Snowday

The wind was wicked, but the snow remained light, like specks of sand and dust rather than genuine flakes. The thing was, it just kept on coming.

We’d purchased a tree the previous evening down at the farmer’s market, and spent the morning on various household tasks. I revved up the snow-blower when a foot or so had accumulated. I knew I’d be out there again, but the machine is so small that after a certain point it simply can’t cope.


Then it was time for a rare jaunt down our street and up the hill on skis. We passed a neighbor hurrying back to her house after walking the dog, but otherwise we had the neighborhood to ourselves. Except for the shovelers. Not a bird in sight. One car had made its way through the drifts and out to a more well-traveled thoroughfare. (The first plow didn’t arrive on our street until after midnight.)

It’s pleasant, this snowed-in feeling. A reheated lunch of delicata squash soup with pasta. Music fills the air. Everything from the Tallis Scholars and English Organ Music of the Renaissance, to Il Viaggio di Lucrezia, a lovely, meditative collection of antique Italian harp music by Mara Galassi.

At some point in the night the Metrodome collapsed. This is news, especially when a team from New York is scheduled to play there. But this morning all was clear and bright, the plow has been by, leaving a dense ridge of snow in front of the driveway.

At 17 inches, this storm ranks fifth or sixth among those that have been recorded in these parts. But to judge from the numbers below, the period between January 20 and 23, 1982, received 37 inches, though there was a lull in the middle of onslaught.

I remember those days. We skiied to the SuperAmerica on 40th and Lyndale. Propped the skis outside next to the propane tanks. On the way down the alley, we met a neighbor who was stuck big-time.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Triple A is on the way."

“Oh, we’ll push you out,” I replied in neighborly fashion. Getting behind the car to give it a shove, I proceeded to punch a hole in the man’s tail light. Oops!!

1. Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 1991 28.4 inches
2. Nov. 29-Dec. 1, 1985 21.1
3. Jan. 22-23, 1982 20.0
4. Jan. 20-21, 1982 17.4
5. December 12, 2010 17
6. Nov. 11-12, 1940 16.8
7. March 3-4, 1985 16.7

Dragon Tattoos and Angel Wings

I was probably the last person in the upper Midwest to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’m glad I did, if only because I no longer will have to wonder what all the fuss was about. But the experience didn’t make me eager to see the other two.

The film takes us to some dark and revolting places. But the violence and sexual abuse amount to only ten minutes of film time (albeit a long ten minutes)and for the rest, it’s just a well-made Swedish thriller in which outcasts and journalists confront the Good Old Boys of capitalist corruption, greed, murder, exploitation, and so on. The “girl” in the title, pierced and tattooed, has been so bent out of shape by bad experiences at the hands of men that she seethes with unexpressed anger—yet most viewers will find her intriguing, and more than that, attractive. The male lead, a journalist played by Michael Nyqvist, is simultaneously committed, resigned, wary, naïve, amorous, and reserved. All in all, he seems to be a pretty nice guy.

While watching the film, I was reminded from time to time of another film Nyqvist made recently called As It Is in Heaven. In this one he plays a world-famous conductor who returns to the remote village in northern Sweden where he grew up to recover following a nervous breakdown. Soon he becomes involved with the local church choir—though he mostly just wants to be alone—and as he gets to know the villagers, a variety of sub-plots develop involving the parish priest (who’s envious of his popularity and doubtful about his religious convictions) a few lovely choir-members, and a boorish enemy from his childhood days.

Some parts of the film are corny and some parts are badly staged, but there is also quite a bit of life to the be found there. In particular, the avant garde choir rehearsals are choice. At various places I was reminded of Waiting for Guffman and Shultz Gets the Blues while watching it. It’s one of those works the shortcomings of which obvious…though its humanity is not to be missed.

About The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I’m not so sure.

