I've almost survived all-star week, that mid-July hiatus from regular season baseball when the rhythm of my summer days is cruelly interrupted. I caught a little of the game at a bar in Minneapolis's Lyn-Lake district, and it just holds no interest for me, though some of the sideshows are of even less interest. The home run hitting contest? The big boppers no longer compete, and, even if they did, so what? The Pro-Bowl isn't very interesting either but at least they don't try to jazz it up with a punt-pass-and-kick competition.
The bar was the James Ballentine VFW. Third Tuesday of every month, they put on a free comedy show that is a good time: nice room, big crowd, one heckler on Tuesday (and a comic who seamlessly incorporated her into his act). There were perhaps a dozen stand-up performers, some better than others, the worst mildly amusing and the best really, really funny. It's not the normal VFW crowd--less white, less straight, way younger. One of the funniest comics let on about half way into his set that he was gay, which, notwithstanding my defective gay-dar, revealed nothing. Afterwards, I went grocery shopping at the Uptown Cub, where just before midnight on a Tuesday there were more shoppers than you might imagine, almost all of them the age of an upwardly mobile young career-builder--the beginning and the end, however, of the demographic resemblance. I felt nostalgic for my youth when, frequently with judgment clouded by Miller High Life (still just $3.75 for a bottle at the Ballentine VFW), I went grocery shopping in the middle of the night pretty regularly. Safer than driving straight home!
With no Twins games going on the TV or radio, I'm right up to speed on our president's antics, his misadventures with double negatives and all the rest of the unusually shitty shit-show. Where does he get off talking about the IQ of Maxine Waters? (General principle: people who are obsessed with other people's IQs are usually not very smart themselves and almost invariably assholes.) And what might Putin have on him? I don't think it's anything relating to sex, a subject about which Trump would be shameless even if Christian evangelicals did not insist that he take one mulligan after another. He's pretty touchy about his finances, though--and he's done business with a lot of shady characters, some of them in Russia. So here is a theory, advanced by Adam Davidson, of The New Yorker, that fits the facts, insofar as they are known, and is moreover recommended by its relative banality. The pee tape I reject on a principle that is a second cousin to "if it sounds too good to be true . . . ."
I've also been sunk in the USA trilogy, John Dos Passos's massive, kaleidoscopic portrait of America at the start of the twentieth century. Last night, I finished the first installment, The 42nd Parallel, without ever forming an idea of the significance of the title. I know Minneapolis is along the 45th parallel, so the 42nd is a little to the south, like at about Chicago and Des Moines, but the action of the novel is geographically diverse and includes Duluth, Seattle, San Francisco, Nevada, Chicago, Mexico, New York, Fargo, and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I hadn't known till a few days ago that a great work of American literature includes references to "Lake Harriet" (in Minneapolis, about a mile from my house), "the fairgrounds," and the amusement park that used to operate on an island in Lake Minnetonka. I thought I detected Dos Passos nodding, however, when a truck route from the Twin Cities to Milwaukee goes through La Crosse.
Well, anyway, I googled the significance of the title, and found this, which seems plausible.
UPDATE: Okay, I've taken the step of looking at a map, and, before the existence of I-94, it's not at all implausible that a route connecting the Twin Cities with Milwaukee would go through La Crosse.
Comments