Best of the Year 2018 (Not)

The time comes when the holiday gatherings are over and things are quiet around the house. It's raining, in fact, and you ought to go out and shovel away the slush before it turns to ice, transforming your driveway into a scale model of Antarctica. But first, there's time to read in the newspaper or in Pamela Espeland's ArtScape column about the fifteen "most memorable" cultural events of the years—maybe three of which you're likely to have attended. Then you take a backward glance yourself, and see ... nothing. It's not because you haven't done or seen anything, but because memory doesn't really work like that.

Actress Mia Farrow

I have set myself the task, therefore, of coming up with a few events of very modest proportions, rather than the traveling Broadway shows or the blockbusters at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts like the Underwater Egypt Show, during which that museum missed the opportunity (as far as I know) to develop an advertising slogan based on the phrase M.I.A. PHAROAH.

No, I said to myself, I'm going to limit myself to a few passing events that were flying "under the radar," as they say. And to give you an idea of what I mean, let me begin by passing over Nicola Benedetti's brilliant recital, during which she expounded at length and also played all three of Brahms's violin sonatas, to remind you of the performance of Brahms's late Clarinet Quintet that a few members of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra performed last spring, along with some lesser pieces by Franz and Clara Schumann. There is no composition in the classical repertoire more deserving of the word "sublime," in my view, than this quintet—it's so depressing that I never think to listen to it, though I have it on CD—yet the performers negotiated the shifting tempos and dynamics flawlessly, so that the autumnal melancholy veritably oozed from the stage.

On a Sunday evening in early September, we went with some friends to Crooners Super Club in Fridley, (a municipality hitherto famous only as the hometown of my friend Steve Herrig), to hear jazz pianist Geoff Keezer bust it up with Gillian Margot, a vocalist I'd never heard of. Geoff (a native of Eau Claire) was ever-smiling and ebullient to a fault, and Gillian delivered the standards with true feeling. I was enthralled.

A minor highlight of March was the sight of several snowy owls at the Mpls/St. Paul airport. Half the fun was taking Cargo Road through a tunnel and emerging in the midst of the runways.

I devoted quite a bit of time during the winter to reading Dante's Divine Comedy.  It took a while, but having completed the journey, I almost feel like starting in again from the beginning. Thumbing through an old journal, I spotted an entry that might be relevant:

"I'm sitting by the back door. Glass of wine. Dante. One problem with reading Dante is that he doesn't really hold your attention. So you're trying to grasp or visualize some very celestial description of stars and light and eminences, but then you jump up to tend the fire, go to the bathroom, or check your emails, and you end up playing a few hands of bridge on the computer. Then you return to the book, and read the same passage all over again."

Speaking of celestial eminences, just the other day Hilary and I went out for our pre-dawn walk and took a detour up onto the hill behind Margaret Mary Church. Venus was very bright, as usual, but we were also hoping to see Jupiter and perhaps even Mercury, low and elusive though it invariably is, before the sunlight obliterated them. And we saw them all.  It's not often that they line up so conveniently. I tried to visual the orbits, Jupiter huge and far beyond our own, Venus and Mercury closer in to the sun and therefore following tighter orbits inside ours. It can be done, especially if you keep in mind that gigantic, brightly painted mechanical model of the Solar System that the roving science teacher (later my football coach) kept in the "cooler" alongside the gym in grade school.

   

Some memorable days slip our minds because they're made up of succession of minor events. I recall one sunny afternoon that I might describe as a Lake Street Ramble. Our first stop was Highpoint Print Studio, where we took in an exhibit of Inuit prints.

Next we wandered a few blocks west to the Soo Vac Gallery, where an aesthetic "flip-side" was on display. The Inuit artists had obviously been influenced by modern printmaking techniques and ways of displaying an image. The art at Soo Vac, by one Sophia Heymans, claimed to represent a landscapes beyond or after humans, whatever that means. The best of these very large canvases succeeded in putting forth strange yet appealing patterns and color schemes. Yet the technique was intentionally crude, as if Heymans wanted to make it clear that she wasn't interesting in making anything look refined or "pretty."

Hilary and I used to live two blocks from here. Considering that it was forty-odd years ago, things haven't changed all that much. The Jungle Theater has moved down the street, Falafel King is gone, and there are far more apartment buildings and cafés now than there were then, but Bill's Imported Foods is still standing on the corner, and the same woman is still standing behind the cash register in front of the same faded poster of Santorini.  I suspect her grandsons rather than her sons now tend the olive and cheese counter, but lush, squarish icebergs of feta still glisten in the tubs of brine behind the glass: Greek, Bulgarian, French, and domestic.

Our final stop was to Moon Palace Books, several miles down Lake Street. The store had moved, but we hadn't been to the new location. It's a much bigger space, with a coffee shop and theater in the back, and the place was jumping. The average age was perhaps 29. The future of books is secure. 

And while we're on the subject of Lake Street, I ought to mention the Mid-Stream poetry reading we attended in a long shadowy room upstairs from the Blue Moon Coffee Shop at 39th and Lake one hot summer evening. The readers were Sharon Chmielarz, Michael Dennis Browne, and Danny Klecko—a group as stylistically diverse as, say, Penelope Fitzgerald, George Moore, and Raymond Chandler.

The readers were all engaging, in their different ways--Sharon wry, Michael musical, Danny gruff--but what I remember most clearly is the buzz on the street after the reading. Hot night air, cars passing, a slight breeze, perhaps, and words flying everywhere among writers who've known one another for a very long time, and their spouses, partners, friends, fans, and well-wishers.

Where are those hot summer nights? (as Francois Villon might have said, had he lived in Minnesota.)

