The fictive governor of Minnesota in my new novel, The Man in the Blizzard, is named Jim instead of Tim.  In a scene late in the novel, Jim (his last name his Holsom), makes an appearance at a huge anti-abortion rally on the state capitol grounds. Pregnant women from around the country have been brought in at full term to be induced and give birth in medical tents around the capitol. The rally takes place on Labor Day and the the organizers have appropriated the phrase “Labor Day” for their own uses. Governor Jim Holsom speaks at the birth-in and signs that say, “Jim, it’s Him,” distributed by 4H kids from the state fair, spring up everywhere. Jim is hoping to get the VP nod and this appearance, in which he quotes Deuteronomy 30:19, “Choose life so you and your descendants may live,” firms up his conservative bone fides and he ultimately gets the nomination. Today, the real guv of Minnesota is in Denver, doing the VP job of dumping on the other party at their convention, as he hopes to get the nod. He actually knows by know. McCain announces tomorrow. Of course, I hope Pawlenty gets it. How often does one get a chance to look prescient? It looked unlikely, back when I turned in the final draft of the novel. I told myself that that was alright. If Philip Roth and Michael Chabon could write alternative history, I could write alternative present. That was my poetic license. Of course, I’d be very happy to see a bunch of Republicans bouncing around with signs that said, “Tim, It’s Him.”

My new novel, The Man in the Blizzard, is about poetry-spouting detectives who get mixed up in next week’s Republican convention.  When I realized that my detectives spoke poetry, part of my research involved raiding poetry collections in bookstores and libraries to find the perfect quotables for my dudes. My neighborhood bookstore at the time was Common Good Books in St. Paul, which has one hell of a poetry section, rivaled in recent memory only by the late Hungry Mind and the great bookstore of my youth, City Lights in San Francisco. When I was sixteen and first started writing poetry, I’d spend long Saturday afternoons cruising the basement poetry section at City Lights. I sampled a couple of dozen books, trying as well as I could to get a beat on each poet’s voice.  I rarely had more than a buck in my pocket in those days so couldn’t afford new books published, which cost anything from $1.75 to $2.25, so I’d amble next story to Discovery, the great used bookstore on Columbus Avenue, where you could get a book from a couple years back for 90 cents. I’d head over to Washington Square Park with my new book and feel like a junior hipster. Forty years later, my fortunes have changed a bit, and I was actually able to buy poetry books at Common Good. Now, marooned in Minnesota for a month of readings and family visits, I’ve had too much time on my hands. Too fractured in mind and spirit to work on a new novel, I’ve been knocking out poems for the first time in years. I don’t make great claims for them. I don’t even recognize my own voice as a poet. I’m really looking forward to reading next Sunday at Common Good with two real poets: Mary Logue and Bill Holm. Meanwhile, here’s a sample of what I’ve been writing:

FURY

I’ll admit, I’m confused by it.

Everybody agrees that it’s not healthy.

A guy can take a course to help manage it.

Talking about it is supposed to be the best approach.

I spend a lot of time talking to myself

but that only seems to make it worse.

Remembering to breathe is also helpful, 

yet far more complicated than it sounds.

Most agree that men are more often 

afflicted by it then women, 

however I think we suffer it in equal measure

but simply express it differently.

To lash out with it can result in violence, 

to internalize it may cause cancer.

It can look like a madman thrashing up the street

or a sullen creature chewing her nails to the nub.

The experts speak of it as something than can be displaced,

which makes me think of a constellation

in the night sky that’s suddenly gone missing.

Some people consider it an irrational act of nature.

Others rack it up with the emotions

as if it were a blameless abstraction.

I’m here to hold it responsible.

I like to blame it on other people’s stupidity and neglect

since I’ve learned how to disassociate from my own.

Or blame it on the fact that so much 

that I’ve expected and deserved has not materialized.

Sometimes I like to test it,

to put on a freshly laundered white shirt

and see how quickly the fury soils it.

