It's the right time of semester for a "go towards the light!" shot, right?

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Funny how your definition of ‘nice weather’ ends up being so contextual. Back home, the crocuses and daffodils are up and the garden shows are in full swing, with bands of merry horticulturists rubbing their hands together in anticipation of planting in early April. Here, we're very happy that it looks like this:

Which means it’s as much as 60 degrees warmer than it was last week, depending on how you're counting. So we’ve all completely changed our wardrobes (from the Negatives Getup to the Dude, Above 20 Means Shorts attire), poked our heads out of our caves, and begun to congregate and remark upon the fact that spring is definitely coming, yes it is. I put on my yellow coat yesterday and reveled in my walk to an afternoon lecture, glove-less and happily stomping on slush that was decidedly not treacherous. Afterwards, I snapped photos all the way back to the parking garage and then drove home through the twilight with the Owls’ “Bury Your Mind” on a loop, intent on getting home ahead of my guest to throw the pot of soup on the stove to heat.

We poured wine and told each other that yes, spring was definitely coming. You can tell with these beautiful days, you know. The weather prophet is similarly excited, forecasting a beautiful, sunny weekend with highs in the 30s. The 30s! These concepts get Twin Citians very excited, especially after a particularly brutal winter, and we do such things as head out to play baseball on the frozen lakes.

Because really, yes. The winds have changed and you can feel the future in them, but the landscape still looks like this. The difference, for us? You can totally see all of the benches now, because they're not half-covered with snow.

We don’t care, it’s a start. Never mind the brutal, sneaky springs, the famous March Mess that is to come.

All we need is the light at the end of the tunnel. And actually, some of us like it just fine right now, right here, where it’s warm enough for the yellow coat and cold enough to keep the promise of snow and prevent the pollen from descending upon us. This stage is pretty fine.

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I’m still totally in love with this place and I still heart the winters, but good God February is a month that gets to you. It’s a month of same same sameness, every day the freakin’ same, and this year we get an extra day of it. Like, this episode of Dude Weather is from the 12th, but it really doesn’t matter one tiny bit that I’m posting it today.

I see from the Archives of Oblivion that about this time last year I was also posting maudlin entries. But hark! The one I was really thinking of is dated March 6! Because there are two more months of winter left in these parts. At least. (Alumni: remember that one time we tried to take a department photo in May and it all of a sudden snowed on us? Yeah. Crazy times.)

There better be snow, that’s all I can say. Fluffy white snow and penguins. And forced bulbs. And fondue.

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We are under a wind chill advisory today:

Temperatures will continue to fall to between 12 and 20 below zero through daybreak. West-northwest winds of 10 to 15 mph will push wind chills to between 25 and 40 below through the morning hours. Wind chills of 25 to 35 below zero will continue during late Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon as temperatures rise modestly. Therefore a Wind Chill Advisory remains in effect for the entire area of central and south central Minnesota and west central Wisconsin until 6 PM Saturday.

I am fascinated, but not fascinated enough to go outside this time. The Art Shantys will have to survive another year without me.

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The Science Museum of Minnesota is 100 and then some.

Thinkery, on the other hand, is only five years old.

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Minneapolis topped the Most Literate Cities poll, and St. Paul is in the Top 5. Because what else is there to do for five months out of the year?

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It was snowing when I got up and went out to teach.

It’s still snowing now as I’m getting ready for bed.

There is snow forecast for three of the next five days, none of which will be over 20 degrees.

This is so my weather.

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In other news, I managed to bump the word meter along by about 3,500 words. I’m not done with InaDWriMo yet, dammit.

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Al’s Breakfast, Dinkytown. 14 precious seats and a one-hour wait outside. Always worth it and sometimes then some, as demonstrated by this overheard testimony:

Diner #1: This place is always wonderful.
Diner #2: Oh, it’s even better when you’re drunk. It’s as good as smoking pot and watching Fantasia! Plus, the Eggs Benedict is a complete hangover cure.

Did I mention it’s right on the outskirts of the East Bank campus? Not so far from Greek row?

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My first semester here, I finagled a trip to the UMN archive and special collections caverns as part of a campus look-see for a visiting scholar. The idea fascinated me: what could be more scholars-on-the-tundra than caverns full of archives, possibly run by a race of archivist gnomes?

