journal features

So this is Minneapolis

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Minneapolis, 2014.10.08

I’m in Minneapolis for a conference and I have to say I like it here. The conference is being held at the offices of a financial institution in the city center, which is small but at 06:30 already bustling. There is a superb LRT system that connects the airport to the city center, and connects Minneapolis with its other half, St. Paul. After struggling to get by with Toronto’s run-down and overloaded street cars and subways, it’s been a delight to have modern and well-appointed transit vehicles. The city is around 350,000 people, and there are certainly signs of poverty but it looks like a decent place to make a home. In fact Minneapolis reminds me of Calgary a fair bit, where I spent the 80’s.

My first stop was the “Mall of America”, where I went to the Lego store to load up for Ken. Lego is absurdly overpriced in Canada, and I saved quite a bit even with the exchange rate. In honor of the business trip my father took to Buffalo in 1978 or so, in which my father brought home a firehall model (my first Lego), I’ve chosen a Lego model fire-fighting for the boy.

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot