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[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY EICHTEN: And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Gary Eichten. Garrison Keillor says Minnesota musician, essayist and poet Bill Holm is, quote, the tallest radical humorist in the Midwest and a truthful and graceful writer.

Bill Holm is out with a new book titled Windows on Brimnes, an American in Iceland. During this hour at Midday, we're going to hear from Bill Holm speaking recently at a Talk of the Stacks event at the Minneapolis Public Library. Bill Holm has won several awards for his writing, including the 2,000 Prairie Star Award. He teaches English literature at Southwest State University. Matter of fact, he's giving the last lecture of his teaching career right now even as we speak. And we congratulate him on a very distinguished career.

A little background before we get started. Bill Holm has spent most of his life in Southwestern Minnesota in the small town of Minneota. But in the summers, he has been spending his time in a small fishing village in Iceland, the home of his ancestors. Holm sets his ninth and newest book in Iceland, reflecting on the state of American politics and culture, which for Bill Holm, is too focused on war and violence. Bill Holm spoke last month as part of the Talk of the Stacks series at the Minneapolis Public Library.

BILL HOLM: I'm going to read you a rather gloomy poem to begin with, and then I'll say something about the book. I made a promise to myself to do this, and the poem that I'll read you ties into my experience in Iceland because I wrote it in Iceland, and I wrote it on hearing news from Minnesota. And it somehow the thread that binds them.

I spent a lot of time in Iceland thinking about Minnesota, if you can imagine that. And I spent summers there. Last summer, I spent there, and I finished this book, went to work on another one. But the manuscript was supposed to come to Iceland for me to proofread.

And so Hillary, and Daniel, and Emily and the gang at Milkweed and Patrick all figured out that they could FedEx me the manuscript in Iceland. Well, I got a call from Patrick at Milkweed saying that he had called FedEx in Minneapolis, and they didn't know where Iceland was, had never heard of Retch-a-velt and couldn't get it there.

[LAUGHTER]

So I called the mother of one of my cousins in this room, Kayla's mother, or Kayla's aunt, Kathy, who was in Minneota, and she brought the manuscript to Iceland. And they flew it without security clearance to the Akureyri Airport, which is an airport in the North. And my next door neighbor, Hallgrimur, we have little houses next to the sea, said I'll give you a ride over to Akureyri to pick up the manuscript, and then we can have some Chinese lunch.

[LAUGHTER]

And I said, I'll buy if you drive. So it's a lovely day in the mountains. And we go over a high mountain pass called Oxnadalsheidi, which is a high mountain moor between where I live and Akureyri. It's about 80 miles. And we're driving through the sun, and I'm admiring the crags. And the radio is on, as it so often is when Icelanders are driving or Minnesotans, with The News, Icelanders' version of NPR, which is state radio.

And my Icelandic is so bad, I only partly understand. So I have to stop sometimes. And this is what happened in the car on the way to Akureyri. It's called August 2nd, 2007. American news. More black news from Minnesota. A bridge over the Mississippi falls down. Nine dead, 20 missing. Details unclear.

All this arrives in half understood Icelandic over state radio while I'm driving to Akureyri. I imagine cars hurtling over the interstate bridge down into the now tepid waters of the river. The sky above, a humid 100, cries and shrieks, muffled in the saturated air. Bridges are not supposed to fall down in invincible can do America.

The Brooklyn Bridge, 1883, by the way, does not fall down. The iron gates of the locks in the Panama Canal have opened and closed every day since 1913. The generators hum below the Hoover Dam to feed the electrical jolt that cools, lights, and irrigates the west. The motor in my old Buick purrs after 250,000 miles. We built to last. We are the world's engineers.

Suddenly, we lose all our steadily stupider wars. The currency evaporates. We're afraid of every moving shadow. The FedEx clerk in Minneapolis has never heard of Iceland. That in Europe? We don't deliver there. Where's Retch-a-velt? The codebook lies on the table in front of him. Number 286. But he either can't or won't read it. So goes business. As Charles Wilson said, the business of America.

3/4 of us believe in a personal god who saves and punishes. 3/4 of us can't find Canada, France, or the Pacific on a map. It's true. We believe in one true god but not in geography. Every day, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan appear in the Reykjavik newspapers. What are they up to now?

