Christmas Moods

Scanning the shelves to find just the right book before heading off to the waiting room of a dentist, barbershop, or doctor's office can be a challenge. The one you select must be small enough to stick in a pocket, yet engaging enough to hold your interest, while also being dull enough so that you can let it go at a moment's notice, and perhaps forever. I can attest from experience that such a deliberation often takes place at the last minute

On a a recent trip to the doctor's office I selected a mid-sized trade paperback I hadn't thought about in decades: Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. (I'm tempted to admit that I had never thought about it at all, except that when I began to read it, I came upon passages I underlined decades ago, even a good ways into the book.)

Gellner divides human activities into three categories—the productive, the coercive, and the cognitive—hence the title: plough, sword, book. And he has a lot of insightful things to say about the follies of modern economists, atavistic hippies, and tendentious anthropologists. For example, he typifies Marx as the "ultimate bourgeois," and offers sound reasons for doing so. He pokes holes in the then-fashionable theories of Marshall Sahlins concerning the lifestyles of the Hadza people.

Where Hayek damns early man for his gregarious social morality, Sahlins praises him for his freedom from greed and, even more perhaps, for his freedom from the work ethic. Where nineteenth-century populists idealize the peasant, Sahlins' neolithic populism goes much further back and idealizes the hunter/gatherer. The rot had set in not with the first bourgeois, but with the first peasant.

 Here we catch a whiff of Gellner's wit, which can often be heard gurgling just beneath the surface of his prose. All the same, large sections of the book remain a bit abstract, because Gellner is writing a typology of cultural and social forms, not a history of civilization. For example, at one point Gellner asks: "How can it happen not merely that the weak, the swordless, overcome  the swordsmen, but that the whole organization and ethos of society changes, that Production replaces Predation as the central theme and value of life? Everything in the standard condition of agrarian life militates against such a miracle. Yet it did happen."

Gellner lists as many as fifteen factors that might have made such a transformation possible. He analyzes them, rejecting some, accepting others as possible, others still as even probable.

It strikes me that Gellner's analysis of the cognitive aspects of human life, while riddled with insights, also suffers somewhat from a failure to clearly distinguish between concepts, categories, and ideas. On the other hand, he's adept at ferreting out the contradictions inherent in nostalgic and utopian attitudes toward the past, for example:

The tendency of societies, especially small and simple societies, to have reasonably coherent visions of the world, to inhabit such a cosmos, has often been noted. The passing away of such coherent visions in complex and unstable societies, and its replacement by an impersonal, law-abiding, indifferent Nature, is a source of much recent romantic regret, poignantly expressed. The coherence of the world we have lost was thematic or stylistic rather than strictly logical. A fairly coherent picture was sustained by devices which evaded or ignored logic.  

This remark highlights Gellner's appreciation of patterns of social organization that "work" fairly well even though they don't really "make sense." He returns to the same theme at one point late in the book:

A man following traditional ideas is at least deploying something unlikely to be wholly false, and will at least fall in with the social proprieties of his culture. By contrast, given the infinity of possible truths, a man experimenting with new ideas is unlikely to be successful ... and at the same time is likely to be socially offensive.

We live in an age when the scientific method is strangely under attack by paranoid and often aggressive nay-sayers.

But Gellner's analysis, multifaceted and brilliant though it may be, inadvertently offers a clue as to why this might be so. In his treatment of cognition—concepts, categories, ideas, and empirical information and analysis—he has nothing to say about the important realm of images, imagination, and vision. That realm continues to be important, and available to us. Many people find both solace and meaning in the material that religions offer along those lines.

*   *   *

It being Christmas time, the current of my thought naturally drifts in that direction. One scholar who can supply the perspective to flesh out this dimension is the English philosopher and critic Terry Eagleton.

To call Eagleton merely a critic is to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him we’re reminded of philosophers and social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counter-puncher. He feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others. (I’m so out of touch, I thought  Spivak and Žižek were the same person!)

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009) It was written largely in response to the then-popular works of Hitchen and Dawkins trashing religious sentiment. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by Eagleton's grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers today are, that we live in the midst of several different "categories of being" and often partake of several simultaneously without contradicting any of them. Gellner would have agreed, I'm sure.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to the an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

He goes on:

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumbing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But once again, do we really have to choose between the two in every case?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romantics (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerrilla fighter.

Excesses of energy about, and Eagleton's insights and combativeness are both ever-present.

At this holy time, I'm not much in the combative mood. I enjoy seeing a pine tree covered in lights and colorful glass balls, tiny ceramic statues of the Holy Family sitting on top of the stereo, from which  the sweet, mellow harmonies of Dufay, Victoria, Palestrina and others waft across the room.

It's a different zone of thought, of being. Cookies get made, friends stop by, we take a walk in the pre-dawn snow. And a poem by Thomas Hardy drifts into view that I haven't thought about in years. I think you know it. Hardy spends a few stanzas describing a manger scene in which the oxen kneel before the infant Jesus. He concludes:

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

 

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.     

 

A Literary Ramble

Korean novelist Han Kang recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. I'd never heard of her. That's not unusual. I logged into my library account immediately and placed holds on a few of her works. I was tickled to see that no one else had done so; I was first in line for The Vegetarian—or so I thought. By the next morning I'd slipped to 96th. I guess they collate that kind of data overnight.

Now, many weeks later, the first of the novels I'd requested has come through. The White Book. It's a short book devoted to one- and two-page observations by a woman reflecting on a family trauma that took place before she was born. 

I liked the format. Reading it last night, I came upon the following sentence.

"Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend." 

Hmm, I say to myself, Is life really like a straight line? Not exactly. 

