Gray Friday with Gutters ... and Books

For a long time I resisted the temptation to go out and remove the leaves from the gutters. But "temptation" isn't the right word here. That word connotes something pleasurable that we ought to avoid. What would be the right word, then, to describe such a thought? Resist the self-imposed injunction? No. (Help me out here!)

It was true, the gutters were full of leaves. It was true, it had started to drizzle, with the prospect of more seriously wet and dreary weather ahead. It was true, when the gutters get clogged, the rainwater dribbles down the front of the windows in both the bedroom and the den, ending up who knows where?

On the other hand, there were still quite a few leaves on the trees. A week or two from now I'll have to do the same thing all over again. But my life has been based, almost from the beginning, on efficiency and flow. Don't get so worked up. Don't push so hard. Things are never going to be perfect.

What finally got me up out of my chair was the realization that it would be impossible for me to enjoy any part of the luscious gray afternoon that was developing if that stupid thought kept nagging me: I ought to go out and clean the gutters.

So I did the sensible thing. I got the aluminum ladder out of the garage, found the flimsy cotton gloves which I use for no other purpose than cleaning out the gutters—I call them my Red Ryder gloves, with reference to a TV show from the early 1950s—and stepped out onto the back deck. 

My plan was a simple one. I would clean out the leaves from those crucial areas that might lead to backups and overflows above the downspouts on the deck, the bedroom, and the driveway, leaving the bulk of the work for another, drier, time when I could climb up onto the roof and slide along the abrasive shale-gray shingles on my rear end, clearing out all the gutters from above.

There wasn't much of a problem with the gutters above the deck, but when I lifted the first clump of wet leaves from the downspout outside the bedroom window, I heard the pleasant sound of water streaming down the pipe, and it went on for quite a while. Ahhh.

On my way back into the house after stowing the ladder, I noticed our little rosemary plant, standing alone in the plot that had nourished Hilary's tomato plants all summer—still green, still offering its oily, pungent leaves, and perhaps doing better now that the tomato stalks have been cleared away, though I doubt it. Tonight might be a good night for spaghetti sauce?

But now, have completed my self-imposed yard work, I was free to make a fire and luxuriate, which was a good thing, because quite a few new books have made their way into the house recently. I'm not referring to the ones I got at the Fall Forum book convention a few weeks ago, but to those I received from a friend of mine in Madison who has recently moved to a newer and smaller house, leaving quite a few volumes stranded on the shelves in the old house, which has not yet been put on the market.

Timothy allowed me to take two books from his newer, trimmer—but still awfully large—library: The Scottish Enlightenment by Alexander Brodie and a selection of essays carrying the title Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.  Back at the old house, now in considerable disarray, I picked up The Haiku Seasons by Higginson, In Defense of Reason by Yvor Winters, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics, a paperback edition of Pascal's Pensées that has "northwoods cabin reading" written all over it, and The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200, a Harper Torchbook by Colin Morris, the very appearance of which reminds me of my undergraduate years at the U.

I'm sure Morris's theory has been discredited many times over by several generations of gender- and race-based scholars, but I'm also sure there are threads of truth in it, and it will make for a relaxing and pleasurable read.

And as for the "ancilla," (a word that I just now looked up: "an aid to achieving or mastering something difficult") I open the book at random and hit upon Melissus of Samos, a disciple of Parmenides, where I almost immediately spot an error. He writes: "If [being] were infinite, it would be One; for if it were two, these could not be spatially infinite, but each would have boundaries in relation to the other."

Not true. For it's easy to imagine two spaces meeting up at an interface—imagine an infinite brick wall—while extending endlessly off in every other direction.

To add to the biblio-influx, I wandered over to the Golden Valley Library book sale this morning. But let me be clear: before doing so I did more than an hour of paid work making proof corrections and emailed another friend (and sometime client) regarding the issue of book cover colors. (But not for this particular book.)

At the book sale I limited myself to five hardcover volumes at a dollar apiece: A Literary Education and other Essays by Joseph Epstein; The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce; The Complete Operas of Verdi by Charles Osborne; You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie; and Red Earth, White Earth by our own Will Weaver.