The Absurd and the Impossible

"[Absurdity] is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world. Why should we be interested in a clearly impossible story? Because, as Gogol says, in fact the impossible is what happens all the time.”
- William Kentridge

An old friend (now caring for her aged mother in Nevada, if I’m not mistaken) sent me this quote not long ago via Facebook. Well, I couldn’t tell you if she sent it to me personally. Maria has 606 friends, and perhaps she sometimes forgets who all is out there. But I’ll bet she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the remark piqued my interest.

I’ve been thinking about the absurd on and off for quite some time now. Ever since my college years, in fact, when The Trial, Troubled Sleep, Nausea, Notes from Underground, and other works in the same vein were my daily reading habit. I got a charge out of reading such dismal stuff, though I was a mostly a happy-go-lucky sort myself. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was the combination of metaphysical speculation and novelistic detail as related by an assortment of hapless misanthropes living on the frenzied edge of nothingness—the typical adolescent syndrome of those who are still afraid of girls. It struck me at the time as funny, important, and largely true-to-life.

But there came a time—I think it was in 1972, I was wandering in the dark amid the grain elevators north of University Avenue and west of the KSTP tower, with the smell of malt in my nostrils—when it suddenly occurred to me that the universe could not be absurd. Why not? Because the word “absurd” can only have meaning in contrast to something that makes sense. If nothing makes sense, then neither “absurdity” nor “sense” hold their meaning.

The word “absurd” does have meaning. But its point of reference is invariably narrow. Let me give you an example. Suppose I were to say: “Georgeanne went to absurd lengths to make sure that the flowers on the table were fresh.” What this means is, “Georgeanne cares a lot more about fresh flowers than you or I do.” Or how about this one: “To argue, in this day and age, that the earth is merely 4,000 years old is absurd.” What this means is, anyone who can disregard the mountains of geological and astrophysical evidence available regarding the extraordinary age of the universe has really lost his or her senses—or is clinging to some quaint and out moded belief for emotional reasons.

In each case, an attitude appears absurd in contrast to another, more well-developed one. We describe an attitude as absurd when we’ve grown tired of trying to explain how mistaken it is on empirical grounds.

Yet between these two examples, the first is far less absurd than the second. Just because we aren’t that interested in flowers doesn’t mean that it’s absurd to pay close special attention to them. In fact, in this instance it may be our focus that’s narrow, not Georgeanne’s. She sees the more brilliant, colorful world that erupts before us when we take care to introduce really fresh flowers to the scene. While we’re burdened with false equivalencies (plastic flowers) and cost-benefit analysis, she opens our vision to an entirely new world—and really, how much is that worth?

The quote I received from Maria may be taken to refer to the fact that we don’t really know what’s possible and what’s not, and it can be a mistake to set false limits to the things we might see or do, the things that might happen.

The positive side of this “truth” has been dramatized time and again in films like Hoosiers and The October Sky, anot the mention horror films and holocaust films beyond number underscoring what dangers lurk beneath even the most benign situations. And weren’t we all, during our childhood years, traumatized in one way or another by that capitalist tract The Little Engine That Could and The Cat in the Hat?

The line separating what can and cannot happen gets especially murky in the outer reaches of time and space—beyond telescopes and on the other side of the Styx. Hence, religious thought is often sparked by tales and adages riddled with absurdity. The Zen koan may be taken as a case in point. And didn’t Tertillian once remark,

"The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.
And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is unsound.
And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible."

This last line, which originally read “et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile” entered the lexicon of Western maxims in a bowdlerized form, Credo quia absurdum, “I believe, because it is absurd”—a remark that will throw a wet blanket on any discussion of religion, though it might help to explain the behavior of suicide bombers.

Poets and novelists have no qualms about combining images and events in ways that don’t really make sense, and such concoctions can sometimes be illuminating or refreshing: A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities come immediately to mind. It seems to me that impossibilities along these lines never take us as deep as do the absurdities in a book like Don Quixote, which springs from the mind of the protagonist rather than that of the author. But we’ll leave that argument for another time.

Nowadays poetry is all but required to indulge in a little nonsense. Did it all start with Rimbaud?