I've been thinking  lately about how the richness of life is, at least in part, a result of  time doubling back on itself as it moves ahead, compounding impressions and creating a firmer, more intricate, and more beautiful fabric. Anyone involved in a healthy long-term relationship is nourished by the steady stream of echoes, reminders, and shared experiences that make up an average day, often without thinking much about it. And the material culture that many of us surround ourselves with--books, music, posters--serves the same function.

A case in point: Charles Dumond died a few days ago. He composed many of the songs that Edith Piaf made famous, including "Non, je ne regrette rien." Basically, "I Regret Nothing." Some friends were coming over that night and I was looking for a Piaf CD to play at the appropriate moment—though conversation is often  so lively no one cares, including me. During that search I came upon a recording of Darius Milhaud's piano music that Hilary's brother Paul made for me many years ago. I put it on the stereo. I hadn't heard it in years. It was a revelation.

I like Milhaud and occasionally listen to a William Bolcom recording of his piano music, but Bolcom's approach is boisterous, whereas these interpretations were quietly lyrical, almost as if Milhaud had been channeling Mompou. They were simpler and more open, though still pleasantly awkward and adventurous harmonically. I loved them. I played the CD three times. Something from my past had been returned to me, and it was precisely the "space" I wanted to be in.

The same thing also happens with books. After devouring Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time, I found myself in need of a breather and began to read short books that I happened to spot on the shelves, almost at random, even though I'd read them before. The first, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (1978),is about old age and memory loss in the Swiss Alps during a weather catastrophe, though the parts I liked best were about mountain climbing. 
The second, Yasmina Reza's Hammerklavier (1997), was better than I'd remembered. Thirty years ago  I enjoyed the whimsy and the slightly cruel humor but missed the occasional moments of tenderness, honesty, and insight into the fleetingness of time and how hard it is to capture. Then again, the New Yorker wrote not long ago, "Reza is an adversarial writer even in her tender moments, which are infrequent, and she has a gift for derision which Flaubert might have admired."

The fleetingness of time also figures prominently in the third of the slim volumes I happened upon, Eugene Ionesco's Fragments of a Journal (1967). I suspect few readers have stuck with this collection of meditations from beginning to end. Ionesco is obsessed with death, absurdity, nothingness, but in an almost childlike way that resurfaces again and again like a bubbling fountain rather than congealing into an indigestible paste of theory. Along the way he relates sad and charming episodes from his childhood in a French village so small it doesn't appear on a map. You never know what's coming next. For example:

Two possible atitudes:

To imagine, because imagining means foreseeing. What we imagine is now true, what we imagine will be realized. Science fiction is becoming, or has already become, realistic literature.

A second possible attitude to consider: reality as something beyond reality, to be aware of it not as surrealistic but as unfamiliar, miraculous, a-real.

And a page or two later:

"What is life? I may be asked. For me life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, forever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it."

Plenitude is a good word, I think, but it would be a mistake to associate it too closely with mere 'presentness.' Life is not a straight line. It's squiggly. The lines circle around and overlap. That's what gives life dimension. Memory is the mechanism by which life fleshes itself out, bolsters itself, and lays the groundwork for rounding the next bend--or heading off in an entirely new direction. 

Shared memories are even better.

I step into the den where Hilary is deep into Percival Everett's James, and there, sitting on the stereo cabinet, is the brightly lit, three-foot, artificial Christmas tree we've stored in the basement for her mom for many years, returning it to her for a few weeks every holiday season. Dorothy died in May at the age of 97. A few days ago Hilary set up the tree, took a picture, and sent it around to her brothers. "Anyone want it?"

No one responded. Meanwhile, we've grown to like it. The colored lights are cheery, and as Hilary says, "It reminds me of all the years I used to go over and help mom decorate it."    

The Garden Against Time

In Olivia Laing's new book, she describes her effort to restore—or better put, re-envision—a decrepit garden in Suffolk that was originally developed by the well-known author and garden designer Mark Rumary. But within a page or two Laing reveals herself to be a woman of wide reading, restless energy, and deep conscience. She finds herself unable to tell that simple tale without also asking herself questions about what a garden is for and why she is so keen on having one. This leads on to an examination not only of the things a garden includes within its enclosure but also the things, and people, it deliberately excludes. 

I wasn't far into the book before it occurred to me that it's cut from the same cloth as W. G. Sebald's book-length meditations—Vertigo or The Rings of Saturn, for example—that wander here and there while keeping us mesmerized by the lugubrious tone, the casually shaped sentences, and the sense that great mysteries lie just beneath the surface. Laing's prose is more vigorous, less uncanny, but it's certainly up to the task, and she interweaves garden history and lengthy literary references adroitly, along with numerous details about her personal life the like of which Sebald would never mention.

A communitarian spirit runs through the book, consistent with Laing's earlier career as a herbalist and eco-activist. Among the duller parts of the book, along those lines, are the ones in which she exposes the slave-trading origins of the wealth that fueled many of the great landscape gardens of the seventeenth century. Yes, it's true. Yes, we get it. But perhaps we don't need to know quite so much about generation after generation of Jamaican plantation owners.

