Crossing the Urban-Rural Divide

I attended a MinnPost Social event at the Happy Gnome with a friend the other day. The ostensible focus was on the "urban-rural divide." Is it a reality, or is it a myth?

The featured speaker, Gregg Ammot, is a MinnPost staff reporter, and he's written some interesting articles recently about things going on in places like Crosby and Montevideo. His presentation the other night was less specific, and therefore less interesting. Ammot's talk was peppered with phrases like "to some extent," "cuts both ways," "you can't generalize," "it's a complicated picture," or others in a similarly evasive vein.

Perhaps he was worried about exhibiting a bias, but it would have been useful to present some relevant facts about (for example) how urban and out-state population, legislative representation, and funding sit with one another. Instead, Ammot hemmed and hawed and failed, in the end, to say anything substantive about the topic at hand. 

Lucky for us, the audience was peppered with individuals with expertise in various aspects of Minnesota culture and politics. I'm not well-versed in Minnesota politics myself, and I don't remember the names, but to take an example, someone asked a question about the need for more broadband in rural areas, and there happened to be a woman in the audience who had been in charge of the state's grants program in that area for the last three years.

Near the end of the evening, audience members started asking more pointed questions about how much the Twin Cities subsidizes rural areas, and a gentleman from Swift County who owns several regional newspapers offered an interesting spin. "I spent a fortune educating my kids so that they could leave Benson and move to Minneapolis. So I've been subsidizing the Twin Cities for decades."

Someone asked an astute follow-up question: "Have you considered ways to make small towns in your region more lively and appealing to local youth?"

Coffee shop in Benson, MN

Another man in the audience brought up an interesting aspect of the subject near the end of the program: the death of the family farm. He told us that as a teenager in Pepin County, Wisconsin, he used to help his dad, an electrician, service 63 farms in the area. "Now," he added, "there are three farms in the area."

His remark reminded me of an article I read about Pepin County in Politico a few months ago with the title, Inside a Blue County Trump Turned Red. It offers a fascinating look at differing attitudes among locals and outsiders—and in some small towns, if you aren't a third-generation local, you're an outsider, no matter how often you attend church or shop at the local Cenex convenience store. The locals appreciate the business but are quick to detect an element of condescension in the air. Newcomers and summer residents are often oblivious to the vague feeling of resentment and reverse-snobbery their presence inspires.

Cafe in Pepin county owned by a real estate developer from Edina

I ran into an old friend the other day. He'd been raised in a small town on the North Shore but moved to the Cities for college and work. He and his wife were both outdoor enthusiasts, and they decided to relocate to Hibbing to be closer to the North Woods. However, when their son got to school age they moved back to SW Minneapolis. "I didn't want my kid developing those small-town attitudes in school," he told me. "You know what I mean." (I'm not sure I do.)

Now his son is grown and he and his wife are back in Grand Marias. It's hard to find good jobs there...but they like the pace of life; it's where they want to be. 

On the other hand, I met a young woman in Hutchinson not long ago who had moved there with her kids from Minneapolis. Housing was cheaper, and she found it much easier to get involved with local arts organizations there. Well, Hutchinson is a model of sorts among Minnesota towns. Just 40 miles from Minneapolis, it has a city park along the river, an attractive town square, a booming medical complex, and a 3M plant. Other mid-sized towns haven't been so fortunate.

Such tales can be multiplied many fold, of course. Connecting the dots between individual stories, what we come up with isn't a divide but a spectrum of attitudes and experiences, pulsing and shifting like the Northern Lights and similarly riven by streaks of darkness and illumination. It starts to look like a stark divide only when people are called upon to vote.

I suspect that on some issues--immigration, abortion, taxation, the environment--glaring crevises exist between city folk and country folk. I had hoped to learn more. At one point Ammot drew our attention to the town of Worthington, in the southwestern part of the state, where a third of the residents are now foreign born, but he didn't say anything much about how the old-timers in town feel about the situation, or how it affects their politics. 

The city mouse and the country mouse

The urban-rural split has a history extending back to Aesop, one of whose moral tales involves a city mouse lavishly entertaining a country mouse. When the cat arrives, the country mouse scurries home, convinced that personal safety is worth far more than fine wines and sauces.

A classic "recent" example appears in Marcel Pagnol's film and text versions of the rural saga Jean de Florette (remade in 1986 to great aclaim) in which a city man inherits some land, and the locals do everything they can think of to bilk him out of it.

The crafty villagers in Jean de Florette

In 2010  MinnPost ran an article by Sharon Schmickle in which she examined some demographic trends exposed by the then-recent census. Among the discoveries that I found most interesting is that “rural” folk own more vehicles than urban folk. Schmickle attributes this to the lack of public transportation options out-state, but I’m not so sure we need to feel sorry for our country cousins on that score. In the country, many people keep old cars around for spare parts. Then again, they might well have put the “closed” sign on the window of their beauty salon and are now out roaming the hills on their ATVs and snow machines. Meanwhile, we city folk remain cooped up in suburban office towers planning desperately how to avoid the rush hour traffic on our way home.

The annual 4th of July canoe trip in Appleton, Minnesota

Hilary and I enjoy visiting small towns, reading the local newspapers, admiring the quaint architecture, hunting out obscure diners, and taking every opportunity to strike up conversations with the locals, or at least do a little eavesdropping. The locals might accuse us of slumming or condescension, but more often they seem eager to share their experiences with strangers from the city who take an interest in what's going on locally. We have found that Wadena, Spring Grove, and Hackensack are interesting places to visit, not to mention Effie (especially during Rodeo Days), Milan, and Embarrass.

Do I really "know" those places? Of course not. But I'm learning. And I'm counting on future investigative reports from Ammot and other MinnPost reporters to help me out with that. 

New Films: Mothers and Daughters

The other day, by sheer coincidence, we found ourselves watching two films about mothers and daughters back to back. Though radically different in tone, both films explored the same theme—that environment plays an important part in personal development. Everyone knows that already, but it was interesting to see how the stories played themselves out, one set in a run-down residential motel in the shadows of Disneyworld, the other amid the elegant and restful modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana.

The Florida Project follows a few days in the life of Moonie, a six-year-old girl who lives with her mother, Halley, in a single room of a purple, three-story motel called the Magic Castle. Moonie is hyperactive, and spends most of her time with her friends shouting, mooching from passing tourists, setting fire to buildings, and engaging in other random acts of innocent mischief. It's difficult to watch; she isn't a likable little girl, though it's easy to see she's been dealt a bad hand and is trying hard, day after day, to turn her childhood into something fun.

Moonie's mother, a professional dancer, black-market perfume hawker, and sometime prostitute, is, if anything, less mature than her daughter. Her vocabulary is invariably crude, her attention span is minimal, her vision of the future non-existent. She scrambles to get by, but parenting isn't high on her list of priorities.

In the midst of all the ugliness and chaos, the motel manager (played by Willem Dafoe), provides an element of rationality as he tries to maintain order, offering some level of attention and support for Moonie and her friends while resisting the ever-present temptation to make his life easier by kicking Halley and her daughter out of the motel permanently.

The film has its quiet moments—for example, when Moonie and her friend Jancey wander out into a field to look at some cows—but it would be a mistake to arrive at the theater expecting anything playful or uplifting. It's a sad, annoying, and agonizing tale—though it does stick with you.

_____

Nothing could be farther removed from the frantic tone of The Florida Project than the rich tones and measured pace of Columbus. The film is set in Columbus, Indiana, a small town famous for its modernist architecture. In the first few minutes, a famous Korean architectural historian collapses on the pavement while examining a building with a woman we later learn was a prize student and is now his assistant. Soon afterward his son, Jin, arrives from Seoul where he's employed translating books from English into Korean. Father and son have never been close.

Meanwhile, Columbus native Casey prepares to give a tour of the city's famous buildings. She's bright, somewhat wistful, not sure what she wants to do with her life, but ostensibly happy to remain in her home town, living with her mother and pondering a MLS while her friends head off to Palo Alto and other more stimulating places.