Yet none of this strikes to the heart of Kentridge’s (or Gogol’s) remark, I think, which issues from a point of exasperation, if not despair. There are times when the world seems to be so far out of whack with our values and expectations that all we can do is throw up our hands with the cry, “How absurd!”

Flaubert remains the high priest of this attitude, though it seems to me his views are usually misinterpreted. We find it easy to sympathize with the disgust he feels in the face of bourgeois culture, but have developed a tin ear with regard to the deep affection underlying it. I picked up my copy of Bouvard and Pechuchet just now and was reconfirmed in that judgment. It’s a very funny book, I really ought to read it again.

In the end, “the impossible” doesn’t happen all the time. On the contrary, by definition, it never happens. And it may be worth pointing out that when words such as “crazy” and “absurd” and “impossible” enter a discuss, it means that thought is at an end. In the political sphere that’s not a good terminal to arrive at. It certainly isn’t a "productive" way of looking at the world, no matter what William Kentridge (or Gogol) says.

Yet don’t we sometimes use those words ourselves?

Sarah Palin as president? Crazy. Absurd. Impossible.

North of Grand Rapids

Gray, leafless November. It’s a time of year to stay home in front of the fire and leave the woods and lakes to the hunters. But it’s also a beautiful time to be out (ask a hunter), when the snow arrives as flecks of soft white dust and the ice is just forming on the lakes. The bogs take on new prominence, now that the leaves are gone from the trees and bushes and the branches show red or orange at the tips. The snow brings light to the scene, one element among many, but it has not yet obliterated all the subtlety in the details.

We spent the weekend in a lakeside cabin at a resort on Woman Lake, at the north end of that fifty-mile welter known collectively as the Brainerd Lakes. It’s hilly around Woman Lake, and perhaps a little wilder than down in the flatter land among the mansions on Crosslake and Gull and Whitefish. In fact, driving east from Woman Lake through Longville toward Remer, you pass nothing but bogs and woods for a good twenty miles. At one point Hilary spotted a large bird flying up from the ditch as we passed. We did a u-turn. It was a great gray owl. (People come from all over the United States to see them.)

Our route took us north from Remer to Deer River and on to Big Fork, where logging isn’t just a matter of rustic deck furniture and Paul Bunyan statues. We bought some wild rice sausage at the local supermarket but couldn’t bring ourselves to check out the Loggers Food and Drink south of town.


Seven miles east of town we paid a visit to Scenic State Park, which has several pristine lakes lined with old growth white pines (preserved due to the efforts of some prescient local residents back in the 1920s) and some of the finest log CCC buildings in the north country. The ice was just beginning to form on the lakes, there was a hint of blue coming through the clouds, and the dusting of snow on the ice sheet, with dark water beyond and dark pines in the background, made for an arresting scene.

We would have hiked out along the esker between the lakes but the ranger advised us that if we did, we might get shot. Our bright orange stocking hats JUST might not be enough of an indication that we were NOT six-foot two-legged deer.

On a gravel backroad north of Marcel we came upon some logging operations that bore the marks of having just been completed. Huge, beautiful trees lying on their sides in a pile, all in a row. Slag carefully scraped into piles near the road, and some of the pines left standing, whether because it kept the forest looking respectable, or because it was required by law, or because they’d be worth more later, I don’t know.


I love seeing cut forests. Why? Because I love things that are made out of wood. And wood comes from trees. But it’s especially nice to see an intelligent, tasteful cut, out in the middle of nowhere. But what do I know about cutting trees?

I love piles of logs sitting by the side of the road. And I love lumber yards, though I have not developed any skill at making things from wood myself, and I’m sure I never will. In fact, I’ve never tried. I also love paper. And I have made more than a few books.

Our drive south on Highway 38 toward Grand Rapids took us through some of the hilliest country Minnesota has to offer, past the Suomi Hills and other intriguing areas of low-impact recreational development. There were swans drifting on several of the austere gray lakes.