Our East and West Bank campuses are indeed situated along the bluffs and banks of the Mississippi, and those sandstone bluffs are full of caves. The U makes use of all of it. For instance, the Weisman Art Museum garage is built right into the bluffs:

It’s a rather deep garage (six stories, perhaps?), and driving down into it often feels like you're descending into part of the river itself, even though that's not actually the case.

In the archive caverns, you have the sensation of being even further down. There’s a four-story service entrance carved into the bank, but we entered through the secured elevator system in Anderson Library. Access is limited to staff, but Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, the founder and head archivist of the extensive Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies*, which we were visiting, was nice enough to guide us through. There are two humongous caverns, each two stories high and the length of two football fields. Jean put it in perspective by explaining that they had the space to archive the Washington Monument several times. Caves being what they are, they naturally featured a year-round temperature in the mid-50s and very stable, high humidity. It doesn’t take too much doing for climate control technology to stabilize the rooms at 62 degrees and 50% humidity, the optimal conditions for paper storage. The Immigration History Research Center has posted a photo tour, and the cavern photos are about halfway down the page. They don’t really convey the sheer size of the caverns, but they do give some sense of just how much material is stored down there.

There were no archive gnomes, as it turned out — just human archivists who are managing a truly vast amount of materials, tucked away in the banks with enough sump pumps to survive a 500-year flood.

*The Tretter Collection is remarkable, and Jean is knowledgeable, chatty and very nice. Some of you would have a fine time doing research there. The collection contains all the usual paper as well as a surprising array of non-paper materials. The queer pulp collection alone could take up years of my life.

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I’m working on a new installment of the Twin Cities Caves series that will feature the UMN archive caves, but since I’ve got to head out the door for meetings it won’t be up until later tonight.

It figures, because I see from the traffic logs that quite a few MNSpeak newcomers are finding their way from a comment I left over there. So for you guys: here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the cave series. The entire Twin Cities category archives are here, if you’d like to take a look. I also keep a Twin Cities Flickr set and admin the Twin Cities Peanuts Statues Flickr Group. A 2008 calendar of Minnesotaness photos is available here, should you find yourself interested in such a thing.

And I’ll be back around here later.

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Cab Calloway regularly played the Castle Royal caves back in the 1930s — which is also when the Fleischer Studio* was producing Betty Boop cartoons. Cab “starred” in three of them.

This one, which ostensibly re-tells the Snow White fable, is my favorite. In the course of fleeing the Wicked Queen, Betty, Koko, and Bimbo end up in a series of haunted caves where they encounter Cab’s ghost, singing St. James Infirmary Blues. There’s layers upon layers of intertextuality going on here: the song, which is about dying after finding your girl dead in an infirmary, spliced into the well-known fable, the name of which is also an euphemism for cocaine**, with various horror and fable tropes worked into the whole thing.

But I digress. My point with all this is: I wonder if Cab's adventures at the Castle Royal might have inspired part of the cave sequence? Betty and her compatriots run from the witch's castle into a snowy landscape that looks not unlike Minnesota. Betty tumbles along bluffs that are quite like the bluffs of St. Paul and is transported in her ice coffin via gnome sledge. The caves are strangely furnished, albeit not at all in the way that Castle Royal was. Along the way, there is a table of dead men gambling; one of the stories told by the Wabasha Caves guide yesterday concerned a gangland murder that took place around a card table in the room adjoining the stage cavern.

There’s no way to really know, I suppose, short of resurrecting Max Fleischer. But isn’t it pretty to think so? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was true?

*There’s a fascinating IP section in the Fleischer entry.
**Cab’s famous Minnie the Moocher also dies of a cocaine overdose, and the relevant Fleischer cartoon also features ghosts. The drug also figures heavily in other Calloway songs as well as the mythology surrounding him.

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Wilhelmina and I met up at the Wabasha Street Caves yesterday morning for the Cave Tour. While I didn’t learn a ton that I didn’t already know, it was still totally worth the $5 admission to actually see the inside. “Inside” means both the restored nightclub, which still holds a weekly Swing Dancing Night every Thursday, as well as a few of the unused caves behind it.

