Norton's Birthday

The other night publisher Norton Stillman was feted at the St. Paul University Club. Poetry readings take place there once a month, but the turnout for this one far exceeded the norm. It was Norton's ninetieth birthday, and fifteen of the poets he's published over the years were slated to read one poem apiece from a Nodin Press collection. 

The event was featured in both the Star-Tribune and the Pioneer Press, and the room was packed, not only with poets and poetry-lovers but also with printers, publishers reps, bookstore owners, former employees of Bookmen (Norton's book warehouse, now long defunct), Nodin Press essayists and biographers, and many of Norton's relatives and long-time friends. Not to mention poets and poetry-lovers who attend the readings regularly. Amiable poet and raconteur Tim Nolan kept the event moving, and there was plenty of time afterwards for people to mingle and chat.

The poets, one after another, expressed their gratitude toward Norton and also their appreciation of his kindness and warm personality. My favorite story—though I don't recall who told it—involved Norton calling a young poet to tell her he wouldn't be able to attend her upcoming reading, due to a veterinary emergency. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and I'd be happy to publish your book."

Phil Bryant

I don't remember much about the particulars of the poems themselves, but I was struck repeatedly by how pleasant it can be, in a landscape often overburdened with politics and moral harangue, to listen to a few vivid personal impressions tinged with silent emotion. Janna Knittel read a poem "about" a kingfisher; Laurie Allmann read one "about" a meadowlark. Emilio DeGrazia and Norita Dittburner-Jax read poems in which trees figure prominently. Jim Lenfestey read a boisterous poem about spring. Sharon Chmielarz read an enigmatic one, full of Biblical overtones, about scorpions turning into cabbages. (Or was it the other way around?)

Freya Manfred read a poem about one of her favorite subjects—swimming—and prefaced it with a touching story about Norton's mother, Millie, who also loved to swim. Cary Waterman reminded us, before reading her poem, of the important role played by the anthology 25 Minnesota Poets, which Norton published fifty years ago, in nurturing the state's rich poetic environment.

Poet Margaret Hasse had arranged for a sheet cake with Norton's portrait on the frosting. It's one of Norton's long-standing event traditions. (He even had one made for Rosalynn Carter when she came to the Bookmen to promote her book!)

I never got near the cake. I've been working on books with Norton for more than twenty years, and there were lots of people in the audience I hadn't seen in a long time, or had worked with but never actually met! In addition to the poets mentioned above and others, I ran into friends (and former Bookmen employees) Annie Klessig and Bill Mockler, Norton's nephew Brett  and his wife Sheila (also publishers), biographers Dale Schwie and Joy Riggs, historian Etta Fay Orkin, essayist and garden expert Steve Kelley and his wife Arla, author John Coy. The list goes on and on.

Norton with Norita

I spoke with Norton on the phone the next morning, and it was like: "Oh, was she there? I never saw her." "Gee, I wish I'd gotten a chance to talk to ...," "His wife died, but he seems to be holding up well." Mike Hazard, Don Leeper, Chuck Erickson, David Unowsky. It was old home week for the local book scene.

During her appearance at the podium poet Morgan Grace Willow mentioned that her book Between originally carried a different and more latinate title. Norton returned to that concept during his brief remarks, mentioning that his mother, returning home from shopping, perhaps, would say, "I had a good "between" with so-and-so this morning."

Good betweens: that's what Norton's career, his books, his friends, his life, has all been about.

Five Worthy Films at the MSPIFF

The Mpls. St. Paul. Intl. Film. Fest (MSPiFF) is in full swing, and it's great to see the halls and theaters full of people again. The scene can be chaotic, with rush lines and ticketed lines forming a hundred yards from the theater entrance, but that's part of the fun, I guess.  Hilary and I made it down to see five films over the weekend, and there was nary a stinker in the bunch. We've been to Mexico, Egypt, France, Sweden, and South Korea.

Cairo Conspiracy exemplifies the virtues of the event. If you haven't seen it, then it's unlikely you'll ever get a peek inside Al-Azhar University, the world's foremost center of Sunni Muslim clerical education. That in itself is worth the price of admission. But director Tarik Saleh uses the setting to spin an intricate tale of political and religious intrigue unlike any plot I've seen before.