Bringing the Outside In

Balsam boughs strewn across the mantle, candles everywhere, ceramic animals lined up around a straw-filled manger, even a living tree in the den, for Christ's sake! These are all attempts, as greenery and light fade from the landscape, of bringing the outside in.

The mood hit me early this year, and I actually made a special effort on the culinary front. In was so cold on my final trip to the farmers' market downtown that the cauliflowers were turning color.

How often have I remarked, when Hilary and I are tromping past a clump of sumac trees at the edge of a field, "You can make tea out of that." Well, this fall we harvested a few clusters of seeds and stuck them in our pockets. Back home, I dried them for a few days, then removed the seeds, boiled them for a while, then strained the liquid. Voila! Tea.

My second effort was to roast the seeds from the Halloween pumpkin that had been sitting on the kitchen counter, uncarved, for quite a while. In an effort to jazz them up a bit, I unearthed a recipe that included Worstercheshire sauce and garlic salt. (Was I breaking the rules, here?)

The tea was mediocre—a poor imitation of Red Zinger, which isn't all that great to begin with. The pumpkin seeds were better. I tried to imagine that the roughage supplied by the woody, fibrous stuff, which was impossible to masticate fully,  would be good for my digestion.

I located a final "outside" recipe in the Sioux Chef cookbook recently published by the U of M Press. It was simplicity itself. Take some dry white beans, soak overnight, then boil along with a cedar branch.

While the pot was bubbling on the stove, the air in the kitchen smelled like a cedar-lined sauna—in a good way. But the beans themselves took on none of that flavoring. They simply tasted like beans, and I ended up whirring them in the food processor  along with raw garlic, salt, and quite a bit of olive oil. Tuscan bean dip meets the North Woods.

Such experiments are unlikely to make their way into the family cookbook that I rewrite every few years, but I still consider them worthwhile. Now, when we're walking past a copse of sumac trees, I won't be tempted to say, "You can make tea out of those." Rather, it will be, "Remember the tea we made?"

Yeah? So what?

I might mention one additional effort involving a butternut squash baked with just a tablespoon of maple syrup and a bit of crushed rosemary. The recipe doesn't come from the Sioux Chef cookbook, but it makes use of a few ingredients that figure prominently in Dakota cuisine. The chunks of squash, fully cooked but still firm, betraying just a hint of sweetness, are quite good as an appetizer or in a salad.

But what I especially love is the sight of the low afternoon sun blasting in across the chunks of vegetable flesh. 

Blaise Pascal: a Metaphysical Bent

I hope you've noticed how spectacular Venus has been in the morning sky just before sunrise for the last few weeks. As levels of sunlight decline and darkness closes in, we cling to such ephemeral delights.

In the evening, we listen for the owls,  and make ourselves comfortable in front of the fire with an appropriately reflective book. Though it's the time of the year when the critics' Top Ten lists appear, I like to give a book a few years on the bookstore shelf to mature—and come down in price. I've been hunkering down with Blaise Pascal, who died in 1662.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved into a small, second-floor apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd never been in an apartment building before, the first time we visited her. It was hot.

She had a copy of Pascal's Pensées on her little bookshelf, along with Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings and a bunch of books I'd never heard of. I have her copy of Pascal today, and I got a second copy—a paperback edition—from a friend in Madison who was downsizing his library. 

Pascal is widely known to people like me, who aren’t that familiar with his work, for only a few choice phrases, the most famous of which, as near as I can recall, is this: “The heart has its reasons that reason will never know.” Alongside this plum stands a second saying, less catchy and therefore harder for me to remember, in which Pascal describes the abject terror that grips his soul when he contemplates the emptiness of the universe. Pascal is also renowned for inventing the first pocket calculator, devising a primitive barometer to study how elevation affects air pressure, and formalizing the branch of mathematics that deals with probability. 

He entered my field of view in a serious way in the sixth grade, when I built a “probability machine” for a science fair. It was designed to illustrate how random activity could result in recognizable patterns over time. The device was simplicity itself. I drew a large triangle made up of smaller triangles on a piece of plywood, then drove finishing nails at the points of each triangle. In theory, the marbles I dropped one after another onto the top triangle would cascade down past the matrix of nails, bouncing to the left and right with equal frequency at each point in their descent. The result would be stacks of marbles at the bottom of the matrix of varying height, which, viewed together, would resemble a bell curve. 

It didn’t work out that way.

For the “machine” to work, it would have been necessary to place each of the nails—and there were fifty or sixty of them—with precision, perfectly centered and absolutely upright. One bent nail near the top would send a disproportionate number of marbles to the right or left. A few levels down, a second skewed nail would further muck up the pattern.

I wasn’t “handy” enough to produce the desired effect; the pattern that took shape at the bottom of the  triangle of nails looked more like a snail than a bell.

There were other lessons I might have learned from the experiment: a) the game is always rigged; b) math and life never match up. By stretching the field of reference far beyond the limits of the experiment, I might have arrived at the conclusion that, to borrow a line from Immanuel Kant, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” But such conclusions would have been out of place at a science fair; no one pointed them out to me at the time, and at age eleven, there is little chance I would have figured them out for myself.

Pascal explores similar themes at length in his Pensées. In one section he tries to explain the difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind. In the mathematical field, he suggests, the principles are obvious but “remote from ordinary usage”; in the intuitive field—that is to say, the world we live in—the principles are so “intricate and numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss some.” And this can easily lead to error.

Now the omission of one principle can lead to error, and so one needs very clear sight to see all the principles as well as an accurate mind to avoid drawing false conclusions from known principles.

