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?

Winona Beethoven Overnight

Winona has been holding a midsummer Beethoven Festival annually for almost two decades now, with world-class performers and a wide array of classical ensembles, styles, and programs. After reading about the event for years—often after the fact—we finally committed ourselves this year to an evening of Beethoven quartets performed by the Ariel String Quartet.

It wasn’t the most auspicious moment to embark on an overnight getaway to Winona. Temperatures were in the 90s and forest fires in the BWCA had sent the air quality index to dangerous heights. The smell of stale smoke was everywhere, and the Minneapolis skyline had been reduced to a vague dystopian silhouette.

We went anyway. We’d already booked the tickets and the motel. And there was reason for hope. The forecast mentioned the possibility of rain, which would wash some of the smoke away, and the NW wind might just shush the nasty stuff east into Wisconsin.

We left town at 1:30. There was water on the roads in Red Wing. The air had improved. Patches of blue sky appeared. Clouds took shape.

It rained heavily while we were checking into our motel on the outskirts of Winona. (Good timing.) We dressed for the concert (summer casual) and headed down into the city a few minutes later, looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. Hilary was scrolling the possibilities on Trip Advisor and happened on Sapori di Sicilia, which described itself as a “panificio : pasticceria.” A bakery and pastry shop?

It was only three blocks away. We parked right in front of the steps leading up to the place. Downtown Winona is full of half-decrepit storefronts, but this place seemed to be housed in a repurposed bank. Modern. Large tiles on the floor. Bakery cases half-full of tasty-looking morsels.

A closer look at the menu on the wall behind the cash register suggested that we’d come to the right place: truffle fries, falafel fritters, capicola panini. aglio e olio, gnocchi. And six or seven house wines at $ 6-8/glass.

Everything tastes better in an oversized bowl.

We ordered a Greek salad and pasta carbonara, took a table by the window, and settled in to watch the passing scene. The chairs were remarkably comfortable. Hilary had a great view of a group of seven elderly women engaged in animated conversation. A book club? University professors discussing some upcoming candidate for tenure? Or were they all headed to the Beethoven festival later that evening?

We nursed our orders, passing them back and forth across the table, happy to be inside watching the weather improve through the window. At one point I went up to the counter to get two glasses of water and said to the young woman behind the register, apropos of nothing, “This image on your menu looks like it came from Crete.”

“Well, it happens to be in the center of the Sicilian flag,” she replied, cracking a hint of a smile.

The concert took place at a theater on the campus of St. Mary’s University, tucked into the wooded bluffs a five-minute drive up the hill from our motel. The night wasn’t cool, but it was no longer unpleasantly hot, and the air had improved so greatly that Hilary spotted the crescent moon peeking through a rift in the clouds. People were milling around on the terrace in front of the concert hall, and it seemed the only thing missing was the sharp report of a passing nighthawk.

The concert itself was deeply expressive and thoroughly engaging: Beethoven—early, middle, and late. Works like these don’t carry you along like a breeze, they draw you in like a compelling argument, and the Ariel Quartet offered a flawless exercise in emotional logic and probing intensity. The first half of the program ran 90 minutes. The single piece after intermission was a mere twenty-two. The balance seemed perfect.

I was impressed. I had never heard of the Ariel Quartet prior to coming upon them in the festival schedule, though they’ve been playing together for almost thirty years. But I’m sure these musicians are less concerned with impressing people than with fully exposing the challenge, the anguish, and the beauty of Beethoven’s imagery.

The next morning, after a "light breakfast" at the motel, we returned to our new favorite Sicilian cafe stop to sample the bakery goods. The same young woman was behind the country, and when she brought us our coffee we learned a bit about the owner's background.

From there it was across the river to Trempealeau NWR, where we drove the nine-mile gravel circuit, stopping hear and there to take a walk or get a better view of a bird. The sky was clear and the humidity had dropped, though not by much. 

We spotted four or five indigo buntings along the way--they like to sit in the open at the tops of trees, displaying their iridescent feathers--but most of the birds were sheltering in the shadows of the vegetation. We heard warbling vireos, common yellow-throats, great-crested flycatchers, Eastern towhees, robins, pewees, yellow-bellied woodpeckers, catbirds--the usual suspects. Hilary spotted a few pelicans drifting out in the river. A beaver swam by. Perhaps our best sighting was of a red-headed woodpecker disappearing into the underbrush. 

   

California Wedding

In the past we’ve sometimes carved out a week in California in early April, when Minnesota is struggling to emerge from hibernation, while the Pacific Coast is awash in fragrant air and riant with color. We amuse ourselves walking along a beach or across the grassy headlands above the beach, or into the redwood canyons extending up through the hills.

But June is a fine month to be here in Minnesota.

We went to California recently because our niece was getting married. And a glorious wedding it was! It was held at an organic farm on the Russian River a few miles outside Healdsburg, with a barbeque the night before at a park nearby in the shade of a grove of redwoods.

