I know this is old news, but I thought I’d give my brief thoughts on the stories from the New Yorker debut fiction issue. I wasn’t bowled over any of the stories, but I was most impressed by Umwem Alpem’s “Ex-Mas Feast,” not so much for writerly virtuosity as for the glimpse of the exotic the story provides. Perhaps because so many short stories seem to be set in the suburbs, I am always drawn to stories set in faraway places. I was somewhat less impressed by Karen Russell’s “Haunting Olivia,” which I thought would have been a more successful story if it had been half as long. I did, however, enjoy how Russell injected a bit of the surreal into her story. I was also dutifully shocked upon discovering that she is only 23 years old, even though I should know that the New Yorker loves to find these fiction savants. Least interesting of all to me was Justin Tussing’s “The Laser Age,” which, at first glance, I thought was going to be a story of the twisted not to distant future, but instead was just another mismatched boy-meets-girl tale.
Debut Fiction Reax
Appearing Elsewhere
NY-based readers are invited to “Step Inside the Book” at a reading/party I’m doing this Friday with Alex Rose (The Musical Illusionist) and Alex Itin (Orson Whales). Alex will be working his narrative/surroundsound magic, Other Alex will be screening his multimedia books, and I’ll be showing art and reading fiction from A Field Guide to the North American Family. Drinks are on the house, I’m told, so if you’re free, stop by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, at 125 Maiden Lane, between 7 and 9 p.m. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
What Is It About Hibbing?
“I ran into a girl…She said I was a strange person and she told me why. She said, ‘You were born in a certain area where the ground is metallic.’” – Bob Dylan, Behind the Shades Revisited
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth but spent his formative years in Hibbing, a small, isolated northern Minnesota town whose claim to fame (according to the billboard that greets you as you come into town) is that it’s home to the world’s largest open-pit iron mine. It’s also my hometown, in an area so remote from Minneapolis that a friend from the city had never heard of it.
There are a number of towns in Minnesota’s Iron Range, which covers the upper fork of the state, but Hibbing is a particularly weird place given an accident of history; its inadvertent placement atop one of the richest veins of iron ore meant the mining company had to grant the townspeople major concessions to persuade them to move its location. Thus Hibbing is the only town with a high school listed in the National Register of Historic Places: the building cost four-million dollars (in 1923!), complete with marble floors in the bathrooms, a 1800-seat auditorium patterned after the Capitol Theatre in New York City, and a Broadway-level green room. Because Hibbing, which is near Canada, wasn’t the most hospitable place to live (in his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan described the winters as so cold and unending as to be hallucinogenic), the mining company also invested in education: the superintendent of the school system supposedly received the highest salary of any school district in the state, and K-12 instructors were paid unusually high salaries for the area. The Hibbing public schools were thus funded more like lavish private schools, so you end up with people like English teacher B.J. Rolfzen, who is often credited by Bob Dylan for instilling in him a love of language.
To give you an idea, this is where we had our pep rallies for homecoming, our auditorium. You can imagine yourself laughing a young Bob Dylan (then, Robert Zimmerman) off the stage at the talent show (yes, this happened).
But whether it was the richly funded schools or the iron ore in the water or some other strange vortex (Hibbing is also, weirdly, at the epicenter of climate change), the town boasts an unusual number of writers, some of them culture-changers like Dylan. (And this is not to mention that Greyhound Bus Lines, Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, and Gus Hall — all Hibbing originals.)
The uncle of one of the kids I sat next to in Earth Sciences in junior high was Vincent Bugliosi, the Charlie Manson case prosecutor and the author of the best-seller about the case, Helter Skelter. Bethany McLean has the distinction of being the person who broke the Enron scandal; she wrote about first in Fortune magazine, and then in the best-selling Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was made into a movie of the same name. Rick Novak, M.D., is the author of a medical thriller set in Hibbing that references the newest Nobel Laureate: The Doctor and Mr. Dylan. Frank Riley, author of various science fiction novels, won a Hugo Award for They’d Rather Be Right, which he co-wrote with Mark Clifton — apparently this was only the second time the Hugo was awarded to a novel.
Who will come out of Hibbing next?
Image: Wikipedia
Google jumps on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon
A week doesn’t go by that there’s not some new news related to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The plagiarism court case, the book’s paperback release, and the book’s connection to the recently discovered “lost Book of Judas” have all made headlines recently. Not bad for a book that first came out over two years ago. People wonder how the book can continue to sell so well (the paperback sold as many as 500,000 copies in its first week of release), but being on the front page of the newspaper every week goes a long way when you’re trying to move product. Incredibly, with the The Da Vinci Code movie coming out in May we’re actually in for another round of news about the book. Undoubtedly the movie will get tons of press, but I was particularly surprised to see that Google is participating in a special promotion for the movie. If you go to google.com/davincicode and follow the prompts, Google will add “The Da Vinci Code Quest” to your personalized homepage (assuming you have a Google account.) The “Quest” is some sort of puzzle game that officially starts on Monday and there are various prizes being offered. Now, Google has certainly morphed into a pretty big company over the last couple of years, but you don’t really expect them to do promotional tie ins. Once again, The Da Vinci Code seems to be rewriting the rule book.Philipp’s got more details.
A Fortune
We went out for Chinese with some friends last night, and this is the fortune that came in Mrs. Millions’ fortune cookie. Auspicious, no?
Foer Excerpt Up
Houghton Mifflin has posted a long excerpt of Jonathan Safran Foer’s forthcoming book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Amazon also has the excerpt up.) And, well, I don’t quite know what to say about it. Have a look. You’ll see. It’s a long, furious stream of consciousness – the warp speed thought process of the 8-year-old, genius protagonist, Oskar – with a punch in the gut finale. It seems that this book is sure to produce a frenzy among critics and readers when it comes out in April, but it’s too early to know whether that frenzy will be positive or negative. On Neal Pollack’s blog, the quality of the excerpt and the book’s use of 9/11 as a plot point are already being debated.