(no subject)

[jfb]

I'm reading another fantastical novel with a contemporary, real-world-ish setting, by another Minnesota writer--Emma Bull's War for the Oaks. Given various predilections, and the book's general reputation, it's surprising I haven't made it to this one before. I suspect it was because I opened it up and saw printed lyrics.

In any case, I'm bringing it up just as an excuse to post another photo. Here's the opening paragraph:

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of office towers and department stores. The big red-and-white city buses roar at every corner. On the many-globed lampposts, banners advertising a museum exhibit flap in the wind that the tallest buildings snatch out of the sky. The skyway system vaults the mall with its covered bridges of steel and glass, and they, too, are full of people, color, motion.

And here's my photograph of the Nicollet Mall:

Some things are just better in prose.

Comments

yum

[rutemple.livejournal.com]

I promise that all the scenes and locations Emma describes are True, and she stitches in most of the truly magical touch-Earth places in the Twin Cities that stitch my home-towns' (yes I meant that plural possessive) magic together.
And I swear even though she put it across the street from where the building really is, I lived upstairs from Eddi's apartment near Loring Park. In 1988...

And if you want to hear how the music really SOUNDS, you dig up old CDs of Cats Laughing, dear lad! She sings 'em true, and she sings the spirit up out of the ground and down from the sky and they rocks just Right.
http://www.greenmanreview.com/another_way_to_travel.html

The Flash Girls, Emma's band with the Fabulous Lorraine, is no small potatos either.

And surely you're familiar with Boiled in Lead? I think she wrote in Drew for grins, somewhere...

There are reasons to have lived in Minneapolis in the 80s. Music among them.

Re: yum

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as it happens I was just listening to Boiled in Lead earlier today, not because of the book but because it's one of many old tapes I'm going through and deciding whether to keep. But I never saw them, living as I did a couple of hours away. And those other bands I know only by reputation.