Gee Whiz! : Three Books About Science

No sooner have I written this title than I see that it's inadequate. The word "science" is a kindergarten word. What follows is a description of books about three men who were deeply interested in the world around them. But that, too, is inaccurate.  What we have here is three books, two of which were written by insatiably curious men about other men in the past that have stimulated their interest because these men, too, were inordinately adept at examining and appreciating the wonders they observed all around them. These two books are accompanied by a third which describes the journey by an individual who was similarly inspired by his surroundings to describe the path he followed to pursue his dream of examining that world in greater depth.  

It might also be worth mentioning that all three books have a worldly or even cosmic scope, but also a regional focus. Seb Falk, who teaches at Cambridge, writes about discoveries in the library there and the lives of monks at nearby Bury St. Edmunds. (check) Hugh Aldersey Williams, a resident of Norwich, writes about the city's most famous son, Sir Thomas Browne, and  Gary Fildes writes about his own development as a budding amatuer  astronomer in the depressed Northumberland town of Sunderland. 

But enough about the inadequacy of titles.

In The Light Ages, Seb Falk introduces us to the world of medieval science by means of a single discovery. In December  1951 a young Cambridge researcher named Derek Price opened a manuscript lacking a title page but catalogued as an instruction manual for constructing an astrolabe, perhaps five hundred years old. He found something quite different. Instead of a manual written in Latin he found a work written in middle English and dated 1392 on every page describing an astronomical device far more complex than an astrolabe.. Geoffrey Chaucer had written a book on a similar subject just a year earlier, and there were grounds for suspecting that he had written this one, too.

As it turned out, Chaucer was not the author, but Falk makes a good story out of following the life of Brother John of Westwyk, the monk who did actually write it. He succeeds in clarifying the importance of such astronomical devices in an age that lacked firmly established calendars, but more than that, he recreates the world of monks, monasteries, universities, and daily life in medieval England without drawing undue attention to the religious elements involved. And considering how murky that age seems to most of us, Falk does a remarkable job a describing the era on its own terms, rather than as a half-baked preamble to more modern scientific discoveries and principles. Hence the book's title. Not the Dark Ages, but the Light Ages.  

"On Westwyk's journey through medieval science  [he writes]  we will meet a fascinating cast, none of them household names. The Spanish Jew- turned-Christian who taught a Lotharingian monk about eclipses in Worcestershire; the clock-building English abbot with leprosy; the French craftsman-turned-spy; the Persian polymath who founded the world's most advanced observatory. Medieval science was an inter­national endeavour, just as science is today. Religious belief spurred scientific investigation, but deeply devout people had no problem with adopting theories from other faiths. .. Watching how one individual knew what he knew will help us understand the ways medieval thinkers built on each other's work and influenced other scholars working in different languages thousands of miles away."

Falk has enormous enthusiasm for the astronomical principles that Westwyk and others put to use in constructing their time-keeping and navigational devices, and he tries his best to pass that on to us. The book is also amply illustrated with diagrams full of azimuths, zeniths, ascensions,  and astrological signs. But this material, while central to the narrative, is perhaps the book's least interesting element. After all, few of us will ever use an astrolabe, much less build one for our own use. But equally vivid are Falk's descriptions of daily life, social organization, crusades, plagues, medical lore, international development and exchange, and other more or less incidental stuff. We lose track of Westwyk and other characters for pages and sometimes chapters at a time, in part because longs stretches of his life have left no record, but also because Falk in intent on fleshing out the material required to help us understand the broader scene. The book carries all the fascination of Evan S. Connell at his best, but with boyish enthusiasm in place of Connells often mordant humor. 

Hugh Aldersey-Williams embarks on a similar mission in The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. His focus is ostensibly narrower—the writings of a single seventeenth-century physician and essayist mentioned in the title. But Browne wrote about so many things that Aldersey-Williams  has his hands full examining even a representative sampling. In any case, his intent is not to convince us of how modern Browne was, but rather, to introduce us to his life and work, and also to suggest that quite a few of Browne's beliefs and speculations, which may seem odd or out-of-date or simply wrong at first glance, offer surprising parallels to the practices and uncertainties of our own time. 

Aldersey-Williams  begins his essay with a narrative of a dramatic witch trial during which Browne was called upon to testify as an expert witness. Browne offered his opinion as a physician that the fits and other symptoms exhibited by the two allegedly "bewitched" children were natural. But he went on to say, "gratuitously" in Aldersey-Williams' view, that this very naturalness was "evidence of the subtilty of the devil, who was controlling the witches actions." This comment likely contributed to the conviction and death of the two women accused of bewitching them.

Why did Browne add that remark? Aldersey-Williams  doesn't know, but he takes the episode as emblematic of Browne's often maddening equivocations and seeming indifference to the resolution of vital questions of the day. Like Montaigne in southwest France at an earlier date, Browne wrote during a period of intense religious and political strife, though you'd hardly know it by reading him.

Alongside his career as a physician, Browne took and interest in, and wrote about, many aspects of natural history, in the spirit, not of exact science, but of curiosity. Aldersey-Williams  organizes these ruminations into categories such as Plants, Tolerance, Melancholy, Faith, and Science, one chapter per subject. Within each category there is room for a wide variety of observations and musings, both on Browne's part and on that of his later-day biographer. The two are equal partners, in fact, and Aldersey-Williams' reflections are a vital part of the "dialogue."

For example, Aldersey-Williams  opens the chapter titled "Physic" with the case of a 102-year-old bulimic woman that Browne is treating. Browne, after describing the woman's condition and indulging in a digression that takes him through one of Plutarch's anecdotes, concludes: "though I am ready to afford my charity unto her, yet I should be loth to spend a piece of ambergris I have upon her, and to allow six grains to every dose till I found some effect in moderating her appetite; though that be esteemed a great specific in her condition."

Aldersey-Williams  acknowledges that it's easy to dismiss the medical practices of Browne's day as "insufferably primitive," yet he also notes striking parallels to modern attitudes and techniques.