The day is frittering away. (Otherwise put, I am frittering the day away.)There's a big pot of borscht in the fridge. Also sour cream and fresh dill. The rain is holding off for now.

It's time to make a fire.

La Rondine - the Swallow

It's odd to think that although La Rondine lies on the bottom shelf of the Puccini oeuvre, I've seen it three times in the last ten years. The Met did an HD simulcast production in 2008 with Alagna and Gheorghiu, touting an alternative ending that Puccini tried out in Palermo in 1920 and then dropped; the Skylark Opera Company did it here locally in 2015 on a pleasantly small stage; and the Minnesota Opera is doing it now.

In fact, Puccini modified the opera's ending several times, and modern composers have added a few variations of their own, which can be taken as an indication of how problematic the plot structure was to begin with.

Only one of the opera's arias, the melancholy "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" ("Who could guess Doretta's beautiful dream?") appears with any frequency on anthology recordings, yet the far more cheerful duet at the end of act 2 between Magda, our heroine, and country boy Ruggero, "Bevo al tuo frescosorriso," (I drink to your lovely smile) is widely considered the emotional high-point of the work.

The plot calls to mind several more robust and popular operas, but it contains subtleties that are worth pointing out. Magda ran away to Paris early and is now a "kept" woman. Her benefactor, Rambaldo, is kindly, perhaps, but a little dull, and that military uniform with bright red pants doesn't suit him at all. 

At a social gathering hosted by the couple, the charming but cynical poet Prunier, evidently a regular visitor, observes that in Paris nowadays everyone is talking about "love," a concept that he finds slightly risible. Magda, instinctively defending the love impulse, pines for an excitement she no longer feels, though Puccini succeeds in conveying the impression that she isn't just a thrill-seeker but is suffering some sort of existential crisis. 

Near the end of the act, Prunier confesses his love to Magda's maid Lisette—though he has difficulty explaining to the audience how he has come to stoop so far beneath his social station. Meanwhile, Magda steals off to town in an effort to revive, if only for one evening, her moribund emotional life.

Earlier in the act, a young man named Ruggero had arrived. The son of one of Rambaldo's old friends, he's visiting Paris for the first time, and the assembled guests giddily discuss which nightclub would provide him with the best introduction to the City of Lights. They settle on Bullier's. Magda is off-stage during this scene—she doesn't meets Ruggero—and as it turns out, she shows up at Bullier's, too. In an attempt to escape the unwanted attentions of several male admirers, she sits down at the table of an innocent-looking stranger. Needless to say, the young man is Ruggero. They chat. He's naive but charming and sincere. Magda begins to feel the warmth of emotion again. She's falling in love.

The plot is thickened by the arrival of Prunier and Lisette at Bulliers—they supply much of the incidental entertainment throughout the opera—but the central point remains the same, and near the end of the act, when Rambaldo arrives at Bulliers to bring Magda home, she gives him the heavy ho. As act three begins, she and Ruggero have run away to a villa on the Riviera to further cultivate their blossoming relationship.

Lacking both the salon setting of the opening act and the boisterous barroom flavor of the second, act three seems a little dull from the moment the curtain rises. Ruggero is head over heels in love—his first and only love—while Magda is stricken with anxiety by the fact that she has told her lover nothing about her checkered past. 

Ruggero is financing the getaway, so Magda is still a "kept" woman; it's just that her protector doesn't know it yet. When Ruggero informs her that he's written to ask his mother's blessing to marry Magda, her world begins to crumble once again. Her doom is seals when Ruggero shows her his mother's response and asks her to read it aloud.

Magda (and the audience) is chilled to hear Ruggero's mother highlight all the virtues that Magda lacks—purity, chasteness, etc.—and underscore the importance of motherhood as the sine qua non without which the attraction couples feel for one another remains empty and without purpose. Magna realizes that she could never enter Ruggero's world, within which she had hoped to find a more meaningful life. But she's not in the mood to shatter his illusions by telling him why. 