Casey and Jin meet by accident. He's bored and eager to return to Korea, though he's tied to the ancient tradition holding that if a father dies alone, his unhappy ghost will roam the earth. He takes little interest in modern architecture, but he and Casey start spending time together, visiting buildings and getting to know one another.

Columbus is one of those films that grab you on the first scene—luminescent, perfectly framed, and wonderful to look at, although nothing is happening. The main characters are similarly engaging. Conversation is unhurried and thoughtful. Jin, though bored and jaded, remains courteous. He listens. And Casey has a youthful radiance that buoys her melancholy and  indecision. She feels the beauty and power of the local buildings, an experience that has been denied to Jin by his father's career. "You grow up around something, and it means nothing to you," he says. Many citizens of Columbus feel the same.

And what about Casey's mother? She, too, has a role to play in the drama--though I don't want to give too much of the plot away--as does Jin's father's assistant and Casey's nerdy friend at the library where she works. It's a lovely ensemble and a lovely film, and first-time director Kogonada has infused it with an intelligence that brings Flaubert's remark to mind: "An author in his book [or film director in his film] must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

      

Winter Reading

Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in Forty Questions

Valeria Luiselli

In 2015 Mexican novelist Valerie Luiselli, while waiting for her green card, took a job at the U.S. Immigration Office interviewing children seeking "immigration relief." Her job was simply to translate from Spanish into English the answers they gave to a series of standard questions regarding their current home, where they came from, why they left, where their parents were now, and so on. Unlike most journalistic treatments of the immigration issue, hers is anchored in descriptions of what individual boys and girls face as they attempt to leave behind a childhood scarred by gang violence, abandonment, and other troubles.

It soon became clear to Luiselli that her interlocutors faced a variety of issues in even answering the questions, ranging from fear to incomprehension. Her job was simply to translate what she heard, but it soon occurred to her that phrasing an answer in one way was more likely to help the child than putting it another way. Whether or not a child was eligible for legal representation was determined on the basis of these interviews . Children who are deemed worthy have three weeks to locate a lawyer on their own initiative or else face deportation.

Luiselli occasionally shared elements of one story or another to her young daughter, who would invariably respond: tell me how it ends. In most cases, her mother didn't know. Luiselli does succeed in staying in contact with one teenage boy whose best friend was murdered by gang members when he refused to sign up. He eventually gets accepted into the U.S. and relocated to a high school on Staten Island, where he meets up with the same gang that was harassing him and his friend in Honduras.

Along the way Luiselli also takes some time exploring her own feelings about applying for a green card: citizenship, nationality, identity. She also shares plenty of information about "coyotes," the hazards of border crossing, human trafficking, and so on. But her personal tone make for easy reading, the sad, unpleasant, and sometimes horrific  nature of the material notwithstanding.   

Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine

Andrzej Szczeklik

For most of its history the practice of medicine has been largely hit or miss—more often miss. In this elegant book-length essay  Szczeklik, a professor of medicine at the Jagiellonnian University in Cracow, reviews that history, telling us more about Greek mythology and medieval alchemy, perhaps, than about modern heart surgery or chemotherapy.

The key word in the title is "art." Szczeklik has an encyclopedic command of the pertinent history, but he's especially interested in what takes place between the patient and the physician during treatment. For example, he spends several pages analyzing the Münchhausen syndrome, named after an eighteenth-century baron famous for telling tall tales. Individuals with this condition come up with a fabulous constellation of incongruous symptoms, stumping one doctor after another. The patient seems not to be aware that the symptoms are fictitious, but enjoys moving from one physician to the next, elaborating on pains that fit no pattern and cannot be diagnosed.  

Münchhausen syndrome is very rare. Then again, so is the Great Doctor who, brought in from the outside and read a litany of symptoms that has stumped everyone on staff, touches a  patient, puts a stethoscope to his chest, and says, "You have such and such. Do so and so."

