Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

Advent Meditations

The Pope in Nicaea.

The new Pope. A wonderful man by all accounts, and better yet, he’s from Chicago!

A few weeks ago he paid a visit to Nicaea, in Turkey, in honor of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Bishops from many nations gathered there in 325—hundreds if not thousands of them—to deliberate a wide variety of issues. (Who paid for the lodging, the food, the enormous travel expenses? The Roman state.) 

At the top of the agenda was the question of whether Jesus existed before his birth in the manger in Bethlehem. The Arians said NO. At the council this position was ruled a heresy. It was deemed imperative to underscore the position (we can hardly call it a “fact”) that Jesus was of “one substance with the father” since the beginning of time, and perhaps well before.

To most people who were raised in Christian traditions the issue isn’t that important. For many, the most enduring result of the council was the introduction of a new prayer—the Nicaean Creed— alongside the somewhat shorter Apostle’s Creed. Most people find the Apostle’s Creed easy to remember. The Nicaean Creed? Not so much.  

At any rate, I never got the hang of it. Yet the rhetoric did sink in, to the extent that I began to wonder what a “substance” actually was, from the metaphysical point of view. I’m still wondering.

It’s a good question. But at Christmas time another question perhaps looms larger: Was Jesus ever really a baby? Would he be “of one substance” with the Father during that rudimentary phase in his earthly ontogeny?

It might seem like a frivolous question, if not a blasphemous one, but it cuts to the heart of the Christmas event. Aside from the lights, the music, the gatherings and the food, it seems to me that people are often moved by what I might call the rural simplicity and innocence of the event.

Let me suggest that Christmas is the most evocative time of the liturgical year, in part, because it's the least didactic. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh are dazzling and exotic; we don’t really care what they symbolize. The Star in the East could be any star, if it’s bright enough to attract our attention. (Stars are cool and mysterious, especially in the deep winter night.) We can forget, for the time being, the sometimes dour, gnomic, and prescriptive episodes in Jesus’s adulthood, and enjoy the aroma of balsam, the sweet buttery taste of a spritz, or the slightly edgy bite of a home-made pepper kaka, hot out of the oven. And also, perhaps, a vaguely delirious sense of cheer and hope.  

Family memories resurface. Some of them are “magical,” while others may remind us, painfully, of how naïve and self-centered we used to be—and probably still are. 

But there is no need to dwell on such things during these celebratory days of darkness and light. Better simply to relish the color, warmth, and togetherness that are pleasantly adrift on a mysterious something. Is it time? Or substance?

Holiday Sale

On a Saturday in early December bright with new snow, what better thing to do than get together with friends, acquaintances, and a few utter strangers (friends of friends) at a low-key arts and shopping event? Hilary has been putting such gatherings together with a few friends for several years, and we hosted another one a few days ago featuring Hilary’s pottery, a friend’s dazzling runners, placemats, and other weavings, and even a few of my old books—plus a few newly printed miniature paperbacks on display as “stocking stuffers.”

Everything was priced to sell, and besides, any gift takes on added luster when it’s accompanied by the remark: “A friend of mine made this.” Not to mention the fact that the artworks themselves were first-rate. But matters of commerce aside, it’s fun to participate in an event where people come and go at odd intervals, bring a few friends, run into people they haven’t seen in a while or have perhaps heard about but have never met. They might eat a cookie or drink a cup of cider, watch the nuthatches and woodpeckers at the feeder out on the deck, or strike up a conversation at random as they examine the wares.

We sent out a few email invitations and so did our weaver-friend, Dave Taylor. We also invited a few young friends who live on our street. Three generations of Dave’s family showed up, two of Hilary’s brothers, a cousin or two, and numerous friends stretching back more than half a century.   

In the course of the day I found myself discussing the bison kill site at Itasca State Park, the Danish String Quartet, the comparative civic health of Chaska and Chanhassen, grizzly bear attacks at Glacier National Park, the novels of Thomas Bernhard, cross-country skiing at Wirth Park, the films of Mel Brooks (I somehow forgot to mention Young Frankenstein!), the merits of E-bikes, and sundry other things that escape me now. One friend was recovering from cataract surgery, another from knee surgery, 

Once the guests had gone home, as we sat around trying the sort the proceeds, Dave told me that he’d spoken at length with six people who owned looms, including one friend of ours who used to design them! (I’d forgotten that.) He’d sold nearly all of his pieces and gotten two commissions. It had been a good day. "Now I can buy more yarn."

Hilary has also “done well.” But I’m pretty sure they would both agree that the most precious result was the memory of friends and acquaintances chattering musically, getting to know one another on a bright December afternoon.     

Re-Inventing the Renaissance

The title of this thick orange book—Inventing the Renaissance—intrigued me, and also the subtitle: The Myth of a Golden Age. I checked it out of the library the other day, surprised to imagine that at this late date historians still cling to idealized “periods,” and that other historians feel the need to let us all know that such categories are perhaps helpful as mnemonic devices but useless as categories of judgment or deeper understanding.