Tomorrow, I suppose, it will be pictures of cars dropping off a collapsed bridge, down into the father of waters that divides US, East from West. The waters that begin in Scandinavian safe, efficient Minnesota. And now will carry bodies downstream in the current through 27 locks and dams that may or may not open and close and open again as they are directed, so that the ghosts can make their way toward whatever is left of New Orleans.

Oh, United States. Walt Whitman thought you might wake up, though he was not sure. And he wept for you. Your sleep is deeper now than ever before, and none of your information systems are worth a damn to wake you or to hold up the girders of whatever bridge might carry you through even one more century of history.

[APPLAUSE]

I was honored that the Star Trib published that poem on September 11th. I wanted to start some kind of a conversation on what had happened to the interior life of my own country. I suppose this book is a longer and more elaborate gesture on my part to start that conversation. We get small indications that something has changed so rapidly, both outside in our lives, in technology, but also inside us. And I think we are in danger of letting too much of what it is that makes us civilized, and sane, and admirable, and decent goal.

I've thought that for a long time, and I suppose now that I'm 65, I get that off my chest. The book isn't quite all that cheerless. And it also has a little tourist stuff in it about Iceland, which I have fallen madly in love with. Here's the first page or two of the book.

In the summer of 2001, a journalist from Saint Paul, Minnesota, a young woman with a sense of adventure, decided to spend a week touring Iceland. I invited her to stop by and see me in Hofsos. There's no address, I said. There are only a few hundred people, and they will all know how to find the crazy American. Just ask for brimnes. I'm next to the sea. And if you can't find the sea, you're out of luck.

She landed at Keflavik International Airport at 6:00 a.m., rented a car, and decided to drive straight north. She found Highway 1, Esja, the tunnel, the pass, even the country music station just by me. And finally, the turn off Highway 1 to Hofsos. The sun shone grandly. Wildflowers bloomed dependably in the ditches. The motor purred, and the sight of the sea and the mountains helped stave off her jet lag.

She drove north with open windows and a glad heart. Soon, a drink, lunch, a nap, a friendly and familiar American face. Suddenly, she hit the brakes and stopped 10 miles south of Hofsos. By the side of the road was a blue metal sign with an arrow, brimnes. It pointed toward the fjord to the east. Well, he hadn't said whether he lived right in town. This must be it.

She turned west down a long gravel driveway, passed through a gate which she responsibly closed behind her, and arrived at a farmstead with a real barn, a corral of horses, a stack of hay bales wrapped in plastic, a tractor, but an empty yard. So he's bought a farm, she thought, and got out to stretch her legs.

Out from the barn came a young farmer in black rubber boots and a blood-soaked slicker. Behind him trotted his five or six-year-old daughter. Same rubber boots, same slicker, but smaller, carrying a bleeding sheep's head. Is this brimnes? Asked a now confused Amy. Brimnes, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] brimnes, said the farmer, clearly astonished at the sound of English, a language he probably neither speaks nor understands, and also not the lingua franca of his neighborhood.

The little girl with the sheep's head examined the pretty young foreigner in the shiny rental car. Go to the house and fetch your mother, said the farmer in Icelandic to his daughter. She understands a little English. So the mother emerged, wiping floury hands on her apron. Amy explained again that she was looking for Bill Holm, an American living in brimnes. Oh, not this brimnes, said the mother in halting English. Maybe he lives in the town, Hofsos, 15 kilometers north. There's a brimnes there too, I think.

Amy thanked the family in her best English, apologizing with her sweetest American smile for interrupting the sheep butchering, and drove back down the way she came, carefully closing the gate behind her. 15 minutes later, she found me, not in brimnes, but rather at the end of a telephone line. She had stopped at the little general store, the only store in Hofsos, and when she inquired after Bill Holm, Dagny, the blonde clerk and postmistress' daughter, told her I was probably having coffee down at the Icelandic Emigration Center, but that she'd ring there and track me down. All this much, to Amy's relief, in fluent English.

I was summoned to the phone. Do you have a good trip up? You must be half dead of jet lag. I had a little adventure, said Amy. You often do in Iceland. One of its great pleasures, in fact. This had been Amy's first experience with the Icelanders' habit of naming every farm, every house, and of course, every rock, rise, gully, and bay in this mostly empty landscape.