The caves that were part of the original Castle Royal are covered over with steel infrastructure and stucco and completely finished out with electricity and running water. After the original club closed at the start of WWII, the caves were repurposed a number of times. They became a roquefort aging facility for Land O'Lakes, which put down concrete slabs in the unfinished caves in order to better roll wheels of cheese across them. (The concrete also effectively seals over any gangster bodies that were buried there during the original nightclub years.) Then the nightclub had another run as Castle Royal II before it became a disco in the late 70s. After the disco closed, it became a teenage hangout called The Library, which lasted for about a year. Then it was finally abandoned and turned into a major headache for the city. You can still see the scorch marks from hobo fires in the 1980s.

At some point in there, the city also crammed it absolutely full of trash from the 1952 Mississippi Flood. When the current owners bought it in 1991, it was two days away from being bulldozed. They’re a construction family, and they paid a fortune to clean the trash out of one of the cave sections so as to have a place to store their heavy equipment. (Several caves beyond it are still packed with trash because it would cost too much to have it hauled off.)

I’m glad they decided to restore the nightclub and find another place to store their equipment, because the place is such an interesting aspect of St. Paul history. The tour also includes quite a lot of information on the part it played in the gangster culture of the city and the extent to which it’s haunted today. (I shall leave it to Wilhelmina to comment on that. She’ll do it far better than I could.) All in all, quite recommended by Thinkery: admission is reasonable ($5), and it’s an excellent way to spend an hour geeking out on local culture.

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My mother always captured bugs and took them outside when I was growing up, which is admirable. But now that I run my own house, I pursue a scorched-earth policy with the insects, if for no other reason that I cannot stand to get close enough to them to catch them. (Sorry, Mom!) I tend toward smushing, while Mister Husband leans toward hosing them down with some ammonia-based cleaning product. (Works well, less toxic than bug spray.)

So there's usually nothing multi-legged in the house, or if there is its stay is rather short. But now... now is the time of the year when the ladybugs want to get warm. There are three living by the warmth of Mister Husband’s lamp in the living room, and three clustered around a window in our bedroom. I am opposed to their being in my space on general principle, but it’s not like they’re hurting anything. And I cannot kill a ladybug, since they’re good luck.

So I guess we’ll just learn to get along for the time being. Le sigh. At least they’ll probably let me make portraits of them.

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There’s both a quaking bog and a marsh nearby, but we visit the marsh much more often simply because it’s closer. Yesterday, I got up at dark-thirty and worked my way through a breakfast meeting, advance responses to student drafts, figuring out storage solutions for the coming onslaught of diss-related website PDFs, doing some actual research, and a pile o' email. So when Mister Husband appeared in my study at 4 and suggested heading out to the marsh and then Chinese for dinner, I got right up and put on my shoes.

Some of the boardwalk needs repairs or is nearly submerged, but there’s a good stretch that’s pretty new. The marsh has a different beauty this time of year, a more muted range of color splotched with bright leaves and brilliant green duckweed. There’s always a lot of texture there, but I see even more of it in the fall. Usually there are geese and ducks and herons, but nobody was stirring yesterday. It was just the two of us tromping along the boards, and eventually hurrying back under the first raindrops.

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More by clicking on the image.

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Via Minnesota Stories.

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When I moved here from Little Rock a few years back, my teaching mentor told me to keep a journal of the transition because it would all fade so quickly. Of course my good intentions about the matter got lost in the shuffle of moving and starting PhD work, and of course now I remember less and less about the whole thing. I was telling Compatriot G. the other day that I really wish I had written down the little things that were so different to me about Minnesota culture before they became just the way things are. Like snow emergency signs.

When we were about to begin our Grand Tour of PhD Programs, I started reading about the Twin Cities. I remember sitting in my mother-in-law’s living room in Pocola, Oklahoma reading a guide to the cities and irritating her with the idea that I would take her son so far across the country. I reached the section on snow plow routes and snow emergencies and paused, because I couldn’t really imagine the weather that would make such a thing necessary. Where I’m from, we get two inches of snow every other year if we’re lucky.

From the time I was tiny, I had always wanted to live somewhere with consistent snow. When we got here, I was a little mesmerized by these signs. It meant it wasn’t just something I had read in a book. It was real, and there would be real winter. Of course, every winter that we’ve been here has been mild by Minnesota standards, but I am Arkansan, and so I have been pretty happy. It’s pretty wonderful to get something you wanted after a long time and find out that yes, you really did want it after all.

