Memorable Films of the Decade

I didn’t see enough films in the last ten years to make a convincing determination of which were “the best” but it’s been fun to see a few of the lists generated by the critics, which have brought back fond memories and also reminded me of a few movies that continue to be (in my opinion) vastly overrated. What follows is a brief list of films from the last ten years that I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind seeing again.

 Hell or High Water is a film about two brothers, their love for one another, and their differing approaches to raising money when the bank tries to foreclose on the family ranch. It’s the kind of film in which every throwaway line sounds perfectly natural, but also adds to our understanding of where people come from and what they’re thinking. This quality extends from the brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) to the Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) who are sent to track them down. Even the bank president and the waitress in the diner have some good lines. There’s a fair amount of bloodshed in the film, but, like the dialog, it’s subtly modulated and consistently kept in check by the pathos of the unfolding story.

The End of the Tour. I have never read the novel Infinite Jest, and I’m pretty sure I never will, though I have read a few tennis articles by its author, David Foster Wallace. This film chronicles the last seven days of a book tour in which Wallace is accompanied by a reporter from Rolling Stone (played by Jesse Isenberg) who also happens to be a budding novelist. The two discuss life, literature, work, fame, celebrity, junk food, and other things as they travel together from one book event to another, slowly generating a camaraderie that’s laced with suspicion and envy, professionalism and need, vanity and self-disgust. The interactions are complex and often edgy, as Wallace pursues the renown that will accompany the feature story while remaining wary of Eisenberg’s power to “spin” the article any way he chooses. Whether these conversations offer an accurate portrait of Wallace I have no idea, but they make for an absorbing film experience.

Museum Hours. Much of this film takes place in the Kunstehistorishes Museum in Vienna, where a tall, middle-aged guard named Johann sits on a bench thinking his private thoughts (in voice-over) as the patrons pass by. Just when we’re beginning to think we’re watching a genuine slice-of-life documentary on the order of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Johann makes an effort to help a stranger, Anne, who has arrived in town from Montreal to visit a relative she hardly knows who’s in the hospital. She has little money, doesn’t know the city, and returns to the museum repeatedly as a way to fill her idle hours. Anne and Johann are both gentle souls, lonely but also widely curious, and they slowly begin to open up to one another as the empty days go by. This plot line—it would be a misleading to call it a romance—serves as an effective counterpoint to the seemingly random but mildly engaging images the camera draws our attention to both within the museum and also on the city streets, which include bored children and cawing crows, streetcars in the snow, and closeups of Grand Master paintings. At one point we listen for several minutes to a lecture being given by one of the docents about the work of Breugel, and the parallels between his peasant-oriented work and the film we’re watching become clear. One remark that she makes could stand as the theme of Museum Hours: a painting’s ostensible focus and its actual point of interest are not necessarily the same thing.

Theeb (United Arab Emirates). Theeb is a tale of a man, the son of a sheik, who agrees to lead a British soldier across the wastes of Saudi Arabia along an old pilgrim trail, now mostly used by bandits, in search of a well. The Arab doesn’t know what the soldier is up to, and perhaps doesn’t like him much, but he’s obliged by the unspoken rules of hospitality to take on the assignment. Matters are made considerably more difficult for him when his baby brother, Theeb, decides the follow the little caravan out into the desert. Theeb bears some similarity to American westerns where the countryside is magnificent, danger is always near at hand, the law is nonexistent, and it’s sometimes hard to tell friend from foe.

Ida chronicles a few weeks in the life of Anna, a young Polish novitiate who is about to take her vows. Before before doing so, her superiors demand that she pay a visit to Wanda, her single surviving family member—an aunt whom she’s never met. Wanda turns out to be a sullen, hard-drinking woman who informs Anna almost immediately on arrival that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. She’s Jewish, and her parents were murdered during World War II. Ida has been in the convent since infancy and knows very little about the world. She seems astonished simply to be traveling on a bus, and it takes a while for her to digest this new information about herself and the evils of the wider world. Wanda agrees to help her niece find her parents’ burial site—a mission that eventually takes them to the bedraggled farmhouse Ida’s parents once owned. It’s now inhabited by God-fearing Poles who claim that “Jews never lived here.” Wanda knows they’re lying, and they know she knows.

The film’s black-and-white cinematography is extraordinary, and the pace is slow enough to allow us to savor it scene by scene. Forests, crumbling buildings, Wanda’s stylish apartment, city streets, a well-lit dance hall. The luminosity of the footage acts as a welcome counterweight to the sometimes grim drift of the plot. We see the world afresh through Ida’s limpid but strangely unfathomable eyes, both the good and the bad. 

Papusza (Poland) Did the Polish film industry run out of color film, or what? First Ida, and now Papusza. Not that I’m complaining. Papusza tells the story of the gypsy poetess of that name and the gadja (i.e. non-gypsy) who comes to live with the band, recognizes Papusza’s talent, and later shares her poetry with the wider world. The film is rich in long-shots of campfires by the river in the moonlight, caravans slowly crossing fields of stubble, and riotous parties at which the gypsy musicians have been invited to play. But if the cinematography romanticizes Roma lifeways to a degree, the plot-line exposes their patriarchic cruelty and xenophobia. Things do not end well for Papusza. Her big mistake was to learn how to read and write.

Tangerine takes place in a wooden valley in Abkhazia, a sub-region of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Georgia is now an independent state, but some of the residents of lower Abkhazia consider themselves more Russian that Georgian, and they’re fighting for their independence. The film’s central character, Ivo,  is Estonian, and now that Estonia is no longer part of the USSR, many Estonians are inclined to go home, but Ivo and his friend Margus have decided to stay on until they’ve harvested the tangerines. They’ve arranged for a local militia to escort the produce to the market, and even, perhaps, help them pick the fruit. Their tranquil agricultural pursuits are shattered when a firefight takes place on the country road outside their farms, and Ivo finds himself taking care of two wounded soldiers, one Georgian, the other a Chechnian mercenary fighting on the side of Abkasia and Russia.

 In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh adds new shades of meaning to the phrase “warts-and-all” biography. His portrait of the famous English painter during the final decades of his life (Turner died in 1851) is spectacularly robust—the streets, the wharves, the salon galleries, the artist’s studio have all been vividly recreated, like a Dickens film without a plot. It’s no wonder the film garnered Oscar nominations for both costume and production design. The acting is first-rate. Timothy Spall, in the title role, mumbles and grunts his way across the screen like a cretinous lout (good enough for Best Actor kudos at Cannes), and various relatives, servants, and artist-friends also fix themselves in our imagination immediately. Marion Bailey is worth singling out for her portrayal of a jolly boarding-house matron, twice-widowed, who possesses an unaffected intelligence and sensitivity that Turner finds appealing. Yet unlike most “period” English dramas, Mr. Turner is devoid of romantic sentiment, and could hardly be said to have a plot. In one scene Turner sits in a music hall while actors on stage lampoon both his canvases and the way he paints them. A few scenes later, someone is offering him a hundred thousand pounds for a few of them.

A Royal Affair. In France they had a revolution. In Denmark, a few years earlier, a physician of enlightened convictions (Mads Mikkelsen) got the ear of the slightly-mad king and launched a series of progressive reforms. The film’s title suggests a back-stairs romance at a decadent court, with harpsichords, wigs, candles, and carriages, and there’s some of that, too, as Mikkelsen and the young queen (played by the Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander) pursue a private agenda. Wrap these elements together and you’ve got a film with more grip and pull than Ridicule, The Madness of King George, Marie Antoinette, Start the Revolution Without Me, La Nuit de Vanennes, or any costume drama you could name.
And did I mention the story is true?

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan once remarked, “The problem with Hollywood is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend—we don’t know what he really thinks.” It would be difficult, I suspect, to make a good film about what we don’t know about people, but in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan gives it a shot. He has made a film in which we get to know people almost in spite of themselves, as twelve men, including a murderer and his brother, a doctor, a prosecutor, an urban and a provincial policeman, and a couple of laborers with shovels, traverse the barren hills of rural Turkey in the middle of the night trying to locate a body based on a few hazily-remembered landmarks. Though parts of the film have a ludicrous humor reminiscent of Almadóvar or the Coens, its overall tone might better be described as Chekhovian.

A Separation is an unsavory gruel of overheated conversations, long-standing resentments, deep familial affections, hopes for a better life, unshakeable religious faith, and economic desperation. The plot thunders on like an express train and though the violence involved, in the end, amounts to little more than a few slaps and shoves, every frame carries an uneasy current. As the film opens, eighteen months have passed since the Iranian couple at the center of the action applied for a visa to leave the country. The visa has now, finally, come through, but Nader is unwilling to leave without his father, who’s suffering from dementia. His wife, Simin, considers it imperative to leave Iran for the sake of their daughter, Termeh, a bright and seemingly docile adolescent who’s obviously taking in every angry work exchanged in the apartment. The two-hour film, shot with natural light in apartments and on the streets of Tehran, goes by in a flash, and as we leave the theater we’re likely to have Aristotle’s theory of poetic catharsis running through our heads: a sense of purification after the release of pent-up or horrific emotions.

The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds, hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, and climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.

Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. No point in mentioned the small event here. The “large” event is the creation of the universe and the development of life on planet Earth. There is extended footage of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Only better.

The Social Network. I guess I have a soft spot for films set on college campuses. Young women and men are in the midst of what, for many, is the first flush of quasi-independence; they’re being challenged to show their stuff intellectually in the classroom while engaging in animated conversations at local watering holes after hours. The Social Network, is similarly well-endowed with late-night drinking, over-bright students, odd-ball personalities, and winsome coeds. It tells the story of Mark Zuckerman, the inventor of Facebook, and the plot-line would fall squarely into the category of implausible wish-fulfillment fantasies if it didn’t happen to be largely true. Though Zuckerman comes across as unbearably snarky, and treats his intellectual inferiors with bored distain, the path by which he hones the features of his networking website is fascinating to follow.

I Am Love is a lavish Italian production that has been compared to the best works of Lucino Visconti. Director Luca Guadagnino adopts a “fly-on-the-wall” point of perspective on the comings and goings of a wealthy multi-generational Italian family. Tilda Swindon attends to the concerns of her three children, her square-jawed and lackluster husband, and her mother-in-law (Merisa Berenson). The scenes flow one into the next; we’re not sure which threads are the important ones, and that’s what makes the film so interesting. It’s as if the director wants us to see the paintings on the wall, the tile on the floor, the glaze on the shrimp, and the insects buzzing amid the clover. He’s equally interested in the shape of the distant hills, the health of the family’s clothing factory, and the aroma rising from the fish soup.

The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural, in so far as it deals with an investigation of a brutal rape-murder on the part of a middling investigator and his brilliant but alcoholic sidekick. Yet the story is made richer by the response of the victim’s husband to the loss of his beautiful young wife, and also by a romantic subplot concerning the investigator’s boss, an equally beautiful but conservative and seemingly unapproachable young woman from the upper classes. It’s difficult to discuss a film of such quiet richness without giving away too much, but suffice it to say that in an era of fascist ascendancy, justice is not entirely served by due process, and at a certain point, life becomes dangerous for the investigator himself.

Particle Fever (2014) follows scientists making use of the newly launched Large Hadron Collider to  recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang hoping to detect the presence of the legendary Higgs Bosen. Or not. It’s a red-hot scientific documentary more fascinating than any sci-fi film you’ll see this year, edited by master Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy).

How I Ended This Summer (Russia, 2010). Two bored and antagonistic men stationed at a lonely military outpost above the Arctic Circle, counting the days until their tour of duty is over. Check it out—if you dare.

