… Sarah LaChance Adams, that is, with Noam Chomsky and Michel Gondry doing backup at the Zinema 2.

About 60 people, I would guess, maybe more, attended the Explorer’s Club showing of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? on Tuesday night.

I was lucky enough to be watch the movie with Amy Clark, local creative writer with regular appearances on public radio… Zinester and creative writer AF Bat, who works with Minerva… Lawrence Lee, theater engine and nerd culture creator. In the audience but not with me were linguist and guerilla historian Dan Turner of Substreet Underground (who I bet had strong opinions about Chomsky’s position in linguistics)… artist and writer Ann Klefstad… Everyone who was anyone in the small sample of people I admire in Duluth were there — a rare achievement, and props to Professor LaChance Adams for facilitating an event that made the works of the most important living intellectual accessible to Duluthians.

I was grateful that Gondry looked at the question of biography — it’s hard not to wonder whether Chomsky’s revolutionary approach to linguistics isn’t conditioned by the politics of the Holocaust in the postwar period United States. By the same token, this look at biography also made Chomsky’s sense of loss at the death of his wife into poetry.

So much to think about, so much to talk about with friends, thanks to the DSFF, the Explorer’s Club, the Zinema and Professor LaChance Adams.