As the film opens, a village fisherman's son named Adam—young, devout, and naive—wins a scholarship to study at Al-Azhar. Not long after he arrives, the reigning Grand Imam dies, and a power struggle ensues between followers of the various Sunni leaders who are vying to succeed him. The Egyptian government has a favorite choice, of course, and it also has a well-developed security network to make sure it gets what it wants. Trouble is, the clerical establishment considers itself to be above secular law, and the government has no way to know what's going on inside the walls of Al-Azhar. Through a series of events too obscure to relate here, a renegade colonel recruits Adam and orders him to bring news regularly from inside Al-Azhar to a coffee-shop assignation. Adam accepts the unorthodox assignment reluctantly, and he grows more uneasy still (as do we) after witnessing a violent event in the university courtyard.  It's hard to tell who is on who's side, not only inside but also outside the walls of Al-Azhar.

Night of the 12th, a "taut and piercing" police procedural, opens with a raucous retirement party at police headquarters, follows with a gruesome late-night murder, and proceeds through ninety minutes of detective work heavily interspersed with conversations and asides that expose the prevailing mentality of the force and various details of the officers' private lives. The youngest member of the team is excited about his upcoming wedding; one of the older officers is getting divorced. 

The murder victim, a young woman returning home on foot from a "girl's-night-out" at a friend's house, is portrayed as a good-natured young woman who entered easily into relationships with a variety of men, none of whom were deeply interested in her. Hence, suspects abound, though the perpetrator left little evidence behind and everyone seems to have an alibi. Thoughtful and generally low-key, the film has a day-to-day feel. The detectives become frustrated as the case grows cold, and gender issues take on new dimensions with the arrival of a female detective and prosecuting judge. Director Moll avoids polemical browbeating, giving us instead a complex and deftly nuanced rendering of modern life in small-town France.      

Ajoomma is a Mandarin word for "middle-aged woman," often translated as "auntie." In He Shuming's feature film debut, we follow the misadventures of Auntie Bee Hua as she departs alone on a package tour of South Korean tourist sites, after her son has dropped out due to an important job interview in California. Auntie, a recently widowed Singapore woman, has devoted her life to caring for her husband, raising her son, and watching Korean soap operas; she hasn't gotten out much. But her solo vacation would have gone much better were it not for the suave and irresponsible youngster leading the tour, who has plenty of problems of his own. The opening half-hour is tame, but it sets the scene for a riotous and touching sequence of events set in motion when Aunt Bee is left behind the tour at a remote apartment complex and comes to rely on the kindness of the elderly night security guard, Jung Su, to find her way back to the group. They don't speak the same language, but they manage to communicate. The episodes that follow combine elements of slapstick, desperation, schmaltz, and farce, with touches of inter-generational wisdom thrown in.

Hilma af Klint is a stagy but generally informative biopic focused on the life of the Swedish painter of "spiritual" abstractions, largely unknown during her lifetime but recently enjoying a surge in serious interest. The early death of a younger sister drew Hilma to currents of theosophy and the occult that were popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the film the young artist stresses again and again that her work is the creation of an unseen spirit that uses her merely as a vehicle. She is painting the unseen connections between all living things.

Himla developed her unusual style in the company of four or five other women who were also artists. They helped her with her work, though they generally lacked her visionary spirit and contented themselves with painting  conventional landscapes. Hilma sold  few if any works in her lifetime, and rarely exhibited them. Lacking a job or family income, she relied heavily on the financial generosity of one of the group, with whom she was also romantically involved for many years.

Swedish director Lasse Hallström fleshes out this scenario in a long series of episodes. He shows the women having tea together, giggling a lot, participating in séances, and invariably acquiescing to the suggestions and demands of their visionary leader. On the other hand, he makes little attempt to examine the underlying issues and contradictions involved, most importantly, how does the "spiritual" content of Hilma's art differ aesthetically from that of contemporary artists who were also driven or "inspired" to paint in non-representational ways? Does her work actually merit comparison to that of Kandinsky, Miro, Odilon Redon, Klee, and other self-professed spiritual painters? It may strike some viewers that it has more in common with decorative Art Nouveau swirls and Marimekko fabrics.

In any case, the film offers viewers like me, who had never heard of Hilma before, an avenue of ingress into the work of a Nordic artist who chose her own path and dedicated her life to it. 

Gods of Mexico is the strangest of the films we saw. It consists of a collection of powerful black-and-white images of indigenous Mexican women and men standing in frozen, tableau-like settings, and two lengthy color sequences, one depicting the activities at a salt farm, the other focusing on mining operations with hand tools deep within a maze of underground tunnels. In their static dignity, the tableau reminded me of the surreal photographs of Graciela Iturbide, while the long episodes with movement underscored the ardor and beauty of repetitive but inescapable work. These sequences also include episodes of shooting craps, cock-fighting, fireworks, dancing, and expert whistling. 