Postprandial Thanksgiving Reflections

I was sitting in the waiting room at a clinic the other day thumbing through The Seventeenth Century Background by Basil Willey when I came upon this appraisal of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682):

Perhaps no writer is more truly representative of the double-faced age in which he lived, an age half scientific and half magical, half sceptical and half credulous, looking back in one direction to Maundeville, and forward to Newton. At one moment a Baconian experimentalist and herald of the new world, at another Browne is discoursing of cockatrices and uni­corns and mermaids in a tone which implies that though part of him is incredulous, the world is still incalculable enough to contain such marvels.

We still live in that world of marvels, I said to myself. We don't know half as much as we think we know.

Willey adds:

At one moment [Browne] pro­fesses himself a follower of Hermes Trismegistus, and feels, pantheistically, “the warm gale and gentle ventilation” of the world-soul; at another, he accounts the world “not an Inn, but an Hospital; a place not to live, but to Dye in”. He exhorts us now to “live by old Ethicks, and the classical rules of Honesty”, and now to “Look beyond Antoninus, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or Epictetus. Be a moralist of the Mount, and Christianize thy Notions.” He had, in fact, what Mr. T. S. Eliot has called the “unified sensibility” of the “metaphysicals”, which was the offspring —perhaps unreproducible in different circumstances—of a scholastic training blended with the expansive curiosity of the Renaissance. It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

For a modern reader like me, the big problem with Sir Thomas Browne is that he couldn't spell!

But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth considering how, if we care to, we can still live in an intellectual world as rich as the one Browne inhabited, and why we should make an effort to do so.

Anyone with an ounce or two of curiosity is likely to be fascinating by the picture of the universe given to us by biologists, physicists, chemists, and other researchers of that ilk. On the other hand, the philosophical community had failed us big time by neglecting to emphasize how many questions lie beyond the range of scientific research, and how much our understanding of life and of ourselves depends on other disciplines—not only philosophy itself but also poetry, history, and religion.

Our lack of clarity regarding the power and appeal of these disparate but related spheres of thought—and the differing types of experience that feed them—makes it difficult to properly emphasize the value and the limitations of any of them.

A case in point: just this morning, after a first-of-the-season ski around Theodore Wirth Park, I was reading a review by Nicholas Kristov of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Lost Art of Scripture. Though I haven't read the book, a few days ago I listened to Kerry Miller interviewing Armstrong of the radio, so I already had some idea of what it's about, and Kristov's review underscored the same points. 

In brief, Armstrong is arguing that scripture—Christian, Hindu, Confucian, or whatever—presents a vision of life in a different way than does the scientific community, and that "we" have lost the ability to receive its message. She goes on to suggest that an important part of that message lies beyond its factual or didactic content; it can be found in its sound, presentation, and embodiment.

The first of these points—the widespread loss of sensitivity to the value of scripture—is certainly true; the second strikes me as a bit silly.

Armstrong reminds us of how easy it can be to ridicule the nonsensical and contradictory aspects of  scripture, and also to make use of it to defend bigoted attitudes and and violent acts. But she also holds that looking for an accurate and all-encompassing representation of life from scripture misunderstands how those writings are designed to work. True once again, though she seems to be edging toward a "performative" interpretation of scripture rather than a cognitive or metaphysical one. Kristov paraphrases :

It’s like complaining about Shakespeare bending history, or protesting that a great song isn’t factual ... Anyone who has been to a Catholic Mass or a Pentecostal service, or experienced the recitation of the Quran or a Tibetan Buddhist chant, knows that they couldn’t fully be captured by a transcript any more than a song can be by its lyrics. I still don’t understand Don McLean’s classic song “American Pie,” but it moves me every time I hear it. Music doesn’t need to be factually accurate to be true.

To which the rejoiner might be, "Yes, a piece of music or a theatrical production often moves us when it's beautiful, but that doesn't make it true, strictly speaking. The categories of experience are getting confused here, and need to be straightened out."

The other day I requested a copy of Durufle's Requiem from the library, and yesterday Hilary and I sat by the fire and listened to it. She was knitting; I was doing nothing. We enjoyed it so much we listened to it again, though it's in Latin and we had no idea what was being said beyond a few Kyries and Agnus Deis.

We were moved. Does that make us Christians? Probably not.

It's easy enough to hive off and discard those elements of scripture that expound an antiquated view of the physical cosmos, and it's also easy to cultivate an appreciation of the beauty of a given liturgy, without pondering the ethical and eschatological pronouncements that lie at the core of the faith in any great detail. Music and liturgy can bolster and strengthen a "faith," but it seems to me that faith must still be rooted in some form of understanding. If not, then it would be difficult to distinguish a religious faith from a social club or a choir group.

Then again, would it be too far off the mark to suggest that a religion is a social club of a special kind, created to facilitate and minister to its members' most important passages: birth, christening, communion, repentance, marriage, and death?

My parents dragged me and my brother to church for many years. They both sat up front in the chancel because they sang in the choir, and they had no idea what we were doing during the service. Nor did they care. They were shrewd enough to anticipate that some aspects of this beautiful world, full of reverence and holiness, might rub off on us no matter where we sat. We often played scissors-paper-rock up in the balcony, though sometimes we ran around in the basement. Occasionally we actually attended to the service—the readings, the psalms, the intercessions, and all the rest.

And some of it did rub off.

I actually found some of the sermons interesting. The minister, an East Coast transplant named Greenley, looked like a white-haired Efrim Zimbalist, Jr., the spitting image of an Old Testament patriarch. From the pulpit he analyzed Greek words and explained what the "fear" of God actually consisted of. His black Studebaker Lark convertible was always parked in front of the side door through which we usually entered the church on our way to the choir room.

St. John in the Wilderness. 

Greenley's assistant was a tall, lanky recovering alcoholic named Andy. He typically wore a long black robe and had a disheveled Whitmanesque beard which gave him the look of a maladroit prophet who'd just returned from a few weeks in the desert. My mom found Greenley to be a little stuffy, I think, but she and Andy hit it off from the first. They were both interested in antique furniture. I think the desk sitting against the wall here in my office once belonged to him.