Brim means waves or surf breaking on the beach. Ness means cape, promontory, or headland. Thus, brimnes, a miniature peninsula. Most of the country lives within spitting distance of saltwater, which means there must be at least 50 brimnesses. Names repeat themselves endlessly. A hundred Hrauns, lava. Farms called Vatn, lake or water. Baer, farmstead. Bru, bridge. Notice these things are a lot less exotic when you translate them out of Icelandic.

The local trolls worship at many churches. The mountain Trollakirkja, the troll's church. Or maybe they dine at the west fjord rocks called trollasamlokur, troll sandwiches. As with places, so with humans, I was once kissed by eight guoruns runs in one night and shook hands with a dozen Bjorns. Are Americans short of Johns and Marys? Maybe we are these days. Without a name, does a place exist? And what is the right name, and who is the right giver of names? So that's the little introduction to a trip through brimnes.

[APPLAUSE]

One of the things I liked about, and I compare Iceland continually to Minneota. You know, there didn't used to be addresses in Minneota. And on my passport, when I got there on my little-- many of you have been abroad. You have to fill out a little form saying how many contraband drugs and terrorist devices you've brought back on your customs form. And I always put down my addresses, box 187. I mean, I even wrote a poem in which I used it, so you know my address. But I half the time forget my address. I do have one. And the passport guy says, what's your street address? I looked at him, and I said, have you ever been to Minneota?

[LAUGHTER]

Some of you know what I'm talking about. But now, even farms, it used to be how do you find, let's say, the old Gisleson Place? Well, you go out 3 miles on that tar. And then you turn east for two miles on the gravel. And then you get to the old bridge over the river. And then when the road curves around to the right, you'll see a rock pile on your left. And then that's the old Gisleson Place. And now, it's 156432, 489th Avenue.

[LAUGHTER]

I speculate in here, part of the reason for living in the country is you don't want to be found too easily. But now we've got this enormous country, and we're gradually filling up, as I noticed, driving from Saint Paul to Minneapolis on 94 at 5:00 o'clock. We're gradually filling up, and somebody in authority wants to know exactly where we are at all times and wants to be able to locate us for some reason.

Are we all sure we want to be located quite so easily? You want your GPS on? You want your cell phone tracked? One of the things I love in Iceland is that when you go, I now have a cell phone, and I turn it off most of the time. But I don't have a TV. I don't have a computer. I don't have a typewriter. I've got a little CD player, and I never play it unless I'm working on some music, practicing it. I listen to music with the score. And I tell everybody to shut up, I'm listening. So there's never extraneous music.

There is, however, a piano in the house. And anybody can play it who wants to and can play any sort of music. Even if you can play heavy techno metal on an old Yamaha, I doubt it. There's no electric piano. Of course, I won't let those in the door.

But so it's a sort of low tech house. And it has no address aside from brimnes, and it has no particular lot. When you come to Hofsos, the little town where Marci and I have a house, you drive about four hours north of Reykjavik. And you go over a couple of mountain passes, much of the road winds along the sea. And in summer, meadows full of wild flowers and particularly beautiful pastures full of horses. And sheep always and a few dairy farms.

But finally, you get to Hofsos, which seems the end of the world. It's the north part of the fjord. And Skagafjördur is a large fjord that opens to the north. And Hofsos is, I suppose, as the crow flies, about 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle. We're past 66 degrees north, which means in summertime, that the sun never goes down. And when it does touch the water briefly, it touches it always in the north. So there's as much light as it is possible to have inside that fjord and inside that town.

There's nothing cutting off the sun and the light. It's open to the sun, 24 hours a day. And it's magnificent to sit there and watch that light. When you come into Hofsos, it's on a little tiny cliff over the sea. And there are two rivers fed by rapidly disappearing glaciers behind the house, feeding two rivers about half a mile apart that have a little mouth.

They go down a little tiny canyon through some hills and bubble into the sea. They're active, lively rivers. So the glacier river is about 70 feet from my house or feet. And you can always hear river bubbling along from the glacier. And then you open the other window, and you hear the fjord sloshing in and the tide coming in and going out. And when the wind blows, enormous surf banging onto the beach. It's kind of like what I grew up I grew up with in Minneota.

[LAUGHTER]

But when you come down the hill to get to my house, it's like something a little kid would imagine what a town looks like. They're little tiny houses. Most of them little two-bedroom houses built from the turn of the century up to maybe 1935. And they were fishermen's cottages for poor fishermen. You know, the owners of trawlers lived in better houses.