Call it the aestheticisation of the mundane, if you will. Or the romanticization of the "other." The Mexican consul who attended the screening doesn't seem to think so. He recited the Aztec names of the gods being represented, and tried to explain why people are corn, and why corn is people.

In any case, the absence of dialogue for ninety minutes helps us focus our attention on the solidity of people and their connections with other living things.  

In one scene that I will never forget, we see the cavernous interior of a mine, with water dripping down into two misshapen tin cans. In the tiny aperture of tunnel light, we see the silhouette of a man approaching. It might take him a minute, or five minutes, to reach the wider cavern. (No one is in a hurry here. Everything takes time.) He picks up one of the cans, drinks the water, and hurls the can off into the shadows. He picks up the second can, drinks the water, and sets it back down where it was before. 

Why?  

Why a Duck?

It's the time of a birder's year when the ducks are moving through.  They're easy to spot, just floating out on the water, and most of them are both beautiful and easy to identify.

You'll see more of them if you head down to the river. Hilary and I took a few days off and rented a little cottage on the shores of the Mississippi just south of La Crosse, Wisconsin. We had no way of knowing what the precise view would be, but it turned out to be superb, and the fact that the cottage was tucked into the base of a cliff, separated from the Mississippi backwaters by a noisy highway and two sets of railroad tracks, hardly mattered.  

We spent our first evening watching the sun go down. A few minutes later steams of pelicans began to arrive from the south in the twilight and settle into the backwaters of the river for the night. I would guess there were 400 of them all told.

The next morning we drove out through Goose Island County Park, where we got excellent views of canvasbacks, redheads, blue-winged teal, shovelers, and lots of scaup and ring-necked ducks. We spotted a few widgeons in the mix, too.

And let's not forget the humble gadwall. A very fine duck, its markings are so subtle that it often goes unnoticed in the crowd.

It was a fine getaway, further enlivened by brief hikes at Wildcat Mountain, Perrot, and Merritt state parks. A few wildflowers were blooming in the hemlock woods above the Kickapoo River. But all the park offices were closed, and we never got a chance to purchase a park sticker.

I should go online and order one right now...

Meanwhile, if the phrase "Why a Duck?" rings a bell, maybe this Marx Brothers routine has resurfaced from your stock of childhood memories.

The April Fools Day Blizzard

Though it won't rank with the Halloween Blizzard of 1999, our most recent blow has a lot to commend it.

1) It took place mostly at night when few people were out on the highway.

2) It arrived early on a Saturday, a day when few people have anywhere important to get to.

3) It freshened up the landscape, which had been littered with grotesque mounds of dirty snow.

4) It was followed by a brilliantly bright day, with full sun and a deep blue sky.

On the other hand, the snow was wet and heavy; limbs came down, and many people lost power, including us.

The previous morning I'd been out in the backyard, getting a closer look at an unpleasant sight previously glimpsed from the bedroom window: some creature had gnawed the bark off several of our nannyberry bushes, which play an important part in our woodsy summertime privacy screen. We planted then eight or ten years ago, and no one had messed with them until now. I was heartbroken.

Not sure which critter might be responsible, I sent a note to Steve Kelley and his wife Arla, of Kelly and Kelly Nursery, clients and friends with whom I worked last year on a gardening book. Perhaps I didn't phrase the note very well, because I got this reply.

We're sad to think that it took a winter's worth of rabbit damage to your shrubbery to bring Arla & Steve to mind. If you cut the damaged shrubs down to the ground, they might send up new shoots. Otherwise, hope everything is well with you.

 Happy Spring,

Steve & Arla

 In my defense, I might observe that it wasn't the first time I'd thought of them, and it was their remarkable knowledge of plants, rather than the destructive habits of pesky rabbits, that brought them to mind. But I'll get over it. As Spinoza says somewhere, "To feel remorse is to be unhappy twice."

 After examining the sorry plants at close range, I wandered over to the fence to watch some technicians install solar panels on our neighbor Rocky's house. The foreman, who was also watching them work, wandered over for a chat. He was curious to know, naturally enough, if I might be interested in a few panels myself.

 "Our yard is a lot shadier than Rocky's," I said. "And much of our roof is actually an antique rubber sheet. I wouldn't want to tamper with it too much." 

 That afternoon I drove over to the library to pick up a few books that had been put on hold for me. And on the way out I purchased a slim paperback called Quarry by a French novelist named Celia Houdar from the friends-of-the-library bargain cart in the lobby. Ignoring the books I'd requested, I spent much of the afternoon reading it.

