The most ‘literate’ American cities according to Central Connecticut State University (Via Bookninja). Minneapolis on its own is number one…given that St. Paul is number four, and no more than a margin’s width across the Mississippi…it’s evident that together the Twin Cities will own the ‘most literate’ title for centuries to come.

Even more interesting, at least to this bookstore photographer:

TOP 10 Bookstore (per 10,000 population)

 Here’s Dr. Jack Miller, author of the study:

"This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation’s social health—the literacy of its major cities (population of 250,000 and above). This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources…As the data for this and previous surveys indicates, cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and cities with newspapers with high per capita circulation rates also have a high proportion of people reading newspapers online. Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy. A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another."

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Dropped in unannounced at Open Book on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis between Christmas and New Year’s after interviewing Rosemary Furtak, Director, Library and Archives, at the Walker Arts Center. Open Book bills itself as a ‘literary’ arts center, one in which ‘all who are interested in the literary and book arts can feel at home.’ The building includes places for ‘contemplation, conversation, and literary and artistic creation, including a book club room with an outdoor deck, individual studios for writers and artists,a resource library, comfortable classrooms and meeting rooms, an exhibition gallery,a performance hall, and a congenial literary commons with conversation nooks.’

Open Book’s mission is to ‘inspire and celebrate’ a vibrant, growing book community. It serves as a gathering place that welcomes all to participate in the ‘power and pleasure’ of literary and book arts experiences, and as a ‘catalyst for artistic collaboration, bringing together the many partners who create books, from idea to finished work.’

And I must say, I did find the space inspirational: a gorgeous, rough hewn,

renovated warehouse; spaceous and accommodating.

I had hoped to interview one of its board members, but unfortunately none were around. Did get a chance to chat with  Curt Lund, Audience Development Manager at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, one of the tenants in the building…. who spoke about how the Open Book welcomes young students into its space, and engages them in practical book making tasks: paper making,

printing,

book binding and the like.

The building also houses an active, and acclaimed, small publishing house, Milkweed Press. Marketing Manager Jessica Deutsch showed me some of their more recent publications…and told me the moving story of how the work of David Rhodes has been revived and reprinted.

Open Book is a marvelous concept, brought to life by intelligent, dedicated book lovers. Oh that more cities were as culturally attuned and vibrant as Minneapolis. Although my visit was short, and regrettably I wasn’t able to interview anyone at Graywolf, Coffee House or Milkweed, I did manage to talk to some key players in the city’s book community, including, in addition to Rosemary, rare book dealer Robert Ruhan Miller, Eric Lorberer editor of Rain Taxi, and the proprietor of Midway Used and Rare Books. Please stay tuned.

During my Minneapolis stay I also, needless to say, took a few additional photos:

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Almost finished reading Netherland, a review of which — with Zadie Smith and James Wood in sight — is forthcoming. For now, these two whimsical ponderings from its text:

"…one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?"

And on carpe diem power outages:

"It also transpired that the upheaval provoked a huge number of romantic encounters, a collective surge of passion not seen, I read somewhere, since the ‘we’re-all-going-to-die-sex’ in which, apparently, everybody had indulged in the second half of September two years previously – an analysis I found a little hard to accept, since it was my understanding that all sex, indeed all human activity, fell into that category.”

James Jensen

This is how Joseph Roth begins his essay "Nimes and Arles" found in Report from a Parisian Paradise, one of the best books read in 2008:

"Alphonse Daudet is immortalized in marble in the little municipal park at Nimes, in the middle of a small ornamental pool, in which two swans swim round and round, with the quiet precision of a pair of clock hands."

Ross Raisin is a young British author born in Keighley, Yorkshire. He has studied at the University of London, worked as a trainee wine bar manager and completed a  postgraduate degree in creative writing at Goldsmith’s College. His debut novel Out Backward (God’s Own Country in England) was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It features Sam Marsdyke, a disturbed adolescent living in a harsh rural environment, and tracks his journey from an oddity to a malevolent, insane, psychopath.

