Macaroni

Best Film of the Year

2012-02-01T20:53:00.009-05:00

I wish, now, that I’d seen The Tree of Life in the theater. On the other hand, after a winter of rabid movie-going, it’s a thrill to see a film that has so much going for it that it clearly stands out from the pack.

The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds (Can’t you hear the crickets chirping?), hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.

There is also quite a bit of whispered voice-over.

To add to the mesmeric effect of experienced childhood (rather than narrative, plot-driven stories about childhood), in The Tree of Life director Terrence Malick brings the jump cut to the level of fine art. (A “jump-cut,” I ought to mention, is a cut between two shots of the same character or scene that have almost, but not quite, the same angle, rather than a reverse angle or a cut to a distinctly different scene or character. This technique, in effect, reminds us of the presence of the camera, but also seems to convey the fluid yet stop-and-go nature of life and memory. After a while you cease to notice it and a dream-like atmosphere develops. It’s the Cubism of cinema.)

Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. The “small” event is that one of the brothers dies. (We don’t see it and we never learn how, and the event comes so early in the film that I don’t mind mentioning it here.)

The “large” event is actually a sequence of events—the creation of the universe and the development of life on the planet Earth. There is extended footage in the first half of the film of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's interesting to note that for the “creation” sequences Malick turned to Douglas Trumbull, who created the spectacular effects in 2001, but hadn’t worked on a film since Blade Runner. Avoiding computer-generated effects, they mixed liquids of varying viscosity in a tank and filmed the reactions, arriving at an effect that resembles the images sent back from NASA exploratory spacecraft.

But astronomer Volker Bromm, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, also played an important role. He commented later:

When I had the first meeting with Terry Malick he said that he wanted to get it right…he didn’t want to just make up stuff—say you have visual effects in Star Trek or Star Wars—he wanted to do the real thing. The closest we can come is a computer simulation of the universe because at this point we cannot directly observe it; therefore, having a computer simulation is the closest thing to how it really was at that time. He wanted to tell the history of the universe with as much realism as possible. Then we translated our simulation into a visualization. The question was always—Does it look right? Does it catch the scientific idea behind it? The visual effects people were very accommodating in trying to get it right and to make me happy.

The Tree of Life is better than 2001, perhaps, because it remains rooted in organic development rather than the esoteria of space travel and super-human computers.

Well, no need to compare. It’s a different sort of film altogether. What 2001 and The Tree of Life have in common is metaphysical ambition. (In fact, due to the presence of Brad Pitt in the cast, some theaters felt it prudent to post disclaimers warning viewers that they were about to enter a philosophical experience and not to demand their money back if they didn’t like it.)
Kubrick may be asking where life is going, but Malick is asking us to consider what life is really like. Why are men and women so different? Why do kids act out? And most importantly, why is God so unjust?

Music plays a large role in the film. Brad Pitt, in the role of Mr. O’Brien, is a largely unsympathetic character, and the fact that he finds solace and inspiration in playing and listening to music seems to make his authoritarian insensitivity that much harder to take.

On the other hand, his middle son plays the guitar angelically. (Malick’s own younger brother studied classical guitar with Segovia in Spain, later willfully broke both his hands and then committed suicide.)

The soundtrack is loaded with classical gems that sometimes border on cornball, from Smetana’s The Moldau to Górecki’s Third Symphony, along with Mozart, Brahms, Couperin, Berlioz, and an assortment of obscure and atmospheric tone-poems that establish an indelible atmosphere of mystery—alluring or sinister, we’re not quite sure.(To see the complete list, and hear some of the numbers, click here.)

Sean Penn seems like a duck out of water in his role as one of the grown-up brothers, and cynics may chuckle at the Hallmark Greeting Card nature of some of the imagery, especially of the final celestial scenes on the beach. I bought the whole package. I was raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which might be worth mentioning. But the estimable Roger Ebert remarked, “I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of The Tree of Life reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me.”

So, is this a film about boys, and for boys? When the movie was over, my wife Hilary, who was raised in Minnetonka, Minnesota, said, “That’s my childhood. I’ll bet Malick is a Catholic.”

The Mysteries of Lisbon

2012-01-29T12:42:00.009-05:00

What a strange four-and-a-half hour film! It resembles Dickens, but without the flamboyant, larger-than-life characters; Austen, but without the wit or the good cheer; Proust, in its labyrinthine regressions into memory; Charlotte Bronte in its depiction of doleful and imprisoned women; and Galdos, Pio Baroja, or any other nineteenth-century Spanish novelist with its priests, pirates, and gypsies.

In fact, the film’s director, Raúl Ruiz, hails from Chile, and the tale on which the film is based is by a Portuguese novelist, Camilo Ferreira Botelho Castelo-Branco,1st Viscount de Correia Botelho, who died in 1890. Branco is said to have written more than 260 books during his career. One critic has observed that Branco’s writing combines “the dramatic and sentimental spirit of Romanticism with … a highly personal combination of sarcasm, bitterness and dark humor.”

Indeed, an atmosphere of gloom and dread, reckless passion and world-weary piety hangs over the action of The Mysteries of Lisbon, which amounts largely to people visiting one another in their gorgeous and rundown country estates or their elegant urban parlors to swap hitherto untold stories about the deep past, stir the cinders of spent passion, or plan routes of escape from their diabolical spouses, invariably male.

At the center of the drama is a boy of fifteen, João, who has no stories. He doesn’t know who his parents are, or where he came from. In the course of the film he finds out a good deal about who he is, and how cruel people can sometimes be to one another.

As the layers of narrative build up, it sometimes becomes difficult to remember which generation we’re dealing with, and a Hundred-Years-of-Solitude-esque mystique begins to envelop the action. I suppose it may have been unwise to watch the film in two parts on successive nights. But after all, a longer version was originally broadcast on European television in six episodes.

It might also have been better to see the film in the theater, I suppose. The camera movement is fluid and the lighting and shot composition are exquisite. It strikes me in retrospect that the effort Ruiz spent planning the character movement of even a single scene probably rivals U.S. Grant’s plotting of the Bayou Campaign against Vicksburg. In fact, I suspect the film has many technical virtues that lie beyond my capacity to notice, much less articulate.

One enthusiast wrote:

“In Mysteries of Lisbon, Ruiz's fluid camera work principally serves his fluid progression of stories, their next-to infinite regression, with re-framings in all but a handful of examples accomplished within rather than without the camera and figure movement universally recapitulated in the visual field through its tight figural identification - moored to his stories' many tellers. The director's long-shot, long-take work also affords for the re-introduction of The Three Crowns of the Sailor's aggressively planar, baroque compositions, at times inorganic and at others not, with servers, in their organic usage, adopting foreground positions where they will overhear the gossip, in the frame's recesses, that will lead to the masters' ceaseless miseries.”

I think the film would have been better had Ruiz paid more attention to fewer characters, allowing us to get to know (and perhaps occasionally even like) them better. Yet in the end, The Mysteries of Lisbon is well worth watching. It has an atmosphere like no other film I’ve seen, and it ranks right at the top in terms of hand-painted wallpaper.

At the same time, it reminded me of another six-part TV show set during the same era that I really ought to see again, The Charterhouse of Parma (1982).

Art Books and Book Arts

2012-01-28T17:16:00.007-05:00

I caught the Graphics Show at the Walker on the afternoon of its last day. Plenty of color posters, digital gimmicks, magazine layouts, and branding displays. As we entered I caught sight of the big display of books in a gallery to the left and whisked past the introductory bulletin board with nary a glance.

Why? Because I like books—precious, hand-made books and those with eccentric, avant-garde designs. But the books under the Plexiglas at the Walker reconfirmed my long-held belief that many such productions are fascinating to ogle but very difficult to read. When a book becomes a mere vehicle for lavish design, or beyond that, a piece of sculpture, I begin to lose interest.

You may argue that there’s no need for us to chose between “books” and “book arts.” As the saying goes, “It takes all kinds (of books) to make a world.”

True enough. And I have books scattered all around the house that seem precious to me, at least in part, because they’re so exquisitely crafted. I recently pulled off the shelf a fine copy of The Book of Tea by Okahura Kakuzo, for example, with heavily textured paper, encased in one of those sturdy boxes.

Opening it at random, I read:

“…But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse…”

Then again, the squared format, quaint illustrations, and scattered type-setting of the anthology The Cubist Poets in Paris is entirely appropriate to the subject. And what about this tiny cased edition, 2 inches square, of Findings by Ursula K. Le Guin that I hold in my hand. It was published by Don Olsen at Ox Head Press in 1992 in the Minnesota Miniatures Series. You could hold the press on which it was printed in the palm of your hand.

All good stuff. But at the point where “design” or “innovation” begins to obscure the literary import, I become queasy. Such creations often exhibit the same delectable textures that make a fine-press book so, well….fine. But I’m not sure whether I ought to read them or put them on exhibit above the piano. (It seldom becomes an issue, because most such examples of “book arts” are out of my price range.)

It strikes me that this issue of cross-purposes extends even to blank books. I’ve bought a few hand-made blank books in my time, but have difficulty writing anything in them. Nothing that’s going on in my head at any given time seems worthy. Eventually I take the plunge.

I’m looking now at a fine little book I bought in a little shop called Il Tourchio in the Altarno in Florence. Opening it at random, I read:

Dec 4, 1992
Poulenc and wine. Just having finished Judge Dee and the Chinese Lake Murders. And I don’t like this pen.
Music by the moods. What would you be reading if you were listening to Ravel’s Scheherazade? There’s an essay by Cocteau that I wish I had but do not have. Don’t know the name of.”

Do I prove my point?

Varieties of Musical Experience

2012-01-22T08:36:00.007-05:00

I can’t help thinking we live in the richest cultural environment the world has ever known. And you don’t have to fly to New York or London to tap into it. Films are everywhere now, of course, presuming you have a DVD player close at hand. Bookstores seem to be on the wane (alas) but access to information about unusual books, and to the books themselves, is greater than ever before. It wasn’t so long ago that book dealers used a weekly used book search magazine, set in very fine lettering on newsprint, to locate those obscure or out-of-print titles for us. Now we can tap into a far wider stock of titles ourselves via the internet in seconds.

Museums? Theater? Live music performance? There aren’t enough days in the week to tap into it all.

I attended two musical events on opposite ends of the musical spectrum recently—maybe that’s what got me thinking about all this.

Last Saturday afternoon we wandered into the second floor gallery at United Methodist Church to hear the Artaria String Quartet perform four of Shostakovich’s string quartets. I’ve never been much of a fan of the man’s orchestral works, which strike me as muddled, bombastic and hermetic by turns, and lacking a core of deep emotion. But hey! The performance was free.

And these more personal works were somehow different. We listened as the Artaria, who’ve been together for twenty-five years, spun their exquisite web of sounds through the pages of the 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th quartets, none of which I’d heard before. I was listening to a man think, hum, grumble, dance, sing, despair. The sixth was a bit breezy—Shostakovich was on his honeymoon when he wrote it. The eighth was rich and rock solid—I later learned that it’s performed more often than all of his other quartets combined.

Following a lengthy intermission, we returned to our seats to hear the ninth and tenth, which were only marginally less powerful and appealing than what had come before. The couples sitting next to us on either side left during intermission, so we could stretch out a bit on our folding chairs as we listened. Members of the quartet gave brief introductions to each piece, setting it in some sort of biographical context. But for the most part, it was simply the sound of the strings, the patterns of interaction, the rich and difficult harmonies, and the lyric thrust—nothing more. What more could we ask for? It was almost like drinking a glass of cool water after an all-day hike through the desert.

Though it was difficult to see the performers from where we sat, it was pleasant enough to look around at the Old Masters hanging on the walls—especially the huge painting of Jesus healing a young woman as two or three bearded men sit by in astonishment. The painting must be ten feet high at least, and my eyes roamed its surface repeatedly in the course of the two-hour concert.

How different the scene was yesterday at the Brookdale Regal 20-screen cinema, where we attended a live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s new work, Enchanted Island! The lengthy two-act romance/comedy has been patched together from the works of several Baroque composers, with Handel, Rameau, and Vivaldi prominent among them. The story draws on elements of both The Tempest and A Midsummer’s Night Dream, though it takes on a life of its own from the get-go. There are love potions, mistaken identities, usurped powers, retribution, freedom, and forgiveness. No need to go into details. It was all amusing, sometimes moving, and the lyrical and heavily ornamented vocal lines are the stuff that sends the heart soaring.

The costumes were remarkable, the sets looked like a succession of antique tarot cards, with raging cardboard seas, dark forests inhabited by Bosch-like animals, and creaking castles. One of the most impressive scenes recreates Neptune’s ocean-bottom throne room, with mermaids dangling from wires and Placido Domingo, complete with seaweed hair and an oyster-shell crown, at the center of it all, waving his trident.

The stellar cast also included the winsome Daniele de Niese, Joyce DeDonato, David Daniels, and Luca Pisaroni in the role of Caliban, a Lurch-like figure who cannot seem to get a date. There is a lengthy ballet number in the middle of act two, and also a plug for environmental awareness!?

I listened to the rousing final chorus, after four hours of merriment, with a huge grin on my face, not wanting it to end, and pondering whether it would be worthwhile to attend the repeat performance February 8. Maybe smuggle in a camera?

1968 - at MHS

2012-01-16T12:40:00.008-05:00

It all started with a Groupon offer: Join the Minnesota Historical Society for $35. I should have renewed our membership long ago, no doubt. Well, here was my chance.

The next morning, after getting the African chicken stew with groundnuts and sweet potatoes going in the crockpot, we puttered over to MHS to see the highly-touted exhibit dedicated to that tumultuous year, 1968.

It’s a lively and fascinating show, and the entryway to the exhibit was packed when we got there. “It will thin out as we start to move on through,” Hilary assured me. Not true.

The first room sets the scene with a few pieces of sleek furniture, including an old television “console” from the midst of which Walter Cronkite tells us that the war in Vietnam is probably unwinnable and would, at best, end in stalemate. (This grim prognostication, which I believe was from Cronkite’s special, Who, What, When, Where, Why?, stood in stark contrast to the official reports being released to the public in those days.)

Stepping around the corner, we came face to face with a Huey helicopter. Many visitors linger here for quite a while, listening to veterans tell their horrific tales of jungle combat as video clips are projected onto the back wall of the copter’s interior. As a result, there’s a huge bottleneck. But that’s all right. It adds to the atmosphere of crowds and mayhem that typify many aspects of the era.

Skirting around this mob, we began to follow the almost daily timeline of events from month to month. Events from many spheres of life are highlighted, from fashion to foreign policy, from moon shots to Memphis riots. Resignations. Assassinations. Martin Luther King. Mayor Daley. Timothy Leary. Goldie Hawn. Some changed our world, while others are now the stuff of trivia questions.

The Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to quell the Velvet Revolution. A few months later, Elvis started his comeback tour. Women’s liberation groups targeted the Miss America contest, and the American Indian Movement got going in Minneapolis. At the end of the year unemployment stood at 3.3 percent.

I turned sixteen in 1968. I remember the assassinations, the moon shots, the riots at the Democratic convention. But these events took place at the periphery of my “real” world, which was centered around canoeing, poker, the Butterfield Blues Band and Cannonball Adderley, and high school debate. “Resolved: that the United States should prohibit unilateral military intervention in foreign countries.” I could argue either side.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying the album covers. Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Arlo Guthrie, the Moody Blues. The corny patchwork fashions and psychedelic designs of the era are also well-represented. You can even take a close look at a pair of Janis Joplin’s pants! I never liked that stuff at the time, and no one likes it now, as far as I can tell, except at Halloween.

Perhaps I was a bit straight-laced or “culturally aloof” at the time. A friend of mine later wrote in my high school yearbook, “I want to see you down at the University campus next year…wearing beads!”

A Tuscan Brainteaser - Certified Copy

2012-01-14T14:45:00.013-05:00

I missed Abbas Kiarostami's latest film at the theater last summer but streamed it last night. It was worth the wait.

As the film opens a small group of Italians has gathered to hear a British author talk about his recent book, Certified Copy. He assures them he isn’t an art “scholar,” and exudes a modest arrogance in his assertion that the issue of authenticity in the art world is overblown. After all, most originals are renderings of something else, he points out—a landscape, a face—while a reproduction can be considered an “original” in its own right. This brief lecture sets the stage for the subsequent conversations between the scholar and a French antiques dealer who owns a shop in town, (Juliette Binoche), not only about art, but also about life and relationships.

Binoche had arrived at the last minute and left early to buy her difficult 11-year-old son a hamburger, after arranging to have the author come to her shop the next morning to sign the books she’d bought. Her son later teases her for falling in love with the man, though she has admitted she doesn’t like his book.

When the author (played by opera singer William Shimell, in his first film role) arrives the next morning, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t like her shop much, either, and they decide to go for a drive while he signs the books. As they drive around aimlessly they discuss art, though the conversation gets more personal as Shimell learns more about Binoche’s sister and her sister's stammering husband. Binoche looks on them as an ideal couple, simple people who have found contentment with one another and their lot in life. “There’s nothing simple about being simple,” is Shimell’s caustic reply.

They go to a small-town museum, then a café, then a historical building that’s become a popular wedding chapel. More talk about art and relationships, including Binoche’s difficult relationship with her son. One of the more interesting conversations is between Binoche and the woman running the café, who thinks the two are man and wife. He’s stepped out into the courtyard to take a call and Binoche plays along with the woman’s error. Though the barista thinks Binoche has a good marriage and an attentive husband, she's a staunch defender of even bad marriages, and sums up her position: “It would be stupid to ruin our lives for an ideal.”

That’s the film: Old World ambiance and cultured talk, sullied by the frustrations of being a single mother in a world where men can deliver lines such as, “Ultimately people must live their lives for themselves.” It contains one or two further odd wrinkles that I’ll leave it to viewers to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say that with Certified Copy, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has created a work that bears comparison with Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia or Antonioni’s La Notte, though it may be better than either of these post-war classics. (For a contemporary equivalent, let me describe it as an Until Sunrise for adults.)

It’s beautifully shot and rich in chiaroscuro. Even the reflections in the windshield of the car are gorgeous. So is Juliette Binoche, who won a well-deserved Best Actress award in Cannes for her quirky, mercurial performance. William Shimell has been widely criticized for his less animated role, but it seems to me he also does a good job. He's basically just killing time with a bright but anxious and slightly distaught woman he hardly knows until the evening train arrives, and he chooses his words carefully for a split-second before speaking, careful to balance truth and tact.

Trypillians and After: Art of the Ukraine

2012-01-08T13:48:00.011-05:00

If you ever wondered what the earliest civilizations devised by humankind were like, stop down to see the current show at the Russian Museum before it leaves town. There you’ll see ceramic artifacts from—not the Egyptians, not the Sumerians—but the Trypillians, who occupied the region between the Danube and the Dnieper rivers extending north from the Black Sea, some nine thousand years ago. (The official dates given are 7400 BCE to 4700 BCE.) These mysterious people knew how to plow, kept domestic animals, grew grapes, and erected temples the look of which have been preserved in miniature clay replicas.

About half of the area occupied by the Trypillians (also known as the Cucuteni) is within the borders of modern-day Ukraine, and the show, titled “ Antiquities From Ukraine: Golden Treasures and Lost Civilizations" includes artworks, weapons, jewelry and sundry other items from succeeding civilizations, too—the Cimmerians, the Scythians, and the Greeks, Johnny-Come-Latelys who didn’t begin to colonize the region until 800 B.C.

Some of the large clay jugs on display are reminiscent of far more recent productions of the Hopi and other Southwestern peoples, and no less beautiful. Others carry the spiral ornamentation I associate with the Minoans. The tall, narrow, clay figurines bring to mind fertility goddesses of the Cycladic cultures of the Aegean. But the Trypillians pre-date all of these peoples by far. Considered all in all, the older artifacts on display fall into the category of genuinely Gee-Whiz “cool.”

Perhaps the most intriguing, though not the most attractive, are a set of weird ceramic vessels that consist of several hollow binocular-shaped units fused together. (Maybe we’re looking at the world’s first kitsch candleholders?)

As we follow the faux-flagstone pathway to the rear of the exhibit space, we meet up with the Scythians, who figure prominently in the history of Herodotus. The Scythians were talented horsemen and knew how to make bronze. They buried their kings surrounded by their household staff, who met their end for precisely that purpose. On the first anniversary of the king’s death, thirty of his top horsemen were killed and buried around the tomb, along with their horses. According to the museum text, Herodotus referred to the Scythians as “wiser than any nation on the face of the Earth." I’m not so sure.

The Scythian warrior carried a gold cup on his belt, in imitation of Herakles, and a very fine one is on display. (We used to carry our cups on our belts while out on the trail in the BWCA, too.) Nearby, a golden headdress made of wafer-thin oak leaves and tiny acorns is also staggering. The small gallery at the back of the museum is given over to jewelry from the classical Greek, early Christian, and Byzantine eras, and it’s almost uniformly exquisite. (The buckle you see below is about one inch high.)

Back home, I pulled my Herodotus from the shelf but found no reference to the overreaching wisdom of the Scythians. At one point he says, “The Black Sea is home to the most ignorant peoples of the earth.” He excludes the Scythians from this judgment, however, and goes on to praise them for having discovered what he calls “the cleverest solution I know of to the single most important matter in human life.” He commends them for carrying their homes behind their horses on wagons, rather than building villages and strongholds. “Since they are all expert at using their bows from horseback, and since they depend on cattle for food rather than on cultivated land, how could they fail to be invincible and elusive?”

So elusive, indeed, that they have long since vanished from history.

North Shore Weekend

2012-01-03T07:26:00.006-05:00

We got back an hour ago—maybe two—from skiing the Homestead Loop, a few miles up the Sawbill Trail. It’s prettier than I remember, or perhaps I’ve become more sensitive to landscape with the passage of time. There are maple forests and birch forests, cedar groves, occasional clumps of spruce, few and far between. Along some stretches you can see the sweep of the big lake in the distance, almost unbelievably expansive from this height and distance, with Carleton Peak to the right and another knobby outcrop—Oberg Mountain?—to the left. We took a few long downhill runs, which are challenging less because of the turns than the bumps and gullies that you drop down into suddenly and then swoop up the other side of, perhaps going airborne a bit at the end.

The snow cover is the bare minimum, maybe three inches. Just enough to keep the rocks and roots at bay, enough to keep us going. Twigs and grasses stick up through the white snow hear and there, though the grooming machine has rudely mangled and severed the worst of them. Very few people have been out, and ice is certainly not a problem.

I can image people saying, “Ski conditions poor.” These are the ones who stay at home to watch college football, perhaps. But the snow-cover is only one of several factors. Weather? Cloudy and 28 degrees. Crowds? None. Terrain and companionship? Superb. Silence? Complete. Final ranking: Very good indeed.

By the time we got to the turn-off to the Oberg Loop, we did some calculating for the first time and determined the entire circuit would be more than eight miles. The stiffest climbs were just beyond the turnoff, we were getting tired, and considering we were not yet quite halfway around the loop, it seemed we had a long way yet to go. But we eventually reached a crest from which we could see another long stretch of gray peaks in the distance through the trees, one of which, I’m sure, was Leveaux Mountain. By this time we’d come around and were now looking down across a valley rather than out toward Lake Superior.

The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the chatter of red squirrels; a single deer barreled past us through the brush at one point; and at another point on the trail we were suddenly overwhelmed by a strong skunk-like smell. I suppose it could have been a bear hibernating nearby?

There were several easy downhill stretches on the return route, during which we felt we were making good time. On one of the steeper ones I came up over a gully and didn’t quite land right. For a split-second I thought I might pull it out before I went seriously horizontal, landing on my left shoulder in the snow and feeling a stab of pain as my calf bent under me and tightened into a cramp. A second later I entered that familiar zone of feeling, half embarrassed, half chuckling to myself at the thought that I’d be back on my feet in no time if it weren’t for the stupid skis stretching out in opposite directions from the ends of my legs.

“Are you OK?” I heard Hilary shouting from the bottom of hill.

We rounded a corner a bit further on and the rugged gray two-tiered mass of Carleton Peak came into view once again below us, its gray-green pines looking like some sort of shaggy goatee.

A half-hour later we emerged from the woods and shuffled over to our car. The lot now held eight or nine other vehicles, though we’d passed only one skier near the halfway point of our three-hour jaunt, and two family groups near the trailhead. I found myself lifting my left leg up into the car with my hand, grunting and groaning, though alongside the usual minor aches I was tingling with joy at having completed a very fine ski on the last day of the year.

* * *
My plan had been to work up a little essay about Plato during the trip, but I’m not sure I’ve got it in me right now. Last night I read Montaigne’s essay on repentance, during which he doesn’t really describe what repentance is, but comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t have a whole lot of misdeeds to repent of. Montaigne is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, but he is nothing if not self-satisfied, and his recurrent denials of any sort of agenda or expertise sometimes strike me as tiresome dither.

This morning I got going on the third speech in Phaedrus, during which Socrates tries to explain why and when madness can be a divine gift rather than a debilitating illness. The two-horsed chariot and all of that. His description of what the gods see as they look out in the opposite direction from the starry firmament is quite interesting and incredible, like The Book of Revelation, (which I’ve never read.) As is his theory of ten thousand years of a roaming soul.
But the salient elements to be found in Plato’s work, in a nutshell, are these:

First and foremost, an intuitive sense of the motion of the spirit toward the good. Yet the soul already knows more of the good than it has actually experienced, and Plato spends a good deal of time trying to explain why. He approaches this feeling, which we might fairly call an inkling of the divine, from several avenues, and concludes that we know of things we’ve only imperfectly experienced because we met up with them in a previous life, and vaguely recollect the experience.

A more static way to describe the same situation would be to say that there’s another world out there—the world of forms. The things we experience in this world are but imperfect copies of the ones they’re copies of, or aspire to become. There is a perfect goodness, a perfect, truth, and so on, all of which the things of this world “participate in” to a greater or lesser degree. If pressed to provide a single quality that these various types of eternal perfection possess, perhaps Plato would say harmony.

Accompanying this theory of forms is another signal contributions to our understanding of life: the breakdown of our values or ideas into categories—the good, the true, the beautiful. Trying to determine the validity of a remark, for example, is something different from evaluating how persuasive it is. Plato raises this issue time and again in his attempts to differentiate the craft of the sophists, who were then teaching young men the art of rhetoric, from the critical acumen of philosophers like himself who were in search of the truth about things. We take such distinctions for granted nowadays, or worse that that, ignore them entirely, and the result is error and confusion. Worst of all, perhaps, is the habit of conflating them deliberately, for example, by suggesting that “everything is political.” Plato made a great effort to distinguish between qualities and values, and in the process elevated thought to an entirely new level.

* * * *
This morning we drove up the shore and headed inland on Cook County 7, planning to do some skiing at Bailly’s Creek. A quarter-inch of soft snow had fallen during the night and the minor roads that snake across the broad hills above the big lake were sheer white. We barely made it up a small hill at the turnoff onto County 158, and a few hundred yards further on we noticed a patch of snowy commotion in a ditch where a large vehicle had gone off the road recently. We had not seen a soul since leaving the main highway, and when an opportunity presented itself at a fork in the road we gingerly turned around and retraced our route to Highway 61. The snow looked good up there but the prospect of hiking miles to a phone and waiting for hours for a tow truck did not seem that appealing.

At Cascade State Park, a few miles to the west, there was less snow but the road to the trailhead had been plowed and sanded. There was no one in the lot. We took the trail uphill alongside the east side of the ravine above the Cascade River through the pines and cedars. It’s a pretty route, and from a turn above the ravine we could see the sun, which was just emerging from behind the gray cloud cover, as it hit the face of a distance cliff. The pines in the foreground were cloaked in white and the scene had the look of a Christmas card, though the fresh cold air and the exhilaration of our mild exertion lent an added luster to it.

We continued up into the woods, then took the long way back along the park boundary, avoiding the more direct downhill runs that might well have been murderous with only two or three inches of snow on the ground. Near the parking lot I heard a pounding sound, and looking over into the woods, I saw a black-backed woodpecker at work on a half-fallen spruce a few feet off the trail. I recognized the white line across the face immediately, and as he turned his head I spotted the little yellow cap, too.

It’s a great feeling to come in off the trail, return to your snug little cabin on the lake, put some Haydn piano trios, chosen at random, on the little plastic CD player, and pull the chicken liver pâté, red cabbage, and candied beets out of the refrigerator. A huge ore boat suddenly appears outside the window, if such a thing is possible. The clouds have closed in again but they look thin and there are patches of blue here and there. Maybe we’ll see some stars tonight!