But these are little tiny places for working people, fishermen. Some of these houses with just two bedrooms, hardly the size of the stage, had six children or seven children raised in them. But they were set sort of cockamamie in the hillside. So they go at strange angles, and they're all different colors. It's very dark in Iceland now at the end of November, much darker than here. How the Icelanders would have loved even a cold day like this one because of all the sun. And how they'd look forward to sun tomorrow, even if it's below zero because it's quite dark and blustery in Iceland.

So to cheer themselves up, they paint their houses lavender, and orange, and red, and green, and blue, and the roofs, all different colors. So when you come down, it's like a toy town. Except there it is, nestled between the sea and the river. It's a wonderful place.

When an Icelander talks about where they grew up, their countryside, they use the word "sveit." It translates just as the word country, district, wherever you're from. If you're from-- you're from Owatonna? You're from out there by Redwood Falls then? Oh, you grew up in Swede Prairie Township.

So the Icelanders have all got a svetit. Even if they're in Reykjavik, they say, well, I'm not really from Reykjavik, I am from Isfjorden or I am from Djupavik or I am from Borgarnes or Borgarfjördur or somewhere. So my little district is a sveit. And people who grew up there are quite patriotic about it.

Oh, yes, the most beautiful horses in Iceland, right here. Best-tasting codfish, right out of this fjord, all the trout are sweeter out of this river. The grass is much richer here. And it's a place rich in history also. So people practice what I think we may have lost a bit of in America. I think the only real patriotism is local patriotism.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, to have any feeling for the United States because it's an abstraction. But it's very easy to have a feeling for Swede Prairie Township or for Minneota or for Hofsos or even, for heaven's sakes, if you're a New Yorker, from some little neighborhood in Brooklyn where you were raised.

That, you can feel patriotic for. And you can feel that you ought to rise to the defense and the justification of those places. But I'm not sure when politicians start talking to you about Patriot Acts and Homeland Security and vast flutterings of the heart in the presence of American ideas, that you should be quite so quick to feel that flutter, be a tad suspicious.

The sveit still kept intact its old economic resources-- the sea harvest, the rich grassy meadows that nourished the sheep and dairy cattle, the cream of Icelandic horse stocks, the cliffs abundant with eggs and tasty seabirds. The neighbors were literate and kindly, and there were overstuffed bookshelves in almost every house.

There were local singers of high repute and skill and even local writers who published small volumes of well-made, old-fashioned verse. One of them an unschooled carpenter who wrote well in three languages-- Icelandic, English, and Danish-- had won literary prizes in the Reykjavik newspapers. The book is dedicated to him.

All this and the majesty out every window-- huge mountains, the multicolored sea, the glaciers, noisy rivers surging fjord-ward over a bed of symmetrical columnar basalt, the cliffs, the decorator islands, the wild flowers and sweet grass in season, not to mention the three-month long daylight. If you had to choose a sveit, this would be a tempting possibility.

But usually a sveit chooses you. And so it had chosen Valgeir, the man who sold me my house. Thus, he carpentered away on the old houses, then put on his necktie to go raise funds from government, business, immigrant groups from North America, anybody who might stock Skagafjördur with cash enough to keep this sveit alive.

My wife Marcy and I slept in Brimnes on our first night in Hofsos. At that time, it was a small guest house with four lilliputian bedrooms. We chose one with the big window open to the sea few yards from the bed. We drew back the pink curtains, opened the window a crack. And the swish of fjord and roar of river filled the little bedroom.

There is no such sleep, no such music to calm the interior frenzy, to lullaby your demons into drooling irrelevance. Someday you are going to die. So what?

[LAUGHTER]

The human race is endlessly foolish. So what? You are broke and almost old. So what? God may or may not exist in some form. So what? It's up to him-- or her or neither or both. So what? Still, the light, always the light." That was kind of a romantic idea.

[APPLAUSE]

I'll read you one more little critical paragraph and then give you a funny story. "So I come here to this spare place in the summer and sometimes in the winter. I like Iceland in the winter, too, when it's spareness is magnified by snow and darkness. After a while, the United States is simply too much-- too much religion and not enough god, too much news and not enough wisdom," I said that in the days before the newspapers started doing their magic.

