After the World Cup

In the 1950s there was a joke going around—not very funny—about the newfangled popularity of Chinese food of the canned Chung King variety: It tasted good, but an hour later you were hungry.

Something along those same lines might be said about the World Cup: it’s great fun at the time, but a week later you can hardly remember which teams you rooted for, who won, or whether you cared one way or the other.

I’m well aware that real soccer fans feel differently—those who follow the European leagues and also the billions of fans whose teams were contenders in the knockout rounds. For me, that lengthy tournament provided many hours of entertainment, more than a few moments of aggravation bordering on outrage elicited by the numerous blatant and brutal fouls, and an occasional touch of awe.

More stimulating than a golf tournament, more fluid than a football game, and perhaps more dependent on chance than any other sport, the movement of men and ball back and forth across that enormous green pitch was often both mesmerizing and incomprehensible.

That being said, the final reminded me a lot of the 2010 final, in which Spain beat the Netherlands. I was a little surprised that the phrase “tiki-taka” didn’t surface in the post-game analysis, though maybe I missed it. Spain controlled the ball to an inordinate degree while doing a remarkably good job of keeping it away from Messi. What they didn’t do much of was score.

The consolation round gave us more than enough of that. Mbappe, throttled and flummoxed by Spain in the semifinals, resuscitated some of his best moves against the English, but it wasn’t enough, and Bellingham’s insurance goal in the final minutes was a thing of beauty.

Not so beautiful was the sight of Madonna emerging from the bowels of MetLife Stadium in a jeep driven by Ronaldo and Ronaldiño, two Brazilian stars from an earlier era that I can only dimly recall. I didn’t recognize them, or her.

“Is that Shakira?” I said.

Connoisseurs tell us that in the end, the best team won. Spain’s captain, Rodri, won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. Commentators note that he “recorded the most touches, most attempted passes, most completed passes, most tackles and most completed passes in the final third.” His pass success rate was  93 per cent, a new record.

But mark my words: twenty years from now, Messi and Mbappe will be driving the jeep. And who knows, maybe Shakira will be in the back?

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. 

Twilight of the Idols

For the past two decades men's professional tennis has been dominated by the Big Three—though I should say the sport "had been" dominated. The rivalry between Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, three athletes similar in talent but wildly different in style and temperament, had been an unavoidable centerpoint of tennis conversation. Who would end up with the most grans slam championships, which of the three was the greatest of all time, when would a new generation assert itself? Contenders would occasionally surface to nab an individual Grand Slam title—Murray, Cilic, Thiem, Wawrinka. Then Roger or Joker or Rafa would return to form and reassert control.

The quarter-finals of this year's French Open will be the first in twenty years not to include at least one of the Big Three. For most of those years, Rafa Nadal not only appeared in the quarters, but won the tournament.  

This year Rafa bowed out in straight sets in the first round to Sasha Zverev. That would have been a shocking result a few years ago, but no surprise this year, considering the injuries Nadal has sustained recently. It was more of a shock when Djokovic withdrew from the tournament a few days later with a torn medial meniscus in his right knee.

The remaining field is uniformly top-notch. Medyedev has been ranked number one and holds several grand slam titles, while Zverev has been hovering on the brink of a breakthrough for years. The Scandinavians Rune and Ruud put on a good show, and two young upstarts, the Italian Sinner (upon Djokovic's exit now ranked number 1) and the Spaniard Alcaraz, have both exhibited tremendous resilience and shot-making élan.

It's likely that Djokovic will be back later this year, but Federer is fully retired and Nadal probably ought to throw in the towel soon. We're now at a position of looking back at the two decades of the Big Three with a degree a nostalgia as an unparalleled Golden Age of stellar tennis, as we launch tiresome arguments about which of the three was the greatest and whether the new generation will ever be able to measure up. 

Tennis is about beautiful shot-making, and also about grit and personality. There have always been "bad boys" and machine-like perfectionists, hot heads and cool operators. For myself, I was a fan of neither MacEnroe nor Bjorg, preferring Edberg or Agassis, though my old tennis buddy Steve Herrig would be shocked to hear me say so. I don't care much for Tsitsipas--maybe it's the hair--and Zverev always seems to have a petulant scowl on his face. Djokovic is disliked by many. Sinner hits remarkable shots without indulging in the histrionic ape-like shouts that have become so popular. I also find Medyedev's droll and quirky personality appealing. 

But we all have our favorites, I guess.    

World Cup in the Neighborhood

On a stunning Saturday morning we left the house after breakfast and made our way down Theo Wirth Parkway to the World Cup cross-country ski races being held on the golf course at the bottom of the hill. They've been making snow and grooming trails for months, of course, but the arrival of six inches of new snow was welcome, to say the least. A large TV screen had been set up in front of the chalet and we could hear the distinctive tone of Senator Klobuchar's voice as we approached. By the time we got there her face had been replaced on the screen with that of Governor Walz, who was welcoming fans to the first World Cup races to be held on American soil in more than twenty years. 