I somehow overlooked the fact that the purpose of a book title is to sell the book. Looking back at other books along similar lines that I’ve purchased in recent years—The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity (2021); Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy (2018); Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (2022)—I can see that I’ve been a sucker for such ambitious popularizations … but I don’t regret it.

And the same can be said for Inventing the Renaissance. It’s written by a scholar, but it’s not really a scholarly work, except by chance. It’s a chatty and insouciant look at the world of academic history, impressively larded with anecdotes about Renaissance figures—she knows the era well—but more seriously interested in the historiographic questions to which that vague and slippery “age” give rise.

The author, Ada Palmer, teaches at the University of Chicago. She also writes science fiction, which no doubt gives her additional insight into how a world or a social milieu takes on body through the accumulation of specific details which have been selected with a given end in mind. (Gee. Historians do that too.) She seems more interested here in stirring the hornet’s nest of controversy regarding the ways historians have assayed the Renaissance than in providing the reader with anything resembling an accurate picture of the era.

In short, this is not a book I’d recommend to someone who’s curious about Italian culture during the early modern period. You’d be better off reading Burkhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), or Bernard Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance (originally published as independent essays between 1894 and 1907). If you’re interested in the science of era, why not try George Sarton’s Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance (1957)?  

In fact, there is no easy way to come to grips with the Italian Renaissance, because it’s a welter of widely divergent personalities, jurisdictions, ideas, images, and events. Perhaps this explains, in part, why so many people are fascinated by the era. It’s rich in color and detail, but the political details need not concern us much. Whether Florence dominated Siena (50 miles away) or conquered Pisa (fifty miles away) has little bearing on the course of European history or the issues we face today.

Palmer narrows her field of view almost immediately to Florence itself, and proceeds to weigh various theories as to why such a focus might be justified. Might it be the banking industry that developed there? How about the vaguely “democratic” form of government?  Florentine art isn’t too shabby, either: Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Luca della Robbia, Fra Angelico, Filippino Lippi. And how about the Neoplatonic philosophy of Ficino, Pico, and other lesser lights? It’s an impressive roll call for such a middling conurbation, though Florence’s population in 1450 is estimated to have been around 60,000, making it one of Europe’s larger cities.

And to top it all off, we have Machiavelli! Personally, I find his remarks about selling firewood more interested that his analyses of political life. Perhaps Palmer would approve!

Rooms could be filled with the books have been written about the art and culture of Renaissance Florence, of course. Palmer mentions quite a few that piqued her interest as a youth, many of them written in the early twentieth century by women who had married into lesser Italian nobility. (None of these works, she adds, are considered historiographically reputable these days.)

In any case, Palmer, tends to keep her attention more narrowly focused on such nagging (yet pertinent) questions as: What is a “humanist”? On this question opinions differ. Many definitions are vague, though most scholars find it convenient to agree that a Renaissance humanist differs markedly from nineteenth-century "secular humanist." Renaissance humanism wasn’t a religion; it was an educational niche. And the word humanista, back in the Renaissance, referred merely to whoever taught that bundle of subjects. Whatever a Renaissance humanist may have been, scholars are pretty well agreed that Petrarch was among the first of them, and probably the greatest.

Palmer informs us that there was an uproar within academic circles when Paul Oscar Kristeller included two humanists in his book Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (1965). Why? Because humanists might be good Latinists, but that doesn’t mean they contributed anything to philosophy. The moral and aesthetic “concepts” they fiddled with usually came straight from Cicero.

But such remarks drive me immediately to hunt out Kristeller's book on the shelf--no easy task. The introductory essay on Petrarch is a good one. To begin with, Kristeller emphasizes the personal nature of Petrarch's remarks, highlighting "the eminently personal, subjective, and as it were, individualistic character of all his writings. He talks about a variety of things and ideas, but essentially he always talks about himself,  about what he has read, and felt."

Yet Petrarch is also reaching for a formal and objective understanding of things, and this quest comes to a head, in Kristeller's view, in Petrarch's appraisal to the relative importance of will and intellect:

It is safer to cultivate a good and pious will than a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will is goodness, the object of the intellect, truth. It is better to will the good than to know the true ...

The issue of Renaissance humanism--its character and value--is but one of many that Palmer addresses in her lively book. It's an example of her willingness to cheerfully expose us to the behind-the-scenes disputes that divide university departments into cabals and camps, perhaps more so that actually engaging with the issues. She’s an academic herself, but her shoot-from-the-hip style is anything but academic. She’s having fun, airing both her many enthusiasms and her dirty laundry in public, and she doesn’t seem to mind bringing us along for the ride. 

