Itasca in Evening Light

Itasca State Park attracts half a million visitors a year, but it's also big—33 thousand acres—which makes it easy for visitors to “get away from it all” if they know where in the park to go, and when. Hilary and I spent a few days there recently and were richly rewarded.

A defining event of our last visit took place when we pulled out of the driveway, leaving the tent behind. This time, we snagged a last-minute room before we left in the four-season suites, a modern complex just up the hill from Douglas Lodge with a small kitchen, stripped-log furnishings, and faux-Northwoods decor. There isn’t much of a view out the window, but when you’ve been stomping through the woods all day, who cares?

The trip north through Little Falls and Wadena has become so routine (though Menagha and Sebeka are wonderfully droll) that we decided to add a small detour to our route. After the traditional stop at Morey’s Fish House in Motley for fresh walleye and herring in horseradish sauce, we continued west on Highway 10 past New York Mills to Frazee, where Wannigan Regional Park opened recently, directly adjacent to the high school football field?!?

It’s a small park—a few miles square—though the locals have big plans for extending and developing it. It consists of a river, a covered bridge, and a few short walking and biking trails across a harmonious arrangement of woods and open fields. We’d been fighting a strong headwind all the way north, and it took some effort just to assay the lovely scene while standing in the parking lot.

One added feature, and the likely reason there were five cars in the lot when we arrived, is the larger-than-life-sized wooden statue of a troll that’s been built in the woods down by the river by a Thomas Dambo,  a Danish sculptor and self-proclaimed garbage-artist. He and his team have crafted quite a few such figures in the region, and around the world, out of recycled materials. Many people enjoy hunting them out. I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of fairy tales. I have quite a few volumes from the Pantheon Folklore Library—French, Arab, Irish, Swedish, Japanese, Native American, Victorian, Provençal—not to mention the classic works by Grimm, Andersen, Perrault, Marguerite de Navarre, and the Neapolitan pioneer Basile.

Trolls have their place in some of these worlds, like genies, kitsune, memegwesiwag, and leprechauns. But trolls are usually small, malevolent, creatures, also elusive. A twenty-foot wooden statue of a troll, resting in broad daylight under a tree, doesn’t seem much like a troll to me.

We took a tour through the reserve on our bicycles, and made a detour on foot through the woods to pay obeisance to the wooden giant. A half-hour later we were eating lunch a few miles down the road at a lakeside café in Detroit Lakes called Hub 41.  It was voted “best new restaurant in Minnesota” by Lake Time Magazine (which I’ve never heard of.) The view of the big lake from the patio was nice; the food was satisfactory. The most notable thing about the place was the decor.

From there it was back east on Highway 34 to Itasca, where the angled afternoon sun streaked through the dappled woods and lakes along the south entrance to the park.

We stopped by the campground office to pick up our key. The woman in line in front of us had a license plate from New York. “I’ve been camping out for a month,” she said, “I need a room with a bathtub.” She held up her left arm; it was in a cast.

Once we’d hauled our stuff into our suite, we got some dinner fixing together and headed down to the lakeside picnic area. We had the place to ourselves. Evening had arrived, and we sat at a picnic table a few feet from shore eating a cold supper while we listened to U of MN biology students (I guess) far out on the lake chatting as they kayaked toward the headwaters. “Yes, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Maybe we need to return to …”

It reminded me of my days as a camp counselor, of childhood evenings in Oklahoma playing kick the can, and also of something my mother told me one evening at the family cabin on Lake Vermilion about Carl Jung’s belief that the crepuscular hour was a “liminal threshold” where the ego's defenses dropped and the "unconscious" opened the soul. 

That may be true. But it’s the sound of distant, youthful voices in excited conversation that seals the uncanny emotional power of the moment.

The Schoolcraft Trail

We spent several hours the next morning in the vicinity of the headwaters, most of it on the Schoolcraft Trail, which follows the western shore of the lake. Small waves of warblers were working the woods along the trail. Most were juveniles or had lost their mating plumage and were hard to identify, but we did recognize a blackburnian, a black-and-white, a chestnut-sided, a Nashville, a golden-winged, a pine, a black-throated green, and a few other species.