We joined the stream of attendees who were continuing west to the trailhead. It was a colorful scene.

The sprints were set to begin in a few minutes, and we clamored up a hill past some handsome oaks to a vantage point above the finish line and the grandstand full of VIPs and full-blooded skiing fans on the other side. 

Hilary and I have skied these same trails many times, like lots of other people, but it was fun to wander the hills watching these remarkable athletes move so swiftly across them, even from a distance. But the greater pleasure was to find ourselves in the midst of this joyous and colorful scene, with flags from all parts of the world dangling in the breeze nearby.

All of the skiers looked the same, for the most part, though quite a few of the women had pony-tails. It was easy to tell when Jessie Diggins went by, because the crown noise suddenly increased. Diggins was later quoted as saying: "That was surreal. It was already the best atmosphere we've had all season, and that was an hour before the qualifier."

After a while we crossed an open vale to another vantage point closer to the track where we could see the skiers better. As they passed I found it hard to tell if they were competing or merely getting familiar with the track. 

Twenty minutes later we moved on to another hilltop from which point we could watch the skiers descend the final hill before the finish line.

Then we walked home. 

I didn't hear a single remark from fans in the crowd in Norwegian, Swedish, or German, but a few interesting remarks later appeared online.

"A little snow came the day that we arrived," Andrew Musgrave of Great Britain said. "It's beautiful now; so different from anywhere else we race. 'Minnesota Nice' has definitely proven true so far."

"I had big emotions before the start," said Italian skier Federico Pellegrino. "I almost cried with all these people knowing my name."

Diggins finished fourth in the sprint final behind Scandinavian sprint specialists Jonna Sundving, Linn Svann, and Kristine Skistad. 

Today they held the long-distance races. We  watched them on TV. Alaskan Gus Schumacher pulled off a surprising win in the men's division, four seconds ahead of the Norwegian favorite, Harold Ostberg Amundsen. 

Incredible.

Algorithm Blues

Emerging from a week-long fog and many hours of sleep due to cold weather, a virus, or something I ate, I find a few ideas converging—ideas that I might have ignored altogether under other conditions.

1) I was scrolling through an interview in the NY Times by Ezra Klein in which his interlocutor, an author named Kyle Chayka, was attempting to press home the point that algorithms are homogenizing the world. Chayka was complaining that wherever he goes on assignment, be it Japan or Austria or Rio, the coffee-shops he visits look the same. It finally dawned on him that " digital platforms, whether Instagram or Yelp or Google Maps, were feeding this series of cafes to me as a recommendation" because of his past preferences. He finds the same issue with film reviews, which used to be personal and idiosyncratic, whereas now, he's much more likely to rely on the aggregate score posted on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

Now, anyone who's taken a look at these sites knows that they give you a score at the top and excepts from a long series of reviews underneath. If you care to read any review in detail, a link is provided. By the same token, if you look for a coffee-shop in Paris or Keokuk on Google Maps, and zoom in a bit, it will show you all of them in the neighborhood you've specified. A few  minutes of investigative work will serve to isolate the one that looks best to you. It will probably be one similar to the ones you've liked in the past, but you're free to take your pick.

2) During my week in a stupor, I roamed the house wrapped in blankets, watching highlights of the Australian Open on the computer, playing backgammon, heating up cans of chicken noodle soup, and staring at bookshelves. A volume caught my eye—oh happy day—that I thought I'd lost or gotten rid of: Stuart Hampshire's monograph on Spinoza. I'd never read it, but wanted to see what Hampshire had to say, if anything, about Spinoza's use of the term "conatus." Hampshire identifies it as the tendency toward self-preservation, and places it at the center of Spinoza's elaborate scheme.

As I browsed the relevant sections, I came upon this remark. "An unenlightened man's own account of his motives and behavior will be what we now call rationalizations; he will give plausible reasons for feeling and behaving in certain ways, but these reasons, expressed in terms of deliberate choices and decisions, will not give the true causes of his reactions....He will speak as if his desires and aversion were determined by the properties of external objects."

A case in point, Kyle Chayka's argument: the algorithm made me do it.

Meanwhile, during my brief but friendly perusal of Hampshire's book, it occurred to me where the central error of Spinoza's system lies. It isn't enough to say that the conatus—the desire to maintain equilibrium and preserve life—lies at the center of things. The sociologist George Simmel brings us closer to the truth when he remarks: "Life is that which seeks to go beyond life." That is to say, family life, social life, community life. And also the expansion of personal spirit. Why did Spinoza go to all the trouble of spelling out the details of his system, for example, except to share the good news?