The one rambunctious judgment for which it would be difficult to forgive Palmer is her description of the Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce as a fascist. On the contrary, Croce was a beacon of liberalism throughout the Mussolini era, and everyone knows it. As the Italian historin Momigliano puts it:

"The liberty Croce spoke about was not just a philosophic notion. It was the liberty our fathers had won for themselves in the revolution and on the battlefields of the Risorgimento. Croce represented a constant reproach to Fascism, a constant reminder of what we had lost—freedom and honesty of thought, especially in matters of religion, of social questions and of foreign policy, tolerance, representative government, fair trials, respect for other nations and consequently self-respect."

Yet for the most part, subsequent generations of Italian scholars have resented the man ever since. They have not been inclined to reread him. 

Palmer does herself no credit by joining that bandwagon. 

The Fall Music Season

When the days get dark, we head inside for entertainment, though when I look back at the events we’ve attended recently, most of them took place in the afternoon!

We attended an afternoon concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra recently. We were struck, a few years ago, by the magic that Eunice Kim summoned  to a performance of Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto, and she worked her magic again on Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3. She retains the knack for bringing out the heavily romantic aspects of the music fully, yet selflessly. 

The orchestra’s woodwind “dectet” (is that a word?) had primed us by opening the “set” with a crisp, frothy appetizer by Jean Françaix, “Seven Dances after the Ballet Les malheurs de Sophie,” in the vein of Poulenc or Stravinsky in his pesky neo-classical phase.  

We left at intermission, fearing that even the most charming of Beethoven’s symphonies—his first—would have sounded lead-footed in comparison to Saint-Saëns’s richer offering. But we picked up a bit of a heavier Central European vibe while having lunch at Moscow on the Hill.

A few days later, we spent the better part of an afternoon in the Ordway’s bigger theater listening to the Minnesota Opera perform Mozart’s delightful Cosi Fan Tutti. I first heard this opera performed by the same company back in 1976 when it was in its infancy. It was a snowy night; my mom had driven into town to see the opera with us, and she spent the night on the couch in our tiny apartment.

I liked the opera then, and I liked it even more a half-century later, the second time around.

Cosi Fan Tutti once had a spotty or questionable reputation, on the order of: “not quite up to Mozart’s best, somewhat trashy, but after all, it is Mozart.” Some found the plot to be “immoral,” though it strikes me that Don Giovanni is hardly a model citizen. In any case, I loved the entire performance, and I was pleased to read later than some experts share that view.  “The most perfect ensemble opera ever written,” Matthew Boyden writes glowingly in The Rough Guide to Opera. And scholar Arthur Hutchen’s confesses, in his biography of Mozart, “For reasons I cannot explain and do not think worth discovering, despite the glories of other Mozart operas, I personally derive the greatest pleasure from Cosi fan Tutti…”

The big issue, when attending a classic opera these days, is whether the “updated” production will add something to the experience, or simply muck up the thing. In this case, the opera took place in a modern office setting, seemingly furnished by IKEA. In the first scene the two male protagonists—or perhaps I should call them “bros”—are drinking beer and playing video games. You get the idea.

The producers added a final twist to the show, giving viewers the opportunity to vote for a given outcome: do the two pairs of lovers remain together, or switch partners, or break up? The tally would determine how the cast wrapped up the “drama.”

It sounds dumb, but I was interested to read in an essay by Florence Badol-Bertrand that Mozart seemed “barely interested” in how the opera turned out. “At the end of the opera,’ she writes, “contrary to the conventions of the period, we are not exactly sure about how the couples are ‘redistributed.’”

We were sitting in the last row of the balcony, under the overhang of the second balcony, and from that distance I couldn’t tell for sure what happened at the end, either. Nor was it easy to discern, during the love scenes, the extent to which the two couples were playing a “part” in the grand ruse and the degree to which they were getting carried away by genuine emotion in an amorous situation. The ambiguity, or complexity, of the narrative made it possible to sit back, relax, enjoy the hijinks, and more especially, enjoy the music.

A few days later we met some friends down at the Dakota for tenor giant Joshua Redman’s eight o’clock show. The club’s habit of cramming the tables into long tight rows doesn’t sit well with me, but we’d reserve one that’s nestled up against the wall in front of the bar. It had the added virtue of obscuring our view of the huge TV sets on the wall behind the bandstand.

It was a pleasant scene, and the performance was decently long. But the band focused its attention on high-energy tunes from Redman’s most recent album, Words Fall Short. With all due respect, the music fell a little short, too. The tunes themselves weren’t that distinctive, and their somewhat arbitrary modal progressions seemed to thwart Redman’s attempts to stretch out lyrically. Pianist Paul Cornish went wild on several numbers, bashing away in a post-Don Pullen mode, and Redman gave it his fiery best, but the most engaging solos were provided by bassist Paul Norris. Hmmm. (The last time we heard Redman live he was exploring standards with Brad Mehldau. It was a musical feast.)

The following week we paid a visit one afternoon to an obscure (to us, not to God) church in St. Paul to hear a recently resurrected Mass by baroque composer Domenico Belli. What? You’ve never heard of him? Neither had we. But Consortium Carissimi always puts on a good show, and in this case they were featuring two quartets of vocalists, one of which included local star Clara Osowski. It was a lovely forty-minute Mass, although the experience was marred somewhat for Hilary by the fact that she was following the text in the program.

The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me.

And so on. Relentlessly. Heavy stuff. Then again, the piece was a funeral elegy. Officium DEFUNCTORUM. We’d been warned.

When it was over, the musicians headed to the basement while Garrick Comeaux, the group’s founder and artistic director, came forward to apologize for the brevity of the performance. He’d discovered the manuscript in an archive in Brescia, not far from Milan.

“I never know how long a piece is going to be until I have it worked up,” he told us. “Do you want us to do part of it again?”

A man in the front row suggested the final aria. Comeaux sent someone down to summon the musicians from the basement, and we were treated to a reprise of the concert’s last twenty minutes, during which all eight of the vocalists have a part to play.  

The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair

The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair was a different kettle of fish. Rain Taxi chose a new venue, the elegant St. Paul Union Depot, and it was definitely a warmer and classier spot than the previous location in the eco-building on the state fairgrounds. I was told that the depot also has better facilities for author events. I don’t know much about that because I hadn’t heard of any of the authors and didn’t attend any of those events.

There was general agreement among the people I talked to that the parking at the new site is terrible. It’s also difficult to get something to eat quickly. A third strike against the new venue is that the room isn’t really big enough to host the event. It was so crowded that as I moved down the aisles, I spent more time plotting out and negotiating a route through the throng than I did looking at the books.

Then again, maybe that’s just as well. I don’t really need any new books.

And as far as I know, the Rain Taxi folks might have been pleased as punch at how the day went.

The first person I chatted with on my stroll through the crowd was Marguerite Ragnow, whom I’d never met before. She’s the curator of the James Ford Bell Library, where I took one of my last classes before dropping out of grad school in 1978. I knew she’d know the former curator Carol Urness, with whom I reconnected recently and worked on a book with a few years ago. Marguerite proudly showed me a dazzling book that the Bell Library published late in 2019--right before Covid--called Tulips, Chocolate, and Silk. It features illustrations from books in the collection in spectacular color. I was impressed. 

We discussed the work of a pioneer in digitalizing maps whose name neither of us could quite remember: David something. (It came to me just now—David Rumsey.) And that was the extent of my contact with actual books during my morning peregrinations.

I spent the rest of the time dodging attendees and reconnecting with old friends. Near the far end of the central aisle I ran into Meleah Maynard, a seasoned freelance writer who introduced me a quarter century ago to Eric Loreberer, editor of Rain Taxi and impresario behind the fest, Recently retired, she told me a bit about the delights and challenges of dealing with all that free time.

While we were chatting, poet Norita Dittberner-Jax spotted us and came over to say hi. She’d recently been in Paris with her three children. “I know,” I said, “I saw the photos you posted. Hilary and I haven’t been there since 1989. I was inspired!”

I’m often in communication with Annie Klessig, who does the metadata and many other things at Bookmobile. I was impressed with her shirt, which said METADATA in fanciful white letters across the front. “I like that tee shirt,” I told her.

“It’s Metallica,” she said, grinning. I looked again.

“No. It says ‘metadata.’”

“I mean the FONT. This is the Metallica font. You know, the heavy metal band?”

“Ah, now I get it.”

I was going to tell her about the black tee shirt I have that says “bookslinger” in white letters across the front. I’m sure it’s a collector’s item, but I haven’t been able to get into it in thirty-five years, and I’m not one for black. 

Down at the Nodin Press booth, where I’d volunteered to cover for Norton during his lunch break, who should pop up but Rod Richards, recently retired from his post as a Unitarian minister. Rod and I were in the same writers’ group back in the 80s. He later took over the small-press distributor Bookslinger before moving to California with his wife, Hanje, and becoming a man of the cloth.

“Are you still writing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how I might fit into this scene again,” he said, perhaps a little wistfully.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve honed your style writing sermons,” I said.

“One a week for thirteen years.”

At one point, standing behind the Nodin Press table, I noticed two young women looking carefully at Freya Manfred’s memoir, Raising Twins. When they looked up I could see why. “We’re identical twins,” one of them giggled.

“But you’re two inches taller than your sister,” I protested.

“Yes, but my sister is two minutes older than me.”

Norton has gathered a fine collection of spirits together under the Nodin Press imprint, and I’ve had the pleasure of helping them produce their books while hovering on the fringes of the ensemble from time to time. I’m sure there were similar congeries of kindred spirits gathered here and there throughout the hall. Conventions are like that. And book people are like that, readers and writers alike, looking for recognition, perhaps, but more importantly, for a bit of camaraderie.

Samuel Johnson once wrote:

The transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendor, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

I haven’t found that to be true, perhaps because I’ve already gotten to know the authors I’m chatting with a little. I mentioned to poet Phil Bryant, a jazz fan like me, that I was heading down to the Dakota in a few days to hear Joshua Redman, and we discovered in the course of conversation that we share certain reservations about Redman’s sometime accompanist Brad Mehldau—a little too spacy, arbitrary, abstract?

A few minutes later, after she’d recovered from the shock of learning I was an Oxfordian (though an indifferent one, not a fanatic), Joyce Sutphen was reciting a lengthy passage from Twelfth Night. I could barely hear her over the din, but as I listened, I was reminded of how much of the richness of the Bard’s words is lost in performance. You really have to study it line by line to appreciate it fully.

Everyone knows this, I guess. But it’s also true that the dynamic impact of his dramas never comes through fully when you’re alone in a room struggling to act out the play inside your head, pondering the action line by line.

Mastering the ins and outs of the man’s work can be a lifelong task, and I simply don’t have the inclination. Give me Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet, Olivier’s Richard III, Stanley Tucci’s Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Verdi’s Otello, and I’ll be content.

Norton was back from lunch, and I was deep in conversation with Joyce’s partner, Walt, when I suddenly remembered that I’d parked illegally. Sure, I’d paid. But the protocol required that I enter my license number into the screen at the kiosk. At the time, I couldn’t quite remember it, but I didn’t feel like walking all the way back to my car to doublecheck. 

I arrived back at the car twenty minutes later. My guess had been wrong—not RYJ 568 but RYJ 679. But the parking lot gods had spared me. No ticket. 

These days the book gods seem to be in my corner, too.

Tariffs on Italian Pasta? Che Palle?

It was with great consternation that the editors of Macaroni read the headline:

        Tariffs on Pasta from Italy Set to Soar

While that primitive and classic starch, macaroni, has seldom been referred to directly in the pages of this blog in recent years, the “concept” of macaroni, elegant yet cheap, foreign yet common enough, capable of assuming a thousand unexpected shapes, foundation for a countless array of exotic sauces, is present in every issue, every blog.

Under the new Trump plan, Italian pasta-makers will face an astounding 107 percent tariff.

For American consumers, this won’t matter much. Only twelve percent of the pasta sold in the US comes from Italy. North Dakota might well be considered the heartland of durham and hard red spring wheat, the crop from which the best pasta is typically made. It’s true, the Creamettes building in the Minneapolis warehouse district is now filled with condos and apartments. But look at the shelves at Lund’s or Byerly’s and you’ll be reassured that the price of most pasta isn’t going the change much. Barilla sounds Italian, for example, but it’s made in the U.S.  

Considering the modest chunk of U.S. market share it commands, it’s hard to accuse Italy of “dumping” its pasta here. And it's also hard to imagine why Trump would play such a dirty trick on his favorite fascist colleague, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whom he recently introduced at an event as “a beautiful young woman …”. But anyone who’s trying to “understand” Trump's motives as rooted in anything other than the perverse joy of flinging large objects around the room is on a fool’s errand.

Shipments of pasta impounded in Naples

The Washington Post has reported that “the new duties would hit roughly half of Italy's $780 million pasta exports to the United States, including 90% of its more expensive premium pastas.”  So it appears that the U.S. Commerce Department is finally “putting the screws” on the American upper class for a change.

World Pasta Day, October 25, has come and gone. Unaware that a pasta war was brewing, Hilary and I fortuitously took advantage of a two-for-one sale at Byerly’s recently and stocked up. And we already had a few packages in the pantry.

Here’s a quick and easy recipe.

Pasta in Anchovy Sauce

½ lb spaghetti

salt

1 can anchovy fillets, minced

2 cloves garlic, chopped

¼ cup olive oil

3 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons dry bread crumbs

Drop the spaghetti into 4 or 5 quarts boiling water.

Place the anchovies, garlic, oil, and butter in a skillet over low heat, stirring and mashing, until the ingredients form a fairly smooth sauce. Add the bread crumbs and cook 2 or 3 minutes longer, allowing the bread crumbs to brown.

Drain the spaghetti when done. Add it to the pan with the anchovy sauce and toss over low heat until the spaghetti is well coated. Serve immediately.

Meditation on Peaks

I suppose those maps you see in the newspapers and online showing areas of “peak leaf color” serve a purpose. But anyone who spends a lot of time outdoors is likely to notice that the show begins in early September and goes on for several months. By early November the basswood tree in our front yard is bare while the silver maple out back is still green, though it’s looking a little pale. The branches of the sugar maple nearby spread their brilliant—I would almost say buttery—yellow leaves above the garden. Meanwhile, the Norway maple that I can see from where I sit here at the computer is kaput.

The concept of “peak” color begins to sound misleading and even misguided.

I’ve raked the front yard three or four times by now. It’s an excuse to get out into the cool and marvelous afternoons, and say hi to a few passing dogwalkers perhaps. Besides, our weekly yard waste pickups run 'til Thanksgiving. That bin can’t handle everything, but it helps.

I am amused repeatedly by the fact that if I rake half of the yard one day, the next day the leaves will once again be distributed evenly over the entire expanse. How can that be? As I rake, I ponder whether the effort of raking lightly three or four times is equivalent to the effort that would be required to rake the entire yard only once after all the trees are bare. I’m not terribly interested in the answer to this question, however. The best time to rake is when you feel like raking.

I have also been in the habit of grinding up the leaves with a lawn mower. They say it’s good for the grass.

* * *

Whatever else it may be, autumn is peak walking season. Fresh cool air, low sun, few birds. And yes, the color. Grabbing the fading light while we can, then home to a fire in the fireplace, perhaps. It’s the same cozy, and perhaps slightly melancholy, feeling, year after year.

The biologist Rene Dubos explains:

On the one hand, the external manifestations of human existence change continuously and at an increasing rate under the influence of social and technological innovations. On the other hand, man’s anatomical structures, physiological pro­cesses, and psychological urges remain in phase with the cosmic conditions that prevailed when Homo sapiens acquired his biological identity.

Though we may live in cities, in other words, we re­spond to changes in our environment the same way the Neanderthals did. Nor, in Dubos’s view, are our seasonal moods driven entirely by changes in light.

The behavioral patterns associated with the sea­sons cannot entirely be accounted for by changes in temperature or in the luminosity of sky. They have their seat in the genetic constitution and originate from a time in the evolutionary past when man lived in such direct contact with na­ture that he could survive only if his bodily functions and his mental responses were pre­cisely geared to the sea­sonal rhythms of nature and the availability of re­sources.

I don’t see how genetics can entirely account for the immediate emotional impact of mer­curial fluctuations in air pressure, cloud cover, tem­perature, or light, however. When I step out onto the deck on a cool autumn morning, sights, sounds, and smells that weren’t there even a few days ago incite me to rhapsodize. Low light, frost on the deck, dew in the long pale grass, and the chrysanthemums, which the Chinese associate with the beauty and melancholy of the season:

           I remember, when I was young,

How easily my mood changed from sad to gay.

If I saw wine, no matter the season,

Before I drank it, my heart was already glad.

               But now that age comes,

A moment of joy is harder and harder to get.

And always I fear that when I am quite old

The strongest liquor will leave me comfortless.

Therefore I ask you, late chrysanthemum-flower,

At this sad season why do you bloom alone?

Though well I know that it was not for my sake,

Taught by you, for a while I will open my face.

                               —Po Chü-i, (812)

The penultimate line of this little gem, in which the poet acknowledges the radical separation between his fate and the ebb and flow of his circumstances, seals its modest beauty.

      

Blue Moon – the Film

The last days of lyricist Lorenz Hart weren’t pretty ones. He’d penned the lyrics for numerous Broadway hits including “Blue Moon,” Ship Without a Sail," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Falling in Love with Love," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "He Was Too Good to Me," "I Could Write a Book," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "Isn't It Romantic?" "It Never Entered My Mind," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Thou Swell" and "With a Song in My Heart." He was overflowing with ingenious phrases, tending toward the humorous, the satirical, and the self-depreciatory, making him the perfect collaborator for the often shmaltzy tunesmith Richard Rodgers, six years his junior. 

But Larry was unreliable, difficult to work with. He drank, he slept in, he missed appointments. When Rodgers proposed a new musical called “Oklahoma!,” Hart rejected it, considering it utter cornball. So Rodgers moved ahead with a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who hadn't written a hit since Showboat, a decade earlier.

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater focuses on one particular evening: the opening night of Oklahoma! Hart attends the show with his mother, then hurries down to the bar nearby where the reception is set to take place. In the course of the evening he chats with the worldly-wise bartender, the young soldier at the piano, and E. B. White (who happens to be sitting at a table nearby.) He tells the bartender about his “girlfriend,” a attractive coed twenty years his junior, and the language gets crude. She’ll be arriving soon. Hart has promised to introduce her to Rodgers.

Guests start to trickle in from the theater, including Hammerstein and Rodgers himself. By this time Hart has had a few drinks, and he’s getting slightly manic. He congratulates Hammerstein, then Rodgers, things remain cordial, and Rodgers even goes so far as to suggest a new collaboration with Hart, an update of the duo’s first show, now fifteen years in the past.

OK, Hart replies, but why not do a new show? A satire about Marco Polo. Four hours long. “We’ll skewer everything and everybody …. “

It’s painful to watch the evening unfold. Ethan Hawke inhabits the role of Hart with all the exuberance and pathos he can muster, but it’s never fun to watch an alcoholic head down that slippery slope to inebriation. Andrew Scott, in the role of Rodgers, nails the complex blend of gratitude, affection, courtesy, and distaste that the songwriter feels for his one-time mentor, collaborator, and friend. And Margaret Qualley is perfect as the worldly-wise yet strangely innocent ingénue who’s truly fond of her much older and much more famous friend, though she doesn’t care for him “in that way.”

