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

"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything," says Homer Simpson. "14% of people know that."

I had trouble getting into John Updike's writing. As an undergrad, I did the thing where I tried to search out my identity through literature, and this led me (scarily) first to Bukowski, then (understandably) to Jonathan Safran Foer, then (scarily, again, in terms of personality, even though he's indisputably a fantastic writer) to Philip Roth. Right now, for the record, I'm hovering around Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kafka.

Age 3: Freud sees his mother naked (1859).
Age 98: Rin Tin Tin dies in his Los Angeles home - age in human years: 14 (1932).
Age 30: Hitler grows a mustache (1919).
Age 53: Local writer and illustrator Eric Hanson publishes a compendium of mini-narratives detailing the origins, endings, and turning points in the lives of several historical figures, ages zero-100 (2008).

I imagine that if Alice Munro were a painter, she would paint landscapes. Her finished canvases would look clear and precise as photographs - that is, they would look real - fields with apparent patches of crabgrass; subtle weeds poking up in flower beds; a river winding into the distance, its surface spotted with dead, floating fish.