It would be hard to mistake the naiveté underlying the notion that we could fully grasp every principle underlying the world we live in. In fact, intuition, by definition, doesn’t reason from principles at all. It relies on feelings, hunches, gut reactions, and savoir faire. What Pascal is examining here isn’t so much a difference in thinking patterns as a difference in subject matter. Mathematics is a game invented by humans to help them describe and predict the behavior of the simplest things in life—the random descent of marbles, for example. Intuition is the mental faculty with which we apprehend life in all its richness and complexity.

Thumbing through the various sections around which Pascal organized his thoughts—boredom, vanity, prophesies, and Christian morality—it struck me that he and Spinoza have a lot in common. But Spinoza’s lines of reasoning are meticulously organized and seemingly water-tight, while Pascal’s are scattered, haphazard, mutually contradictory, and often half-baked. Therefore, they make for much more interesting reading. 

Though Pascal’s probability theory can still be found in textbooks of mathematics, his theory of “the wager” holds greater interest for most of us. In this section of the book, number 418, he reasons that although there is no way to prove God’s existence, it would be wise for us to act as if he exists, because if we end up winning that bet, we’ve gained a lot, whereas  if it turns out there is no god, and we lose the wager, we’ll be no worse off than if we hadn’t wagered at all.  

This strikes me as a facile and self-serving line of reasoning. In the first place, if nothing is being put in jeopardy, then nothing is really being wagered. In any case, a half-hearted devotion based on the likelihood of personal gain doesn’t seem like much of a foundation for religious faith. As often happens in such cases, the error lies not in the line of reasoning but in the axiomatic assertions upon which that reasoning is based. Here Pascal’s problems originate in an overly mathematical conception of God. After riffing on the concept if infinity for a paragraph or two, he states that God is infinite in extension. Therefore, we “bear no relation to him” and he lies “infinitely beyond our comprehension.”

If these things were true, there would be no point in talking about him, or imagining that our ultimate fate—saved or damned—might be determined by how avidly we embrace his existence. It would make more sense to drop the subject entirely than to speculate on how we might most cunningly orient our thoughts with respect to such an alien and incomprehensible entity. We would not even be justified in referring to the God Pascal describes as a being, considering that, like infinity, he is limitless in extension. That is to say, he encompasses everything.

Religion has never been, and cannot be, rooted in such stuff. It might be worthwhile for us to bend our feeble brains around such abstractions from time to time, in an effort to get beyond our day-to-day fears and expectations and refocus our attention on matters of “ultimate concern.” But to be fruitful, such efforts require some sort of affinity with the issue at hand. A loving god is worth pondering. A remote, abstract, and infinite god is not.

Pascal knows these things. In fact, the sections immediately preceding and following the famous discussion of the wager bring up two alternative approaches to the issue. Section 419 reports:

Custom is our nature. Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else.

        

And 417, immediately before the “wager” section, says:

Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; wc only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.

Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.         

In these two passages, Pascal touches on elements of faith that are nowhere to be found in the wager section we’ve been analyzing. The remark about custom highlights, perhaps without intending to, the fact that religious faith is, to a large extent, a community enterprise. Entering into belief introduces the believer to a social world of shared duty, fellowship, ritual, and comfort. Pascal associates belief with fear, however, and focuses on how it might enhance an individual’s personal fate. Yet custom, which is always shared, undergirds a universe of camaraderie and support that many people value highly.

The second passage underscores the foolishness of contending that God is infinite, alien, and unknowable. Christianity is rooted in the notion that Christ is God. And Christ, through scripture, is knowable. Beyond that, the presence of the Holy Spirit, though tricky to discern, offers an even more powerful and immediate point of access to the divine.

Sandwiched between these two brief but pertinent remarks, the tortured ratiocinations of the famous wager fragment seem facile and unconvincing.

Augustine believed that it would be impossible for the individual to know or understand anything without divine illumination. And I’ve got to admit that it’s difficult to describe the cognitive path by which a being or a principle that once seemed incomprehensible gradually, or suddenly, starts to make sense. When “illumination” occurs, it exposes an order and a harmony that shares something of the divine. Have we suddenly seen a snatch of God’s garment as he leaves the room?

I suggested a few minutes ago that Pascal’s Pensées are more scattered, but also more accessible and fun to read than Spinoza’s Ethics. On the other hand, Spinoza’s more rigorous inquiry leads him to an important discovery that Pascal never made, namely, that God is the indwelling, rather than the transient creator of all things (proposition 18). Spinoza’s reasoning is that if God were merely a transient creator, then the things he created would be distinct from and “outside of” him, and his extension would not be infinite. Against Pascal’s remote and alien God, Spinoza gives us a being whose energy works through all things, like a blossoming flower. Also, it would follow, through us.

Extensive though his analysis is, I don’t think Spinoza fully explored all the ramifications of this theory. Briefly put, the very notion of creativity requires open space, accident, contingency. Creativity, which in its most quotidian form is simply living, always comes in response to an inchoate urge, a challenge, a crisis, or a sense of lack. To say that God creates everything, through us, may be true enough, sub specie aeternitatis, but that’s not how it looks or feels. If something needs doing, we’re the ones who will have to do it. Creative living involves putting ourselves out there, taking a risk, not knowing if our efforts will meet the need or measure up to the ideal that fueled them. 

Though I can’t claim to understand Spinoza’s “system” adequately, it strikes me that he reduces most emotions to cognitive errors, and suggests that loving God as he manifests himself in events, regardless of feelings or outcomes, is our best path. It’s a quietistic vision, only slightly engaged in the rough and tumble of life. 

Pascal offers a different description of our view from “in the field,” slightly better in some respects because it isn’t so gobsmacked. 

I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me.

The mathematician in him sees finitude, contingency, and chaos. He sees hatred in men’s hearts and vanity in their endeavors. In one section he argues that people would never travel to exotic places were it not for the pleasure they derive from telling other people about it later.