"It is in its way a thoroughly modern encounter. Browne displays curiosity and compassion. He is alert to a possible connection between the woman's medical condition and her environmental circumstances. The medicine is unusual but like all medicines at this time it is natu­rally sourced rather than made artificially (ambergris is a fatty accretion ejected from the stomachs of sperm whales and could be found floating on the sea or lying on the coast). Browne has a clear idea of its specific effectiveness, and is aware that dosage is an important factor. He is also conscious that medicine costs money, that he must husband his resources in order to run his medical practice at a profit, and that attention given to a 102-year-old may not, in the end, be, as today's euphemism has it,' optimal resource allocation'."

The author  goes on the observe what everyone who's been to the doctor knows: today's medical practice also leaves a lot to be desired.  He describes a recent visit to a GP due to a stomach bug. "I am out in under ten minutes clutching a prescription for some opioid that will address my symptoms and a mild bewilderment at the doctor's lack of curiosity about the cause of my illness." The doctor also mentions antibiotics, but leaves it to Aldersey-Williams  to observe that no infecting bacterium has been identified, and the drugs would be unlikely to be effective. The doctor then asks Aldersey-Williams  if he wants a referral, without specifying what it would be for. "At the end I feel as if I have been played," he concludes, "and that he has had me labeled all along as one of the 'worried well'."

One of Browne's greatest claims to fame is as the inventor of new words. More than seven hundred neologisms have been attributed to him. Though many have since fallen from common use, a short list of his more durable creations (copied from Wikipedia) would include ambidextrous, antediluvian, analogous, approximate, ascetic, anomalous, carnivorous, coexistence, coma, compensate, computer, cryptography, cylindrical, disruption, electricity, exhaustion, ferocious, follicle, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, herbaceous, holocaust, insecurity, indigenous, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical, migrant, mucous, prairie, prostate, polarity, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian. Aldersey-Williams  devotes some time on this aspect of Browne's genius, but finds the task daunting, and soon decides to highlight one or two here and there as they appear in the text with extended notes at the bottom of the page. Good idea.

In the chapter on Animals, Aldersey-Williams  draws from the text of Browne's work Psuedodoxia Epidemica to create an impromptu bestiary that includes the ostrich, the bittern, the owl, the sperm whale, the mole, and the badger, among other creatures. Because the book from which the material is drawn is devoted to what Browne calls "vulgar errors," these two-page entries are more odd than accurate or informative. For example, in Browne's day many people thought the legs of a badger were shorter on one side than the other, because these creatures were often seen running rapidly down the furrows of a plowed field.  Browne rejects this thesis, not by examining a badger or a badger skeleton, but on the strength of inductive reasoning: the legs of all other animals are the same on both sides. If a badger were differently construed, it would, in Browne's words, be "repugnant unto the course of nature."

Aldersey-Williams  is disappointed by Browne's conventional line of reasoning in this case. A more Brownian solution would have been to capture a badger, chain him to a tree, and measure his speed going clockwise and then counterclockwise around it. If the times differed, it would "prove" that the animals  legs were not the same length on either side.

Such flashes of whimsy appear through the books. Yet it's clear that Aldersey-Williams  knows the man he calls his "hero" inside and out, and has read and absorbed even the driest and least interesting of Browne's works, thus saving us the trouble. I've poked my nose into Browne's Religio Medici, his Urne Burial, and one or two other works with interest—the era, the style, the mood, the quizzical intelligence come through—but when push comes to shove, Aldersey-Williams' book is more stimulating, thought-provoking, and fun to read by far.

An Astronomer's Tale: a Life Under the Stars, is a simpler book. Its author, Gary Fildes, grew up in a working-class home and began his professional career as a brick-layer. He went to soccer matches with his "mates" and brawled with fans of the opposing team almost by instinct. But he harbored a secret love for the night sky that was nurtured by family and a neighbor with similar interests, and a good telescope. This is the story of how Fildes, with tireless enthusiasm but no formal training in astronomy, guilelessly pursued his interests and eventually became director of the Kiedler Observatory in Northumberland, a public institution that's located in one of the world's most spectacular dark-sky havens.

Fildes isn't a researcher or even an expert astronomer; he's an educator. His passion for watching the night sky is evident on every page, and every chapter is punctuated with a section describing the night sky at a given time of year and focusing on a specific constellation. The book chronicles Fildes' extraordinary rise in the field of science education, which surprised him as much as anybody else,  in terms designed to encourage others to do the same. Or at the very least, to do a bit of reading, then find a dark place, and stand in awe of the heavens in the midst of which we go about our daily lives.  

  

The Genius of the Season

So much is contained in a single word—a single letter. Thus, “Celebrating the birth of God” carries a different connotation from “Celebrating the birth of a god.” Maybe the phrase “Celebrating birth” says it all.

My Greek is a little rusty after all these years, but as I recall, the prefix “gen-” carries a range of inference that spans race, kind, line of descent, origin, creation, sexual relations, and reproduction. Just think of the modern equivalents: generation,  genius,  generator,  genuine, and genesis. But we must also include such words as genus, genealogy, and general, as well as that seemingly all-powerful biological entity, the "gene." 

Clearly that simple prefix can take us in two different directions. On the one hand, it calls up a series of concepts having to do with novelty, creativity, authenticity, and uniqueness. One the other hand, it refers to concepts that lump things together into groups on the basis of their type or ancestry. We hold no one in higher esteem than the “genius,” yet reserve our most withering derision for the merely “generic.”

Somewhere in between lies the concept of the "gens." In ancient Greece, a genos (Greek: γένος, "race, stock, kin") was, to quote Wikipedia, " a social group claiming common descent, referred to by a single name. Most gene were composed of noble families and much of early Greek politics seems to have involved struggles between gene." Eventually many of these families became associated with hereditary priestly functions.