 The story, such as it is, concerns itself with a man who's been behind bars for three years awaiting trial in Pisa, the judicial magistrate who's going to handle the case, her husband--an unemployed expert in ancient Hindi textiles--and their daughter, who takes sculpting classes two days a week at the quarry in nearby Cararra.

 The novel consists of numerous chapters, never more than three pages long, that shift from one character to another at random. The details are precise, but links between passages are non-existent, and readers who take them as "pieces of the puzzle" and try to fit them together into some sort of narrative will struggle. Of course we want to figure out who took a potshot at the victim. Yet Houdart refrains from interpolating, foreshadowing, or removing herself in any way from the event at hand.

For example:  

On a Saturday afternoon near the end of November, Marian was driving a charcoal-gray Fiat Croma slowly down the narrow road from Pontedera to Vicopisano. As she rounded a curve, she saw a man in a tracksuit walking on the shoulder, followed by two women who looked like sisters. All three were carrying canteens. From the way they watched her pass, and the way she saw them squinting to make out the province code on her license plate when she glanced back in the rearview mirror, Marian got the impression that they were very anxious to know who she might be."

We never learn who these people are. In fact, they never appear again. They're simply people on the road, behaving the way people often do.

For that matter, we don't really need to know that Marian was driving a charcoal-gray Fiat. Wouldn't "a gray Fiat" do? Every detail adds a little to the picture, but the level of seemingly random detail tends to detract from the momentum of the plot.

Or course, some passages certainly weigh more heavily than others. For example

At around six that evening, Marian received a visit from the court clerk. He asked her if they could talk. His voice was unsteady. He said he was ashamed of himself for not having had the courage to speak up sooner. He wanted her to know that, from the first day of the hearings, he had been pressured. Marian asked him to be more specific. His face changed and went pale. He seemed unwilling to continue. Marian insisted. They were alone, she said. He could speak freely. He was still hesitant. He said that, if he told her, it might mean trouble for both of them.

This sinister episode lingers in memory, but in the end, it figures no more prominently in the story than the pedestrians on the road.

I finished the book that afternoon, puzzled and refreshed. I have no intention of giving away the ending. I'm not sure there was an ending.

While I chopped the onions and celery for an ad hoc spaghetti sauce, I pulled two CDs that we rarely listen to from the rack. The first was The Essential Ben Webster. I'm not a big Webster fan, but listening to this album I began to understand that his appeal lies less in any dazzling virtuosity as a tenor saxophone soloist than in a boogie-woogie spark that drives his work.

The second CD offered a similar lesson: the flamenco guitarist Moraito has never been viewed in the same light as Vicente Amigo, Chicuelo, or Paco de Lucia as a solo guitarist, but Moraito comes from a large family of musicians, and here, in Mora Morao (2004) he maintains a robust village energy, bolstered by a chorus of clappers and shouters with names like Rafa, Bo, and Chicharo.

There was a time when I could distinguish a alegrías from a sevillana or a soleá por bulería from a bulería por soleá with ease. Not any more. But little matter. It's time to relax and enjoy the music.

We woke the next morning to the foot of snow that I mentioned earlier. The power was off, though we could see porch-lights glowing across the street. By the time I got into the kitchen Hilary had already fetched our small green camping suitcase from the basement. She'd set up a flashlight lantern on the counter and was heating water on the stove for coffee. 

We went out for a walk around the block at sunrise. A narrow plow had made its way through the neighborhood, but otherwise the streets were dead. At the end of the block one large branch had snapped from the weight of snow and fallen across the street.

During our first stab at the driveway our neighbor Sean, who was also out shoveling, came over to chat. He'd been awakened by a "pop" a 3 a.m., noticed the power was out, and called Xcel. Hilary asked him how the winter had been treating him. "Too long. Scott and I are headed for Nashville in a week," he said with a laugh. "His parents live there."

Hilary also carried on a conversation with our neighbor Rocky when she came out to shovelg. She was bummed because her new solar panels were now covered with a foot of snow.

After our first phase of shoveling we took another walk around the block. I spotted our neighbor Elfrida, three houses down, waving at us from the window. That was odd. On our return trip ten minutes later she came out on the stoop and called to us.

"My electricity is gone," she said, in her thick German accent. "I don't have a little phone. Would you call the police? I don't have any power." Elfie is one of the neighborhood's few remaining original residents. She and her husband must have moved here in 1947 or thereabouts. After the war.