Both men are grappling to reconcile the finitude and contingency of life with the celestial grandeur of divinity, but having been seduced by mathematical concepts, they have difficulty seeing how such a reconciliation could take place without stripping life of its charm and flavor. Pascal lacks Spinoza’s emphasis on love. Spinoza lacks Pascal’s familiarity with life in all its distinctive, idiosyncratic, and deeply imperfect aspects.

I thought about the connection Pascal alleges between travel and vanity for a while and decided it wasn’t sound. To visit and get the measure of a place is enriching, regardless of whom you tell the story to later. It deepens your perspective and expands your appreciation for things in their near-cosmic variety. I can still remember the first open-air market that Hilary and I visited. It was in 1978, in Sarlat, a town in the Dordogne Valley of southwest France. Live chickens squawking in cages. Women in floral print dresses walking off with them, clutching them around the neck. The sight of the windows in Étienne de La Boétie’s house. The cave art at Font-de-Gaume, and the ten-year-old kids who were going in after us with their crayons to draw the beasts. Years later, another open-air market in the French Alps, with rounds of cheese lined up like very thick poker chips and chickens broiling on wood-fired spits. (Thoughts of John Berger. Is that him, sampling the weak white wine of the region in the next stall?) The royal palace at Knossos; the tinkle of goat-bells on the hillsides near Delphi; the sight of Africa looming across the strait from Tarifa. Old men sitting around a bonfire on the road to Stonehenge. Hallowed memories that haven’t come up in conversation for decades.

Duluth Overnight

After hosting a large family gathering on Thanksgiving, we thought it might be a good idea to take a brief vacation, and what better place to visit than Duluth? I had downloaded an article from the Midwest Weekends website about hike opportunities in the hills above the city, after which you could return to your car via local transport. We were also equipped with a list of top restaurants and a few pages of the official Duluth events calendar that I'd edited down to size.

We were on the road by 7:45 Sunday morning. The freeway was deserted and the countryside was mute and hauntingly beautiful. The low sunlight spread across the fields and swamps; every branch stood out,  sharply etched in brilliant, muted colors, as if a calm perfection had settled across the landscape, dormant perhaps but not yet frozen: a soft blue sky with scattered puffy clouds, clumps of gray aspens, orange-tipped willows and darker red-osier dogwoods catching the sunlight in the ditches, and vast islands of red oak trees, as crisp and rusty brown as a newly poured bowl of Wheaties.

We took the 21st Street exit off the freeway in downtown Duluth, drove up the hill past UMD, and by 10:45 we were pulling on our balaclavas in the parking lot at Hartley Nature Center. We eventually found the thin strand of the Superior Hiking Trail amid the broader, flatter, and more prominent ski trails and headed up into the woods. The trail was hilly, rocky, snow-packed, and icy in some places, but it felt good to be moving through the woods, and once we reached to top of the ridge we could see the sunny glare of Lake Superior in the distance through the trees.

The plan had been to cross Arrowhead Road, continue along the trail though Bagley Nature Area, and pick up a bus back to the nature center on campus, but it had been slow going through the woods, buses only run once an hour, and we chose to return to the car on foot through the woods on Old Hartley Road instead. It was lunchtime.

We were intrigued by a little place on the list I'd created called Martha's Daughter, a café tucked into a narrow storefront on Superior Street with a very old "Coney Island" sign above it. It was warm inside. That was a good thing. On the other hand, the café was brightly lit and deserted, the music was bad, and the seating stretched bench-style along the wall across from a lunch-counter with stools—not my favorite arrangement. We were greeted by a bulky young man wearing a crocheted stocking cap, tilted to the side. We examined the menu briefly (Chicken and Waffle $17) and decided to move on.

Superior Street was like a wind tunnel, and by the time we got to Pizza Luće our standards had dropped considerably. But the place looked suburban and there was a 20-minute wait, so we ambled back toward the car with the idea in mind of revisiting O.M.C., a ten-minute drive away in Lincoln Park.

Then I noticed the Zeitgeist Cafe. It has always seems dark and deserted to me in passing, though it's often touted as a centerpiece of the downtown Duluth revival. We crossed the street to take a closer look and found there were people sitting at the bar!

Inside it was warm and lively. A folksinger was at work near the front window. Looking to find a place a little farther away from the music, I notice that a long flight of stairs leading up to a mezzanine above the bar.

"Are there tables upstairs?" I asked the greeter as she handed me a menu.

"Do you have trouble with stairs?" she said, giving me a look of friendly concern.

"I'm not that old," I said, as good-naturedly as I could. "After all, we've been out hiking for the last two hours."   

"In that case, let me show you to a table." And up we went to a table overlooking the front window and the entryway far below.

Hipsters and families with young kids were scattered at tables here and there. Strange and diverse works of art hung on the walls. From a distance the music sounded pleasant.

"That's an early Beatles song," Hilary said.

"I don't think he's got the melody quite right," I said. "What is that? 'Here, There, and Everywhere'?"

The food was top-notch. Hilary's salmon hash was tasty, and my omelet, with a creamy river of white wine sauce dribbling out from  a pale yellow envelope stuffed with prosciutto and spinach, was suffused with a distinctly fresh aroma of garlic. The potato latkes alongside the eggs—our waitress called them "rosti potatoes"—were light and mild.

"I read in the menu just now that this place is a non-profit," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Yes, it's a group effort to give back to the community, and not only as an art space. What comes to mind right now is the program we have to provide transport to elderly people who can't get out to buy groceries."

The only troubling aspect of the dining experience was the number of times our waitress had to go up and down the stairs to bring us coffee, jam, ketchup, and to refill the water glasses. During one of her visits, I said, "There's something in this jam besides strawberries, I can't quite pinpoint it...."

"I'll go ask the chef," she said, and was off before I could dissuade her. She reappeared a few minutes later.