 Among the literary figures she draws upon in the course of developing her thesis are John Milton, John Clare, William Morris, and Iris Origo. One reviewer found these interpolations tedious, preferring Laing's gardening exploits. I felt just the opposite. I skimmed quite a few paragraphs describing Laing's garden plantings, buoyed by the music of the language but entirely at sea regarding the specific plants she was mentioning. For example:

As bare patches were revealed I started to draw up embryonic planting plans. I wanted a group of Narcissus cyclamineus under the magnolia, the ones that look like Piglet with his ears blown back. Acid yellow, ballet pink. More hellebores under the hazel, the yellowy-green Ballard hybrids with a maroon splash at the eye, plus a fine blue mist of Anemone blanda under the tree peony, which had just opened an abundance of crumpled yolk-yellow petals. Irises everywhere. Dying plants were discarded and new plants took up their stations. A Rosa rubrifolia, dead as a doornail. Great mats of lamium that had conquered and pillaged the shadier border in the pond garden. A variegated euonymus, hideous anyway, and blocking two-thirds of the path. Arbutus, sick, ceanothus, deceased. In their place I planted more pinkish-green astrantia and Geranium psilostemon, Verbena hastata ‘Pink Spires’ and a mass of tawny heleniums. We got six goldfish, four orange and two black, and the garden instantly felt more animated and alive. The tulips went over, replaced by a wave of purple and white dame’s rocket, aqui- legia, purple drumstick alliums and the first glowing roses.   

The eye trips along, but such passages don't mean much to me. On the other hand, I found the long section about the garden themes of Paradise Lost and Milton's persecution following the civil war to be fascinating, likewise the story of Iris Origo's Italian villa and the part it played harboring refugees and partisans during the Second World War. Laing praises Origo's courage while upbraiding her for maintaining the medieval mezzadria land management system on her vast inherited estates under which the workers had no opportunity to purchase the land they worked, generation after generation.

That aspect of gardening—its elitism and escapism, if you will—is one of the many themes that contribute to Laing's long meditation. But that being the case, it strikes me as strange that she never says a word about the financial arrangements that made it possible for her to buy an estate in Suffolk and spend two solid years investing heavily in repairing, rebuilding, and replanting it. Royalties from her previous books? I doubt it. Early on, she mentions marrying a Cambridge don named Ian. Do retired academics in England really make that much?  

It's a minor point and does nothing to obscure  Laing's intense curiosity about literature and history, her vast knowledge and love of plants, her concern about all manner of social inequality, or her desire to create a verdant enclosed landscape and oasis for herself. No book that I know of describes that process more richly.

A Moral and Spiritual Forest

When the evenings get dark we think about music, and by the time the notices start to appear in the papers about Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Handel's Messiah, and the Brandenburg Concertos, it's likely our cherry-picked "fall season" is already well underway. Not that there's any real planning or subscription involved. In the course of the last week we heard two outstanding concerts, both of them in St. Paul.

On Sunday afternoon Consortium Carissimi performed selections from Monteverdi's La Salve  Morale et Spirituale, a heterogeneous collection of pieces he put together and published in 1640. The translation would be "a moral and spiritual forest"—great title!

The show was at three in the afternoon in one of the courtrooms on the third floor of the Landmark Center, and the proceedings had a casual atmosphere that almost made you feel like you were part of the group. One woman was taping the event on a tripod using her phone. A baroque trombone (no valves) was sitting on a table right behind my head. Guests and musicians greeted each other warmly. No one was taking tickets. The nineteen members of the ensemble—singers and instrumentalists—gradually settled into their places, but then started to converse again with a colleague or adjust a music stand. Director Garrick Comeaux and bassist Julie Elhard, standing ten feet apart, couldn't seem to agree on when to start the program. We watched all the comings and goings as if it were the introduction to a neo-realist film by Ermanno Olmi. 

Finally Garrick addressed the audience, informing us in an almost inaudible voice that contrary to the information in the program, there would be no intermission. "If you want to stretch your legs, fine. But hurry back to your seats. The concert isn't that long." He also announced that the group had commissioned the construction of a new organ and had found a permanent home for it—and for the group itself—at a nearby church. He introduced three or four new members. They stood up in the back, everyone clapped, and then he gestured unceremoniously for them to sit down again. And off we went into the sweet world of Italian Renaissance music—a world that Hilary and I almost invariably enjoy, but know almost nothing about.

The first half of the program consisted of singers and instrumentalists in various combinations performing relatively brief selections. One of the tenors did a solo number. Two violinists put a lot of energy into a somewhat repetitive piece full of call-and-response figures to piercing effect.

I don't remember precisely which was which, but the performances were invariably fresh and engaging, and the long Mass that concluded the program offered a tremendous blast of rich vocal harmonies. Wow! I say "long" but it wasn't too long. Rich, but also somehow light, unlike so many concert Masses that are titanic to the point of bombast and tediousness.

Two days later we returned to St. Paul to hear an afternoon performance of the Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas performed by the Greek virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos. Unlike the material in the previous concert, which was entirely new to me, I've been listening to these pieces since my college years. I even taught myself one of the partitas on the guitar. 

But they're naked works, full of mournful scraping sounds and double and triple stops that threaten to upset the flow. No one listens to them very often, I think, great though they are. They're deep yet also lively, sometimes harsh, often mournful and intense. How they would sound on a concert stage I had no idea, but Kavakos pulled it off, both by his playing and his serious, untheatrical demeanor. The thought and feeling were ever present, the care and virtuosity merely a means to an end.

It was a recital not to be forgotten.

Back home, we cooked up a pot of leek and squash risotto while listening to a CD of the three sonatas that weren't included on the afternoon program performed by the Venetian virtuoso Guiliano Carmignola. The tone was slightly different, but Carmignola touched on the same array of emotions.  

 

A Bright, Do-Nothing Day

Whenever a Republican wins a presidential election, I cut a branch or two off the dracaena that's been growing in a pot in a corner of our dining room for decades. It was getting sort of tall.