3) At our best, we have all sorts of emotions stirring within us that can't be accounted for by reference to Spinoza's "inadequate ideas." At other times, our hearts are mute. One of the benefits of being "under the weather" is that the mental lethargy makes it easier to stick to a long book, where we become engaged in the emotions of others. As a result of such an effect, I now find myself three-quarters of the way through Stendhal's long and episodic novel The Charterhouse of Parma.        

There are plenty of emotions in this rambling and energetic work, which Stendhal is reputed to have written in a few months, though the central character, a young nobleman named Fabrizio del Dongo, might fairly be described as a moral idiot. The younger son of a conservative Count, Fabrizio is inspired by Napoleon's campaigns and races off, at the age of seventeen, to fight for the cause of liberty. He arrives at Waterloo just in time to participate in the famous battle, but knows nothing of guns or warfare and is attached to no military unit. He's befriended by some camp-followers hauling a food truck, briefly becomes an aide to General Ney, and meets up with numerous other adventures before making his way back to the castle in Italy where his family lives. He's in trouble now, having fought in Napoleon's army, and the Austrians are convinced he's a spy. His enchanting aunt takes Fabrizio under her wing, and for the rest of the novel their lives are intertwined in one way or another.

Fabrizio isn't quite sure whether he actually fought in a battle, and he spends most of the book convinced that he has never experienced "love," though he kills a man in a street fight over an actress—another black mark against him in the eyes of the authorities. In many ways the book resembles The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, though the breezes of liberal political sentiment freshen the air and complicate the plot. Yes, Fabrizio (like Spinoza?) tends to over-analyze his emotions. Many of his actions seem to be inspired by the thought that "This is the kind of thing someone like me ought to do." He can stir himself to anger and burst into tears a few minutes later. It's all rather operatic ... in the best possible way. I guess that's what makes him a "modern" hero rather than a mere swashbuckler. 

But it's not the kind of novel you have to think about much. You just keep turning the pages.

Last Days of Roger Federer - Geoff Dyer

There isn't much about tennis in Geoff Dyer's latest book, and most of the tennis talk it does contain focuses not on Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, or Novak Djokovic, but on the aches and pains that Dyer himself has been experiencing on the court more severely than ever as he presses on past his sixtieth birthday. 

But Dyer still loves to play, and his boyish enthusiasm extends far beyond the tennis court. In this longish ramble through the back pages of cultural history Dyer examines the later careers of individuals as diverse as Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Turner—the painter, not the soul singer—but he has no difficulty throwing in de Chirico,  Bob Dylan, D. H. Lawrence, Phillip Larkin, John Coltrane, John Berger,  Jean Rhys, Eve Babitz, and many other artists and thinkers alongside them, while also keeping his own experiences firmly in view. The musings trip along, returning to their ostensible "theme"—how advancing age has affected the creations of this or that individual, and of Dyer himself—almost surreptitiously, and sometimes not at all.

Dyer isn't advancing a pet theory of aging, however—how dull that would be!—or offering words of warning or encouragement or advice.  He's observing, reporting, speculating, in a narrative style that, because it shifts its focus so often and so abruptly,  never becomes ponderous. On one page we're wandering the streets of Turin with Dyer in search of Nietzsche's ghost, and a few pages later we're in the Nevada desert at Burning Man, where Dyer had sworn he would never return ... until he went again, seduced by the invitation to appear in a documentary about the annual event.

This has always been Dyer's style. Here the passages are numbered and divided into four or five unnamed sections. The connecting links are often intuitive or non-existent, but when an author knows his or her material well, such a method can hardly be bettered, as subterranean connections rise to the surface and assert themselves. Similar examples of the same approach that come to mind are Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart, Karen Olsson's The Weil Conjectures, and Adam Zagejewski's Slight Exaggeration. 

But there's a difference. Those other works are all about something rather specific. Dyer's grand exercise in thinking out loud is about all sorts of things, from train travel to painting to literature to tennis—and on to the hip-hop being played on the boom-box at the basketball court next to tennis court number 6 (which you don't really want to play on) and even how the smell of marijuana, wafting his way from that basketball court, has changed over the years.

Though Dyer doesn't claim to be an expert on any of material he examines, he's certainly done plenty of research, and he flits back and forth between areas of focus expertly, like a hummingbird among the foxgloves. If there is one bloom he returns to a little too often, perhaps it would be Nietzsche's theory of the Eternal Return. This is the notion that we are all doomed to live our lives over and over in exactly the same way an endless number of times. There is no evidence that this is the case, however, and if there were, that evidence would vitiate the theory, because it would suggest that we have memories of our previous lives, making the current one different from the ones we've lived before. In short, the theory is illogical and conceptually ridiculous, though it does serve to convey the sense that even the most spirited among us must have occasionally of the grinding sameness of things.