The happy couple met while working in an olive grove run by monks up in the hills somewhere north of San Francisco. Scott later paid Emily a few visits when she worked at the farm where the wedding was being held. They found they had a lot in common. And the rest is history.

 Emily arrived at the late-afternoon riverbank ceremony via the Russian River, in a canoe. Her dad was in the stern. Her mother, Mary, officiated at the service, and her sister, Nora, read a poem. Music for the event was provided by Scott’s father, Phil, an accomplished guitarist.

Emily, Scott, and Sarah

It was a golden afternoon.

After the ceremony, Scott tried to get me to eat an oyster. "I haven't eaten one of those since the spring of 1978," I said. "It didn't go down well." 

"Well, here's your chance to get the hang of it," he replied with a grin.

Emily and Scott have a lot of nice friends. I would be tempted to use the word “attractive,” though the fact is that they were simply young, fresh, animated, and casually well dressed. I never talked to any of them. They were busy talking to one another, and I’m pretty sure Hilary and I were the oldest people there.

Emily’s dad, Jeff, was beaming throughout the afternoon. Love, joy, and relief were jockeying for position on his smiling face. Things were going well.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of relatives for Hilary and me to catch up with, or get to know. I chatted with Scott’s father at some length about the guitars of Grenada and the wonder of synthetic fingernails. I expressed my enthusiasm for a few flamenco guitarists—Paco, Tomatito, Chicuelo, Vicente Amigo—and offered to burn him a sampler CD.  I chatted with Mary’s nephew John about all the family (and historical) lore that’s being lost while the youth of today flip through their phones. I chatted with my niece Sarah, who lives in Portland, about her chickens. Brother-in-law Paul described a few episodes in his family’s free-wheeling seat-of-the-pants road trip down the coast from Oregon. And I chatted with my sister-in-law Mary’s sister-in-law Gretchen about the urban attractions of St. Louis, where she lives.

The food was spectacular and tasty. It arrived in leisurely stages, which tended to encourage over-eating. One never knew what was coming next. If anything.

The wines were also far better than average. I was especially taken by the GMS blend made at the farm, to which they’ve given the proprietary name Palmeri.   

And to top it off, the speeches given by friends and family members after the meal were affectionate and also informative. It’s a part of a wedding--one of many--that’s difficult to relate effectively after the fact.

 You really had to be there.

The Heavenly Regions

Bright sun, a moderate breeze, and temperatures in the low sixties. These are the conditions that prevail in the heavenly regions, I suspect, and last weekend we were blessed with the same regime here in town. After rejecting three or four more exotic cycling options, Hilary and I decided to pump up the tires and make the time-honored, but often overlooked, trip around the Lakes.

What lakes? Calhoun, Harriet, and Isles, of course, a few minutes’ drive down the parkway from our house.

We got an early start. The air was sharp, and traffic on the bike paths was moderate. We were soaring.

It’s become fashionable to describe such episodes as “being in the present.” More than a few books have been written celebrating that level of innocent awareness, and offering advice about how to reach and sustain it.

I have no advice to give. I’m tempted to argue that such a concept is inappropriate to the occasion. At the least, it seems to suggest that our recollections of the past are filled with remorse, our anticipation of the future fraught with anxiety. That’s not necessarily true.

We used to live much closer to these lakes, and throughout our leisurely tour I was pleasantly reminded of people and events from the past. The recollections added an emotional depth to the visually spectacular scene. I was reminded of the years when our friends Greg and Betty lived in a condo across Bryant Park from us. As we locked our bikes and took a stroll through Harriet Gardens, I was reminded that the bedding plants near the fountains were once set off by a trim row of buckthorn hedges!

The tennis courts at Beard’s Pleasance reminded me of matches with an old friend interrupted again and again by snippets of conversation about food, films, and travel. We passed my cousin’s house, where we all used to sit on the shady porch as the morning heated up. And at one point, on the west side of Lake Harriet, I was reminded of a party I went to in the mid-1970s in an upstairs apartment before Hilary and I had even met.

On our way back to the car, we sat on a bench overlooking Bde MaKa Ska, trying to pick out a good place for lunch. Yum? No. Niviya Thai Kitchen? It’s gone downhill. Hazelwood? Too suburban. Convention Grill? Might work.

In the end, as we often do, we went home and cooked up something new, in this case a pasta salad with corn and cherry tomatoes from a recent recipe in the Times. Not bad. (But might not be a “keeper.”)

*   *   *

The next morning was equally brilliant but far more blustery. We drove down to the farmers’ market to pick up some parsley and a few discounted zinnias. Did some planting back home.

But the real highlight of the day came later, when we once again drove into town to attend a concert by Lux String Quartet being given at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in association with a traveling exhibit called Violins of Hope. The display consisted of six or seven Plexiglas cases holding a selection of violins that had been owned by Jews who died in concentration camps during WW II.  

This is serious stuff, and it might almost have seemed a bit morbid, except for the subtlety and zeal with which the members of Lux worked through their program, and also the verve with which each of the four performers announced a piece and also described what it was like to play an instrument from the venerable collection.