The next thing, I still don’t really understand. Minnesotans raffle off meat. From the New York Times piece:

My lovely female relatives steadfastly drank me under the table. They drank me, in fact, under the green plastic fake-grass rug under the table. And so I wasn’t at all certain I was hearing things correctly when a man in a plaid flannel shirt approached us and asked, “Would you ladies care to participate in my meat raffle?”

The ladies reached for their purses again — not for guns, as I would have imagined, given the man’s question — but for wallets. They were each peeling one cool dollar bill off their private stashes as I stammered: “Wait! His what? His what raffle?”

“It’s just a meat raffle, Liz,” Aunt Luana explained. “We always have meat raffles around here.”

“But what do you win?”

“Meat.”

The bartender reached into a freezer and produced for my benefit the evidence: several giant packages of, indeed, meat. Frozen meat. A stunning pack of pork chops and a handsome four-pound chuck roast. These were the prizes of the night — beautiful meat to be sweepstaked off to some lucky drunk! Saloon meat! Chance meat! Destiny's meat!
You know you’re an outsider when something that seems perfectly normal to everyone else is impenetrably bizarre to you. I was dizzied with a thousand questions. (Where does this meat come from? Why is the meat-raffle game board imprinted with an official stamp of the Minnesota State Gambling Control Board? Is that an official Minnesota State Gambling Control Board chuck roast? Is it unsanitary to consume pork that you found in a bar?) But there was no time for questions because, lo, the meat raffle was quick approaching, and there were only a few tickets left. I announced, “Mr. Meat Raffle Man, I shall buy all your remaining tickets!”

Perhaps I will figure out a way to live here long enough to understand meat raffles.

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Wabasha Street Caves, 2007

Castle Royal Nightclub, c. 1933, as pictured in John Dillinger Slept Here

S., her friend L, and I spent part of yesterday on the St. Paul Gangster Tour, which starts at the Wabasha Street Caves. We didn’t actually see the caves, but I skulked around the outside taking photos for awhile, and last night I picked up a copy of Paul Maccabee’s John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook’'s Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 for bedtime reading. Published by the MN Historical Society Press, it looks like a marvel of research, and the materials are now collected at the Society. A little reading there and a little googling, and now I know that the caves have been in use since the 1840s, first as a silica mine and then as a mushroom farm of sorts run by French immigrants. In the 1930s, it became a speakeasy at the center of St. Paul's police corruption. Maccabee offers a description of the roaring nightlife it supported:

Continue reading "Twin Cities Caves, Part 1: Wabasha Street" »

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Last fall, I would teach on the St. Paul campus on Friday mornings and then drive over to the East Bank with Mister Husband. I'd drop him off for his Friday afternoon seminar and head off for a late lunch at the Vietnamese joint, where my favorite waiter would fill me in on what his band was plotting and playing that week. Then I’d go on over to the Engineering library’s second floor reading room to read for exams (and procrastinate on reading for exams). It was a good space for me, and I got quite a bit done there. Now I’m thinking maybe I should work in one day a week of diss writing in this room. Can’t hurt, might help.

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I was headed for the Apple store to pick up the new iWorks and iLife. They opened the doors to me and about 8 middle-aged guys. The geniuses all flocked to help the guys and ignored me. I grabbed my software and headed for the checkout. When I got there, the Apple guy peered down his nose and said, “You do know this is the Family License.” “I have four Macs,” I replied testily.

Love Macs. Not particularly fond of the Apple Store, especially since my favorite ex-student Genius shipped out for London. I usually do all my Apple business via the Internets, but the impending new school year means that we both decided we needed new software right this very minute.

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It turned out there wasn’t a Flickr group for the Twin Cities Peanuts statues we have scattered all over the place, so I made one last Thursday night. As of now, it has 14 members and 82 photos. You should take a look — they’re a lot of fun, and there are quite a few statues in there that I’d never seen before.

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We call this The Bowling House. As far as I can tell, the motif goes all the way around.

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I’ve been homesick for swamps the past week or so, so I went out and found some muck this afternoon. Snail Lake certainly isn’t a swamp, and neither are the marshes and bogs we have up here, but I felt better afterwards.

I took the camera along because I think I’m too dependent on that creamy Minnesota summer light. It’s easy to make photographs in that golden stuff. Today was cloudy, flat light, just like almost every damn day for the past week. So flat light and muck — I wanted to see what I could do with that. I made a lot of terrible shots, but there were a few that I think are decent enough to flickr.