"Too many weapons of mass destruction, or for that matter, of private destruction-- why search so far away when they live here right under our noses? Too much entertainment and not enough beauty, too much electricity and not enough light, too much lumber and not enough forest, too many books and not enough readers, too much real estate and not enough Earth, too many runners and not enough strollers, too many freeways, too many cars, too many malls, too many prisons, too much security but not enough civility, too many humans but not enough eagles.

And the worst excess of all, too many wars, too much misery and brutality reflected as much in our own eyes as in those of our enemies'. So I come here to this spare place, a little thinning and pruning is a good anodyne for the soul. We see more clearly when the noise is less, the objects fewer.

When Americans ask me to describe my little house, I tell them, not entirely disingenuously, that it is a series of magical windows with a few simple boards to hold them up to protect your head from rain while you stare out at the sea."

[APPLAUSE]

One of the interesting things in Hofsos-- and there's a whole chapter on it in here-- is the genealogy business. I've already run into a few cousins in this house tonight. I grew up in a place in Minneota where I was surrounded by cousins. It was all a bunch of people who had emigrated from Iceland, settled together, and even interbred.

[LAUGHTER]

The smart ones, of course, married Belgians or Irishmen or-- they could have found anyone, Black or Chinese, that would have improved the stocks. My parents couldn't find anybody else so they married each other. They were Icelanders. But one of the kind of worldwide habits at the moment, not only among icelanders, is searching for relatives, doing genealogical stuff.

Norwegians do it. Poles do it. Brits do it. Scots do it. Everybody is looking for where their height, their ancestry came from. Why? I mean, for a long time in America, we didn't care very much about that. Why has it suddenly become a kind of hobby again?

I think it's partly because we have gotten too big, too crowded, too noisy. And we feel living on 1568, 2489th Avenue, 56314-1935, we begin to feel in need of a little human connection to the planet.

So Valgeir, the guy I talk about in the book, the guy who sold me the thing and the sort of entrepreneur in the town, set up a museum, and I describe it, and a genealogy center, where people can come and bring what information they have and find their relatives.

And of course, they have computers. It's kind of wonderful. Somebody will come in from Canada or from North Dakota. And they'll come in and they'll say, well, I don't really know very much about this. But my dad always said he was from a farm in [NON-ENGLISH] They can't pronounce the words [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

[NON-ENGLISH]? He said yes. And he came about 1890. So he was-- when was he born? Oh, he was about 25. So he was born in 1865? We'll feed that in. [NON-ENGLISH] Is that his name? Yeah, that's his name. And so then-- so this is where your farm is and these are your relatives. And these are the people you're connected to.

And the computer says, [NON-ENGLISH], just a minute. And it says, we have 3,564 new listings. Would you like more?

[LAUGHTER]

I want any of you to imagine going into a little place with a computer and being presented with 3,000 or 4,000 more cousins.

[LAUGHTER]

Does that give you a warm feeling for life on the planet?

[LAUGHTER]

And I tell some stories. And it's really quite touching. And particularly with Icelanders, when you hear-- the only thing I can do in Icelandic is pronounce Icelandic names. It's an almost impossible language. My mother and father both spoke it.

And my mother was particularly good. And I took her to Iceland when she was in her 60s, and she loved speaking Icelandic. She had a few immigrant words. But she got to put on the dog and have long conversations. And people would compliment her on her grammar and her accent, though she'd never been in Iceland.

We went out to a little museum outside Reykjavik, a folk museum where they had old houses and buildings and stuff from the old days in Iceland. And we go out there and [NON-ENGLISH] comes in and she sees this little five-year-old girl dressed in a little Icelandic [NON-ENGLISH], the little Icelandic folk outfit.

She says [NON-ENGLISH] to my mother, and my mother responds. And the two of them were having this long conversation. She says, well, aren't you cute? What a lovely [NON-ENGLISH]. And she says, yes, my made [NON-ENGLISH] for me. And she says, and I wear it on Saturdays.

And my mother said, oh, you speak such beautiful Icelandic. And they have a little conversation. And then we walk on a bit. And my mother takes my arm, and she said, listen to that little girl, perfect Icelandic, perfect. And she's only five years old.

[LAUGHTER]

And I said, what the hell else would she speak?

[LAUGHTER]

This is her country. She lives here. And my mother, who was not to be disabused-- she was a real Icelander. You can never disagree with them. They're always right. And they always get the last word. So she says, well, no, but you have to be much more intelligent to speak Icelandic.