I’ve had it with Plato; and turn my attention to that wry and ornery North Shore prose poet, Louis Jenkins. Many of these one-paragraph monologues, one to a page, carry the music of quiet angst or desperate irrationality, usually diffused (though not contradicted) by a humorous turn in the final sentence.

And now the music, too, grows mores serious, as we complete the long weekend with the fourth and final CD of the Budapest String Quartet performing Mozart’s String Quintets and the quartets dedicated to Haydn. The Quintet in G Minor K.516, which is playing just now, is especially dark and lovely. The set was recording in 1952, the year I was born.

Jenkins has some sort of connection with the early Plato, and also with Montaigne, for that matter. He allows himself to run on, not sure of where he’s going but confident that the method can lead to some interesting juxtapositions and is more likely to produce a moment of beauty or insight than anything that’s been worked out rigorously ahead of time.

That’s what makes the poems so interesting: the flow of commonplace associations that bring us to surprising conclusions. Plato would chide me if I went so far as to describe these creations as “true.” It would be muddling the categories. But Jenkins has captured the flavor of middle-aged dissolution in striking images that exhibit a degree of Plato’s divine madness in their brilliant illogicality. Jenkins knows the fish, the vessels, the woods and winds of the North Shore, and he captures their flavor well. But that isn’t what these poems are about.

In one poem he takes a walk across a woodlot at dusk, observes the call of the birds and the sway of the aspens, which remind him of spindly women lined up waiting for partners at a dance. He carries this flight of fancy for a sentence or two and concludes:

“…Now the music begins again: ‘Moon River.’ Ladies choice. That tall homely one bends over to whisper to her friend and .. oh, hell, they’re all looking straight at me.”

Four Holiday Movies with Dogs

2011-12-29T11:13:00.008-05:00

In case anyone is planning a New Year’s film binge, here are a few suggestions:

The Adventures of Tintin
Although this animated feature is a little short on character development, the plot is plenty thick, and the colorful settings are marvelously rendered. The sea battle between flaming vessels is particularly vivid, and the film gets more interesting when our detective-hero and his companion, Captain Haddock, arrive in a storybook North African city to retrieve the model ship that carries the third and final clue to the location of the buried treasure.

Fans of the comic book character have had a good time pointing out all the ways that the movie fails to live up to the superb genius of the original material. Those of us who come into the theater without expectations can sit back and enjoy the ride. For myself, I’m not a big fan of animated movies, in which the plots tend to be sentimental, the expressions generic, and the voices wildly exaggerated. Ratatouille? Finding Nemo? UJggh!@#%!

But I liked Tintin, which mostly looked quite real. I think I might read the book.

Margin Call
Margin Call Takes us inside the offices of a hedge fund on the eve of the market melt-down on 2008. Half of the staff has just been fired, but one of the departing “risk managers” (Stanley Tucci) has crunched enough numbers to see that far worse news lies ahead.

The film takes place during a single late-night panic during which young employees, board members, and honchos arriving in helicopters attempt to make the best of a terrible situation, and “get out” before everything goes south. Sales manager Kevin Spacy seems to have a bit more conscience than some of his colleagues, though his emotional life is largely consumed by the health needs of his dying dog. Several sharks (including top dog Jeremy Irons) are given the opportunity to deliver fairly accurate speeches about the willing collusion between fund managers and their clients.

Never having owned a piece of a hedge fund or visited a brokerage of any kind myself, I couldn’t say how accurate any of this is, but it’s a vivid and thought-provoking film.

The Artist
This black-and-white film has a rich soundtrack and a predictable plot, but it’s a charming vehicle for the stars, who spend a fair amount of time merely grinning at one another.

An actor unknown to me, Jean Dujardin, plays the silent-screen idol George Valentin, and a second new-comer, Bérénice Bejo, is equally winsome as the enthusiastic fan who slowly creeps into his life. Both actors indulge in plenty of the “hamming” that takes the place of talk in silent pictures, but they’re very good at it, and the story itself is awfully sweet.

Young Adult
On the other hand, Young Adult is bittersweet at best. Charlize Theron plays an attractive divorcee who writes young adult novels from her high-rise apartment in Minneapolis and drinks Coke from a 2-liter bottle in her pajamas every morning. She’s pushing forty, though she looks to be twenty-five, and her life is a mess. Receiving an almost random baby-announcement email from her high school boyfriend, she decides to return to her home town and “rescue” him from what she presumes to be a boring, claustrophobic life.

Theron does an excellent job of making herself continually watchable but never likable. At the same time, director Jason Reisman succeeds in fleshing out the limited horizons of small-town life without condescension. Patrick Wilson plays the new father with aplomb—obviously happy with his domestic situation, though also guilelessly concerned to make his unexpected visitor feel at home. Added ballast is provided by Matt Freeholf (Patton Oswalt) who was the victim of a hate crime in high school and now paints model super-heroes and distills whiskey in his garage.
Considered all-in-all, Young Adult is far better than any brief description could convey. I might almost describe it as haunting.

The Genius of the Season

2011-12-27T09:59:00.007-05:00

So much is contained in a single word—a single letter. Thus, “Celebrating the birth of God” carries a different connotation from “Celebrating the birth of a god.” Maybe the phrase “Celebrating birth” says it all.

My Greek is a little rusty after all these years, but as I recall, the prefix “gen-” carries a range of inference that spans race, kind, line of descent, origin, creation, sexual relations, and reproduction. Just think of the modern equivalents: generation, genius, generator, genuine, and genesis. But we must also include such words as genus, genealogy, and general.

Clearly that simple prefix can take us in two different directions. On the one hand, it calls up a series of concepts having to do with novelty, creativity, authenticity, and uniqueness. One the other hand, it refers to concepts that lump things together into groups on the basis of their type or ancestry. We hold no one in higher esteem than the “genius,” yet reserve our most withering derision for the merely “generic.”

These two aspects of the expression will never be fully reconciled, but it would be a mistake to imagine that they’re altogether opposed to one another. We meet up with both at every family gathering: the idiosyncrasies, the differences between family members that stimulate and nourish us (though they can sometimes annoy us, too) and the veins of affection that run ever-deeper, and constitute the reality (rather than merely the pedigree) of the clan.

Praise be to whoever cooked up a universe replete with affinities, both elective and congenital. May we become ever more generous and genial in our efforts to expand the reach of such ties.

Adventures in Coulibiac Country

2011-12-18T20:24:00.012-05:00

A Koulibiac is a loaf of fish, meat, or vegetables baked in a pastry crust. This Russian dish was traditionally made with sturgeon marrow, which is not easy to come by these days. I suspect most recipes today derive from the one that appeared in French cookbooks after Escoffier included the dish in his book.

We recently proposed this dish for a large-scale Christmas gathering on the strength of a dim recollection I had of a remark Craig Clairborne made about it. I could no longer remember what he’d said, but I knew the dish had salmon in it, and I suspected it was complicated to make. I had the distinct recollection that a recipe could be found in a book called The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth which had made its way to the basement decades ago. (I was wrong.)

According the Foodlover’s Companion, “the French adaptation of the Russian original (kulebiaka) consists of a creamy melange on fresh salmon, rice, hard-cooked eggs, mushrooms, shallots and dill enclosed in a hot pastry envelope. The pastry is usually made with brioche dough. Coulibiacs can be large or small but are classically oval in shape. They can be served as a first or a main course." The word is pronounced koo-leeb-yahk, by the way.

Perusing recipes online, we soon learned that there are many variants—though salmon, eggs, and mushrooms appear in most of them. We chose one that sounded especially interesting due to the inclusion of a can of sardines and a complicated sauce made with wine and the water in which the dried mushrooms had been reconstituted. A week before the big event, we made a trial run and found that the sardines were overpowering, the salmon was half raw, the wine sauce was indistinct and hardly worth the effort, and the rice added nothing to the dish.

On the strength of this flop, we moved on to a recipe that called for crepes rather than rice, had a less complicated duxelle of mushrooms, and included leeks rather than spinach. This recipe made use of an herb hollandaise, which seemed like a good idea. We also incorporated a twist we’d found in several other recipes, of searing the salmon fillets on both sides before adding them to the loaf, to insure that when the pasty was cut open following its time in the oven, the fish would be done.

Here’s the recipe, pretty much the way we did it. This recipe makes two loafs, ample for thirteen guests with quite a bit left over. Cut things in half if you want to make a single loaf. In any case, you might have some crepes left over, which you can have for lunch after assembling the loaves and putting them into the fridge.

The evening before the event, we prepared the leeks as follows:

Braised Leeks
9 large leeks
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup vegetable broth or water
kosher salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. To prepare the leeks, trim off the dark green stalks and the roots. Next, slice the leeks in half lengthwise. Place the leeks in a large bowl of cold water, cut side down, and allow them to sit there about 10 minutes. Most of the grit will fall to the bottom of the bowl. Rinse the leeks again, checking between the folds to make sure all the grit is gone. Dry the leeks with a paper towel. Spray a nine-by-13 baking dish with nonstick cooking spray. Set the leeks in the baking dish, cut side up. Brush with the olive oil. Roast 20 minutes, tossing halfway through to make sure they don't get too brown. Pour vegetable broth over the leeks. Roast another 10 minutes or until leeks are tender. Season with kosher salt and pepper.

Having performed this elaborate cleansing ritual, I might be tempted, the next time around, merely to slice the leeks thin, remove what grit is present, and sauté. We found that when slicing the finished dish, the long fibrous strands of leek were occasionally difficult to break through.

The next morning we got going on the crepes, which Hilary made one-at-a-time in a crepe pan.

All Purpose Crepe Batter
1/4 cup cold water
3/4 cup cold milk
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup flour
3 tablespoons melted butter

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. Make a well in center and pour in liquid ingredients. Stir until smooth.

The mushrooms weren’t difficult, though it took quite a while for the fluid to evaporate. I included a step here from a different recipe, adding ¼ cup of white wine and reducing before adding the broth. And as for the broth itself, we used a corner of a chicken bouillon cube dissolved in water to cut expenses.

Filling
1 pound baby bella mushrooms, finely chopped
1/4 cup chopped green onion
1/4 cup butter
1/2 tablespoon salt
1/4 tablespoon dried marjoram
2 tablespoon flour
Dash of pepper
1/4 cup beef broth
2 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

In a saucepan over medium-high heat, sauté the mushrooms and onion in the butter until liquid evaporates. Stir in salt, marjoram, flour, pepper and broth. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Remove from heat and stir in parsley.

At this point, after boiling four eggs, we were ready to begin the assemble.

We had purchased two large fillets of farm-raised Atlantic salmon, which weighed in at 3.5 lbs in all. This is not a good time of year for Pacific salmon, and in any case, several butchers told us we’d be better off with the oilier, farm-raised variety, considering there was no way to check whether the salmon was done prior to cutting into the loaf.

Now wash the salmon fillets and pat dry. Remove any bones and skin. Put a little oil in a very large pan and sear the fillets on both sides. (It would be a good idea to cut them into chunks, which won’t hurt the assembly at all.) Put them on plates as they get done. The insides should still be raw.

The final assembly:

The first step is to roll out two pieces of puff pastry into rectangles. The top one will be somewhat larger than the bottom one. Flour a work surface and roll out a slab of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry to a rectangle maybe 9 x 13 inches. Roll out the other slab (two come in a box) and make it an inch smaller all the way around. The pastry stretches as you use it so the dimensions don’t need to be exact. Keep chilled until ready for use.

Now put the smaller sheet onto a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Arrange three or four crepes (overlapping) on dough followed by a layer consisting of ¼ of the mushroom duxelle. Then make a layer of leeks, followed by one of the eggs, sliced. These layers should extend to within one inch of the edge though they’ll taper inward as they pile up.

Top with half the salmon slices. (The other half goes into the other loaf.) Place an additional ¼ of the duxelle, then some more leeks, then another sliced egg over the salmon.

Make an egg wash and brush the exposed edges of the dough with it. Then apply the larger sheet of dough (which you’ve wisely kept cool in the fridge) on top. Seal all edges, cut off the excess dough, and roll pastry so the seam is underneath. Make some stars with the excess dough and apply to the top of the loaf. Then brush the entire top of the loaf with egg. Put in fridge. (Several of the recipes suggest making the entire thing the day before the event.) When the time comes, bake at 375 degrees F for 30 minutes.

Here’s the recipe we used for the hollandaise
Garden Herb Hollandaise
1 egg, yolk only
Juice of half a lemon
1 cup unsalted butter, soft
Salt and smoked paprika
1/2 cup, finely chopped selection of fresh herbs

Place the eggs yolk and lemon juice in a steel bowl over a double boiler. With a French whisk, combine vigorously until thick but not curdled and slowly add soft, whole butter until thickened. Add seasoning and herbs. Keep warm by placing in a warm water bath time to serve.

Edo Pop – A Star in the East

2011-12-16T22:39:00.011-05:00

The Edo Pop exhibit currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is mostly Edo, with very little Pop. That’s OK with me. The Edo period, which spans the shogunate of the Tokugawa clan, runs from 1603 to 1868. During that time artists you’ve probably heard of—Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro—produced affordable woodblock prints of courtesans, Kabuki performers, scenes of Mt. Fuji, and floral and avian subjects that are a delight to behold.

The Institute owns scads of these works, and they’ve put the best of them on display in the first five rooms of the exhibit. In the last two rooms we have the privilege of seeing contemporary works—videos, acrylic paintings, brief amine films, masks—that draw upon the Ukiyo-E tradition. They’re far less interesting. But few, perhaps, are likely to rush to the museum and fork over $8 to see the prints we’ve been looking at all our lives for free.

Before the show we met some friends for Happy Hour at the Fuji-Ya, only a few blocks from the museum, where the rock-n-roll was booming out of the speakers above our heads. I asked our waitress, largely in jest, if they ever had live Koto music. She responded, “No, that was at the old place. And we all wore Kimonos there.” We were pleased to discover that she had actually worked at the old Fuji-Ya, down by the locks on the Mississippi River, for fifteen years. And she, in turn, was visibly pleased that we remembered it. In fact, I remember the Koto players they used to have there, and the water tumbling over the falls just outside the window. Hence the facetious question.

I ordered the hot sake, which comes in an earthenware pitcher. In all the Japanese films I’ve seen, two men pour for one another across the table repeatedly—the cups are very small—until both are pretty well drunk. But I was the only one in the group who ordered sake, and therefore I had to do all the pouring myself.

The food was simply great. Negi Mutsi, Shake Maki, Caterpillar (a long string of cucumber slices with a smoked eel running down the middle). It goes down too quickly, however, and the bill does mount up.

Our visit to the museum happened to be on a Third Thursday, during which the “youth” element is especially strong. A rock-n-roll band, The Brutes, was playing in the first floor atrium. People wearing ties and stylish dresses were crafting Christmas cards at a few folding tables nearby—no children in sight.

The first three rooms of the exhibit consisted of a long series of stylized renderings of geishas, semi-nude female abalone divers, kabuki stars, and scenes from Japanese folklore. I like these images for the same reason I like Homer. Beyond the artistic conventions lies an expressive force that appelas to us even today. And the world being depicted is pleasantly “primitive”—in other words, it’s largely free of junk.

In one print, a woman reads a poem-scroll. She has her ink tablet, and what looks to be a book press, too. There’s a samurai sword hanging near-by, in case the poetry gets out of hand, I guess.

In another print what appeals to me most is the slate green background. Later a stunning blue begins to appear. The text accompanying the prints is long and detailed. At a certain point I quit caring which Kabuki actor played what part, or where the illegal red light districts of Kobe were located in the eighteenth century. Time to just look and admire.

In the fourth room, just as our attention was beginning to lag, nature moved to the forefront of artistic interest. These are the famous and remarkable flowers and birds of Hokusai, the pilgrimage scenes of Hiroshige. I found myself looking longingly at some of the snow scenes. It’s mid-December, after all.

The final two rooms had fewer, but far larger works, many of them digital or photographic. It would take too long to describe what was interesting about them. For the most part, they signaled an vast increase in technological dependency, a regression into adolescence emotionally, and a noticable drop in expressive power.

The Institute has so many great works of art, that the discoveries we make on the way out are sometimes among the most memorable. On our way to the third floor to see the period rooms decked out in holiday festoons, we passed what has always been one of my three or four favorite works in the museum—the mille-fleur tapestry. Parked in front of the tapestry is a medieval sculpture of the Virgin and child. Also very nice. I happened to notice that the bends in her posture bear striking similarities to those of the courtesans in the red light district in Kyoto.

But a different message is being conveyed here. I think it has something to do with the child.

Advent Reflections

2011-12-14T20:30:00.004-05:00

- Rain in December, as we approach the shortest day of the year. It’s evocative, if not delightful, and the plants undoubtedly appreciate it.

- I recently made of poster of a photograph I took of the forest floor on the fringe of the Canadian Shield: baby white spruce, Labrador tea, bunchberry, wintergreen, false lily of the valley. You can see them all, larger than life above the fireplace, clamoring for space and light, yet harmoniously arranged. ( I did clone out a few dead twigs.)

- Which reminds me, it’s a time of death. My old camp director passed away recently. Then the co-owner of the firm where I worked for a quarter-century. (Where did they go?)

- A colleague from camp says, “We should have a reunion.” I say, “I don’t much like my former selves. Wouldn’t want to be introduced.”

- Racquetball. We aren’t as good as we once were. (Don’t play enough.)

- We skip the Bly reading. Sit by the fire catching up on the fate of the Euro.

-Then there’s the Saturday Met HD telecast of Gounod’s Faust. The story has never been good. Marlowe? No. Goethe? No. The gleeful and smug self-confidence of Mephistopheles is boring—the kind of catty naughtiness that jaded theater-goers love to titter at. Faust himself is a shallow cad with a beautiful voice. Marguerite is the best of the lot—simply naïve. She has been criticized for loving the jewels in the box too much. But the jewels provide the “objective correlative” for her brilliant, yet downtrodden, spirit.

It was fascinating to hear the Russian soprano, Marina Poplavskaya, being interviewed during intermission. She not only knows the part well, but embodies it, in so far as she seems to share the romantic faith and hope expressed by the character she’s portraying.

All three of the voices rise about the characters, as is so often the case with opera. The music lifts us above the story-line. Poplavskaya’s music most of all. She’s a believer.

Handel’s Rodelinda

2011-12-04T13:54:00.007-05:00

There were maybe ten cars in the vast parking lot of the Brooklyn Park Regal Cinema when I pulled in at eleven Saturday morning. An elderly couple, neither of them much more than five feet tall, were walking gingerly toward the entrance across the asphalt under the dismal gray sky. Both carried canes, and I heard a middle-aged man say to his wife as I got out of my car: “This looks like the right crowd.”

When I asked for a ticket to “the opera,” having forgotten the name of the rarely-staged Handel work I was attending, the burly black teenager in the booth said, “Senior discount?”
“What’s the cut-off?” I asked.
“Sixty.”
After a split-second of hesitation, I shook my head. No. And forked over my $24.

Rodelinda is the story of the wife of a slain king who must marry the usurping tyrant to save the life of her son. It will come as no surprise to opera-goers that the king isn’t really dead. He returns in disguise with the hope, not of regaining his kingdom, but merely of rescuing his wife and son. He’s crestfallen to discover that she’s agreed to remarry, not knowing her bitter rationale, and certainly unaware that her vengeful condition for going through with the ceremony is that the tyrant must kill her son before her very eyes. Grimoaldo finds he can’t do it, and is eventually sent into a mental tail-spin as his conscience revolts at the crimes he must commit to retain the seat of dictatorial power. (Richard III he’s not.)

Throw in a trusted servant, a Machiavellian advisor, and a devoted sister to thicken the plot, and you have the ingredients for a first-rate opera. The sets are lavish and suitably Italianate, the orchestra maintains a subdued “period” flavor, with two harpsichords, no less! Fleming and Stephanie Blythe deliver their da capo arias with lovely agility, and the male leads are hardly less engaging.

Yet there seems to be a slight disjunct at the heart of this work. Throughout the afternoon, the two appealing elements I’ve just described—the melody and the drama—were somewhat at odds. And the fact that two of the four male leads were sung by counter-tenors didn’t help much. Though their voices were both very fine, the unusually high range they employed was not meant to be a reflection of character, but merely an convention of the era during which the opera was written, when castrati were the superstars of the genre.

It would be pointless, I suppose, to try to “work around” or modernize the piece by cutting the arias in half or recasting the castrati roles as baritones. As Renee Fleming herself pointed out in a recent interview, part of the appeal of the genre lies in its clarity and grace. The drama may be similar at times to the darkest turns of Simon Boccenegra or Rigoletto, but the vocal passages are invariably lilting and intricate.

It came as a surprise to me that one of the most lovely and memorable arias in Rodelinda was the heroine’s demand that the tyrant execute her son! There were times when I succumbed to the temptation to close my eyes to the drama and simply listen. And in doing do, I may have been adding to the historic accuracy of the experience. In Handel’s day, after all, subtitles didn’t exist, and few in the audience knew Italian.

Some critics objected to Italian opera at the time on precisely those grounds. If was felt that nothing edifying could be transmitted in a language no one could understand. Richard Steele, writing in the Tatler in April of 1709, observed:

“..the stage being a Entertainment of the Reason and all our Faculties, this Way of being pleased with the Suspence of ’em for Three Hours altogether, and being given up to the shallow Satisfaction of the Eyes and Ears only, seems to arise rather from the Degeneracy of our Understanding, than an Improvement of our Diversions.”

We might note in passing that Steele’s friend Joseph Addison had recently written an English-language libretto for an opera that was an utter flop. In any case, the fact that few could understand what was being said hardly seems to be the worst aspect of the opera performances of Handel’s day. As one historian of the era remarks, at the opera people would “play cards, chat, move about, eat oranges and nuts, spit freely, his and yowl at singer they did not like.” Many went simply for the stage effects and the remarkable vocal pyrotechnics of the Italian divas whose exorbitant fees eventually drove Handel to the brink of bankruptcy.

Times have changed, audiences have become more attentive, and I found myself growing increasingly irritated as a woman five rows behind me took fifteen minutes to extract her sandwich from a cheap plastic bag and then undo the Saran wrap. Reviving the eighteenth-century habit, I got up and moved long before she'd taken her first bite.

But with the help of subtitles, I left the theater five hours later, just as darkness was descending, not only buoyed by the boundless lyricism of Handel’s music but also more than a little moved by Grimoaldo’s crisis of conscience and abdication of power, Bertarido’s magnanimity, Rodelinda’s vehement defiance, and her son’s precocious courage.

Back home, I built a fire and scoured the shelves for a means of sustaining the mood. Here’s what I came up with:

Kiri Te Kanawa: Sorceress—A Handel Celebration with Christopher Hogwood (1994)
Emma Kirkby: Handel/Italian Cantatas (1981)
Natalie Dessay: Handel/Delirio (2005)
Lisa Saffer: Handel/Arias for Cuzzoni (1990)
Danielle de Niese: Handel Arias (2008)
And finally, Handel’s complete opera Aci, Galatea e Polifeo(1987)

I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account, but I will say that the women with lighter voices—Kirkby, Dessay, and Saffer—wrap themselves around the music especially well.

Francis Lee Jaques in Aitkin

2011-11-28T08:42:00.011-05:00

Suppose you didn’t want to buy anything on Black Friday. Or suppose you didn’t particularly care to get an extraordinary deal. Here’s an alternative scenario.
We were in the car, heading north, by 9:15. (In Minnesota, heading “north” carries a special ring.) Nothing much to report on the way up to Aitkin, though Mille Lacs was as impressive as ever, and we spotted a swan, two golden eyes, and a few mergansers just off shore near Garrison.

We found a parking spot across the street from the American Legion in Aitkin and wandered inside to the Chili Cook-off. Folks were already having fun. Some of them in costume. We bought two tickets for $7 (total), were given our Styrofoam bowls, and began our circuit around the crowded room, sampling the offerings.

One of the entrants had put potatoes in her chili. “We have a potato farm up in Palisade,” she told me, gesturing at a framed potato sack hanging on the wall behind her booth. Another was serving little cornbread muffins on a stick. A third group had chosen a “Wizard of Oz” theme. One team (from the DNR) wore prison outfits, another had sombreros on their heads. I don’t know why.

Chili and cornbread (and potatoes) call for beer. At the bar I asked what they had, the bartender asked what I liked. I am no expert, and didn’t want to get into ales, stouts, porters, pilsners, IPAs… She was in a hurry, and as I was thinking of something to say she blurted out, “We have Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Schmidt.”

OK. Budweiser sounds great.

Later, out on Main Street, we watched a succession of colorful floats pass by, their occupants throwing candy. Few of the floats had the slightest resemblance to ice houses, as far as I could tell. Then again, I’m not an ice fisherman.

While waiting for the parade to start, we’d walked down the street to the Frances Lee Jaques museum, which is housed in the old Carnegie Library building. Jaques, a wildlife artist, lived in Aitkin for many years when he wasn’t off in the Caribbean or the Rockies painting birds. He’s best known, perhaps, for a series of dioramas he did for the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Or perhaps he’s not so well-known. The New York Times once reported:

The painted backgrounds of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History have a curious place in the hearts of almost everyone who has grown up in New York City during the last century. They are some of the most elaborate landscape paintings in the city and some of the most frequently viewed pictures anywhere, but almost nobody knows who did them or, in a sense, even seems to notice them when they’re staring straight at them.

Here in Minnesota, many of us grew to love Jaques work at the Bell Museum of Natural History. Children beyond counting have stared into the enormous scenes he did of elk on Inspiration Peak, of moose on Gunflint Beach, and of timber wolves on the rocky cliffs of the North Shore, as if they were real. And several generations of outdoor enthusiasts have cherished the scratch-board illustrations he did for the wilderness canoeing books of Sigurd Olson, and also the books he did with his wife Florence—Canoe Country, The Geese Fly High, and Snowshoe Country.

Jaques was raised on farms in Illinois and Kansas. Even as a boy he was entranced by the plumage of the birds he shot while hunting with his dad, and began to work at depicting them realistically. In the spring of 1903, after yet another unsuccessful year of farming, the family headed north in search of fertile, inexpensive soil, and ended up in a log cabin on a plot of land just north of Aitkin with an oxbow of the Mississippi River wrapped around it.

As a young adult, while working at various occupations—lumberman, railroad hand, taxidermist—Jacques continued to draw and sketch, and he also spent a good deal of time exploring the forests and lakes of the northern Minnesota border region by canoe. After serving in the military during WWI, he returned to Minnesota and found work in the Duluth shipyards, but his interest in nature stayed with him, and in 1924 he sent a painting of a black duck to Dr. Frank Chapman, a curator in the Ornithology Department at the American Museum of Natural History. To his surprise, the museum took Jaques on as a staff artist and he suddenly found himself working in the company of some of the country’s leading scientists. In time Jaques himself was recognized as one of America’s foremost wildlife artists.

Perhaps due to his years spent as an untrained but avid observer of nature, Jaques had developed the ability to render an animal’s posture and flair without resorting to the painstaking depiction of every piece of fur or feather. He was especially adept at capturing the form of birds in motion. Yet he also had the knack of integrating the elements of the surrounding environment into a pleasing whole—thus satisfying the requirements of art and science at a single stroke.

He once remarked:

The shape of things has always given me the most intense satisfaction. Everything one sees and senses. Geese in a storm, a landfall after a long period at sea, horses in a fence corner, the first glimpse of the ‘shining mountains’ across the plain, the eroded bank of a stream winding through a pasture. With me the keenest interest of all has been in wildlife, and that includes its habitat.

The main room of the museum was largely given over to holiday crafts, but in the back a number of Jaques’ paintings and scratchboards were still on display. As I wandered the gallery, I couldn’t help listening in on a conversation that a silver-haired man in a plaid shirt and hunting vest was having with a passing couple. They were telling him that their son had gone deer hunting for the first time—and got his deer.

“Was your brother there, too?” the seated man said. “You all must be very proud.”

“It was from 200 yards.”

“What kind of rifle?”

And on it went.

A little later, Hilary was admiring the paintings and the man said, “Do you like these pictures. I own most of them.”

When he found out we were fans of Jacques’ work, and actually knew something about him, he introduced himself.

“I’m Jerry Holm and this is my wife Cherie.” In the course of conversation I mentioned that I’d developed an appreciation of Jacques’ work while giving tours at the Bell Museum, and she replied, “I’m on the board there. There’s a lot going on at the Bell these days. The new planetarium...”