These aspects of the concept—family origins, noble group functions—are obviously not the same as the striking individual referred to as a genius, but it would be a mistake to imagine that they’re entirely unrelated. In modern times the individualistic element has grown in prominence, no doubt, along with the notion of finding one's "true self," but we meet up with both at every family gathering: the idiosyncrasies and the differences between family members that stimulate and nourish us (though they can sometimes annoy us, too) accompanied by a sense of something hallowed in the air. At best, the veins of affection run ever-deeper and constitute the heart and soul (rather than merely the pedigree) of the clan. 

Praise be to whoever cooked up a universe replete with such a dialectic, which, whether fueled by merely congenital or broadly congenial energy, is the richest heritage we possess. 

The Little Things

On a quiet Saturday morning with shades of copper light in the hazy sky, I pause to appreciate a few of the little things. Why? Maybe it's because four young deer stopped in front of the window here in my office a few minutes ago to nibble on the yew bushes. That hedge is immense; they can nibble all they want. But there was no sign of the ten-point buck that was cavorting in the back yard a few weeks ago.

After our first good snow a week ago, as Hilary and I set out for a pre-breakfast walk, I noticed some very delicate tracks in the snow. It had to be some sort of mouse, but the strange thing was, the tracks were coming and going from the base of the linden tree alongside the driveway. Later that morning, Hilary spotted a little mouse silhouetted against the sky. It was scurrying along a branch twenty feet above the ground in that very tree. It disappeared into what looked like a squirrel's nest—a pile of leaves situated in a fork in the branch. I saw it too. Better to spend the winter in the squirrel's domicile than ours, I guess.

I was surprised the other day to see a flicker on the bird feeder. A few of them stick around through the winter, I guess. But most of the flickers I see are flying off into the distance while flashing their white rump-feathers. To suddenly see one right outside the window is almost a shock. They're big. And the spotted breast, which in summer can look almost clown-like, takes on a subdued and striking beauty in winter light.

The sun itself has dropped very low in the sky, and now I'm reminded of the coming solstice. In our little Stonehenge of a house, the rays streak in above the piano for only a few days at this time of year and strike a light-switch in the hall at the opposite side of the room. The sunlight doesn't flip the light switch, however. That would really be something special.

One of the less serious effects of the pandemic has been the disappearance of those de-acquisition shops and lobby book carts that used to add spice to any trip to the library. Now they're back. A few days ago I returned from the library and set to work at one of my favorite idle pastimes—peeling bar codes and other stickers off the books I just bought at one of those little shops.

The selections? From the Rockford Road branch in New Hope, for a quarter, a classic mystery by John Dickson Carr called The Crooked Hinge; from the Golden Valley Library, for a dollar, Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It. 

My dad was a big fan of Carr, who also wrote under the name Carter Dixon. I read one of his mysteries on my dad's recommendation when I was in high school. It was one of the "locked-room" mysteries for which Carr is famous, but the solution hinged on a dental procedure performed on the victim before he'd even entered the room! I was slightly disappointed. Then again, isn't the intrigue and suspense of a good mystery almost invariably more riveting than the wrap-up, when all becomes clear?   

It was just my luck that both of these books were wrapped in Mylar, to which most of the library stickers had been affixed. Once I removed the plastic sheathes, only the little Hennepin County bar codes remained at the top of the front cover. I got to work with my thumbnail, pushing and scraping, and with patience and a little dribble of GooGone, I soon had both volumes looking like new again.

I'm not sure why I find this process so satisfying. It might be because library stickers, though necessary,  are a form of defacement , and when done right, especially on a glossy dust jacket, removing them returns the book to full dignity. Or maybe it's because I suspect I may never read these books, but at the very least, I've done something with them. 

That same afternoon—almost balmy—Hilary and I drove down to the Northern Clay Center, taking the city streets through North Minneapolis and down West River Road. One great benefit of the easing of pandemic restrictions has been that she can once again take classes at the center, during which she can make use freely of the wheels, glazes, and kiln. She's been bringing home nice pots for weeks. Classes were over but firings continue for several weeks and she still had a few pots to collect.     

Making useful articles that are also beautiful with your hands is a big thing, not a little thing. Soon quite a few of Hilary's recent creations will become Christmas gifts, but we'll keep a few favorites for ourselves. It's important, I think, to have a great variety of colors, shapes, and sizes near at hand. 

This is another one of life's "little things": choosing exactly the right bowl, pot, or plate for a given dish or task.

Exploring the South Shore

To most people in Minnesota and nearby states the phrase "North Shore" evokes images of crashing waves, towering cliffs, cascading falls, seemingly endless vistas, and easy hiking trails cutting through otherwise almost impenetrable pine forests rich in the smells of the north country. On the other hand, I suspect that for many, the phrase "South Shore" conjures little or nothing at all. Yet this region also has a lot to offer, including the Apostle Islands National Seashore, Bayfield, and the bucolic gem of Madeline Island, once the capital of the Ojibwe people, now home to Big Bay State Park, the village of La Pointe, and miles of gravel roads offering intermittent views of vintage cottages and the outer islands.

Discerning readers will immediately point out that none of the things I've mentioned here is actually on the South Shore; they all lie mostly around the corner of the Bayfield Peninsula, tucked within the protection of the outer islands and the expanse of Chequamegon Bay. But that's merely a quibble, especially when you consider that the South Shore runs for hundreds of miles, all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.

The stretch we visit, running from Superior to Ashland, has a character altogether different from its opposite number to the north. The beaches tend to be sandy, behind which the highway lopes through graceful hills weathered by streams and creeks so feeble that they've been given names like Lost Creek One, Lost Creek Two, and Lost Creek Three. The hardscrabble villages along the way—Port Wing, Herbster, Cornucopia—are miniscule, though they carry a lingering atmosphere of maritime life highlighted by the lighthouse and concrete pier in Port Wing and the Halverson Fishery in Cornucopia.