It isn’t difficult to guess who’s going to get the girl.

But that's not the point of the film. Linklater wanted to bring to life a fascinating and dreadful moment in the history of American popular culture, and in that he's succeeded. 

It almost makes you want to stream Oklahoma! again. 

___________________

For deeper insights into the art and milieu of the Great American Songbook, I would highly recommend Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. For an almost academic look at the lyricists of the era, including forty-odd pages on Hart himself, it might be worthwhile checking out The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia.   

 

Limits of the Known: David Roberts

The cover of the book shows us a megalith sticking up into the sky with snow-covered peaks dimly visible far below. It looks almost fake; something out of Photoshop by way of Lord of the Rings.  It happens to be the Great Trango Tower, a peak in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. (I looked it up.) At first glance we might fail to notice the two tiny men standing on the narrow patch of flat rock on top. When we do, our attention is likely to be drawn immediately to the almost sheer walls dropping away on every side. How did those guys get up there? How are they going to get down? Call it a moment of minor frisson.

The book’s publicists have made an effort to characterize it as a tour de force of derring-do on the order of John Krakauer’s best-selling Into Thin Air. But in Limits of the Known journalist and self-styled “adventurer” David Roberts blends three or four elements into a robust if uneven whole.

In the early going Roberts shares stories of his youthful climbs in Alaska, which have become legendary, emphasizing how remote and daring they actually were. He more than occasionally compares these “light and fast” expeditions, during which he and a small group of friends were often out of communication with the outside world for weeks at a time, to more recent expeditions that are logistically complex and almost invariably rely on contact with support teams­­—and sometimes the world at large—on a daily basis.

“It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor,” he writes, “a stage on which latter-day imposters try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery.”

Roberts gnashes his teeth a little at the fact that later in his career he more than occasionally earned his living as a journalist providing copy for these transmissions.

Subsequent sections are devoted to the history and current state of different realms of exploration: mountain-climbing, river-running, caving, Arctic exploration. Roberts draws here on his years writing for Outside and other magazines, but he also spends considerable time detailing the early history of these “sports”: Shipton in the Karakorum, Mick and Dan Leahy in New Guinea, Nansen in the Arctic. For a reader like me, who reads a mountaineering yarn only occasionally, these straight-ahead historical overviews are among the best parts of the book.

In the midst of these overviews, Roberts punctuates his memoir with a blow-by-blow of his battle with throat cancer, describing each phase and issue in excruciating medical detail, almost as if the illness were an indominable mountain peak to be faced and somehow overcome. It’s not a pleasant picture.

Only in the last few pages of the book does Roberts say much about his domestic situation. It seems he and his wife led independent lives. At one point he writes:

“I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my effort to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.”

Though many parts of the book are engaging, it strikes me that in his attempt to get at the “core” Roberts has failed. In the book’s final pages he uses phrases like “vocation” and “ultimate things” in passing, but he shies away from probing what those concepts might mean. (Well, it isn't a theology text!) (Well, why not?) Nor does he give sufficient emphasis, in summing up his life and career, to the value of the pleasure he’s brought to the thousands of readers who, sharing his love of adventure, have relished his many popular articles and books.

What, in the end, is the value of adventuring? It can hardly be merely to bring back a report of a place no Westerner has visited before. It needs to be a good story, involving risk, and effort, and fear, and fortitude as well. This tussle of emotions is a critical element no less that a heart-expanding view from a lofty peak.

Though I haven’t read it, I suspect that Roberts’ first book, the now classic The Mountain of My Fear (1968), covers this ground admirably.

Does such adventuring bring us closer to the divine? Maybe so. But it’s usually a fleeting sensation, devilishly difficult to capture in words.

Those who can do so have reaffirmed the value of art.

No Kings

Yes, we went down to the “No Kings” event downtown yesterday, and it was awesome. Colorful, peaceful, joyous. The speakers were slightly rousing—with the exception of firebrand Keith Ellison, who was in a position to say “We’re suing the government and will meet them in court on November 5 —and the music was ho-hum. But the vibe was tremendous.

The space never got claustrophobic, yet there were so many people there that a half-hour after the actual march started, no one in our line of sight had moved, simply because they had started the marchers from the other end of the park.

I will be the first to admit that I was lukewarm about attending the event, out of laziness and the thought that “one person more or less won’t make a difference.” I know, I know. If everyone said that there wouldn’t have been a march.

Our plan was to park on the north side of the Mississippi in old St. Anthony and walk across the stone arch bridge to the gathering site. Hilary and I often park there during the film festival, but we drove down in the morning to double-check the parking signs on University Avenue and the side-streets nearby.