I don't remember much about the Sunday morning liturgy, beyond its inordinate length. But all lapsed Episcopalians probably remember these lines from the General Confession by heart.

"We have done those things which we ought not to have done,

and we have not done those thing which we ought to have done,

and there is no health in us ... "

At that age, my recurrent misdeeds were on the order of putting tin cans in the trash bag rather than the garbage bag.  I was also adept at forgetting to take the trash bag down to the basement to burn it in the incinerator, even after having been entreated to do so several times.

Yet even at an early age, the statement "there is no health in us" struck me as a bit extreme. Give me a break! No health whatsoever? Isn't that laying it on a little thick?

I also found the repeated reference during the readings to Israelites, Canaanites, Philistines and Maccabees incomprehensible and tedious.

But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that the sensations associated with a particular faith experience, repeated again and again, continue to resonate subliminally and eventually become a source of comfort (or nightmares, I suppose) long after we've rejected most of the theological particulars involved. I'm grateful to have been raised in a rich Anglican tradition in which the concept of sin tended to get slighted or ignored, and this gratitude extends beyond the aesthetics of choral harmonies and stained glass windows to the kind of ingrained and unthinking reverence that lends so much power to church events. 

Perhaps one value Armstrong finds in orally transmitted scripture—a value she fears we're in danger of losing—is precisely this ritualistic liturgical repetition, which played a much larger role in daily life during ancient and medieval times, when many people couldn't read, than it does today.

 

But I think another aspect of scripture is also due for a revival: the poetry itself. And while we're at it, why not extend that interest more widely to encompass  poetic works that do not claim for themselves the imprimatur of divine revelation. I'm not talking simply about verse here, but about all types of imaginative literature. Such creations summon experiences and types of understanding that can be had by no other means.

In his description of Sir Thomas Browne mental tool kit, cited above, Willey hits upon precisely the frame of mind needed to draw sustenance from that zone of experience and expression: 

It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

Here, in a typical passage, filled with Browne's halting yet elegant delivery and terrible orthography, he draws upon his medical background to consider where in the body the soul resides—he can't seem to find the relevant organ.

... In our study of Anatomy there is a masse of mysterious Phi­losophy, and such as reduced the very Heathens to Divinitie; yet amongst all those rare discoveries, and curious pieces I finde in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe as in that I finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not any thing of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast: and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument of the inorganity of the soule, at least in that sense we usually so receive it. Thus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor can tell how it entered in us.

Browne goes on to consider what the human body is actually made of:

Now for the walls of flesh, wherein the soule doth seeme to be immured before the Resurrection, it is nothing but an elementall composition, and a fabricke that must fall to ashes; All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves and yet do live and remaine our selves.

Now there's some food for post-Thanksgiving thought.

A Musical "Lost Weekend"

Near the end of the four-week jazz class I teach in the U's lifetime learning program, a woman asked me, "So are you saying that rock is inferior to jazz?"

The question caught me off guard, because at the time, as near as I can remember, I hadn't been saying anything about rock specifically. Perhaps I'd been describing how the jazz fusion movement of the mid-1970s often degenerated into long, noodly solos and primitive rock rhythms.

"Inferior?" I replied. "I'm not saying that at all. That would imply that musical experiences exist on a straight line, like SAT scores, with some being superior to others. No. It isn't like that. Brahms' Requiem and "Shall We Gather By the River" differ radically in scale and complexity, but one isn't inferior to the other. They appeal to the heart in different ways."

I don't know if she was satisfied with that answer, but a little later I brought up the question of which single rock artist would be most likely to endure in cultural memory a hundred years from now, and she quipped, "The Rolling Stones will still be touring a hundred years from now."

I was thinking about that exchange this morning as I reviewed the unusual range of musical experiences Hilary and I had over the weekend.

It all started with a Friday morning concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.  The program consisted of a brief Donizetti sinfonia followed by a woodwind octet by Mozart, meatier yet still fresh and bright enough for the morning occasion, played with exemplary musicianship as usual. The final piece, the third of Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets, arranged for string orchestra, seemed a little over-heated and moody in comparison. The program notes refer to "a slow and despairing introduction," a "somber" mood in the second movement, and a "whirlwind fugue" in the finale. But Beethoven quartets, in my view, are best listened to at home, late at night, when the bizarre frustrations, disjuncts, and meandering asides that characterize his work can be fully relished, and even groveled in, preferably in front of a fire. In a huge suburban church at noon, I couldn't quite get my head around it all, and kept thinking about the gaggle of young priests, wearing floor-length black robes and white collars, who were sitting in the balcony to our left, looking down.

That evening we attended a performance by the Oratorio Society at the Basilica of St. Mary in downtown Minneapolis devoted to French sacred music from the romantic era: Frank, Fauré, and Honegger, followed after intermission by Duruflé's Requiem. The harmonies were rich and shifty in the best French manner, and the sentiments, though familiar, approached the sublime.   

Saturday was on off-day. Removing leaves from the gutter. Yet music intruded once again when we took a break from yard work to visit the offices of Coffee House Press, where some hand set broadsides were being offered for sale as part of a larger craft fair being held in the building's atrium. 

As we stepped inside, we were greeted by a quaint half-shouting tune by The Talking Heads that was wafting from a speaker somewhere nearby. That naturally brought to mind associations with Blondie, Television, and other CBGB heroes of the Blank Generation, with whose music I have a passing acquaintance dating from my Bookmen days.

The broadsides themselves had been wrapped in plastic sleeves and spread out across several old-fashioned linoleum-topped tables. In case you wanted to examine one of them closely, white cotton gloves had been placed here and there in pairs. Many of the broadsides were signed, though the only authors I remember now are W. S. Merwin ($65) and William Burroughs ($260).  

A publisher's office is a hallowed place, don't you think? Anyone who admires authors and loves books ought to be fascinated by this locus of artistic and intellectual activity—just a bunch of desks, really—where great things take shape, and later get marketed, though nothing much is actually produced, stored, or sold here. In the Coffee House offices one or two small platen presses are sitting on tables, and a number of antique typewriters have been arranged in a row on top of some file cabinets.