Unlike several of Puccini's other heroines, who die of consumption in the arms of their lover (Mimi) or kill themselves nobly (Butterfly) or in desperation (Tosca), Magda, the "swallow," is doomed to return to a lackluster life with Rambaldo, drinking champagne and listening to jaded, cynical talk about "love" while pining about things that might have been.

In one alternate version Rambaldo arrives at the villa, in another Ruggero finds out about Magda's past and creates a "scene." Puccini even toyed with the idea of having Magda commit suicide, but that seemed too dire a way to end an opera so heavily peppered with barroom music and frothy declarations of love.

The tack chosen by the Minnesota Opera seems just right to me. Though it isn't very operatic, it makes Magda a tragic heroine by keeping our attention focused on her self-sacrifice and almost Kierkegaardian anguish in the face of a situation from which she can see no good way out.

Do opera plots matter? I think they do. Last spring Hilary and I saw Massenet's Thais, the plot of which is simply dreadful—too wretched to describe even briefly. There was no avenue upon which to enter that drama emotionally, and it ruined the show.

But it can be a mistake to think about the plot too much. In the case of La Rondine, the fact that Ruggero knows absolutely nothing about Magna calls into question the depth of their love, as does the fact that she would rather call it quits than take a chance on Ruggero's ability to understand and accept her past follies. Rather than pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, perhaps it would be better to settle back and luxuriate in the music, the staging, and the lively and affectionate bantering that goes on between Prunier and Lisette--just as if they were already a long-married couple.  

The Music Season

There has been a movement afoot for quite a while to de-classicize classical music. Orchestras and chamber groups are naturally concerned that their audience is aging; concert-goers find it difficult to attend evening events, have already heard Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" quite a few times, and will soon enough be dead. Meanwhile, younger enthusiasts aren't keen on spending a bundle at such events while also saving up for those $200 tickets to Hamilton and Guns N' Roses.

In response, organizations like the Schubert Club and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra have worked hard to make their programming more diverse, their ticket prices more reasonable, and their venues more casual and widely scattered. In recent weeks Hilary and I have attended concerts at Ted Mann Concert Hall, Saint Paul Academy, and Aria, a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis, at an average ticket price of $10. We're not in the targeted age group, but we're benefitting just the same.    

As far as creative programming, it seems to be bearing fruit. The most memorable piece I heard at the first SPCO concert we attended was a lush, early-twentieth-century piece by Franz Schreker, a composer I'd never heard of. The hit of the next concert was Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano by Max Bruch, about whom I knew nothing except the name. 

In contrast, though the musicians obviously relish getting the dynamics in Haydn's symphonies just right, these works contain little genuine musical interest. Their chief merit is that there are so many of them, it isn't hard to find a new one to add to a program. The SPCO's recent performance of Haydn's 102nd was a snooze. It didn't help that it had been preceded by Mozart's brilliant Linz symphony.

The most rewarding of the concerts we heard recently was given by violinist Nicola Benedetti at Aria, a gutted brick warehouse in the North Loop that served for many years as the home base of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The last time I visited the place was in 1993 to see the Jeune Lune's performance of Carlo Gozzi's The Green Bird. 

The Schubert Club had brought in Nicola, a dazzling young Scottish/Italian violinist, as part of their casual "Mix" program. There was a trivia context before the performance, free pretzels, and a cash bar in the back. The program was described as an exploration of Johannes Brahms's personal life through his three violin sonatas. Or maybe it was the other way around: a study of Brahms's violin sonatas through the lens of his personal life. The approach sounded interesting to me, and I was curious to hear a concert in that cavernous venue.

Not surprisingly, the musical performance was top-flight. But I was prepared for neither the deep, almost giddy, enthusiasm nor the level of detail which Nicola brought to her analysis of the various details of Brahms's personal life and his complex and conflicted relations with Clara and Robert Schumann. She went on for quite a while from the podium, with the help of an iPad, ingenuously apologizing more than once for the length of her peroration. It brought me back to my college years, when that classic tome, Harold Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers, was a frequent reference resource, and the love lives of Wagner and Liszt seemed as relevant to musical study as their compositions.