I can't quite explain it, but I found myself taking great pleasure as I held the branches over the yard waste bin out by the garage—glorious sunny morning—and cut the branches into very short lengths, one after the other, with my pruning shears.

The other day we invited a couple of friends over to commiserate about the election, but couldn't quite decide what to call the event: Whine and Wine? or Gnash and Nosh?

I'm through with politics for a while. I glance at the headlines and then look away, as if I've been accosted by the sight of a rotting carcass. No need to scrutinize the autopsy report right now.

The leaves are crisp and dry, and I've been raking them up a sections, but there are still plenty to gather up.  I've noticed that if you rake half the yard, a few days later the leaves will be evenly distributed again over the entire yard. How could this be?

In any case, on a day like today it won't do to simply wander the house, staring out the windows, so I came up with a plan. I was going the do a few of things I should have done a long time ago, such as buying a tube of Henry's rubber roof repair goo to squeeze into the opening above the gutters that the ice dams like to take advantage of. As it happens, the hardware store is right next to the liquor store. Although our recent guests brought plenty of wine with them, it seems we're now out. So I added that stop to the itinerary..

During our little soirée the conversation moved so thick and so fast that we forgot to set out half the food we'd planned to serve, and now we have a fridge full of spanakopita and smoked salmon. My idea is to add the salmon in little strips to some spinach pasta along with cream, maybe a few capers, and fresh dill. A trip to the grocery store is now in order.

And wonder of wonders, just now I even brought a box of books up from the basement and ran it out to the car. Someone had written <Good. Sell These> in bold letters on the side. That was me. I'm getting rid of it, without even looking inside. No second thoughts. No regrets.

But right now it's out into the yard to show those luscious crispy crackly leaves who's boss.    

 

Twin City Book Fest: David Shields

The Saturday morning of the Twin Cities Book Festival marks the high point of the publishing year, at least for me. Sponsored by Rain Taxi, it's been held annually for almost a quarter of a century. I can remember the first one I attended, way back in 2002. It was held on one of the upper floors of the International Design Center, across Lyndale Avenue from the farmers' market on the Near North Side. The space was large but dark, the floors concrete, columns everywhere. My first book of essays, Mountain Upside Down, had just been published by Nodin Press, and I was naively enthusiastic about it. (It's now long out-of-print. I have two unopened cases in the basement. Let me know if you want a copy.)

That morning I traded a copy of the most recent print edition of MACARONI with Scott King, a letterpress printer who ran Red Dragonfly Books, for a copy of a fourteen-page, hand-tied, limited edition of Horace's Poem on Anger translated by Robert Bly.

But I'm suddenly reminded that I attended a book event a year or two earlier held in the Butler Building on the edge of the Minneapolis warehouse district, then still in its infancy as a district. Maybe not a Rain Taxi event, but very exciting stuff all the same. I was on the verge of buying a fine small-press edition of Patricia Hampl's poetry collection Resort but opted in the end for a smaller (and more affordable) eight-page chapbook containing Ronsard's poem "The Salad" translated by Wendell Berry.

The Rain Taxi event later moved down to the atrium of the Minneapolis Technical College, near Loring Park, and it was often lively to the point of frenzy in that bright yet modest space. One year I heard Stephen Pinker speak about the history of violence. With his thick, silver mane he looked like an eighteenth-century philosophe, and come to think of it, some of his controversial theories could have been lifted straight from Condorcet. Later I listened in as New Yorker staff-writer Larry Welschler told us all about "uncanny valley" and eight or nine other random but fascinating topics.

The festival's current location on the state fairgrounds is just fine with me: well-illuminated, food trucks outside, plenty of parking nearby. The event would be stimulating under any conditions, but for me, it offers an opportunity to reconnect with old pals from Bookmen days, writers I've gotten to know through the writer's union, and authors whose books I've editor and/or designed, a few of which I worked with recently but had never met face-to-face.

On top of that, there are the forums, the guest speakers, the used book sale, and the rows and rows of tables where small presses and self-published authors display their books.

Before the event last Saturday I took a look at the line-up and spotted one or two speakers that sounded interesting, including the translator Damion Searls. I also noticed that a few old friends (Cary Griffith, Theresa Wanta) would be there signing books at various times of the day. I drew up a schedule, but it was shot to hell the moment I arrived and noticed the author David Shields sitting alone in front of a camera at a table near the door. I sat down in the chair opposite and said hello.

"What's going on here?" I asked.

"I'm interviewing people. Would you care to answer a few questions?"

"Why not?"

I mentioned that I owned a copy of his book Reality Hunger, though I referred to it as Reality Bites, and added that I liked the aphoristic style. I told him it was the kind of book I liked to take up north; you could read a passage or two and ponder them for the rest of the day. I had found it to contain a much higher percentage of "winners" than the aphorisms of Novalis or Chamfort, for example.

There followed a lively conversation centered around some very interesting questions. Here are a few exchanges, cherry-picked, condensed, edited for length, and essentially fictionalized:

David: "What is the difference between 'nonfiction' and 'fiction'?"

Me: "Have you ever noticed that when we meet the author of a novel, the first thing we want to know is 'Did this really happen?'"

David: "I've written a few novels myself, and yes, I have found this to be true."

We arrived finally at the notion that a novel can't be said to be "true," but a good novel has the contours of truth.

Me: "Any interest in Peter Handke?"

David: "Not really. Though I did like Goalie's Anxiety at Penalty Kick."

Me: "That's one of the few of his works I haven't read. So you don't read much fiction. Name an author."

David: "I like certain novels by J.M. Coetzee. Elizabeth Costello. The title character goes around giving speeches about various things."