The coastline itself is punctuated by peninsulas extending out into the lake—Quarry Point, Roman Point, Bark Point, Squaw Point—and the bays that lie between them. But you don't find many DNR signs directing you to these features. More common are the signs identifying the sloughs that have formed in the backwaters where the creeks meander out to meet the big lake. It would take a connoisseur of landscapes to fully appreciate this biome—one equipped with a kayak and a field guide to ericaceous plants.

Most vacationers speed past these nondescript stretches of highway, eager to get to the shops, restaurants, and more picturesquely recreational marinas in Bayfield and Washburn. I suspect many skip the shoreline route along Highway 13 altogether—you don't actually see the lake all that often—and keep to the faster lanes of Highway 2 farther inland.

A few weeks ago Hilary and I booked a cottage right in the middle of Herbster. It turned out to be sandwiched between the fire station and the community center, which (we learned) is open twenty-four hours a day. But the setting was plenty woodsy for all that. Venerable spruce trees were growing in the front yard on either side of the sidewalk, much of the real estate nearby was undeveloped woodland, and we could see Lake Superior off in the distance out the kitchen window. 

During the two days we were there we saw only four people in Herbster: one construction worker on a scaffold refurbishing the windows of a church and a mother and her two children leaving the community center gym. Traffic on the highway at the bottom of the hill was negligible; the deer hunting opener was still a week away.

Our plan was simple: explore a few of the minor sights in the region, buy some fresh fish at Halvorson's Fishery for dinner, and read. We spent some time on our first evening acclimatizing ourselves to the suddenly snowy landscape at the beach in Herbster (see above) and the public landing at the end of Bark Point. The next morning we took a hike into Lost Creek Falls.

The trailhead lies just off County C, a few miles up the hill from Cornucopia. The air was cold and crisp, the landscape mildly hilly, and the snow-dusted forest a mix of spruce, maple, and mature red and white pine. My only concern, and a minor one at that, was that we didn't know how long the hike would be. The Trails.com website described it as 1.1 miles, but didn't mention whether this was one-way or round trip. The sign on the fridge at our cottage listed it clearly at 2.2 miles each way. And the spiffy government sign at the trailhead put it a 1.5 miles in each direction.

It was a lovely trail, and the falls, though hardly dramatic, made for a pleasant stop and turn-around point. Hilary broke open a dam of twigs that had created a backwater pool downstream from the falls, and we watched the water tumble through the newfound gap in a minor torrent for a few minutes.

Such are the quiet amusements of a morning spent in the deep woods.

The hike out, as usual, was much shorter than the hike in had been. (Correct distance? A little more than two miles round trip.) On the spur of the moment, we continued south along County C over the hump of the Bayfield Peninsula and down the other side, veering east through orchards, past a golf course, and into the town of Washburn. Our new plan was to get a cup of coffee at the Coho Café and spend some time in the Chequamegon Bay Bookstore.

I rarely browse in bookstores these days—I have more books than I'll ever get around to reading. But everything is different when you're traveling. You didn't bring all that many books with you, you're spending money right and left anyway, and you sometimes form an indelible connection between book and locale that becomes a meaningful part of the vacation. I still look back fondly on the hardcover edition of The Iliad (the Fitzgerald translation) that I bought in a used bookstore in Lanesboro that later burned down. Then there's that masterful piece of travel writing, Time and Tide in Acadia, which I spotted in a little shop in Stonington, Maine. And what about that coffee-table book of the photographer Nadar's portraits of his illustrious contemporaries Baudelaire, Sara Bernhardt, Balzac, and many others that I lugged home all the way from Avignon? I've never seen a copy like it. (Confession: I haven't looked at it much, either.)

Wandering the aisles can be a pleasure in itself, but it's nice to have something in mind. I was hoping to spot an inexpensive copy of Theodor Adorno's collection Prisms. The copies for sale online start at $40. But would this rare item be stocked in sociology, philosophy, or belles lettres? This uncertainty pleasantly expanded my field of view. But I hadn't been in the philosophy section for more than thirty seconds when a different title caught my eye: The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. I had never heard of the author, but there were attractive woodcuts scattered here and there among the pages and a blurb on the back by none other than the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. The asking price of $12 seemed reasonable indeed for a pristine hardcover with Mylar protective covers and a retail price of 20 ₤.

We walked up to the check-out desk twenty minutes later with the Browne study, a small hardcover anthology of the poems of Theodore Roethke, a beginner's instructional manual for the accordion, and a copy of Hilary's upcoming book club book, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. (We might easily have stayed longer, but the sun was shining outside, and I had neglected to bring my reading glasses.)

The woman behind the counter pulled out a small pad equipped with carbon paper and wrote the titles and prices on the topmost sheet. Then she turned to her electric adding machine and rung up the total and the tax, which she noted on the slip.

"I'm almost tempted to pay with the emergency check I carry in my wallet just to maintain the anachronism," I said. This benign remark produced only a slight look of bewilderment, so I handed the woman a credit card.

The Coho Café was closed, but lunchtime was approaching, and we decided to head up the shore to Bayfield. Along the way Hilary made use of her phone to determine that Maggie's Cafe was closed (we later learned that it had been closed for two years) but she spotted a restaurant a few blocks down the hill called the Manypenny Bistro. It was not only a good choice, but also, we learned, the only restaurant currently open in Bayfield. Our waitress explained why herring was the only fish on the menu, and we picked up a number of incidental facts about people in town from a large, talkative man named "Tiny" who was sitting alone at the next table.

Quiet times in Bayfield

Tiny seemed to be retired, though he paid for his meal with a very large bill that the waitress had difficulty making change for. Everyone who came in seemed to know him. He told us he was born and raised in Happy Hollow, just east of Cornucopia, and we took note of the road sign later as we passed on our way back to Herbster.

Along the way we'd passed the Red Cliff Reservation and taken the loop road north to the Little Sand Bay Visitor's Center. From the beach and pier the views out across the bay to the islands were grand, but the buildings were closed and the only person we saw was a goose hunter returning to his car carrying a shotgun and wearing a bizarre, full-body suit made of short strips of cloth that resembled feathers--a ghillie suit--who told us, "I missed."