As an added twist, the performance consisted of isolated movements from several compositions—Grieg, Shostakovich, Kodaly, and, best of all, the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet, one of my favorites. Taking them out of their broader musical environment seemed to refresh them.

And as chance would have it, we ran into five of our friends at the concert. But is that really chance? They all live near the Lakes, and three of the five are musicians.

After the concert I ran into composer David Evan Thomas in the hall where the instruments were on exhibit. I told him the tale of the LP of Ravel’s Quartet that I had in college, a Nonesuch recording with a pink hot-air balloon on the cover. He agreed that Nonesuch album covers could be outrageous.

“You should write something for the Lux,” I said.

He cleared his throat and replied, modestly, “Well, they premiered my second string quartet.”

Oh. I didn’t know.

 

   

Summer Reading: Three Japanese Novels

 

Convenience Store Woman is a novel about—guess what—a woman who works in a convenience store. There’s nothing so unusual about that, but Keiko has been doing the same job at the same store, part time, for eighteen years. She likes it, and she’s good at it. The position is lowly, but Keiko shoulders her responsibilities with utter dedication and professionalism. It’s basically her life.

Keiko knows she’s a little different. In the novel’s opening pages, she relates the story of a schoolyard fist-fight she witnessed as a child. All the kids were standing around shouting “Break it up! Break it up!” Keiko picked up a shovel, knocked one of the belligerents unconscious, and considered she’d done a good job. “I still don’t see anything wrong with what I did,” she tells us.

But Keiko isn’t driven by irrational or antisocial impulses; she just likes to keep order and make sure everything’s in its proper place. Much of the novel—which sold more than a million copies in Japan—deals with the minutia of her day, managing inventory, re-ordering products, setting up special sales depending on the season, tending the cash register, and remaining forever cheerful in the face of customer requests throughout her shift.

If I happen to enjoy reading about such things, it might be because I worked in a book warehouse for twenty-odd years, so I’m familiar with the satisfactions that such work can sometimes provide. That might also explain why I enjoyed the German film In the Aisles (2018).

But just when things start to get tedious, author Sayaka Murata gives her story a twist in the form of a new employee, Shiraha, hired by the manager out of desperation during a busy season. Shiraha is a loser, a slacker, an arrogant miscreant, practically homeless. Needless to say, he and Keiko don’t get along …

Tokyo Express, originally published in 1958, has the look of a mystery novel. It focuses on the question of whether an apparent murder/suicide on a lonely beach on the southern tip of Japan might actually have been a murder. But there is never more than one real suspect in the case, and from the early chapters to the end of the book, Inspector Mihara spends nearly all his time trying to break that suspect’s seemingly water-tight alibi. There are three or four “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” moments, plenty of interviews with subsidiary characters, and lots of analysis of train schedules, all of which establish an atmosphere of mild intrigue. But the fact that the book’s first few chapters focus on the behavior of two waitresses and an eminent businessman with ties to a government scandal would be hard to explain if he weren’t somehow connected to the crime … presuming  there was a crime ...

 The Summer House follows the early career of an inexperienced and sometimes dilatory architect, one Tōru Sakanishi, who, by a stroke of luck, gets hired on to the firm of master architect Shunsuke Murai. Murai needs some help: he’s preparing an entry for a competition the design Japan’s National Library of Modern Literature. In the past, he has avoided such competitions, preferring to work with clients who know and appreciate his quiet, subtle style. It’s almost as if he knows he’s approaching the end of his career. And perhaps his life.

Little by little, Sakanishi picks up the rhythms of the architectural team, which has moved up to a mountain retreat to work on the project together. He’s eager to make himself useful, though the tasks he’s given seldom have much to do with the competition entry itself. It takes him a while, for example, to catch on to the fact that in Shunsuke’s world, it’s taboo to sharpen your pencils after 5 p.m.

As the summer passes, meals are shared, errands are run. We listen in on discussions about furniture design, acoustics, the proper location of fireplaces, and sundry other architectural issues. In the course of his narrative Sakanishi also drifts into lengthy digressions on the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Murai studied as a youth) and the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, whose famous design for the Stockholm Public Library has captured Murai’s interest.

Among the team are two women, Mariko and Yukiko, and Sakanishi takes a liking to them both, adding yet another subtle, almost unspoken ripple to the stream. Murai himself rekindles several personal connections in the mountain neighborhood, where he’s been coming for decades. Meanwhile, under an atmosphere of professional calm and unspoken reverence for the master, weeks pass, months. The competition deadline approaches.

Author Matsuie won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for this, his first novel. He succeeds in transforming what might have been a plodding narrative filled with attestations of respect that we can acknowledge but have been given no reason to share, into an exotic and atmospheric whole, where relationships between walls, chairs, books, and people are in constant flux, restrained by patience and tact, buoyed by a sense of balance and proportion, fueled an unspoken affection, and threatened by the passage of time.