Snow Day Roundup

Schools are closed across Northeastern Minnesota today, including the college where I work. I get another day (two in one week!) to catch up my ungodly to-do list.

• One item on my to-do list is to compile the results of the Dylan Days Creative Writing contest. We should be announcing winners soon. We run five categories (open and student fiction, open and student poetry and one-act plays) and got about 750 entries from all over the world. The quality of the entries this year was excellent. Stay tuned. (And check out Dylan Days, May 22-25 in Hibbing).
  
• The PUC was supposed to meet yesterday to render a couple somewhat important decisions about Excelsior Energy's Mesaba Energy Project. I'm trying to find out what happened.
  
• For national political junkies, I am now of the opinion that Barack Obama supporters need to brace for a Pennsylvania disappointment. I still think Obama is likely to win North Carolina and has a good shot at Indiana, but I am getting a big time "Ohio" vibe from the Pennsylvania tracking polls. Clinton's numbers, even during bad news cycles, remain rock solid at 48-50 percent. The only real chance at knocking her out of the race will come in the first week of May with N.C. and Indiana. After that comes a string of Appalachian primaries where the Clintons are revered like Hillbilly royalty. She can run the table and would still likely lose the nomination, but oh how the press will chatter. I am an Obama fan but my desire to end this primary "contest" has more to do with party well-being and the potential stomach ulcers that come from watching too much cable news these days.

All this and more shoveling today ...

Dylan Days announces schedule for May 22-25, 2008

If you didn't know, I am the co-chair and volunteer media coordinator for Dylan Days in Hibbing -- a celebration of the Iron Range's most famous son, Bob Dylan, and the arts community of the region. We've recently posted our schedule for the 2008 event which runs May 22-25 (perhaps you caught my blatant sales pitch in my last column). Check it out.

Highlights include the opening of an exhibit at Ironworld called "Tangled Up in Ore," which will highlight the connection between Bob Dylan and the Iron Range, a new one-act playwright contest which will lead to the winning play produced on the Hibbing Community College stage during the event, and all our regular events such as the Literary Showcase, singer/songwriter contest, bus tour of Dylan's Hibbing and more.

Tickets for the Ramblin' Jack Elliott concert go on sale today. You need to reserve a spot if you want to take the Bob Dylan bus tour, join the free writing workshop or participate in the singer/songwriter contest. Otherwise, just show up, buy a pin and program and the rest is free and open to the public.

I return, bearing the head of the dragon called First Draft

I still have to mop up the blood on the last essay, but I've had a good week of writing for my book of Iron Range essays and finally feel like I can dabble in the time vortex that is blogging.

Thanks to the person or persons who contributed so many fine lines of dialogue for the Obama/McCain cop movie. I think I have enough to write a good trailer now that I might share over the weekend. If anyone has more, jump in.

Also thanks to the many who continue to vote in the"Most plausible Range statewide candidate" Quick Poll on the right column. Tony Sertich appears to be leading as we enter the last day of voting, but he's only got a few votes over the guy who posts the xenophobic signs along Highway 53 south of Cotton. (Watch out, T-Money, this guy lives in 5B). Bakk and Rukavina continue to chase the rainbow, but kudos to the Bakk camp for your late surge. It's not over yet. I'll decipher the results when the last votes are cast Friday afternoon.

Also over the weekend I'll review the Range, state and national news that I've missed. Friday I'll post my preview of the Itasca County and SD 05 DFL conventions and Saturday night I'll tell you if I was right or not. It would appear that, in regard to the Democratic presidential nomination race, certain candidates (I won't name names) have decided to poop in the pool during the water polo championship and that we have to keep playing anyway. Hooray! I didn't want my faith in American politics to be restored anyway. As an educated white male under 30 I need to wait and see how my demo performs in suburban Pittsburgh before I know what I'm supposed to think about this whole ordeal. (Confidential to Mark Penn: I drink BEER you overpaid hack!)

Oh, and there's a legislature here in Minnesota that is apparently in something called a session. I sure hope Viceroy Pawlenty suppresses this nonsense and lowers my sales tax by a tenth of a penny on the dollar. Think of all the extra things I could buy over a vast, incalculable amount of time!

Glad to be back!

The arts, the Iron Range and the resulting dilemma for many young people

The Hibbing Daily Tribune, like many local papers, is running its "annual edition" this month. The edition spans four consecutive Sundays and includes large feature sections that, back in the day, were huge advertising revenue builders for the paper. They're not as big as they used to be, but the paper still puts a lot of work into these sections. The topic for this year's Tribune annual edition is "Iron Range Generations," featuring stories of people of many different age groups and how they contribute to our local culture.