On our way back to the car we ran into a couple heading out to the point. The man was wearing a floppy leather hat of the Buffalo Springfield variety and a tee shirt from the Winnipeg Folk Festival. “Are you from Canada?” I asked him. “

No, we’re from Cold Spring, just south of St. John’s. I sued to be an electrician at the university there.”

Hilary and I attended one of the first Winnipeg festivals, back in 1975. They last attend in 2018, just before Covid hit. “We couldn’t believe it! They had rap in the mix!”

Hilary mentioned St. John’s resident potter, Richard Bresnahan, and the woman piped up: “They’re going to light the wood kiln on October 14 at 4 p.m. It’s open to the public, and very ceremonial. You should come.”

“But I like to go a few days later,” the man added, “when the kiln is really hot and the flames are shooting up from the chimney toward the sky.”

Back at the parking lot, we ran into a ranger and we caught his attention.

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said.

“I’m not the guy to ask,” he said, “I’m in security.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. “The last section of the trail has been closed for years now. Why?”

“They made some archeological finds out there and they don’t want people disturbing the site before they get a chance to dig.”

“Well, we just want to go out and enjoy the view …”

“You’re not the kind of people they’re worried about,” he said.

So we went back down the trail, climbed through the brush alongside the barricade, and continued a quarter-mile to the point to enjoy the wonderful view across the lake toward Schoolcraft Island and the pristine wooded shoreline of the scientific and natural area beyond.  

State Fair Strategies

A day or two before visiting the fair, I copied the text from a Star Tribune article ranking the food into a Word document, then edited it down from six pages to two by removing all entries relating to cookies, desserts, ice cream, and alcoholic beverages, and every item that ranked lower than three stars. I also removed the cutesy narrative verbiage that accompanies such articles:  “We all liked the xxx but the yyy was bland and strangely salty at the same time.”

We forgot this document at home, but it’s just as well. Once you’ve had a pronto pup, an “about a foot long” hotdog with fried onions, a chocolate malt, and a bag of hot, greasy mini-donuts, you don’t have room, or funds, for much more.

We left home at 7:45—twenty minutes earlier than usual—and didn’t meet up with the line of cars west of the North Lot on Larpenteur Avenue until after we’d passed the Bell Museum. Halleluiah! Twenty minutes later, after repeatedly cursing the stream of cars entering the line from side-streets to the north, we turned the corner into the lot. It was going to be a good day.

We entered the fairgrounds proper at 8:45. There were still hints of coolness in the air, and the North Plaza was half-deserted. But there were plenty of people around, and when we spotted Giggles Campfire Grill down the way Hilary said, “Why not have some walleye cakes right now?”

So we did.

Year after year, we habitually begin the day in the Eco-building, but we decided on a whim to tackle the art building—the day’s piece de resistance—first. But we made a stop at an ATM because we couldn’t remember if credit cards were widely accepted on the fairgrounds. (Duh! I must have been thinking back to those days in junior high when you went to the fair with a friend and fifteen dollars in your pocket, which you’d been saving up all summer.)

The art exhibit was a mixed bag, as usual. The two qualities that were in short supply were freshness and expressiveness. Some works were laborious constructions using bottle caps or hand-made tiles. Some were nature paintings done from photographs that got all the details right but failed to bring things to life. The sculptural pottery was uniformly uninteresting.

But there were also quite a few pieces that made you look again, and again. Everything came together, for one reason or another. A casual confidence, a lack of evident effort. Also, perhaps, a sense of mystery.

Here, for example, is a piece by Kimberly Wetzel called "Hidden in the Marsh."

It isn't easy to see the delicacy of the lines, but I would simply say that it's pretty cool.

Or if that's a little messy for your taste, how about this wonderful image of a green heron that has been created entirely out of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Or how about this landscape by R. Baller called "Sharp Landscape."

The title hits the nail on the head. The painting has a sharpness in the edges, and also an intensity in the tints, without becoming overly detained or undermining the almost statuesque beauty of the landscape itself. 

On a different plane of exactitude in Ronda Dick's elegant and slight stylized "Who Doesn't Love a Birch."