Me: "That reminds me of one of my favorite books: Julio Cortázar's Diary of Andrés Fava. It consists of a number of essays and fragments Cortázar deleted from a previous novel."

David: "I might like that."

 From time to time Shields took another look at his list of questions.

David: "What is the difference between truth and belief?"

Me: "Well, Ortega y Gasset says that we rely on our beliefs but we don't really think about them. When we think about something, we're trying it out, so to speak, to see if it offers a reliable concept or explanation."

David: "Does truth really exist?"

Me: "Certainly. But it would be a mistake to imagine we can ever know the truth fully."

At this point there ensued a lengthy discussion of historicism, during which I inexplicably failed to mention Vico's principle of verum factum; We can understand the things we've made ourselves.

David: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Me: "I saw a ghost once in Cimarron, New Mexico. Something slightly uncanny. But if that realm exists, it doesn't seem to play much of a part in the larger scheme of things."

David: "Are you superstitious?"

Me: "Well, I have a glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary on my bedside table. But I don't think about it much. I got it at a party, a gift from a friend who had been raised Catholic and subsequently rejected everything about organized religion. The glow is fading. I need to put it out in the sun more before winter sets in."

At several points in our conversation, Shields directed my attention to his new book, How We Got Here, a slim shiny red volume with a quasi-mathematical formula on the cover: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Zizek (squared) equals Bannon.

I liked the bizarre string of associations, and I'm sure there's some insight to be drawn from its logic, but I was leery of wandering too deeply into politics, and I was pretty sure Shields wasn't at the festival to make a video of himself describing his own book to a stranger who hadn't read it. In fact, I've never read Melville. Nietzsche strikes me as mostly a shallow, confused, and hysterical thinker. More of a gadfly and social critic that a philosopher. I have trouble keeping Spivak and Zizek straight—I haven't read either of them—and I have had difficulty finding any book worth reading from the past half century of "literary theory," though as I looked at the cover David was holding in his hands, an image of Terry Eagleton's essay collection, Figures of Dissent, did flash through my mind.

The formula he drew my attention to seemed to be fleshing out a harrowing descent into chaos—the negative moment of a dialectic, rather than its developmental synthesis.

David's final question was: "Why are you here and not canvassing for Kamala Harris?"

My answer, in brief: "I'm a lifelong Democrat, I give money to the party. But I'm not really a grass-roots-movement kind of guy. And Minnesota is a reliably blue state."  It sounded a little lame.

I might have added, "On a day like today, I'd rather be here talking to you, looking at books, and hanging out with friends." 

Chasing Comets

A comet is a ball of dust and ice—mostly dust—that has fallen into an orbit around the sun. Usually that orbit takes a long time to complete, and it sometimes happens that the comet disintegrates before completing a c iruit.. Hence, most people have only seen Halley's Comet once, if at all, because it only come around every 76 years or so. It sped by in 1986, and I saw it. It looked like every other comet, I suppose, a distant, fiery ball with a faint smudge of light tailing off into the darkness behind it. I don't remember exactly what Halley's comet looked like, but I referred to it in a poem I wrote at that time—a very bad poem—so I must have seen it. Right? 

Does it matter? Not much. Then again, those who have seen something rare and distinctive have a slight edge over those who haven't. And those who were at Woodstock? You never hear the end of it!

Hilary and I had a more memorable sighting in 1997, when were camping at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. It was a dark night; there are no towns within 30 miles of the desert site in any direction. And there is was: Comet Hale-Bopp. It has been referred to as the brightest comet of the twentieth century. I associated it at the time with the death of Laura Nyro earlier that year, a bright star zooming off into the cosmic night.

My best photo of Neowise

Just a few years ago Comet Neowise showed up. We drove down to Lake Louise State Park, a few miles from the Iowa Border, and went out into the night to the campground dumping station. From there, looking north across 30 miles of largely uninhabited farmland, we got an excellent view of the comet while standing in the dark next to a green dumpster. It had a nice long tail.

And just recently, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS showed up. It took its time swinging around the sun, offering plenty of opportunities for enthusiasts to see it, but it suffered from an unpronounceable name, and people began referring to it as simply A-3, which is easier to say but hardly glamorous or enticing.

One night recently we went out at sundown to Valley View Park, a long grassy sward near our house that points roughly west, to see what we could see. Nothing. Pondering the situation later, I determined that a better viewing site would be the east shore of Medicine Lake, a fifteen-minute drive away, where we could look out across the lake to the broad sweep of the western horizon. The next morning, leaving nothing to chance, we drove over there to familiarize ourselves with the route and choose a viewing spot. Hours later, just as the sun was going down, we returned.

A flock of geese was drifting a hundred yards off-shore, silhouetted in the golden sunset. Four or five people were already standing in the grass above the beach. One man—a high school geography teacher, we later learned—showed us a photo of the comet a friend of his had taken the previous night. Out across the south end of the lake Venus was shining brightly. That was a good sign, because the comet had been described as "just to the right of Venus."

There was a short squiggle of gold above the trees on the far side of the lake, just above the horizon. "Is that it?" one woman asked.

"No," I said, "You can see it's sort of broken and bent. That's a contrail."

"I'm glad I asked," she said. "I would have taken a picture and gone home."

A man came over to join us and soon conversation turned to the saw-whet owl everyone had seen in Sochaki Park last winter. But soon the man was telling stories about the random ducks his daughter had seen at a swamp nearby. We stepped down into the shadows on the beach to get away from the chatter. As it happened, the shadows also cut out most of the peripheral light from the parking lot behind us, making it easier to see objects in the darkening sky.