Mike Jennings, the Tribune editor, wrote an interesting piece about the how the Iron Range inspires artists and writers of all ages. This is something I've talked about for a long time and is part of the book I'm working on for next fall. It's also a big part of why I have dedicated so much time to Dylan Days. I really think the Range, though a flawed region, is a great place for writers in particular. You don't get much more human than this place.

Jennings' headline says a lot in itself.

"Is Hibbing a town that breeds rare achievement, a town that spurns its talented young, or both?" March 9, 2008, Hibbing Daily Tribune

Excerpt:

Certainly there’s nothing remarkable about young people whose ambitions are out of the common run deciding that if they don’t escape their native small-town environment, their potential will wither and die.

What may be uncommon about Hibbing, though, is the number of its young who turned out to be correct about the rare nature of their talent. Bob Dylan (who, when he was still Bobby Zimmerman, had his microphone switched off by his principal during a high school talent show) may head the list. But it’s a lengthy list, and one that includes a healthy complement of literary and musical talent.

...

“I mean, there could be something about the landscape,’ [Hibbing High School drama director Chuck Viren] said. “There could be something about the makeup of the community, where you have these blue-collar roots, and yet now we have ... a mixture of people from various backgrounds.”

...

“People always question how Bob Dylan could come out of a place so barren, as it were,” [retired Hibbing English teacher Dan Bergan] said. “Well, how did Shakespeare come out of Stratford?”

Maybe I'm in the wrong business

As a writer, I find an article like this to be troubling:

Reading's new chapter?
A study paints a grim picture of U.S. reading habits, renewing the debate on literacy and learning in the digital age.

By Sarah T. Williams, Star Tribune
Last update: November 19, 2007 – 12:01 AM

Is reading at risk? Or is there a "new literacy" emerging that cannot be measured by traditional testing tools and standards?

That debate is sure to flare anew today among literacy experts, teachers, multimedia whiz kids and good old-fashioned book lovers as the National Endowment for the Arts lays out a study that sounds the alarm about the dire state of reading in our culture. It's the second time in three years it has raised such concerns.

To the first question, NEA researchers and chairman Dana Gioia are ready with statistics from more than 40 broad-based studies on the reading habits of children, teenagers and adults.

"Americans are reading less, therefore they read less well," Gioia said last week during a conference call with reporters and writers. "And because they read less well, they do less well in school, less well in the economy and are less involved in civic life -- in every way that we're able to measure this."

The NEA's new study ("To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," at http://www.nea.gov/) echoes the findings of a 2004 study ("Reading at Risk") but brings in more recent data from many more sources, including federal agencies, universities, nonprofit foundations and business research organizations.

Among the findings:

• Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.

• People ages 15 to 24 spend only seven to 10 minutes per day on voluntary reading (about 60 percent less than the average American).

• Reading scores for 17-year-olds are down, while those for 9-year-olds are at an all-time high (ground that is lost in adolescence).

• Even while reading, 58 percent of middle- and high-school students are watching TV, listening to music or using other media.

• Literary readers among college graduates dropped from 82 percent in 1982 to 67 percent in 2002.

"These negative trends have more than literary importance," the NEA study argues. They correlate, among other things, to fewer job opportunities, lost wages, higher incarceration rates and less participation in civic and community life, including voting and volunteering.

The full article is here. Later in the story, some researches differ with the findings, saying you can't correlate social problems with reading deficiencies. Less reading doesn't necessarily cause these problems. Perhaps, they say, reading problems are symptoms of the same larger issues in American society -- poverty and failing education systems, for example. I agree that the NEA findings seem a little overblown, but I can't help but think of anecdotal evidence that traditional reading is on the decline in my generation. We talk about TV shows, not books.

Maybe blogs like this will one day replace traditional books? If so, I have to think of a way to make money writing these posts. Hmmm. It'll need to be something subtle, but profitable. I'll have to think about this after a sip of delicious Hills Brothers Coffee. Rich, bold, but never overpowering, Hills Brothers. We replaced the Arabian guy on our cans for you, America. Hills Brothers.

Bananas on deadline

I'm going to give readers a glimpse into the creative process. I write two things on a weekly deadline, a newspaper column and a radio essay. The radio essay topic is generally dictated by KAXE's "Between You and Me" show topic that week. In a way, that makes this piece easier to write because it's essentially like working off a prompt. The weekly column can be about a topic of my choosing, which means enormous freedom but also, ironically, more writer's bloc.

So here's the question. Can I write a 600 word column about the following concept?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes people will pull bananas off the bunches at the grocery store so they only have to buy the amount they want? Isn't that outrageous? Did you know that they sell the single bananas at a discount when they turn brown?

I think I can do this. Pray extra hard, little boys and girls.