You may accuse me of highlighting nature-oriented works while ignoring the portraits, scenes of human drama and whimsy. Maybe so. But here is a piece of whimsy that I could not pass by or ignore.

And here's a remarkable pencil sketch by Robert Lundgren with the portentous title "Portent" that captures the spirit of the scene without in any way clarify what it was all about.

In one of the first aisles I came upon this print by Josh Bindewald called "Discourse." I don't particularly like the colors but for some reason the ensemble works.

 As Hilary and I made our way through the building I heard one volunteer say to another, "The line at the crop art exhibit is already two-and-a-half hours long."

Yikes! But that's the thing about the fair. There are plenty of things to do. If you want to wait in line, you wait in line. If you don't, fine. You go do something else.

When we emerged from the Art Building, I noticed there was no line at the "about a foot long" hotdog stand, so I bought one. Hilary usually geta a Pronto Pup at the stand down the street, but the line there extended all the way down past the Education Building. A forty-five minute wait!

In the distance, the line at the Pronto Pup food truck.

So she went to get a malt at the Kiwanis booth and we sat in the shade of the park across the street listening to a performer called Duke Otherwise sing a song about a dog. The fiddler was very good!

In the 4-H Building we watched a large group of young people do a choreographed line dance while singing a cheerful song the exact import of which I no longer remember. I noticed that the kids in the front were much better at it that the ones in the back, and I tried to imagine what the rehearsals had been like, off in far away Pelican Rapids or Waubun or Thief River Falls. (After all, the fair is billed as the "great Minnesota get-together." Shouldn't we be trying to get to know the farm kids from outstate?)

We spent some time in the Handicraft Building admiring the knitting and the quilting and even the jewelry. 

The bagpiper had begun to play outside O'Gara's by the time we reemerged into the sunlight. The day was getting hot. (It had reached 91 by the time we left.) We headed for the Agriculture Building, where I chatted with a woman from the Minnesota Horticultural Society about old cottonwood trees and the best time to fertilize your garden. We crossed back to the Farmers Union, and along the way I stopped to tell a woman selling metal roofs about the rubber roof we recently had installed on our house. (These people are bored. They'll be happy to talk to anyone.) 

At the Framers' Union we bought a pork cutlet in a bun with cole slaw and a cup of iced coffee, which we consumed on a shady park bench nearby. As we passed Ye Olde Mill I suddenly realized I had always wanting to take a flume ride through a dark tunnel where you're sure to get soaking wet. But not today.

We learned some things from the woman at the Voyageur National Park booth outside the DNR Building, wandered into the bat cave and wandered back out again, looked briefly at the fish pond--always refreshing--some beautiful chickens, a man sheering a sheep ...

Our final destination was the West End Market ... a terrible, treeless place to be. Five dancers were twirling in a performance circle, only one or two grades higher in skill level than the 4-H teens, I would say, though their costumes were better, and it appeared they were having fun. (Maybe they were getting paid?)

We bought a $12 strawberry lemonade on our way back to the lot on Larpenteur Ave that was so sour we had a hard time finishing it. But we were in need of hydration, and the Culligan booth was three blocks away.    

Tinges of Autumn

And aren’t they grand! Who knew (or remembered) that cool morning air could feel so good.

Our weekend commenced with a Friday morning trip to the downtown farmers’ market. Such color! Such hubbub! We contented ourselves with a few spectacular tomatoes, two long and massive leeks, a huge clump of kale, and a cardboard tray of oversized zucchini and summer squash.

One teenaged kid was unloading ears of corn from the back of a pickup truck by the armload onto his table.

“Think you’re going to sell all that?” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied blasély, and went back to work.

I asked the guy with the zucchini if he’d do a three-for-ten deal. “No. I work too hard,” he replied.

We had a few friends over for a late afternoon meal on the deck consisting of kale salad and a simplified version of cassoulet in which the duck and sausage are replaced by a few slices of bacon to go along with the chicken, cannellini beans, squash, and leeks.

Almost by chance, we kept to the southern French theme with the wines: a Saint-Véran, a Vacqueyras, and an obscure white from the Costiéres-de-Nîme.  

