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HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY, MICHEL FOUCAULT! [via Humanities Editor @dmkasprzak.]

GOOD Magazine writes that in Akron, Ohio, police shut down a stretch of highway so that 500 people could have dinner there and discuss the city’s future. The setting sent a strategic message: this freeway was once a neighborhood, and in the 1970s its construction divided a community.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the interstate highway program in fact divided lots of communities across the United States. While some (New York, New Orleans) fought back to preserve historic neighborhoods, others staged projects of creative opposition. In The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, author Eric Avila maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought.

Judd Apatow is a screenwriter/director/producer/comedian/what-have-you jack of many trades known for a certain brand of strategic humor and an eye for emerging talent that has manifested itself in movies like Knocked Up and Trainwreck, and TV shows like Girls and Freaks and Geeks. His new book, Sick in the Head: Conversations about Life and Comedy, showcases a lot of interviews with famous funny people—and reveals a raw humanity behind them, including Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, and Stephen Colbert. It manages to strike a truly nostalgic-without-being-wistful note on many comedians’ careers, including his own: “It was our magical moment. If it never happens again, I’m okay with that. At least it happened once,” he writes about Freaks and Geeks.

It’s not entirely surprising that Apatow, a known F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, named Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted as one of his favorite books about Hollywood. This book is a fictionalization, rooted in true events, of the post-Jazz-Age Fitzgerald we don’t often hear about. Past his career’s heights, dealing with health issues, and all but forgotten by the literary establishment, this protagonist is now writing for Hollywood to get by and finds himself with an assignment that brings him to the brink of longing and disillusion.

“An artist should build slowly through his twenties, start maturing in his thirties and reach his peak in his fifties or sixties. Maybe that’s the trouble with you American writers, you think of yourselves as athletic stars.”

Switching back to stand-up comedy, another University of Minnesota Press book worth mentioning here is Lorna Landvik’s Best to Laugh, a novel based on Landvik’s own experience moving from Minnesota to Los Angeles in the ‘70s to try her hand at stand-up. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, it’s “happily filled with a double dose of nostalgia—the protagonist’s for the golden age of Hollywood and the author’s for a lovably gritty 1970s Los Angeles.”

August is National Water Quality Month.

Access to water has been part of a mainstream conversation for some time, particularly for Detroit, California, and other parts of the southern United States. Much of the time, the conversation includes environmental and policymaking issues. Turns out, the threat of water privatization is yet another terrifying element to take into consideration here.

The University of California Press has recently published Sustainable Water: Challenges and Solutions from California, an edited collection with input from economists, policymakers, and many more, that tackles the state’s issues with water management. Last year’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein also connects climate crises with political systems, with a strong, direct message that calls to mind Margaret Atwood’s recent essay, “It’s Not Climate Change—It’s Everything Change.”

Adding another layer of scary to these scenarios is Karen Piper’s book The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos. Piper grabs the reader from the beginning by juxtaposing two events experienced on the same day: champagne and caviar at the 2012 World Water Forum in Marseille, France, that cost $1,500 a head and involved two of the world’s largest water corporations; and an alternative, not-government-funded event serving hot dogs and pizza with a march, powerful speakers, and a solid underlying message—no one owns water. Piper’s book is the product of seven years of investigation around the world, and highlights a coming global crisis of access to water—one where thirst is political and drought is a business opportunity.

Last December, The New York Times Magazine asked Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to take a (very chilly) road trip beginning in Newfoundland and ending in Alexandria, Minnesota, home of the controversial Kensington Rune Stone. Legend has it that a large rock was discovered in 1898 by a Swedish immigrant farmer near Kensington, Minnesota, with writing that indicated that Viking missionaries in fact reached this land in 1362—disputing Christopher Columbus as the first settler.

Knausgaard writes: “It was irrelevant whether the Kensington Runestone was authentic or fake, for what it testified to was the fact that some people wanted it to be seen as authentic, some people wanted the Vikings to have made it to Minnesota and these people were in all probability Scandinavians . . . who wanted in this way to endow themselves with a history, which is one of the many forms that a sense of belonging takes.”

For those who have partaken in Knausgaard’s darkly humorous and beautifully evocative road trip sagas (Part 1 and Part 2), two Minnesota books also take up the legendary Kensington Rune Stone, though in very different ways.

Myths of the Rune Stone by David M. Krueger. Krueger dives into this myth, how it was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity, and what the legend reveals about not just Minnesota but also America’s preoccupation with divine right and coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents.

Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery by Larry Millett. A fictional take on the Rune Stone myth, this installment in Larry Millett’s Minnesota-set Sherlock Holmes series relies largely on the real historic record surrounding the stone. (More about Millett’s research appears here.)

Did you like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts? (We did!)

You might try these books next:

Queer Optimism by Michael Snediker. Nelson’s vividly beautiful bursts of writing reference many literary and philosophical greats, from Gilles Deleuze to Anne Carson to Susan Sontag to Eve Sedgwick. Included in this list is Michael Snediker, whose Queer Optimism was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2008. (Though the image registration quality here leaves something to be desired, we see some similarities between the two covers, no?)

Feminist Art and the Maternal by Andrea Liss. Nelson also references Catherine Opie’s 2004 photograph “Self-Portrait/Nursing,” which appears on the cover of Andrea Liss’s Feminist Art and the Maternal—a book whose topic mirrors Nelson’s in its treatment of the tensions between feminism and art.

No one sounded like Willis then, and no one sounds like her now: wry, playful, humble, genuinely searching, intellectually formidable.

Carlene Bauer, New York Times Book Review

A visionary fable about equality delivered through a comic Rube Goldberg machine of domestic disaster. In 1928, nearly a century before t

Flushing a toilet in Detroit has become a sign of white privilege. There, residents are facing what people in poor countries have experienced for decades: massive water cut-offs. Thousands of connections are being shut off per week as the city attempts to pay down its debt and attract a private contractor to lease its bankrupt water utility. This is what water privatization looks like.

—Karen Piper, author of The Price of Thirst, today on UMP's blog.

"More than fifteen years ago a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me. . . . It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: 'cinders there are' (il y a la cendre). . . . I had to explain myself to it, respond to it—or for it." —Jacques Derrida

We are very excited to announce that CINDERS is now available from University of Minnesota Press.

"There's no such thing as too much freedom—only too little nerve." —Ellen Willis

Our fantastic new book trailer for THE ESSENTIAL ELLEN WILLIS features interviews with Irin Carmon, Jay Rosen, Alix Kates Shulman, Jennifer Baumgardner, Daphne Brooks, and Stanley Aronowitz. A huge thanks go out to Aaron Cassara and Nona Willis Aronowitz for producing an incredible sort of trailer/mini-documentary for such a legendary thinker.

tinyurl.com/essentialellenwillis

This mixed plate of tastes was cooked up by Eric Goerdt of Duluth, Minnesota's Northern Waters Smokehaus (complete with "microsmokery"), featured in our book Lake Superior Flavors: salamini (with fennel flavor); lonzino; chorizo; and smoked king salmon.

Tonight, author James Norton and photographer Becca Dilley (the forces behind The Heavy Table website) will be cooking up fare from Northern Waters Smokehaus along with other foods featured in their book (bourbon-laced cake from Jampot? Yes, please!) at Kitchen Window in uptown Minneapolis. It appears as though the event is already sold out, but you can catch these two at a few other upcoming events around the area: http://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2014/04/15/eating-and-drinking-with-heavy-tables-james-norton-lake-superior-flavors

Or if you can't wait, their book is on sale now: http://upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/lake-superior-flavors

Bon appetit!

A couple excellent pieces of writing in honor of World Autism Awareness Day 2014, from the contributors to "Worlds of Autism":

Moments in time #107days: http://107daysofaction.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/day-14-moments-in-time-107days/

Charlie in Autismland: A Lesson in Parenthood. http://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/my-health-story/charlie-autismland-lesson-parenthood/

Last week, film. This week, music! The Portland-based folk band Blitzen Trapper graced our office with its presence today, courtesy of local radio show The Current's coffee break with Steve Seel and Jill Riley. The Press was more than stoked to have them hang out with us, and are grateful to The Current for choosing us among, as they mentioned, 80 other offices. THANKS A MILLION!

More Blitzen Trapper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNUmSwWq-LU

Today we discovered a movie is being filmed in our very own building! Even for those of us who've been with the Press awhile, this is a first. Initial rumors had us thinking it might be the Jason Segel/Jesse Eisenberg film about David Foster Wallace (The End of the Tour), which filmed at the Mall of America over the weekend, and we were psyching ourselves up for a glimpse of Segel (who plays DFW) in a bandanna. Further digging revealed that it is a set for The Public Domain, a fictional film set against the backdrop of the real I-35W bridge collapse of 2007. More info: http://thepublicdomainmovie.com/

José Ésteban Muñoz "died as he lived, in a queer time that he may not have chosen but that insistently chose him."

—Jack Halberstam, in an essay included in a collage to honor the highly respected scholar.

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