“The hardest thing,” Jerry told us at one point, “is to get anyone under fifty interested in this place. I don’t understand why. I’m just a dumb farmer from Palisade but I know good art when I see it. The front part of this building is the old Carnegie library, you know. It cost $15,000 to build. We added this part here where we’re standing, which wraps all the way around the back, a few years ago. It’s only 15 feet wide, but it cost $550,000. But we’ve got a lot of supporters here in Aitkin, and they really came through. Do you want to see the basement?”

So while Cherie went back to the front room to tend to customers, we took the elevator downstairs and Jerry gave us a quick tour: the vault, where the art collection is stored; the weaving room; the offices; the classroom. He also showed us a copy of The Geese Fly High.

“Do you have this?” he asked.

“Yes, we do. But it’s an old edition. It doesn’t have this full-color cover.”

“Take it. We’ve got hundreds of them.”

Jerry shared some stories about Les Kouba. And when he learned we were birders ourselves, he told us, “A friend of mine saw a snowy owl out on the road to my farm just this morning. I’ll tell you how to get there. You go out Highway 210 for about four miles. Turn left when you see the big osprey nest. You can’t miss it. Our farm is in about half a mile, it has a white PVC fence all around it.”

As we left we thanked the Holms' for their gracious hospitality. (Did I mention the donuts and the apple cider?) And when we left town after the parade we kept a lookout for the osprey nest. We spotted it, turned left, drove past the farm and all the way to a public access ramp to the Mississippi. The river is already fairly robust at this point. Well, river boats used to ply the route between Aitkin and Grand Rapids. It’s gotten pretty quiet in these parts. The edges of the river were stiff with ice. We could hear the sound of a chain saw in the distance. Someone clearing brush off a snowmobile trail, I’ll bet.

Quest for Fire...Wood

2011-11-23T09:14:00.010-05:00

The task of buying firewood fills me with suspicion, frustration ... and pleasure. The men (and occasionally women) who cut, split, age, and haul the stuff around are a breed apart, only one step lower, perhaps, on the ladder of atavistic trades, than the men who apply hot asphalt to warehouse roofs in the summertime. Yet I feel that I’ve got a lot in common with them. I love the woods, I love the trees, I’ve cut plenty of wood myself (by hand) in my time, and feel an almost Hamsum-esque attachment to individuals trees and pieces of wood.

I want to know where the wood came from. But I also want to get a good deal. Firewood is no longer cheap.

I got a call from “Sheila” of the hoarse smoker’s voice the other day. “We sold you some wood last year,” she said. “How’s it holding out?”

“I’m doing fine,” I relied. “But thanks for calling.” What I had it in mind to say was, “Actually, I’m almost out, because the “oak” you sold us last year was half cottonwood.”

But it was true. I was running out. I called a few numbers, including a guy in Stillwater that I spotted on Craig’s list. “Golden Valley? That’s too far.”

I called a number in Golden Valley for Ron’s Tree Service and left a message. I called another number, it sounded good, but the woman told me she was out on the road. She’d call me back later, she said.

But Ron called me first. Not Ron, maybe his wife. A pleasant, articulate woman, at any rate. I'd made a few more calls by that time and had no recollection of who or what "Ron’s" was, so I asked, “Where are you located?”

“We’re in St. Cloud,” she said.

“Where do you get the wood?”

“My husband buys it standing. We hire loggers to cut it and bring it in to the woodlot. We’ve got a big barn where we store some of it. We age it and send trucks down to deliver it in the Cities every day.”

The price she quoted was 20% more than I’m used to paying. Then again, it was only half of what Paul’s Fireplace Wood in Little Falls quoted me. And a little voice in the back of my head kept saying, “Maybe you wouldn't have so much trouble buying wood if you weren't so cheap. You get what you pay for.”

The truck that showed up Tuesday morning was bigger than any wood-hauling truck I’d ever seen, and it was full to the brim from front to back. Clearly I was the first stop. The smell of ammonia was in the air—a smell I associate with green oak—but the wood itself had that seasoned gray look, and it was expertly split into moderate-sized quarters.

Meanwhile, the two guys unloading it alleviated any disappointment I was feeling at the hitherto bourgeois nature of the deal. As usual, one of the unloaders was just a kid, while the other was a seasoned pro. “I’m actually a tree-trimmer,” he told me with obvious pride. “I could bring down a cottonwood single-handed, though it’s better to have someone around to hold the ropes…in case something goes wrong. They’re paying me a lot of money to do this.”

As he tossed the wood down into the rubberized wheel-barrel, he said, “Look at that. This stuff is dry. There’s a layer of dust on it. Look at that bark fly off when it hits the wheel barrel. Ron is one of a dying breed. The production firewood operations have all the machines, but their wood doesn’t look like this.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘production’ operation,” I queried.

Here the lad broke in. “You can get a unit. I think it costs $250,000. One guy sits there with a crane, brings in a log, then the machine cuts it. He sets up the pieces, also remotely, and the machine splits them. But half the time they don’t line up right. Whatever comes out, that’s what you get.”

“Surely Ron uses a splitting machine, too,” I exclaimed, glancing at the load of wood in the back of the truck.

“Yeah,” the old pro replied. “But you load it by hand. And it runs by centrifugal force, not by hydraulics. Man is it fast. You release that handle and pow!”

I was trying to imagine where the centrifugal force might possibly come from, and why it would be better than hydraulic force. I suppose the “pow” is the sound of the splitting wood. Both of these men had a peculiar gleam in their eye as they described the process, as if they’d just emerged from a carnival stripper’s tent. It must be some amazing machine. Pow!

The old pro gave me Ron’s card as they were leaving. Also a refrigerator magnet, which seemed a little much. How often does anyone order firewood, after all?

“He has 1,500 people on his list,” he said as he climbed back into the truck. “He delivers to them every year ... It’s a business. But with a three-year aging process, it’s a big investment, and it’s tough to anticipate the market... When things slow down, he sells some of it to his brother.”

Heart of Crystal

2011-11-19T13:30:00.003-05:00

After months of dallying, I final loaded the two old tube TVs and a Gateway computer into the car and headed out to the recycling center in Brooklyn Park. I shed a tear, thinking back to what a beautiful color screen the smaller of the two TVs had, and probably still does—though it’s only about a foot square, and the rabbit ears are long gone.

As for the computer, I think I got almost everything of interest off its 30 gigs of hard drive (with the help of a friend) before it crashed for good a few years ago. And for the rest, who cares? Electronic nostalgia doesn’t run very deep.

It’s an interesting part of town, the northwestern suburbs, seemingly stuck in the fifties. Narrow little asphalt highways, heavily patched. Auto body shops by the dozen. Free-standing neighborhood liquor stores like the ones you see in the opening frames of a B-movie, where a crime is about to take place. West Broadway, Bass Lake Road. Surprisingly soon, you’re driving past gravel pits and factories that manufacture enormous concrete storm-sewer pipes. Some people call these parts home, I know, but to me it was a gray November mini-vacation.

Things have changed at the recycling depot. They no longer charge you for dropping things off. Nor was there a long line of cars waiting to get in, though it was a Saturday morning. I showed the man my driver’s license, affirmed that the items I had were from my own home, and proceeded on into the warehouse to container #1.

Three burly gentlemen in white lab coats helped me unload. I noticed that there were quite a few TVs just like mine in the massive bin already. I can hardly imagine the conversations that might go on from screen to screen once the doors are shut.
TV#1: “Football, football, football.”
TV#2: “Well, that’s better than all those religious shows.”
TV#3: “Oh, God, the channel surfing wears you out! Why can’t anyone make up their mind?!”

I left the building without an iota of regret. On the contrary, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. (Well, at least a moderate weight.) The house will be a little bit roomier, and it will now be much easier to access my Encyclopedia Britannica (the 1956 edition), which was sitting in the back of a closet behind one of the TV sets.

I also felt flush with cash, having escaped without paying any fees. So on the way back I pulled into a shopping center somewhere in the heart of Crystal to check out an Aldi store, and around the corner in the same shopping center, a Half-Price Books.

At Aldi I picked up a can of olives, some mixed nuts, refried beans, marinated artichoke hearts, and an assortment of hummus dips in a circular plastic tray. All the “brands” were new to me. We used to call them “generics”; now they carry names like Tuscan Garden and Casa Mammita. At the check-out I learned that Aldi doesn’t have bags and doesn’t take credit cards.

In the bookstore I made an extraordinary find. “Gerry Mulligan: the Original Sextet.” A two-CD set recorded in New York (also in 1956) with tenor Zoot Sims and trombonist Booby Brookmeyer along with Mulligan in the mix. It’s sort of like “Birth of the Cool,” though brighter and less lumbering. I’m listening to in now.

The shopping center is actually sort-of handsome. The trees in the parking lot, though still youngsters, add a lot to the ambiance, even in November, and the fact that the cross-streets don’t meet at a right angle also helps.

For that fact I guess we can thank Pierre Bottineau. If I’m not mistaken, West Broadway, which cuts northwest at an angle across the grid to define the west edge of the parking lot, follows the footpath he popularized while founding such cities as Osseo and Maple Grove. Bottineau, a Métis, also founded such far-flung cities as Red Lake Falls and Wahpeton, South Dakota, and in 1862 he guided U.S. troops as far west as Walla Walla, Washington.

Eight Books, Cloud Nine

2011-11-15T07:41:00.008-05:00

I like to tell myself that my book-buying days are largely over. A mere trickle moving through the house. Review copies. An occasional book from the Ridgedale de-acquisition shop. Well, yesterday that trickle became a flood. I picked up eight new books. I was on Cloud Nine.

An order arrived in the mail from Daedalus, the remainder house, at noon. It contained a coffee-table book about clouds, a brief history of the ontological proof for God’s existence, and a revolutionary revision of our understanding of the Middle Ages, Barbarians to Angels, by local archeologist Peter Wells.

Meanwhile, unaware that these goodies would be waiting for me at the front door when I returned, I went out to Ridgedale Library to retrieve a few books I’d requested about the early history of Texas. (Don’t ask me why.) Naturally I stopped into the adjoining bookshop...and left with a healthy stack under my arm. (Total cost: $5)

In that stack was a book of essays about books and reading by Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda; a slim volume of lectures by Jorge Luis Borges titled This Craft of Verse; a full-color travel guide to San Antonio and Austin; a book about tuning musical instruments called Temperament: the Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle, and a recently-revised Penguin paperback edition of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, (to replace my yellow and crumbling edition of 1982.)

The cloud book has quite a few full-page color photos of various cloud-forms, including the lentil-shaped altocumulus linticularis (sometimes mistaken for a UFO), the high-flying cirrocumulus stratiformis undulatis (otherwise known as “mackerel sky”), and the cumulus humilis (generally wider than they are tall, hence humble and unthreatening).

Among the heaps of cloud lore the book contains, I’ve already spotted one little-known gem: the cumulonimbus cloud, which is often associated with stormy weather, is also the cloud we refer to when we say we’re “on cloud nine.” Why? Because it was the ninth of the ten clouds enumerated in the original 1896 edition of the International Cloud Atlas.

Raking Perfect

2011-11-14T10:32:00.005-05:00

Over the years I’ve become adept at delaying household chores until the perfect moment arrives. If it sometimes happens that the window of opportunity closes entirely, I say, “There’s always next year.”

Saturday was the perfect day to rake leaves—cool, bright, dry. I’d been over the grass a few times with the mower in recent weeks, so there weren’t a whole lot of leaves left to rake—mostly stragglers from the two big maple trees in the front yard. Due to the dry weather every leaf had a twisted, sculptural quality that I found myself admiring repeatedly as I leaned on my rake, enjoying the fall sunlight and assessing my stately progress across the yard. The wind kicked up from time to time, and I began to notice a leaf I didn’t recognize in the mix, small and heart-shaped, like a poplar leaf without the scalloped edges. Also greener than the rest. It dawned on me at last that they’d fallen from my neighbor’s redbud tree and drifted in from thirty yards way.
I hold firmly to the belief that it’s pointless to rake the leaves out from under the bushes. You can’t see them, they might be good for the bushes (who knows?), and in any case, why add needlessly to the world’s landfill problems?

We dump most of our leaves into a wire enclosure in the back yard. We occasionally dig soil out the bottom of the pile in the spring, but for the most part the leaves just sit there, sinking under their own weight, year after year.

Sunday morning new leaves were scattered across the yard, of course. Not so many as before, but fairly evenly spaced, as if some yet-undiscovered principle of physics were at work. The sky had turned gray. I climbed up onto the roof to clean out the gutters—yes, by hand—priding myself personally on how quiet the neighborhood was.

While I was up there, I also lopped off some overhanging branches of the mulberry and walnut trees that have been transformed from unnoticed weeds to impressive trunks in a remarkably short span. Not so long ago I was mistaking the walnuts for sumac volunteers and wondering why they weren’t sending out suckers.

An adventurous squirrel has once again figured out how to leap the ten feet from the roof of the house onto the birdfeeder. He skedaddles when I open the deck door, sometimes scurrying down the pole, at other times taking the plunge directly to the ground fifteen feet below. He invariably sits coyly on the far side of the feeder as he nibbles, blithely unaware, perhaps, that his long bushy tail is dangled there in plain sight. I’ve noticed that he eats less than the blue jays scatter when they visit. But he also keeps the birds away, and the feeding tray is hardly big enough to hold him.

Last night, as I was hauling the garbage can out to the street, I spotted four huge turkeys sitting in the trees above the neighbor’s house. I didn’t know they could fly so high.

Keats got it right in “Ode to Autumn”:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too …

Deconstructing Ravel (or Debussy)

2011-11-07T20:08:00.009-04:00

I never studied deconstructionism—that was after my time, thank God—but reading an on-line article in the Brittanica a few minutes ago, I learned that it was rooted in an effort to expose unsubstantiated and often false oppositions that guided intellectual inquiry implicitly. The authors of the encyclopedia article cite “nature and culture, speech and writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning” as examples.

Personally, I don’t see what’s wrong with any of these oppositions, and would be hard-pressed to choose which is supposed to be “primary” and which “derivative.” I also begin to wonder what those (French) deconstructionist blokes would make of Hume’s oft-quoted set of oppositions between a)the natural and the unnatural; b) the natural and the artificial; and c) the natural and the supernatural. In each case, the meaning of “natural” changes slightly to fit the opposition. All three oppositions are illuminating, it seems to me.

I’ve thought of a similar set myself: truth and error, truth and falsehood, truth and darkness-and-confusion.

Among my great library-discard book finds of the last few years has been The Mirror of Ideas by Michel Tournier. I have never been able to enjoy the man’s novels, but this little volume stole my heart. It examines a long series of oppositions, some analytical, others poetic, such as willow and alder, railroad and highway, pleasure and joy, left and right, salt and sugar, tree and path. The analysis stands in the glorious tradition of Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), though the essays are much pithier and more entertaining.

There are also classic historical oppositions of personality to consider. Plutarch wrote several books about it. In our own day we have Grant and Lee, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Rousseau and Hume, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. I could go on and on.

One of the classic oppositions of our time is that of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. Ravel is certainly the more popular of the two. In fact, based on revenue, Ravel is the most successful French musician of the twentieth century! This is, in part, a testament to how BAD French rock-n-roll has always been. But the statistic also reflects how wildly popular such works as Bolero and the Concerto in G have remained over the course of many decades. But we’re wandering from our point.

Ravel and Debussy both write in a shimmering “impressionistic” style. They probably influenced one another (little matter) and both were deeply influenced by “ethnic” music. Debussy drew from the gamelan music of Bali, Ravel drew from his Basque roots and from Greek and Hebrew melodies. Debussy was a closet Wagnerian. Ravel was a closet classicist, and that closet door was always ajar.

In the end, most of Debussy’s compositions turned out to be wandering, self-indulgent drivel. (That’s a little harsh.) Ravel never wrote a bad piece of music in his life. Some criticize him for never writing anything BIG.

Debussy’s greatest composition is an opera, Pelléas and Mélisande. Ravel’s is a smallish, but devilish, chamber work, Trio in A Minor. Both composers wrote a single string quartet, and the two are invariably paired on recordings. I’ve heard them both a thousand times, and until recently, I couldn’t tell you which was which.

But on Sunday I heard the Parker Quartet perform the Debussy Quartet in St. Paul, and the music poured forth. It’s so rewarding to hear the individual voices sing out, and to palpably feel how hard it must be to hold all that sinuous stuff together. Astounding.

So tonight I pulled out my seldom-played 3-CD set of Debussy’s Complete Chamber Music (Delos D235914). These are the box-sets you get for free from your “record club” when you’ve earned a bunch of “points” but no longer really want anything they have to offer. Back in the day.

Well, the CD I happened upon is one I’d never heard before. (In general, I don’t think that much of Debussy. Can you tell?) The entire CD contains music for piano four-hands. Great stuff!

The lesson being—never give up. Never shut the door…and never quit the record club.

Mississippi Swans

2011-10-31T08:49:00.009-04:00

On the spur of the moment, we decided to drive down to Alma, Wisconsin, on the east bank of the Mississippi, to see the swans that funnel through every year on their way from western Canada to Chesapeake Bay.

I booked a cheap motel in Winona and we set out Saturday morning. It was a brilliant day, blue sky, bright sun. A great day for a trip.

The swans evidently felt differently. Though Lake Pepin was beautiful and the bluffs above the road, from Maiden Rock to Chimney Bluff and beyond, were spectacular, there were no swans in Alma. We saw a shrike in a tree at one point during our drive down, but that was hardly a consolation. We followed some dirt roads north of the Chippewa River in an attempt to penetrate the Tiffany Wildlife Area, without success. There were a few widgeons intermixed with the coots and Canada geese at Reick’s Lake in Alma, where the swans normally congregate. From the heights of Buena Vista Park we could look down at the tiny fishermen in aluminum boats trying their luck below the dam.

The gentleman at the visitor’s center downtown told us the swans won’t come in until the weather turns bad. And in any case, he said, they don’t arrive in such great numbers as they used to. It seems the lake has been silting up.

Well, so it goes. On the plus side, the sloughs on the Mississippi look far less skanky than usual at this time of year, with golden leaves covering the forest floor and dappled autumn sunlight filtering down. And the remarkable Marine museum in Winona has added some choice new paintings since our last visit, including a very fine little Matisse. I wanted to take a picture of it but the docent wouldn’t allow it.

We explored the waterfront between Winona and Minnesota City as the sun was setting, and arrived at our motel feeling that we’d had a good day.

The next morning the sky was gray, the air was cold, and everything was wet, which gave a romantic sheen to the logos of the Target store and the Holiday Inn we could see across the highway from out our third-floor motel window. Yes, but what to do on a cold, rainy, pitch-black Sunday morning, 140 miles from home?

We decided to continue south along the river to Brownsville, near the Iowa border. The river fans out down there, with lots of shallow water and sand islands just stable enough from year to year to have been given names. You pass several houseboat villages along the shore. A few viewing platforms have been constructed along the highway.

Here, in the gray morning light, is where we began to see the swans, off in the distance to the right, almost out of sight. And hear them. Hundreds of them, honking. There were gadwalls and mallards, too. A few clumps of pelicans, drifting here and there as if in formation. Eight or nine egrets. Bald eagles sitting miserably on the ends of stubby deadheads a few feet off the water, off in the distance.

The rain was coming down in a light drizzle. There were very few cars passing on the highway. We stopped in several places, and finally found a good point from which to view the birds.

Had they blown in the with bad weather? I have no idea.

On the way back we took the backroads through the hilly country of Houston and Fillmore counties, stopping at Beaver Creek State Park for some watercress.

Edward DeVere for Me

2011-10-28T15:16:00.003-04:00

I had a pass to see a sneak of the new Shakespeare movie, Anonymous, but our Happy Hour ran on too long, got a little too happy, and besides, the ramps at the West End Kerasote complex are a mess. The film fleshes out, in more ways than one, the increasingly popular notion that Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, actually wrote the plays we now associate with the Bard of Stratford.

I read a few of the early reviews, which were generally unfavorable. I’m not surprised. But along with the reviews, there has also been a steady dribble of condescending ink being spilled about how absurd it is even to suggest that the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays might still be in question.

I think it ought to be more widely known that there is very little evidence to suggest that the man from Stratford with whom many of us associate the plays actually wrote them…or anything else. In fact, every bit of genuine documentary evidence we have about the man could probably be listed in a three-page Word document. Much of the biography that academics take as established fact will be seen, on closer inspection, to have been largely spun from whole cloth and then transformed in time from supposition to unassailable truth. At a famous inquiry at the Folger library in 1949, one scholar was asked to present a single bit of documentary evidence from the playwright’s own time linking the man from Stratford to the authorship of the plays. After a good deal of hemming and hawing, he admitted he could not. And unlike other playwrights and scholars of the Elizabethan era, not a single one of the books he owned (if he owned any) has ever been unearthed. Strange.

This is a tiny bit of one side of the argument put forth by the Oxfordians: We know almost nothing about the man from Stratford, though millions of hours of research have been extended in search of it. On the other side of the coin, the Oxfordians point out that the correlations between the life of Edward De Vere and the plot of Hamlet, for example, are far too uncanny to be ascribed to coincidence.

Anyone who’s interested in the details can take a look at the Wikipedia article about the Oxfordian theory. The only point I’m trying to make here is that the Oxfordians are far from being the crack-pots we read about in the newspapers. Not all of them, at any rate. No less eminent a Shakespearean interpreter than Derek Jacobi stands among them. In particular, the patient, painstaking, and well-reasoned book by Charlton Osburn, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, spells out the arguments honestly and in masterly detail.

Aside from all that, my discovery of DeVere solved another problem for me. I could never understand why all the books I’d tried to read about the Man from Stratford were so boring. It’s because they’re full of speculative nonsense. “He must have walked along this….” Or “We can presume he sold his shares in the manner of…..” The man from Stratford was himself, as far as we know, very boring.

No one ever said that about Edward DeVere.

Continuous Life-Time Garlic Fitness

2011-10-24T18:37:00.004-04:00

While waiting in the doctor’s office to get some ear-wax removed from my ear, I picked up a copy of Experience Life, the magazine associated with the Lifetime Fitness health-club chain. Half the feature articles were of the “slow down, stop and smell the roses” variety, and the other half offered advice as to how to supplement your daily machine-based work-out routines with an additional segment using free weights. I was happy to learn in one health piece that there is no scientific correlation between saturated fats and heart disease. (Once again, Woody Allen was right!) And the recipes for stuffed jalapeños were so tempting that I found myself scheming to swipe the magazine outright, or at least tear out a few select pages.

But what surprised me most was an article about garlic in which it was reported that the plant has been cultivated in Egypt (or somewhere) continuously for 6,000 years.

That must be one hellofa big head of garlic! (Just like the giant strawberries in Sleeper.)

It’s a little thing, but what I’m getting at here is that the word “continuous” is a little out of place when discussing the cultivation of garlic. The misuse is part of a larger difficulty writers have with a clutch of words referring to types of duration that sound very similar but mean different things.

The most commonly misused is the word “constantly.” In nearly every case where that word appears, it would have been better to say “repeatedly” or incessantly” or “tirelessly.” Water pressure can remain constant. The phone cannot ring constantly.

Nor can garlic be cultivated continuously—that is to say, without a break—for 6,000 years. On the contrary, there is a break every time the farmer returns home from the fields. And there is a bigger break every time the garlic is harvested, the heads are divided, some are sent to market, and others are saved to be replanted in the coming season.

Remove that single word, “continuously,” and the problem disappears. “Garlic has been cultivated in Egypt for 6,000 years.” Or “Garlic has been cultivated, year in and year out, for six thousand years.” Or, “Garlic first came under cultivation 6,000 years ago.”

I pity the poor Egyptian slave who’s been cultivating garlic continuously for 6,000 years. It’s a dog’s life… but I’ll bet she’s really fit!

The Twin Cities Book Festival

2011-10-16T12:50:00.020-04:00

The Twin Cities Book Festival, always a stimulating (and free) event, has really come into its own since moving a few years ago from the old Munsingwear Building to the Minneapolis Technical College downtown. Exhibitors of one-of-a-kind fine press books are lined up cheek-by-jowl with self-published poets promoting their slim volumes, internationally ambitious distribution firms like Consortium, used book dealers, literary presses from Graywolf to Nodin Press and Holy Cow, and arts organizations from all over the map. Meanwhile, the people at Rain Taxi book a succession of speaking events ranging from Steven Pinker (one of Time Magazine’s ‘top 100 intellectuals in the world’) to panels of local talent dilating on “A Sense of Place” and memoir writing.

I’m not sure how many books are actually sold during the day—perhaps not many. But I can think of no event where you feel more strongly you’re in the midst of that bubbling current of intelligence that makes books possible. And a seemingly limitless cadre of Rain Taxi volunteers makes sure that people are ushered into and out of the events in an orderly way, that everyone finds the booth they're looking for, gets their free copy of Rain Taxi magazine, and all the rest.

Part of the fun, for me, is simply to reconnect briefly with old friends from the book world. For example, the last time I saw Meleah Maynard may have been five years ago; she and husband Mike were walking across the Stone Arch bridge that day. At the time I learned she was suffering from a bizarre illness that no one was able to diagnose—she was hot all the time. I was glad to learn at the book fair that she’s put all that behind her, and is coming out with a new book next week: Decoding Gardening Advice: The Science Behind the 100 Most Common Recommendations.

Over at Consortium, old buddy Bill Mochler was excited about the prospects of two of the books on his table – a children’s book for adults called Go the F**k to Sleep and Wingshooters, which I gather is Wisconsin’s version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Nice cover.

It was a pleasure to meet poet Cary Waterman, finally, after having worked with her during the summer on the design of her smashing new book of poems, Book of Fire. “I feel like I already know you,” she said. The feeling in mutual, though the author photo I’d been working with doesn’t do justice to the sparkle of the real thing.

Later in the day I ran into a figure from the more distant past—Brett Laidlaw. We worked together on the Bookmen loading dock maybe twenty years ago. He has a new cookbook out called Trout Caviar. I read his food and foraging blog occasionally, so I knew a little of what he’s been up to recently. He assured me that the book had plenty of prose along with the recipes. “I’m a writer, not a chef,” was how he put it. “But when you write fiction it’s all this made-up stuff…” At this point he screwed up his face and raised his hands above his head as if he were turning himself into a marionette. “When you write about bacon, you just write.”

I tend to agree. At any rate, the two authors whose talks I sat in on were both promoting works of non-fiction or belle-lettres. Both events were well-attended and thoroughly engaging, though it different ways. Steven Pinker made use of a power-point presentation to hammer home the thesis of his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that the world has become progressively more peaceful with the passing centuries. In a seemingly endless succession of charts and graphs he offered graphic proof that violence is in decline (while I.Qs are on the rise) and he tossed out some intriguing theories as to why this might be so.

Against the oft-repeated (but never substantiated) contention that WWII was the most destructive event in history, he countered with evidence that it ranks merely ninth. During that bloody era perhaps 3% of the population died violently. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were five times bloodier. Expanding the range of reference, the evidence of forensic anthropologists suggests that in pre-historic times, 15% of the population died violent deaths on average.

How are we to explain this trend? Pinker offered a few suggestions, including the rise of the state, the expansion of international trade, the decline of self-righteous and wrong-headed ideologies, and the rise in human empathy due to rising literacy. In brief, he’s lending support to the theories of progress and fellow-feeling promulgated by Condorcet, Turgot, Shaftesbury, and other Enlightenment thinkers—but with more evidence and less didactic theorizing to back them up. To judge from the reviews, the book is far more complex and fascinating than the author’s one-hour gloss could possibly suggest. Pinker did a good job of sticking to the basics, at the risk of underselling the merits of his 800-page book.

Meanwhile it occurs to me that the author, with his long silver locks, looks a lot like an Enlightenment thinker himself.

A few hours later I wandered into a smaller room to hear Lawrence Wechsler read from his new book of essays, Uncanny Valley. Where Pinker had been eloquent and to the point, in an entirely engaging way, Wechsler (for twenty years a staff writer for the New Yorker) was rambling, soft-spoken, nimble. At times it seemed he was simply thinking out loud as his stood at the podium pondering everything from the challenges of digitalizing the appearance of a glass of milk to the broader significance of the phrase “We hold these truths…”

He quoted from Tomas Transtromer’s poem “The Outpost”:

Mission: to be where I am.
Even in that ridiculous, deadly serious
role – I am the place
Where creation is working itself out.

He described an afternoon he spent with another Nobel Laureate, the Italian playwright Dario Fo, in a manic attempt to see twelve Broadway plays in a single day. This reminiscence led him on to a dscription of a Russian film shot in a single 90-minute take, and then an elaborate series of connections (drawn from the book) that included “The Ride of the Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now, Custer’s Last Stand, The Birth of a Nation, and the music criticism of Theodor Adorno.