Suddenly everything changes. As in katharsis, a process of purification follows, and that’s when the doctor in charge of the patient, who has gone through weeks on end, sometimes months of anguish, trying to find a solution but getting nowhere, thinks about that unusual guest and says: “What a Great Doctor!”

Szczeklik argues that such scenes are tinged with something magical that "has its roots in the midst of medical prehistory." And much of his book is devoted to exposing what might almost be called the metaphysical roots of that magic. Unlike works such as Evan S. Connell's The Alchemist, which revel in the poetic illogicality of medieval medical practices, Szczeklik is interested in painting a sympathetic picture. So that when, in later chapters, he describes the early days of open heart surgery and the genome project, we place those efforts, in spite of ourselves, in the context of past practices that were speculative and often dangerous but also rooted in sound intuition about how the body works and interacts with its environment.

Chapter headings such as "Chimera," "Ribbons," "A Purifying Power," and "The Rhythms of the Heart," might convey something of the tone of this little book, which is so eloquently written and so chock-full of allusions and asides from classical and medieval literature that having finished it, I'm tempted to read it all over again and see what I missed.

The Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

Robert Ferguson

I'm a big fan of European culture, and almost invariably enjoy those books in which the "soul" of a nation is laid bare. Luigi Barzini's The Europeans is a classic study, though now out of date. Similarly Gerald Brennan's books about Spain, and all of H.V. Morton's travel books. In fact, I've already moved The New Italians (Richards, 1995) and The New Spaniards (Hooper, 1995) to the basement. Sometimes the older volumes, less concerned with current trends, have more to offer. Patricia Storace's Dinner with Persephone (Greece), Benjamin Taylor's Naples Declared, Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, Paul Hofmann's The Sunny Side of the Alps: the list goes on and on.

Robert Ferguson's new book about Scandinavia is current enough to deal with mass murderer Anders Breivik and soccer great Zlatan Ibrahimović, but also well researched enough to take us back to the grave finds of the pre-Viking Vendel Period. He's equally at home discussing the revolutionary reforms instituted by the physician to Frederick VII of Denmark in the late eighteenth century and the film version depicting those years, A Royal Affair, with Mats Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander, which was released in 2012.

English by birth, Ferguson fell in love with Knut Hamsun after reading Hunger and later studied Norwegian, largely because he couldn't think of anything better to do. He settled in Norway when in his thirties and went on to write the first (and still the only) full-length biography of Hamsun, while also working for a Norwegian TV station on a six-part bio-pic. (I reviewed the bio for the Star-Tribune in the late 1980s—not something you're likely to find on Google.)

Ferguson's ostensible mission in writing the book is to determine whether the reputation Scandinavians have for melancholia is justified. But that's litle more than a pretext, a peg for the use of reviewers and blurb-writers. In pursuit of this elusive truth he spends a lot of time conversing with his Scandinavian friends while drinking in bars in Oslo and other places. This rambling and personalized approach works well because Ferguson is adept at shifting from the conversation at hand to his own deeper and more well-informed analysis of the same material, whether it be the Kensington Runestone, polar exploration, the films of Ingmar Bergmann, the German invasion of the Oslo Fjord, or the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

It's a discursive book, in short, but pleasantly so. It reads like a very long New Yorker profile—400 pages worth—though he tells us almost nothing about social customs or food.  

Faces, Places

Documentary films have a freedom seldom granted to feature films to flit from one thing to another, held together by the thin thread of the narrator's curiosity. Some documentaries choose a more serious path, which is often cautionary and can usually be encapsulated in a simple statement: the world is heating up; you shouldn't eat at McDonald's; killing sharks to feed epicurean tastes is wrong; war is hell; grizzly bears are dangerous. There's nothing wrong with that approach, and I have found repeatedly that seeing such weighty film  is far more rewarding than merely acknowledging with a yawn the truths they're attempting to underscore.

Yet Faces, Places opts for the more discursive, playful, picaresque approach, and it works. It was directed by Agnes Varda, whose film roots extend back to the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s. A long-time friend of Jean-Luc Godard ( who is also still making thoughtful, quixotic, and bizarre documentaries) Varda's recent films, such as The Gleaners and Me, have a gentler edge, or no edge at all, and they're more firmly rooted than Godard's in rural sensibilities and affection for working people.

