Saturday Essay Posts

I Was Left for Dead at Nopeming Sanatorium in the 1918 Fire

Oct 28, 2023 No Comments

(Excerpts from Scions of Cloquet by Jean-Michel Cloquet, 1946, out of print)

I was left for dead at Nopeming sanatorium in 1918, as the Cloquet-Duluth-Moose Lake fire combined with World War I, tuberculosis, and the influenza pandemic just hitting the northland. I’d brought my tuberculosis home with me from the filthy trenches of the Somme. There wouldn’t be an armistice for a month. Reaching Duluth, I was trucked on the dirt road to Nopeming with other infected veterans, fresh off the hospital ship. There we met citizens suffering from the homegrown TB outbreak traced to sewage in Lake Superior. That’s the Duluth I returned to. I’d barely survived overseas, evading German flamethrowers. Some of my trench-mates weren’t so lucky. Now I was barely surviving even though I was stateside, too sick to be properly shell-shocked from the omnipresent global crisis. So they tucked us away 10 miles outside of town in the forest sanatorium. Its name is Ojibwe for “in the woods.” The woods that burned.

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History , ,

The History of Cloquet, Pierre the Pantsless Voyageur and Duluth’s Missing Vermeer

Oct 07, 2023 1 Comment

Excerpts from Scions of Cloquet by Jean-Michel Cloquet (1946, out of print)

“In 1820, when he was 17 years old, the Frenchman Pierre Cloquet boarded a packet ship in Le Havre and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. He was trying to escape his father, like many of us try to do, perhaps all of us. He just wanted a little peace and quiet. By a certain measure, he found it in the territory eventually known as Minnesota. Pierre (or Grandpère Cloquet as my brother and I refer to him) became a legendary voyageur and fur trader 20 miles southwest of Duluth, trapping, hunting, and occasionally bear-wrestling. Over two decades of working for the American Fur Company, he built his own trading post where metal tools shipped in and beaver pelts shipped out. He gradually adopted native dress, and he married into a Black-Ojibwe family out of Michigan, sought-after guides and translators. And, right around the collapse of the beaver pelt industry in 1843, he inadvertently founded the town of Cloquet.

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Ripped at Jimmy’s Saloon in 2003

Sep 30, 2023 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to Jimmy’s Saloon, which still operates at 1812 Iowa Ave. in Superior’s Billings Park Business District. Although patios at drinking establishments have become commonplace in recent years, they were somewhat rare when this article was published in the Oct. 1, 2003 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

I’m a sucker for good conversation. So, by all means, tell me how bad your husband is in bed. The more details the better. Tell me about the spit bubbles that foam up on the edges of his mouth as he nears climax. No, seriously. I like that stuff.

Sports and rock ’n’ roll are good too. Just please do me the favor of saving the politics for your Chamber of Commerce meetings and lame-ass Wicca bonfires.

Tonight at Jimmy’s Saloon in Superior’s Billings Park business district, the conversation is just right, so far. Sure, I could probably hear the same talk of music, sports and fucking at any other bar in town, but it’s better at Jimmy’s because the drinks are cheap and there’s a nice courtyard.

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Duluth’s Lost Township on Chester Creek

Sep 09, 2023 17 Comments

Co-written with Allen Richardson

The Duluth Inside Duluth

In 1963, on 14th Avenue East overlooking Chester Creek, seven houses installed their own sewer rather than hook up to the city system. To do so, they took advantage of the experimentation sweeping the nation regarding public services. New forms of neighborhood government had emerged as housing associations. These seven houses applied for a federal grant as an independent municipal corporation. Technically they seceded from Duluth and became an autonomous township inside the city limits.

A democratic sub-society, the citizen-residents named the township “Duluth” by unanimous vote. After all, they felt they should not have to change the name of where they lived; in fact they were the real Duluth. Their right to name themselves was blessed by an appellate court ruling in 1968, hence “the Duluth inside Duluth.”

