Rich Broderick's blog
Look Homeward, Angel: The death of Mahmoud Darwish
by Rich Broderick • August 12, 2008 • This past Saturday, one of the world’s leading writers died. He was a towering figure whose more than 30 volumes of poetry place him alongside international literary giants like Yeats and Lorca, Eliot and Mandelstam, Whitman and Rilke, Dickinson and Montale, Dario and Amachai.
Eagles Nests: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and “The Last Empire in The World”
Rich Broderick, August 10, 2008 • My family and I left for a friend’s cabin outside Grand Rapids the day after Alexander Solzhenitsyn died.
As we passed through an Iron Range landscape not unlike the sub-boreal regions of Siberia where Solzhenitsyn and millions of other “anti-Soviet elements” were sent to toil, I found myself noting the universally recognizable scars heedless resource extraction leave behind – tailings and open pits from mining, second-growth scrubland from clear-cut timber operations, hard-scrabble towns struggling to hang on.
What’s the best way to respond to the RNC? How about running away?
by Rich Broderick, 8/1/08 • Feeling as though the upcoming Republican National Convention is less like an opportunity to show off the Twin Cities’ charms and more like an invasion by an enemy host?
You now have a way to act out your aversion as part of a grandiose bit of street theater being planned by a new organization.
Calling itself the RNC Flight Crew, it aims to organize a mass exodus from the metro area the week of the national convention.
How's that working out for you? Franken blames the pollsters, natch...
by Rich Broderick, July 24, 2008 • I took a lot of heat from some readers just prior to the DFL state convention when I suggested that delegates think long and hard about what a weak candidate Al Franken was going to make. At the time I mentioned a poll that showed him running neck and neck with Mike Ciresi, who’d already suspended his campaign, and only a few points ahead of Jack Nelson-Pallmayer. Where was I getting my facts? Franken fans demanded. Al’s going to flatten Coleman, just wait and see!
What? Wasn't Phil Gramm available yet?
by Rich Broderick, July 19, 2008 • Had to chuckle at the news that Eric Schultz, former national spokesperson for the 2008 John Edward’s primary campaign, and a state communication director for the 2004 Kerry Presidential run, has decided – after what is described as intensive lobbying by DNC mandarins – to swoop into Minnesota and help rescue Al Franken’s Senate campaign, officially labeled by the Washington Post a couple of days ago as “foundering”