There's a fishery museum further down the shore, but it, too, was closed. I walked past the yellow tape and down to the shore; the buildings appeared to be deteriorating to the point of collapse.

The fishery in Cornucopia was also closed—no fish for dinner—and the general store was closed for the season. But the sun was still shining, and we had a fine time stopping to investigate the ingress of Lost Creek into Lake Superior from both banks. This entailed driving out to the end of Roman Point and stopping at an unsigned public landing.

Chalk it up to the brilliant afternoon sunlight: everything roundabout was stunning. The slough was bristling with vegetation, the rocks on shore looked like lumps of rusty gold, the sand lay spread in elegant swirls along the beach, and the clouds drifted by in soft, theatrical bands and tufts.

We spent the evening reading and listening to Bill Evans' CDs on the DVD-player at our cottage. I took a look at an anthology of critical essays about the Scottish philosopher David Hume that contained passages like this one:

Exegetically, we could say that Hume was following Schaftesbury's two most distinctive ethical tenets, namely, that the moral life stands on its own feet, and must do so if it is to retain its purity, and that judgments are akin rather to aesthetic taste than to rational insight.

Well put. But I soon wearied of such stuff and turned my attention to a collection of blog entries set in Door County by the opera-singer-turned-mystery-writer J. F. Riordan that included entries such as "In Praise of Small Towns," "The Intricacies of Casual Conversation," and "The Going Price for Squirrels." I especially liked her piece about eating an entire package of Chuckles in the local hardware store, evaluating them, flavor by flavor, from one end of the row to another. The cashier watched her and then said, "People always finish the whole pack before they leave the store."

Meanwhile, Hilary had spotted a collection of newspaper columns on the shelf by a local author named Howard Paap, chronicling life on the nearby Red Cliff Reservation, reviewing the early history of the Ojibwe people, and describing life in Bayfield both in and out of the tourist season. Perfect.

It clouded up during the night, and our morning walk through the woods east of Meyers Beach was a chilly one, further undermined by the wooden boardwalk that extends without a break for the first three-quarters of a mile. I'm sure it serves a purpose, perhaps both practical and ecological, but in mid-November I'd rather be walking on crunchy leaves than icy planks. All the same, the hike through the scrubby woods was nice, though neither the big lake nor the red cliffs for which the area is famous ever came into view.  

A half-hour in, the trail meets up with the stub end of Mawikwe Road, and at this point you can also see Lake Superior, just down the hill through the woods. Though the trail continues through the woods for miles, we scrambled down along a steep narrow path to the lake, and I was delighted to discover when we got to the beach that it was frozen solid. We could walk back to the car along the lakeshore without struggling against the shifting sand. 

And so we did.      

 

Beethoven: The Danish String Quartet Comes to Town

Two years after they'd originally been scheduled to play, the Danish String Quartet finally arrived in town last week to perform the complete Beethoven string quartet cycle. The six performances took place over the course of a week with a single break half-way through.

Many had bought tickets to the entire series when it was originally announced, including several of our friends. That seemed like an awful lot of Beethoven to me, notwithstanding the fact that the quartets are widely considered to be the pinnacle of his achievement. I love the late quartets, so much so that I rarely listen to them—don't want to wear them out. When I do listen, I tend to do so in a steady stream from one to the next, and I couldn't identify a specific opus or movement to save my soul, other than the Grosse Fuge, Opus 135.

We checked online a few days before the first performance, found that it had not yet sold out, and secured two seats. We arrived early, parked on Summit Avenue a half-block from the church, and listened with half an ear to an pleasantly old-fashioned lecturer walk us through the movements: "The third movement is a scherzo, but Beethoven didn't call it a scherzo because it doesn't follow ALL the rules, but it has the flavor of a scherzo, and you're going to love it."

Considering that there were three quartets totaling seventeen movements on the program, such remarks were mostly useless, but they passed the time until the performers arrived on stage, and I suppose a few bits and pieces sunk in.

The Danish String Quartet doesn't look much like a classical string quartet. If they had been wearing suspenders and Makinaws they could have passed for a lumber-camp crew. But their playing was superb: thoughtful, nuanced, rich, bright. I had forgotten how much fun it was to follow the cello or the viola line, just because the sound of the individual instruments was so rich and the separation was so good in comparison with studio recordings regurgitated through a Bluetooth speaker. I felt that the performers were thinking and feeling the music, bar by bar, as a unit, and bringing me along with them, capturing a greater range and depth of emotions than I'd heard at a chamber music concert in years. Especially rich was the third movement of the Opus 59, No. 1, "Adagio molto e mesto." Coming on the heels of the relatively light quartet Opus 18, #3, it filled the church with palpable sorrow.

Following the intermission, the musicians returned to play Quartet No. 14, which is a wandering cavalcade of moods and movements, more richly endowed with beauty than structure, perhaps the musical equivalent of Hölderlin's poetry, though much more robust.

After the show Hilary said, "I think that's one of the best concerts I've ever been to. Let see if we can get some more tickets." I was doubtful. Yes, the concert was great. But does the sequel ever measure up to that initial blast of surprising, shocking, artistry and emotion? The weekend concerts at the Ordway were sold out, but we were free three days later, and there were tickets, so why not?

Once again, the early arrival, the great parking spot, the frivolous but endearing before-concert lecture, and then the show. The Opus 18, No. 4, was meticulously observed, but it left me cold. I was afraid of this. But the late quartet, Opus 127, was a knock-out. I was reminded of a remark that our lecturer made to the effect that this quartet was so conventional that it hardly qualified as a "late" quartet. This might be true on technical grounds, but in terms of sprightly and brooding emotion it lies well within the fold of Beethoven's last, richest, and most introspective creative period.

