The Lord of the Barnyard
The story of Tristan Egolf, a punk-rock frontman who wrote the great American working-class novel of the 1990s about a mythical Midwestern garbage strike.
His handwritten manuscript was discovered by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano.
Published in French by Gallimard, Egolf’s novel became a global sensation — everywhere except America.
In December of 1993, when Tristan Egolf arrived in Paris at the age of 22, he had only a hundred dollars in his pocket, three books, and a manuscript. In his notebook, an address on the rue Carpeaux belonging to a friend from Philadelphia. A friend he’d made in college — he’d spent just one semester at Temple University before taking a job as a projectionist in a movie theater. That friend, James Porter, was attending art school downtown. The two met at a party hosted by a common friend and found they both loved Werner Herzog’s films. Above all, in James’s telling, they liked that they agreed on nothing: none of the movies they saw together, none of the books they exchanged. “Tristan had no inhibitions, youth was the alibi for our arrogance. We didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything.”
James showed an interest in restoring buildings. Tristan in literature. He would sit all night reading in his …
The Front Porch
With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence fast approaching, Americans are badly in need of a sense of hope and renewed opportunity. Our solution is one deeply rooted in our history but aimed at the future: a new Homestead Act for the twenty-first century.
The Homestead Act — proposed by President Abraham Lincoln and signed into law during 1862, at the height of the Civil War — was a brilliant and farseeing effort to oppose the Southern slave economy with a Jeffersonian vision of a continent-sized nation of independent property-holders, stretching from ocean to ocean. The device Lincoln created to establish this vision was simple: Allowing any American citizen, or prospective citizen, to file a claim on the millions of acres of surveyed but unappropriated public lands. Applicants for a homestead had to be at least 21 years of age, to be the head of a household, and to swear that …
The Lumberjack World Championships
Shanty boys and lumberjills hot-saw and do the underhand chop at the Olympics of the Forest.
A is for axes, you very well know, B is the boys who can swing them also
Sean Yokoyama is probably the best speed climber in the world, apologies to Caleb Graves.
Just north of Black River Falls was where the bald eagle descended, cannonballing at the lump of deer decomposing on the shoulder of WIS 27. I screeched the car to a halt on the empty two-lane road as the bird coolly appraised me, fanning its six-foot wingspan. Tornado warnings had been issued from Milwaukee to Antigo, with four separate funnel clouds confirmed across the state; now the gray-green light of early afternoon was conspiring with the humidity and my broken AC to stupify me into a minor trance, before the bird took off like the angel of death. I’d been driving through Wisconsin for something like five hours. Once I passed Chippewa Falls, it was time for a drink.
“Whaddaya want?” snorted the bartender of Cookie’s Holcombe Inn, immediately pegging me for what I was, a FIB — as in, a “Fuckin’ Illinois Bastard,” Wisconsin’s less-than-kindly nickname for their neighbors to the south who …