Before we left I bought a book dating back to the days of Toothpaste Press, a precursor to Coffee House. It's a collection of poems by a Finn named Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Anselm Hollo and published in 1983. It was hand-set in what looks like 11-point Centaur, which reminds me of a piece of advice David Godine once gave me: "Never use Centaur under 14 points." But the pages are handsome and easy enough to read. I guess in this case Godine was wrong.

Life was given to man

for him to consider

in which position

he wants to be dead:

gray skies float by,

star-meadows hang

and the earth

comes into your mouth

like bread

Our next musical event, on Sunday afternoon, was a fluke: a few days earlier, while waiting for a friend at the Turtle Bakery, I started thumbing through a neighborhood newspaper, the Longfellow Nokomis Messenger, and came upon a notice from the Mount Olive Lutheran Church announcing a free, 4 p.m. concert by Ensemble Me La Amargates Tu. The group was described in the notice as one of the world's leading Sephardic music ensembles. I found that hard to believe, but the price was right, and the late afternoon start time was also appealing. 

The performance turned out to be top-notch. The drummer and the guitarist were from Mexico, the singer from Argentina, the woman playing recorders from Greece, and the cellist from Venezuela, though he seemed to know quite a few people in the audience. (I later learned he teaches in Eau Claire.) I gather than they've been playing together for quite a while, but pursue independent careers, meeting a few times a year wherever it's convenient to rehearse and perform.

The folk songs they shared with us were from Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and Morocco. Good stuff. The lyrics were in Ladino, a Sephardic dialect peculiar to those areas. The printed text looked simpler and more straightforward than modern Spanish, in the same way the Occitan looks less tricky than French. (Well, what do I know about languages?)

Though "early music" concerts can sometimes be underwhelming and even dreary, this one was enlivened repeatedly by the expressive voice and dramatic delivery of tenor Esteban Manzano. And the lyrics, which ranged from lengthy medieval ballads to enigmatic love songs, were worth following in the program.

If the sea was of milk,

and the boats of cinnamon,

I would stain myself,

to save my flag.

If the sea was of milk,

I would become a fisherman;

I would fish for my sorrows

with small words of love.

If the sea was of milk

I would become a merchant,

walking and wondering

where does love begin.

Here's the original, so you can brush up on your Ladino.

Si la mar era de leche,

los barquitos de canela,

yo me mancharfa entera

por salvar la mi bandera.

Si la mar era de leche,

yo me haria un pexcador,

pexcaria las mis dolores

con palabricas de amor.

Si la mar era de leche,

yo me harfa un vendedor,

caminando y preguntando

donde s'empieza el amor.

During the intermission I noticed a gentleman in the reception area opening about 20 bottles of Charles Shaw merlot. That would come out to roughly half a bottle per person. We might have lingered after the concert to sip some of that wine and learn a little more about Ladino but we'd booked some seats for the evening show at the Dakota, ten minutes away downtown.

 The Jeremy Walker/Clara Osowsky Quartet: it's all in the name—a jazz/art song mashup. Well, Walker's piano style tends toward the melancholy, while Osowsky's vocal style tends toward the rich and haunting. The two obviously enjoy working together, and the result ended up somewhere between the summer Source Song festival and the winter Song Slam at the Ice House. Jeremy and his trio also played some Ellington tunes with extended bass solos by Anthony Cox. 

Clara delivered well on a number of Jeremy's original compositions and also sang a heartfelt rendition of Billy Stayhorn's "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing." It was a long, leisurely set punctuated by a brief intermission. Osowsky isn't a "jazz" singer but she has a lot of humor and sass, and her voice is genuinely compelling. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, and so were we.

Setting these performance styles side by side—German/classical, French/liturgical, New Wave electrical, Renaissance/Ladino, and jazz/lieder—which can be said to be inferior to which?

Love of Leeks

I sometimes rise before six, make the coffee (grinding the beans as quietly as I can) and sit in the Poang chair by the front window watching light come into the sky. A few mornings ago, as I sat at my pre-dawn post, the word "strata" came to mind. Why? Rummaging through my grab bag of associations, I quickly rejected the opera singer Teresa Stratas and the Fellini film La Strada from consideration.

When the word "stirato" drifted into view I knew I was getting warm. Stirato bread, as you probably know, is like an Italian baguette, and there was a glass container of bread, sliced into small cubes, sitting on the kitchen counter. I'd seen it there while making the coffee.

But the word "strata," I seemed to recall, referred to a breakfast dish consisting mostly of bread and cheese. Should I make some such thing?

These idle thoughts stood to attention when it occurred to me that there was a leek lying on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. A leek strata! Such a thing might not exist, but it was suddenly clear I had to make one.

It didn't take long to find a long string of recipes for strata online. I chose one from a website called Pioneer Woman—because it offered four or five variations and made the process of  assembly otherwise very casual. I converted the text to a Word document and printed it out.

Five eggs, 2 cups of milk, four cups of hand-torn day-old bread, some cheese, and whatever else you have available. The recipe called for 8 strips of bacon (!) and 1/3 cup of shallots. I made do with my single precious leek, which I sliced lengthwise down the middle as quietly as I could, and then into quarters in the same direction, finally cutting it crossways into 1/4 inch pieces. I sautéed the little pieces in butter for a while and also got a bag of parsley out of the freezer and tossed a generous handful of surprisingly green and aromatic leaves into the mix.

Next, I fetched two stubby pieces of hard white cheese from the cheese drawer, both with rind attached. One was Gruyere, I'm pretty sure. The other, who knows? A dash of salt, a big dash of dry mustard, then into a lightly greased  8 x 8 pan. You're supposed to let it chill in the refrigerator for six hours, but that wasn't going to happen. I slipped it into the oven at 350 degrees to bake for 50 minutes. A few minutes later, when Hilary came around the corner, a variety of pleasant aromas were emanating from the kitchen.