Back home, we queued up the Alban Berg quartet doing one of the late quartets; it was "nice" but thin in comparison with the real thing. We had once more chance, and we took it. The final performance consisted of an early quartet, a "middle" quartet, and Beethoven's last, brief quartet, Opus 135. Once again, riches galore.

I don't remember them one by one, but it was a pleasure and more than that to hear them. After the performance we were chatting in the lobby with two friends who had heard the complete cycle. One said, "I wish the events had been more spaced out so you could savor them." The other said, "I like the intensity of becoming immersed, and consumed, by the performances."

Perhaps we had had the best of both worlds. The performances were spaced out because we had missed half of them. And they were intense because in each case we signed on at the last minute. We savored every one.

But that was not the end of the affair. After the last performance, and the next night, too, I gathered together every CD I could find around the house—Alban Berg Quartet, Guarneri Quartet, Quartet Italiano—and we listened again, in the dark, on the "good" stereo in the den. We even read bits of the text from the concert program, as well as some of the CD liner notes. For example:

"The Andante in A flat, one of Beethoven’s most sublime and contemplative slow movements, takes the form of a theme with six variations. Apart from the introductory bars, the theme falls into the two traditional eight-bar phrases, but this is as far as any resemblance to variation structure goes: there are no repeats, the length of the variations is by no means constant, and the resemblance between them and the theme is often highly tenuous. The third movement is permeated by the angular accents of its theme, which is stated by the cello and immediately inverted by the viola; its second section is twice interrupted by mysterious, recitative­like octaves on the viola and cello."

Someday, perhaps, I will correlate remarks like these to phrases in the music itself, but not any time soon. The people who write such things know what they're talking about, but it hardly matters to the listener, who is faced with one essential problem: Beethoven's lack of "flow." By the time he entered his "late" period, he couldn't hear a thing, but he could string together snippets and phrases of German folk melodies above complex and unorthodox harmonic progressions, augmented by contrapuntal fabric of the utmost sophistication, and the result was sublime, but in a mode utterly distinct from, say, Mozart's heavenly and seemingly effortless sublimity. Mozart's sublimity arises in uncanny directions from largely Italianate conventions. Beethoven's sublimity arises from Germanic frustration, stammering, disgust at the forms he is called upon to fill with sound appropriate to his feelings.

The Danish String Quartet's utterly fresh renditions have revived my interest and reminded me that the early-middle-late schema is merely a mnemonic device. This afternoon I burned a couple of CDs of the "middle" quartets, which I hardly know at all. It might be just the thing for our gray November ramble north through Wisconsin to the South Shore.

Snow buntings, anyone? 

The Golden Autumn of 2021

Everyone remembers the Halloween blizzard of 1991, and we can all think back to where we were when that tornado ripped through town in—you remember, the year your cat died—but a year or two from now, will anyone remember the golden autumn of 2021? Probably not.

After the long summer drought, the accepted wisdom was that the autumn leaves would be sub-par at best. The negativity was so widespread that some even cited the lack of vaccine compliance as a factor contributing to a likely drab fall season. (Not really. I just made that up.)

Yet here we are, in the third or fourth week of bright blue skies and stunning leaves of every hue.

As the mornings grow darker, Hilary and I often step out into the front yard to check on Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, and the Gemini Twins. As we take our morning walk around the block, I am stupified and delighted, again and again, to find that Sirius, the dog star, which was shining brightly above our spruce tree a few minutes ago, is now occupying a position above Jay-Jay's house at the end of the next block! It hardly seems possible.

One dark morning recently I put a plan into action that I'd been contemplating for weeks: after turning off the porch light, I took my binoculars outside and lay down on the front sidewalk. Scanning the sky in the vicinity of Cancer, below Castor and Pollux and to the east of Procyon,  I finally spotted the Beehive Cluster, which I hadn't seen in years. Yes, it's faint, but it's still there, and sort of where I thought it would be.

See the owl?

On another morning we were greeted, when we stepped outside into the dark, by the complex, multi-note hoot of a great-horned owl. The typical call has five hoots, but this owl had added a few grace notes to her call. Then we heard the male respond, shorter, less delicate, on a lower pitch. It appeared that Chad, our neighbor across the street, was shining a searchlight up into the trees.

But the greater glories of the seasons arrive during daylight hours: the multicolored leaves, the rich blue sky, the intermittent clouds, and the ambiance generated by sunlight irradiating the cool crisp air from a lower angle. Just driving down the parkway can make the heart sing. Two young oaks no more than twenty feet tall have been putting on a show down by the archery range for weeks, moving from a coppery yellow-orange to something resembling rusty candy-apple red.

crispy leaves

Meanwhile, the dry weather has made it a perfect year for raking. The fallen leaves are crisp and light. You can do a few loads, carry them on a tarp back to the compost pile, call it a day, and return the next morning to do a few more. Quite a few leaves linger on the tress, so there's no special pressure about getting them all raked up the first time around.

On Sunday morning I got up at five, turned on the computer, only to find that the time had changed: it was actually (or conventionally?) four in the morning. The male owl was hooting across the street, but getting no reply.

Later I climbed up onto the roof while Hilary held our shaky aluminum ladder to spend some time removing the leaves from the gutters. The view is nice from up there, but the positioning required, above yet leaning out over the gutters, is awkward, and I ended up with a crick in my back. That didn't stop me from pruning the branches of the mulberry and the pagoda dogwood that had grown in over the roof during the summer.

Hilary had agreed to stay outside until I was done, so she could hold the ladder while I stepped gingerly around the edge and started down, (most mountaineering accidents take place on the descent) but she was out by the curb chatting with our neighbor Sarah. These conversations are interesting and important; Sarah and her husband are much better connected with neighborhood happenings than we are, and we enjoy hearing about their camping excursions, too. So I sat on the crest of the garage for a while, idly admiring the rooftop views, too far away to hear or appreciate the conversation. Eventually I could not resist banging the top of the ladder against the gutter once or twice--oh so discreetly.