After a few remarks I failed to catch, Wechsler read a piece in which he watched an ant laboriously line up three piece of grass end to end, and then vanish into the desert gloaming. From there it was on to an analysis of America’s efforts to tank the legislation that established the world criminal court. A little later he was recommending that we all go home and watch the YouTube piece “Marcel the shell with shoes on,” which he claimed had greater merit as a piece of animation than Avatar.

All in all, it was a wild ride.

Tranströmer

2011-10-14T11:13:00.003-04:00

When Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel prize for literature last week, many people around the world uttered a collective, “Who?”

Perhaps half the people in Minnesota who follow such things were pleased, or at any rate, not overly surprised. This is not only because of the state’s Scandinavian heritage, but also because one of Tranströmer’s early translators and lifelong friends is Robert Bly, who is a literary institution in these parts.

I was biking with a friend on a rail-trail near Nisswa over the weekend, and conversation got around to the recent award. “I dug out this book,” my friend said, “to give him another chance…”

“I know the one,” I relied. “It has a purple cover with a painting by Vermeer.”

“Yeah, I read five or six poems…they just didn’t grab me.”

“I often take that book with me when we go up north. Yet I feel like I’ve never read it. Now Rolf Jacobson I like.”

And so it goes.

It’s a great thing that the Nobel committee still gives out awards to poets, and also great that the news can make the front page of the paper, or somewhere close. Everyone loves to dispute whether so-and-so is worthy, and who’s been unjustly neglected for too long.

Perhaps Tranströmer will someday return to the ranks of the obscure in the lengthening Nobel list, along with Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, and Henrik Pontoppidan. Maybe tomorrow. It doesn’t matter.

As I thumb once again through The Half-Finished Heaven, with its gloomy and enigmatic urban images and it bizarre nature-associations, I hit upon expressions that seem artificial and portentous to me:

The building not open today. The sun crowds in through the windowpanes
And warms the upper side of the desk
Which is strong enough to bear the fate of others.
That's a bad line. But in the next stanza things improve.

…If you stand in the sun and shut your eyes,
You feel as if you were slowly blown forward.
The narrator has come down to the beach—a place he rarely visits—to stand among “good-sized stones with peaceful backs.”

He concludes:

The stones have been gradually walking backward out of the sea.
I like that. There is a sense of things left behind and other things being noticed for the first time. A minimum of words.

The heaviness is not in what the desk bears but in the psyche of the man who too often sits behind it.

The Mysteries of Dürer

2011-10-06T07:51:00.007-04:00

We had driven down to do a little birding at Swan Lake, a few miles west of St. Peter. A hundred years ago the lake was a market-hunter’s paradise, and thousands of ducks and geese were bagged there, packed in ice, and shipped immediately to the fancy restaurants in Chicago. Duck hunters still go there today, though more than half of the lake has been drained, and if you don’t have a boat or a canoe you’re not likely to see much. The cattails have overgrown the viewing platforms on the SE side of the lake.

Our best sighting was of a least bittern, typically an elusive bird, who was standing in the mud in plain view near the conservation club headquarters. We watched him picking up passing morsels from the muck for a good fifteen minutes.

After a pleasant picnic at Mill Pond Park, we drove up to the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College. It has a windswept feel, sitting on the top of the hill with miles of former prairie to the west and St. Peter, nestled in the valley of the Minnesota River, to the right. The arboretum is fit for a pleasant stroll. But we had it in mind to see a collection of Albrecht Dürer prints that were on display at the college’s Hillstrom Museum of Art.

The museum proved to be harder to find than the overgrown shores of Swan Lake. It’s tucked in the far basement of the student union without a single sign to guide the way. We asked around an eventually reached the empty museum. When I opened the door the attendant jumped about a foot. (I don’t think they get many visitors.)

The exhibit carries the title A Collector's Passion for Dürer's Secrets: the MAGJEKL Collection. The woman whose collection is on display, Elizabeth Maxwell-Garner, may be described, I think, as an amateur—in a good way. Her interest in the works of the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was kindled as recently as 2006. The Connecticut collector now owns more than forty of the master’s woodblocks and engravings.

The images themselves are stunning, for the most part, and Maxwell-Garner has studied them with a fresh eye. She has developed a host of theories that orthodox scholars would never have dreamed of about how they relate to Dürer’s Hungarian background and the petty urban politics of the time. Each one of her acquisitions appears to have a secret meaning that no one has explored before. How extraordinary.

To take a single example, Maxwell-Garner makes the commonplace observation that Dürer’s most famous engraving has been given the name Melancholia on the basis of a word that appears in the rendering, but that word is not Melancholia. It’s Melencholia. How are we to explain the discrepancy? She proposes that the lettering actually contains an inscription in Greek rather than Latin.

"Mele" means honey in Greek; "col," means "suffering." To pronounce these two words in succession word would have required adding a meaningless "N" in between. The "ia' at the end Latinizes the Greek. A "flourish" comes next, followed by the letter "I." She tells us that researchers have ignored this symbol, though it has a horizontal slash through it—a symbol for "returning." She suspects that the “I” at the end might actually be a “J”—perhaps a symbol for Jesus or Jehovah?

Thus Maxwell-Garner concludes that the lettering actually means: "in sweetness and in sorrow, returning to the Lord." She goes on to speculate that the various objects that clutter up the periphery of the engraving symbolize various relatives of Dürer who have died. Not quite satisfied with the simplicity of these speculations, she adds:

“It is my opinion this image is a tribute to all the Dürer relatives who had died by 1514, and specifically to his mother Barbara and his sister Margret (the eighth child in the family). I also believe that this image tells us that Dürer's family is of Hungarian noble descent, that they are possibly Jewish, that Dürer's mother Barbara functioned at some point as his woodblock cutter, and that his sister Margret helped him with his engravings.”

I can’t say whether any of this is true, though some of it is definitely hard to follow. The effect of such observations is to remind us that Dürer had a lot of things on his mind as he cut these images—both “meaning” and markets prominent among them. He also took a serious interest in mathematics. Some expert has determined that the large geometrical object in the engraving is a cube, first distorted to give it rhombus faces with angles of 108° and then truncated so that its vertices lie on a sphere. The picture also contains Europe’s first magic square.

Garner will be giving a public lecture on Sunday, October 16, in the Nobel Hall of Science in Wallenberg Auditorium at Gustavus. It might be fun to listen to this wildcat art historian speak.

Lake Superior Pre-Socratics

2011-09-29T09:59:00.014-04:00

What better place than on the shores of Lake Superior (north and south) with sea gulls keening on the beach and ships passing in the distance, to ponder the works of that rag-tag bunch of thinkers known as the Pre-Socratics, many of whom lived and wrote on or near the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea at a time when the works of Homer were established classics but Plato had not been born? These men don’t constitute a “school” of any sort, but quite a few of them incorporate water, air, atmosphere, hot and cold, and other elemental sensations into their theories. Almost as if they’d been camping.

We can learn a few things from them about the differences between science and philosophy, a few things about intuition and speculation, and also about how easily specious logic can lead people astray. Some of these thinkers uncannily anticipate entire schools of modern thought in a single sentence or aphorism. (And there are times when a single line is about as much as we need to remember.)

Thales of Miletus, by all accounts the first of the lot, is famous for suggesting that everything is water. From such a simple view many interpretations have arisen. Thinkers from Aristotle to Etienne Gilson and beyond have offered glosses on the remark, all of them much longer than the original. I probably don’t need to point out that in fact, everything is not made of water. Thales remark may be considered important as among the first attempts to say something very broad and at the same time very simple, about the nature of the cosmos. Call it science, call it philosophy. Strictly speaking it’s neither. But it does expose the urge to “unify” things which seldom bears much fruit, and is far more likely to be reductive than illuminating.

Alongside Thales remark we might set the more nuanced views of his near contemporary Anaximander, who argued that the universe is composed of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. He further postulated a contrary succession of motions involving hot and cold, wet and dry. These elements and qualities, related but opposed to one another, offered much greater potential for both description and explanation than anything to be found in Thales work. They later formed the basis of an analysis of character, with the humors—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic—coming about due to various combinations of the primal elements. This theory enjoyed a very long run, not being abandoned until the nineteenth century. (For an exhaustive treatment of the history of the humors see Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humors, by Noga Arikha.)

It’s been argued that both Thales and Anaximander were engaged in scientific rather than philosophical enquiry. Well, the distinction isn’t that easy to make, even today. And we ought also the consider the possibility that their reflections were poetic in nature. We can say with some degree of certainty that in the works of Parmenides we meet up with some genuine abstract philosophizing—the results are not impressive.

Parmenides followed a line of argument from one shaky point to the next, arriving at a conclusion that no one today would accept. In brief, he reasoned that every thing occupies a space. (This might even be considered a definition: a “thing” is something that takes up space.) But he went on to argue that every space must have a “thing” in it. (Why?) But movement requires empty space, because a thing needs to move somewhere. Because there is no empty space available, nothing ever moves. Thus, he concludes, the universe is one big unchanging block of thing-ness.
Parmenides delivered this theory in verse form, and as we read it we can, perhaps, gain some sense of his overriding awe in the face of the fullness of being. In one crucial passage he writes:

How might what is then perish? How might it come into being?
For if it came into being it is not, nor is it if it is ever going to be.
Thus generation is quenched and perishing unheard of.
Nor is it divided, since it all alike is.
Neither more here (which would prevent it from cohering)
Nor less; but it is all full of what is.
Hence it is all continuous; for what is approaches what is.
And unmoving in the limits of great chains it is beginningless,
And ceaseless, since generation and destruction
Has wandered far away, and true trust has thrust them off.

This passage has the tone of a Hymn to the Lord, though the subject of the passage is not a god, but a far less personal what is—something that we’d be more likely to call being.

If the tone of the poem has a certain ecstatic appeal, the argument has none. After all, things do change. Neither generation nor perishing can be quenched by a groundless assertion to the contrary. Yes, it’s difficult to envision a time when there was nothing rather than something, and Parmenides’ verses make that point clearly. But he nowhere gives a convincing argument for the notion that the supple and multifarious beings we see before our eyes—the rocks, the gulls, the passing clouds—must in fact be a unchanging, unified block of undifferentiated stuff, like a huge block of granite.

Between Anaximander and Parmenides we see an opposition between types of philosophizing that has parallels throughout the subsequent history of philosophy. On the one hand, some philosophers attempt to explain or establish grounding principles for the fact that things change. Their philosophies are dynamic, just like the world they’re attempting to understand. Other philosophers retreat into abstract realms of their own devising, whether they be logical, ludic, mathematical, or “critical,” in an effort to escape the flux of the world via static, artificial constructions.

Both Anaximander and Parmenides have successors who continued further down the paths they chose—either toward accuracy and truth, or towards irrelevancy and nonsense. Parmenides’ friend Zeno became famous as the purveyor of mathematical paradoxes. However, life is neither mathematical nor paradoxical, and Zeno’s work will provide little nourishment to those who are genuinely interested in what life is all about. On the other hand, Anaxagoras added another crucial element to the picture of life as a ceaseless flux of hot and cold, wet and dry, earth and fire and air and water. That element was “mind.”

One of Aristotle’s disciples quotes Anaxagoras to the following effect:

Mind is something infinite and self-controlling, and it has been mixed with no thing, but is alone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself but had been mixed with some other thing, it would share in all things…for in everything there is a share of everything, as I have said earlier…[Mind] is the finest of all things and the purest, and it possesses all knowledge about everything, and it has the greatest strength. And mind controls all those things, great and small, that have soul.

Anaxagoras goes on to describe how mind controls the revolutions of the celestial bodies, and how its influence is increasing in ever-widening circles, and how individual things separate off in what seems to be some sort of centrifugal action. Yet nothing separates off completely, because everything contains at least a portion of everything else.

And the dense is separating off from the rare, and the hot from the cold, and the bright from the dark, and the dry from the wet. And there are many shares of many things, but nothing completely separates off or dissociates one from another except mind. All mind, both great and small, is alike.

It would be tendentious to describe Anaxagoras’ concept of “mind” as an anticipation of the modern “world soul.” Yet the comparison is tempting, and less far-fetched, perhaps, than the suggestion that his theory of “spinning off” contains the kernel of the modern scientific truth that heavy elements are created and hurled out into the universe when stars explode. Or as Joni Mitchell put it in “Woodstock”:

We are star dust
We are carbon,
and we’ve got to get ourselves back…
To the garden.

In any case, several elements in these theories put Anaxagoras well ahead of the pack. He recognizes that no two things are alike. He acknowledges that affinities exist between things, because they’re made of similar stuff, or spun off from the same source. He recognizes a sphere that’s utterly distinct and set off from matter—one that has an important part to play in determining what shapes matter takes. And he suggests that everything within this separate sphere of “mind” is somehow alike. (The collective unconscious?) Finally, he argues that this powerful force of “mind” is in the midst of an ongoing process that might almost be described as “developmental.”

Aristotle criticized Anaxagoras for coming up with a great idea and then doing nothing with it. He may be right. Perhaps I’m “connecting the dots” a little too freely here. Yet among early attempts to explain how the universe got to be the way it is, I find the one put forth by Anaxagoras quite appealing.

Two other Pre-Socratic thinkers may also make a serious claim to our attention—Pythagoras and Heraclitus. Modern scholars describe Pythagoras as the best known and also most obscure of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. They’re convinced he had little, if anything, to do with the mathematical theories associated with his name, and they engage in lively academic disputes over whether he urged his many disciples to avoid eating beans, due to their digestive peculiarities, or whether he loved beans above all other vegetables.

For myself, I love beans of all varieties—Tuscan beans, Boston baked beans, re-fried beans, cassoulet, you name it. (Not lima beans, though.) And the Pythagoras that interests me is the traditional one who explored the relations between number and harmony, and spoke of the music of the spheres as if he could hear it. The Pythagoras I’m referring to noticed that strings vibrating in harmony will be of varying lengths bearing a simple mathematical relation to one another. Similarly, the sides of a pleasing building façade often exhibit mathematical dimensions that differ…but exhibit similar “harmonic” patterns. It’s the birth of aesthetics!

The Pythagoras that interest me, whether real or conventional, went on to commit the classic mistake to which philosophers are prone—he elevated the mathematical relation to a position of eminence above that of the phenomenon it describes. Taking the symbol for the reality, he reified the number, and ended by suggesting that only number is real. Opps!

Heraclitus comes across as the most distinctive personality among the Pre-Socratics. He was referred to as Heraclitus the Obscure by Aristotle, and other commentators called him “The Mocker” or “The Riddler.” His doctrines are similar in some ways to those of other Pre-Socratic thinkers. The warm grows cold, the dry moist. That kind of thing. But because he presented his ideas in brief and often cryptic one-liners, they have taken on the aura of being less concerned with matters of natural science and more seriously concerned with what we now refer to as metaphysical speculation.

His most famous saying is, “You never step into the same river twice.” This remark exposes the difficulty of dealing with the man’s views. For Heraclitus’ book is lost. We know of his works only through the references of other, later writers. Here are several other versions of the same remark:

We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.

On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow—
And souls are exhaled from the moist things.

Heraclitus’ most famous general notion is that opposites are one in the same. How can that be? To take an example, a single point on a circle is a start…and also its end.

Among other personal favorites:
A man’s character is his guardian divinity.
The fire, in its advance, will consume all things.
(Or: Fire will come and judge and convict all things.)
The path up and the pat down are one.
Unapparent connection is better than apparent.

Heraclitus had a general distain for the learned, and a number of his epigrams along these lines have a mocking tone:
Let us not make aimless conjectures about the most important things.
A foolish man is put in a flutter by every word.
For human nature has no insights; divine nature has.
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and famine.

Political comments include:
People should fight for the law as for the city walls.
Violence should be quenched quicker than arson.

The upshot if it all, a but stern, a bit grim, might be found in the remark:
One should know that war is common, that justice is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must be.

Or better yet:
Combinations—wholes and not wholes, concurring differing, concordant discordant, from all things one and from one all things.

Such remarks, isolated and enigmatic, have made Heraclitus the darling of modern philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger. And perhaps with good reason. He was onto something. But it’s a harsh something, decidedly Western, and quite unlike the one-liners of his Chinese contemporary Lao Tzu.

Wild or Beautiful--or Both

2011-09-27T10:25:00.007-04:00

The handling of the Pagami Creek Fire has raised all sorts of interesting questions about wilderness recreation and forest management. The fire, which might easily have been put out in August, was left to burn in the interests of keeping the area a wilderness, and eventually raged out of control. It was still only 50% under control, the last time I checked, and 877 people were up north battling it.

A few days ago the Star-Tribune ran an editorial by local outdoor writer Greg Breining, hammering home the idea (at considerable length) that “wilderness” is a human construct which has never existed in nature. One of the points he makes in the course of his peroration is that fires have always raged across the countryside; some were lightning-driven, but many were started by Indians.

Perhaps wilderness is a human invention. If so, it’s a good one. I suspect the only problem is that we define it in a scientific rather a poetic or spiritual way, which makes us prone to eminently “rational” decisions that lead to absurdly counter-productive results.

The Indians (read here Ojibwe, Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Huron, Crow) may well have burned the countryside from time to time, but they also had a seemingly endless list of “sacred places,” which are often the same places from which we white folk now draw spiritual sustenance—rivers, waterfalls, islands, promontories, and remote, lofty places with commanding views. I couldn’t say for sure, but I doubt if they burned their sacred places to the ground in pursuit of game.

Alongside the scientific rationale for letting wilderness fires burn because it’s “natural,” we invariably hear the argument—not quite the same thing—that forest fires rejuvenate the forest. Perhaps we ought to call this the “silver lining.” The forest will be an intractable tangle of stubby underbrush and look like hell for fifty years…but the moose will like it!

Our best bet, in dealing with these things, might be to admit, first off, that we consider the BWCA wilderness (and other such places) a spiritual resource, not because they’re technically “wild,” but because they’re uncommonly beautiful. Controlled burns could be conducted when conditions are perfect, resulting in a healthy and diverse forest that visitors would return to in great numbers. And it would all be eminently “natural” because we humans, after all, are a part of nature, too.

Ode to Basil

2011-09-08T18:44:00.003-04:00

Easy to grow, green herb (in sun)
That we love, common though it be,
With tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt,
soaking into the crusty bread
like the gall that Christ was given
on the Cross…?

But now we’ve taken a strange turn,
And soon we’ll be discussing which
Provençal skull of Mary Magdalene is real.
I’d rather return to the basil, wild-grower
In the Cinque Terre and throughout Liguria,
Where Montale wandered the sunny beaches,
drenched in gloom.

Neruda I’m not. And the basil gets tougher,
Still big clumps for a dollar, Hmong women five feet tall,
Wondering, perhaps, why you don’t buy the
Thai variety? The eggplants also look nice.
But is eggplant necessary?
And is Al Hirt necessary?
(And anyone who can trace that reference
Gets a free subscription to Macaroni.)

Later, I will turn all this into a sestina.
For now we enjoy the mellowing early autumn light,
The hints of sweet licorice in the basil leaves,
The perfect tomatoes, gifts of near-perfect friends.
The sprinkler coats the leaves of nearby trees
as it passes, back and forth, and a redstart (female)
flitters nervously through the underbrush,
cleaning her feathers in the stunning evening light.

The Great Thirst

2011-09-05T21:29:00.005-04:00

“All the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psycho-analysis—had their beginning in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truth.”

– Merleau-Ponty: Sense & Non-Sense, p. 63

A bit later in his essay, Merleau-Ponty describes the movement of consciousness as one from a subjective “certainty” to action, which (according to Hegel) always has unexpected consequences. These consequences are an objective truth of sorts, in the light of which man modifies his project, acts with somewhat greater discernment, until at last man in his subjectivity finally brings himself into line with objective truth and “he becomes fully what he already obscurely was.” (p. 66)

What makes this little essay interesting is the odd mixture of accurate depiction of certain aspects of Hegel’s phenomenology (rare enough) and bogus French existential terminology (common enough). What seems to be altogether missing from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is any understanding of the impetus behind the dialectical process Hegel is describing.

At one point he remarks, astutely, with regard to Hegel’s phenomenology, “Absolute knowledge, the final stage in the evolution of the spirit as phenomenon wherein consciousness at last becomes euqal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession, is perhaps not a philosophy but a way of life.” (p. 64) But the weakness of his analysis here, and of the French existentalist analysis generally, lies in the mistaken notion that the end to be achieved is some sort of personal peace as a result of elevated consciousness. On the contrary, Hegel’s evolution of spirit is driven by a dim awareness of the ideal—which is not the same thing as knowing one’s-self. (Though the two are related in an interesting way.) The end of result of “the evolution of spirit” is the creation of an environment within which that spirit can continue to flourish. It is not Nirvana. It is not The Kingdom of Heaven—though that phrase brings us nearer to the truh. No, it is civilization.

Everyone has a different notion of “the ideal.” Some are simple and narrow in focus; others are far-reaching and complex. And in fact, we all have far more “ideals’ than we commonly recognize. It isn’t a matter of “the ideal,” as if there were a single thing toward which all our energies were directed. Whatever moves us to act is, in some sence, an ideal. Individuals are often motivated by a really good meal, a cigarette, sexual pleasure, athletic competition, moments of solitude, natural beauty, art, the administration of justice, lively conversation, handyman projects, the passing countryside, religious awe, the challenge of raising a family, teaching, and even the satisfactions of physical labor.

We tend to think of “the ideal” as the ultimate. What would the ultimate cigarette taste like? What would the ultimate benevolent act be? But even to couch “the ideal” in such terms exposes the mediocrity of the notion. There is not, and never will be, an “ultimate” novel, creme brûlée, or scientific discovery. On the other hand, anyone who’s inspired by an ideal may feel that each achievement he or she arrives at is merely a step along the way to something higher.
That might be what George Steiner was referring to when he wrote:

The intuition—is it something deeper than even that?—the conjecture, so strangely resistent to falsification, that there is “otherness” out of reach, gives to our elemental existence its pulse of unfulfllment. We are the creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known. The “irrationality” of the transcendental intuition dignifies reason. The will to ascension is founded not on any “because it is there” but on a “because it is not there.”

(Grammars of Creation, p. 20)

Steiner’s remark may be more interesting than it at first appears. In the course of a few sentences, he identifies this “thirst” first with an otherness, then with a home, and finally with a transcendental intuition that we aspire to, however irrational it may be.

To the careful reader, these various signposts may seem entirely comprehensible. Yet he or she might also be attentive to what’s missing—that Hegelian dialectic which recognizes that the “otherness” of the ideal is approachable, and is, to take the argument a step further, already within us. For how could we recognize a just act, or a beautiful work of art, if justice and beauty were not already a part of out kit-bag? And why would we care to do so, except that we dimly recognize these values—beauty, justice—to be the most precious and authentic aspects of our being? Steiner himself acknowledges as much when he associates “the ideal” to which we aspire with home.

Now, it might well be suggested that underlying many of the impulses I’ve mentioned is the desire to exert ourselves, to put ourselves forward, egotistically, as it were—to rise above the rest. And few would deny that there is a certain pleasure in excelling—though many of us have been trained to feel shame or guilt at the same time , as if we’ve broken some sort of social code. In our day the classic case is of the scientist working nobly to discover a cure for some virulent disease--while at the same time working equally hard to make sure that the discovery is associated with his or her name, and no one else’s.Such impulses sometimes come into conflict with one another, no doubt, but it seems to me the presence of the one doesn’t vitiate or undermine the loftiness of the other.

To put it another way, the opposition between selfish and self-less actions is artificial and doesn’t illuminate much. In many cases, the pursuit of the ideal and the pursuit of self-knowledge are one and the same. Perhaps we truly come to know ourselves only in the act of showering the world with our gifts. In that restless, anxious progress of spirit, we discover simultaneously who we are and what the world needs.

An awareness of this fact is likely to alter the way we look at our world and the people around us. It may give us pleasure to differentiate ourselves from those who sport a more primitive or “fundamentalist” view of life. We may snicker and puff ourselves up. But there is often a degree of congruence, if not actual identity, between our ideals and those of others very unlike ourselves—it’s only that we define them differently, with greater or lesser subtlety and nuance. Such an awareness may lead to the tempting desire to unearth the root or genuine ideal of which all our personal ideals are but imperfect copies or approximations. History teaches that this is a temptation it would be best to resist. The proponents of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, Aryan supremacy, the classless state, and, on a less destructive scale—so far—democracy, American-style, felt that they had uncovered the root of all value, and had no qualms about enforcing it on others.

Did these people really believe in what they were doing? To quote the butler in Citizen Kane: “Well …Yes and No.”

No, if there is any universal ideal, it can only be dscribed in the simplest terms—to promote life. But am I to promote my life, the lives of my children, the homeless, the party? Or “life” in general? It all depends. Although the ideal is always the same, the situation changes, as do the talents and potentialitis of the agents involved. That’s what makes life difficult and keeps the agonists—you and me—in a state of ceaseless anxiety. And that’s what make history—the study of the spiritual merit of individual actions that have already taken place—so rewarding.

Yet it would be a mistake to restrict our attention to those arenas—science, the arts, politics—in which remarkable individuals excell. “Social history” is constitutionally incapable of illuminating the issue, true enough. What is required is to see the force of “the ideal,” the force of aspirant energy, at work everywhere.

This may be what Novalis was referring to when he wrote: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” And it’s most certainly what the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel had in mind when he wrote:

“...the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God.”

– Marcel:Ego and Others, p. 24

As we ate our pot roast and vegetables, we watched a flying squirrel on the bird-feeder, and five very fat raccoons waddled into view from theshadows beyond the yard light.

State Fair 2011

2011-09-02T22:22:00.010-04:00

I used to think that the State Fair Art show was always the same—some good works, some mediocre works, some clever works, some pleasingly naïve works, some pretentious works, and some that were just plain terrible. But this year’s show is better. Interesting works of all kinds, and relatively few clinkers.

My favorite was a photograph of a pier. Looks like California to me. It has that blue light that seems to come from everywhere. The photo you see here, taken with a cheap camera through glass and later touched up to remove my own reflection and the glare of the surrounding lights, can only hint at its beauty. (That’s true of most of the other photos you see here.)

Second on my list is a print (silk-screen?) by Faye Passow. She seems to make the show every year, with some sort of imaginative litho illustrating female anxieties. They’re always very well done. But this one is more naturalistic. The chiaroscuro is intense and the subject matter itself—a half-dead tree—is very unusual.

We happened to be having a pizza with Faye and her boyfriend when she was making this print last spring. At the time she had just come from the studio, and was frustrated by all the registration the print required—there are eleven layers to get exactly right, if I remember correctly. I would say that the results were worth the effort.

Every show has a noteworthy political creation, almost invariably with a liberal bent. This year’s has Obama as Dorothy, Chaney as the wicked witch, and Bush as the minion monkey. The elderly couple ahead of us took one look and said, “I wouldn’t give that one a prize!” To which I couldn’t help retorting, “I would.” They just kept on walking.

Among the many arresting photographs there was one large panorama with a tornado front and center dwarfing the two semis that had pulled off the freeway in the foreground. I also liked the one of the snake between two tree trunks. (At least that what I think it was.) And there was something sweet about the little girl prancing toward a shop window in which a Tinkerbelle manikin was on display.)

There was a photo of a cedar waxwing in flight that looked like a painting, and several pencil drawings that looked like photographs. And I was also intrigued by a very large painting of Fruit Loops. In the retrospective corner of the show I was taken by the Alex Soth photograph of a young woman wearing a stocking cap.

Another highlight, in a different part of the fairgrounds, was the steer-wrestling. In this rodeo event, teenage boys on horseback chase a baby steer that’s fleeing at break-neck speed, leap onto it and try to wrestle it to the ground. Of the ten we watched, only three were successful.

We had our all-you-can-drink glass of milk. We listened to a demonstration about Danish Smorbrot that wasn't worth much. We tried to identify rocks at the geology booth, and won a Norway Pine seedling at the forest industry center. (It's still sitting in the bag. Where should we plant it?) We drank a free sample of an energy drink that tasted like concentrated Lick-em-aid.

Ah, the State Fair. Always the same, always something different.

New Yorker Train-Wreck

2011-09-01T19:44:00.004-04:00

Flipping through the current New Yorker, after a long, hard day at the office, I find myself repeatedly coming up against troubling, mediocre material. First a poem by W.S. Merwin that sounds like a parody of a poem by a far lesser poet. Then an article about a philosopher’s quest for “moral truth.”

Excuse me! (As they used to say.)