I was a big fan of Brahms in those days, though in time I began to find him slightly overbearing and even strangely turgid in comparison with his younger French contemporary Gabriel Faure, for example. In recent years I've gotten interested in his work again, but I was entirely unfamiliar with these complex, emotional pieces.

They differ quite a bit in temperament. Nicola and her long-time accompanist Alexei Grynyuk performed all three with intensity and élan. The performance was more than satisfying ...  though I must confess that not once during the musical sections of the evening did my wandering thoughts take me in the direction of the specifics of Brahms's personal life.

That's not to say that Nicola's forays into biography were beside the point. Her talk gave us a chance to get to know her better—not only her unaffected zest for every aspect of the music, but also her character. And the stories Nicola told us about how she came to a love of classical music—her parents preferred ABBA and the Bee Gees—were an added delight. "My parents don't like me to tell that story, but it's true," she told us. "When I heard one of the Brahms sonatas at age 12, it changed my life."

Sure, Nicola is talented, vivacious, and articulate. But she's also personable. During her recital at Aria, the diva in her lost out time and again to Brahms, and the girl next door.

***

Postscript. I'm sure you're wondering, and the answer is no. I didn't win the trivia contest. How could I, when David Grothe was in the audience? The first time I went over to his house (for an editorial klatch with his wife, Margaret, as I recall), I noticed that the wall in the living room alongside the front door was filled, floor to ceiling, with CDs—entirely classical, as far as I could see.

"You have quite a collection," I said.

"Well—um—yes," Dave replied, a little sheepishly. "It's alphabetical. These are the As and Bs...."

Heartland Forum: Memories of Sleep

"Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters."

Thus begins Sleep of Memory, the first novel by French novelist Patrick Modiano to be published since he received the Nobel Prize in 2014.

I picked up that slim volume the other day—a generous gift from Yale University Press—as the Heartland Fall Forum wound to a close.

"The press recently secured the rights to all of Modiano's books," the rep told me.

"What do you think of him?" I asked.

"I read one of them," she said with a shrug.

"I read a couple in the New York Review Books edition," I said. They were largely the same. Some guy wandering aimlessly around the streets of Paris. Lots of cafes. Some vague mystery. Not so focused as Breton's Nadja, even. There isn't really much there."

The same can't be said of the bustling Fall Forum, which brings together bookstore owners from states stretching from Ohio to North Dakota with the exhibitors who produce the things they might want to stock: newly published books. Yet reading a few pages of Modiano seemed a fitting way to wrap up a day spent among such books, a day consisting largely of brief encounters with publishers' reps, marketing directors, editors, authors, strangers, and a few old friends.

Being neither a buyer nor a seller myself, I didn't participate in any of the workshops, dinners, reading events, or social gatherings that lie at the heart of the gathering, but I did have the privilege of attending the trade show at the request of my old friend Norton Stillman of Nodin Press, to give him a hand behind the table and also to tend the booth while he wandered the floor, saying hello to the raft of friends, young and old, that he's made (and continues to cultivate) during more than fifty years in the trade.

Though I will always be an outsider at this event, I've gotten to know quite a few attendees over the years, and I enjoy reconnecting with people I've known casually for a decade or more but only see for half an hour once every two years. The many books that are "up for grabs" on the vendors' tables can be an added bonus.

Perhaps there was a time when I looked forward to accumulating a bit of swag in the course of a show. Not any longer. I already have plenty of unread books, including bits of detritus from previous conventions. And besides, those free-bees are mostly intended for book buyers rather than functionaries like me.

Yet inexplicably, I came away at the end of the two-day event with a hefty stack of books, most of them interesting, to judge by appearances. I really wanted a few of them, a few looked intriguing, and there were a few that I accepted out of courtesy and compassion, simply because the author was standing there or sitting behind a "signing table" and there was no one else around. The publisher's rep would say very cordially as I passed by on my way somewhere else, "Would you like a signed copy?" and I would look over to see a gracious, smiling, forlorn author sitting alone beside a big stack of books. What else could I say but yes?

And who knows? Those "courtesy" books might be the ones I come to know and love best?