Another couple came down to the beach. They seemed to be speaking in some Slavic language, and I couldn't help asking them where they were from. "Ukraine" was the short reply. But we soon learned that she was from Georgia and he from the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. She hastened to inform us that they arrived in the United States a quarter-century ago, as if to disassociate themselves from any misunderstanding. She made a random comment about Andropov—I don't remember the context—and I replied: "Don't forget Brezhnev and Kosygin."

"Good heavens. You remember Kosygin?" she almost shrieked. She seemed pleased.

They told us about a midnight excursion they'd taken recently to see the Northern Lights. "It was so colorful," the woman said. "White and green and even shades of red! We drove west for an hour to get away from the lights."

"Where did you actually stop to view the aurora," I asked.

"In a cemetery," she said.

"Did you see any ghosts?" I couldn't help asking. She laughed dismissively.

Back up on the grass, the geography teacher had spotted the comet.

"You see that house across the lake with the bright windows? It's up from there and a little to the left."

Soon everyone had found it. The trouble was, if you looked away, it wasn't easy to find it again. It was a faint glow with a smudge of a tail, and the tail was short. But it was definitely "cool." Now the task became to conceptualize what we were looking at.

The comet appeared to be streaking toward the sun with an exhaust trail behind it, like an image from a comic book, but we all knew the comet was actually on its way out of the solar system. The so-call "tail" was caused by solar radiation evaporating the comet's gases, causing it to emit dust and micro-particles. These particles almost invariably appear on the far side of the comet, regardless of the direction it's moving, due to the pressure exerted by the solar radiation.

But that's not a fun thing to think about. I prefer the Flash Gordon version.

As we were leaving the beach we passed a man fumbling with a camera fitted with an eyepiece and mounted on a tripod. The tripod was only four feet tall, and the man had to hunch over to look through the eyepiece. "I can see it with my binoculars," he said, "but I can't find it in the eyepiece." Frustrating.

Then again, all comets look pretty much alike. I will remember Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as the comet with a name I can't remember that we saw on the beach surrounded by a bunch of friendly strangers. They say it won't be back for 80,000 years.  

Sparkling Fall Days

These sparkling fall days called out for a response, and we answered the call, engineering an overnight on the North Shore.

The leaves were brilliant, of course. And the lake exhibited an uncanny depth of color when calm and also once the wind came up. A few days before we left, Hilary spotted a mom-and-pop place called the Islandview Resort in Knife River, just east of the candy shop—the kind of place where the cabins are up on a hill several hundred yards from the lake, on the "wrong" side of the highway, and you might say as you pass by, "Who would want to stay there?"

We booked the Honeymoon Cabin—our 47th honeymoon, I guess—and it was great. The cabins are strategically situated so they all have a view down across an immense lawn and out across the lake.

 They're old; you can almost imagine the tube-and-knob wiring under the paneling. The cabinets seem to be home-made. The chairs are wicker. Knotty pine walls. All the wood surfaces have the glow of antique shellac. The bathtub is four feet long at most.

But it was quaint and cozy, and considerably larger than many of the places we'd stayed in England. It was also much cheaper. And the view from the front deck, nestled in the midst of mature white pines and perky yellow popples, was superb.

But we hadn't gone north simply to sit around. We stopped at Hawk Ridge, which was quiet. We had better luck at McQuade Safe Harbor, where we saw a few Lapland longspurs. They're not especially striking in their non-breeding plumage, but I'd never seen one before.  The evocative name refers to their Arctic breeding range and the unusual length of their back claw.

Other afternoon stops included the Two Harbors library, which has a splendid de-acquisition shop, and the harbor itself, where we spotted some juvenile Harris sparrows and joined the crowd that was watching the James R. Barker ore boat maneuver around the breakwater and into the dock, delivering its famous horn salute—the Barker Bark—several times as it turned the corner.  (You can hear the salute on this link, not quite so sonorous as the original.)

Our dinner consisted of a chicken pasty we'd picked up at the Northern Bakery in Duluth and the remains of the BiBimBap Bowl Hilary had ordered at the Duluth Grill for lunch. After dinner we walked down the hill and across the grass to a large fire that the owners had started for guests in the firepit. Back on the deck we read aloud from the poems of T'ao Ch'ien and Louis Jenkins. Returning later to the firepit, we threw another log on the fire and watched the stars come out.

Simple pleasures continued the next morning. Gooseberry Falls State Park was teaming with visitors, but the Gitchi Gummi Trail was deserted. Out near the end of the loop we met up with an elderly man hiking alone. "Does this trail eventually take me down there to Agate Beach?" He asked. He glanced down at the beach hundreds of feet below us.

"I'm afraid not," I said. "That beach is on the other side of the river. You'll have to continue around this loop, cross the river on the highway bridge, and return to your car. You can drive down to that beach. There's a parking lot right next to it."

"My wife will like that," he said, seemingly unperturbed, and continued on his way.

In some ways the most extraordinary event of the trip was also the most unexpected. I had gone out with binoculars before dawn. The eastern horizon was glowing and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see the comet tsuchinshan-Atlas unobstructed by buildings and trees. 

If I'd done my research I would have known the comet has swung around and is now visible on the western horizon, just after sunset. But I did see something else—the Green Ray. I had my binoculars trained on the spot where the sun was about to peek above the horizon when I saw a sudden flash of intense green. It lasted only a split-second. Then the edge of the sun appeared, a flaming orange-red.