The results (if I do say so myself) were outstanding, and the effect was heightened by the spontaneous nature of the event. The day-old bread (actually three days old) was from Rustica, the city's premier bakery, which helped, but it was the subtle elegance of the leek, I think, that put the dish over the top.

Can a vegetable be elegant? I hope you know what I mean. Yes, a leek is just a glorified onion ... but I have long since grown suspicious of this usage of the word "just." Most of the good things in life are "just" better versions of the crummy things in life. 

It's true that leeks cost more than onions, but a single leek from Trader Joe's costs no more than a fancy apple or vine-ripened tomato. So what? And at mid-summer farmers markets you can get a bundle of three long, tender stalks for $2.

Leeks have been held in high regard since ancient times. They appear in Egyptian tomb hieroglyphics and figure prominently in Apicius's famous Roman cookbook. Yet no one has been able to put their unique flavor into words precisely. Waverly Root describes them as "less fine but more robust than asparagus," a remark that seems very odd to me. The Oxford Companion to Food refers to their "mild, sweet flavor."

Off the top of my head, I'd say they taste like ethereal onions infused with a hint of thyme. But words aren't worth much in a situation like this. You just have to try them. 

The Weil Conjectures

Joint biographies are not uncommon: we have Gelhorn and Hemingway, Custer and Crazy Horse, Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, for example. Now Karen Olsson has written a joint biography of Simone Weil and her brother, André . Simone will be familiar to many readers, André  to relatively few, I suspect. She was a writer, a religious thinker, and some say, a saint, who was driven to seek out the most painful and laborious undertakings, her chronic ill health notwithstanding. He was a distinguished mathematician whose famous "conjectures" still occupy the attention of learned scholars today.

Do these two exotic spirits have anything much in common, other than the fact that they're siblings? Olsson thinks they might. In any case, she makes use of their letters, writings, and biographies to tell their stories, shuffling back and forth from one to the other, and along the way she also takes time to explore the nether regions of both spirituality and mathematics. 

In the midst of these free-floating segments Olsson also tells us quite a bit about her own experience as a undergrad in the math department at Harvard, where she made it a few rungs up the ladder but soon realized she was not one of those wunderkinds for whom everything came easy—and in the world of math, they're the only ones who matter. She dropped the subject and became a writer, without entirely losing her interest in math's mysterious and often incomprehensible worlds of correspondence, transmutation, speculation, and evident paradox. She compares her efforts to share her interest with readers to that of describing a Beethoven symphony to a deaf person. Often she admits that she doesn't really understand what she's talking about either.

I know nothing about higher math. We didn't even have a calculus class in the small-town high school I attended. I was good at algebra and geometry, and I once sent a note to Martin Gardner offering my proof of the Three-Color-Map problem, which had stumped the experts for centuries. (He sent me a kind postcard explaining that my "proof" was not convincing.  Someday, I will be vindicated.)

My "declared" major as a college freshman was math, but I dropped that pursuit after taking my first freshman history class at the U. History was messier, but much more full of life. Olsson has pursued the subject far enough to offer us a splendid smorgasbord of mathematical fields, problems, and personalities, without expecting us to decipher a single complex formula. She displays a knack for evoking the abstract worlds that numbers, shapes, fields, and theorems describe, and sometimes create for themselves, without confusing us with the details. For example, at one point she describes the work of the nineteenth-century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie as follows:

"Leaving aside the details here, the gist of the matter is that Lie, by expanding a theory in algebra, namely the study of groups, found a way to shed light on an entirely separate area of math—or one that had seemed to be entirely separate, namely differential equations. It's as though he had located a wormhole from one mathematical realm to another." 

This is the kind of math that André  Weil's sister Simone was suspicious off. It didn't refer to anything real. It was as if mathematicians were working up half of a structure out of whole cloth, and then attempting to "prove" what the other half would have to look like. Though Simone was good at math herself, up to a point, she was attracted to the physical—factory work, for example—seemingly less out of personal masochism than out of a desire to fell the suffering that those around her often felt.

Olsson admits that in college she owned a copy of The Simone Weil Reader, but can't remember if she ever did more than skim through it. (I have the same book, and I feel the same way about it. I should take a closer look.) And she presents little in the way of quotations to confirm the view of T.S. Eliot, Susan Sontag, and many others, that Simone was an extraordinary thinker, writer, and human being. But the letters Simone exchanged with her brother, to take one example, form an important part of the book. And in the end, along with other details, they expose a fascinating community of personalities rather than a litany of solitary and heroic geniuses.

In one longish passage Ollson refers explicitly to the social aspect of a mathematician's world:    

"The seeming fixedness of mathematics is surely one of the reasons I’ve felt drawn back to it, given our present-day world’s particular instabilities and alternative facts, but an­other reason, a stronger reason, is that my son likes math, which is not to say that I need to relearn abstract algebra for his sake but rather that his excitement has reminded me of my own old excitement, has made me want to blow on the embers—has made me realize there are embers. And as I do, what strikes me are the dialogues, the exchanges, whether it's me talking with my son about numbers or Benedict Gross’s [online] performance of algebra. Even as mathematics presents itself from afar as an austere architecture dreamed up by singular geniuses, up close it’s a torrent of transmissions, teachers lec­turing, college kids trying to solve problems together, col­leagues at conferences, André  writing to his sister. For every solitary discovery there are massive systems of relationships, which I begin to think of as a kind of giant math ant colony, or math hive, and I even begin to wonder whether (or con­jecture that) the desire for mathematical revelation, the wish to dwell in a perfect, abstract world, is secretly, unconsciously twinned by another desire for communion. One the negative imprint of the other. Abstraction the flip side of love."

At this point Olsson adds a remark by Simone. "Nothing which exists is absolutely worthy of love. We must therefore love that which does not exist.” 

