulous and intricate way than our 140-character epigrams. Art is the organization of the personal into the persona. The artist is as much our creation as the art itself.

Growth in Possibility

Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again
Tony Rauch
Eraserhead Press, 2010

Even as an unseasoned critic, MCB is aware of the pitfalls one faces when reviewing young and/or emerging writers. S/he is either rife with exciting potential, or emblematic (this is the exact word one uses) of his or her generation, or both. Tony Rauch, with his third collection, Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again, proves to be both, yet this isn’t a pitfall. Rauch is one of those authors for whom reviews like this are reserved—for whom they were formulated in the first place. His work is exciting, and his ability to inhabit his protagonists’ heads betrays a deep understanding of gens X and Y.

When MCB was young(er), MCB lived in a basement with a strange electrical system, and whenever MCB played the guitar there was a slight electric current on the strings. It was nothing you’d want to rest your naked wrist against, but to calloused fingertips it was devilishly thrilling. That’s what Rauch’s work is like—a teenage boy playing guitar with a slight shiver, because it’s a voice that needs to be heard, and a voice that one doesn’t expect to be so engaging. Except Eyeballs is more like that boy reflecting on his days of guitar playing, maybe ten or twenty years later, after he’s lived enough to inflate those days with meaning.

A New Publisher’s Debut

Get In If You Want to Live
John Jodzio
Paper Darts Press, 2011

Get In (To this Launch Party) If You Want to Live
Honey, NE Minneapolis
Saturday, October 15, 2011

Chances are, if you’re aware of MCB, you’re aware of the local literary magazine Paper Darts. It therefore goes without saying that their foray into a full publishing press, gorgeous first book, and resulting launch party will also be familiar to you. However, one must acknowledge the possibility—as remote as it may be—that an MCB reader, though familiar with MCB, has never heard of Paper Darts. Why anyone would wish to imagine such a scenario is better left to the creative machinations of Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks. MCB, for one, cannot live in such a world. The aforementioned foray, book, and party are inarguable reasons for MCB readers to agree.

Several months ago, the three headed octopus down in the belly of Paper Darts pushing all the buttons and wrapping its tentacles around all the levers announced that the magazine would be publishing their first book, joining the ranks of Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, and other local publishing houses. That book would be local author John Jodzio’s second short story collection, Get In If You Want to Live. On Saturday night, dreams of both mollusk and man came true while over a hundred people huddled down together at Honey in Northeast Minneapolis to drink, support local artists, and laugh until their diaphragms protested as Jodzio read from his new collection.

A word on the book.

Fostering Community: Three Things to Love about Two Gals

It is with no small degree of reticence that MCB quotes Tom Wolfe.

That’s the kind of thing writers always want to know: What are other writers doing?

It’s a solitary act, writing. Even for an artistic endeavor it’s solitary. Perhaps that’s what makes it so lonely, at times. Perhaps that’s why history is peppered with little circles of writers sharing ideas, even if those ideas made them jealous of one another. Beckett, for example—where would he be without Joyce having driven him into despair? Where would Faulkner be without berating Hemingway for his eschewing of the “ten dollar words?” We’re a social kind of creature, writers, however alone. What we’re always looking for is some kind of community.

A Poet Soars from Stage to Page

The Bones Below
by Sierra DeMulder
Available from Write Bloody Publishing
$12

Today is your birthday.
I wish you would answer my calls
so I could tell you how much
I wish you were never born
miss you.¹

There’s something to be said for conflict, for indecision. There’s a purity in contradiction. What readers look for, in literature, is a general dichotomy between two coexistant states—something that appears unresolvable at first glance and—if the work is particularly powerful—is still unresolved at the book’s conclusion. When National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam champion Mike McGee called Sierra DeMulder’s writing “a bastion of youthful wisdom and vigorous, tempestuous confessions,” he hit the mark so squarely that it’s almost startling to read DeMulder’s poems and see this process in action. The Bones Below, published in January of 2010, is exemplary of one of literature’s oldest and most beloved tricks: a complete reconstruction of the two halves of each human heart trying to destroy one another.

MCB would like to make a confession.

For Bookish Types Who Love Surprises

Booksmart Enterprises
Soon to be located at: 1300 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN

When MCB decided to start a blog on the Minneapolis literary scene, there were already a lot of ideas on the cybernetic table. One that seemed particularly thrilling was the possibility of a citywide book store tour. Marooned in Uptown last Saturday by a companion’s haircut (no explanation necessary), MCB was left to roam the area for a good twenty minutes, which was the perfect opportunity to turn the tables on MCB’s companion and spend forty minutes at Booksmart, currently on Hennepin between Lake and Lagoon. MCB had been thinking about starting the Minneapolis Book Store Tour for several days and was downright jubilant at the opportunity, especially since MCB’s companion generally spends their time in book stores following MCB around and groaning about how long MCB is taking.

It was MCB’s second time at Booksmart, and it would be dramatic to say it was the last, but who doesn’t love a little drama now and then.

The Fruits of Tentacular Talent

Paper Darts, vol. 3:
A Magazine of Lit + Art
Available at Mager’s and Quinn Booksellers or direct from paperdarts.org
$12.00

If any given Minneapolitan were to encounter the startlingly beautiful three headed octopus that edits and produces the literary arts magazine Paper Darts, he or she would feel compelled to ask said octopus how it could possibly put those three heads together to produce a work of art so cohesive in its vision-—so exact-—that it feels made by the hand of one meticulous and brilliant artist. Yet even without waiting for an answer, paging through the magazine again makes this Minneapolitan realize just how refreshing three heads can be. With its differing backgrounds, tastes, and talents-—with a reach so astonishingly tentacular—-the three headed octopus succeeds where an individual artist, however fastidious, cannot. Paper Darts bears no signature, no ego, and no associated neuroses. As a magazine for arts and literature, its primary function is to showcase the work of others, and while a work of art in itself¹, it never fails to step aside and let its contributors speak for themselves.

Mill City Bibliophile would like to take a moment to discuss the zine as a generalized concept.