The air was cool, the dappled evening light was beautiful coming in through the trees, and the chipmunks were plunking. One red-eyed vireo passed by and lingered to examine the white berries on the dogwood shrubs along the deck. For a moment we thought it might be a warbler heading south!

The next morning, hardly fazed by the food and wine, we loaded our bikes on the car and drove up to Elm Creek Regional Park, which has the finest bike trails in the metro area—at least for the kind of recreational biking we do. 

It’s a nice mix of hills and flats, woods and fields, marshes and lakes, with relatively few cyclists and nary a dwelling in sight along its 20-mile length.

Another thing I like about it: there are so many twists and turns and so few recognizable landmarks that you seldom know quite where you are or how far you still have to go.

Catbirds meowed and squawked from the woods, peewees pined, goldfinches chuckled. We passed fields of goldenrod and black-eyed Susans. The sumac is not quite turning red, but a few plums are ripening on the trees.

Back home, Hilary diced a few of our market tomatoes and raided the garden for a handful of basil to put together a topping for bruschetta. She added some drizzled olive oil, salt, a minced clove of garlic, or two; that’s all it takes.

The tomatoes were moist and red and absolutely flavorless. The vine-on tomatoes at Trader Joe’s are far better. But the ensemble tasted good heaped onto pieces of toast. The mild afternoon heat was already on the wane.

 And one of our resident owls started to hoot again. Everyone likes it cool.

   

The Revolution of Everyday Life

The recent death of Raoul Vaneigem, at the age of 92, must give all of us pause for thought.

To be honest, I’d never heard of the man until I saw his obituary in the Times. His chief claim to fame was to have written a manifesto in 1967 called The Revolution of Everyday Life, which was an inspiration to the student uprising that closed down universities in Paris and elsewhere in May 1968.

The literal translation of this little book of aphorisms—sort of like Mao’s “little red book,” I suppose, also popular at the time—would be The How-to-Live Handbook for the Young. Whatever wisdom this book may contain, I’m probably too old to benefit from it. But I requested a copy from the library, and I also requested another of Vaneigem’s many subsequent books: A Cavalier History of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, I fetched from my basement stacks a slightly musty paperback copy of The Spirit of May by J.-J. Servan-Schreiber (marked ‘25 cents’ in pencil on the front fly) and also the hardcover volume right next to it, The Taxis of the Marne, by Jean Dutourd (one dollar).

Perhaps you see the connection. The taxis Dutourd refers to were used to transport soldiers to the front lines in the exuberant early days of World War One.

I had originally planned—that is to say, forty years ago—to include a third volume in a study of the vicissitudes of the modern French state: Strange Defeat by Marc Bloc. That essay never got written. None of those books got read. I can’t find the third one. Is it still around somewhere? (Who cares?) Anyway, if you're familiar with the books, you can connect the dots.

Perhaps I was intuitively following the path set out by Vaneigem: down with capitalism, screw the state, abandon the quest for wealth and glory and enjoy yourself, your friends, your community.

In one line quoted in the Times obit, Vaneigem asks: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

I guess this is where surrealism comes in.

Vaneigem’s name came up during a breakfast conversation I had recently with a friend of mine at the Buttered Tin. We also talked about Agora, the classic film set in ancient Alexandria in the months before its famous library burned down. Jeff had recently had breakfast with a mutual friend, the documentary filmmaker and poet Mike Hazard. Jeff did the sound production for several of Mike’s films.

I’ve heard it said more than once that “everyone knows Mike.” It might almost be true. I worked with Mike briefly on a book of poems by the late Roy McBride, but I’ve run into him here and there at other times. He once came up to me at a book convention covering his face with three pieces of “poetry on a stick.”

There’s a touch of zaniness, color, freedom, and “Why not?” in much of Mike’s work, and his films often focus on other masters of this poetic domain.

It was a beautiful morning, and when I got back home from breakfast, Hilary and I decided to pay a visit to the Andersen Library on the West Bank, which is hosting an exhibit of Mike’s work.