No aspect of the tale interests Olsson more the obscure mental process by which mathematicians make their discoveries. Often enlightenment coming only after months or even years of unproductive "head-banging," as she calls it. An insight may come in a dream as a visual image, or during a feverish, sleepless night. She also notes that some mathematicians, including André  Weil, took special pleasure during that phrase when it was clear that some new discovery was "on the tip of one's tongue" but had not yet been fully grasped.

"The cruelty in all this is that the head-banging hardly guarantees the revelation, that to be an ambitious mathe­matician is to spend much if not most of one’s time being stuck... "

André  Weil, in one of his letters to his sister describing the process through which he arrived at the solution to a sticky problem, admitted that “the pleasure comes from the illusion and the far from clear meaning; once the illusion is dissipated, and knowledge obtained, one becomes indifferent at the same time.” Olsson concludes that "the flicker of a parallel, the suspicion of a connection, excited him, more so than nailing it down, working out the details. As though knowledge itself were a bit of a letdown: it’s being on the cusp that brings the greater thrill."

The Weil Conjectures has the twin virtues of being short and also so loosely organized that the reader could almost pick it up at any point and start reading. But better to begin at the beginning. Its protagonists reappear again and again—not only André and Simone but also historical personages like Fermat, Gauss, Archimedes, Hadamard, and Poincaré.     

The layering of personalities, events, and points of view allows Olsson to raise all kinds of conjectures without arriving at any conclusions about either the "reality" of various fields of math or their possible connections with spiritual enlightenment. We're left with a tantalizing, tingling sense of awe, as if we, too, were on the cusp of some important discovery, not about math, but about the universe, or ourselves.     

The Library Sale

On a sparkling Friday morning the in-box is empty and I have nothing better to do than drive down to the Golden Valley Library book sale. Though I'm not a member of the local "friends" group, the woman in charge lets me in to the pre-sale on the strength of my donations to the Hennepin County umbrella group. Compact discs are what I'm after, mostly.

Two dollars per CD? Shocking! And not a single jazz CD in the bunch! But that doesn't stop me. It's for a good cause, and even at that inflated price, it gives me the opportunity to take a few chances.

I walk away with fourteen CDs, and a few hours later I'm already pleased with some of the choices.

The Art of the Fiddle - a part of the Rounder Heritage Essential Folk series. Good, clean, raw fiddling, and as an added bonus, the accompanying pamphlet has photos and extended bios of these often little-known artists.

Thomas Tallis: Spem in Alium. I'm listening to it now, a haunting motet for forty voices, probably written in 1567. That's a lot of voices, though it doesn't sound much different that other massive choral works I've heard.

Altan: Island Angel. A lively recording from 1993 by the Irish folk supergroup.

Jimmy Dale Gilmore: Spinning Around the Sun. I once had a cassette tape of this classic album by the Cosmic Cowboy. I especially liked the steel guitar. Will I listen to it again? At least once.

The Baltimore Consort: On the Banks of the Helicon. It's described on the jacket as a collection of early music from Scotland. But I will never know what it sounds like, because the jewel case is empty.

Puntimayo Native American Odyssey, from the Inuit to the Incas. There are times when I really want to hear some Dakota drumming or some Inca piping. And I know nothing about Mohican music. However, a closer look (and a little listening) suggests that this CD contains quite a bit of pop and rock by indigenous groups. Hmm.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Another in the Rounder Heritage Series. Brash music for a wan season: Lent.

David Torn: Only Sky. The tracks on this ECM recording of Torn's work for guitar, electric oud, and far-out studio effects were recorded in real time. After listening to the ominous first track, "at least there was nothing," I would chalk this one up as a stinker.

The 100 Best Opera Classics. This 6 CD set, which was rung up as a single item, will be a fun one to queue up in the car and try to guess what opera each aria comes from.

In a room mostly filled with books on sale for a dollar, naturally I glanced here and there, and came away with a few items:

The Oxford Book of French-Canadian Short Stories. Something to read on the plane during our next trip Quebec?

Basil Willey: The Eighteenth Century Background.  I already have a copy of this outstanding survey. Now I have two.

Sarah Leah Chase: Pedaling Through Provence Cookbook. I had a copy of this book in my "stash" at the Bookmen for many years, but never got around to buying it. Black olive and Swiss chard tart, anyone?

Judy Rodgers: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I've never heard of the cafe, but this is a big, beautiful book. Thumbing through a few pages, I notice a recipe for sage pesto. We have a lot of unused sage in the garden, and winter is closing in. Let's give it a try.

Charles Lamb: The Essays of Elia. A very sturdy edition from the Heritage Press, complete with cardboard case. Skimming the introduction as I listen to Tallis's choral piece, I come upon an excerpt of Lamb's letter to William Words­worth describing how he felt upon retiring from several decades as an lowly office clerk.

“I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition over­whelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity ... I wandered about think­ing that I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumul­tuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift.”

The Twin Cities Book Fest 2019

The Twin Cities Book Fest has developed an exuberant and egalitarian tone that no other local book event can match, at least none that I've been to. Publishers, self-published authors, used book dealers, trade organizations like the Professional Editors Network, university creative writing programs, digital printers and design firms, and a variety of other organizations that promote books and reading in one way or another are arranged in no particular order down five or six rows of tables. Most of the tables are strewn with books, and quite a few of them have pieces of bite-sized candy on offer in a bowl or basket. Rain Taxi, the festival organizer, has set up a used book sale in one corner and a children's book area across the cavernous room in the opposite corner. Some belly dancers were getting ready to perform in a third corner when I walked by—I don't know why.

Rain Taxi has also arranged for a handsome array of authors, both local and national, to read and discuss their books in a second venue just down the street. We dropped in briefly to listen to Faith Sullivan and Susan Straight discuss the importance of women telling stories about other strong women, while in another makeshift enclosure a few feet away two outdoorsy men were analyzing the delights of Minnesota's Northwest Angle .

The author on the program who interested me most, David Shields, was appearing too late in the day. His book of aphorisms, Reality Hungry, includes a surprising number of winners. Evidently he's been involved in two or three new projects since then.