There is no such thing as moral truth. Morality has to do with the way we behave. Truth has to do with our understanding of the world. The two are certainly related. On the other hand, many books have been written about the close connection between humanitarian ideals and spineless behavior. Thinking and doing don’t always work hand in hand. Which explains why “moral truth” is a meaningless association of terms.

No need to read that essay. (The guy has a sanctimonious expression and a horrible haircut, too.)

But the final blow came when, reading an article by Louis Menand about Dwight McDonald, he describes his own father in the following terms: “The American Civil Liberties Union and the Metropolitan Opera were the joint deities of his world.”

That sounds OK to me. But not to Menand. “I met a lot of people like that growing up, people who managed to combine unequivocal support for principles like equal rights and freedom of speech with flagrant cultural elitism….They can be democrats out in the town square and snobs at home.”

I guess Menand doesn’t like opera much. He may be “musically challenged.” But there is nothing snobbish or elitist about opera. Anyone who loves opera loves it the way a kid loves baseball, the way a patriot loves the flag. Opera combines glamour and fantasy with melodrama and primal vocal sounds that rend the heart and buoy the spirit in ways that few other mediums approach. There is something childish, rather than snobbish, about the whole enterprise. Fairy Tales for grown-ups, and the music, which cuts through both the theory and the protocol of adult living, is for real.

Verdi, for one, was a peasant. He often conducted his rehearsals in secret, because he didn’t want the local organ grinders to pick up his tunes and start playing them on the street before the premier. He knew that before long every Tommaso, Richardo, and Enrico in Italy would be hummin’ La donna è mobile ("Woman is fickle") but he needed to sell some tickets first.

It costs a lot of money to stage an opera, it’s true. Therefore, the tickets are not cheap. But many of them are cheaper than Minnesota Vikings tickets. And the Met HD broadcasts are not only relatively cheap, but far superior to local live performances. They’re loud enough to summon the level of emotion opera at its best can touch.

Now that I think about it, there is far more “moral truth” in an opera by Verdi, Mozart, or Puccini, than most philosophers’ hypothetical rigamarole. Tosca’s aria Visi d’Arte, Visi Amore is not only hauntingly beautiful, it also raises the basic moral dilemma of our time—or of any time.

If there is moral truth, it’s something we do, or see in the actions of others, rather than merely think.

Was Confucius Happy?

2011-08-18T19:44:00.008-04:00

In a recent, widely-discussed book, The Happiness Equation, an economist at the University of York (Nick Powdthavee) examined the relationship between various economic indicators and human happiness. The results could be encapsulated in a time-worn cliché, “Money can’t buy happiness.”

This reminds me of the slightly-less-well-known adage, “Money isn’t everything...but it sure beats the heck out of whatever comes in second.”

I don’t have a lot of money, and I haven’t read the book in question, because I’m a fairly happy chap myself, and I’m not really interested in what statistics and interviews can tell me about what other people say they feel.

I myself have noticed, and felt, a few things that may be of relevance to the question:

People who have read a good novel, or seen a good film, cherish it as if it were a god.

People sometimes return from expensive vacations and get excited only when they’re talking about the horrendous service they received at a restaurant in the Travestere.

There is a passage in one of Willa Cather’s novels, maybe My Antonia, that made an impression on me. I looked it up just now on-line:

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great…”

Politics can be a noble pursuit, but talking about politics can be dull. It often boils down to excoriating the selfish, bigoted folk who vote Republican. Such judgments are usually sound, but they don’t change anything or illuminate anything.

So, what should people talk about?

The other day, Hilary and I were sitting on the deck drinking a glass of wine. It was dark, we had a candle burning in our dragonfly candleholder, the crickets were chirping, and she was telling me about what Karen Armstrong has to say about Confucius in her recent book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Being the “Mr.-know-it-all” par excellence, I leapt from my chair and said, “I’ve got an idea, let’s see what Confucius himself has to say.”

I ducked back into the house and returned a few minutes later with three translations of the Analects: the groundbreaking Arthur Waley translation (1924); the Penguin edition translated by D. C. Lau (1979); and the recent David Hinton translation (1998). We began to read out loud, back and forth. Let me give you an example:

The Master said: “Of villages, Humanity is the most beautiful. If you choose to dwell anywhere else, how can you be called wise?” (Hinton)

The Master said, “Of neighborhoods, benevolence is the most beautiful. How can a man be considered wise who, when he has the choice, does not settle for benevolence?” (Lau)

The Master said, “It is Goodness that gives to a neighborhood its beauty. One who is free to choose, yet does not prefer to dwell among the Good—how can he be accorded the name of wise?” (Waley)

And then we would dispute which version was the best.

Clearly the Waley version is the best of the three here.

Among the discoveries noted by Mr. Powdthavee in his recent book about happiness, he mentions that the rich are slightly more anxious than the poor. He observes that many people are concerned not only about the size of their paychecks, but also about how their pay compares to that of their peers. This strikes me as a bit odd.

The review that I read appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and the conclusions the reviewer arrived at concerning labor demands and the benefits of immigration are worth a look.

In Book Six Confucius remarks:

The Master said, “To be fond of something is better than merely to know it, and to find joy in it is better than merely to be fond of it.” (Lau)

BWCAW – Elemental

2011-08-17T09:24:00.010-04:00

Why go there? Because it’s elemental. You pull out of the garage at 8:15, leaving the computer, the clients, the Tea Party, the unmowed lawn, and the half-painted woodwork behind, and six hours later you’re near the Canadian border, heading out across a pristine lake in an aluminum canoe, wondering where you’ll be setting up your tent for the night.

We hadn’t been on the water more than half an hour when I spotted a moose emerging from the woods on a back bay. That’s unusual. But therein lies the enduring interest—in the BWCA you never know quite what’s going to happen. The moose was a quarter-mile away, but with binoculars we could see it perfectly.

We camped at a familiar site on the north end of the lake, not far from the portage. I paddled out to get some water, hunted down a dead tree in the woods behind camp, assembled the all-important camp chairs, which consist of little more than some plastic rods and webbing to support a folder air mattress.

The wind was gusty and we weren’t entirely into the swing of things yet, though Hilary went swimming almost immediately and then gathered some blueberries. A little honey bee came by as we were sitting in the dirt, reading or looking out across the bay at the clumps of black clouds forming in the distance. Hilary held out her finger and the bee landed on it.

Two parties were fishing out in the bay. We could hear them exchanging pleasantries from time to time but they obviously weren’t together. Both canoes disappeared as dinner time approached but reappeared later for a few more hours of fishing before the sky grew dark.

Returning from our evening paddle, we passed right between the two canoes. As we approached the man in the bow of one of them got a strike. His buddy got the net out and they landed the fish. The man with the net then lifted an impressive string of fish out of the water.

“Walleye,” he said. (It’s hard to imagine how they’ll eat all those fish.)

Our dinner consisted of turkey jerky and almonds, followed by coffee made with water heated over the campfire. As we sat on the rocks a swarm of dragonflies appeared above us, just as they had years ago at this same spot.

Spectacular sunset, wisps of cloud tinted copper or pink, with one big dark clump near the horizon.

The transit from Sawbill to Cherokee Lake takes you through some interesting country, with small lakes, streams, portages, reeds, creeks, and mossy escarpments. At one point a beaver dam has raised the water level in a slough, making the boggy stretch easier to navigate and turning a 92-rod portage into a 12-rod portage. That’s OK with me.

We came upon a couple of spotted sandpipers on Cherokee Creek and admired the water lilies and pitcher plants. A raven crossed the creek ahead of us several times, monitoring our progress.

Cherokee Lake itself is a gem, and I suspect many parties just head up there and sit for a few days. The lake is studded with islands and the countryside to the north and easy is hilly, which gives the lake itself some added drama.

We took a campsite on the west side of the lake, much improved since the last time we camped there. There’s more greenery and the tent site has been artificially leveled with clay and a few well-placed logs.

The weather took a turn for the worse, with deep rumbling in the distance, darkening skies…yet with patches of blue sky still prominent. The wind seemed to come with the clouds, with fierce squalls followed by patches of utter calm.

This is what you do. You sit under the tarp and wait for the rain to come. An innocuous sprinkle from time to time, but at 3:30 all the serious weather was still passing us by to the south and east. Our moment will come.

Wandering the high rocks behind the campsite, I notice that the forest is very healthy. Very little dead brush, few deadfalls. Mountain ash here and there, jack pine, balsam, bitch. Blueberry season is over.

Time for a nap in the tent. It’s like a furnace in there, but the deer flies won’t get you. The wind rises; the wind dies down. A seagull flaps by fairly high. I adjust the straps on the tarp, cinch them up.

It started to rain in earnest at 6. A few minutes of hard rain, but medium to light for the most part. Again and again, it seems to be letting up—it’s an aural illusion. If it were happening as often as it seems to be, the rain would have quit long ago.

We cooked and ate our “pouch” dinner of beef stroganoff under the tarp. When I rather cavalierly dumped a pool of water that had collected above our heads over the edge, it began gushing along a path between the exposed rocks and dirt directly under the tarp past where we were sitting, rendering the chairs useless.

It occurred to us eventually to put on our raincoats. We heated water for coffee. I could no longer stand erect under the tarp, but had the options of crouching over, squatting like a Japanese baseball player, or stepping out into the rain.

It was a soft rain, not a pelting rain. I enjoyed wandering the campsite, looking out at the dark gray clouds in every direction.

Just as it started ro rainin earnest, three canoes had passed on the far side of the channel. Scrutinizing them with binoculars I could see they were thirty-something men with shaved heads and muscle shirts. They bivouacked on a island a half-mile away, but left again before the rain quit, no doubt due to the coming darkness. Finding a campsite of Cherokee can be tough at that time of the day, regardless of the weather. I felt sorry for them.

The rain finally let up at eight. I made a fire (with wood I'd prudently tucked under the tarp) and we watched the vague orb of the moon rise through the thinning clouds.

Early August

2011-08-08T09:22:00.008-04:00

It sounds like a minor film by Yasujirō Ozu. Early August. A time when thought begins to bend almost imperceptibly toward cooler, quieter days ahead. A delicious time of the year, in my opinion, with three months of wonderful weather in prospect. Maybe a few vacations, too!

In our neck of the woods the crickets started to chirp on July 31. The Cedar Lake rail line is now dominated by the mauve of wild bergamot in profusion (also in decline) and seven varieties of sunflowers, cone flowers, and back-eyed Susans none of which I know the precise name of.

The Twins are limping along with fading hopes but the new bike trail under the stadium is a boon to recreational bikers. It connects the downtown riverfront with communities as far away as Hopkins and Excelsior, and also serves as the northern leg of an easy 20-mile loop in conjunction with the 28th Street Greenway. We took that route the other day, stopping at the Longfellow Grill for a midmorning breakfast of meatloaf hash topped with two eggs and a dollop of Béarnaise.

My August reverie may have been spurred by a visit to the Scott County Fair a Wednesday or two ago. There weren’t many people there, which gave me the opportunity to chat with the men and women in the food wagons while Hilary was off tending the Scott County Booth.

The young woman in the cotton candy trailer told me she’s from Macedonia. She’s just here for the summer earning some easy money. The man at the Elkburger stand filled me in on the recent chronic wasting catastrophe in the local elk population. Evidently the market in North Korea for elk antlers has taken a nose-dive, too. I would like to have bought a burger from the guy…but I’d already been to the 4-H booth and didn’t have the appetite.

Just yesterday, eager to take advantage of the cooler weather, we headed to Faribault (less than an hour south of town) to do the Sakatah Singing Hills Trail. The trail passes through rolling fields, crosses the Cannon River twice, follows the shores of a few lakes and alongside several remnant prairies before reaching the mature forests of Sakatah State Park.

You emerge from the woods at the lackluster town of Waterville, which bills itself as “Southern Minnesota’s Vacation-spot.” There’s a nouveau coffee shop on main street (with WiFi) but no one was in the tidy dining area when we stepped in to get an ice cream cone. Nor was the woman behind the counter especially friendly. Maybe there’s a connection. (Or maybe she was just out of sorts because all her regular customers were at the 127th annual Fireman's Weekend pancake breakfast over at the VFW.)

We wandered Main Street and examined the postings in the window of the real estate office, looking for a dirt-cheap cottage on the lake (dream on!) and then started the long haul back to Faribault. There was almost no one on the trail. A few warblers chirping in the deep woods. A kingbird on a fence-wire showing off the white band on his tail. A few robust walnuts above our heads...

Pine Nuts

2011-08-02T18:02:00.005-04:00

The price per pound was roughly half what they charge at a discount supermarket. And a few big clumps of basil happened to be sitting on the kitchen counter back home, waiting to be chopped into pesto and frozen for the winter. So I bought the great big bag of pine nuts at CostCo at $14 dollars a pound, little considering that due to their high oil content, pine nuts go bad quickly, and a pound and a half of those tasty little nuts will take you a long ways into the autumn.

We made the pesto—though a friend later reminded me that it’s better to toast the pine nuts in a frying pan and sprinkle them on top just before serving. And we gave some to my mother-in-law for her birthday. At that point I began to dig out a few tried and true recipes…

Why are pine nuts so expensive? Because they take eighteen months to mature (which seems very odd to me) and must be harvested by hand. I can remember driving north from Pie Town to Fence Lake, New Mexico, through several monotonous hours of miniature hills covered with juniper and piñon pine—a Georgia O’Keefe nightmare. There were pick-up trucks parked in the ditches here and there, and we finally figured out that folks were out gathering pine nuts. We stopped at a café—it may have been in Quemado—and I was pleased to listen in on the conversation of two chunky young Indian men in the booth next door. It seems that one absent member of the party wasn’t pulling his weight. I heard one of them say, “ Next year, I think it should be just you, me…and grandma.”

Pine nuts grow best at elevations between six and eight thousand feet. That’s the zone at which the snowpack is likely to linger, providing run-off well into the summer. But there’s no telling if a crop of nuts will mature or wither on any given year.

Harvesting pine nuts doesn’t have to be a drag, however. The Spanish composer Enrique Granados published a set of canciones amatorias in 1915 that includes a number called “They Went into the Pine Woods.”

Country girls from Cuenca go up into the pine-woods,
Some for the pine nuts, some for the dancing.
As they dance and shell the pine nuts
The pretty country girls enjoy
Throwing the darts of love at one another.
Between the branches—when blind Cupid
Asks the sun for his eyes to see them better—
You can see them treading on the eyes of the sun.
Some go for the pine-nuts, some go for the dancing.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it sounds a little more interesting than “you, me, and grandma.”

Quite a few species of pine trees produce edible nuts. The pine nuts they sell at road-side stands in the American Southwest are very different from the ones we buy at the store, being larger and perhaps less delicate in flavor. (Maybe they’d taste better if I shelled them.) The bag I bought at CostCo came from China. It’s said that in China they mercilessly denude the trees of branches to make the job of harvesting easier, and then just move on. I suppose it’s possible...

In any case, these Chinese nuts are as good as any I’ve tasted. In fact, the pesto we made the other day was almost too rich. I also recently made a salad of fresh beets, gorgonzola, pine nuts, and vinaigrette—you can’t miss with that combination.

But the best of the dishes I cooked up is an orzo salad that I rank among the most subtly pleasing concoctions in the world. What’s interesting about this salad is that when you take a bite, you don’t taste much of anything. There are little bits of flavor taking you this way and that, and only gradually does the full impact hit home. I once made a batch of this stuff and something seemed wrong. I finally figured out that the raisins were sticking to each other. Not getting dispersed. You need every little touch, in the right proportion, in every bite, or the thing won’t go.

Here’s the recipe.

Orzo Salad with Lemon, Feta, and Pine Nuts
Ingredients:
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoons minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, plus more as needed
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 cup orzo
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup golden raisins
3 tablespoons finely chopped black olives
3 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
1/4 cup thinly sliced fresh basil
2 oz. feta cheese, crumbled

Combine the olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, and sugar in a jar. Shake it and set aside.

Cook orzo according to package directions. Meanwhile, toast the pine nuts in a dry skillet over medium-low heat. Shake them from time to time — they burn easily. They should toast up in just a couple of minutes. They’re done when you can smell them and they start to turn brown. Lovely.
Drain the orzo and transfer it to a medium bowl. Add the dressing to the hot pasta and toss to coat. Let cool to room temperature. (Stick it fridge to speed things up.)

Add the pine nuts, raisins, olives, red onion, and basil and stir to combine. Add the feta and toss lightly. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking.
It’s a good idea to make this at least 4 hours ahead of time so the flavors can meld. It’s also fine right away and delicious the next day.

Page One: Inside the New York Times

2011-07-28T20:09:00.008-04:00

The first thing that ought to be said about this entertaining and generally worthwhile film is that it doesn’t take us very far inside the New York Times. How could it?

The New York Times ranks among the most influential newspapers in the world. It remains influential because it produces top-flight articles about important subjects—political, social, environmental, artsy, and so on. How does it do this? By being in New York (the capital of the world, or haven’t you noticed?), hiring top-flight people, taking full advantage of its position as a top-flight newspaper, and otherwise holding true to both the methods and the image that have served it in the past. People throughout the United States subscribe to the print edition. It’s very cool to be reading the Times in Broken Bow, Nebraska, or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Not only cool, but also very entertaining and enriching.

For myself, I read the Times on-line, sporadically, here and there. You know, the editorials: Krugman, Brooks, Kristol, etc. When they asked me to pony up for a digital subscription, I didn’t hesitate for an instant, though I have no idea whether I’m currently breaking the 20-article monthly quota. (That’s not exactly true. I waited until the last day before their half-off offer expired.) One way or the other, we need to pay these guys.

The film takes us inside the Media Desk of the Times—not its most important or enthralling section, I’m sure. But what everyone loves about journalism (or hates, if you happen to be a Conservative) is the combination of brilliance, skepticism, competition, and pomp that comes off as a kind of moral rigor. The film throws us into that mess. It doesn’t really illuminate it much, but that would be a study in “conflict of interest.” That would be epistemology. That would be boring.

The subtext of the entire film is the arrival of the infamous beast—social networking. The more significant but less glamorous element is the concomitant departure of advertising revenue.

Then we have WikiLeaks. Then we have Judith Miller affirming the existence of WMD. Then we have some young hot-shot reporter heading off to Baghdad to ferret out the truth. A tough assignment, a noble cause.

A good deal of the film is spent at media conferences, during which internet geeks scoff at print journalists, who return the compliment. Nothing is established. Nothing is resolved. The universe of information is changing. We all know that, but it’s really nothing to be afraid of. And it’s great fun to watch as it unfolds.

The essential conundrum that no one really confronts outright is that if information is not to be controlled by the government, then it must be free. But nothing is free, so who’s going to pay for it? Advertisers. And who’s going to make sure the information is true? No one.

Some people value the truth and will pay for it. Others value titillation or the reinforcement of their own bigoted ideas. And they will pay for that. The New York Times reeks of intelligence and class (in my view) but it’s losing money, and it’s specious of liberals to suggest that it will endure because it must endure. There are elements of that attitude in the film, too.

In any case, it's difficult to find anything resembling the truth on any serious issue outside the editorial pages. As chance would have it, Krugman himself hit the nail on the head the other day when he pointed out that the mantra of "balance" so dear to the heart of journalists often obscures the essential differences between things and the manifest superiority of one position to another. Near the end of the article he writes:

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Page One never really sizes up this ongoing issue. (You can read Krugman's column here.) But jumpy and inconclusive though it may be, it’s a film that everyone ought to see.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-07-24T20:27:00.008-04:00

Among the strange places Werner Herzog has taken us to over the years, the caves of Chauvet, in the Ardeche region of southern France, do not rank near the top. Nevertheless, we are glad that he visited them and took us along.

First, a few cold, hard facts. The walls of the caves contain painting s that are 32,000 years old. Discovered as recently as 1995, they’re the oldest works of art in the world by a good ten thousand years. They offer representations of a number of large mammals that haven’t walked the earth for quite some time. It’s impressive.

These caves are not open to the public, and very few film-makers with lights have been granted access. Therefore, even if the film itself was a piece of monotonous documentary fluff—which it is not—every man, woman, and child should be rushing to see it, or at least put it on the Netflix cue.

Why? Because these works of art were created by our ancestors at a time when “the world” and “the out-of-doors” were synonymous. Today we debate whether to install Wifi among the trees at state park campgrounds. In those days, other large mammals outnumbered humans by maybe 100 to 1, and nomadic bands hunted beasts, gathered roots, played music, built fires. In short, their lives were like our hobbies.

The sight of a string of horses sketched in charcoal on the wall of a cave force us to re-ask the question: “What is an image? What is its relation to “reality”?

Such images drag us beyond mysticism and metaphysics to a realm of awe and stupor, which is only intensified by the fact that we will never know any of the answers.

I have been to a few such caves myself. Hilary and I visited Faut-de-Gaume in the Dordogne region of France in 1978 (Lescaux had already been closed), walking down narrow tunnels and slithering over sills before arriving in those small dark chambers covered with polychrome images of bison and mammoths and who knows what. The extraordinary thing (aside from the paintings) is that we were accompanied by about fifty grade-school children from the neighborhood who were on a field trip.

We paid a visit to the Ariege region of the Pyrenees in 1999 to investigate the cave paintings at Niaux and Bedeilhac. The woman selling tickets at Bedeilac was tipsy and the tour was entirely in French, but the caves were massive and the images were superb. Later that day I made an attempt to master the art of throwing a spear with an atlatl at the Parc de la Prehistoire at Tarascon sur Ariege. (It isn’t as easy as it looks.)

And a few years later we toured a cave in Andalusia holding lanterns given to us by the “tour guide”—the local farmer who owned the cave. (To get his attention you drive up to the mountainside entrance and honk your horn.) There were images of fish scratched into the walls and a series of slashes that looked like a primitive version of a cribbage scorecard you’d create if you’d forgotten the cribbage board.

Staring at such primitive slashes forces us to reconsider how much time we spend keeping track of things. Did I fill out the time card correctly? Did I send the estimated tax payment on time?

Herzog intermixes his cave footage with interviews, focusing on smiling, long-haired French experts who are hippies in disguise. (One was formerly a circus performer.) Their comments are intermittently interesting, but they reinforce our impression that our guess is as good as theirs, regarding the meaning of it all.

Music plays a prominent role in the film, and some reviewers have found it intrusive. I would agree that at certain points it becomes a little “churchy” and overblown, yet it also contributes to an atmosphere of staggering awe that would be difficult to sustain through imagery alone. After all, a cave is a font of echoes. And singing came before talking. (Remember Vico!) And visual imagery is often created to revive experience that might otherwise be lost to memory.

Why did these men or women draw images of wild beasts on the wall of a cave far removed from “ordinary” life? One answer would be, Because things are hard to remember. The past will fade into mush, if we don’t make an attempt to take hold of it through enduring imagery. Such imagery naturally takes on a magical caste. And imagery is a kind of music, with echoes and overtones and patterns of repetition.

There is a long segment near the end of the film during which the camera pans repeatedly across a marvelous grouping of horses and bison while the music blares. Some viewers may find it monotonous, but I found it mesmerizing. The problem with visiting the caves is that you soon grow tired of looking at these astounding images in spite of yourself, and begin to think about the Coke machine back at the visitor’s center, and whether you should camp out tonight. Here we have no choice. We are forced to reconsider, to re-evaluate, to ponder once more.

Postscript on memory: I had a strong recollection of having read an essay by John Berger about the caves at Chauvet, at a time when I’d never heard of the place, but couldn’t find the book. The caves were only discovered in 1994, which rules out most his books that I own. It occurred to me that a library of books is like a wall of images, a memory palace, a lifeline to the past.

I eventually concluded that the essay may have appeared in Here is Where We Meet, a collection I reviewed in RainTaxi but only checked out of the library. In any case, I can't find it. You can read Berger’s very interesting essay here. If you read the essay and then see the film (or the other way around) it will give you an idea of how the power of words and images differ.

Dew Point

2011-07-19T21:23:00.005-04:00

Minneapolis broke a dew-point record today. The local atmosphere has never before held so much water vapor without raining—at least since records of such things have been kept.

I knew it was going to be an extraordinary day when I walked into the living room at 6:30 in the morning and saw a family of wild turkeys wandering across the front yard. By my rough count, there were nine chicks along with the parents, grazing my lawn, which I haven’t cut in at least two weeks. (Everyone knows that tall grass keeps the roots cool, and if the grass goes to seed, all the better!)

Yesterday we lost power for a while. I called Excel and the young man on the other end of the line told me my neighborhood should be back on-line by 4 pm. It happened to be 4:05 at the time.

“I could set you up with an automated message,” he added helpfully. “If it isn’t back up by 5 they’ll send you a message with the anticipated time.”

“Don’t bother,” I replied. “They’ll fix it when they can.”

Meanwhile, I asked the man where the substation was that had blown. (I thought maybe I’d wander over and see what was going on, maybe lend a hand.)

“We aren’t given that kind of information,” he replied. “But there are 753 homes without power in your area, so it’s not a major outage.

“Are we the only neighborhood down?”

“God no. We thought things would be worse today, what with the heat. It’s bad enough to keep everyone busy…but not bad enough to justify overtime.”

“Where are you? Denver?”

“No. I’m in Eau Claire.”

“Tell me, then,” I replied. “I was in Eau Claire a few weeks ago and everyone was tubing through town. Do they do that all summer, or only on Fourth of July?”

“All summer long. Eau Claire is a college town. You put in at the city park downtown and get out by the hockey arena two miles downstream.”

Today I kept inside most of the day. We lost power briefly…when Hilary plugged in the iron on top of the fan, the air conditioner, and the computer stuff. No harm done. But at a certain point I knew I had to get out of the house. Buy some bread and garlic for the gazpacho. Lemons and parsley. The atmosphere was oppressive.

But you have to get OUT in it.

Back from the grocery store, I replaced a board in our back deck. Then I planted a few annuals I got for free yesterday at Bachman’s while hunting for a new birdbath. Then I clipped off the buckhorns that were stealing sunlight from the Amur maples we’re trying to nurture as a privacy hedge now that our red cedars have bit the dust.

Then I mowed the back lawn. (A very small space.)

Then I moved our ancient pagoda-lantern out from the woods that have grown up around it over the years. I moved it six feet. In my book, that’s progress.

Then I was drenched in sweat. A lovely sensation.

Then I went inside and poured myself a glass of cheap Argentine chardonnay. I cut a slice of bread off the 99 cent loaf I’d purchased at Cub and dipped it into the gazpacho. (They say that the two essential ingredients of gazpacho are vinegar and bread.)

And then I started thinking about Robin Hood.

Lo Jai on Bastille Day

2011-07-14T18:54:00.003-04:00

Back in Bookmen Days, we in the receiving department hosted a poetry reading on Bastille Day every year, and cajoled someone new every year from the library division or the front office or somewhere, to recite a poem, in French, before we began slicing the baguettes and pouring the wonderful coffee. Apricot marmalade was also on hand, and perhaps even unsalted butter—though I doubt it. We were warehouse workers, after all.

Those days are long gone, of course, but Bastille Day returns again and again. I’ve chosen a short poem this year, it goes like this.

Nos mouches savent des chansons
Que leur apprirent en Norvège
Les mouches ganiques qui sont
Les divinités de la neige.

I don’t speak French myself, and you’re probably wondering if I recited the poem at all. Actually, no. But I’m listening to a remarkable album by a French band, now also long gone, called Lo Jai. Not the second album, with its slick Leger cover, but their first album, which seems to erupt from the hills of the Auverne with the cheerful, rugged, jarring, and irascible sound of the pipe and the hurdy gurdy.

Another very exciting French album that will be hitting the turntable soon is Face to Face, a collection of duets by Eddie Louiss (Hammond organ) and Richard Galliano (accordion.) It’s incredible.

And having logged nine hours on various books today, I think the time has come for a glass of wine. Cote du Rhone?

Midnight in Paris

2011-07-11T21:55:00.007-04:00

Many of us Baby Boomers grew up with Woody Allen. I thought Bananas (1971) was so funny I dragged my parents—and my baby sister—to see it, and was somewhat embarrassed during the bogus under-the-sheets sex scene narrated by Howard Cosell. From that film I also remember a few of the pronouncements of the Latin American dictator. “From now on, Swedish will the national language.” “From now on, everyone must wear their underwear on the outside!” Also a few jokes about leprosy. Memory fades.

When Annie Hall was advertised as Woody’s “breakthrough” movie, I knew there was trouble ahead. The maker of Sleeper and Love and Death really didn’t need to “break through” to anything. He had already arrived.

Annie Hall holds up very well; I’ve seen it several times since. The jokes work and the plot works. It’s a classic. Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton add a lot to the film’s specific gravity. But Woody’s later career is all but foreshadowed near the end when we see a few scenes from a high school theater production. The romance is hackneyed, the acting in stilted.