 It’s odd publishing a book that’s set in the present moment, or what will soon be. Labor Day, with the Republican convention kicking off in St. Paul. (My first three novels were each anchored to public events, the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights demonstrations in San Francisco, the Patty Hearst kidnapping.) With this novel, I couldn’t figure out where the finish line was. After awhile it got fixed on Labor Day, the public event I imagined was a huge anti-abortion rally on the Minnesota state capitol grounds, featuring an induced birth-in, with the evangelicals appropriating the term “Labor Day” for their own uses. The anti-abortion rally on the state capitol grounds didn’t seem so far-fetched, as Governor Pawlenty and his wife hosted Louis Palu’s  Christian revival on the capitol grounds during Pawlenty first term in office.  I muddled along for a couple of years with this novel, in the middle of some big life changes, when the RNC gave me the gift of opening the Republican convention on Labor Day in the Twin Cities, where my detective smoked a lot of weed and feared he was losing his existential chops.    

It’s strange to aim at the present. The only way I could see it was pictorially, broad strokes leaking toward cartoon. But that’s not so different from the way we live our lives, disembodied from the news of the day, but still reliant on it. So much of the news involves the manipulation of it. Obama and Paris Hilton. Inspired cartooning. News is a rated production. I enjoyed thinking ahead of events a number of months, but the news kept changing. At first, as McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, each won one of the first three primaries, I imagined a brokered Republican convention in which the fictive guv of of Minnesota stole the presidential nomination after delighting the evangelicals and firming up his conservative bone fides speaking at the capitol birth-in. I scratched the presidential nomination heist after McCain locked up the nomination. My guv now has to be content with the vice nomination. It occurred to me that what I was writing was the first cousin of Philip Roth’s “alternative fiction,” as practiced in The Plot Against America. Mine was “alternative present.”

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, my former wife Patricia and I packed everything we owned in a Ryder truck and left San Francisco for a new life in Minnesota. I’d tired of San Francisco, hard as that was for anyone to imagine. Patricia was more reluctant to give up the City, she’d come from the Midwest and had “earned” S. F. I’d only been born there. I had a wee fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis and we decided to give the Twins cities a shot. We had an exciting drive, detouring south through Nebraska to visit Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud. I remember going past signs near Red Cloud that touted a tourist attraction called Pioneer Village: “In 1865, 145 covered wagons passed here. we noted that we were traveling the opposite way, thus becoming pioneers in reverse.Now, after twenty-five years in St. Paul, I’m reversing myself and returning to Northern California, where I’ll settle in Sonoma. My son is making the cross-country drive with me in my well-packed Saab. Yesterday, Anton and three of his friends helped me move fifty boxes (mostly books), some sticks of furniture, and other crates of minutia, into 10 leased linear feet of a massive semi. The truck, which barely fit onto my street, sheared overhanging tree branches where it passed. The driver, a seventy-five-year old gent named Dave, told me he was on the road almost all the time. What a fate, I thought, as large an albatross as a man could attach to himself. 

 Last Saturday I picked up one of the last tickets for the Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. The preferred local theater, for both its sound quality and stadium seating, was a cineplex in a god-forsaken suburb of Minneapolis, where the folks are really into god. I ended up with a small bucket of popcorn and a seat in the the middle of the front row. Once I tilted back and beheld a high-definition version of soprano Renee Fleming, the beautiful, if slightly vapid, backstage host, on the massive screen, I knew I was going to give myself to the experience. La Fille du Regiment is a playful bit of fluff with a handful of fine arias, especially for the tenor, sung winningly by the boyish, bright-eyed Peruvian, Juan Diego-Florez. But the real glory of the production belongs to La Fille, Marie, with the French coloratura Natalie Dessay turning in a performance of great charm. The screen’s pores-eye view keyed in on the muscularity of Dessay’s performance as a young woman raised by a regiment of French soldiers. Dessay’s rich voice was just fine, though it seemed almost ancillary to the marvel of her acting. which ranged from vein-popping physical to playful, with a wry sense of the absurd. Renee Fleming grabbed the principals after the first act, as they came backstage panting, and both Diego-Florez and Dessay, without skipping a beat, gave warm and self-effacing accounts of the challenges of their roles. There was a palpable sigh from the theater audience as everybody’s voyeuristic desires were satisfied. With this production, the Met completed its second season of simulcast operas beamed by satellite to hundreds of movie theaters across the United States, and Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan. As my first experience of the enterprise, I have to laud it as a bit of cultural and technical genius. To make opera of this quality accessible to a vast audience almost makes a skeptical character like me believe that there is some form of god.