Would Dyer take an interest in my little critique. I doubt it. At one point he writes:

In 1910, at the age of twenty-one, de Chirico wrote to a friend, I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche—all of my work demonstrates this.’ The claim to exclusive comprehension is some­thing all readers of Nietzsche will recognize, one of the things we all have in common. If you don’t feel this way you haven’t experienced Nietzsche at all; you’ve only studied him.

Dyer also seems to be somewhat out of his league when analyzing the appeal of Beethoven's late string quartets. He admits that writing about music can be hard when you don't know the technical terminology, and on the whole his judgments here seem a bit second-hand. But he makes good use of the biographical material, and we can give him credit for scouring Adorno's unfinished book on the subject for insights. Dyer reveals himself here (and elsewhere) as a working class Joe who yearns to absorb whatever's sublime and expressive in both life and art, with the drive and the smarts to do so and the candor to make his quest sound funny, and ring true. It's a rare gift.

Near the end of the book, Dyer confesses that his original plan had been to do a collective study of three roughly contemporary nineteenth century artists working in different fields each of whom developed a widely recognized "late" style, perhaps in the manner of Jacques Barzun's Darwin, Marx, Wagner. He soon settled on Beethoven and Turner, but had trouble finding a writer of roughly the same period who fit the bill.

This has allowed him to make use of his original research while also sifting through and processing  a much wider field of creative endeavors--including tennis!--in constructing the book he actually wrote.

Dyer spends quite a bit of time, for example, describing the plot-lines of specific films, from Robert Redford's All is Lost to those old-fashioned British classics Brief Encounter and Colonel Blimp, (which made him cry).  He discusses the significance of the American artist Albert Bierstadt's painting "The Last Buffalo" and describes the profound impact of a Clash concert he heard in 1988, adding that he can hardly bear to hang on to the end of one of their songs today.

In one section he reflects on all the canonical novels he read as a young man without really comprehending, and those he simply could not finish, "great" though they were purported to be.

"Just because something's a classic doesn't mean it's any good ...  My Penguin Modern Classics edition of a certain book quotes Walter Allen's opinion that 'a good case could be made out for considering it the greatest novel in English of the twentieth century.' Since that's an experience no one in their right mind would want to miss out on I will milk the suspense no longer: it's Nostromo, a book I waded through forty years ago, when I had the stamina of a youthful ox and the dumb faith of a bespectacled lamb, a book that has stayed with me because nothing I have read since has been quite as boring as Nos-frigging-tromo. That's not true, obviously, but the horror, the horror of trudging through Nostromo is something not easily forgotten. 

(I presume the reference here to Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the horror, the horror— is not merely coincidental.)

 At another point Dyer describes in some detail his waning enthusiasm for smoking marijuana, a passage that concludes:

Anyway, that's all in the past now. I just don't like marijuana anymore and at some level I can scarcely even remember what it was like when being stoned lit up the world, releasing the latent glow of things. It's difficult not to feel, like Wordsworth, that 'there has passed away a glory from the earth.' which is not at all the way to feel in California, the land of glory, one of the last places on earth where the glory fades each day, where everything glows, where the blue sky that shows nothing—though whether sky this blue can be counted as nothing remains a moot point—is nowhere and is endless. 

In the end, Dyer's interest in tennis takes him far beyond Roger Federer's career to those of earlier stars who eventually flamed out, as all athletes must:

Sampras seems to be a champion who was utterly unfazed by life after tennis. Borg, in his untutored way, was heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court jumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Strindberg, held in check during the course of his career by a sweaty headband (or, conceivably, caused by the headband?)

In a book full of judgments delivered almost in passing, no reader is going to agree with them all. Dyer likes Keith Jarrett's noodling solo piano recordings for ECM more than I do; he's less enamored of James Salter's exquisite sentences that I am, and even goes so far as to suggest that Salter's first book is his best—a judgment with which few readers will agree.

Dyer's passing enthusiasms are many:

"If you don't find [Joy Williams] funny then there's no point even having a sense of humor."

And he cannot resist the occasional zinger:

"I read somewhere that W.H. Auden believed he was always the youngest person in the room—quite an achievement given the state of that thousand-year-old face ..." 

And how about this one?

"No one wants to be lectured at once a lecture is over. In Milosz's case he sort of converses with the reader from on high, as if that's where he habitually dwelt. It's not even self-regarding; it's more a well marinated assumption of the high regard in which he is held. Fair enough, you might say, the guy won the Nobel Prize. How could I forget, given that he mentions it so often?"

 In short, Dyer's ruminations are all over the map, and the book might fairly be described as a romp. This may be because Dyer has become adept at following his own advice: "After a stage in a man's life—especially if a degree of eminence has been achieved—it is essential that he retain some residue of how he saw the world as a fourteen-year-old."