Back home, I went so far as to pay in advance for parking at the St. Anthony Ramp, just in case all the on-street parking was taken.

A friend of ours stopped at our house and rode down with us, and we met other friends at a coffeeshop two blocks from the park. By the time we reached the park, it was jammed with people as far as the eye could see. The weather was stunning. The signs were clever and also heartfelt. It was encouraging to see so many young people amid the crowd.

Marxists and terrorists?

Did our presence there make a difference? Did the march itself make a difference? Who’s to say? In his Substack column this morning economist Paul Krugman, my guru on all things political, had this to say:

“There is a solid body of research by political scientists like Erica Chenoweth about the effects of civil resistance -- nonviolent shows of opposition to those controlling or attempting to control the government. The clear answer from this research is that demonstrations like No Kings Day can make a big difference. They are a show of the depth and popularity of a movement, reassuring those who are opposed to a nation’s direction that many, many others share that opposition.

“Moreover, if a broad cross-section of society is represented in the demonstrations — and the crowds I saw consisted of a mix of seniors, middle-aged liberals, families with children, students and other unthreatening types — they can induce defections from the ruling regime, because the protestors can’t easily be ‘othered,’ portrayed as strange and alien. So protests with a wide base of support can ultimately pierce the regime’s bubble. In fact, in the aftermath of the massive scale and breadth of the demonstrations, the MAGA propaganda machine has gone remarkably quiet, although Mike Johnson has claimed that the demonstrators were all Marxists.”

You can read the entire column here.

 

The Nobel in Economics – Creative Destruction?

Reading over descriptions of the discoveries on which the newest Nobel awards were based, I was struck by two things. 1) The “discoveries” were pretty obvious. 2) The frequent use of the term “creative destruction” in describing those discoveries was a mistake.

As to the first point, let me hasten to add that economists often win awards for nailing down with mathematical precision the necessity and significance of things that are obvious. There’s nothing wrong with that. The publication being cited as critical to the current argument appeared in 1992. It's been around for a while, and has proven its worth..

But my dad, who spent almost his entire career as an analytical chemist at 3M, told me decades ago that 3M envisioned a three-year window of profitability for the new products it developed. From that point on, the Japanese or the Chinese would have figured out how to make the same thing cheaper. Hence the need for ceaseless innovation. In the business world, it falls under the category of "common knowledge."

On the other hand, the application of the term “creative destruction” to this process is simply a mistake. New products don’t “destroy” older products. They merely render them less popular, and sometimes obsolete. In many cases the older products retain a niche market among those who are nostalgic, or more interested in quality than in saving money.

The phrase “creative destruction” has a long history. Schumpeter popularized it in the field of economics almost a century ago. But the first time I can recall hearing it was in an episode of Northern Exposure (1992) during which Chris in the Morning hatches a plan to fling a cow. He later wimps out on the project and Maurice (the astronaut) gives him a dressing down for doing so. In the course of the discussion, Chris is reminded of Picasso’s oft-quoted remark: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

And that’s about the level of culture at which the phrase should remain, I think. It sounds bold, and the idea of destroying things appeals to many, especially those who aren’t very creative.

But what’s really going on when things develop isn't destruction but transformation.

It’s too bad Marx so badly misunderstood, sullied, and besmirched the concept of dialectic, because that’s the concept at work here. Maybe it's time we revived the associated concept, so dear to Hegel, of “aufheben.” Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Aufheben  or Aufhebung  is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate." The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend". In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel in his exposition of dialectics, and in this sense is translated mainly as "sublate."

One analysis of the recent Nobel’s laureate’s work that I read goes like this:

 Economic growth in industrialised nations such as Britain and Sweden has been remarkably stable in recent centuries. However, below the surface, the reality is anything but stable. In the US, for example, over ten per cent of all companies go out of business every year, and just as many are started. Among the remaining businesses, a large number of jobs are created or disappear every year; even if these figures are not as high in other countries, the pattern is the same.

Aghion and Howitt realised that this transformative process of creative destruction, in which companies and jobs continually disappear and are replaced, is at the heart of the process that leads to sustained growth. A company that has an idea for a better product or a more efficient means of production can outcompete others to become the market leader. However, as soon as this happens, it creates an incentive for other companies to further improve the product or production method and so climb to the top of the ladder.

The process itself is easy enough to understand. The fallacy here is in imagining that things are being destroyed to make room for new things. Yes, people lose their jobs, companies go out of business. But the important thing—the expertise those workers possess—remains alive and active in the workers themselves, who make use of it when they get rehired at the start-ups that have been driving the less innovative firms out of business.

As Hegel envisioned it, this is a process of negating and rising above, while retaining and expanding on whatever remains useful of the older process or vision. Plenty of other phrases could be used, and would be more appropriate, than "creative destruction," to describe this process, though they would have quite the same journalistic zing. 

I suspect our newest Nobel laureates would agree.