During my stints at the Nodin Press table I had the opportunity to chat at length with Joanna, the marketing director of Milkweed, the publisher occupying the adjoining table. We discussed the bookstore they maintain now at Open Book, which she's found to be useful in evaluating prospective covers and maintaining a thumb on the pulse of the book-buying public. "Well, Norton here," I said, gesturing to my right, "owned Micawbers, a bookstore in St. Anthony Park, for many years, and for the same reasons." Judging by her reaction, I'm not sure she'd ever heard of it.

Though I seldom buy books retail, I have stopped into the Milkweed shop on occasion after viewing an exhibit at the Center for Book Arts next door, and I've found it to be pleasantly small and uncommonly well-stocked.

Joanna told me that due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict, she and her cohorts were going to vacate their table earlier than usual. "We're a non-profit." she said. "And we're having our contributor's dinner tonight. We depend on those events and the generous people who attend them for our budget, our operating expenses!" I'm probably misquoting, but the remark got me to wondering what role book sales really plays in the life of a small non-profit literary press.

While we were watching the passing parade, Norton told me about the chutney he made the other day, and asked me if I wanted a jar of it. Of course, I replied. Then he recited a very long list of ingredients. "But I didn't put in any onions," he said.

"I don't know," I said, though I've never made chutney myself. "Onions can mellow out and add some subtlety to the mix."
  

On my first wander around the floor, I heard another interesting piece of "financial" news from an old friend, Kate Thompson, a senior editor who was recently promoted to the directorship of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Not long after she took over the helm, the umbrella agency for the historical society, which also runs museums throughout the state, decided that it was illogical for the press to sell books to state-run gift-shops at a profit. That would be "robbing Peter to pay Paul," as they used to say.

However sound or unsound that line of reasoning might be, it has created an accounting challenge for the press and also reduced its revenue stream somewhat. (I suspect this is not the kind of work that drew Kate to editing, publishing, and the literary life as a young journalism major.)

All the same, her press continues to put out high-quality books. Scanning their double-wide booth I was immediately attracted to a book called Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America by Michael Edmonds. It consists neither of identification tips nor the latest ornithological arcana; rather, it explores how humans have reacted and responded to birds in the Midwest throughout American history. 

The crisp back cover copy informs us that

Taking Flight explores how and why people in the nation’s heartland worshipped, feared, studied, hunted, ate, and protected the birds that surrounded them. From ancient American Indian shamans to Renaissance explorers, and from frontier mar­ket hunters to modern conservationists, our ancestors thought about birds differently than we do, and acted differently toward them.

Sounds interesting.

At the other end of the back row of booths I chatted briefly with Josh Leventhal of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, though I didn't examine his badge closely enough at the time to discern that he was the director. A woman was at the booth signing copies of her new book about long-vanished downtown Minneapolis department stores, and I did my best to come up with a few: Donaldsons, Daytons, the Golden Rule. She hadn't heard of Amlickson's, but that was a fabric store. I failed to come up with Holzerman's Department Store on Cedar Avenue, which wasn't downtown anyway. And what about the Emporium?

I was more interest in a book I spotted out of the corner of my eye: Untamed Mushrooms - from Table to Field. The photography in this book, by Dennis Becker, is simply gorgeous. Again and again he creates a thing of beauty without removing himself too far from the moist dark ambiance of the woods.

"Are you a forager?" Josh asked.

"Let's put it this way," I replied as I thumbed through the thick luscious pages. "I like mushrooms, and I spend a lot of time in the woods ... but I don't want to die."

Then I added, so as not to appear entirely clueless: "Oh, I can spot a chanterelle, or a pheasant back, or a puffball, or a morel." Unfortunately, I mispronounced "morel" as if it were "moral." Maybe that's what convinced Josh I ought  to have a copy of the book.

Before moving on, I asked him, "How do you like having your booth way back here?"

"I think it sucks," he said with a wan smile. "Don't quote me on that ... No, do quote me on that. They should at least have the aisles running east-west so people can see there are exhibits back here."