We talk here about praise Ross has received from the likes of J.M. Coetzee and Colm Toibin, ignoring your own press, original titles, the importance of voice,  embellishing the yorkshire dialect, the differing roles of an editor,  ‘Lankenstein’, evaluative criteria, language and style, the craftmanship of Peter Carey, and shipyards.

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The Reader is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years. Its triumph is rare: art that works intellectually and emotionally, intertwined with exquisite skill. Countless frames of textural beauty are captured and laid down as backdrop to this adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s 1995 novel of the same name: peeling paint on old door fronts, stitching on the back of a blue trench coat, the bright yellow stanchions of a Brooklyn bridge, church walls, lithe young  bodies, German countryside — this movie is filled with lush, exhibition-worthy photography.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FdQ3Y7royU

Coupled as it is with a sensitive soundtrack, powerfully understated acting, and David Hare‘s screenplay, The Reader, on many levels, succeeds, as do few other films, in producing material which teases out, and demands, a human, emotional response to the hard, historical record. The extent to which shame about illiteracy influences the life decisions of a proud young woman, stimulates both reflection and empathy.

Deeply thought provoking and moving, you can ask little more of a film. This is an exceptional work of art.

And as so often happens on the Internet, from The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite page, to host Frank Lynch’s blog , to Jerry O’Sullivan and this tour of the Hebrides:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5q5fFVAnGs

Image from here.

Samuel Johnson was born on September 18th, 1709. Few books have given me more pleasure than Boswell’s Life. Few men have spoken or strung together more brilliant words. Here are a few the good Dr. imparted on the topic of writing, culled from this goldmine:

"The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life."

"I never desire to converse witha man who has written more than he has read."

"The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more powerful attractions, to spread such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second view of things hastily passed over, or negligently regarded."

"I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils:’Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’"

"Whatever can happen to man has happened so often, that little remains for fancy or invention. We have been all born; we have most of us been married; and so many have died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet. In the fate of princes the public has an interest; and what happens to them of good or evil, the poets have always considered as business for the Muse. But after so many inauguratory gratulations, nuptial hymns, and funeral dirges, he must be highly favoured by nature, or by fortune, who says anything not said before. Even war and conquest, however splendid, suggest no new images; the triumphal chariot of a victorious monarch can be decked only with those ornaments that have graced his predecessors."

"Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day."

"To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation."

Here’s an immediate, not entirely considered  — yes, exactly what bloggers are excoriated for by haughty traditional media types — gut level response (one that may be re-visited) to last night’s MacBeth, performed by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre:

It knows only one emotion. Every character on stage spits and seethes with anger.  When news that fathers and wives and children and kings are murdered, when daggers and the dead appear, when forests move, wives die and witches meow…anger is the only response. The result is one of the worst presentations of this play I’ve ever attended. 

I can only assume, because of the uniformly uni-dimensional acting performances, that director Barbara Gains ordered her toupe to attack the text with only one thing in mind: hostility. It guts the play of all subtly. Murders its humanity. Renders it unaffecting. MacBeth is a decent man who gradually descends into hell on earth. He’s torn, conflicted…as with most of Shakespeare’s important characters he changes. Ben Carlson’s MacBeth doesn’t change. From the moment he steps onto the stage a victorious general, to when he leaves it with a dagger in his gut, his MacBeth is the same man. We feel no sympathy for his awful ordeal. No loss. It signifies nothing.

This, despite some clever conceits. Gains has her witches play paparazzi and strippers. False unreliable prophets, frequented by de centered, hollow men. those unloved. Motivated by cheap sex and celebrity worship. MacBeth is in constant need of affirmation and external validation.  Lacking center he is insecure about his manhood. Goaded into action because of a fragile sense of self, he loses his soul. His behavior contradicts his morals.

There are some good ideas here. Some good visuals too. Karen Aldridge’s dead, Marat-like,

Lady MacBeth in a transparent bath tub full of diluted, outed blood is particularly striking.

What this production lacks is life.

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Braving frigid temperatures and howling winds blowing down the corridors of downtown Madison I bagged this late night booty: