High School Reunion

A fifty-year reunion is, by many accounts, a wonderful way to revive old friendships and jog the memory. And I could tell, the minute we arrived at the Hopkins Art Center, two hours late, that this kind of warm social interaction was in full swing. The lobby was packed, and the din of conversation was already considerable. It was clear that for many attendees, the anxieties and insecurities of youth were a thing of the past. The fact that beer and wine were included in the price of admission might also have contributed to the bonhomie of the occasion.

Many of the faces in the crowd looked to me like older, thicker, and more mature versions of the teenagers I went to high school with. I loved them all, but I didn't recognize any of them, undoubtedly because I didn't go to high school in Hopkins.

We threaded our way to the front desk to get our name tags, and the man behind the counter asked: "Lindberg or Eisenhower?"

 "Neither," I replied. "We're here to listen to the band."

Hopkins was a hotbed of rock-n-roll back in the mid-seventies. (Maybe every high school was?) At the time, Hilary's brother David was in a band called Seth that also included Steve Almaas (who went on to fame as part of the Suicide Commandos) and Jeff Waryan (later the lead guitar for Figures and other local bands). Dave played the keyboards and sometimes sang.

Recently someone got the idea of reviving the group to play at the fiftieth reunion. They got a hold of drummer Jay Peck, who had also played with Figures, rehearsed mostly remotely, and in the course of a few weeks worked up a play-list of covers that included the Yardbirds' "For Your Love," the Stones' "Under My Thumb," the Beatles "Oh, Darlin'," and a few golden oldies by Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers, and other bands that were after my time.

In performance the reconstituted Seth was clean and crisp. Front-man Steve Almaas was in his element with both the bouncy bass and the lively patter, reminding the audience, for example, of the first gig the band played at a junior high dance half a century ago. Commandos guitarist Chris Osgood stepped in for one number. People danced. More often they merely chatted with friends or videoed the performance.

Hilary and I joined a group of family friends and relatives at a large table near the back, though the vibe was so infectious I spent most of the set out in the crowd, digging the music. Hey! The Yardbirds were one of my favorite bands in junior high. I can whistle the guitar solo from "Shapes of Things" even today.

Though jazz later occupied most of my attention, I also took a brief dive into New Wave rock-n-roll in the early eighties, during which time I was introduced to the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, the Flamin O's and other local groups. Somewhre in the basement I have a great four-minute super-8 film of the Suburbs performing live at twilight down in Loring Park. (It's probably worth a fortune.)

After the set I went up to Steve Almaas and said, "You sounded great. But I wish you'd done a favorite from Suicide Commando days: 'I Just Moved into a Haunted House.'"

"That's goin' WAY back," he replied with a laugh.

The tone, character, and even the volume of the music was perfectly suited to the evening, and the crowd of not-so-young listeners all appeared to be having a wonderful time. I'm sure David was proud to look up from the keyboard to see his two sons, both of them now fathers themselves, out in the crowd, and also his brothers Paul and Jeff, who were monitoring and adjusting the mix throughout the set. 

One final touch was the "Seth" coasters that the band had printed up, which were now scattered on tables all around the room.

_____________________

The romance of high school never dies, and it was a pleasure to be standing among women and men who had outgrown it without entirely losing it. The music brings all of that to life. 

As Hilary and I were leaving, I snapped a photo of our friends in the crowd, who by chance happened to be lined up like something out of Velazquez's "Las Meninas."

Twenty-Five Years of Writing ... and Not Reading

I took a look at the NY Times list of the hundred best books of the 21sr century, as voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, to see how I stacked up against the real literati. Not bad, though I guess it depends on how you look at it. I have not read any of the books on the list cover to cover but I've heard of almost half of them, and I've read more than a few of the pieces collected in The Short Stories of Lydia Davis.(88) I thought I had a winner with Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century, which I read and enjoyed, but a second look reveals that one of Judt's other books, Postwar (43), had made the list.

I think I also ought to get a little credit for other near-misses. I haven't read the number-one title on the list, Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, but I read volume two of the tetrology, The Story of a New Name, which was difficult because I didn't know who any of the characters were. Likewise, I haven't read Lucia Berlin's collection,  Manual for Cleaning Women (79) but I did read the sequel, Evening in Paradise. I didn't read Small Things Like These (41) but I did read Keegan's recent collection, So Late in the Day, which might more accurately have been titled Creepy Men I Have Known.

I was surprised to see Austerlitz (8), a novel-essay-whatnot by W. G. Sebald, in the top ten. I own that book, but haven't read it. I have read Sebald's previous books, Vertigo (my favorite), The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants, all of which I enjoyed, though I enjoyed each one a little less than the one before.

I started to read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (12) but found myself strangely unmoved. And I seem to recall that many of my friends read Correction (5) to the end with grim fascination, then admitted that they hated it.

At a certain point, as I scrolled through the list, drawing mostly blanks, I began to wonder if I'd actually read any books published after the year 2000. Of course I have. Here are some of my favorites:

Borges and Me / Jay Parini (2020)

The Round House / Louise Erdrich (2012)

Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine / Andrzej Szczeklik (2005)

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown / Karen Olsson (2019)

Literature and the Gods / Roberto Calasso (2001)

The Fruit Thief / Peter Handke (2022)

Out Stealing Horses / Per Petterson (2003)

Dept. of Speculation / Jenny Offill (2014)

The White Road: Journey into an Obsession / Edmund de Wall (2015)

Beyond Sleep / Willem Frederik Hermans (translated from the Dutch in 2007)

Netherland / Joseph O'Neill (2008)

Philosopher of the Heart: the Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard / Clare Carlisle (2019)

The Fly Trap / Fredrik Sjōberg (2014)

The Last Days of Roger Federer / Geoff Dyer (2022)

Normal People / Sally Rooney (2018)

In Search of Zarathustra / Paul Kriwaczek (2003)

Paris to the Moon / Adam Gopnik (2000)

A Gentleman in Moscow / Amir Towles (2016)

I'm not suggesting these books are among the best of the era; I'm in no position to judge, dilatory reader that I am. All I'm saying is that they stick in memory as good enough to mention.

From the Times list I extracted the names of an essayist unfamiliar to me, Elisa Gabbert, and a "philosophical" novelist, Rachel Cusk, and put in requests at the library for The Unreality of Memory and Outline. 

I also found it interesting to investigate the individual picks of selected judges, where I sometimes came upon books I liked that didn't make the consolidated list (e.g. Netherland) and also spotted titles I want to check out that I'd never heard of (e.g. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched The World, by Deirdre McCloskey. )

One final aspect of the article is worth mentioning: the graphics. (See above.) The editors separate the finalists into groups of twenty, and often make use of well-worn and sometimes shabby paperbacks for the group shots, rather than the pristine hardcovers we see in the individual listings.

It's always a pleasure to peruse a shelf of someone else's books. Or your own.

After the Storm

I awoke in the middle of the night to thunder in the distance, impressive, like the Battle of Waterloo. But the throbbing rustle in the leaves was ominous, and it occurred to me I ought to go out on the deck and take down the umbrella. 

It was like an adventure. Half-awake, wandering barefoot to the back of the house, I flicked on the light above the deck. It was raining. The umbrella was lying awkwardly, bottom up, in the shadows on the steps down to the back yard, twenty feet from the table out of which it has been lifted by the wind. There wasn't much more I could do.

The day dawned sunny and warm, with twigs and clumps of leaves lying haphazardly here and there across the yard, but no serious damage in sight. It looked like a good morning for tennis. We had been invited to a dinner with friends and instructed to bring along some "good crusty bread," and we hatched a plan to proceed down Wirth Parkway to the courts at Beard's Plaisance just west of Lake Harriet. It would give us an opportunity to check out the storm damage, if any, along the way, and we could pick up the bread at Patisserie 46 after our match. And in so doing, we'd be paying some sort of feeble homage to Bastille Day.

A few large trees were down west of Cedar Lake, and a smattering of isolated mid-sized trees were twisted and split in odd and disturbing ways, but the roads were clear. 

The puddles on the courts were already evaporating, and we'd brought along an old broom to spread the water and accelerate the process. While I was sweeping I heard a woman sitting on the balcony of a house nearby shout to her neighbor, "Our power is out. Is yours?"

As we were finishing our set, three late-middle-aged men showed up. Hilary offered one of them our broom to dry off the other court, and he gladly accepted. "It's good that you thought to bring it," he said.

I could hear a few "Va bene"s in their conversation, and as we were leaving I asked them where they were from.

"Italy," one of the men said. 

"But where in Italy?"

"Genova," he said.

"You've got some great young players on the tour," I said. "Did you read the article in the Times about how Musetti beat Fritz with the backhand slice?

"I did," the man said. "And a one-hand backhand at that!"

Ten minutes later we were standing in line at Patisserie 46. We couldn't decide between a baguette and a levain and ended up ordering both. As Hilary was paying I walked over to a woman I thought I knew who was just retrieving her latte. 

"Are you Jan Leigh?" I said.

"Yes I am," she said, as she probed my face, trying to figure out who I was.

"I'm sure you don't recognize me," I said. "John Toren. I worked on the loading dock at Bookmen."

A light went on. "John, of course! Bookmen!" And she gave me a big huge.