On mornings like these, everything happens in a precious envelope. Unlike the seemingly endless days of summer, and of winter, we know that this autumn interlude is not going the last long. Just yesterday we drove down to the warehouse district to have what may be our last al fresco lunch of the year, following the route I took for twenty years five days a week to and from work. A new food court called Graze has opened in a space that formerly served as the parking lot for the Bookmen. This neighborhood has changed in many ways, but the view toward downtown from the rooftop terrace of Graze still contains a few venerable warehouse landmarks, and the food was good.

Last night we went down to Magers and Quinn, in Uptown, where I was scheduled to read from my new book, Cabin in the City. I always enjoy standing in front of dear friends, former clients and workmates who have become friends, and total strangers, shuffling papers while trying to keep things lively. During my ad lib introductory spiel, I said a few words about how glorious the autumn had been, and someone in the back row shouted, "Why don't you write about that?"

And I said, "Maybe I will."     

Surprised by the Falls — Owamni

 

It was a crisp morning, with heavenly blue sky and sharp sunlight igniting the yellow leaves, and it cried out to be experienced. I could see that from every room of the house. When Hilary returned from an early morning walk along West River Road with a friend, she was eager to get back out in it, and take me along.

"Well, why don't we go downtown," I said. "There's an article in today's paper raving about the architectural features of the newly opened riverside park down there."

Good plan. We parked in a pay lot across the river from Boom Island and began our stroll under the brilliant trees along the pedestrian path past a very active children's playground, past the Federal Reserve building, and under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to Water Works Park, which architectural journalist Linda Mack was calling "the most intriguing new building in the Twin Cities."

We weren't seeing it at its best. It was half-wrapped in mid-morning shadows, the charcoal firepits hadn't been lit, the chairs were tilted up against the tables, and almost no one was using it. I found it hard to remember what used to be there, because the area had been under construction for many months. But all of that being granted, this short slice of riverfront looked handsome. No doubt next spring it will look even more appealing.

A spanking-new two-story building stands at the east end of the park.(see top photo) The facade is partly rough-hewn limestone of the type used to build the flour mills than once dominated the riverfront neighborhood. The rest is faced with attractive fresh-cut stone, perhaps of the same kind, if not the same vintage. This is the home of Owamni, the Native American restaurant that has been in the news off and on for years, though the restaurant itself opened only a few weeks ago. (I picked up a copy of chef Sean Sherman's cookbook at a book convention several years ago, and I've actually tried to make a few things.)

It was dark inside, but the heavy glass door opened when I pulled on the handle, and we went in. To the left I could see a hall containing several comfortable-looking chairs; to the right a man was sitting behind a desk, minding his own business. We continued straight up a long flight of stairs, eager to see as much as we could before they kicked us out.

Upstairs a young woman was standing behind a podium, talking to someone on the telephone. "No. We take a few walk-ins, but reservations are booked until the middle of December. Once the reviews appeared in New York and Los Angeles ...."

When she hung up I inched closer and said, "Can you find a place to squeeze us in?"

"Two? I can seat you at the bar."

"That would be great."

 We hadn't planned to eat lunch at Owamni. We'd never discussed it. But we followed her into the restaurant without a word or a glance.

When we'd seated ourselves the bartender said, "You know the basic idea here, right? No dairy, no wheat, no care sugar." He handed us a couple of menus.

Sitting at the bar has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you can't see the river. But we've seen the Mississippi hundreds of times. No big deal. On the other hand, you can see things being done in both the bar and the kitchen, so much so that you almost feel involved. You can chat with the staff from time to time; they're right in front of you. On the other hand, you see food under the heat lamps that you wish you'd ordered, but didn't, and your server is often standing three feet in front of you, mixing a drink for someone else. A drink you wish you'd ordered.

The food was very good. The drinks only fair.

We've made two of the drinks on the menu ourselves at home or on the trail more than once using ingredients we'd gathered in the field. Sumac tea tends to be bitter, like Lick-um-Aid without the sugar, and Labrador tea tends toward a nauseating vegetative flavor. In a word, terrible. We were curious to see how Owomni's versions, which came iced rather than hot, compared. The flavors were the same, but much milder, and refreshing at first sip. By the third sip, however, and especially with the food, I felt we might just as well have stuck with tap water and devoted the funds to other food items.

Waksiti (left) and Garden Sisters (right)

The dishes we ordered were all good in different ways. The fresh tostatas that accompanied the smoked Red Cliff lake trout, blueberry/maple syrup reduction (wojape) and tepary bean spread were wonderfully light and crispy. The Garden Sisters, which consisted of black bean puree, pickled squash, and purslane on a chubby corn disk, had a complex blend of flavors and a surprisingly spicy kick. And the native grain bowl (waksica) with bison offered a complex but balanced palette of  flavors drawn from the beans, nixtamal, wild rice, quinoa, pesto, wojape, and grilled vegetables. (I ought to mention that our servers described these things to us one by one as they were being served, but I had to look them up on the menu later and google a few Ojibwe and Spanish terms to complete this paragraph.)

Looking around, I didn't see a salt or pepper shaker anywhere in sight. The bison could have used a pinch. But I suppose it was hard to come by in precolonial times.

Smoked trout with crispy tostadas and wojape

Lots of other things on the menu sounded interesting. I wouldn't mind going back, though we might not be so lucky as to get in next time.

 A young woman with long blond hair was sitting alone next to Hilary. She was trying quite a few of the dishes. I wondered if she might be a reviewer, but she wasn't writing anything down. Hilary struck up a conversation, asked her which dishes she'd liked best. Turns out she was from Los Angeles, but not a food critic. She had enjoyed most of the things she'd ordered, but found the squash too spicy, and had hardly taken more than a bite. (I was tempted to ask her to pass it over to me, but I didn't want to reinforce the widespread bi-coastal stereotype of Minnesota Gauche.)

She expressed disappointment that the walleye only appeared on the dinner menu. "We don't have walleye in Los Angeles," she said. I was on the verge of remarking, in order to add to the stereotype, that walleye was delicate, but didn't really have a distinctive taste.