I wouldn't have known what to call it if I hadn't seen the Eric Rohmer film The Green Ray, which came out in 1986. The plot concerns itself with a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make the most of their summer vacations, which are mostly full of frustrations, disappointments, and missed opportunities, as I recall. Most of these kids end up watching sunsets on an ocean beach somewhere, probably in Brittany, and there's a lot of talk about seeing the Green Ray. At the time, I had no idea whether the phenomenon was real or merely a plot contrivance.

Now I've seen the Green Ray. Incredible. Hilary wants to see it too, naturally. We can add that rare event to the list of the North Shore's many enticements. 

Note: The film is currently available on several streaming platforms under the title "Summer." Easy to find if you add the word "Rohmer." (I wouldn't recommend it.)

The Lustre of the Masters

Researchers in the Netherlands have found a means to quantify a phenomenon that art-lovers have been aware of for centuries: original works of art are more engaging than copies and posters. A recent article in the Guardian reports that by fitting viewers with a helmet equipped with eye-tracking technology and MRI scans to record brain activity, these scientists were able to determine that genuine artworks generated a response ten times stronger than did reproductions.

It seems likely that these scientists fudged the numbers to come up with such a tidy ten-to-one ratio. But little matter. The difference between original and reproduced is real. But everyone knows that. Two important questions remain unasked: Why is the original more stimulating? Des such an effect necessarily mean that the piece is a better work of art?

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay on this question in which he suggested that the difference lies in the unique physical presence of the original, which he referred to as its authenticity and also, strangely, as its "aura." This argument doesn't take us very far. A better answer might be that an original work of art—and especially an original painting—distinguishes itself by its luster. (An equivalent argument in the realm of music would make reference to the richer timber of instruments used in live performances.)

Luster produces a variety of effects that cannot be reproduced by offset or digital printing. For example, the red cloak in a Modigliani recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts bristles with an energy that derives entirely by the sheen it gives off. A more subtle example of the same phenomenon might be the Pissarro landscape they own in which the mid-afternoon heat and the dust in the air can be seen, and felt, in the chalky luster on the building facade.

We spent a few hours at the National Gallery in London recently and I came away with a variety of impressions regarding those classic works we see again and again in books. The marriage scene by Van Eck was deeply engaging. The Holbeins seemed less attractive, less complex that I'd remembered them. A few of the Veroneses almost measured up to the best of the Titians. And it struck me that some of the late portraits by Van Dyke were top-flight. Who knew?

To my eye, the composition of Mantagna's six-panel Triumph of Caesar offered a new and astounding way to fill a large canvas. And there were individual faces in several of the works that conveyed great depth of character.

Over all, I came away from these galleries with a renewed appreciation of the human face. The modern galleries, in contrast, were dominated by color, often depicting landscapes clothed in pleasing but entirely artificial harmonies. But in the modern rooms of the National Gallery, I felt that I was just looking at surfaces. The Cezannes, in particular, struck me as flat, dry, harsh, generic ... uninteresting.

On the other hand, most of the artworks—prints, posters, photographs—that are hanging on the walls of our house are landscapes and domestic scenes, most of them dating from the twentieth century. I've long been a fan of the Fauves, and we have framed posters or book illustrations by Matisse, Miro, Dufy, and Braque hanging here and there, and even a N. C. Wyeth book poster of Kidnapped.

You can be moved by the shadowy penetration of a Rembrandt self-portrait in a museum without feeling the need to have such a face bearing down on you enigmatically day after day. To judge from the artworks we pass by on our movement around the house, you might wonder if we had been inspired by the remark of Henri Matisse:

What I dream of is an art of balance, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…..a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue. 

A Slice of England

Why England? Good question.

It's quasi-European, but they speak English there. It's a non-stop flight, a mere eight hours across the "pond." We hadn't been there in forty-odd years. And there were a few places we'd never been that we wanted to see, especially south of London.

We set up an itinerary that included three nights in London followed by stops in Canterbury, Rye, Eastbourne, and a few villages in Dorset and Wiltshire. What we were going to do, specifically, was entirely open. As the trip began to take shape I might have mentioned Greenwich, Hampstead Heath, and Samuel Johnson's house as places I'd never been that might be interesting. We went to none of those places. Rather, we wandered London, visiting the National Gallery and the British Museum, Hyde Park and Westminster Abbey, and attended an international art song competition at Wigmore Hall—all of which places we'd been to before. So what? 

On our first morning, after dropping our bags at our B&B near Marble Arch, we wandered out into Hyde Park, where a large section of open ground had been roped off. Bobbies and military women and men wearing berets were at attention maybe a hundred yards apart. I asked one of them what was going on.

"We're going to do a 41-gun salute to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the queen." Interesting. The field was full of geese and crows; there was no artillery in sight.

A half-hour later, while we were eating some sandwiches at a café overlooking the Serpentine, a pack of elaborately uniformed horsemen rode by just outside. Time to head back to that field. We arrived to see them charge down from the north dragging cannons, set them up, and blow them off one at a time. Then do it again. And again.

On the first blast, the crows and geese took off. The smoke billowed out of the cannons and hung in the air in clouds fifteen feet off the ground. I could hear a military band playing on the other side of the field, where a crowd had gathered that seemed slightly larger than the fifteen or twenty passersby we were among.

It took a while to reach forty-one blasts, but we had time. Then they reattached the cannons to the horses and charged by us again, their swords and accoutrements clattering at their sides.

 

A few hours later, on the advice of the couple who ran our B & B, we were sitting at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Duke of Kendal Gastropub. It's situated on the triangular tip of a backstreet intersection in quiet Connaught Village, a neighborhood just north of Hyde Park that I'd never heard of until I looked it up just now. The streets here are lined with tiny shops—cheese, patisserie, fresh flowers—and "ethnic" cafés, including a Persian "tapas" restaurant and two Iraqi places. On our plates, fish and chips and a fresh Greek salad. People were conversing in twos and threes at nearby tables over beer or wine. Bicycles and cars whizzed by. The best of European life on a mild sunny evening.   