"Yes, don't worry," Hilary said. "No one has power. We'll call."

I was about to head out for phase two of the shoveling—the really heavy stuff out by the street—when I heard our neighbor Brendan's snow blower roaring. I waited. Fifteen minutes later he was finished with his driveway, and ours, and neighbor Sam's next door. (I own him a six-pack of Surly.)

Our final neighborhood interaction took place that afternoon, when Lee and Joe, a young couple who moved in a few houses down the street two or three years ago, stopped by. "We hear your power's out," Lee said, "so we brought you these." She handed me a zip-lock bag of chocolate-chip cookies. Sweet.

"If you need anything, just let us know," she said.

"Oh, we'll be fine," I said. "We've got the Jøtul going, and we've got a lot of flashlights."

She looked a bit confused, so I added, "It's a Swedish stove." Perhaps that didn't help.

We spent much of the day sitting in the den, judiciously feeding the Jøtul (made in Norway, as it turns out) as we read. Hilary, who was reading An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, would say, "Did you know that when a bat emits a sound, it's so loud that its ears momentarily shield themselves from the noise?"

A few minutes later, looking up from the book I had started on, The Serpent Coiled in Naples, I read her a passage like this:

"Melody was born in Naples. So they claim, and who am I to dispute what people say of themselves? They may overdo the sauce a little, but I’d much rather it be them for a change and not me. Some people flee an unsupported assertion as if suddenly sprayed with insecticide. Others reach for their intellectual weapons of choice. We are, on the whole, expected to be reasonable. The poet Giacomo Leop­ardi, whose ghost I will later pursue, says we place too much value on reason for it is the enemy of nature and he was no subscriber to the Whole Earth Catalogue. Melody was born in Naples. The claim, wild though it is, is not wholly without substance."

As darkness descended we threw another log on the fire and donned our headlamps. It was still cozy by the stove but the back of the house was cooling off. We'd grab a down comforter from the closet before going to bed.

 

The Late Winter Blahs, and How to Beat Them

 

As the gray days of early March rolled in, we conceived of a perfect antidote to the later winter blahs—go to St. Paul.

It was a Thursday morning. We made a quick stop at the Center for Book Arts in downtown Minneapolis, where some very dense and interesting hand-made paper by a woman named Mary Hark was on display. The sheets were a far cry from anything resembling an actual book, but they were coarse, earthy, and cool.

"My shoulders and arms aware of the weights of buckets filled with pulp," Hark writes, "pulling and couching one sheet of paper at a time, with only the soft sound of water dripping from my mould into the vat ...."

We saw the Vikings stadium close up and personal for the first time (it's BIG) while trying to find the 6th Street entry ramp onto I-94, then hurried across town to catch a Schubert Club Courtroom Concert featuring young singers from the Minnesota Opera. I was prepared to drive around for awhile in search of a parking spot, or even to splurge for a slot in the ramp, but we came upon perhaps the best open meter we've ever scored, right in front of the Landmark Center. It was going to be a good day.

World's best parking spot

The recital was outstanding. It featured six young singers doing arias and duets from Song Poet, Don Giovanni, and Lucia de Lammermoor and a couple of Spanish zarazuelas, all to spirited piano accompaniment. The moods were varied but the voices were lovely and the emotions almost uniformly powerful.

After the performance we fed a couple more dollars into the meter and walked two blocks past handsome if slightly bedraggled building facades to the Grey Duck Tavern for lunch. It's situated in the old Lowry Hotel and the windows face south, toward the Mississippi, which lets in lots of nice light. The food was pretty good, the waitresses were friendly. The state wrestling tournament was in session, and we watched groups of geeky high school kids from out of town wander the sidewalks while we ate.  

 Our final stop was the Grand Hand Art Gallery on Grand Avenue, famous for its locally made pottery. Lots of artistry to me to admire and Hilary to draw ideas and inspiration from.

As we returned to the car we passed a row of apartment building where some good friends lived very early in their relationship, and I felt a twang of nostalgia as we passed.

__________________________

Two days later, the gray returned, and we headed east again, this time in the direction of one of the most obscure corners of St. Paul, unknown even to most residents: the Grey Cloud Dune Scientific and Natural Area. To reach it you must traverse the backstreets of suburban Cottage Grove, past a grade school that might have been built in 1960 and two immense warehouses. The first one is empty, though it bears the name Ryan Construction. I noticed on a sign our near the street that 832,000 square feet of space are available for lease. One block down, on the other side of the street, Renewal by Anderson is in the process of building a new warehouse that looks to be about the same size ...