Many of Woody’s subsequent films are like that, from Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) up to the vastly over-praised Vicky Christina Barcelona, which seemed to me like it was largely cribbed from an adolescent woman’s private journal. In short, beautiful people cheating on one another. Broadway Danny Rose (1984) might be the best of the bunch. I saw it again recently and it struck me as a minor masterpiece, both visually and conceptually. (I’d like to see Stardust Memories (1980) again, just to make sure.)

That having been said, let me hasten to add that Midnight in Paris is a delightful film, bringing Woody’s strengths into play while minimizing his (dare I say it) somewhat puerile take on human relationships.

Woody’s two great strengths are his shtick and his nostalgic romanticism. His two great weaknesses are that his plot-lines are driven by the most commonplace romantic impulses and imbroglios, and that everyone in his films ends up talking like he talks. (Mia Farrow was the worst.)

In Midnight in Paris, the focus is on a single character, a novelist named Gill (Owen Wilson), and his affection for the era during which Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and all the rest were living the life of artistes in Paris. By a strange quirk of fate, he ends up traveling to that time period. (This is the imaginative element that had been lost from Woody’s films for so long. Remember the giant strawberries in Sleeper?)

It’s true that Gill talks just like Woody talks. But it would spoil the effect if Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein also talked like Woody. So Woody is forced to create characters different from himself, and he (or the actors) do a very god job of it. The charm lies in the fact that these characters are comic parodies of themselves, while also seeming exactly like themselves. Thus Hemingway is ridiculously blunt and forthright, Fitzgerald is suave and obliging, Zelda is pleasantly scatterbrained and direly suicidal, etc. etc. We are approaching the brilliant realm of Love and Death, with its ridiculous glosses on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. “I never want to get married. I only want to get a divorce.”

Adrian Brody, in the role of Salvador Dali, is probably the best of the lot. And Gill’s late-night café conversation with Dali, Bunuel, and Man Ray might well be the best scene in the film. (Yes, but where, I ask you, is Ford Maddox Ford?)

And then we have Marion Cotillard, in the role of Picasso’s mistress Adriada, who hits it off quite well with Gill. She has a remarkable screen presence—which may explain why she is one of only two actresses to have won a “best actress” Academy Award for a film shot in a foreign language. (The other was Sophia Loren.)

She isn’t classically beautiful, in the manner of the ageless Medusa Catherine Deneuve, but is infinitely intriguing. (She was also good in the under-rated Ridley Scott film, also set in France, A Good Year, playing opposite Russell Crowe.)

Meanwhile, the modern-day sequences with Gill, his fiancé (the winsome Rachael McAdams) , and her parents, are lame and predictable—though there are quite a few good son-in-law one-liners scattered here and there to keep us amused. Wilson himself is pretty lame and predictable in many of these scenes too. The idea that this person might ever have written even a chapter of a novel seems rather hard to believe.

Similarly, Woody gives us no reason to believe that Gill and his fiancé ever liked each other much, though this allows him one of his classic Allen-esque falling-off remarks. Gill is trying to explain the relationship to the mysterious Adriana: “We agree on most things, on the big things…Actually, we agree on the little things. We both like Indian food…Well, not all Indian food…we both like pita bread.”

It’s easy to imagine Woody Allen saying that. And Owen Wilson does a good job of delivering those lines, too. Plot and character development are being thrown out the window here in the interest of the comic sketch. But that, after all, is what Woody Allen does best. Why not settle back and enjoy it? And while we’re at it, why not give a round of applause to someone who obviously loves Europe, and “old-fashioned” literature in which romance and heroism command the spotlight—with a touch of Surrealism here and there for good measure.

Oh! Oh! Eau Claire!

2011-07-05T17:09:00.005-04:00

Long before the Republican Party decided to torpedo the state of Minnesota, we had made plans to spend the 4th of July weekend in Wisconsin. The plan, specifically, was to ride the Red Cedar Bike Trail from Menominee to the Chippewa River and back, spend the night in Eau Claire, explore that city, hook up with a few segments of the Chippewa Valley Trail the next day, and be home in time for the evening news.

What a marvelous itinerary! The Red Cedar Trail follows that river for fourteen miles, and for most of its length it seems more like a very flat two-lane logging road than a rail bed or an improved bike trail. That’s nice. It often hugs the river, though there are very few places where you can actually get down to the banks to soak your feet. Along the way you pass groves of locust and basswood and sumac and box elder, limestone quarries, swamps, and rocky cliffs covered with jewelweed and moss and topped with majestic white pine.

The spiderwort was blooming in profusion on the trailside, and there was yarrow and bindweed and purple vetch here and there, too. At one opening in the trees we spotted some Sandhill cranes in a corn field. Much of the trail is covered in dappled sunlight, though on one of the sunny stretches we came upon a family of lark sparrows in a stunted oak tree. I hadn’t seen one of those for quite some time. A few hours on (we stop a lot) we finally came to the bridge spanning the Chippewa River. The river is wide and edged in dunes at that point. It makes you want to get out your canoe. We proceeded on to the T and headed south toward Durand for a few miles before turning back. Along the way I suddenly came upon a very large snake on the path—definitely not a garter snake. Looking at photos and distribution maps later, I would guess it was a Eastern Hognose snake or a Western Fox snake. I didn’t see it very well in the shadows of the forest before I ran over it. I let out a shriek but couldn’t swerve in time. It slithered off into the underbrush before we had a chance to view it carefully.

By the time we got back to the bridge across the Chippewa a number of boaters had arrived at the beaches. Several teenage boys were jumping off the bridge with mid-summer braggadocio. Everyone seemed to be having fun, though to me it looked excruciatingly hot out there in the full sun.

We made our desultory way back to the car and drove the back roads to Eau Claire, arriving on the outskirts via County C. I suppose that city is a tangle no matter how you approach it. It’s shaped like a horseshoe with the downtown on the rim, the Chippewa River below, and both the campus and Carson Park occupying the lowland in the center. There’s also a half-moon-shaped lake nestled within the arc of the horseshoe, which doubles your chances of hitting a dead-end or otherwise veering off your intended path. Neither the freeway nor Highway 53 get anywhere close to downtown. I suppose most people don’t care.

We spent a good deal of time going back and forth down Menominee Street, Clairmont Avenue, and Craig Road, and passed Lakeview Cemetery several times before finding our way into Carson Park. Evening was approaching and the park was simply gorgeous. Anglers were congregating on the pier at marshy Braun’s Bay, and the parking lot in front of the handsome limestone ballpark a hundred yards away was beginning to fill up. Families with picnic baskets and young couples were also approaching along trails through the woods. (The Eau Claire Express was playing the Wisconsin Raptors.) I caught sight of two uniformed players in the sunlight out on the field as we crept by, and was visited by a memory of that anticipation that greets any player prior to a game—relaxed but nervous.

We drove on through the pines past several less substantial ball fields before coming to a reconstructed logging camp and the Chippewa Valley Museum. Both were closed, which was just as well. We were content to sit on a park bench and look out across Half Moon Lake toward the city in the gathering twilight.

On our way out of the park we passed the longest string of horseshoe pits that I have ever seen. Returning downtown, we sat on a bench and watched a congeries of college kids floating quietly downstream on a variety of colorful plastic flotation devices. What a pleasant summer custom!

Books in the Mail

2011-06-28T20:25:00.013-04:00

I have loved bookstores since the B. Dalton opened at Rosedale Mall back in 1966. (Just a guess.) It was ten miles from my house, which was closer than St. Paul Book and Stationary downtown. I can remember buying paperback copies of Hesse’s Siddhartha and Sartre’s Nausea there. (Both had black covers. I must have been in a bad mood.) Also a book of critical essays by Robert Penn Warren, one of which was titled “Pure and Impure Poetry.” As I recall, in this essay Warren contrasted the somewhat abstract verses of Wallace Stevens with the dark incomprehensible images of Hart Crane and Warren’s old friend Allen Tate, and concluded that something wrenching and enigmatic was worth more than something blandly musical and formally precise.

Such disputes seem quaint today, yet the fact remains that the New Critics (of which Warren was one) were the last bunch to take literature as something important in itself. Succeeding schools have been content to view literary works as mere symptoms of something else. That’s wrong-headed, and sad.

Most readers care very little about the views of critics in any case—especially academic critics. We’re all critics nowadays, writing eloquent testimony on Amazon to the matchless quality of the books we like—even those written and published by our friends. I am a huge fan of the New York Review of Books, but its reviews are so thorough and insightful that often, having read one, I no longer feel the need to read the book itself.

The word “Amazon” brings me back to notion I was hoping to expand upon before I lost my way. Bookstores are lovely and hallowed…but it’s also a lot of fun buying books on line.

In the first place, it’s so easy that you find yourself making impulse purchases. A few days later, you get the email announcing that a book has been shipped, but you can’t quite remember what it is. If you do read down the email to the fine print and come upon the title, it may mean nothing to you. (A subtitle would have helped.) But that merely heightens the sense of vague anticipation, as if you were about to receive a gift from a thoughtful friend. What could it be?

I have had this sensation several times recently, due to a $75 birthday check I received from my dear in-laws not long ago, which I felt honor-bound to dispose of as light-heartedly as possible. As opposed to paying off the water bill, for example. There are times when "things of the spirit" must come first.

The first book I ordered (and received) was The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion, by Jay Gitlin. Not a genuine page-turner, perhaps, but we all ought to learn a little more, don’t you think, about the men and women who maintained a flourishing Francophone civilization in the Mid-Mississippi Valley (upper Louisiana in those days) for decades after France’s territorial claims in North America were all but defunct. I am not anti-American by any means, but I find it interesting to read about those regions and eras of our history during which the landscape was largely inhabited by Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Brits—not to mention the Choctaw, Menominee, and Fox.

The second to arrive was a mass-market copy of A Fatal Grace, by Canadian mystery-writer Louise Penny. I read Still Life, the first book in the Three Pines series, a few weeks ago, and liked it well enough. Inspector Gamache is a sort of French-Canadian Simenon, more interested in people than crimes, really. The rest of the characters seemed a little sketchy to me, but I suppose I’ll get to know them better bye-and-bye. (I might save this one for our upcoming canoe trip.)

And then, just today, I received a package from Labyrinth Books, the scholarly remainder outlet, containing two fine hardcover books: The Library of America anthology of Audubon’s writings and drawings, and a slim volume by the Polish travel-writer Ryszard Kapuścinski called The Other. Kapuścinski’s star as the most daring of all journalists, witness to 88 revolutions, etc, etc, has gone slightly into eclipse now that it has been surmised he made a lot of it up. Still, I like his style and hope this may be a book short enough (92 pages) for me to finish.

On the first page of Audubon’s Mississippi Journal, which starts off that book, he shoots 30 partridge, 1 woodcock, 27 gray squirrels, a barn owl, a turkey buzzard, and an immature yellow-rumped warbler. He makes it a point (still on page 1) to criticize the mis-identification of this bird by his famous predecessor Alexander Wilson. On page 2 he shoots four young grebes with a single shot, and remarks: “This is the second time I have seen this kind, and they must be extremely rare in this part of America.”

With all of this cultural wealth streaming in from the post office, I still have $12.50 in my birthday account. What next?

St. Louis, Mo.

2011-06-26T09:27:00.009-04:00

Have you ever noticed how St. Louis is a lot like Manhattan? Well, it isn’t on an island, but both cities have water at the east end, and also a very big statue. There are tall buildings clustered near the water and a relatively narrow swath of long parallel streets heading off to the west. In both Manhattan and St. Louis, the building-height drops and then begins to rise again as you approach a very large park. On either side of this central corridor the neighborhoods decline somewhat in quality. (In St. Louis, quite a few of the buildings have vanished altogether.) To the east of the big “central” park in both cities, there are several blocks of elegant nineteenth-century residential buildings. (In St. Louis they're blocked off by wrought-iron fencing into "private" neighborhoods.) The chief art museums of both cities are situated within the park.

There’s a lot more of everything in Manhattan than St. Louis, of course, including buildings and people of every sort, bustle, and things to do. But there was a time when the differences would not have been so glaring. In 1850, St. Louis was the second-largest port in the United States (after New York). And for many years its Union Station was the busiest rail terminal in the world. (Today it’s a shopping mall.) In the last ten years alone, St. Louis proper lost almost 30,000 residents—roughly 8 percent of its population. Ouch!

But for this very reason, St. Louis can make for a pleasant getaway—urban, historic, but also low-key and relatively free of traffic congestion.

We arrived in the city from upstream, shrewdly spending our first night in the historic community of St. Charles, on the banks of the Missouri River a few miles west of town. St. Charles was settled in 1765 by French Canadians, served as Missouri’s capital for a few years, and was the last town Lewis and Clark saw before heading off up the Missouri on their two-and-a-half-year journey to the West Coast.

A number of the buildings from those early times still stand along a cobblestone stone street near the river. It’s a pleasant neighborhood to explore on a warm Friday evening, with plenty of restaurants and pubs. Young men and women in tuxedos or satiny pastel prom attire gave the streets a festive flair, though it seemed many of them were hanging out in large gangs with others of their own sex. An art “crawl” was also underway, with colorful six-foot banners, like little wind-surfing sails, fluttering in front of the participating galleries. The art itself was lame, for the most part. Photographs of African animals, hand-thrown pots of middling interest. The best things we saw were some small color pencil sketches of exotic birds done by a retired illustrator from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A hundred yards away, beyond the vast grassy sward that runs alongside this prettified historic village, the Missouri River rushes northwest toward it’s rendezvous with the Mississippi. The far side of the river is forested, and there was hardly a clue that we were only a few miles from a major metropolis.

The famous Katy bike trail—225 miles long—starts at the west end of the park, though it looks like the start of any other bike trail. We walked down toward the river past a huge bronze statue of Lewis and Clark and their dog, surrounded by a circle of bedding plants. Beyond stood an open-air museum housing a keel boat and a pirogue like the ones those explorers used to travel upstream two-hundred odd years ago. No one was passing on the river when we were there. Frogs were croaking in the soft evening light from the park’s grassy ditches, which were filled with water from the recent rains. At a parking lot down the way, runners wearing powder blue doublets were straggling in to a finish line, cheered on by their friends and relatives.

We walked along a sturdy industrial pier extending well out into the river, which was swollen with spring floodwater and moving very fast.

The next morning we crossed the river on the freeway bridge and made our way past the suburbs of Bridgeston and Jennings into the city. A tornado had ripped through St. Louis a few days earlier and we saw some of the devastation—mostly commercial rather than residential—across a swath of landscape near the airport. Soon the Arch came into view in the distance, appearing and disappearing again behind other buildings. As we got closer it came to dominate the landscape, standing twice as tall, or so it seemed to me, as the buildings nearby. We hadn’t planned to visit it just yet … but we hadn’t decided not to. It was a beautiful sunny morning, early. As we arrived downtown, looking this way and that at all the fine buildings, and exited the freeway (lest we zoom past Busch Stadium and out the other side of town) we saw a sign that said, “Arch Parking.” We followed it.

The Arch is one of those monuments that are useless, irrelevant…and cool. It’s simply cool that such a thing would get built, and it reminds me of the remark of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, which I can misquote as well as the next guy: “The superfluous is in every way more essential than the necessary.”

Now, I realize that the Arch is ostensibly a monument to American’s westward expansion. The plan for such a monument was originally bruited in 1933, when the man who eventually designed it twenty-five years later, the naturalized Finn Eero Saarinen, was still in architecture school. But there is nothing about the Arch itself that makes us think about the West, or about expansion. Some metal wagon wheels welded into an arch? Maybe. A 630-foot-tall saguaro cactus made out of uranium tailings? Not a bad idea. But a simple, shimmering metal arch designed by a Finn? What has that got to do with the American West?

And yet, when you think about the things the arch and its creator evoke—immigration, elegance, simplicity, engineering brilliance, pointless bravado—it begins to reek of Americana of the very best sort. The architect himself described the symbolic element as “the gateway to the West, the national expansion, and whatnot.”

And that is pretty much what the director of the National Park Service at the time, Newton Drury, requested: “One central feature: a single shaft, a building, an arch, or something else that would symbolize American culture and civilization…transcending in spiritual and aesthetic values." The Arch also falls into that category of things that are media-resistant. Like the Grand Canyon or Rheims Cathedral, you haven’t seen it until you’ve actually gone there and seen it. It elicits a sort of awe. Not only because it’s tall, but because it’s sleek and beautiful. Take a few steps this way or that and the effect changes. Sunlight catches it higher or lower. Parts of it grow thicker or thinner.

The ach sits in the middle of a huge grassy field which was created after condemning many blocks of derelict warehouses. Historic preservationists remain shocked, a half-century after the fact, though there is no great demand for warehouse space in St. Louis today. Many such structures became superfluous when the Eads railroad bridge was built in 1874 and goods were no longer ferried across the Mississippi by boat.

As we waited in line to enter the underground visitor’s center beneath the arch, I saw a sign that said something about security scanners ahead. So while Hilary held our place in line, I went over to talk to the ranger standing nearby about my Swiss Army knife.

“That knife won’t be a problem,” he told me.”If you have a knife that opens with a spring-action button, that would be a problem.” (I was reminded of the line from Crocodile Dundee. “That’s not a knife…”)
“How long until we get in?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes,” he replied. “You got here early.”

As we waited in line, we chatted with the man standing behind us. He was from Sweden, he’d been attending a seven-day training seminar at Boeing. We mentioned how lovely the pine forests of Minnesota were, and he told us how much he loved to go camping in Norway along the fjords with his wife. “That was before the kids started coming,” he added with a quirky smile.

Once we got inside, I purchased the tickets to the tram that takes you to the top. During the forty-five minute wait, we had plenty of time to explore the Museum of Western Expansion that takes up most of the space under the Arch.

Once again, very cool. There are mechanical Indian chiefs, black cowboys, and French fur traders, telling their stories as their arms and heads ratchet stiffly back and forth. Huge portraits of Indian chiefs. There are teepees and covered wagons and stuffed horses and oxen. Along the back wall there are 20-foot photographs of the ever-changing landscapes people passed through as they followed the Oregon Trail to what they hoped would be a better future. Size is important here. Grandeur, real or imagined, is of the essence of Western Expansion. But there were also detailed panels full of little-known facts about events that took place during the presidencies of Van Buren and Polk. All in all, the place remined me of the five fine mueseums they have in Cody, Wyoming, all mixed into one.

Our time-slot finally arrived and we climbed into a little pod with a couple from Chicago who were returning from Branson. “My mom moved there when my dad died,” the woman said. “We’re thinking of buying some property ourselves. For retirement, you know.”

Once the doors closed on the tiny compartment, we were whisked to the top in a matter of seconds. Very little room up there. Small windows. A slight swaying in the breeze, 600 feet off the ground. Good views of both the river and the city, though the windows are only about 12 inches high, and they're bevelled at an angle toward the ground. A kid standing next to us eagerly pointed out the various sports venues visible far below us, and told us which team played in each.

It's true what they say, going to the top is something you do once, and never have to do again. We were soon ready to return to our pod and head back down.

Seven Lunches

2011-06-21T19:57:00.006-04:00

I don’t eat out enough to get a proper perspective on the restaurant scene, but I did stop in at a few cafes in recent months, nearly all of them good. Even one sitting can give you the feel for a place. The food is only part of it, of course. The shape of the room, the demeanor of the waitress, the direction of the light coming in, the music...

1. Blackbird (38th and Nicollet) I like the very tall ceilings, the cheery décor, and the sunny east-facing window. Their sandwich special had bean sprouts on it—also good. A good place to stop for lunch following a visit to the Art Institute, which is almost right down the street.

2. La Chaya (45th and Nicollet) We parked right in front and as I stepped out of the car I felt like I was back in California. It’s a good feeling. It must have been the fanciful wrought-iron railings and waxy green boxwood shrubs ringing the delightful brick terrace. Whatever it was, the effect was enchanting. The food was also good—semi-hot Mexican fusion.

3. King’s Wine Bar (46th and Grand) I ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a bowl of asparagus soup. The chicken salad was dominated by chevre and a very tasty vinaigrette rather than the chicken, the bread was toasted to perfection—or more likely fried in butter. The café is furnished with black chipboard furniture—the IKEA look, I guess—but there’s nothing wrong with it. Yet it was high noon, and we were the only people in the place, while Patisserie 46, right across the street, was packed with people.

4. Victory 44 is located in an obscure corner of North Minneapolis, just south of Victory Memorial Drive and west of Henry High School. The place is noted for chef-waiters, small portions, and very flavorful food. I can still recall the macaroni and cheese I had there—though they called it something entirely different. It was so tasty I could hardly believe it. I also remember the three perfectly sautéed scallops I had on another visit. Come to think of it, I also remember the little potatoes in the shape of footballs they served on the side, and the swizzle of glaze in the shape of a raspberry red Z across the top.

On the other hand, the lamb paté was about the size (and color) of an old-fashioned rectangular pencil eraser, and the rabbit sausage, sliced into two pieces at a very sharp angle (to create an optical illusion, I guess) and served on a bed of greens, didn’t amount to much.

I went there for a bite to eat with a friend one evening and had the privilege of sitting on one end of a long padded bench. A heavily pierced young woman sat at the other end, about fifteen feet away. She and her boyfriend ordered the Tuesday night “date” menu, which at $30 for five courses (for two) seems like a very good deal. The top of the bench was only loosely fastened to the base, and we inadvertently played a game of teeter-totter all night long, without really thinking about it, as we shifted in our seats.

5. Travail, in downtown Robbinsdale, offers a similar menu, similarly exquisite charcuterie, similar small portions, and perhaps even cockier chef-waiters. It’s fun to sit against the wall looking across the room at the open kitchen. A friend and I arrived on morning just before noon and there were ten or twelve people waiting outside the door for the place to open.

6. The Republic, which replaced Sergeant Preston’s after all these years at Seven Corners, has a remarkable open-air Happy Hour. The chips are notably flavorful and ungreasy and the $5 grass-fed-beef hamburgers come in several modes, from garlic confit to red wine reduction and brie to aged cheddar and caramelized onions. Three dollar craft American taps.

7. The best sandwich I’ve had in years came from the Northern Waters Smokehouse in the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace out on Canal Street in Duluth. It’s called the Sitka Sushi, and it has Wild Alaskan Sockeye gravlox with cucumber, shredded veggies, pickled ginger, cilantro, chili sauce, and wasabi mayonnaise on a hero roll. Wow!

8. The best blue-plate special I had recently was at the Pease Café, located in (you guessed it) Pease, Minnesota. (It’s just south of Milaca.) Low prices, genuinely “home-cooked” food. And I can assure you, it isn’t difficult to eavesdrop on what the locals are talking about at a place like that.

Epistemology Provençal

2011-06-19T10:04:00.009-04:00

In a recent travel piece in the New York Times, novelist Nicholas Delbanco described a trip he and his wife made to Provence, where they’d spent an extended honeymoon forty years ago. Hilary and I have been to Provence several times but not since 1990, and I was curious to see how the return visit struck him. (For what it’s worth, many years ago I read and was impressed by one of Delbanco’s early novels, Small Rain, which was set in the south of France somewhere.)

There were not many surprises. Things have changed, Delbanco says, but there’s still plenty of beauty and culture to be enjoyed, especially if you move further up into the hills with bigger wads of cash in your pocket. Even the Luberon Valley, he tells us, has not been utterly ruined by the outlandish popularity of Peter Mayle’s books—which inspired our visit in 1990.

What did surprise me was the digression Delbanco made, early on in the piece, to ponder the issues associated with seeing things anew that you already think you know pretty well:

It’s difficult to know, in the wake of Heisenberg and Einstein, what is absolute, what relative, and why. Do we change as witnesses, or does that which we witness change, or both; does it alter because of the viewing, and is our estimate altered by the consciousness of sight? Think of a train track and moving train; does the world pass by while we sit still, or is it the reverse? These problems of philosophy and mathematics are personal riddles also; was it always just like this, and did we fail to notice? For we have changed more than the landscape, no matter how the locals complain that the landscape has changed.

What I find odd about this passage is that Delbanco is presenting as “philosophical riddles” questions that most of us know the answer to intuitively. More understandable, but also more distressing, are the references to physicists whose opinions have little to do with the issue.

Most of us realize when we look out the window of a train that the train is moving with respect to an earth that’s pretty much staying put. When the engineer builds up a head of steam, we lurch ahead; when he puts on the brakes, we stop.

Delbanco’s real (and more interesting) concern is to focus our attention on the conundrum of a seemingly static personal point of view in the midst of an ever-changing world. No matter how old we get or how radically we change, we seem to remain, in some basic sense, “ourselves.” When we return to a place (or run into an old friend) this change/no change is thrown into relief as distant memories collide with the immediacy of new experiences. The event can be rich with pleasant nostalgia or tinged with a dreadful sense of lost or disparagement. It all depends.

What does all this have to do with Heisenberg and Einstein? Absolutely nothing. Einstein is the father of relativity, as everyone knows. Heisenberg formulated the slightly-less-famous “Uncertainty Principle,” which suggests that when observing sub-atomic particles, we can be sure of their speed or their location, but never both. Or something along those line.

Yet centuries before Heisenberg had outgrown his crib, philosophers were telling us that we can never really be certain of anything.

A better way of framing this issue would be to say that certainty is a feeling rather than an attribute of truth. When we say, “I’m certain the door was locked when I left the house,” what we mean to say is, “I’m confident I locked the door before leaving the house.” After all, we’ve all been certain of things that have turned out not to be true.

By the same token, the uncertainty and relativity of which physicists speak is less germane, with respect to return journeys, that the fact that with time, everything changes. We change, the landscape changes, the people change, the prices change. You never step in the same river twice, and if you remain standing on shore, reluctant to take the plunge, the “winds of time” flutter by just the same, and you continue to change in spite of yourself. In the end, nothing is absolute.

Why harken back to Heisenberg or Einstein when we’ve got Heraclitus to draw upon?!

But Delbanco’s description of a region that has retained much of its appeal also carries an unspoken message of maturation. The things we respond to remain the same—food, wine, lavender, rosemary, history, comfort. (He speaks with affection of “the insouciance of youth” but the rooms the couple stay in cost $600 per night.) The question is, As we age, do these “romantic” aspects of travel sink in further, resonate more deeply?

I would agree with Delbanco (though he doesn’t come right out and say so) that they do. But we also begin to learn, as we age, that you don’t have to travel as far as you thought to find them.

Nisswa-Stammen 2011

2011-06-13T22:43:00.007-04:00

The Nisswa-Stammen is a low-key festival held each summer in an outdoor “pioneer village” in the lake country a few miles north of Brainerd, Minnesota. Fans of Nordic culture drop in, often in costume, to listen to musicians play. There are amateurs and professionals, Scandinavians and home-grown talent. Dance and performance workshops are held throughout the day on Friday, there’s a concert that night, and the next day the musicians play a rotating schedule of 30-minute sets at three outdoor stages, with further brief dance instruction being offered (to live accompaniment) to beginners like me, in a log cabin “dance barn” so small it might better have been named the “dance shed.” On Saturday night a smorgasbord is offered in a nearby church, followed by a genuine dance that can run to the wee hours of the morning.

Or so I’m told. We’ve been to two such festivals now—the Saturday portion at any rate—and have taken a few dance lessons ourselves. But we’re not sufficiently adept to make it worthwhile lingering at the evening dance. Besides, after a long drive and a day of listening (and eating) in the open air, we’re pretty much worn out by the time that last meatball disappears from the smorgasbord plate.

Last year the Scandinavian headliners put on outstanding shows—Geitungen (from Norway), Faerd (from Denmark and Sweden), and the Polka Chicks (from Finland). This year the groups were smaller and slightly more traditional in their approach. This required more careful listening, but the rewards were equally great.

The Nasbom brothers, for example, learned to play from their musician father, and listened to eminent fiddlers perform in their home, including Eric Sahlström and Viksta Lasse, at an early age. Torbjörn took up the nyckelharpa as well, and though Pär later moved the Switzerland two decades ago, they brothers have continued to perform and tour together, playing the Uppland tunes they first learned as children.

Norwegian Hardanger fiddler Britt Pernille Frøholm teamed up with freebase accordionist Linda Gytri for a couple of lively and good-natured sets, though I was no less mesmerized by the fiddling of America’s foremost Hardanger fiddler, Loretta Kelley. She did a few haunting tunes at one point with vocalist Arna Rennen, who lives on the North Shore. Arna, in turn, did some story-telling numbers in the Summer Kitchen Stage with Georganne Hunter.