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Ripped at ‘R’ Place Bar & Grill in 2003

Aug 05, 2023 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to ‘R’ Place Bar & Grill and wrote the article below for the Aug. 6, 2003 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. ‘R’ Place, located a few miles outside Superior at 6611 State Highway 13 in South Range, has been out of business for many years.]

The first thing I do when I walk into ‘R’ Place is check to see if Jake is still alive. It’s hard to tell sometimes. He tends to sprawl out in the middle of the floor for extended naps. Sometimes he’ll look up when you step over him, but not always.

Jake, by the way, is an old, fat golden retriever. But he’s no ordinary old, fat golden retriever. He’s on a short list of candidates for being the best bar-dog ever. That’s because, when he is awake, he knows how to entertain. His best trick goes like this:

1) You take a dollar bill and present it to him like food.

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History ,

American Boy

Jul 08, 2023 No Comments

“Get out of the lake right now, or I will fucking shoot you,” he hollers, staring down an invisible sight and into my eyes, his finger threatening to pull the trigger — a notched branch on the stick rifle he has cocked and rested on his shoulder.

None of us respond, but if heart rates were words, we’d be babbling.

Our silence exasperates him. “I am not fucking kidding. You get out of the lake right now” — he sweeps a dictatorial finger from the lake where seven of us are circled in the water and toward the pebbled beach where he’s tantruming — “… or I will fucking shoot you.”

A few of us turn our backs to him, attempting to pick up the conversation we’d been having before this agitated teen and his friend, high on unaccustomed warmth in the air and whatever’s in that vape pen tucked into that pocket, stumbled into our orbit. The gun-pointer, initially aided by his sidekick, has been yelling at us for five minutes now, a genuinely unnerving bundle of aggression in green shorts. But if there’s one thing this group of grown-ups — parents, partners, queers, professionals, grieving, recovering, regulating, growing — knows how to do, it’s ignore the todderlistic foot stamping of a heckler.

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Random

In Memoriam: Duluth Artist Max Moen

Jun 24, 2023 5 Comments

Anyone within the sound of my voice, the artworks of Max Moen must be found and saved. I interrupted his dying days begging him to grant me a custodial role regarding his body of work. I think mostly of his collages which I greatly admire, surrealist masterpieces. I told him I’d arrange a show and self-publish a collection at my own expense, because the world must know. At the time he told me they were boxed in a car in another state, and I feared I was taxing him as he fought the cancer. I think he got that car back but I let it go; he was too busy dying and I didn’t want to be that guy. At least I impressed upon him that I considered him an artist with a capital “A.”

Sadly I have none of his work to share with you today. He had some examples on his old Facebook page but he took it all down. I remember searching his photos to copy them but he’d already deleted the lot. He did that sometimes.

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Art ,

Times I Was Secretly High: An Apology Letter

May 27, 2023 1 Comment

Well, it looks like it’s finally going to be legal to smoke weed for funsies in Minnesota, which is terrific news for all of the people languishing in jail for smoking or dealing weed for funsies in Minnesota. Law is the ultimate example of the abject arbitrariness of reality: we have an entire system of rules and consequences established around the specious assertion that smoking weed, and all practices associated with it are, well, objectively bad. And not just rules and consequences, an elaborate — and until very recently, shared — ethos that avers a deep and persistent truth: using marijuana is dangerous and wrong. What a hoot.

Being a human is such absurdity, most of the time — how does anyone keep a straight face? Like so many of you, I have struggled with some of the more frittersome or idiosyncratic morae introduced as inalienable verities: men do this, women are that, and you’re either one or the other; these are the ways we cover our bodies with cloth, but these ways are terrible and wrong; these animals are great to eat, but these ones are friends … Sometimes, the whole world seems like a very elaborate game of make believe we’re all playing together. Through the right lens, even the houses we live in, with two sinks in the bathrooms, secret refrigerators, walk-in closets — it’s all like some fantastical fever dream.

