Duluth Blogs: How to Collect Baseball Cards
Today, I point to another blog by a Duluthian, this time John Boucha. You can tell because his name is the URL.
Today, I point to another blog by a Duluthian, this time John Boucha. You can tell because his name is the URL.
I’ve been discovering blogs by Duluthians lately. Sister Scotland collects the observations of a Superior student as she studies abroad. Some observations, about the taste of haggis … well, I will never be okay with food cooked in a stomach. It feels like duplication of effort; we only need one stomach in this process. But others, they are just playful thoughts on life.
Daniel Levar was a Duluthian in Minneapolis at the time he submitted this sketchbook to the Brooklyn Art Library.
I’ve been working on a medical humanities project. Some Duluthians are part of it, including local author Avesa Rockwell.
“As I child I could run out the backdoor and leap over tumbleweeds and sagebrush like a jackrabbit. By the time I reached tenth grade my body lost its buoyancy, and the open spaces around my house and in my mind were being leveled, fenced off, and cul-de-saced. I felt trapped by the prefabricated structures of school and its social hierarchies.”
Read the article at repository.stcloudstate.edu.
I’ve been working on a medical humanities project. Some Duluthians are part of it, including local artist Rob Adams.
Read the article at repository.stcloudstate.edu.
I’m digging deeper into the online collection of Duluth-related Sketchbooks at the Brooklyn Art Library.
I’ve been working on a medical humanities project. Some Duluthians are part of it, including communication instructor Daniel Egley and his partner Beverly Egley.
I’ve been working on a medical humanities project. Some Duluthians are part of it, including poet Zomi Bloom.
“After the endoscopy … while living in limbo, every attempt to eat led to unbearable burning and the inevitable blowing up of the balloon on my right side. I drifted in and out of waking dream‐state such that dreams became nightmares and shifted back into dreams of fantastic sweetness.”
Read the poem at repository.stcloudstate.edu.
About a year ago, Samantha Nielsen was subject of a Selective Focus on Perfect Duluth Day. She’s one of the Duluth artists in the Brooklyn Art Library.
Brooklyn Art Library claims to hold the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world with more than 41,000 sketchbooks on shelves and more than 20,000 in a digital library. Some of them reference Duluth.
Jan Carlson Carey
My friend Jan Carlson Carey and I served on the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council at the time of its immense growth. I was the at-large Duluth representative, and Jan represented the Iron Range, more or less.
In all those five years, I never knew she was a talented painter in her own right.
I spent Saturday at the Marcus Duluth Theater, which is on the lake [in the DECC]. For point of wry comparison, the Marcus Lakes theater is in Hermantown, near no obvious lake. My sweetheart Zomi and my friend Kate and I hoped to see Holmes and Watson.
So a drip coffee is free at Barnes & Noble until the Dec. 23 after 8 p.m., so I am back. The people watching is better tonight, maybe because it’s Friday.
I’m at Barnes and Noble, which is open until midnight through the Dec. 22. And I’m reflecting on the past year.
In the late 1990s, before it reorganized in bankruptcy, Sun Country Airlines flew out of the Humphrey Terminal at Minneapolis/St. Paul. It ran specials on undersold planes, and I received an email alert, I think, about round-trip tickets to Alaska for $300. It seemed so far away for so little money. I was a graduate student in the College of Agriculture on the Twin Cities campus; I was making $12,000 a year. This was cheap, it was an extravagance, an adventure, a story to tell.
I boarded the plane in Bloomington and disembarked in Anchorage. (It was the first time I had been to an airport with signage instructing passengers how to check and reclaim your gun.) The bus took me downtown, and I looked for a hotel. In the years before travel websites and mobile phones, this was hard — I had to walk toward hotel signs and hope for vacancies. There were few; the flight was cheap, but the hotels were booked; I spent twice what I spent on my ticket on my hotel, at what felt like a dive for the price.
I was young and weighed less than half what I weigh now, so I started walking. I walked to Cook’s Inlet, which was muddy. “Captain Cook” was not a real person to me, and so his inlet meant little. So, too, did Mt. McKinley mean little to me — Mt. McKinley, also called Dinale or Denali or Bolshaya Gora/Большая Гора, Densmore’s Mountain. The history of its naming means more to me than the mountain. I was more interested in a business dedicated solely to pull tabs.