We know Georganne because I did a book with her husband, the eminent North Shore herring fisherman Stephen Dahl. But such connections didn’t help when we tried to get past the Viking gate-keeper into the Summer Kitchen, a log cabin just half the size of Dance Barn, if that. (We listened at the window for a while, and Georganne later filled us in on the gist of the stories they were telling in that cozy space. Something about a jilted sister whose bones were fashioned into a harp, which later revealed the nasty deception at the wedding, etc. )

Out on the Allspel Stage, veteran Finnish soloist Arto Järvelä also put on quite a show, drawing some delicate stuff from the fiddle and letting loose on one or two raucous vocals. He later took the stage with the American group Kaivama—one of the few groups with both a guitar and keyboard (though never used at the same time).

As you may have guessed, I couldn’t tell a polsk from a jenkka or a hambo from a nigvals, not if my life depended on it. (I could easily distinguish between a siguiriyas and a soleá, but that’s a different story.) Still, I love the music—both the cheerful “regular” tunes and the strange, irregular ones. Something precise and lively and as simple as a children’s game, yet steeped in piney forest mists and the brooding spirit of Swedenborg and Hamsun.

How can you really explain it? Yet music and dance and food and landscape and heritage must come together from time to time. At the Nisswa-Stammen they do.

At the smorgasbord we sat across from a Francophone couple from Thunder Bay who’d come down for the entire festival—a ten-hour drive. We got to talking about the Acadians in Louisiana and they told us about a Celtic festival held in Thunder Bay every year. Later we all headed up to the town hall at Pequot Lakes for the big dance. You can’t miss the place: it’s just off the highway, under the water tower painted to resemble a giant fishing bobber!

This blending of music and dance is the essence of the experience, of course. If you add the ambiance of a cool summer evening—with or without nighthawks—the memory sinks deep. And if you can’t do the dances, you can still enjoy watching. They do some “mixers” that everyone screws up, due to how crowded the dance floor is (and also due to the fact that some people just can’t count to eight). But it’s fun, regardless of the confusion, to find yourself dancing with an eminent fiddler or a twelve-year-old girl with braids and braces for a few minutes, before the routine carries you on to your next partner.

But that's not the end of it. After a lovely nightcap in your room at the Rodeway Inn in Brainerd, loooking out toward the dumpster behind Papa Murphy's and the big white Kohl's sign beyond, you drive back to the Cities the next morning and begin searching through the Itunes store for music by Pernille Britt Frøholm or Jensen and Bugge. You download. You listen. The sound is better than anything you heard under the pines at the Pioneer Village in Nisswa. Something remarkable going on here.

Tettegouche Backcountry

2011-06-07T08:11:00.007-04:00

A hundred-year-old cabin on the shores of a pristine lake in the boreal forest of Northern Minnesota? It might sound like the height of luxury, and beyond the reach of most of us. Let me complete the picture by adding that the cabin has mice, but neither bathroom nor running water—there’s a creaky hand-pump fifty yards away. It’s heated by wood. The “rustic” furniture is only marginally comfortable. And did I mention that you have to walk almost two miles through the woods to get to the place?

My hat goes off to those backpackers who cram five days worth of equipment and supplies into a pack and set off up the Superior Hiking Trail. We had trouble getting a week-end worth of supplies—no tent, no foam pads, no cooking equipment required—into our packs. Just sleeping bags, clothes, and food. And then there were the books, of course. A thick terrycloth towel? Yes, we brought one. A cribbage board? Why not? The hooch was strictly measured and limited: six ounces of Calvados per night, divided more or less equally by two.

The cabin does have a modern two-burner stove and a little fridge (with ice). The building itself was originally part of a logging camp that was later sold to a group of Duluth businessmen, back when cars had cranks and fighter-pilots flew bi-planes. Some of the buildings fell down eventually and the state of Minnesota bought the rest of them. There are four cabins left, along with a variety of sheds and a single large lodge that anyone who trudges in can hold a picnic in.

Each of the private cabins comes with a canoe, and there are fishing rods lined up in one of the sheds. No lures or bait, however. That took me by surprise. Though I haven’t fished in thirty years, there are two Rapalas sitting right here—one gold, one silver—in the front drawer of my desk. They’re made of balsa wood: I think I could have borne the weight. I ended up fishing from shore with a bobber, using raw chicken or slices of andouille sausage for bait. Hard to explain, I had no luck.

Cabin B, which we reserved about a year ago after spending a night in cabin D, is by all accounts the best of the lot. It’s located beyond the others are the end of the trail, making it the most private by far, and it’s also the only one that sits right on the lake.

Micmac Lake is only five feet deep in many places, but it’s surrounded by lofty hills and sheer cliffs that in Minnesota might almost be mistaken for little mountains. There are swamps at either end—always fun to explore. On our second night we paddled a circuit around the lake’s shoreline in half an hour, spotting a deer in the distance at one point and later surprising a huge beaver who was sunning himself on the shore a few feet from our passing canoe. He waddled down the grassy embankment and eased himself onto the water, paddled a few feet from shore, then took a dive, slapping his tail—twice! On the east side of the lake fifteen turkey vultures were soaring and diving together in the evening light. They looked almost majestic.

The first night it dropped below fifty, and we had a fire blazing in the cast iron stove. The next morning broke bright and sunny, and we were on the hiking trails by 8:30. Ovenbirds and black-throated green warblers were singing away by the hundreds. Though we never spotted either of those species on the hike, we did get a very good look at a handsome magnolia warbler, a red-eyed vireo, and a least flycatcher.

The trail we took circles around Mic Mac Lake through the hilly terrain, joins the Superior Hiking Trail for a while, diverges north to swing around Nipisiquit Lake, crosses Mosquito Creek, and ends up back at the hunting camp. It took us three hours, and was unspeakably pleasant from beginning to end. The leaves are not entirely “out” yet, and we could see ample chunks of sky. The trailsides were an unending succession of starflowers, clintonia blossoms, sarsaparilla, emerging ferns, bedstraw, and forget-me-nots. The temperature? A delectable 65 degrees would be my guess.

We took a spur at one point out to Raven Rock, an exposed piece of rock that offers a spectacular view out across the hills to Lake Superior. The air was so clear that with binoculars we could see the channels separating the Apostle Islands, maybe 60 miles away.

During our hike back to the car Sunday morning, we stashed our packs in the woods at one point and took one final side-trip up to Mount Baldy. Another sunny morning, another great view across the hills to the sea.

June 1 Rhapsody

2011-06-01T12:22:00.004-04:00

We’ve been having more than our share of Weird Weather—so much so that those two words have become a genuine meteorological catch-phrase, worthy of capital letters. It seems especially important to note, therefore, that never before has the earth been graced with a finer June 1 than the one we’re in the midst of today here in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Bright sun, cloudless sky, slight breeze, 65 degrees.

I drove to Uptown early for a dental check-up. My route took me past the tornado-twisted trees in Wirth Park, it’s true, but that was a single ugly stretch in a long and lovely drive; the dappled light on the parkway was superb.

I chatted with the dental hygienist about our upcoming trips to the North Shore (ours in June, hers in July) and she also told me about her son’s vegetable garden. My dentist, as it happens, returned only recently from a trip to Chaco Canyon, where a friend of his is spending the summer as a volunteer.

My next stop was the Wedge, Minneapolis’s oldest and most venerable co-op. I always feel a notch or two more virtuous when I step into that place, though I can’t afford the produce, and was there mostly for the fresh figs. I also picked up some banana chips, granola, and dried black beans—to be reconstituted during our North Shore trip. It’s a two-mile hike in to the cabin we’ve rented in Tettegouche State Park. (I’m thinking bean dip with a fresh-chopped jalapeño and chips.)

Back home with work to do, I decided the day was just too fresh, and took the time to transplant a few hostas into a patch of our back yard that was laid bare by the demise of a juniper tree last fall. Yesterday we planted three six-foot arborvitaes along the fence. I’m not sure how well they’ll do—the roots seem to be caked in clay and each tree weighs a ton—but they sure were cheap!

The other day I came across a few lines in a poem called “Riffing Deciduous” by Brendan Galvin that came close to encapsulating the effect summer days eventual have on us:

Summer, old bore, though we love the ways
you reduce everything to five shades
of green, one of these days

in a fall of soft tonnage, your stranglehold
on the obvious must end…

But it’s far too early for such sentiments, on this fresh, cool, morning with the honeysuckles still in bloom.

And now, to work!

Publishing Industry Workshop

2011-05-28T10:00:00.017-04:00

I gave a talk about the publishing industry at a public library south of the river the other day. I’m no expert, but over the years I’ve designed maybe a hundred books, edited fifty, written three … and schlepped millions.

I had anticipated that if anyone actually showed up, they’d probably be writers eager to learn more about how to get their work into print. Partly true. People did show up, but they seemed to be interested in every aspect of the process. Some raised their hands when I asked if anyone in the crowd had ever considered writing a book. Fewer raised their hands when I asked who was actually working on one.

It can boggle the mind to consider that a publisher buys a manuscript from an agent, hires editors, designers, proofers, and perhaps marketers, then sends off the files to a printer. The finished “product” might then go to a distributor who handles “fulfillment,” while also making an effort to get the title into a major warehouse, at which point a bookstore chain might (or might not) agree to order it. A publicist or marketing department sends out ARCs for blurbs and to reviewers, sets up media spots, etc.

None of which can guarantee that a prospective reader will notice the book, and beyond that, actually buy it.

Considering the difficulties involved in finding a publisher for a manuscript, and the Byzantine nature of the production and supply chain, it’s no wonder some attendees were interested in the advances in technology and distribution that fall under the rubric of Print-On-Demand, which sides-steps many of these elements. They asked about production quality, ISBNs, Amazon sales, ebooks, and all the rest. Alongside these reasonable concerns, I tried to bring the issue of “platform” into the discussion, which amounts to trying to get famous before you publish your book.

Such issues are the stuff of countless blogs, and I had nothing original to offer. What I tried to stress is the value of assessing motives when trying to get a book into print. Self-expression? Fame? Wealth? Making the world a better place? Some books are probably best suited to being hand-bound and distributed to relatives and friends. (Like my own choice little hand-bound volume: What Ever Happened to Hegel?, which I showed the class.)

We talked a little about blogs—a cheap and easy way to get your work “out there.” Few read them, perhaps, yet it’s worthwhile, I think, to cross the threshold between private and public thinking from time to time, in any case.

One woman told the story of a cattleman who printed a thousand copies of his memoir and gave 800 of them away at cattle auctions as a promotional effort. The book never caught on (or perhaps he’d saturated the market) and they gave the other 200 away at his funeral.

To me that’s a powerful tale of the value of the printed word. I’d like to have a copy myself. Coincidentally, one of the sample “self-published” books I brought along was a book of cowboy verse and sayings that the author, a rancher herself, sells at Cowboy Poetry festivals. Opening it at random during my little seminar, I read:

A cow chip is paradise to a fly.

No one laughed.

We were nearing the end of the lively ninety-minute event when it occurred to me that I had made only brief mention of the role played by an editor in getting a book to market. In retrospect that seems a little strange, considering that I spend quite a bit of my time editing books. The long and short of it is that editors exist—in some situations they’re unavoidable—and they can radically improve the quality of a manuscript.

It depends on the condition of the work to begin with. In some cases, an editor might be compared to a spouse who picks flecks of lint off the author’s tuxedo before he or she steps on stage to deliver a speech. In others, the editor functions as a building inspector, informing the homeowner that the wiring isn’t up to code, the deck needs a safety rail, and the cracked concrete in the sidewalk will have to be replaced. And there are occasions when the editor functions as a counselor, coaxing the author to a fuller realization of what he or she really wants to say. Often it's a combination of all three.

Henry David Thoreau once remarked, “It takes a long time to make a book short.” This could be the mantra of any editor, with the added proviso, “…and costs a lot of money.” But Thoreau also said, “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new perspective on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

Herein lies the spirit of the book as a medium of communication, and of communion. There are times when I begin to wonder if the book industry actually serves this spirit, in the midst of all the media hoopla it generates, but I have noticed that the individuals who work for publishers, printers, and retailers almost invariably do love books. It’s only when you add the sales and production issues to the equation that things sometimes get dicey, turn sour, or go awry.

And without those elements, we really wouldn’t have many books on the shelf.

We wouldn’t have much to read.

The God Particle

2011-05-25T08:36:00.003-04:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17 mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, is the world’s largest atom smasher. I sometimes wonder if it might be the world’s largest man-made anything. Certainly it’s the world’s largest tool.

Meanwhile, the Museum of the San Raphael Swell, in Castle Dale, Utah, has a remarkable set of artifacts on display—a complete Stone Age tool kit, including letter belt and holsters, that was once the property of a Fremont Indian. The kit contains an array of stone chopping tools running from large to small. (I wonder if the individual who owned it was “union.”)

Neither tool is really of much use to us today. Stone tools are rather clumsy, even when they’re very sharp. And the LHC is only used for looking at things so small they don’t seem to be there.

It was rumored recently that the physicists conducting experiments on the LCH had found the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle sometimes referred to rather frivolously as the 'God particle.'

Some insiders dismissed the “leak” as a hoax, while others lauded the find as a potentially huge breakthrough in our understanding the how the universe works. 'If it were to be real, it would be really exciting,' physicist Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University exclaimed, upon hearing the rumor.

In the currently orthodox Standard Model describing the “building blocks” of the universe, six elementary bosoms seem to be required by the math. (We’ll leave the fermions for another time.) Of the six, only the Higgs has never hitherto be actually seen or detected in any way…until now. Yet it is the Higgs bosom, physicists theorize, that bestows mass on all the other particles. Without that tiny and elusive particle, the Standard Model offers no explanation for why objects have mass.

When reading popular reports about scientific breakthroughs, it’s always a good idea to listen closely for the metaphors. I wonder, for example, in what way a particle “bestows” mass on other particles. The image of a knight bestowing knighthood on another, kneeling knight, springs to mind. It seems to me (in my ignorance) that a particle either has mass or it doesn’t. Better yet, why don’t we just say that all particles have mass, and that “things” lacking mass aren’t particles but forces.

Adopting the semantic approach for a moment, I might suggest that objects have mass by definition. Objects that don’t aren’t objects. They just fly off into space like balloons, never to be seen again.

Even those physicists who do the most arcane math end up using metaphors and tinker-toy models to explain what they think they’ve discovered. And they make use of huge devices like the LHC to slam particles together at enormous speeds, just to see what comes flying out, because numbers themselves aren’t “real.” We just use them to describe the behavior of real things.

Not long after the rumors about the Higgs boson began circulating, physicists began taking bets about whether it would hold up to close scrutiny. Some were confident it was a false result, while others were hoping it was evidence of an entirely new particle that a new generation of physicists could spend their careers exploring.

When asked about the rumor, Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, TRIUMF, said: 'We are so close to learning something profound.'

Yet here again, we must ask ourselves what is “profound” about a particle that bestows mass? Especially once we’ve smashed it to bits and exposed it to the light of day. And why, for that matter, is this particle referred to as the God-particle? Is there something intrinsically divine about mass?

Or are we merely enchanted by dark spaces clothed in unintelligible symbols and enormous force, the way our ancestors were enchanted by the cryptic tales of the mighty Lancelot and the noble Yvain?

New Orleans: Jazz

2011-05-19T21:29:00.008-04:00

I have heard more than one person say recently, “New Orleans is my favorite city.” A cyclist we met on the Natchez Trace the other day said, “New Orleans. You either love it or you hate it,” and then added, “I want to be there right now.” My sister’s one-sentence appraisal is, “It’s smelly and dirty: I hate it.”

To each his or her own, as they say.

After having spent a mere two days on foot in the French Quarter, I’m in no position to call New Orleans my favorite city. (New York? London? Rome? Paris?) But I can say that New Orleans is fascinating and full of history and energy and music and color. If the Minnesota State Fair were held on the Left Bank in Paris, the atmosphere would perhaps resemble that of the French Quarter in New Orleans.

To which remark the learned might reply, “There is very little French architecture in the French Quarter. The neighborhood is largely a reflection of Spanish building and decorative techniques.” All well and good. Let’s just say that the open-air bohemian café-sitting, the street musicians, the various little shops and museums, the urban intimacy created by the side-streets and courtyards and grade-school kids in uniform marching toward the waiting bus, give the place an attractive European ambiance, while the affordable and unfussy Cajun cuisine and the ubiquity of tourists in flip-flops and tank tops divest the area of the slightest whiff of haughtiness or pretense.

Here’s a theory: The French Quarter is the anti-Las Vegas. Everything is small and closed in, some of it is venerable and most of it (dare I say it?) is sort of “real.” Yet it shares with Las Vegas the sense that those who come here know why they came, and they know how to have a good time while they’re here.

Ten minutes after we’d hit the streets, slightly overwhelmed by the age and glitter and grit of the Quarter, we turned a corner and happened upon the Smoking Time Jazz Club, a brass band that was playing some old-time tunes like “Sweetheart on Parade” and “Livin’ in a Great Big Way.” A lithe young couple was doing the Charleston (or something) on the street in front of the band. They were part of the band, in fact. The musicians were equally loose and the soloists took to their sixteen bars of fame with brash and joyous aggressiveness.

Ninety degrees. Trumpets blaring, limbs flaring. It was a great introduction to the city. We even bought one of the band’s CDs—a self-produced item sans label wrapped in a sheet of yellow construction paper. (I’m listening to it now. It’s good.)

That night (after returning to the room for a nap, a shower, and a glance at the laptop in search of entertainment ideas) we wandered back down to Bourbon Street, which was just coming alive. Monday is probably the quietest night of the week, but there was still plenty of music blaring out of doorways, block after block.

Folks were wandering here and there with green Hurricanes in hand, though they weren’t staggering yet. It was exhilarating to thread that gauntlet, though nothing I heard sounded all that tempting to me. The Dixieland bands were less youthful and brash that what we’d heard at noon, and though the Cajun band we listened to for a while from one doorway was good, we’d been hearing that kind of thing for days and the dance-floor inside was already packed. The ubiquitous, noodling white blues guitarists that came into aural range, block after block, were uniformly dreadful. That’s just my opinion.)

Eight or twelve blocks on toward downtown, we finally wandered into the marble-lined, fern-festooned halls of the quiet, largely empty, and unmitigatedly staid lobby of the Royal Sonesta Hotel.

The choice was neither arbitrary nor escapist. We’d come to the Irvin Mayfield Jazz Playhouse to hear the The Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, which has a continuous record of performing in New Orleans dating back to 1910. A few of the original members have “passed” by now, of course. But drummer Bob French has led the group since 1977, which isn’t bad. The band was good-natured and eager to please. The white guitarist (who, to judge from his solos, might once have been a protégé of Johnny Smith or Howard Roberts) looked like he’d just stepped off the set of I Dream of Genie. A black torch-singer in a white spaghetti-strap gown stepped up onto the stage to do a few songs, and at one point the trumpeter cut loose with a brief but startlingly inventive solo. All in all, the set was “good enough,” considering there was no cover and a one-drink minimum.

It was made more interesting by the fact that a pleasant, uninhibited, middle-aged woman joined us at our table. She’s spent the previous week at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with a “gold” pass. She was thrilled to have heard Sonny Rollins at the final concert, and was a little surprised to learn that the Northerners with whom she was sharing a table had heard Rollins—“Yes, live”—several times during the ‘70s, when he was still in his prime.

She was an interesting woman—she called the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound home. Evidently she didn’t need money and wandered where she willeth, but she wasn’t trying to impress anybody. She seemed to have roots in New Orleans, too: as it happens, she was dating the bassist—a tall, elderly black man with a well-trimmed mustache and courtly manners who came over to join us after the set. He’d been engaged throughout the Jazz Festival with one combo or another, and the two of them re-lived the exciting moments they’d heard or participated in while we finished our $6 pints and prepared our exit.

“How long will you be staying in New Orleans,” the man asked us genteelly as we rose to depart. “We’ve only got one more day here,” I replied. “We’re due back in Minneapolis on Sunday.”

“But that’s four days!” he blurted out, somewhat surprised.

“We’ll be doing a bit of zigzagging through the Ozarks,” I replied apologetically. (But it was true.)

We could have learned a lot from those two, but it was a little hard to hear what they were saying across the table with the music being piped into the room.

The next day was walking tours (National Park Service) and museums and beignets and blackened catfish po boys, and I was surprised when, back at our hotel room at 6 pm, I looked over and saw Hilary with her curlers in her hair. I guess we’re going out again.

Bourbon Street was a bit more animated, and there were quite a few more women of all ages and shapes in fringed bikinis leaning from doorways toward the passing businessmen.

We got to the Jazz Playhouse at the Royal Sonesta before the set started. We listened in as the drummer (Jason Marsalis) chatted with the reedman (Rex Gregory) about the chord changes on some obscure Art Blakey LP from the mid-1950s like a couple of precocious college ethnomusicologists who were specializing in bop.

As I sat in my Victorian chair fifteen feet from the stage, the talented but self-effacing bassist, Peter Harris, looked like a surfer Wilson that was too clean-cut to join his older brothers in the Beach Boys. Marsalis himself looked like a young Will Smith. And Rex looked like a thin white guy with a cap trying to be cool. I mention the strangely collegial appearance of these folks as a prelude to declaiming that the set they played was one of the best I’ve heard in years.

As I remember it, a week or two after the fact, the play-list included a Charlie Parker tune (“Barbados”), a Monk tune (“Nutty”), a Hoagy Carmichael tune (“Stardust”), and “All of Me.” But Jason Marsalis, like his older brother Wynton, is not only a fine musician but a musical scholar and a resident of New Orleans. Therefore, he felt compelled to grope even deeper into the past to come up with “St. James Infirmary,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and finally even “Bourbon Street Parade.” But there was nothing academic or Gunther Schuler-esque about these performances. Marsalis provided the percussive energy and Gregory sustained the lyric spark. I kept saying to myself, like Redford (or Newman), “Who are those guys?” The absence of a piano was a blessing. Genius in our midst. Egoless expression. These people don’t know how good they are…

Acadiana Travelogue

2011-05-15T23:02:00.015-04:00

The term “acadiana” has been appearing in the news of late, because that’s the region of Louisiana that will bear the brunt of the Mississippi flooding now that they’ve opened the Morganza Spillway. It wasn’t coined to the until the 1960s, but the French-speaking Acadians to which it refers began to arrive in the region in the eighteenth century, having been expelled from Nova Scotia by the British for “security” regions, though they had maintained a posture of vehement and long-standing neutrality in the colonial wars of the era.

Today few people in southern Louisiana speak French of any type, I suspect…but their grandfathers did. Yet the culture of the region is distinctive and colorful, with crayfish, Roman Catholicism, jambalaya, bayous, alligators, and the Cajun two-step adding to the fun. There’s a lot of oil industry activity as you approach the gulf, of course, in towns like Houma and Morgan City, and the Gulf Intracostal Waterway cuts through the region like an enormous gash.

On the map the entire area looks to be a maze of rivers, swamps, bayous, and canals, but anyone who pays a visit will see that most of “acadiana” consists of flat fields planted with sugar cane, wheat, and rice. As you travel south down the minor roads that parallel the major bayous, the fields turn to grasslands and water.

During the three days we were in the area, we caught a bit of the local flavor. I think our most pleasant morning was spent in St. Martinville, where we toured an Acadian plantation and ate some fabulous biegnets at Le Petit Paris Café. A group of women were having breakfast when we arrived. One of them told us that they attend Mass every day at 6:30, arriving 30 minutes early to do a few rosaries. On Saturdays they have breakfast together after Mass at the café across the street from the church.

“St. Martinville is a dying town,” the woman told us. “You can see for yourself.” And she gestured toward the empty storefront of Hebert’s Jewelry store next to the café. “When they built to freeway from Lafayette to Baton Rouge, the businesses began to drift north to Breaux Bridge.” All the same, she was born and raised there, and she lives next door to her brother, who has taken to shooting the armadillos that tear up the yard with their snooting and shoveling antics.

Breaux Bridge is famous for its Café des Amis, which serves some very fine food and holds a Zydego brunch every Saturday morning. We’d eaten lunch there the previous day, and also caught some of the Saturday morning Zydego action before walking a half-mile on up the highway past the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket to the Breaux Bridge Crayfish festival.

Mulates is a more traditional Cajun roadhouse out on the highway, with lower ceilings, more frequent live music, murals of the bayous on the walls, and a bigger dance floor. (You can watch a video of the Saturday morning action at Cafe Les Amis at the end of this post.

A few miles south into the backcountry (presuming you know the way) is Lake Martin, the shores of which are ringed with half-submerged cypress trees.

It’s easy to spot alligators near shore, and at one point the scrubs contain a rookery where we watched little blue herons feed their babies as roseate spoonbills flew back and forth from their nests in the pines further out in the swamp.

As you proceed south and east toward Houma, the vast workings of the oil industry begin to manifest themselves. Cranes, vast fields covered with pipes and machinery. Helicopters here and there. And as you continue further south toward Cocodrie, farms give ways to grassy expanses, and villages are replaced by fishing “camps” sitting on fifteen–foot stilts.

It’s beautiful down there. But it’s the end of the road. And much of it will be under water soon.

Back in Breaux Bridges, we took some dancing lessons at the Crayfish festival. Then we ate three pounds of crayfish. In fact, we bought three pounds, but once you’ve torn the heads off, and peeled way the legs, there isn’t much left: I’ll bet we didn’t eat more than a third of a pound apiece.

We would have danced—there were several bands playing—but I couldn’t figure out what to do with our lemonade glass that guaranteed unlimited $1 refills. (It was 92 degrees.)

Mississippi Floods

2011-05-09T19:19:00.004-04:00

It's been in the news, I know. The masses of water barreling down the Mississippi. We saw it all from the bluffs in Natchez and Memphis. But when you're driving around amid the bayous of southern Louisiana, you don't get the news. There's still a lot of dry ground between Houma (which is an hour southwest of New Orleans) and the Gulf of Mexico.

There are interesting bridges along the backroads that parallel the bayous on the way south to Cocodrie to allow the shrimping boats to get through. Much of the landscape is water, though there's also a lot of grass--it looks like a very unkept corner of the Netherlands. The houses and shacks that line the bayous are all perched fifteen feet in the air, with cars and boats stored in the open air underneath.

I spotted a least bittern fly into a roadside march and then run delicately along the tops of the reeds in pursuit of a fish. Forster's terns were flying overhead, and helicopters passed repeatedly much higher up carrying men and parts out to the oil rigs in the gulf.

A construction worker at a snow-cone stand along the canal told us that they were going to open a spillway and flood the town of Morgan City, which we passed through yesterday. We told him we were headed for New Orleans and he said: "They're also going to open up the Morganza spillway. You'll be going right over it."
"Can we get through?" I asked.
"Of course," he said, "There's bridges."

From the waterfront in the French Quarter, the river looks like a mile-wide rapids... but the ships are still moving up and down the river. Music is playing on the Riverboat Natchez. They're serving beans and rice and beer and hurricane drinks at a dozen restaurants in the Quarter. It's 90 degrees, and it's fun.

A Few Things I Can't Tell You About

2011-05-04T22:36:00.001-04:00

A lovely spring afternoon on the campus of the University of Iowa.

Red buds in bloom in the woods at Geode State Park.

A Civil War battle reenactment in a park in Keokuk, complete with horses, cannons, uniforms, and gunpowder.

The sight of the gleaming arch on the waterfront in St.Louis, towering impossibly above your head.

The ribs at Pappy’s Smokehouse.

The flamingos at the St. Louis Zoo.

The ancient earthen mounds at Cahokia, Illinois, towering over the surrounding countryside.

The 18th century French buildings in the little riverside town of St. Genevieve.

The flowering dogwoods on the hiking trails at Hawn State Park.

The shortleaf pines that look like the Aleppo pines in Rome.

The floodwaters of the Mississippi, covering fields for as far as the eye can see.

The chicken at Gus’s Chicken Shack in Memphis.

The town square in Oxford, Mississippi, which has three bookstores.

These are a few of the things I can’t tell you about, because I’m on a trip.

Willie Nelson - King of Luck

2011-04-28T08:56:00.004-04:00

I have a generally sunny view of humanity, but it gets ramped up a few degrees higher every time I head down to the Mpls/St. Paul Film Festival. In the lobby you'll see interesting characters from every walk of life who have dragged their butts down to the Mississippi to watch a film they’ve never heard of--just for the fun of it.

We were feeling like we’d neglected the event a little this year, having seen only seven films, two of which were not part of the festival line-up. We’re leaving town in a few days for the Gulf of Mexico, and will miss the "Best of the Fest" reprise. I doubt if the film of Finnish men exchanging stories of their peak experiences in the sauna will ever find a local distributor. Nor the Bollywood retelling of the epic Ravaanan, suitably modernized.