[LAUGHTER]

To which I looked at her and said, is that why I seemed unable to learn it under any circumstances? I have given it a try a little bit. And I don't think I tell this story in this book. But my friend Wincie who is referred to often in this book, half American and half Icelandic. She's a teacher of grammar and English, among other things.

But I was trying to learn Icelandic grammar. And I went through a grammar book. And don't, you will need a stiff drink afterwards. Everything is declined in Icelandic. And in order to ask for one of something [NON-ENGLISH], you have to know the gender. You have to decline it fully.

And I counted the ways-- when you go into a store, when you're using the word one, there are-- I found 48 possibilities of declining the word one. So I said to Wincie-- I said, god, there's 48 chances of making a mistake. And she says, that's not true. You always exaggerate.

[LAUGHTER]

I said, how the hell did I exaggerate? She said, well, one of them is right. Only 47 are wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

Read you one last little poem and then we can ask some questions. This is about the immigration center. And I had to be taught to pronounce these names. But people who have lost the pronunciation of their own ancestors. They've got these little brittle yellow pieces of paper and old photographs and this stuff.

And they come in hoping to find some connections to somebody else on the planet-- not to bomb them, not to intimidate them, not to improve them, not to make money off of them, not to get land from them, But to get coffee maybe.

This is a little poem I wrote about a photographic exhibition. It's called "Silent Flashes."

"In this room a mausoleum

of emigrant faces, embalmed

in brown tone for over a century.

Try pronouncing their names

Sumarlidi, Hrafnhildur, Sturlaugur, Jarnthrúdur.

The grandchildren give up,

mumble a few consonants.

These faces, once flesh, sweat

in their itchy suits and whalebone corsets.

No weather like this damp heat

before they boarded their boats west.

Now, all flesh gone, names too.

Nothing left but brown images

lit by silent flashes,

the squeezed bulb in the photographer's hand.

Such mustaches! Such intense pale eyes!

Such piles of Norse hair!

Indridii, Árngrímur, Adalbjorg, Ragnheidur.

Here's a map with pins where they settled,

that weave a spiderweb over the whole continent.

And these are the towns where the Icelanders settled

Gimli, Muskoka, Shawano, Gardar,

Mozart," or as they say in Saskatchewan, Mozart.

[LAUGHTER]

"Mozart, Minneota, Markerville, Spanish Fork.

A few here, a few there, never many, never enough

so the neighbors could ever get their tongues around

Hrolleifur, Hrafnkel, Audbjorg, Thorgerdur."

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

GARY EICHTEN: Musician, essayist, poet, and author, Minnesota native Bill Holm. He spoke last month at the Minneapolis Public Library, reading from his new book, Windows on Brimnes: An American in Iceland. Now, following his reading, Bill Holm took some questions and comments from the audience.

AUDIENCE: A comment first, Bill, I wanted to commend you on taking a stand to talk about the state of the states. I think it's important that people who do have a strong voice say something to those who will be listening. And the second is the question as to whether or not there is a variation of the boxelder in Iceland. And if so, do they hang out in the Yamaha piano?

[LAUGHTER]

BILL HOLM: No, probably Iceland is very poor in insect life. You might not want to go there in the summer. They don't have any mosquitoes and have never had any. They do have flies that hang around in the summer time and occasional spiderwebs in the window. But there's no real-- there's no real insects to bother you while you're playing the piano.

Oh, flies sometimes buzzing to your ear. And you have to-- it's one of the things-- my little hobby is I play with the left hand so you've always got one hand to swat flies with.

[LAUGHTER]

But I'm glad you think that's a good thing for writers to do. I think many writers do-- this book is not entirely cheerless. I've done a little preaching tonight. It has humor in it. It has my affection for Iceland and some funny stories about what happens to people who travel.

But also it's about looking at your own life from a detached point of view. If you're in the middle of Minnesota listening to NPR every day and reading the papers, and you're in the middle, sometimes America gets to be too much. You just don't think you can see clearly.

And Thoreau recommended that, that you get off to the side somehow. Jim Harrison has got a wonderful little memoir in his view of his own life, in his country, and his culture, called Off to one Side. That's, in a way, what a writer has to do. You have to find a place to position yourself so that you can think with a little more clarity and a little more penetration about what your own culture looks like and what your life looks like.