"Cinnamon." 

"Ah, yes. Sorry to put you to all that trouble, up and down all those stairs."

"That's my job," she said cheerfully. "And besides, I used to be a ballerina."

*   *   *

On our way out we wandered around the lobby of the theater that adjoins the cafe. Someone had installed a Day of the Dead exhibit on a few banquet tables, with plastic skeletons, orange and red posters, and other unidentifiable things. I was enjoying the bright colors, but wasn't looking very closely.

The lobby of the Zeitgeist Theater

At our next stop, the nearby Nordic Center, we had an opportunity to examine a collection of objects cut from an entirely different piece of cultural cloth: gingerbread houses.

The center occupies a modest storefront that used to be a print shop. A brick ramp runs up through the back of the long thin space, who could say why. It was dark in the room, though in the light coming in from the street I could dimly make out a group of women sitting around a table, chatting freely as they worked on some sort of craft project. Gingerbread houses of all kinds had been set out on white sheets along both walls, at a level low enough to be seen easily by eight-year-olds.

I especially liked the roofs, some of which were studded with spice drops. A few of them had rows of Dots running from eave to eave. I was reminded of a similar house my mom made when I was a kid, following instructions she'd gotten from Ladies Home Journal, no doubt. She constructed the roof out of Necco wafers, overlapping them like multicolored shingles. It's seemed a tragedy that, due to the adhesives involved, no one--not even me--would ever get to eat those wafers. 

The Nordic Center struck me as a poverty-stricken but good-natured place, run by volunteers yet dedicated to its mission, and perhaps even punching a little above its weight. We chatted with the two women who seemed to be in charge about how they'd gotten the little houses, who'd put them together, and whether they keep them from year to year. (No.)

One of the women had been to the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis recently and come home with two smocks by celebrated Swedish clothes designer Gudrun Sjödén. She was offering to sell one of them at half price because it didn't fit her very well. Hilary tried it on; it didn't fit her, either.

Then the woman said, gesturing toward the craft table,"Alison here had a show at the Swedish Institute recently." Really? Alison went into the back room and returned with her card. Turns out she's a professor at UMD, and has recently written a book about Norwegian author Cora Sandel. I looked at a few of her paintings on line. Very nice.

After a brief stop at the nearby Karpellus Museum—always free, always deserted—to take a look at some letters exchanged between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, we decided to head up the shore to enjoy the lake, the rocks, and the now-bright afternoon sun.

The offshore wind and the low light gave the lake a rugged five o'clock shadow, though it was only three. Near the end of Stony Point we stopped to take a picture of an old fishing shed. At one point along the way,  perhaps imagining what might have been going through Hilary's mind, I said, "Too bad the candy store in Knife River is closed for the season."

"Well, there's also a nice candy store in the Seitz Building on Canal Park," Hilary replied. True enough.

Back in town, we bought a few pieces of candy at Hepzibah's Sweet Shoppe, and then wandered into the kitchen supply shop next door, where Hilary took a liking to a locally printed Christmas card. Looking at the address on the back, I said, "This company is on South Lake Avenue. They might even be in this building."

Thirty seconds later, one flight up, we found the Kenspeckle Letterpress— "Curious Engravings / Eccentric Broadsheets." It would be hard to imagine, I think, a more attractive setting for such an operation or a more colorful and whimsical selection of woodblock prints, posters, note cards, and other printed objects for sale. A man in slightly outmoded dress (owner Rick Allen?) showed me the presses and told me a bit about them, but they were on the verge of closing up shop and we spent most of our time hurriedly thumbing through the cards and printed posters.

I came upon one small poster devoted to the word coddiwomple. "This looks very familiar," I said to the woman behind the counter.

"You probably saw it on the Grammarly website," she replied with just a hint of annoyance in her voice. "It got forty thousand hits. We didn't get anything."

Oh.

Hilary picked out two nice sets of cards, marked down to half price. I think we were catching the tail end of an extended Black Friday event. Merry Christmas!

By the time we'd checked into our hotel out on nearby Park Point, the sun was setting. It was approaching 5 p.m. The next event on our free-and-easy agenda, a "beer and hymns" singalong at Sir Benedict's Tavern, was scheduled to start in five minutes. But it was cozy there in the room, looking out through the last splash of evening light past the Coast Guard cutter moored nearby and on across the inner harbor to the distant grain elevators in Superior. 

We decided to hole up, order a pizza, do a little reading, and sort out a plan for the coming day.       

Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes

Jazz isn't for everyone, but I think just about everyone would enjoy the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, which was given a showing at the Trylon Theater the other day. 

It's about jazz, as seen through the careers of two Jewish emigres from Germany, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who decide to start a record company devoted to the genre simply because they like the music. During the 1950s and '60s the label they founded, Blue Note, was one of several that specialized in jazz—a slightly more popular genre then than it is today. I'm not a scholar of the era by any stretch of the imagination, but I bought quite a few LPs in the 60s issued by Blue Note, along with others put out by Riverside, Prestige, Verve, Columbia, and Impulse, without distinguishing overmuch between them. Sound engineer Rudy van Gelder appears on so many of them that I got to recognize the name, but Lion and Wolff never made an impression.

In the course of this film, director Sophie Huber introduces us to these two gentlemen, who liked the music without claiming to "understand" it, treated the musicians well, paid for rehearsal time as well as recording time, and in other ways stood slightly apart from the pack. Blue Note jacket covers, designed by Reid Miles making use of photos Wolff took during studio sessions, are instantly recognizable fifty years after the fact--several coffee table books have been devoted to them--and the musicians involved include some of the era's greats: Trane, Miles, McCoy, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock.