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Random

Avant-Garde Women: Gertrude Stein Makes No Sense

Apr 22, 2023 No Comments

Stylistically it is appropriate to link Gertrude Stein’s experimental 1914 book Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms to Dadaism, because the book makes no sense. It pre-dates Dada’s 1916 anarchic language-destroying sound poetry, so we can’t say the Dadaists invented nonsense. Perhaps we can say the Dadaists invented “sheer nonsense.” Stein hadn’t taken it quite that far. But Tender Buttons began her mission to explore the strange new worlds of the sense/nonsense boundary.

Else Lasker-Schüler explored that same boundary in 1913, in her language-subverting experiments that also influenced Dadaism. The Dadaists paid homage to, and expanded, Lasker-Schüler’s work: her “nonsense sound poetry in Berlin cabarets, poems that would be used a few years later by the Zurich dadaists in the Cabaret Voltaire” (Baroness Elsa by Irene Gammel, pp. 146-147). Lasker-Schüler was the only woman in the inner circle of German Expressionist poetry, a Stein-esque figure in her own right who cross-dressed and ruled the Berlin nightlife. And one of her innovations was the performance of poetry that didn’t make sense.

For that reason, both she and Stein represent a proto-Dadaist spirit, even though technically Lasker-Schüler was an Expressionist and Stein was a Modernist. All the cool kids were doing it. Stein’s writing of Tender Buttons was contemporary with Lasker-Schüler’s nonsense performances, which Stein very well may have been aware of, her hyper-senses tuned to the avant-garde. Like the birth of calculus, many artists were developing similar approaches around the same time. Nonsense was in the air.

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Art

Ripped at C’s Lounge in 2003

Apr 15, 2023 1 Comment

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot visited C’s Lounge, 1419 Banks Ave. in Superior, which today is the location of a Kwik Trip convenience store. The article below appeared in the April 16, 2003 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

Whenever I go to C’s Lounge — and I’ve been known to do that from time to time — I find myself baffled that I’m in Superior, Wis. Hell, I’m baffled that I’m in the 21st century. Walk into C’s and it’s like walking into Hibbing in the 1970s, not that I have any idea what that would be like. Nonetheless, that’s the feel.

The place is dark, in a good way, with amber and red lights hanging from the glittery ceiling. Everything else is either red or the color of wood. In fact, it looks and feels a lot like the Regal Beagle from Three’s Company, except that instead of spotting Jack Tripper and Larry, you’re more likely to spot middle-aged white trash.

The best thing about C’s is that the drinks are cheap and strong. It’s not uncommon for the drink specials to be something different and surprising, such as $2 Manhattans. For the domestically inclined, beer comes in big mugs for under $3. And, for folks like you and me, tap Busch Light is always 65 cents a glass. That is information to be treasured.

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Random

Tony Dierckins on Jim Richardson: “Myth-Maker”

Apr 01, 2023 2 Comments

About today’s essay, I told editor Paul Lundgren, “I love the April 1 publication date. This essay pulls back the curtain on my hoaxy stories, yet immediately discredits itself with the date. Beautiful!”

On March 31, in conjunction with the Twin Ports Festival of History, Duluth historian Tony Dierckins gave the presentation “Duluth’s Greatest Myths.” I am pleased and proud he included my Perfect Duluth Day writing in a brief mention. He was kind enough to share the slides, below. They list some of my efforts and I have annotated them.

As I told Tony, I draw a distinction between my fiction and my myth-making “essays.” Both are set in Duluth. But for instance “The Alworth Incident” presents as non-fiction, but quickly reveals itself to be a screwball superhero origin story. Maybe it could become a rumor, but it is not designed to be believed per se. However my “myth-making” material, such as Lake Inferior: The Underground Lake Beneath Lake Superior, is specifically designed to live on as urban legend. These myths have “tells” but readers may miss them. Also, I have tailored the stories so Duluthians want them to be true. Lundgren called them “Duluth fan fiction,” naming the new genre. Allowing me to publish them as “essays” aided the crime. They were also tagged as “Hoaxes – Fake News – Satire – Folklore.”