It's quite clear when you read any of my books that I don't always look so good to myself. I've been the goat of lots of this. And I'm a damn fool in more places than you can well imagine in this book. But also, the Vietnam war, the awful, I-- I must be the only American who really was depressed in the '80s. I almost broke a television set when it said that Reagan was elected for the second time.

I haven't been able to believe-- to be an idealist very often in my adult life. And I'll tell you the two times that I was. There's discussion of this, by the way. There's a little history of my upbringing. And maybe one more story I'll read you.

But the two-- Wal Stone was a hero of mine.

[APPLAUSE]

And I have-- but the first hero-- and remember, I was 18 years old in 1961. God, how I loved Jack Kennedy. I hated the '50s. I hated the voice and the look of John Foster Dulles. Every time Richard Nixon came on, I got the creeps on the radio-- Ezra Taft Benson, Joe McCarthy said, Tail Gunner Joe, It was creepy.

And finally, we elect Kennedy-- this elegant, witty, sophisticated man. He wasn't what I thought he was. But remember, I was 18 years old and foolish. You were foolish at 18, too. And we were all in love with his wife, this elegant, beautiful woman who spoke French and dressed brilliantly and entertained Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin in the White House.

No rock and roll in country Western for them, French red wine and conversation in French and glorious music and writers and philosophers-- I thought I got a little taller. I got a little-- I was bigger. I'm shrinking now. But even at 18, I grew because of Kennedy.

There were flaws in Kennedy, and I discovered things later but just to have something as a symbol in the national life that you can grapple onto with idealism. And then after that, it was a little hard. But it happened again in '68 when I was in graduate school.

I was so fed up with the United states, I thought of going to Sweden. I thought of going to Canada. I thought of just getting the hell out. I didn't ever think of going to Iceland. But I was stubborn. I thought, by god, I'm an American. I'm going to stick this out. And I'm going to be unpleasant or something.

[LAUGHTER]

And then again in Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy runs. By God, I shaved and I washed and I got-- I got a good shirt and a clean pair of pants. And I was hauling brochures around Lawrence, Kansas. And I thought, finally. And of course, I'm a writer. I'm a man who loves language.

I don't think Kennedy wrote all of his own speeches, but he was literate. But Gene McCarthy, god, to read-- I thought a president who writes fine poetry and his prose-- nobody ever touched Gene McCarthy's speeches. He wrote them, thank you. Can you imagine revising Gene McCarthy's sentences? [LAUGHS] For--

[LAUGHTER]

So I had that little moment of idealism. And then until Wal Stone came along, I didn't have any more. So I've had long fallow periods in my adult life when there didn't seem to me very much to cheer me in the body politic.

I'm an old Lutheran. I'm still going off to the Icelandic church on Sunday morning. I'm a little skeptical. But then so are most Lutherans.

[LAUGHTER]

And I believe, like a good Scandinavian in the public power of religion, to mark ceremonies in people's lives and to be important for families and also as an instrument for humane and kindly thought in communities, not for dogma, not ever, not any of them.

[APPLAUSE]

So it's been a kind of long haul for a guy like me. It's--

AUDIENCE: I'm with you.

BILL HOLM: Hm?

[LAUGHTER]

Well, that's what I tried to say in the book, that it's been a long haul, not just for me but for lots of us. And when I read much of-- many of the new books, I don't find that being said. Of course, in Minnesota, we've had the tradition of Carol Bly and of Robert Bly and of endless numbers of writers of the last generation who did their best in order to bring the life of the body politic into consciousness.

And, of course, Walt Whitman is still alive in Minnesota. But we've been luckier here than in many places. But every generation has to have its own writers. And I sometimes think we're getting a little cutesy. And we need to, as writers and intellectuals and what I call culture workers, to assume the responsibility for seeing to it that the inner life of our own country is examined with some honesty and openness. So--

[APPLAUSE]

One always has the hope that this would happen. I'll read you one paragraph about Minnesota because I think this is a wonderfully funny story. I talk in an essay about my early life, about how I came to political consciousness. I was listening to the radio in the '50s. And then I've just told you a little more about it.

But of course, I grew up in Minnesota, which was not exactly in modern terms multicultural.

[LAUGHTER]

But it was-- it was in a way. I'll read you just one page. And I also describe how I came into consciousness-- nuclear war and the horribleness of war. I came just to detest all of it and detest all the talk about war.