Lion was an early champion of Thelonious Monk, and he devoted six sessions to recording the pianist before arriving at material he considered worth releasing. Monk's jarring harmonies were never that popular with the public, but Lion didn't care.

Alongside those artists now considered the core of modern jazz, Lion and Wolff—the "animal brothers"—also recorded more avant garde musicians, including Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, but that fact doesn't change the narrative much, and Huber naturally prefers to explore the connections between the hard-bop and modal jazz of the golden age and Blue Note's reincarnation during the 1990s as a label willing to back efforts by musicians to bring jazz and hip-hop traditions together. 

Lou Donaldson, a soul jazz giant of the 50s and 60s, has some wry stories to tell about working with Wolff and Lion during Blue Notes early years, and young pianist Robert Glasper and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire join Hancock and Shorter in the studio with current Blue Note producer Don Was to chat while doing a few takes of Shorter's "Masqualero."

One gets the impression that some of the younger musicians don't entirely "get" jazz, and the associations they make between 60s jazz and the Civil Rights Movement are slightly misguided in the present context. On the other hand, artists about whom I know nothing, like Kendrick Scott and hip-hop producer Terrance Marti, are clearly getting things out of those classic sides, and I suppose I ought to direct more of my attention their way to see what they've found.

The film leaves several questions unanswered, and ought not to be scrutinized too closely. For example, if Blue Note was so great, why did most of the musicians move on to other labels? And how could it be that the label finally went under as a result of two mega-hits, Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" and Horace Silver's "Song for My Father"?

Such quibbles aside, the film remains a delight from beginning to end, not only because of the ebullient sound track, the stunning black and white graphics, and the articulate analysis, but also because the gentle souls of Lion and Wolff can be felt throughout. They were long gone by the time Nora Jones signed with Blue Note in 2002, but here, fifteen years later, she's still raving about the artistic freedom the label gives her.

*   *   *

Back home, we popped a frozen pizza into the oven, I uncorked a bottle of wine, and then started digging through stacks of CDs in search of Blue Note material. From the early days I came up with Thelonious Monk: Genius of Modern Music, volume 1, which was recorded in 1947. Wayne Shorter's Without a Net appeared in 2013. I rounded up 21 CDs in all, and was a little surprised to find that quite a few were from recent times: Don Pullen, Greg Osby, Bill Charlap, Sonny Fortune. Sticking to the old stuff featured in the film, I dropped Monk's early efforts into the player, then an album from 1960, Art Blakey's A Night in Tunisia. It's a spirited bunch of tracks, but thrashing and poundy, and it belies drummer Blakey's claim in the film that he never wanted to be a leader. 

Then on to Joe Henderson and Kenny Dorham. Page One. We were listening with fresh ears. We were groovin' high.   

Two Traditions

The winter blahs are threatening very early this year, and they must be kept at bay! Fires in the fireplace, hearty stews, long walks through the barren winter woods. And music. Getting out of the house after dark takes an extra effort, but it's almost invariably worth it.

Hilary and I drove over to St. Thomas University Saturday night to hear an organ and voice recital in honor of Francois Couperin's 350th birthday. We walked across the icy campus to the chapel, listening to the laughter of passing co-eds while admiring the pedestrian space illuminated by brilliant streetlights on crusty snow.

As for the concert itself, I would say it had too much organ and not enough voice. Speaking as a rank amateur, Couperin's style strikes me as lilting yet halting, like a courtly dance. It lacks the flow, majesty, and drama of Bach's keyboard work, and the tone tends to be light. In the course of introducing the program, Pipe Dreams impresario Michael Barone drew our attention to the various stops and voices that the young Couperin made use of—everything from the Aéoline and the Clairon to the Nazard and the Vox humana. Nevertheless, during the recital that followed I eventually got a little bored and began to examine the huge tapestries hanging on either side of the alter, wondering if they were mirror images, and if not, how the patterns, very similar to each other, had been generated.

I also began to wonder if these organ pieces might sound better on the piano. But that would have been a different concert altogether, and a huge disappointment to many in the audience, who were, no doubt, organ enthusiasts. The organists themselves never appeared; they were off somewhere behind the rood screen.

 After four or five such pieces, the singers of Consortium Carissimi emerged from the chancel and stood in a row in front of the audience, looking like they'd just been wakened from a long nap. And the singing was dreamlike—but in a good way. I especially enjoyed the second "set," sung by two tenors and a baritone, but by this time more than an hour had gone by, and we'd heard nine or ten organ pieces along with the fine spots of singing.

The old colors

Well satisfied, we took our leave at intermission and drove home through the night, admiring the silent river as we crossed the Lake Street Bridge and the various lights along West River Road, including the Guthrie spire and the flashing neon Grain Belt Brewery bottle cap, which seemed to be emitting a sequence of blues and whites rather than the greens and oranges I'm familiar with.

When we got home, Hilary said, "That was fun. What shall we do tomorrow night?" Digging out the weekend Variety section of the paper, she soon hit upon a concert scheduled to take place at the Cedar Cultural Center featuring a lyra player from Crete named Stelios Petrakis. Neither of us had heard of him but I hunted up a few YouTube videos. He sounded good. The important thing here is to make sure there will be a healthy measure of authentic music, rather than an electrified facsimile with the volume turned up and the rhythms watered down. There's no way to know for sure, but it looked promising.

And so, in a fit of late-night enthusiasm, we took the plunge. I bought two tickets online—and this is an important step. If you don't buy the tickets, it becomes easy to talk yourself out of going the next day when it's dark and cold outside and you've already had a glass of wine.