What interested me more were the horned larks we saw rising from the side of the road here and there along Ideal Avenue. That's a nice name, and a nice bird. I wouldn't call it a sign of spring, but they do tend to appear at this time of year. You rarely get a look as good as one here in the photo. They're always flying off as you approach.

We parked at the end of the road, just past the decrepit farm with the barking dog and the MAGA flag hoisted on the pole, and hiked out across the dunes on  crusty snow, down the hill to the railroad tracks,  with a frozen backwater of the Mississippi River a few hundred yards below us and the steaming stacks of the Flint Hills refinery in the distance on the far side of the river. 

It was good to see the forms of the dead weeds against the blinding snow, and to see the contours of the land and feel it underfoot. At one point I thought I heard the croak of a passing sandhill crane in the distance. A little early for that; maybe it was a crow? 

We stood on the tracks and watched four bald eagles soaring high above us, with the orb of the sun trying to break through the thick gray clouds. The ballast under the tracks consisted of uniformly superb chunks of granite, as far as I could tell, and those colors offered a vivid and welcome contrast to the bleached out black-and-white landscape we were hiking through.

Our next stop was a cafe on Payne Avenue called East Side Thai. This is not a neighborhood we visit often. On a cold gray Saturday, we could have been anywhere: Philadelphia? Newark? The posted sign limited the seating to 43 people, but I can hardly imagine it would hold that many. Hilary enjoyed watching the locals arrive for their take-out orders.  The food was tasty and the staff was friendly. Who cares if the upholstery on the booth was ripped?

A few blocks down the hill we pulled into the parking lot at Morelli's liquor store, a no-frills establishment famous for its low prices, full-page newspaper ads, and no-nonsense tone. The aisles are narrow, and the joint is always bustling. Minnesota Monthly describes it as "a rare liquor store that not only sells liquor, wine and beer, but also offers authentic Italian sausages, meats and pasta, along with takeout pizza. Cash only." Delivery men bringing in cases of beer and wine on aluminum two-wheelers are a frequent shopping hindrance. On our last visit we bought one of their huge bake-at-home pizzas. This time, we stuck to the wine.

Undercover Brother

Our last stop was the conservatory at Como Park. To fill your eyes with green as you walk through the fern- and tree-filled halls satisfies some primal visual thirst. It's not quite like a week in Costa Rica, but it's nice. The foxgloves and cyclamens in the sunken garden are lovely, too.

After the Snow

It was a lot of snow, but it was light, and it arrived in manageable stages. Three inches one day, three inches the next morning, a heavier blanket the following evening and overnight.

Newscasters made a big deal out of the projected accumulation, with good reason, but a glance at any decent web weather page told a more nuanced story.

Also (as I may have mentioned already) the snow was unusually light. Which is not to say that travel wasn't difficult. We didn't go anywhere during the worst of it, and I noticed at nine o'clock Thursday morning that neither a snowplow nor any other vehicle had ventured down our little street. That's a first.

In the midst of the shoveling, we found time to go out for one or two walks through the neighborhood, and along the way we ran into a few of our neighbors. Returning home from an afternoon walk Wednesday up to the parkway and down through a copse of trees we refer to as "the pines," we came upon our neighbor Barb at the end of the block, pushing snow off her driveway with a galvanized metal contraption that looked like it belonged in a county historical society museum.

"You should get a motor for that," I said.

"This is my Finnish shovel," she replied. "We have a snow-blower, but our neighbor borrowed it, and he isn't up yet. I've got to get this snow cleared off. My husband has some heart issues. We're headed up to our cabin near Cloquet this afternoon."

That sounded like a bad idea to me.

"Up near Cotton?" I hazarded a guess.

"No, that's farther north. We turn west at Black Bear Casino. Tomorrow we're going on to Cook to do some dog-sledding. I've always wanted to do that, and some friends gave us a gift certificate for our anniversary."

"Our family cabin was on the west end of Lake Vermilion," I said. "We drove through Cook all the time."

"That's a long drive," Barb said.

"Before they built the freeway it was five-and-a-half hours. "

Barb is short and stout, with short gray hair and an animated expression. She and her husband have lived in the neighborhood for 45 years; that's ten years longer than we've lived here. Over the years I've seen her a few times in passing, usually planting annuals at the base of the birch tree in her front yard, but I'd never met her.

"We moved in in 1976," she said, "right before the real estate market took off, and we've never been able to get out!"