Back at our cozy cabin, we cooked up a butternut squash stew with corn and jalapeños, and then settled into the evening reading. The sky outside the window was a deadly gray. The lake was grayer still. The wind was from the southeast, which at this time of the year usually means snow.

Kenny Barron at the Dakota

Kenny Barron blew into the Dakota last night, trailing an all-star band—as they call it. Kenny himself has long since graduated from “world’s best jazz sideman” to “world’s best lyric jazz pianist” though such monikers are tossed around mostly by club owners trying to fill the house. (He barely made the top ten in the latest Downbeat Critics Poll.) Kenny’s style is distinctly linear, as opposed to the bold, impenetrable chordal thickets so often thrown our way nowadays by the likes of Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and Chucho Valdés. In his frenzied moments, the mix of furious arpeggios and rapid-fire riffs can sound like one holy muddle, but the pianistic “touch” and sheer musical thought Kenny exhibits in quieter moments more than redresses the balance.

In the end, you go to a Kenny Barron show to hear the kind of jazz you’ve been hearing all your life—straight-ahead bebop with a few modernist furies and a touch of “stride” here and there. That’s why I go, anyway.

Kenny’s current quartet features David Sanchez, a firebrand tenor in his mid-forties who was once Barron’s student at Rutgers, and two musicians I’d never heard of, bassist Linda Oh and drummer Kim Thompson. Kenny met Kim in Cuba in 2001 at the Havana Jazz Festival. "I had never heard Kim play,” he later recalled, “but when I asked Ben Riley for a recommendation, the first person he suggested was Kim. We didn't have time to rehearse, but her performance blew me away." Since that time the two have performed together often, though to some readers Kim’s most impressive credit would be that she’s pop-diva Beyonce’s drummer.


Thompson’s energy and taste were in evidence throughout the evening, though on the opening number, a rousing rendition of “Softly as a Morning Sunrise,” she all but overpowered the rest of the band. From that point on, the group settled down, moving through a pleasant but somewhat rusty samba, a tender piece Barron had written for a film score called “Theme #1,” and “Body and Soul,” which seems to bring out the best in any soloist.

David Sanchez played a robust, straight-ahead tenor throughout the evening, building his solos carefully, hanging close to the changes and not really cutting lose until the groundwork had been laid. Exactly the kind of music I go to the Dakota to hear. Near the end of the final piece of the set, “Bud Like,” another Barron original dedicated to Bud Powell (one of his idols), Sanchez put together a remarkable cadenza, and to judge from the attentiveness of Barron and his other cohorts in the band, it wasn’t something he played every night.

The entire set was engaging, and the elderly couple hacking away at their steaks down the way, directly in our line of sight, were only mildly distracting.

I sometimes get the feeling that live jazz is sustained by people who don’t really like jazz much, but if that’s what it takes, so be it. The food at the Dakota looks and smells so good that it becomes part of the show, whether you order it yourself or not.

Barron came out for a brief encore, a solo rendition of Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You.” And Sanchez, dripping with sweat and wearing a boyish grin, held the door for us as we left the club. (Perhaps he’d stepped outside for a smoke.)

“Great set,” was all I could think of to say. But it was true.

Vision:Hildegard von Bingen

Thick snow covers the branches and telephone wires, once again the electricity is off, no heat or light except what can be got from candles and a fire in the fireplace. On the stereo, some ethereal hymns composed eight-hundred-odd years ago by Hildegard von Bingen. It suits the occasion.

Hildegard began seeing visions and hearing voices at the age of three. Much later she wrote down these experiences, encouraged by clerics in high places. She is often referred to as Western Europe’s first mystic. As an adult she founded an abbey, wrote music and some of the first Mystery plays, executed visionary, almost psychedelic paintings, traveled widely, corresponded with the high and mighty, and attracted many pilgrims to her doorstep.

And now German director Margarethe von Trotta, a former cohort of Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog best known for The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum (1975) has made a film about her.