"I'm sort of sweaty," I said. "from the tennis. Last I heard you were working at the Chautauqua in Bayfield."

"I'm still up there," she said. "I built a theater in Washburn. It's called Stage North."

"You built that?! I saw a great movie there once about a guy who kayaked every lake on Isle Royale."

I was about to tell her the funniest part, where the kayaker's WhisperLite stove flames up unexpectedly, but she said she had to run and made a quick exit. 

It was a promising start to the day. 

Daylilies and the Spectre of Idealism

Every plant has its problems. For example, daylily blossoms only last for a single day. We've got a couple of clumps of Mary Todds in our front yard that are well established and currently at their peak. The blooms are staggered, which is nice, but the deer love to nip off not only the blossoms but also the buds. That's a second problem.

This year I put some green plastic fencing around one clump, and Hilary suggested we put some old netting that had been idling in the garage for decades around the other. This has preserved the blossoms ... but blooming daylilies don't look all that hot when seen through such fabrics. This morning I removed the netting from the clump under the piano window. The flowers look great! Will I remember to replace the net in position tonight. Who knows?

Wandering out back, I loaded some decaying leaves from the compost pile into a galvanized bucket and spread them around on the floor of our "cherry orchard," where I recently planted a turtlehead and Hilary transplanted some groundcover. That might sound like a grandiose name— "cherry orchard"— for a strip of land where, a few years ago,  I discovered two volunteer cheery trees amid the underbrush. But what better place to be grandiose, and playful, and a little imaginative, than in one's own back yard?  

I was enjoying the morning, unalloyed by the nagging thought that I wasn't doing anything productive, because I'd already done a few things. I sent a file to a client in Massachusetts to be proofed. I'd looked up some royalty figures for Norton. I emptied the dishwasher. I uploaded some files to SpeedPro to be made into posters.

One of them was for a rock band called Seth that will be playing at the Hopkins High School 50th reunion in a few weeks. My brother-in-law, David, was in that band, back in the mid-seventies. Will we "crash" the reunion just to see David up on stage? It's hard to say.

Settling down to a recent issue of the New Yorker, I spotted an essay by Adam Gopnick about the historian Charles Taylor. I was reminded of one of Taylor's earlier books, A secular Age, that I bought decades ago. I didn't think much of it at the time—it seems to be arguing for a utopian return to medieval guilds and  faith communities. To judge from Gopnik's critique, the new volume, which carries the vaguely portentous title Cosmic Connections, is cut from the same cloth.

Yet when I fetched my copy of A Secular Age from the basement. and opened it, my eyes immediately came to rest on a passage brilliantly exposing the poverty of materialist explanations of history, while underscoring the role played not only by concepts in general, but by ideals specifically, in historical development.

"In general, a new practice will have both “material” and “ideal” conditions; which of them we try to explain may depend on which is problematic. Why did a democratic revolution occur just then, and not before? The answer may be: because people hadn’t suffered from monarchical rule as much as they came to on the eve of the turn-over; or it may be because they began to see from some striking example that democracy brings prosperity (the draw of Europe?). But it might also because at that moment they had developed the repertory which allowed for a self sustaining democracy, as against just a revolt which changed one mode of despotism for another. And it may also be because democratic forms of rule came to seem right, and in keeping with their dignity, around that time. There is no good empirically-based reason to think that the second kind of explanation must always give way to the first. The weighting between the two can’t be determined a priori, but will be different from case to case."

But there is really no need to choose between the two. Material and conceptual (or spiritual, if you will) elements are at work at every moment of our lives.

At this point Taylor feels the need to explain in some detail what the interaction between ideas and conditions looks like, by considering the question of "how the new idea of moral order came to acquire the strength which eventually allows it to shape the social imaginaries of modernity." Good question.

He begins by mentioning the "discursive practices" of thinkers reacting to the devastations of the Wars of Religion, who felt the need to identify a basis of legitimacy unsullied by religious differences. Reaching further back in time, he draws our attention to the "domestication of the feudal nobility" between the 14th and 16th cen­turies.

"I mean the transformation of the noble class from semi-independent warrior chieftains, often with extensive followings, who in theory owed allegiance to the King, but in practice were quite capable of using their coercive power for all sorts of ends unsanctioned by royal power, to a nobility of servants of the Crown/nation, who might often serve in a military capacity, but were no longer capable of acting independently in this capacity."

All of this makes perfect sense to me. In fact, it's a fine description of the dialectical process itself, though that specific word, "dialectic," doesn't appear in it. Taylor clearly wants to stick close to events, hoping to avoid even a whiff of Hegelian meta-history or teleology.

A Secular Age is 800 pages long, and I'm suddenly convinced I'll have to get back to it soon.

But maybe not right now.