We came prepared with a telephone number. The building is locked: you have to call someone to come to the door and let you in. This may explain why there was no one in the galleries but us. The exhibit spaces are small but elegant, almost lavish. Several Plexiglas kiosks contained samples of postcards, flyers, chapbooks, and photographs that either depict Mike’s work in arts education or are the result of it.

You can view quite a few of Mike's works, including videos, here. 

A second room, beyond the main gallery, has been given the look of a gentleman’s club: antique globes, finely unholstered wing-back chairs, stained glass windows, and maybe even a replica of a bust by Houdon. It reminded me of the rare books room on the fourth floor of Wilson Library and the book-collecting legacy of James Ford Bell and the library’s namesake, Governor Elmer Andersen, both of whom employed book scouts for years to explore antiquarian collections in London and the Continent in search of rare volumes.

It made for an interesting contrast—aristocratic digs and exuberant ephemera. I love them both. I have enough books in the house to satisfy almost any pang of curiosity, but I also have a cheap metal pin stuck into the window-frame behind my desk that says “Demolish Serious Culture.” I picked it up years ago at the Walker Art Center’s extensive Fluxus show dedicated to the work of Joseph Boyce and the German avant garde.

Some of that stuff is playful, some of it is pretty angry, or grim. By way of contrast, here’s a poem by Mike, reprinted in the little handout on a table near the door.

Namesake

Pounding a black gavel

Engraved with a nickname HAP,

The handle of a grandfather I never met for real,

And my last name, HAZARD—

My heart pounds.

 

It was time for lunch, and we decided to cross the bridge on the freeway to Dinkytown to find a place to eat. I don’t need to tell you that the neighborhood has changed since 1978, the last year I tended parking lots for the U of M. I don’t need to list the used bookstores, hamburger joints, bakeries, guitar shops, and Italian restaurants that have vanished either. 

We had a perfectly decent lunch at a Vietnamese café called Pho Mai that seems to be an offshoot of a more elegant restaurant in Brooklyn Park. To be honest, it was better than the tendon we used to get at the Tokyo cafe years ago. But the street is entirely different. Perrines is gone. Annie’s Parlor is gone. Gray’s Drug is gone. The Loring Café is gone. (Wasn’t I going to skip that part?)

Around the corner, the upstairs incarnation of the Bookhouse is still there and still packed with used books. Yet in this case, I find that my interest is gone. You can tell at a glance that most of the books are rattier than the ones we have at home. The poetry section is especially bad. The books are too skinny, dust jackets gone, you can’t read the titles on the bindings. All is lost. They might as well chuck the whole section into the Mississippi.

As I was passing the front desk I heard a young man on the telephone: “Books from that era are usually so ragged that they aren’t worth anything. Old is not necessarily good.” I was impressed: he’d heard it all before--and said it all before--but by the tone of his voice I could tell he was being good-natured about it.

 

Morning Meditations: Election Day

Hilary is off to her post as an election judge, and I’m facing a blank grayish day. It starts with a mug of French roast coffee and a CostCo croissant from the freezer.

Are they any good? At fifty cents apiece they’re quite good. The ones at Patisserie 46, at $6 apiece, are only slightly better. And they’re a half-hour drive away.

I can remember a time when the only place in town you could get good croissants was the New French Café. This was followed by the era that produced two important works: The Preppie Handbook and Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. From there, it was but a few short steps to the January 6th riots and the first major attempt to overthrow a freely elected U.S. government.

Before rosy-fingered dawn had shown her smiling pink face, I’d already done the Wordle and Connections, and read Paul Krugman’s latest column, in which he restates the (to some of us) obvious fact that the American health care system has been largely government subsidized for decades. He goes on to describe the private insurance industry as “parasitic.”

Everyone should read this column, but few will read it. I would go farther and suggest that all government activity is by nature socialistic. Good governments handle their responsibilities sensibly; bad ones don’t.

Krugman follows up the reasoning and the statistics with a popular song, as usual. Today it was “Closer to Fine.” I didn’t recognize the Indigo Girls. (They were after my time.)

I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

And the best thing you ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously… 

By now, so many popular musical groups are “after my time” that I can hardly make it through the daily crossword puzzle. “Lead singer of REM, Michael _____.” If they didn’t do a half-time show at the Superbowl, I’ve never heard of them. I just watched Help for the first time the other day—on DVD. (I liked it.)