Stepping into the lobby of the Cedar Cultural Center can take ten years off your life. It's not that you suddenly feel young in the midst of a bunch of old fogies, but that the crowd is casual, diverse, sharp, and buzzing with enthusiasm. We grabbed a couple of chairs on the center aisle, nine rows back, leaving an empty row in front of us for no particular reason. It was soon filled by a tall man who seemed to know everyone in the room. Petrakis himself dedicated a song to him. He was having a fine old time, speaking Greek with various friends seated nearby, though he resisted the impulse to hum along with the tunes—with only a few exceptions.

Petrakis was playing a small stringed instrument called a lyra, no more than two feet long, that he cradled in his lap and bowed like a cello, accompanied only by a toubeleki-like drum and a Cretan lute. The lyra isn't loud, but, like its distant cousin the cello, it's capable of producing slow, haunting tones and also frenzied patterns. Petrakis covered the range, and he also sang several numbers. He opened the show with a few pleasant numbers accompanied by piano, during which the music teetered on the edge of a Yanni-like schmaltz. Once the band came onstage the vibe improved, and on several numbers the drummer got up from his seat and did some dancing.

During his soft-spoken patter Petrakis conveyed his deep love of the musical traditions he was extending, and also his appreciation for the crowd's enthusiastic response. "In Chicago, a chilly audience," he said in his shaky English. "Cedar Rapids, warmer. Here, most warm of all!"

On one number he played a goatskin bagpipe, and inquired as to the proper way to pronounce "shepherd." He tried it several times, but the second syllable wasn't coming out well. "That's very hard to pronounce," he said with a laugh.

Including an opening set by a local band called Uskudar Eclectic, we were treated to two and a half hours of music and conversation, absorbing the warmth and sincerity of the eastern Mediterranean just fifteen minutes from home. The walk back to the parking ramp was bitter—but somehow it didn't feel that bad.  

November Reflections

Wan gray skies and a room full of books.

Opening Joseph Epstein's A Literary Education to the title essay,  I almost immediately came across a quotation by Duff Cooper, Britain's one-time ambassador to France, now largely forgotten:

"Had I devoted as much time to my school work as I did to promiscuous reading I might have obtained some scholastic distinction. But I had a stupid idea that hard work at given tasks was degrading."

For myself, I was never afraid of a little hard work, but in college I found it hard to bear down on any specific subject long enough to produce anything worthwhile. Decades later, I haven't changed: roving interests, little accomplishment. Yet I still take pleasure in reading academic works like the ones that we were required to read in college; of course, now I can take my time, read them at my leisure, and drop them at will.

That might explain why I was attracted to a recent acquisition, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200. It's short and the gray days of November are well suited to medieval study. Also, the title seemed absurd to me and I wanted to see where the author was going to take it. Could anyone possibly believe that prior to 1050, Europeans had no awareness of themselves or their neighbors as individuals but conformed unthinkingly to rigid social norms, like ants? 

It seems Morris does. In his introduction he dismisses the many individualistic elements in Greek culture by citing a single remark of Aristotle that man is a political animal. It would have been more convincing to cite the fertility cults of the Hellenic world, which we know little about because their rituals and beliefs were secret. My thoughts took another step backward, to the most popular book of ancient times, The Iliad. It begins with the word "wrath." Achilles is upset because he didn't get the young woman he preferred as a battle prize, and he sulks off to his tent for the first half of the book, indifferent to the outcome of the dire conflict his "people" are in the midst of. He's a striking individual, but not much of a team player.      

And what about Heraclitus's one-liner: "One man is a good as a hundred, if he's the best," or Sappho's deeply personal and erotic love poetry? Or Archilochus, the self-sufficient mercenary soldier, leaning on the only thing he really values: his trusty lance?

No, the Greeks were a profoundly individualistic bunch. They valued their community—their polis—but even here it was one against the other, and the ultimate aim of life was to cut a good figure, stand out from the masses, and be remembered. That was the closest thing anyone could think of to immortality.

Morris is on slightly firmer ground when he suggests that during the dark ages, individualism of this type was replaced by a more socially-minded ethos, yet this view doesn't square with what we know of the people who lived at that time—the Celts. In Celtic society great emphasis was placed on the position one was given at the feasting table following a successful hunt, raid, or battle. If you weren't happy with the spot you'd been given, you might be inclined to challenge one of your comrades who was seated closer to the lord to single combat. To the death. Cheerfully.

No, the dark ages weren't short of individualism. What they largely lacked was literacy—and paper. The bards of the era recited the exploits of heroes, and the lord and his retainers listened, probably imagining that they were no less valorous themselves.

The bond between lord and vassal was often strong, as was the despondency of those who had lost that connection. Here is an early (950?) and famous expression of lonely exile.

THE WANDERER

This lonely traveler longs for grace,

For the mercy of God; grief hangs on

His heart and follows the frost-cold foam

He cuts in the sea, sailing endlessly,

Aimlessly, in exile. Fate has opened

A single port: memory. He sees

His kinsmen slaughtered again, and cries:

“I’ve drunk too many lonely dawns,

 Gray with mourning. Once there were men

To whom my heart could hurry, hot

With open longing. They’re long since dead.

My heart has closed on itself, quietly

Learning that silence is noble and sorrow

Nothing that speech can cure. Sadness

Has never driven sadness off;

Fate blows hardest on a bleeding heart.

So those who thirst for glory smother

Secret weakness and longing, neither

Weep nor sigh nor listen to the sickness

In their souls ...

In short, the dialectic between individual and group is active in every age and era, including our own. We tend to take an interest in those who stand out, rather than merely "acting out." They inspire us, kindle our souls, and give us something to revere and emulate. An important wrinkle is added to this process by the fact that some notable individuals rise above the crowd and inspire others by virtue of their selflessness, social awareness, and compassion rather than their genius or swagger.