"Well, it is a nice neighborhood." Hilary said.  "Lots of dog-walkers, and young people moving in recently."

"The neighbors across the street," Barb pointed, "are having a baby. It will be fun to have little kiddies running around again."

The next morning during our daily pre-breakfast walk around the neighbor we came upon Jay Jay, whom we hadn't seen in months. She was shoveling a path across her front yard. "It's for the dog," she said. "He's got to have a place to come out and pee."

A barred owl had paid us several visits in the previous few week, and I asked her if she'd spotted one. Her house looks off into the woods and down to a wooded backwater of Bassett Creek.

"No. What kind of owl did you say? We see a lot of crows."

Another turn of the road and down the hill, we met up with another neighbor, out walking his dog. We've spoken in passing for decades, but I still don't know his name.

"Sorry your house didn't sell last fall," I said. "I suppose you'll put it back on the market next spring?"

"I don't know," he said grimly. "With interest rates going up, I think that window may have closed."

"We chatted with your neighbor Barb yesterday," Hilary said. "She told us they were heading north."

"Yeah, they went up to go dogsledding. People up there love the snow. Snowmobiles and all that. Cross-country skiing."

"We're happy just to go skiing down at the golf course," Hilary said.

"Before I had this dog, I had a Siberian husky. I had a harness, and he'd pull me around on skies! That was a long time ago." He laughed and took another drag on his cigarette.

As we neared the house, we met up with our next-door neighbor Rocky, out walking her little black dog, Dempsey. I didn't recognize her because she was all bundled up—so was the dog, in a pink crocheted coat—and she was walking alongside a guy we'd never seen before. We said hello, and while Dempsey came over to sniff us out, we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then I said, "Who's your friend?"

"This is Steve."

"We're the next-door neighbors," I said. "It's nice of you to come by to help Rocky with the shoveling." He smiled.

Once we were out of earshot I said, "Typical old-person remark."

Hilary said, "Yeah."

Thus does the fabric of a neighborhood develop—a decade, a generation at a time.

_____________________________

We spent most of our blizzard time indoors, of course. Hilary made a great deal of progress on her current bookclub book, a novel based on the life of the goddess Circe. I found myself skipping around quite a bit, which for me is not unusual. First there was The Letters of Rayond Chandler:

"In the long run ... the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time ... He can't do it by trying, because the kind of style I'm thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. But granted that you have one, you can only project it on paper by thinking about something else."

A few lines later Chandler adds:

"No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes."

A few hours later, while trying to make space for some books on a shelf, I removed a copy of Etienne Gilson's classic Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, intending to take it to the basement. Before assigning it to that shadowy place, I opened it at random and read:

"For Plato, the union of soul and body is the accidental result of a Fall; the soul is shut up in a body as in a prison or a tomb by a violence done to its nature, and that is why the whole effort of philosophy is directed to effect its deliverance from the body. A Christian on the other hand must admit in the first place, that the union of soul and body is natural, for it is willed by that God Who Himself declared that all his works are good: et vidit quod erant valde bona, and no natural state can be the result of a fall."

Then there was essayist Charles Lamb, relishing the no-nonsense approach to card-playing practice of Mrs. Battle.

"This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them."

Hilary and I played a few rounds of cribbage ourselves in front of the fire. And I played quite a few more on the computer in the course of the day.

Then there was Bee Wilson, in Consider the Fork, informing me how a Japanese knife is made and evaluating the pros and cons of a no-stick frying pan. That was followed by the witty and down-to-earth astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, in Death by Black Hole, sharing such tidbits of knowledge as that the number of atoms in an area of deep space 100,000 kilometers on a side is the same as the number that would fit in an empty refrigerator. Staggering emptiness. I'm glad I don't live there: no one around and nothing to eat!

I finally settled in to a novel by the late great John Berger about a junkyard community on the outskirts of London as seen from the point of view of a stray dog named King.

The temperature was -11 this morning, but the skies were clear. We passed no one on our morning walk. Three deer ran across the road a hundred yards in front of us, slipping and sliding on the de-icer, I guess, though we haven't see the neighborhood owl in a week.

The bright sun looks spectacular on the newly fallen snow.