Right now my main concern is to determine which translation of The Odyssey is best. The Emily Wilson version that I requested arrived at the library the other day. I’m finding that the iambic pentameter doesn’t really flow. She might just as well have straightened it out into prose paragraphs.

Of course, any translation will be radically different from the film, a medium that even in the surest hands lacks the tools to bring the lyricism of the original to life.

Down by the stony trail they made their way

As far as Clearwater, not far from town—

A spring house where the people filled their jars …

And round it on the humid ground a grove,

A circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold

In runnels from high rock ran the spring,

And over it there stood an altar stone

To the cool nymphs, where all men going by

Laid offerings.

Yesterday was a marvel of serendipitous conversation. We chatted at length out in the street with our neighbors Brendan and Sara. They were hard at work digging up a rectangle of bare ground the local energy company had disturbed while installing a new gas line. We discussed the neighborhood owls, Brenden’s success at selling odd pieces of junk on Facebook Marketplace, and the deterioration of their mini-camper, which hasn’t left the driveway all summer.

Our next-door neighbor Rocky was also out in her yard—a rare occurrence. Brendan told me she bought a robot lawn-mower, and it seemed she was trying to program it with her phone. 

We might have stopped over to say hi, but we were heading down to Edina to pick up a book-club book from some friends. They were expecting us. We sat in their imaginatively landscaped front yard sipping drinks that Michel concocted in a big wooden bowl with fresh limes, Brazilian rum, and salt. Conversation roamed from the nature of “borderline personalities” to office politics at Metro State to the rising stars on the women’s tennis tour. Michel later brought out a succession of choice morsels from the kitchen. I might call them cheeseballs or bruschetta; he would call them acılı ezme or bolinho de aipim.

Late in the afternoon I took some newspapers out to the recycling bin and ran into our neighbor Brian, out for a walk with his daughter, Vivian. He’s seldom around; we chat maybe once a year.

“How’s the sound-track industry treating you,” I asked him.

“It tanked. My sponsor lost his funding. Now I’m installing audio systems.”

“Well, at least it gets you out of the house,” I said.

Vivian has grown in the course of a year. “Gee. Are you in college now?” I asked.

“I’ll be a high school junior next fall.”

Favorite subject? “English, I think.”

Good answer. All young people should read Middlemarch, All the King’s Men, Notes from Underground, and A Farewell to Arms, don’t you think? But who knows? Maybe she’s been reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Bel Canto, Olive Kittridge, and Bright Lights, Big City?

Now the sun is out. Rising. Along with the heat. It's the same thing every day, but with variations. The hummingbirds are starting to get belligerent around their red plastic feeder. 

"Take it easy, fellas. There's plenty for everyone."

And the catbird is devouring the berries on the dogwood. Cats and dogs.   

Any time now, I'm going to go vote down at the fire station. While I'm at it, I might as well check the water clarity at the bridge above Bassett Creek. It's getting better, year by year. 

Chalk it up to the efforts of the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission.  I wonder who's paying for that ...

The Odyssey: Grim Pageantry

A day does not go by when someone new doesn’t weigh in on the merits and defects of Christopher Nolan’s new film-version of The Odyssey, or tries to convince us which of the translations of Homer’s epic poem is really the best, or what the film tells us about the film industry, or our own society.

I saw it today. Didn’t like it much. It’s pretty grim. What is lacks isn’t the gods, or the swashbuckling heroism, or the eroticism of the original. It lacks the poetry.

Sea-faring films used to be good at that kind of thing. As a kid I was mesmerized by the romance of such matinee fodder as Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I will admit that most of the films we watched in those bygone days on the afternoon TV program called Epic Theater didn’t reach that high standard. Many of them were made in Italy and poorly dubbed, which gave them a slightly creepy tone. But they also conveyed a sense of the open sea and a sort of corny nobility, by Zeus!

Nolan’s Odyssey does not. The soundtrack is too loud, the screen overfull of commotion. The flashbacks are sometimes so brief as to be all but incomprehensible.  And Matt Damon doesn’t seem at all like the wily Odysseus, fated by the gods to endure a seemingly endless string of calamities before they allow him to return home.