In Faces, Places she teams up with JR, a photographer and muralist I'd never heard of, to travel the back roads of France celebrating the lives of common workers by creating huge photo-based murals on the walls of factories, barns, villas, and other structures. They visit the worker housing of unemployed coal miners in the northeast; they create a mural of a young waitress in the tourist village of Bonnieux in the Luberon mountains; they do a long mural of the workers at a modern industrial plant that manufactures hydrochloric acid; and they create an enormous mural in the container port of LeHavre of three women who work there.

And let's not forget the extended visit to a goat farm, where the discussion turns to whether or not it's ethical to remove their horns, and the interview with another farmer who manages 2,000 acres all by himself with the help of seven huge machines. Once they've finished pasting a fifty-foot-tall reproduction of his image on the wall of his barn, they say to him: "You'd going to be the most famous farmer in town." To which he replies with a sheepish grin, "I already am."

It's important to note that Agnes and JR take a genuine interest in the people they're using as models. They interview many of the subjects about their work and their lives. And the workers involved seem eager to work together with their factory colleagues and JR's mobile production team to create something positive for their communities. Everyone recognizes that the murals are made out of paper and won't last forever. One image, pasted at low tide onto the side of a crumbled concrete bunker left over from WWII, is obliterated by the next high tide and gone before morning.

Several segments are devoted to Agnes and JR in conversation about their ongoing film, their unlikely May December friendship—she's 89, he might be 35—and why JR refuses to take off his sunglasses. We get to watch them eat French pasties, drink cafe au lait, chase through the halls of a deserted Louvre, etc. They visit JR's grandmother, and he takes some very fine photos of Varda's tiny feet, which he later enlarges and applies to the sides of a railroad car.

What's the point? Art can be an occasion for celebration, fellow-feeling, and fun. Various lines of work are worth knowing about. Odd couples are interesting. Rural France is still pretty nice.

   

What does JR look like without his sunglasses? We still don't know. He does take them off at one point, but we see his face only from Varda's point of view, and she has horrible eyesight. It's just a blur.

I suspect he looks a lot like Jean-Luc Godard.

* * *

I suppose many film-goers don't have all that much affection for the golden age of French films. But some of us cut our cinephile teeth, so to speak, on The 100 Blows, My Night at Maud's, Pierrot le Fou, Shoot the Piano Player, Mon Oncle d'Amerique, and other now largely forgotten classics. Even the lesser Rohmer films had a certain appeal. And the string of French hits continued, albeit at a lesser rate, with A Sunday in the County (Tavernier), Un Coeur en Hiver (Sautet), Va Savoir (Rivette), and so one. 

This summer a three-hour documentary arrived in town, My Journey Through French Films, devoted to Bertrand Tavernier's retrospective analysis of the French movies that inspired him and influenced his own work. My thumbnail review: yes, everyone loves film clips ... but there was not enough Renoir, too much Jean Gabin, too much Jacques Becker.

Maybe Part 2 will be better?          

New Year's Reverie : The Pleasure of Limits

Well, cold is cold. And we've already had quite a bit of it.

Starting the year at -15 degrees, on the road to the North Woods. Sunny, but a dangerous chill over everything.

The first adventure—lunch at OMC, a smoked meat café in West Duluth we'd read about in the papers. Excellent ribs, chicken, brisket, jalapeño grits, and cole slaw. (We shared a sampler platter, which arrived on two enormous plates.)

A cheery waitress named Cassidy explained the four sauces. Later one of the owners stopped by our table, and she explained to us how her son's had traveled the south, working in a variety of kitchens, picking up authentic techniques.

There's a gift shop across the street, and a deli going in soon. Bent Paddle Brewery right around the corner. But it seems to me that the Lincoln Park neighborhood is in no danger of become over-gentrified.

