The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

When people ask what religion I am - an occurrence whose frequency seems to sextuple in December - I usually answer with a stock phrase: "Well, my grandparents are Jewish," I say. "And my parents sometimes are."

When I was in third grade, my school bus driver was named ‘Slice,' and he was the coolest. His hair was blond and spiked, held in place by gravity-resistant gel. In the front seat - where not even the nerdiest of nerds dared sit - he kept a Styrofoam container filled with icepacks and cans of orange Slice soda, which he sold for twenty-five cents, instead of the usual pop machine fifty.

I was at a wedding this weekend, which reminded me that, at least in Minnesota, summer is the same as wedding season.

I live over by Kenwood Elementary School...and steal their wireless Internet signal from time to time...somewhat by accident...Anyway, they've been doing a lot of construction on the school this summer. Right now they're working on replacing the windows, I think, and there's a big yellow cherry picker that goes up and down the side of the building, and a guy who takes out the old frames and puts in the new ones and then, I imagine, eventually washes the panes.

This is one of those rare mornings where The New York Times' homepage isn't dominated by a picture of Obama or McCain. So I figured I might as well bring the election back into forefront...of this blog about books...oy. The real reason I'm posting this can be found after the poem.

We've been having some pretty ridiculously great weather lately. If I had a real job (sorry, Mom), I probably would have played hooky last week to go and hang out by one of the lakes. Instead I just read a bit by Calhoun, but without the sense of freedom (or guilt) of having emancipated myself from a necktie.

The introduction to this week's Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider's forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

The introduction to this week's Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider's forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

The introduction to this week's Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider's forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

Welcome to a possibly special edition of Poem Worth Reading. The very title of this Cracking Spines segment — that is, Poem Worth Reading — is jeopardized with today's entry. But because this is a blog, and should thereby not be held to any qualitative standards (self-imposed or otherwise), and because I got the go-ahead from my editor, who said I could post "basically anything...," I've decided to go ahead and put up some of my own scribblings.