But the key point is this: in Homer’s original the barbarous elements in the story are counterbalanced by the beauty of the language and the lofty—if sometimes repetitive—tone of the narrative. To take one of countless examples:

At evening came the shepherd with his flock,

his woolly flock. The rams as well, this time,

entered the cave: by some sheep-herding whim—

or a god’s bidding—none were left outside.

He hefted his great boulder into place

and sat him down to milk the bleating ewes

in proper order, put the lambs to suck,

and swiftly ran through all his evening chores.

 

It seems like a bucolic scene, but of course we know better. The shepherd is Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster.

Then he caught two more men and feasted on them.

 

The tone doesn’t change. It’s all part of the narrative flow.

 

My moment was at hand, and I went forward

holding an ivy bowl of my dark drink,

looking up, saying:

‘Kyklops, try some wine.

Here’s liquor to wash down your scraps of men.

 

The Odyssey is riddled with such juxtapositions, but it’s a difficult trick to pull off on the screen. Nearly impossible. Nolan abandons the poetic element altogether.

The lines quoted above are from the Fitzgerald translation. Back in my college days, when I spent some time studying Classical Greek, the accepted wisdom was “Fitzgerald for The Odyssey, Lattimore for The Iliad.”

A few years ago. I took up The Odyssey again. I couldn’t find my mass-market Fitzgerald translation, but had a copy of the Fagles translation near at hand—a gift from a friend—and decided to give it a try. I made it halfway through, but it was a struggle. I felt there was some indefinable element missing in the tone. Gravity? Humor? Freshness?

Naturally a hubbub arose about various translations with the release of the film—Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Wilson, Mendelsohn, and another new one coming out soon. I felt the need to revisit my old friend and bought a reissue of Fitzgerald’s version in trade paperback. It was cheaper than two tickets to the film. 

I’m glad I did.

Which reminds me of an old joke: What did the goat say after he ate a can of film? He liked the book better.

 

After the World Cup

In the 1950s there was a joke going around—not very funny—about the newfangled popularity of Chinese food of the canned Chung King variety: It tasted good, but an hour later you were hungry.

Something along those same lines might be said about the World Cup: it’s great fun at the time, but a week later you can hardly remember which teams you rooted for, who won, or whether you cared one way or the other.

I’m well aware that real soccer fans feel differently—those who follow the European leagues and also the billions of fans whose teams were contenders in the knockout rounds. For me, that lengthy tournament provided many hours of entertainment, more than a few moments of aggravation bordering on outrage elicited by the numerous blatant and brutal fouls, and an occasional touch of awe.

More stimulating than a golf tournament, more fluid than a football game, and perhaps more dependent on chance than any other sport, the movement of men and ball back and forth across that enormous green pitch was often both mesmerizing and incomprehensible.

That being said, the final reminded me a lot of the 2010 final, in which Spain beat the Netherlands. I was a little surprised that the phrase “tiki-taka” didn’t surface in the post-game analysis, though maybe I missed it. Spain controlled the ball to an inordinate degree while doing a remarkably good job of keeping it away from Messi. What they didn’t do much of was score.

The consolation round gave us more than enough of that. Mbappe, throttled and flummoxed by Spain in the semifinals, resuscitated some of his best moves against the English, but it wasn’t enough, and Bellingham’s insurance goal in the final minutes was a thing of beauty.

Not so beautiful was the sight of Madonna emerging from the bowels of MetLife Stadium in a jeep driven by Ronaldo and Ronaldiño, two Brazilian stars from an earlier era that I can only dimly recall. I didn’t recognize them, or her.

“Is that Shakira?” I said.

Connoisseurs tell us that in the end, the best team won. Spain’s captain, Rodri, won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. Commentators note that he “recorded the most touches, most attempted passes, most completed passes, most tackles and most completed passes in the final third.” His pass success rate was  93 per cent, a new record.

But mark my words: twenty years from now, Messi and Mbappe will be driving the jeep. And who knows, maybe Shakira will be in the back?