Morris would no doubt agree to much of this. The book is more nuanced than the title, which recalled to my mind—and that was perhaps Morris's intention—part II of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which carries the title "The Development of the Individual." Morris simply wants to slide the bar back a few centuries, following the lead of Walter Ullmann (The Individual in Medieval Society, 1966), Charles Haskins (The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927), and other scholars of bygone eras whom he mentions in his introduction.

And I was willing to go along with him, in hope of refreshing my memory and learning a few new things about that obscure era along the way. Here are a few of his observations that I found especially interesting:

"It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the Church's history, years in which death was often close and threatening to most men, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted."

"The interesting feature of the development [of personal confession] is that it was an attempt to introduce the idea of self-examination throughout society; at this point, at least, the pursuit of an interior religion did not remain the property of a small "elite," but entered every castle and every hovel in western Europe."

"The revolution of thought in the thirteenth century created, at least in principle, the possibility of a natural and secular outlook, by distinguishing between the realms of nature and super-nature, of nature and grace, of reason and revelation."

All three of these remarks offer insights that would occur only to those who, like Morris, have spent a lifetime examining the relevant material. The first, that the suffering Christ is largely absent from the iconography of the first millennia of Christian history, is, indeed, remarkable. But it seems to underscore the fact (is it a fact?) that Christians of the dark ages had little grasp of the nuances of Christianity, and perhaps more often considered it a talisman for military victory than an avenue to personal salvation.

The second statement, about the rise of personal confession, highlights a theme that Morris seems to be overlooking throughout the book. What he is actually prodding his way toward isn't "the discovery of the individual" or even the discovery of "individuality," but the growing interiority of art, personal expression, and conscience during the period under review.

In the early going it was largely a group interiority, I think, fueled by plainsong and Latin phrases that few of the faithful could understand. And having written these lines, I leap from my dilapidated and uncomfortable office chair and put of CD of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Pérotin onto the stereo. This music dates from the very end of the period Morris is exploring, but it's the earliest I have at hand.

Viredunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri

It suits this bright November morning.

Hilary and I came upon a striking example of this group interiority when we were in Ireland a few months ago. We drove out from Dingle across empty fields to see the Gallarus Oratory, alleged to be a 7th century structure, though it was probably built five hundred years later. We took it to be a place of worship, but here once again, archaeologists suggest it's more likely to be a refuge built for pilgrims and other passing strangers. There isn't much room or light inside.

Morris's the third statement refers to St. Thomas's complex analysis and differentiation of the natural (Aristotelean) and supernatural (Christian) realms. He claims that Aquinas thereby "created the possibility of a natural and secular outlook."  Yet very few individuals read St. Thomas Aquinas during the middle ages or at any time since, and people have always known that nature is all around them. The interesting question in this or in any age is: in which direction, if any, do individuals move beyond that secular view? Toward magic, witchcraft, and science? Toward spiritual devotion and service to a higher end? Toward superstition and ancestor worship?

In later chapters Morris reviews the literary heritage of the era. It quickly becomes obvious that he doesn't think much of the troubadours, who often celebrated their love for seemingly unattainable females. In an interesting aside, he analyses the marriage contracts of the day, finding them typically shaky and often revoked or annulled as property changed hands and political alliances were made and broken. In such a context, the celebration of fin amor and the proffering of elaborate praise for a "high-born" woman considered in her own right, might be taken as a breakthrough in the "discovery of the individual" with profound gender implications. Yet Morris refers to the works of the troubadours as "brittle"—twice in a single paragraph! And he suggests in the introduction that they have been given far more attention than they deserve. Hmmm. I wonder if he prefers the French fabliaux, those bawdy, primitive tales of cruelty, cuckoldry, chicanery, and obscenity.  

Morris finds the expressions of friendship between monks more interesting than the amorous expostulations of the troubadours, though he has the perspicacity to observe that the sentiments expressed in espousals of friendship were often lifted from De Amicitas, Cicero's treatise on friendship. He also notes that such friendships were often merely epistolary. The men who cultivated them rarely met one another face to face.

Reaching the conclusion to this short work, I cringed to find Morris clinging to the inadequate phrase with which he began, "the discovery of the individual." He writes:
"The discovery of the individual was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200."

In fact, Morris is tracking the development of interiority, reflection, exuberant love and shared private space. Farther on in his concluding chapter Morris describes this cultural development, more astutely, as "a concern with self- discovery; an interest in the relations between people, and in the role of the individual within society; an assessment of people by their inner intentions rather than by their external acts."  

Well put.

Morris might have advanced his case more forcefully by offering a few points of contrast. Once I'd finished the book, I was moved to take another look at the Icelandic sagas, which are focused almost entirely on individuals, but unfold within a world that has little interiority. Here is a typical passage, less gruesome than some:

"Sel cast off his burden and lunged with a bear-hunter's knife at Halfdan, who parried with his sword and sliced the knife handle in two, cutting off all the fingers of one of Sel's hands as well. Sel picked up a rock and flung it at Halfdan, but he dodged out of its path and, getting close enough to Sel, managed to take a grip on the tooth jutting from his snout. Sel started away so violently that the tooth came out, and Halfdan gave him such a blow on the nose with it that it broke both the nose and the whole row of front teeth. The giant looked like nothing on earth—apart from himself, that is."

I then pulled an anthology of medieval philosophical works from the shelf and was lucky enough to hit upon exactly what I was looking for—Peter Abélard's analysis of whether an act or the intention to commit that act constitutes the sin. It's pretty dry stuff, I didn't get far, and soon enough it all began to sound casuistic.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that the author had entirely overlooked Marie de France, whose fables fall squarely within the period he's describing. More elevated than the fabliaux and more richly symbolic than many of the troubadour lyrics, Marie's narratives occupy a zone of expression well worth examining.  

But it would hardly be fair to praise someone for the brevity of his work and then criticize him for the things he's left out.