On my way out of San Francisco the other day, I spent an hour going through “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,” at the Legion of Honor. The show, originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum, ends its cross-country run in San Francisco on May 25. As I stood in front of an oval-office shot of George W. and his war cabinet, a tall socialite, who looked as if she’d been chauffered over from her pad in Pacific Heights, sidled up beside me and said, “Wouldn’t you like to choke each of them to death?” Then she gave me a second look and said, “Only in San Francisco, would I assume that a total stranger shares my political views.” I nodded toward Donald Rumsfeld, clenched my hands in a choke hold, and told her that I imagined that the same conversation had taken place in Brooklyn. One of the surprises of the Leibovitz show is the way it gets people who don’t know each other talking. Leibovitz’s gift is similiar to that of the great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who excels at allowing his subjects to present (and incriminate) themselves, with little commentary. Add to this the extraordinary access Leibovitz has had to the political leaders and cultural luminaries of our time, through assignments from Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, and the result is a portfolio of iconic images, whose subjects we immediately recognize. It’s this collective shock of recognition that has strangers nodding to each other. There’s Nicole Kidman, ravishing in silvery gown and wash of spotlights; painter and film director Julian Schnabal, lounging in his paint-flecked striped pajamas; skeletal William Burroughs hung beside an anonymous Venetian who looks like his first cousin; Cindy Crawford, naked to the waist, adorned with her pet python; Generals Schwartzkopf and Powell, in full regalia, looking like a pair of grown-up boys playing dress-up. A woman in her thirties stood enraptured in front of a 1992 portrait of Daniel Day Lewis. The actor’s long, elegant fingers were ready to leap out of the frame. “The hands,” I said, and the woman sighed, “Yes,” as she imagined herself being touched by them.

I’ve added a new category–self promotion. It was inevitable. I’m curious why the prospect of writing about myself or on behalf of myself is still difficult at this ripe age. I experience a little bloom of cowardice about exposing myself. Is it some sort of false modesty? The word “shameless” has now been attached to the term to give it a bit of levity. I find myself more keyed to the words root “shame.” In any case, I have a new book coming out which always brings this problem front and center. The galley came this week and I am very happy with it. The publisher did a lovely job. And I had my first conversation with my new publicist who was sharp, and very enthusiastic about the book. She suggested that since the novel is set in contemporary Minneapolis and St. Paul that I go off and take photos of a few spots around the cities where scenes take place. They’d drop a few photos with relevant excerpts into the publicity packet. So obediently I set off to Minneapolis yesterday in the middle of a blustery winter day–despite the fact that it’s mid April–and took photos of Shorty & Wags, a BBQ joint in south Minneapolis where my character Augie procures a twenty-four pack of wings, a half pound of chicken gizzards, and a couple pints of collard greens. Two or three nights of dinner which my man manages to eat in one night. After taking photos yesterday, I simply ordered a pint of greens. Then I drove over to the Walker Art Center and climbed up to the lovely bridge that crosses countless lanes of traffic to Loring Park. An early scene in the book takes place on the bridge, which Augie calls the Armajani, after the architect. “I spent a lot of time on the bridge,” he says, “after the I-35 bridge fell. I figured the best way to contemplate the collapse of one bridge is to stand in the middle of another.”                                                                      

Finally, after the wind ripped through me and my winter coat, I headed over to Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in St. Paul, not far from where I live. Garrison’s good store is referenced in the book a couple of times. Augie had noted a bit of the owner’s self promotion, saying: “Garrison had a desk down there withe a sign pinned to it that named the books he’d written on it and the various typewriters he used. It was almost as good as being at the John Steinbeck museum in Salinas. I took a photo of the sign. So there I was, in the midst of my self promotion, capturing his. It’s self promotion as a hall of mirrors.