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Last year, my chiropractor pointed out to me that there are only about 10 weeks of reliable summer weather up here — 12 if we’re lucky. I’m always amazed at the prompt death of summer after Labor Day. There’s no dallying around with the season in Minnesota. We are on to the fall, ja! Oktoberfest! Polka polka polka! Which is part of why I love it here. Fall is my favorite season, closely followed by winter.

Still, I would like the remaining three weeks to behave as expected, please. It is our due. But yesterday, the high was 57. I wore a tank under a thick, hooded t-shirt to breakfast with C. She wore a t-shirt. After we finished, we went straight back to my house to put on sweatshirts and fleeces. We was cold. And today is more of the same. Last night I had to ditch the summer blanket and put the comforter back on the bed. I imagine it’ll be nice to have it again tonight.

Perhaps it will be fall sooner rather than later this year.

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Where the archives live.

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Update: This is what happened later.

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We were not on the 35W bridge when it collapsed. I was amazed to come home to so many emails in two inboxes and in Facebook, and so I wanted to let you all know we're alright. I was teaching and Jeff was erranding on this side of the river. He's been glued to the TV for hours, but I was oblivious until class was over at 9.

I don't know yet whether anyone we know was there, and my heart goes out to all the people who were.

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I found this little 2-inch garden gnome while walking the Kingfield neighborhood with Compatriot G. It was in a wee, freshly-planted cactus garden, which you don't see so many of around here. I’m thinking that a Minnesota cactus garden must be quite the experiment in ephemerality.

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A rather long set that starts at a sushi joint in Apple Valley, goes to Mall of America, and then drives home along part of the Grand Rounds. There was quite a lot going on at MOA yesterday — a SPAM castle, the B&N Harry Potter party setup, and a human frog, among the usual carnivalry.

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Well, I had two weeks of vacation time coming
After working all year down at Big Roy's Heating And Plumbing
So one night when my family the I were gathered 'round the dinner table
I said, "Kids, if you could go anywhere in this great big world, now
Where'd you like to go ta"
They said, "Dad, we wanna see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota"
They picked the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.
— Weird Al, The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota

The museum is one of those wonderful small-town museums that is about 20% on-topic and 80% Contents of the Town’s Attics. The evidence is in the flickr sets.

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The gigantic green pumpkin weather-vane sculpture thingie at the St. Paul Farmer's Market.

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I think universities should also have water gardens up to the windows. I'd be happy to look over from grading and see something like this.

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We spent tonight wandering around the Taste of Minnesota festival. It wasn’t what I expected — I guess I thought it would be less fair food, more actual food. But it was still a lot of fun. Almost all the people were smiling and the light was generally great.

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In which I reinterpret an Elvis Costello album cover.

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Best viewed large.

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(Most of these are fairly cheap. Shannon’s got the master list of free summer music posted up at her place.)

Jimmie Vaughan at Cabooze ($20.00, 7/8)
John Doe at 7th Street Entry ($11.00, 7/18)
Magnolia Electric Co. at 7th street Entry ($9.50, 8/25)
Hank III and Assjack at First Avenue (price unannounced, 8/7)

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Since I didn’t have a senior year of high school, I didn’t have to worry about the Senior Trip. My brother was still in the class, though, and my best friend was a year behind him, so I generally kept up with the happenings at Little Southern Baptist High. In the early spring, my old class voted on their senior trip plans. Faced with the possibility of going anywhere in the US they could scrape together the funds for, they chose ... Mall of America.

Needless to say, I felt this development confirmed my choice to move on down the road to early college admission. (Git along, little smartass, egghead doggie.) The class two years before us went to Colonial Williamsburg. The one-year-prior class went to the Grand Ole Opry. I wasn’t particularly impressed with either of those decisions, but at least they didn’t involve driving 750 miles on a bus in order to go shopping. For the next decade or so the occasional mention of Mall of America prompted much ranting from me, along with recitations of my old classmates' folly.

So when we moved to the Twin Cities, Mister Husband dragged me over there pronto. Not just once, but several times over that first summer. (Like all good spouses, he’s immune to my ability to bitch a blue streak.) Eventually, I stopped flailing about and started to regard it as a sort of Museum of Capitalism. When he quit smoking two years ago, walking the laps there was the only thing that settled the late-afternoon jitters, so that’s what we di