It’s a good, if conventional, film, which charts the course of Hildegard’s career in episodic fashion, focusing mainly on her relations with the sisters and monks at the monastery where she was raised. Von Trotte makes little effort to reproduce Hildegard’s inner experience, recreating only one brief vision and neglecting to show us even one of the abbess’s paintings. Nor does she delve deeply into the woman’s philosophy of “greening” or “life-power” which has become popular among environmentalists of a New Age stamp.

But von Trotta has recreated the atmosphere of the times quite well, with the help of Hildegard’s own music, and actress Barbara Sukowa, in the title role, has the piercing gaze and utter sincerity of purpose to command our attention. Hildegard’s love of books—very scarce at the time—and her interest in nature, come through loud and clear, as does the challenge of dealing with her visions in a world where cries of “Heresy!” come easily to the lips of those in power—who are almost always men. Her conflicts with the church hierarchy supply most of the film’s drama, and the undercurrents of shifting affection among the nuns themselves give it some counterpoint.

While watching the film I was reminded from time to time of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, but more often of those little-seen films Roberto Rossellini made at the end of his career such as Pascal, Socrates, and The Age of the Medici. I find it remarkable that in this day and age, a documentary film shot along such lines can still get a few weeks of screen time at a major film venue!


Also remarkable is Hildegard’s music, which you can hear in all its glory on “A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen” featuring the incomparable soprano Emma Kirkby with the Gothic Voices (Hyperion CDA66039).

The Social Network

I have a soft spot for films set on college campuses, my favorites (off the top of my head) being Wonder Boys, Good Will Hunting, The Paper Chase, and Legally Blond. Young women and men are in the midst of what, for many, is the first flush of quasi-independence; they’re being challenged to show their stuff intellectually in the classroom while engaging in animated conversations at local watering holes after hours and attending wild parties where all the females look almost like movie stars. My years at the U of M weren’t quite like that….but our five-man intramural touch football term, the Dirty Hittites, did reach the class-D finals in my freshman year!

The Social Network, set largely on the campus of Harvard University, is similarly well-endowed with late-night drinking, over-bright students, odd-ball personalities, and winsome coeds. It tells the story of Mark Zuckerman, the inventor of Facebook, and the plot-line would fall squarely into the category of implausible wish-fulfillment fantasies if it didn’t happen to be largely true. It would appear the Zuckerman came up with a proto-version of the website in a single evening after being jilted by his girlfriend, by hacking into the photo pages of every sorority on campus. The rest was just a matter of nuance, details—and funding.

The plot-point around which the film turns is a legal battle between Zuckerman and several former partners or associates who were dropped from the development team at various points along the way (or were never a part of it, according to Zuckerman) and are suing him to cash in on the webpage’s success. We’re brought up to date in a series of flashbacks as the lawyers question Zuckerman and the plaintive about who did what, when. At the heart of the film, if not the legal dispute, is a difference of opinion between Zuckerman and college roommate Eduaro Saverin, who financed the project and is considered Facebooks co-founder, about whether or not the site ought to carry advertisements. Eduaro is Zuckerman’s only friend and their clashes become increasingly painful to watch, especially after cool-Californian Sean Parker, the founder of the file-sharing site Napster, arrives on the scene.

Though Zuckerman comes across as somewhat snarky, and treats his intellectual inferiors with bored distain, he’s seldom really malicious, and the path by which, picking up on incidental conversations and events, he hones the features of his social networking website, is fascinating to watch. We rarely actually see a page of Facebook during the film, and that’s probably just as well. The film is well-paced and unflaggingly engaging, while Facebook itself is a simple thing, not well-suited for the big screen. Lots of people get a kick out of it. In fact, I have a page myself. Being self-employed, I find that it offers a refreshing break from the solitary grind of making books—like gathering with friends for chit-chat around the proverbial water-cooler. But I find it hard to see, even with ads, how it could ever live up to its current valuation of $33 billion dollars.

And now, writing a blog about a movie about Facebook, I find myself in an almost Borgesian situation. (Borgesian? What’s that?)