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Art, Random ,

Ripped at Frozen Man in 2003

Mar 18, 2023 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot wrote the article below for the March 19, 2003 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

One reason to be nice to your bartender is that she will likely throw a party some day, and you will want to be invited. See, bartenders are good at throwing parties because … well, they’re bartenders. They have connections to all the good drinkers, and they know who the big-time assholes are. This allows them to “cast” their parties.

The party I’m going to tonight is called “Frozen Man.” I won’t provide too many details, like the name of the host, the date or the location, because I want to be invited back next year. I will tell you that Frozen Man is held in the Duluth Township, just outside of Howdy-Dotyville, where a good bonfire/campout/drinkfest can go down without someone creating an ordinance to stop it.

The concept of Frozen Man is to drink alcohol around a fire when it’s really cold out. There are various activities and rituals and surprises throughout the night, but the main purpose is to see how much cold your body can endure before you either die, go home crying or prove you are more powerful than nature itself.

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History

What if the South Shore was a mountain range?

Feb 18, 2023 No Comments

A study/position paper by the Institute for the Study of Light and Water.

Any mountain building on the South Shore is to be opposed. A positive feature of Duluth’s view of Lake Superior is that Wisconsin is barely there. Lake Superior takes up almost half your view; Wisconsin (being flat) is just a thin strip between the lake and the sky. So the sky basically sits right on top of the lake. From our quaint hillside, we gaze over Lake Superior and down upon Wisconsin, that piteous, benighted state. Wisconsin presents a thin band of color: green in summer, fall colors in autumn, white or gray or brown in winter. It contains flecks of texture. But it contributes so little to the view overall, one might wish for the visual interest a mountain range could provide.

But there are benefits to Wisconsin being flat. One of those benefits is that on clear days, the sunrise immediately strikes the water with that intense glittering effect, the blinding mirror of the morning lake. But what if Wisconsin had mountains? What if, instead of an unobstructed view of the sky, the South Shore had a mountain range?

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Random

Obituary of Peter S. Svenson, Minnesota’s Rogue Historian

Feb 04, 2023 6 Comments

August 23rd 1947-January 24th(?) 2022. The historian Peter Sven Svenson died without heirs sometime last week according to his autopsy. He will be buried in Forest Hills cemetery in Duluth after the spring thaw. Speaking as one of his only friends, I have penned this obituary.

A document hoarder, Svenson was practically the state’s analog back-up brain for decades, and its conscience.

He was a popular history professor at UMD from 1973-2002. However, he tussled with the university over the legitimacy of his sources. Then they disavowed his work altogether when issues arose about his statistical analyses. Under pressure, he took early retirement, but sued the university for defamation. He lost.

Svenson went on to self-publish books, monographs, and articles, but struggled to find a paying audience. His most important work was produced during this period. Being his friend enabled my access to his research and unpublished manuscripts.

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History, R.I.P. ,

Ripped at Molly’s in 2003

Jan 28, 2023 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. One of Slim’s favorite old stops was Molly’s Tavern in Superior, which had a sign outside promising “dancing & sandwiches,” neither of which could be found inside. The bar closed in 2005 and later became Tower Avenue Tavern. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to Molly’s and wrote the article below for the Jan. 22, 2003 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

Whenever I find myself at Molly’s, I’m usually there to “finish up.” Usually, it’s late, I’m half in the bag and I have little interest in anything other than the square foot of bar top directly in front of me — the magical zone in which I lay down money and it miraculously turns into booze. But tonight Sean the Locksmith and I end up at Molly’s relatively early in evening. And I’ll be damned if Molly’s isn’t a pretty sweet place.

This doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve heard many tales of the coolness of this bar: the cheap booze, the weird and amazing antiques scattered about, the mother of Darryl Hall’s child pouring drinks. But maybe it’s to its credit that I’ve never really analyzed it. I go to Molly’s because I want to drink undisturbed. The appreciation of the bar among homosexuals and its seedy location at the very end of Tower Avenue help to keep away most of the local dillweeds.

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