Kirk Cousins and Me

 We use the phrase "the holidays" for that stretch of celebratory events with friends and family that often runs from Saint Lucy's Day (December 13) past the winter solstice, Christmas, New Years, and even, for some, as far as the Orthodox Christmas on January 7, with concerts, dinners, religious observances, maybe a bonfire or two.

And then the morning arrives when you realize it's all over and a fresh new year is staring you in the face. That's a good time to get a haircut. 

I drove out to one of the chains in Minnetonka—Great Clips, I think. Now that Fantastic Sam's has raised their rates, I've been shopping around. This particular storefront is sandwiched between a Caribou Coffee and a Wild Bird Store, with Trader Joe's right around the corner, so it has potential.  

The monitor said it would be a 23-minute wait, but I'd brought along something to read: Romanticism—a Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press. I chose this book not because I was in a romantic mood, but because it's the smallest paperback I own: 4-1/4 by 6-3/4, and only 3/8 of an inch thick. It would be nice if they had a similar volume called German Romanticism, because that particular group—Lessing, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Schleiermacher, the Humboldt brothers, Novalis—is a tough nut to crack.

The wait wasn't all that long. After the stylist had set me down and draped the black sheet over my chest she said, "So, what have you got going today?"

"I was afraid you'd ask me that," I said.

She grumbled something about the Vikings on course to lose to the Bears, and I replied, "I'm not much of a football fan. I watch the highlights sometimes. I wouldn't recognize Curt Cousins if I passed him in the street."

Pause. "I also cut hair down in Eagan," she said. Another pause. "I cut Curt Cousins' hair. His name is Kirk." Really?

She informed me that he's a very nice guy, likes Minnesota, sends his kids to public schools, always gives her a $50 tip.

I was happy to hear it. "But Tom Brady isn't a nice guy," she continued. "Mahomes, now he's very nice."

"Well, he seems pretty nice on the Subway commercials," I said. I presume she doesn't cut Brady's hair, but heard all this from Cousins.

"Kirk  isn't sure how long he wants to keep playing," she said. "One thing money can't buy is your health."

"It's true. You're probably too young to remember Robert Smith," I said.

"What? I remember Tommy Mason, Fran Tarkenton."

"OK. I believe Smith retired in his prime and got a law degree."

"Back when the Vikings played at the Met, you could meet the players after the game," she said. "It's not like that now."

"I saw Joe Kapp play at the Met," I said. "We lost 33-3 to the Rams. In the snow. It wasn't much fun."

I was going to mention that I knew Tony Oliva's daughter, but thought better of it. I don't know her that well. Then again, how well does she know Mahomes?

Meanwhile, she was doing a careful job on my tangled gray mop. But she wasn't wearing a mask, and it suddenly occurred to me that Kirk Cousins isn't vaccinated. In fact, he had Covid just two weeks ago. Hmmm. I wonder when he got his last haircut?

I was going to ask my stylist if she was vaccinated, but what would be the point? If she said No, would I leap up, grab my coat, and head for the door? Not likely.

The Vikings ended up winning the game. When I got home I tuned in and saw a few minutes of the fourth quarter, which included two wild, open-field Viking interceptions that reminded me of my touch football days. The win was meaningless, of course. The Vikings are out of the playoffs. All well and good. Why prolong the agony? And the Australian Open is starting any day now. Spring is right around the corner.

Later that afternoon I was rummaging through a desk drawer and made two important discoveries. One was a sheet of paper containing the lyrics to a French-Canadian shoe-passing game called Sorry Sue, written out long-hand, that we used to play at Christmas time.

Savez vous passer la traderailera

Savey vous, passer, ceci sans vous trompez

But we sing it like this:

Sorry Sue passey suree suri, surroo

Sorry Sue, passey, suree suri surroo

The other was an envelope containing three photos. One was a snapshot of the author Jon Hassler on the deck of a sailboat, one was a photo of Norton Stillman, circa 1980, at a baseball game out at Met Stadium, and one was a picture of the Bookmen ad hoc touch football squad from (just a guess) the mid-1980s.

There's me, Mike, Chuck, Roy, Jim, Rod, and John. Mike became a cop, Chuck now runs a cash register at a co-op in Grand Marais, Rod is a Unitarian minister in sunny California, and John works the floor at The Home Depot in St. Louis Park. Every time I run into him he says the same thing: "If I'm ever on 'So You Want to be a Millionaire' you'll be my lifeline." OK.

What happened to Roy and Jim? I have no idea.    

Bastille Day Revolutions

Bastille Day is the finest international holiday, and the fact that we can turn it into pretty much whatever we want to exemplifies what we're celebrating—unbridled personal exuberance and creativity—while the holiday's French overtones insure that the end result is something a little more than just another lazy day at the beach.

Hilary and I had planned to play tennis and then watch the World Cup consolation match between England and Belgium, but it was a sparkling morning and by 7:30 we were on our bikes peddling downtown to wander the Walker's arty new sculpture garden.

There was dew on the wildflowers—bee balm, vervain, purple clover. It's only a mile or two from Cedar Lake to the sculpture garden, and soon enough we were wandering inside a brick tower dedicated to St. Lawrence, the patron saint of librarians. The Basilica of St. Mary loomed pleasantly in the distance, exuding a Franco-American Beaux Arts elegance that none of the sculptures in the garden possess. But why should they? Today we have a giant blue chicken and an even larger cherry on a spoon to draw inspiration from.

Be that as it may, the garden is a nice place to wander. But a trip across Hennepin Avenue to Loring Park returns us to a richer past. There's a lake, a bridge ... and the gardens have flowers. We biked our way around the park to the Dunn Brothers Coffee on the south side and picked out a chocolate-filled  pastry to eat on a bench with our take-out coffee au lait. It wasn't pain au chocolat but it was in the vicinity.  

Winding back through the central garden we came upon an old colleague, Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Forest Ecology and Institute on the Environment. He lives nearby and is on the board of the Friends of Loring Park.

"The garden looks pretty good," I said.

"Yes, but there are two dead trees over there in the central hub." I hadn't noticed.

They were having an all-volunteer Saturday morning garden clean-up. (We would have volunteered ourselves, but we had other fish to fry.)

"You've got a Zen-like job for yourself," I said to one of the volunteers.

"Haven't I, though," he said, trying to crack a smile.

Then it was downtown to the Local to see how the match between Belgium and England was going. The English coach had been quoted as saying, "Who wants to play for third place?" But one thing about the athletes themselves is that they don't like to LOSE.

Considering that Nicollet Mall has been under construction for the past two years, it didn't look all that different to me.

We traversed the mall to Washington Avenue, then on to the Guthrie Theater on the spur of the moment to check out the prospects for rush seats to West Side Story.

I'm glad we headed down that way because, although the ticket prospects were nil, the Saturday Mill City Farmers' Market was in full swing right next door. I talked to the authors of a new book about mushrooms at their booth sponsored by the Minnesota Historical Society: "What about pheasant-back mushrooms?" I said.

"Delicious, and unmistakable," they replied.

At the booth next door I sampled some ginger-lime marmalade, and told the vendor I'd had some Smucker's Orange Marmalade on toast for breakfast, in honor of Bastille Day. He smiled, but I had the feeling he was not impressed. The marmalades he was offering were $12 a jar. But it's that kind of market. One woman was selling big bags of flax seed. We bought a few pastries at the Salty Tart booth and listened to a solo cellist trying to buck to animated conversations and the urban breezes.

Our ride back to Cedar Lake was uneventful. There were fewer cyclists, though they tended to pass in large groups--Saturday cycling clubs, no doubt.

We got home just in time to see the recap of Belgium's win over England. Then it was off again to St. Anthony Main to see a French film called Á Voix Haute. It's one of many films about disadvantaged kids being inspired by talented teachers to fulfill their potential, but in this case the kids are already in college, and the skills they're trying to develop are oratorical. One is from Syria, several are from Africa, one walks twelve miles a day from a small town to attend classes. The kids are diverse but uniformly earnest and likable. And there are lessons to be learned about what makes an argument sound or a word or a phrase effective. It choked me up on more than a few occasions.

But Bastille Day would not be complete without some food and wine. Nez Pas? On our way home from the theater we stopped at Surdyk's and picked up some Camembert, a slice of country paté, and a baguette, then sat on the deck with Ravel's piano music wafting out from the stereo through the screen door: Miroir, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Gaspar de la Nuit. I can no longer tell them apart.

I had opened a bottle of cheap white Burgundy, and a copy of Cubist Poets of Paris was sitting on the table beside us. 

The windows of my poetry are wide open
on the boulevards and in the shop windows
Shine     
The precious stones of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the
xylophones of the linotypes
The sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the sky
All is color spots
And the hats of the women passing by
are comets in the conflagration of the evening...

World Cup Runneth Over

One definition of the game of soccer goes like this: a bunch of men run around in shorts kicking a ball for ninety minutes, and then Germany wins.

Not this year. In the group stage Germany, who won the tournament four years ago, was stunned by Mexico 1-0, and eked  out a 2-1 victory over Sweden on a masterful free kick that ended the game, seemingly righting its wobbly ship. A few days later, however, it suffered a devastating 2-0 defeat to lowly South Korea, a team ranked 57th in the world whose hopes of advancing in the tournament had already been obliterated.

Why, you might ask, was South Korea even included among the 32 teams in the draw?  Because, although many of the world's best teams come from a few regions, for purposes of the tourney the entire world is divided into regions, each of which is given a certain number of slots to fill. That's why they call it the world cup. (It's sort of sweet, don't you think?)

Argentina, the other finalist from four years ago, fared only slightly better than Germany. After enduring a humiliating 1-1 tie with tiny Iceland and a crushing 3-0 defeat to Croatia, it crawled into the knockout rounds by means of a 2-1 victory over Nigeria. 

For many American soccer fans, it came as a great relief that the United States failed to make the tournament entirely, being edged out by Panama and Costa Rica during the regional qualifiers. There was no chance that they'd win it, and their absence allowed the announcers to avoid spending precious time discussing what the U.S. was doing wrong and what they'd have to do better to make the knock-out stage.

It also gave Volkswagen the opportunity to come up with some cute ads advising Americans which foreign teams to root for instead.

When played on the highest level, soccer can be a game of great artistry, vicious brutality, and absurd theatricality. The World Cup is not the highest level...but it's very good indeed, and all of those qualities are on display. After all, many of the stars of the European leagues are there, though they're playing with countrymen with whom they've shared a practice pitch only intermittently during the previous few years. Yet the concomitant rustiness is more than compensated for among fans by the passion aroused by nationalistic sentiments and the preciousness of a once-every-four-years tournament that many nations think they have a chance to win.

And these many nations are probably right. Even when played on the highest level, soccer is often a game of flukes. Let's get real. Deflecting a ball arriving at 100 miles an hour off the top of your head or the shank of your foot into a carefully guarded goal, on the fly, more than occasionally involves an element of luck. The fickle judgment of the referee also plays an important part in the result of many matches. He has the power, by calling fouls inside or near the box, to essentially award goals to either side. Or not.

Yet the actual results of World Cup tournaments have not varied all that much since WWII. Here are the winners: Uruguay, West Germany, Brazil, Brazil, England, Brazil, West Germany, Argentina, West Germany, Brazil, France, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Germany. Considering that more than two-hundred nations participate, that's a very small pool of winners. 

Among those still on their feet this year as we move into the knock-out rounds are Brazil, Spain, England, France, and Uruguay.

Matters of winning and losing aside, what everyone who watches the World Cup wants to see is a beautiful goal. Yet goals are so few and far between that whenever someone actually scores, an element of genuine disbelief is involved. What? It went in? That's amazing!

It's a beautiful emotion, something like finding a present under the Christmas tree ... in June.

Two of the three top stars in the world—Portugal's Renaldo and Argentina's Lionel Messi— were ousted during the first day of knock-outs. Brazil's Neynar, shadowed by his old pal Coutinho, continues his run to redeem Brazil from a devastating 7-1 lost to Germany in the semi-finals four years ago. In fact, Brazil's roster is packed with players that any follower of the Europeans leagues (where most of the world's "talent" plays) would be familiar with. With Germany out, Brazil is the clear armchair favorite.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a genuine soccer fan. I've watched quite a few matches in the last two weeks, ignorant of the subtleties that distinguish a brilliant defensive play from a flagrant foul,  mesmerized by the run of play, usually cheering for the underdog but appreciative of any combination that ends with a ball in the back of the net.

I wouldn't mind seeing Sweden win ... though there's little chance of that. I'd be pleased to see scrappy Uruguay, with Suarez and Cavani up front, knock off Brazil. A trophy run by Mexico would be amazing. Nineteen-year-old Mbappe has given life to a young and talented French squad.

Or why not Belgium? When was the last time Belgium won anything?  

Super Bowls

The other day I came upon a small book of poems on the shelf by the Argentinean surrealist Julio Cortazar, and it reminded me of the value of letting one's associations roam—fun for the writer, maybe not for the reader.

Bowls have been on my mind, for some reason. We stopped over to the American Swedish Institute the other day, where an exhibit called CraftBowls is in full swing. In the modern showroom near the door more than a hundred bowls of various shapes, sizes, colors, and materials have been set out, each with a story told on a little card from its own point of view. Some are ceramic, others are made of metal, glass, felt, or wood. Some are fanciful, others "primitive." Among my favorites were a pair of Sami bowls that look like spoons; and also, of course, many of the hand-thrown pieces.

In the lobby restaurant I felt the urge to order a bowl of tomato-basil soup (though I hated tomato soup as a child). It was the highlight of the lunch, far better than Campbell's, though the duck terrine was more picturesque. When eating at Fika, the smell and crunch of a single piece of toast can inspire rhapsodies of appreciation.

Next door in the mansion, works by several contemporary artists from Scandinavia were on display. But here the attempt to combine modern craft technique with ancient lore and tradition was on shakier ground.

Bertil Vallien, identified in brochures as "Sweden’s leading figure in international glass," has made some peculiar glass vessels that may be technically brilliant but struck me as toy-like and juvenile rather than mythic in conception. Videos give us glimpses of the man philosophizing about the thin membrane of the vessel upholding its contents against the mystery and danger of the surrounding depths. It sounded poetic, indeed, but the pieces themselves, though spectacularly lit, looked rather makeshift and obvious.