But we did make it down one last time last night, to see a musical biopic—to get us in the mood for the trip south, I guess. Two years ago we saw a film about Maria Callas at the fest. Last year it was Glenn Gould. And last night it was Willie Nelson. All three films were shot in black and white, and all three were good.

The King of Luck is made up of stills of truck-stops and rickety old towns, shapshots from Willie’s family albums, interviews with Willie’s band members and technical crew, his sister, kids, and wives. There’s an affectionate, easy-going tone to the thing, and lots of live performance footage. We also see Willie playing poker with Owen Wilson and Woody Harelson, and there are some choice scenes from the 1960s of a very young and clean-shaven Willie talking about the song he wrote, “Hello Walls,” with Faron Young (who made it a hit), Kris Kristopherson, and other Nashville song-writers.

In one of the film’s last scenes, Willie plays a song he’s just written. Billy Bob Thornton (who directed the film) is listening. It’s got complex harmonies and an interesting, unpredictable tune. Another “Stardust” in the making?

My Spring Confession

2011-04-25T20:50:00.004-04:00

I don’t read poetry much, but that’s not because I don’t like it. I love poetry, poetry is my religion. But after reading one poem—presuming it’s a good one—I find myself filled with awe and admiration for the poet, the poem…and life. Then I stop reading.

Can I put it more simply than that? I don’t think so.

I picked up a copy of Alan Dugan’s new and complete poems this afternoon in the shop at Ridgedale Library. One dollar for a National Book Award winner, Poems Seven—How could I resist? A few hours later, after I’d finished editing an article about revolutionizing the World Bank, made a bowl of tzatziki (the cucumber was definitely over the hill), downed a glass of cheap red wine, and listened to a few minutes of Darius Milhaud’s Saudades do Brazil, I opened Dugan’s book and read the first poem. “This Morning Here.”

It was everything a poem should be. Brief, descriptive, cosmic, and very down-to-earth. So much so, that I had to put the book aside. I want to read more of Duggan’s work…someday. Maybe later tonight.

Then I got to thinking about the remarkable thing I’d seen today—the leaves on the honeysuckle bush. They opened. I watched them all day. This morning they were nascent. Now they’re bona fide. I can see them out the window beyond the computer screen even now. And just beyond them, I see the robust red orbs of the maple seed clusters. They almost look like blossoms, though they’re not. But shaggier than yesterday. As “orbs,” they’re past the prime.

I spoke with a client today who’s turning sixty. Two of her sons are getting married this year. And she’s going on a “girl thing” with some college friends of the same age to celebrate the occasion. That’s beautiful.

Then there’s the patch of wild ginger near the trellis by the garage. I’d never seen it before, where did it come from? And a few stray scilla—deep blue—amid the periwinkle, which are just beginning to flower. This is the time of year when a single day can make an enormous difference. It’s kind of thrilling.

But of course, every day is sort of like that. If nothing else comes to mind, crack open a book of poems.

International Film Festival

2011-04-18T10:30:00.015-04:00

As the weekend comes to an end, I finally settle back into an easy chair, having visited Mali, Rajasthan, Israel, Romania, South Ossetia, the Congo, and Kashmir—all without leaving town. Yes, the Twin Cities International Film Festival is upon us once again down at St. Anthony Main. Better organized than ever. The Aster Café, at the other end of the building from the theater complex, has also been transformed into an inviting place, with $3 house wines (poor) and $5 Happy Hour flatbread pizzas (good). It’s a nice place to meet friends before a show.

Steering clear of the dark European love triangles and Scandinavian vampire flics, we caught Kinshasa Symphony, a delightful documentary about an amateur orchestra in the Congo rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The city of Kinshasa itself has “third world” written all over it, with sewage running down the unpaved streets past crumbling mud and concrete buildings. But the camera-man has adroitly kept our attention focused on the extraordinary energy, life, and color all around, and the musicians themselves are uniformly high-spirited, though most of them are self-taught and the music is a challenge.

There are set-pieces interspersed throughout the film of soloists performing in the midst of the urban throng, and also a few subplots. For example, the flautist is looking for a new “apartment” and one of the string players is building a double bass from scratch. But the film mostly bubbles over with the innocent joy of music-making, offering an inside look at the “African temperament” without the evil despots or the machete massacres.

Hopping from theater 3 to theater 5 down the hall (yes, we had tickets) we then saw Russian Lessons, a truly dreadful exposé of Russian efforts in 2008 to stir up ethnic strife, start a war with neighboring Georgia, and then convince the Western media that the Georgians had started it. And as we sit through a grueling hour-and-a-half of peasants describing how Russian soldiers murdered their loved ones in cold blood before their eyes, tortured priests, threw peasants down wells just for the fun of it, bombed schools, and worse, we may begin to ask ourselves why we’ve chosen this particular type of Friday night entertainment. Most people have no idea where Georgia is, after all, much less South Ossetia or Abkasia. And few of us have much personal influence in the region in any case.

But film-makers Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov, who are Russians themselves, have risked their lives to give the world a more accurate picture of what’s been happening on the southern borders of their country, and how the European community has reacted to war crimes committed by the nation that supplies them with much of their oil and natural gas. (The answer? Obsequiously.) It’s a situation worth pondering.

Our Saturday night feature was an Israeli film, The Human Resources Manager. You won’t find it in the festival booklet: it’s playing at the Lagoon in Uptown. But it’s the type of film the festival often shows. Director Eran Riklis’s previous outing, Lemon Tree, was a big hit at the festival a few years back. Riklis’s current films is more complicated and also better, though less overtly emotional.

In fact, the title is the worst thing about it. It deals with the irritable HR man of a prominent industrial bakery in Jeruselem, who finds himself in a jam when one of his employees (a foreigner whom he’s never met) dies in a suicide bombing. A variety of complications ensue, but the upshot is that the HR man must return the body to Romania, accompanied by an annoying tabloid journalist who’s writing an exposé on the insensitivity of the bakery to its employees.

He’s estranged from his wife and eager to return home in time to take his daughter on a field trip, but the unexpected challenges he runs into in Romania threaten to turn the film into an absurdist shaggy dog story. Yet by imperceptible degrees, our hero’s desire to dump the body and get back to Israel is subsumed by a new and stronger desire to “do right” to the employee he never knew and also to the odd-ball family she left behind when she emigrated to Israel. He meets the former husband, the angry son, and finally, after a perilous cross-country journey in a military vehicle, the woman’s peasant mother. Every turn of the path is unexpected, and there are personal details littered here and there along the way that leave us with a hundred things to think about.

The next day we bid farewell to the glorious afternoon to accompany Dutch filmmaker Sander Francken on a trip to three exotic locales—Rajistan, Mali, and Kashmir. For Bardsongs, Franken commissioned eminent folk musicians from each region to write and perform a song retelling a local folktale chosen by Franken himself. We watch the musicians performing, then enter into the narrative cinematically as the music continues on the soundtrack.

The stories are familiar and somewhat simplistic, though I wasn’t quite sure how any of them would end. The entire enterprise has a multi-cultural Arabian Nights feel, and the fact that there are three tales rather than just one guards against the premier danger that peasant films set in exotic locations succumb to—excessive length. Bardsongs is a perfect film--colorful, sweet, exotic, and just a little bit wise. The music itself adds a good deal to the atmosphere.

Field Trip--St. Peter

2011-04-12T10:23:00.006-04:00

The day was humid, warm, and intermittently overcast. Spring was in the air, and we decided to venture southwest across some of the most beautiful landscapes in the metro area—up the valley of the Minnesota River. The river had overflowed its banks in most places, and vast forests of trees were rising from the gray-brown expanse of water. The bridge across the river to Chaska was closed. But the water was receding—albeit very slowly, a policeman in the riverside park in Shakopee told us.

It’s a historic part of the state, and the river towns still boast stone and brick buildings dating from the Civil War era. There are gravel pits and tree farms on either side of the highway, and various shelves or levels of floodplain from which to view the river valley, depending on which highway you follow. In many places the lowest level, which floods commonly year after year, has been turned into the Minnesota Valley State Recreation Area.

At one point we turned down a gravel road and pulled into a parking lot at the Louisville Swamp trailhead, wandering from there through savannah-like landscape a few hundred yards to an overlook. A man returning to his car with a big white dog exclaimed, “There are snakes everywhere!” as he passed.

We didn’t see any. But we heard plenty of frogs croaking in a pond, and at the edge of the bluff I got a very good look at a field sparrow, whose attractive pink beak and subtle head-coloring set him apart from the brashly striped song sparrows we more commonly see flitting through the underbrush. The sun had come out and you could smell the moist grass as it heated up.

Le Sueur is not an exciting or an attractive town, though Pierre-Charles Le Sueur, the Frenchman for whom it’s named, had a colorful life. He led the first white party up the Minnesota River in 1700 and established as fort upstream from Mankato, where it was suspected the “blue earth” was rich in copper. He had returned down the river with some big tubs of mud for analysis when the fort was overrun by Sac and Fox Indians and most of the inhabitants were massacred. Le Sueur himself died not long afterward in Havana.

Crossing the swollen river in Le Sueur, we continued through the bottoms down the west side of the valley (much narrower than the east side) past the wonderful museum of the Nicollet County Historical Society (didn’t stop) and the St. Peter municipal park (underwater) and on into town in search of a Mexican restaurant.

The main street of St. Peter is extremely wide, and the old store-fronts are in pretty good shape. Coffee shops and co-ops betray the presence of a college somewhere nearby. Indeed, you can see the campus of Gustavus Adolphus perched on its hill to the west from many places downtown.

Ignoring the Taco John’s, we stepped into a darkened Mexican grocery store on Main Street. A young, heavy-set bleach-blond stood behind the counter with her back to us, applying a coat of mascara to her lashes.

“Is there a Mexican restaurant in town?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Behind the bank, down there,” and she gestured with her little brush before returning to her pocket mirror.

She repeated the name of the restaurant several times, but her English was limited and I wasn’t sure if she’d said The Agape ( the Greek word for Christian charity) or The Agave (the plant out of which tequila is manufactured). And I was suddenly reminded that one scholar involved in deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls arrived at the conclusion that the word “Christ” in the New Testament actually refers to a species of mushroom.

It was a fine little restaurant with a yucca-like agave plant on the sign, crowded with families and students. A soccer match was underway on a big screen in the other room, though the sound had been turned down. We steered clear of the tequila. The newly-scrubbed tile floor was treacherous enough as it was.

After lunch we wandered down the street to check out the newly-opened Cedars Grille. Housed in a historic building with rough-hewn limestone walls, it looks like the kind of place students would take their parents to when they visit the campus for the day. “It used to be Richard’s,” the cheerful hostess told us. When that drew a blank, she said, “You’re not from St. Peter, are you?”

I can image that the Cedars Grille might turn into a fine restaurant. The owner is of Lebanese descent, and he says he’s dedicated less to “fine dining” than to “affordable meals.” (Well, I saw butternut ravioli and chicken tarragon pasta on the menu along with the kabobs.)

We stopped to examine the statue in front of the courthouse of three-time Minnesota Governor John A. Johnson—the first to be born in Minnesota, and a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1908. We wandered into the art center on Main Street to see an exhibit of pottery by recent McKnight grant winners, but it’s a very small space and there wasn’t much to see.

There were at least fifteen bicycles parked outside the River Rock coffee shop just down the street, which seemed odd, considering that nearly everyone inside was hunched over a laptop. I came very close to buying a used paperback copy of Light in August but drew back at the last minute, though the book cost hardly more than the latte, and Faulkner is such a slow read that I certainly would have got my money’s worth.

During the long drive home we made one last discovery. The hamlet of Ottawa, Minnesota, sits in the woods on a terrace on the east side of the river a few miles downstream from St. Peter. It consists of twelve or fifteen buildings, eight of which were built of Oneota limestone during Minnesota’s territorial period. I’d never heard of it.

Spanish Spring - Tortilla Española

2011-04-07T20:25:00.003-04:00

Spring finally arrived in Golden Valley, Minnesota, yesterday. How do I know? I ventured outside without thinking of putting on a coat or hat, left the door to the deck open for more than ten seconds, and felt that faint glow of sunburn on my face at the end of the day. Things have been perking up for a while in the fields and woods hereabouts, too. Bluebirds at Highland Park Reserve, for example. Hilary and I drove to Hastings the other day, saw some loons in Lake St. Croix near Prescott, Wisconsin, song sparrows and phoebes in the park near the locks in Hastings, and quite a few kestrels on the wires in farm country, too! Egrets in the roadside swamps again, and a colony of elegant but unidentifiable terns well out in the Mississippi by Gray Cloud Island. (Unidentifiable from the seat of a moving car, at any rate.) I’m not sure what any of that has to do with Spain, but last night I made a gazpacho, and tonight I peeled a few potatoes and made my famous Tortilla Español. That’s a complicated way to make four potatoes and an onion, to be sure, but if you’ve got the time, it’s well worth the effort. I made the dish from memory, and inadvertently cut the oil involved by three-fourths. No wonder it stuck to the pan a little! Still, I pulled it off alright, like a seasoned pilot landing a 747 in an Iowa cornfield. God was not my co-pilot. All the while I was flipping the potato pie back and forth from the cast-iron pan to the white Noritake plate (part of a wedding gift from my uncle and aunt in Lincoln) my efforts were bolstered by the unearthly shrieks of Ginesa Ortega, flamenco cantaora extraordinaire, and her guitar accompanist Chicuelo. I hadn’t heard that CD in a while. I love that stuff.

Robert Glasper at the Dakota

2011-03-29T18:58:00.006-04:00

My two big gripes about jazz shows go together: the cover is too high and the set is too short. So when I heard that the brilliant young pianist Robert Glasper was going to do a single set at the Dakota with a $20 cover, I felt almost duty-bound to attend.

All the good seats were gone by the time I’d made up my mind, unfortunately, and I ended up on a stool against the back wall of the mezzanine. I could see the heads of the drummer and bassist, but Glasper himself was only visible when one of the men seated at the table by the rail overlooking the stage went to the bathroom. I could see the entire trio perfectly on the TV screen hanging at eye level on the wall behind the stage—but that’s not quite the same thing. I also wandered around a bit for a change of perspective.

By my reckoning, the show was 135 minutes long—a long set by anyone’s measure. And Glasper and his rhythm section sounded much like I expected them to sound. I like his style to the sound of leaves rustling. Listening to Glasper is the aural equivalent of watching the waves come in, mesmerized by the flow, the power, the uniformity, yet keenly intent on detecting the tidal shifts, the currents, the changes, within the shimmering, repetitive chords and arpeggios. All the while the bassist keeps the lower register churning and the drummer lays down a crisp, light ratta-tat-tat punctuated by a rim-shots now and again.

It’s a unique sound. A different conception of what music is supposed to do. Rather Asian, perhaps (though Glasper played the piano in three different churches as a youth in Houston, TX) and definitely far removed from the structural roots of jazz in the blues and the pop tunes of Hollywood musicals and Tin Pan Alley.

But there’s a fine line between “mesmerizing” and “monotonous.” Glasper’s trio crossed back and forth repeatedly. They also crossed occasionally into a domain of feverish improvisation that took me pleasantly by surprise.

At one point Glasper asked the audience if they wanted to hear “old” or “new.” Among the feeble call-outs “old” had the upper hand. “Oh, so you’re not interested in what I’m working on now?” Glasper remarked, as if his feelings had been hurt, and broke into “Take the ‘A’ Train.” It sounded good to me—that solid chord structure, that catchy tune. But it lasted only a few seconds. He followed it with a few bars of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Once again, tantalizingly brief. Then it was back to the signature ambient music—rustling chords, ethereal harmonies.

Glasper finished the set with a tune I recognized: it may have been “Of Dreams to Come” from the album In My Element. It was great. It’s the new music he’s devised. Subtle and remarkable. But perhaps better suited to a shorter set?

Quick Winter Getaway: Venice

2011-03-27T20:35:00.009-04:00

Stepping into the exhibit of Venetian masters at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts I felt like I was back in Europe again, where the museums are chock-full of glowing canvases. And who better than the Venetian painters of the Renaissance to help us forget the extremities of the season for an hour or two.

There may be no more than two dozen paintings in the show, augmented by a few drawings, etchings, and period maps, but that’s just about right when nearly all of them are masterpieces of one kind or another. The “progress” of Venetian painting from the dignified if somewhat stiff works of the Bellini brothers to the fluid realism of Titian’s early maturity, and on to the robust group scenes of Veronese and the often shallow hyper-dynamic distortions of Tintoretto, may be taken as a model of how a school of art can “develop” while leaving some of its best qualities behind in the process.

I love the early stuff. In fact, I have a (smallish) reproduction of Giovanni Bellini’s “Madonna with Trees” (1487) hanging on the wall right here in the house. Lorenzo Lottos’s “Madonna and Child with Saints,” (1505) which hangs in the current show (see above) is an outstanding example of the genre. The faces have both beauty and gravity, the colors glisten, and the two guys in the background chopping down trees are an added bonus.

Hanging kitty-corner to the left of the Lotto Madonna is Titian’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and an Unidentified Saint,” c. 1515–20. It’s no less compelling, but much more active and also more realistically modeled. The Madonna’s sleeve is so elaborate it almost looks ridiculous. Though hardly 2 x 3 feet in size, it’s a visual feast, sending the eye back and forth across the canvas in an unceasing motion. Our attention is drawn this was and that by the pattern of limbs and glances, the arrangement of forms, the depth of field. The red and blue are drawn from that standard palette of the time that may strike us as a bit generic, but the individuals represented have moved beyond the vaguely hieratic sobriety of that earlier period, so that however standard the themes and poses may be, they appear to us as thinking, feeling people occupying a landscape.

Jacopo Bassano’s “Adoration of the Magi” (ca. 1540) dominates the second room of the show. It’s twelve feel tall and full of life and color. The draftsmanship is impeccable, as far as I can see, excepting the contorted rendering of the architectural ruins required to properly separate the Holy Family from the newly-arrived kings and the curiosity-seekers beyond. Across the way, Veronese’s “Mars, Venus and Cupid” (ca 1580) attracts us…but doesn’t really hold us.

Titian’s nearby “Venus Rising from the Sea,” (1520) which was used as the promo image for the Minneapolis show, once again mesmerizes us, though not at first glance. The “beauty” is a little homely and the flesh is over-ripe, but the figure has an inner glow that reminds us how much depth can be brought to a “simple” rendering by the use of delicate glazes and a perfect sense of proportion. Even the greens in the misty sea roundabout are magnificent.

The two “Diana” painting that have received the most press, and were considered among Titian’s supreme masterpieces in his own life, are well worth a look, but few will walk away from the show, I think, hold them as favorites. The balance and motion are complex, and no part of the canvas fails to interest us, but the flesh reminds me of spaghetti that’s been too long in the soup. And let’s face it, it’s almost impossible to render a moment of surprise in a static work of art.

On the other hand, although Titian is working here on the highest level of “official” government art, the work remains solidly rendered and humanly expressive. He has not succumbed to the garish lighting and slapdash techniques of his younger contemporary Tintoretto, who also painted his share of masterpieces along the way, I guess--though they fall into that dreadful "Mannerist" category and are not represented in this show.

We walked out into the bright light of a late-winter Minneapolis morning, almost shocked at being reminded how expressive painting can be. Titian's painting doesn't tell us about Titian, so much as it re-acquaints us with the human spirit, exploring sensuality and eroticism but moving beyond them to a more subtle realm...

Hardly knowing what to do with ourselves, we had lunch at the sunny restaurant Blackbird at 38th and Nicollet(recommended). Then we rode the elevator to the top of the Foshay Tower downtown for a look out over the city. It ain’t Venice, and it ain’t New York. Breezy. No peregrines in sight. But it’s beautiful, and it’s fun.

Gee, you can see all the way to St. Paul!

We’re All Rich Now?

2011-03-25T14:18:00.006-04:00

Reading the daily newspapers can be a source of great entertainment—though not always in ways the authors intended. I was struck the other day by an article in the Los Angeles Times reporting that the wealth of the average American household had dropped by more than $100,000 between 2007 and 2009, from $598,000 to $481,000. The figures, derived from a recent Federal reserve survey, seemed a little high to me. (Or else this household is way below average). So I went on-line to discover, in a article in CNN Money based on the same Fed survey, that median net worth in the US fell from $125,000 to $96,000 during that two-year interval. These numbers are only a fifth of the ones reported by the LA Times. I guess the differences between average and median might account for some of the discrepancy. But if a few extremely wealthy households can account for four fifths of all wealth, that’s a real story. And if they lost their shirts in the downturn, who cares?

Buried in the CNN report, and also in an article by Mark Ryabstav at the website Obama.net, was the fact that “families below the median national income in 2007 actually saw their earnings increase by 2009.” Across the board, average family income dropped by $300 a year. In other words, the average family has to get by on 82 cents less per day today than they did two years ago. The average household size is somewhat more than three, which means that on average, we’ve all been out 25 cents every day since the crash! Bummer.

Averages are worth little, I know, and anyone who’s unemployed or carrying a big mortgage is in a terrible jam. But the article in question was dealing with averages. It was using such figures to justify the use of lines like: “The numbers paint a stark picture.” and “Now, a new report has come out about just how bad Americans are hurting because of the economic crisis.” How bad? Take a close look and the answer would be: On average, not too bad.

Meanwhile, I’m having a hard time figuring out why, if those below the median increased their earnings while the earnings of those above the median declined, we keep hearing reports of a widening income gap between rich and poor.

Seriously. Any ideas?

The Bloomington Writer’s Festival

2011-03-20T11:09:00.015-04:00

The Bloomington Writer’s Festival is a horse of a different color. It isn’t a trade show like the Midwest Bookseller’s Convention, and it isn’t a book fair like the Rain Taxi event. It’s a writer’s festival. Perhaps it might better be called an “aspiring” writer’s festival. Workshops are offered on various writing and editing techniques, and the tables set out in the several halls mostly offer services such as indexing, coaching, for-fee publishing, printing, marketing, ebook publishing, and print-on-demand services. It’s one-stop shopping for all the things that publishers offer their “talent” less often than they used to, and that more companies now brazenly offer to writers who have chosen to go it alone. I didn’t see any agents in the mix. I guess agents don’t need to seek out clients. (Dawn Frederick, of the Red Sofa Agency, told a crowd of listeners not long ago at a Writer’s Union meeting I attended that she had 7,000 queries last year…and picked up five authors.)

Scattered amid these well-meaning entrepreneurs were tables occupied by men and women who had written and published a book or two and were now trying to sell them. I’m not sure it was intentional, but one stretch of the aisle leading to the bathroom consisted entirely of WWII veterans who had immortalized their combat stories within the covers of hardbound books. Well, I can think of worse ways to spend your veteran’s pension—a second ATV, for example, or a $20,000 sweat lodge experience in the deserts of Arizona.

Across the sunlit hallway from these distinguished gentlemen was a Celtic contingent consisting of Erin Hart (False Mermaid, Haunted Ground) and Audrey McClellan, whose Scottish novels have a following of their own. Judith Palmatier, an old friend of mine who now runs her own press, Amber Sky (which published Audrey’s latest book) happened to be standing at the table when I passed by. It was old home week.

I fact, I’ve gotten to know quite a few of the people that were at the festival over the years, and I can attest that they’re a talented and well-meaning bunch. I was there tending the Nodin Press booth along with author Nick Hayes, whose memoir And One Fine Day has just been released in a paperback edition. Another Nodin author and friend, Gail Rosenblum, joined us for a spell to sign some books and greet the adoring multitudes. Her new book, A Hundred Lives Since Then, was released just a few weeks ago.

It was fun chatting with Gail and Nick at the booth, and I also enjoyed the stories offered by the passing strangers. One man, a retired policeman from Duluth, was writing a memoir about how a cop can keep his soul. Another told us he had a fabulous strategy for marketing his half-written book of poems. “What? A bi-plane banner? A hot-air balloon?” I quipped. “Well, I’m not going to tell you,” he replied. “But it’s going to be big!”

During my circuit of the halls I struck up a conversation with Carrie Rogers, an editorial assistant at Scaretta Press who filled me on how that publisher works. She also told me she writes a 10,000 word short story once a month, and hopes to get into a sci-fi anthology (the name of which I’ve forgotten) before she’s published too many stories to qualify. I noticed that one Scarletta title, Our Jewish Robot Future, is a finalist for a Foreword award this year. By such means do writers crawl from obscurity into the light of fame and fortune, inch by inch. (You think writing is about story-telling, about expressing oneself? Sometimes it seems the most important thing is the “platform.”)

I’m sure Kate St. Vincent Vogl, who teaches a variety of classes at the Loft, would disagree. I learned a few things about narrative construction in the few minutes I chatted with her, and I would recommend her classes to anyone on the basis of that brief encounter. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s had some success with her recent book Lost & Found:A Memoir of Mothers. But while we’re on the subject of “platform” it probably didn’t hurt that her book was the subject of a feature on NBC News.

Across the aisle, I chatted with Mike Roberts, who wrote a book about his experiences as the last light-house keeper at Split Rock after attending a conference similar to this one in 2009. North Star Press (just down the hall by the front door) published it, and he told me the first run of 2,000 is pretty much gone by now.

Our conversation was dwindling when Gail whistled me back to the Nodin booth. “Hey,” she said, “this guy wants to meet the author of Seven States of Minnesota.” So I shook the fellow’s hand. Then I turned to Gail and Nick and said, “I swear to God I do not know this man. He is not my cousin.”

“That reminds me, my cousins should be here any minute now, “ Nick replied, looking at his watch.

I couldn’t convince the fellow to buy my more recent book, Vacation Days, however. (Fame is fleeting, I guess.)

Later I listened with interest as Jane Gilgun told me how easy it is to upload files to Kindle, Scribd.com, Smashwords, and other sites. She recommended loading smaller files—articles, essays, chapters from books—which many people prefer to download. Evidently you can make money doing that.

Sybil Smith, a recent recipient of a lifetime award from MIPA, covered some of the same ebook ground, though I preferred hearing the stories of her radical days in Saskatoon, back when she was burning people in effigy on the courthouse steps.

The crowds were thinning (see photo) when Writer’s Festival director Kate Pettit stopped by a few minutes later. She was also generous with her reminiscences, telling us stories of the ingrown Finnish community of Menahga (one point of Minnesota’s Finnish Triangle, don’t you know) from which some of her relatives hail.

Three-thirty arrived at last, the Boy Scouts showed up to take down the tables, and Nick graciously helped me load all the books we’d brought back into their boxes (we’d sold eight or ten). But he was upset when he discovered a big bag of barbeque potato chips in one of the empty boxes under the table, which I thought I’d left in the car. They don’t sell food at the festival, and he hadn’t brought a lunch.

Which only goes to show you, the writer’s life is a hard one. Sacrifices are great. But you also meet lots of interesting people.

Craving for Kale

2011-03-14T16:30:00.004-05:00

It came over me all of a sudden, one sunny March afternoon. I really wanted to have some kale. I found a recipe on the Epicurious website for Kale and White Bean Soup. A few minutes later I was at the local grocery store loading my cart.

When I tried to weigh my bag of kale at the self-serve checkout I attracted the attention of the supervisor, a tall, middle-aged black woman with a long pony tail. She came over to investigate.

“How many bunches you got in there?” she asked, looking at me askance.

“Two,” I replied. “Two and a half, in fact. I thought they sold it by weight.”

She pushed a few buttons, clearing the screen, then pushed a few more, then entered the code for kale, which she knew by heart. When the quantity field came up she pushed “3.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s take a look.” She pulled out one, then two. There were some loose fronds in there, too. That was the “half” I was talking about. But I had to admit, when you grouped them together, they also made up a pretty robust bunch.

“You’re getting a lot of kale for 95 cents,” she said. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Eat it. I’m making a soup.” That sounded a little lame, so I added, “They say it’s good for you.”

“Tell me about it,” she replied, cracking a smile for the first time “We’ve been eating it for centuries.”

Back home I got the onions sautéing and put on a rarely-played Johnny Cash CD. As usual, I didn’t make it past the second number. Better suited to the occasion was “Jazz Jumps In: Swing This,” an anthology of classics from the early Big Band era like “East St. Louis Troodle-oo” and “Doggin’ Around,” performed by the likes of Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, and the famous Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy (never heard of him).

I dropped in the beans and browned the slices of kielbasa in a cast iron pan. As I chopped up the kale, so crinkling and firm, I said to myself, “I could see a brontosaurus eating this.”