We wandered London for two days, then hopped a train to Canterbury, a fairly large town masquerading successfully as a lively village. Lots of restaurants, street musicians, tourists ogling the impressive cathedral, and students attending one of the four local universities. Two blocks off main street things quite down. We enjoyed a peaceful walk along the river, listened to the bells chiming at some length, and attended an evensong at the towering cathedral, which was directly behind our hotel.

Another short train ride took us to Dover, where we'd rented a car. That night we were at an inn near the coast just outside the village of Winchelsea. Taking a walk across the fields at sunset we came upon a man out for a stroll with his son. Formerly the London bureau-chief of Knight-Ridder news service, he wanted to talk about Trump. Why? Why? Why? I finally had to remind him about Brexit, and said, "Liz Truss wasn't too impressive, either."

"Tell me about it," he said. "The first day she was in office, I lost ten percent of my pension."

I asked him whether there was a footpath from Winchelea to Rye, which lies a few mile to the east along the coast.

"There is; you can do it," he replied, "but it's a rotten trail."

The next morning we drove into Winchelsea, one of the few English towns laid out in a grid—it's only a few blocks long—and hunted down the house where Ford Madox Ford lived for several years early in his career. Ford's work is not well known today, but I was deeply impressed in college by his tetralogy of WWI novels that were later published together under the title No More Parades.

Here, in a nutshell, is the way Amazon describes his career.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor. He was an international influence in early 20th-century literature. Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic environment as the son of a German music critic and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. He wrote his first novel at 18 and went on to publish more than 70 works. He is remembered for Parade's End and his generous encouragement of younger writers.

For many years I was in the habit of hunting down Ford's lesser books in used-book stores, and over time I amassed quite a few, most of which now languish in a box in the basement alongside forgotten works by W. H. Hudson and George Moore. I took a closer look at one of Ford’s early travel books, The Heart of the Country,  before we embarked on our whirlwind trip across the countryside of the southern Home Counties, but it didn’t grab me. I’m reading it again now, having been there, with greater pleasure.

Our next stop was Lamb House in nearby Rye, where Henry James lived for several decades in the early twentierth century. Not large, but “well appointed,” as they say. The walls of the study ar lined with pencil scetches of those of James’s literary friends who also happened to be friends, including Ford, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and others.

I’m not a huge fan of “the Master,” as Ford often referred to James. He seemed to be fond of writing books about things that didn’t happen, at increasingly great length. My approach has been—the shorter the better: Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle.

I asked both of the tour guides present in the house whether they were full-fledged fans of James’s work, and neither would admit to it. I shared two quips with the knowledgeable guide in the bedroom and got a hearty laugh from both. “Henry Adams’ wife once remarked that in his later novels Henry James chewed more than he bit off.” And “I believe it was Oscar Wilde who remarked that James wrote novels as if it were a painful duty.”

But I have it in mind to give James another go … right after I finish The Heart of the Country.

In an entirely different key, we drove out the Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, a vast and impressive collection of trains through salt marshes and across beaches at the edge of the English Channel. And we saw some new birds there, including the little egret, common redshank, eurasian curlew, eurasian oystercatcher, great crested grebe, little grebe, and great cormorant.

From that point on our route was designed to take us past long-distance footpaths. England has quite a few. We had planned to walk the last few miles of the North Downs Way, following the route pilgrims used to take into Canterbury, but events intervened. We picked up the South Downs Way at Beachy Head and walked it for a few miles, high above the sea. And we joined it again thirty-odd miles inland just west of Steyning, where it proved a lot harder to hike up to it than to follow it once we reached the top of the “down.” We were overtaken by a psychiatrist and his Irish setter during our ascent who advised us as to the best way to the top, and during our subsequent trek I enjoyed chatting with a man who spends his winters in Crete about the recently concluded U.S. Open, where the rising British star Jack Draper had made an impressive run to the semi-finals.

The countryside was grand. We passed yellow fields of wheat and herds of white cattle, with blackberries in the hedgerows and red kites occasionally hovering above. And from time to time we could see the English Channel glistening on the horizon far to the south.

The most luxurious of our lodgings was Gore Farm, an AirB&B a few miles south of Shaftsbury. We were surprised when the caretaker informed us that the little cottage we’d rented, which looked out onto a plowed field surrounded by mature woods, was appended to the home of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, renowned orchestra conductor and founder of the Monteverdi Choir. That evening we sat on the terrace in front of the house with a glass of wine and watched the shadows lengthen across the recently plowed field as the sun set while listening to some Bach cantatas Hilary had called up on her phone. The next morning we walked through the woods and across the road to Fontmell Downs, the obscure but lovely National Trust holding that had attracted us to the area in the first place.

Near the end of our two-week circuit we spent some time wandering the famous landscape garden at Stourhead and exploring the Stone Age archeological sites in the vicinity of Avebury. These generally ill-formed stone megaliths are less concentrated and less impressive than the ones at nearby Stonehenge, but they’re more extensive, cover a much wider area, and are a delight to wander among. The nearby West Kennet Long Barrow, sitting on the top of a hill in a farmer’s field, is also an impressive site. The burial remains it contained have been dated to around 3600 B.C.E. 

A mile or two down the road we parked at the top of Hackpen Hill and walked a few miles on the Ridgeway Trail to Barbury Castle—not a castle at all, but an ancient grass-covered hill ringed by primitive earthen defenses.