I had a pleasant conversation about the merits of sheet cake with Anne Hellman of venerable Macmillan Publishing. (At the time I was eating a piece of cake supplied by Brett and Sheila Waldman in honor of Peef, the Christmas bear.) Anne and I agreed that nowadays cakes can get too chocolaty for their own good, and she ended up, incongruously, giving me a hardback comic book version of the early life of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Undoubtedly the chattiest rep I met up with in my various wanderings was Bailey Walsh of the University of Chicago Press. I think he was simply bored, but perhaps he noticed early on that I was interested in quite a few of the titles he had on display. I asked him straight away why anyone would put out a book featuring two thinkers as remote from each other as Isaac Newton and Francesco Guicciardini? Soon he was showing me a book about falcons by Helen Macdonald that had been "hurriedly" re-released when Macdonald's subsequent book, H is for Hawk, became a best-seller. (Hurriedly as in two years later!)

I noticed a new Peter Handke novel on the table and we got to talking about the used book trade. I seized an opening and told Bailey a little about my luck at finding remainder copies of Handke's early novels, including A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and Short Letter, Long Farewell. Bailey was about to erupt into speech again when I added, "You know, Handke's more recent novels are even better. Slowness. Across. And don't forget Repetition."   

"But he's not the draw he used to be."

"Well, he used to be a pin-ball wizard and the future of literary Germany. Now he's just a moody, out-of-date romantic."

We got onto the topic of declining print runs, and I was surprised to learn that some of the books on the table were printed in smaller quantities than the one we were displaying in the next aisle at Nodin Press.

"You know what the trouble is," Bailey said. "The new generation of academics no longer feel the need to build up their personal libraries. That market is gone."

Then he told me about his ex-wife's father, who, years ago, built a new house in Spring Green with a climate-controlled basement for no other purpose than to hold his vast collection of medical books.

Brian Ferry's translation of the Aeneid was sitting there on the table, and it got us onto the subject of poet and translator Anne Carson. Bailey told me he'd bought her recent work Nox, an accordion-box book that contains facsimiles of the old letters, family photos, collages, and sketches Carson used to create a one-of-a-kind scrapbook in honor of her brother's untimely death.

"You would never find that in a used bookstore," he said. "At least, not with all the extraneous material intact."

Our conversation moved on the Enzenberger and Agamben, Bernhard, and even George L. Mosse, the historian after whom the widely disliked brutalist modern humanities building in Madison is named.

At a certain point I asked the inevitable question: "Are you the kind of rep who has to catch a plane back to Chicago tomorrow morning and would be glad to get rid of a few of these items?"

"No," he replied, cordially but firmly."Nothing is available. I'm traveling by car, carrying my books in the trunk, and I'm going to need everything at another trade show in Iowa tomorrow."

Fair enough.

A few seconds later sometime-publisher Ian Leask appeared to get a few books that Barry had evidently promised him. Barry seemed a little embarrassed by the poor timing, but it didn't bother me in the slightest. Ian was getting a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (who needs it?) and a few oversized workbooks.

"I have multiple copies of these," Barry said sheepishly to no one in particular.

"Ah. Don't worry about it," I said a few times. "I have plenty of shelves full of unread European masterpieces already."

"Well, here's my card. Just let me know if there's something you're really dying to read."

Perhaps I ought to mention the conversation I had with Monty Stoakes of Indigo Bridge Books about recent enhancements to the warehouse district in Lincoln, or with Steve Semken of Ice Cube Press about the new digital printer in Michigan he's using. Or Frank Domenico, the cheerful Ingram rep from Nashville whom I hadn't seen since 2004? Or Paul Von Drasek, who's excited about the literacy work he's doing with the Midwest Oceanographic Institute. Well, enough is enough. 

When I got back to our table, I noticed that the Milkweed reps had, indeed, left for the day, leaving behind a hand-written note to passersby that read, "We had to run. If you see something you like, take it."

I hope their fund-raising dinner went well; they've been putting out some very interesting books. I selected a single slim volume, a book of poems by someone named Ada Limon. It was the smallest thing on the table.

Thumbing through it later at home, I was surprised to discover the book has been set in 7 point type!