"I found-- I thought Minneota multicultural is a boy. Even in Swede Prairie, I could hear Icelandic, Flemish, Swedish, German, Norwegian, and by traveling a few miles, Polish and Czech. In the town itself, the doctor was a French Jew and the chicken sexer at Doc Kerr's poultry plant was Japanese."

Do you know that? After the war, the Japanese got special invitations to work in the poultry business. They were chicken sexers. It was Minneota's business then.

"A veritable festival of peaceful and courteous neighbors, Lutherans and Catholics even married one another. But that was often not so peaceful.

[LAUGHTER]

I read tales of slavery and Jim Crow. But that was in the south, not in courteous civil Minnesota, where bridges don't fall down. I'd never met an Indian, though two reservations were close by and the site of the Dakota War of 1862 was only an hour and a half drive.

But then what? That happened before any of the citizens of Swede Prairie had ever arrived on the continent. That nasty business was over and done with. After which, we homesteaded the land and largely turned Republican."

It's true Scandinavians were largely Republican.

"I went to a Swedish Lutheran College in 1961 in a class with perhaps half a dozen Black faces, mostly Africans who arrived after being missionaried. The civil rights movement was in the air. Little Rock had been integrated after a fashion. And in Birmingham, buses and lunch counters were about to take a turn for the better and more humane. The '50s lasted a long time in Minnesota.

[LAUGHTER]

In high school, I served as the local delegate to a summer American Legion Boys State Week, intended to instruct in the fundamentals of American politics and government. But mostly, I played the piano for the Boys State chorus and tried to make friends with the counselors-- grown-ups, teachers, and college students who seemed worldlier than my high school peers.

Boys State turned out to be administered largely by the staff of my Swedish--" Oh, I may as well mention it, Gustavus. You all know what it is, "Though it was located on the University campus in Saint Paul. A kindly old man in the athletic department was the director.

He remembered my piano playing and offered me a week-long summer job as a counselor. My chief duty was again to accompany the chorus. Apparently, pianists were hard to come by.

Though I was suspicious of the patriotic line, I liked the idea of introducing young people to the notion of how government actually works. And so I went in June. I think I was the only non-athlete, probably the only non-coach among the counselors.

But I liked them all for the most part. My favorites were a pair of hockey coaches from the east side of Saint Paul, a hockey-crazed neighborhood." Is it still?

[LAUGHTER]

The east side? "They were physically rough-looking fellows-- big shoulders, bulging biceps, meaty hands. But they were a good joke and storytellers. I liked their violent sagas of hockey brouhahas-- how I got this gold tooth, who inflicted this scar.

The skilled choral director, a Black man from a city high school, was the other non-athlete. But he was also a good storyteller and an amiable fellow. One night, seven or eight of us decided to go out on the town for a few hours, eat a big steak, and drink a few beers.

Ah, the excitement, drinking beer with the old guys. Our counselees were busy with some public event and wouldn't need our supervision for a few hours. We drove to a steak house north of Saint Paul, where we were greeted by the owner, who recognized most of them as well-known local coaches.

Good to see you, boys. I'll get you a table. Then he spotted the choral director. You can't do that. Get that nigger out of here. A most unjovial silence descended on the scene. I was speechless, in shock.

One of the coaches, the burlier, began rocking on his feet and curling his fingers as if he were about to deliver a hammer blow. His eyes burned. Two other coaches flanked him. Cool it, Sam. We don't want this in the papers. Let's get the hell out of here. Let's go eat cheeseburgers down at Manning's.

And so we headed for the popular University of Minnesota bar. But a sort of spiritual shroud had fallen over the gaiety of the evening. The Black conductor tried to buck up the crew. Don't let it worry you guys. It happens. There are assholes everywhere. But weren't all the assholes in the south--

[LAUGHTER]

--below the Mason-Dixon line or in mean eastern cities? Wasn't the refusal of a table illegal by federal law? I thought then of all the lazy nigger and drunk Indian jokes I'd let slip in one ear and out the other. Maybe there was an interior asshole inside America-- indeed inside every culture. every human being.

And that is how a Swede Prairie boy came to consciousness of civil rights in America."

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

GARY EICHTEN: Bill Holm, Minnesota musician, essayist, and poet, speaking last month at the Minneapolis Public Library as part of the Talk of the Stacks series. He read from his new book, Windows on Brimnes: an American in Iceland.