But the main interest of this event has always been in the grand hall, which serves as the Eco-Building during the state fair. With the Bookmobile booth right inside the door, and the Nodin Press booth a few feet away, front and center, I felt like I was among friends right from the get-go.

Wandering the aisles can be fun, though for me there is greater pleasure to be had from running into old friends. I'm almost guaranteed of seeing Bill Mockler, a colleague and friend from twenty years ago, because he tends the booth for Consortium Distributors. He harvested the last of the hot peppers from his garden recently (I saw a photo on Facebook) and we got to talking about his garlic crop.

"Right now is a good time to plant," he told me. "Or soon. When there's been a hard freeze but the ground itself isn't frozen yet." He recommended buying garlic for seed at the farmers market rather than the grocery store. "That stuff could be from China, as far as we know."

I was suddenly reminded of a book I own that might interest Bill. A Garlic Testimony: Life on a New Mexico Farm. "I have two copies," I said. "I'll send you one." On a preliminary sweep through the shelves back home, I could not located either copy.

Also likely to be in attendance is another old Bookmen friend, Richard Stegal. He often helps out at the Nodin Press booth, and there he was again. He told us he spent a few weeks near Ashville, NC, recently, babysitting his younger sister while she recovered from a knee operation. "It's so nice down there," he said with a wan smile. "And then you come home to this?"

The weather was dreadful indeed: just above freezing, gray skies, gusting wind, slight drizzle. I think the dreary conditions outside might have added to the energy inside the hall.

I often help Nodin Press authors get their books ready for publication, but I only occasionally  meet them face-to-face. It's always a pleasure to do so. We "know" each other, but the sight of a human face, the movement of an arm or a leg, the sound of a voice, adds immeasurably to the relationship. 

For example, I worked last spring with Ed Block, a retired professor from Marquette, on a book-length critical appraisal of Jon Hassler's novels. Now here he was, signing books at the booth. I introduced myself and we had a lively chat. Somewhere along the way I was reminded that he was an expert on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, and I steered the conversation in that direction. "Yes, I used to the editor of Renascence magazine, and we did an entire issue on Marcel." He paused and then said, "It wasn't one of our more popular issues. I'll send you a copy if I can find one."

Over the years I've become aware that I remember lots of people who don't remember me. This gives me a  little freedom to pick and choose my interlocutors. Just to be safe, I usually make it a habit to greet a passing acquaintance by saying my name. It can sometimes be difficult fitting a name to a face on the spot. "Yes, of course I remember you...er..."    

 

We caught up with Norita Dittberner-Jax at the Redbird Chapbooks booth. She's got a book coming out next year, though I haven't seen it yet. "I was thumbing through 26 Minnesota Writers over at the book stall," she said, "and there you were." I couldn't deny it. That was a long time ago. It was an essay about the Grand Canyon, as I dimly recall. Something about the silliness of Kant's theories of space and time, and an image of two rafts floating downstream, seen from high above, the size of grains of rice.

Norita's daughter in the mayor of Duluth, and Hilary asked her how the re-election campaign was going. We'd been in Duluth recently and we'd seen the yard signs. "She won last time with 73 percent," Norita said breezily. "She hasn't got too much to worry about. But she genuinely likes her opponent. He isn't mean and he doesn't lie."

A few minutes earlier we'd run into Nick Hayes in an adjacent aisle. He's putting the final touches on a memoir about his time spent in Russia. The subject of readings came up—how difficult it is to anticipate the size of the crowd. Nick told us the story of his friend, Peter Quinn, who had written a grisly mystery called The Hour of the Cat. The publisher had arranged for a reading somewhere in Manhattan, but as the event approached there was only one elderly woman sitting in the front row. Quinn looked out across the podium and said, "Ma'am, might I ask why you're here?" She replied, "Oh, I love anything to do with cats."

We got to reminiscing at the Friends of the St. Paul Library table about the early years of the book festival. "Remember when it was downtown at the Vo-Tech? It was cramped, but there was a lot of buzz." "And what about the very early days, when it was held on one of the upper floors of the International Design Center? Rather dark and dingy in there..."

A few minutes later Media Mike Hazard and his wife, Tressa, suddenly appeared, and Mike handed me a postcard advertising the closing reception (on October 20th) for their joint show at Homewood Studios. "That isn't far from our house," I said. Before long we were discussing the choice of Peter Handke for the Nobel Prize, and how hard it can be to really, really finish a manuscript on your own. Especially if you imagine it's the only book you'll ever write.

We also spent some time with prepress wizard Sean Knickernocker admiring a few of Bookmobile's latest full-color art book productions; with historian Joy Riggs, whose son in enjoying his freshmen year at Grinnell College; and with poet Laurie Allmann, who recently got back from investigating an obscure scientific and natural area in Nemadji State Forest on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.  

In the interstices between these bursts of conversation, newly-published books presented themselves in a steady stream as we moved from table to table. And older books, too. (I'm so far behind the times that often I can't tell new and old apart.) The double-wide table at Coffee House Press looked especially inviting. I took a look at a book by Ron Patchett called Big Cabin. Nice title. (Maybe I could use that myself, or something similar. How about Small Cabin?)

I also thumbed through a few pages of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth.  But I've become so reluctant to purchase anything on impulse that Hilary occasionally reminds me, "You know, you could buy that." Still, I hold back. Too many books piled up at home already.

Finally, as we were about to leave, she went over to the Majors & Quinn table and bought signed copies of the new novels by Faith Sullivan and Leif Enger--novels by local authors set in regions of the state we enjoy visiting. We ought to be offering some support to somebody.

Considered all in all, it's a beautiful scene, full of energy and aspiration, creativity and kindness. Everybody's got a story to tell, and there are plenty of people, too, who take pleasure in listening. We aren’t all “on the same page” and we don’t want to be, but we all acknowledge the value of pages, appreciate what’s written on them, and honor those with a knack for filling them up with interesting stuff.