Then again, if I actually owned one of those glass boats, and had it expertly displayed on the mantle above the fireplace, I'd have more time to examine it and feel its presence; in time, I'd probably warm to its subtler meanings and emanations. 

    

In a nearby room a selection of wooden spoons, chairs, "shrink-boxes," and objects d'art by Swedish woodworker Jögge Sundvkist are on display. He often crafts them with nothing but an axe and a knife, and can whip one out in half an hour or less to the pounding rhythms of Swedish rock'n'roll. He was in town a few days ago to show us how he does it—or so the docent roaming the galleries told me.

Sundvkist is sort of a rock star himself, at least in the eyes of Hemslöjden, the National Association of Swedish Handicraft Societies. Yet I'm not convinced that his approach to craft is in any way philosophical or deep, as it's being described in the promotional material. I have seen better utensils on display recently at the Swedish Institute that were crafted by local Minnesota artisans—better because more delicate and utilitarian, and with a greater appreciation of the nuances of the wood.

And they don't cost $400 apiece, either. 

Don't get me wrong. All of these small exhibits are well worth seeing. But they raise questions in my mind as to whether "mythic" or traditional themes can be revived or preserved at will, rather than developing naturally out of the midst of a community for whom such stories and artifacts are essential elements of survival and meaning. 

  

One small room was devoted to the work of Ingegerd Råman, who carries the official designation of a Swedish National Living Treasure. Her plates, cups, and glasses look a lot like the things we might buy at Ikea, but they're a little bit better: simple, lightweight, elegant. There is unquestionably something commercial about them, but nothing of the faux-folk or the faux-mythic, and in her vases she gets to create one-of-a-kind pieces in which years of practice result in flowing, unostentatious vessels.

 A few days later we wandered down to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see a very minor exhibit of ceramic bowls thrown by twentieth-century Japanese masters of the art. The Institute has become so labyrinthine—so full of small, square, interior spaces with numbers like 232 and 434—that I had to ask a guard where the "exhibit" was. (I had tried, without success, to find its location on the iPad sitting on a bench in the lobby that now serves as an introductory guide.)

The "bowls" were nice, and more than nice, though technically they weren't bowls but water jars used to bring in the water to be heated for a tea ceremony and also to clean the utensils after the ceremony is over.

On our way through the Asian wing we stopped at the exquisitely recreated scholar's study, and also the small display case containing a dried mushroom (good for longevity) and two ceramic trays about the size of my fingernail that were once used to feed pet crickets. I couldn't help thinking of that long tradition of scholars and writers (until recently almost invariably men) who derived great satisfaction from sitting alone in a room reading the thoughts of others or recording their own thoughts in the hope that others would read them, or recording them merely to focus, reflect, and get their heads on straight.

Finally, so as not to ignore entirely the bowl that's come to our humble village of Minneapolis, we went downtown a few nights ago with friends to experience a little of the Superbowl hysteria in which many segments of the nation have been gripped for a week or two. We rode the train in from Midway, and as we traveled west I had a tough time determining where we were, exactly, through the frosty windows. Dinkytown? Stadium Village? The West Bank?

I reminded my friend that in 1972 we'd lived together with seven other young women and men in a three-story house on that street—a "house" later known as the Zoo. I had ridden my bike down that street, day after day, or hitchhiked, or walked. 

We eventually arrived at Nicollet Mall, got off, and wandered south through various security check-points, listened to snatches of the New Power Generation (or was it Mint Condition?) performing in their thick parkas, and saw bored sportscasters we couldn't identify getting ready to broadcast on ESPN (or whatever) in the Crystal Court, where, in an earlier era, we had once seen Andy Warhol walk by.

It was fun. But the liveliest element of the scene was the brightly lit ski sprint competition running back and forth over the Birkebeiner Bridge.

Corporate sponsors were everywhere—Target, Verizon, Doritos—but the event had the feel of a county fair, where everyone is enjoying the flashing lights and the community vibe but there isn't really that much to DO. You could get your picture taken in a snow-globe, or step briefly into the Anderson Windows warming house. The line to get into the Target Bull's Eye Lodge was too long, and the free skate-rental at the rink on Peavey Plaza required a lengthy sign-in that seemed to augur a life-long relationship with Hyundi vehicles. 

One block off the mall, we grabbed a quick dinner at a sports bar called the Union Grill, where all the TVs were tuned to basketball games. It started to snow, and on the way back to the light-rail station my face was unpleasantly lacerated by tiny icy crystals. We skipped the NFL merchandise mart and were not even aware of the pop-up Prince museum nearby, but the good news is, I found a student rail pass lying in the street which got me on the train free of charge. 

Not that anyone was checking.