We stopped by the side of the road at Leif Erickson Park and walked through the snow to the railing overlooking the harbor. Eight oar boats were anchored off shore—the most I've seen since the grain embargo of 1978. Later in our trip a woman explained to us that when it gets really cold, loading hatches freeze shut, machinery breaks down, and everything backs up. However, the locks at Sault Ste. Marie close on January 15, and some of the freighters may have to return to their home port empty.

In Two Harbors we stopped at the supermarket for pasties and M & Ms, then drove out to the harbor in search of a snowy owl. No luck. Though we notice along the way that Castle Danger Brewery has build a big edition to their warehouse.

Arriving at our cabin a few miles east of Castle Danger, we find that it's been fitting with a gas fireplace. I don't mind. The arrangement of fake logs is not very realistic—it looks like a modernist sculpture or the set for a miniature opera—but it's certainly handy. Just push the button on the wall and presto, you've got flames and heat.

A giddy thrill at having arrived. Tall windows facing the big lake. We went out for a walk around the grounds at sundown. It might have been 7 degrees. Golden yellow light on the snow, tinges of orange and deep blue shadows in the trees. The lake is relatively calm, small waves curl around the icy rocks from the south.

* * *

It's 5:15, pitch dark. We step out again to get a look at the stars before the moon gets too high, but it's already bright and the stars are pale.

* * *

"For Nietzsche's intention—and he was sure he had succeeded—was to break out of the enchanted castle of metaphysics. He himself had already defined that castle ... as a site of marvelous spells where the inhabitants are unaware of living under a spell. Of course, having emerged from this place, he claimed to have found not silent country paths, but a desert that extends endlessly and easily swallows one up, where there is no marked goal."  — Roberto Calasso

I would prefer to remain in the castle, of course. Nietzsche was banished, however, and could think of nothing better to do than to pound on the doors from the outside in an effort to attract others to his desert of torments.

* * *

Morning. 7:30. The lake is an ominous blue-gray. Wind from the south, stronger. The waves seem to pass us by without stopping, churning toward some distant rendezvous. Wisps of sea smoke moving in the same direction, and out across the lake to the east a bank of clouds a hundred feet high—or a thousand, who knows?—blocking my view of the horizon.

Cirrus clouds above and beyond are a pale peachy white. The sky is a pale bright blue, if that's possible. I've got the magic fire going, coffee brewed, just listening to the waves. Waiting for the sun to arrive.

On the one hand, I feel that I've brought the wrong books. Then again, when you're stuck with the wrong books, you find yourself reading them, which was the idea. All the same, there are too many theoretical books, not enough poetry and genuine literature. With Borges's This Craft of Verse somewhere in between.   

* * *

"The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. He only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."  — Chesterton

* * *

Back from our morning ski at Gooseberry Park. A fine ski, though the snow was barely sufficient and a few of the downhill runs were dicey to the point of no control. I took one glorious tumble, self-induced, to avoid even greater speed and risks ahead.

"Are you okay?" Hilary called from the top of the hill.

"I'm fine," I shouted back. But I had a terrible time getting back on my feet and finally crawled through the snow to a nearby tree for support.

We were on the trail for almost two hours, but saw no one. Eagle, downy, raven, blue jay, chickadee. By the time we got back to the car the temperature had risen to 11 degrees. But the day is hazier and grayer than what the dawn had promised. Something the wind blew in.

Now the snow is coming down lightly and a hundred yards from shore the fog is impenetrable. The waves are getting big: it looks like the dawn of creation. Yet a few minutes ago Hilary saw a little girl just outside the window on the pebble beach below the cabin take her shoes off and stick her feet in the water.

* * *

"Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody ... but when something is merely said or—better still—hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it." — Borges

* * *

I just stepped outside into the dark to greet the morning. Calm and cold, with half an inch of new snow on everything. Stars are mostly gone, but three bright orbs continue to dazzle to the south. Maybe I'll look them up later. Borges notes that the word "consider" originally meant to "bring the stars together," as in drawing a horoscope. Nietzsche would not have approved.

Hilary is reviewing trail conditions on her phone. A sliver of bright orange appears on the edge of the cloud bank to the east. Today the sun will shine. But it will be very cold ...