Our bartender/waiter, who was also hers, assured her near the end of her meal that all of the wild rice served at the restaurant was Minnesota-harvested. She had no idea that most of the wild rice on the market comes from California and Manitoba. I tried to explain that most wide rice is now paddy-cultivated and machine-harvested, though the natural Minnesota type grows in shallow lakes and stream margins and is harvested by canoe with wooden poles.

Do they taste different? I have no idea.

As we left the restaurant, I heard the couple to our right mention that they were from New York. But anyone can come to Owarmi. And you don't even have to come inside. The outdoor seating is accessible from the street. After all, it's a public park.

First Fire of the Season

Wednesday night. First fire of the season blazing in the fireplace. Chunks of dead branches from our maple out front that I cut up during the summer. Wonderful smell.

Thus, one thing leads to another. The branch falls. I saw it up, and months later we burn it. Then, smoke.

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous lines deals obliquely with this phenomenon. Something about "exploring," followed by a remark to the effect that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started from, and know it for the first time." Not a direct quote, obviously.

I could look it up—I see the collected poems on an upper shelf, almost out of reach—but the exact wording isn't important. I received that book as a gift from a friend back in college days. On the end paper he wrote, "Merry Christmas, and I'll be seeing you when we're both famous." An atypical remark, considering how modest and self-effacing he tended to be. He and his wife headed east to grad school, and I haven't heard from him since. 

I have never liked that line by Eliot. Pseudo-profundity, or at best sheer speculation. After all, when he wrote it, Eliot hadn't reached the end of his searching, so how would he know? And in any case, it doesn't seem likely we'll end up right back where we began, unless it's in oblivion, a place we won't be able to recognize at all.

I prefer my own pseudo-profundity: "One thing leads to another." But let's not confuse this notion with an altogether different one: "One thing leads to the next." That phrase implies that the steps are preordained or somehow causal or unavoidable, which isn't the case. Considered in retrospect, they often seem entirely fortuitous.

Such notions often cross my mind when I spot a book on the shelf—one that's been there for quite a long time—and chide myself for having bought it. "I'll never read that book. I should get rid of it," I say to myself. But I almost invariably leave it be, though once in a great while I will actually pull it down and take an extended look. Occasionally, in some small way, it changes my life. How close I came to missing this path entirely!

A few weeks ago a collection of essays by Theodore Adorno caught my eye for perhaps the twentieth time. The title, Critical Models, stands out in thick yellow lower-case italics on the spine. I have rued the day when I bought that book many times, because it reminds me of an entire realm of thought, loosely referred to as the Frankfort School, that I've never investigated. But on this occasion, I said to myself, for no reason that I can think of, "I'm finally going to read some Adorno."

I read a few pages dealing with interactions between the city and the country, and I found them interesting. I even went so far as to copy out a few passages.

"Urbanity is a part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either."

"The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions are meanwhile irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself."

"I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes."

I suppose these remarks sound sort of cranky and high-handed, but it's worth noting that Adorno escaped Nazi persecution as an adult and returned to his home after the war to find that the German's hadn't really changed that much. Though he has plenty of scathing things to say about modern culture, his heart seems to be in the right place, to judge from this somewhat longer passage about spirituality and teaching:

"Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling's age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has under­taken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement."

I find this association between "spirit" and "momentum" very attractive.

Some of Adorno's reflections on authoritarian personalities have obvious relevance to the American political scene today, but one or two sentences will suffice:

"Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents. [e.g. fascism, communism] Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives."

At one point a blurb on the back cover caught my eye in which Susan Sontag praises another of Adorno's collections, Notes to Literature, and especially that volume's introductory essay, "The Essay as Form." I requested the book and it arrived at my local branch a few days later, after having sat on a shelf in the semidarkness of the downtown stacks for years, in all probability.

Good stuff, though rather dense. For example:

"The essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure.  It is not unlogical; it obeys logical criteria insofar as the totality of its propositions must fit together coherently ... but it neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria."

A better gloss, perhaps, appears a few pages earlier:

"[The essay's] efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him....[It] reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say."

This particular essay is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, I think. Adorno clearly feels the need to defend his chosen form against the strictures and the ridicule of the positivist scholarly community that had come to dominate German culture well before the 1960s.  At one point he writes, "In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship [Wissenshaft] comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism. Positivism's irresponsibly sloppy language fancies that it documents responsibility in its object, and reflection on intellectual matters becomes the privilege of the mindless."

Reading such humorously scathing passages, I almost feel like I'm rereading a Thomas Bernhard novel.

Yes, one thing leads to another. And another. And sometimes three or four things. I really ought to order a used copy of Adorno's Notes the Literature. (Really? To sit there on the shelf beside Critical Models till the end of time?) But perhaps I ought to take a look at Susan Sontag's collection Against Interpretation. And why not her Notebooks, which offer fresh snippets of thought devoid of the hidden formal excellences that Adorno attributes to the essay form? For that matter, there are unread Thomas Bernhard novels scattered here and there on the shelves—Frost, Gathering Evidence. It's a beautiful situation: a plenitude of options, sullied only by an agonizing sense of insufficient time in which to do the exploring adequately.

Yet it strikes me that this agony of overwhelming possibilities grows weaker as we age. We don't give up in despair or resign ourselves to a third-rate understanding of things, but we come to recognize that our microcosmic worlds echo or exemplify the larger ones lying beyond our grasp, and the things and people we know best offer far more enrichment than a scattered and superficial familiarity with everything.

This may be what Eliot means when he says that at the end of our exploring we finally "know" a place for the first time. You can see, I think, how clumsy the wording is. There isn't much finality to the process. We gradually get to know and love things better, sink into them, feel more at home, limiting our field of view while honing our senses. Once eager to hike the Compostela Trail, we now stroll down to the creek at the bottom of the hill and relish every step.  

Which is not to say we won't be doing the Compostela Trail one of these days!