Great, Good, Fair, or Amusing: A Few Recent Films

 
Living

A "gentleman" bureaucrat, Rodney Williams, circa 1953, facing a serious medical prognosis, realizes that he's never "really" lived, and decides to do something about it. Trouble is, he doesn't quite know how. But this film isn't your average madcap exercise in better-late-than-never carpe diem nonsense. Bill Nighy was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the tight-lipped central figure, and the film wouldn't be much without him, but the entire production is sophisticated, from the use of squarish 35-millimeter color stock, which looks to have been discovered in a deceased WWII documentarian's trunk, to the office staff's nuanced display of petulance, deference, and diffidence in maintaining the buttoned-up atmosphere over which Mr. Williams has held sway for years. But Aimée Lou Wood, in the role of the good-hearted office secretary, also plays a crucial part in the unfolding drama. Brilliant.

The screenplay, by Kazuo Ishiguro, also received an Oscar nod. I saw the Akira Kurosawa film on which it's based, Ikiru, many years ago. I hardly remember it, but I liked the recent version better, perhaps because the appeal of the film is based so much on nuances of facial expression and tone of voice. Kurosawa's most popular films feature Toshiro Mifune, a vigorous actor who makes Jack Nicholson look like a wallflower. Takashi Shimura, the star of Ikiru, is a far more sedate and enigmatic figure. 

 Turn Every Page

What could be more fascinating than a documentary about an editor and his client, a hard-working biographer whose door-stopper-sized books come out at infrequent intervals? Nothing, if the editor is Robert Gottlieb and the biographer is Robert Caro. Gottlieb's daughter made the film, which helped. Both men turn out to be somewhat different—more humble, gracious, idiosyncratic, and interesting—than one might expect. A variety of commentators appear briefly, from Ethan Hawke and Colm Toibin to the New Yorker's David Remnick and Mary (Comma Queen) Norris. One of many highlights is when Caro recounts how he tracked down the political operative, in a trailer home in south Texas, who provided the fake votes that elected LBJ to elective office for the first time. Another is the effort made by Toibin to convey how important the semi-colon can be to maintain is certain breathing rhythm in a sentence. Gottlieb personifies the sympathetic yet no-nonsense editor, and he describes his relationship with Caro well. The love of books is everywhere. So, also, is the conviction that what books reveal can make a difference.  

Good Night Oppy

This documentary about the 2003 NASA mission that sent two rovers to Mars is full of wonderful bits. Though we've seen many of them before, it's fun to see them all lined up in a row, along with a narrative thread about the project and personal stories of the engineers and scientists involved intermixed with maps, reenactments, and genuine footage from Mars. The two rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, were designed to operate for 90 days. Spirit kept going for almost fifteen years. One unexpected turns of events was that the ferocious dust-storms on Mar, far from undermining the physical integrity of the rovers, actually proved to be beneficial, wiping away the sand and dust that would otherwise have rendered the solar cells useless. 

 Aftersun

An atmosphere of melancholy hangs over this Scottish film, which depicts a vacation taken by a young girl and her father at a Turkish resort by means of commonplace holiday events interspersed with  random videos taken by the girl herself. Her parents are divorced, and her dad, though good-natured and affectionate, seems to be struggling with demons we never learn much about. He practices tai chi, gives his daughter quite a bit of latitude to play pinball with strangers much older than her, and never really comes alive except on the dance floor. The few scenes of the woman as an adult tell us little about anything, and viewers are likely to leave the theater disappointed. Paul Mescal received an Oscar nomination as the listless dad, though I don't quite see why.   

II. Matinee Fare

The Fablemans

Steven Spielberg has made quite a few popular films. Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, E.T. I can't remember them all. But few have approached greatness. True to form, The Fablemans is a matinee diversion with high production values but little depth. I enjoyed it. Anyone who sees it will enjoy it. But no one will be gripped by it. Throughout the film I kept thinking of other films that did the same things better, made similar scenes seem more real: Licorice Pizza, A Serious Man, Little Miss Sunshine, Ladybug. It's worth noting that Judd Hirsch received an Oscar nomination for a bit part as the family's estranged and embarrassing  uncle. He's the only really interesting character in an otherwise sad and sweet but  "milquetoast" film about a shy kid who turns to film-making as a means of escape from  things, including the slightly weird dynamics of his family life.

See How They Run

This semi-comical period mystery works largely as a result of Saoirse Ronan's wry performance as the unwanted rookie side-kick to Sam Rockwell's world-weary alcoholic detective. Free of the excesses of the big-budget Knives Out series, it putters along a notch or two above the standard PBS Agatha Christie fare.  It would be hard not to like it.

Knives Out: Glass Onion

We've gotten used to Daniel Craig's bad Southern accent, which, to be fair, is better than Lawrence Olivier's accent as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And the mystery is intriguing. It's a star-studded, extravagant, corny, and ridiculous romp.