A Historic Evening with Norton

For many years our habit has been to take Norton out for dinner in the spring as a way of saying thanks for the opportunity of working so often and so closely with him on his books during the previous year. Some years we splurge—for example, Cafe Ena, Kâluna, Martina—in other years we take a shot at a wild and "fun" place such as the Beer Cave in Hopkins or the food truck outside Utipils brewery on Bassett Creek near Norton's house.

This year we settled on Maison Margaux in the warehouse district. Why? Because Norton wanted to go there. Why? Because a mutual friend's son works there, and besides, Norton's uncle used to own the place, back when it was better known as Ribneck Furs. He hadn't been inside since he was a kid.

Hilary and I also had good reason to enjoy the choice. We're Francophiles, of a sort. One of Hilary's ancestors was an early immigrant to Quebec, and we've spent at least four months over the decades touring the French provinces, though not recently, and Maison Marguax has established itself as a place to eat good old-fashioned provincial French cooking.

A glance at the menu confirms that it's true. Hilary and I ate aligot at a country inn in the Aubrac, a seldom visited region of south-central France. It consists of a gooey mass of mashed potatoes and gruyere cheese. I never thought I'd see that item on a menu here in the States.

I was more interested in the salade nicoise, which can be assembled in several ways. Most appealing of all, to my mind, was the cassoulet, a traditional dish of southwest France consisting of white beans, duck, sausage, herbs, and other unidentifiable elements. The residents of Carcassonne and Castelnaudary have had a centuries-old dispute as to where the dish originated and what the ingredients ought to be. Ford Madox Ford dilates at length on the issue in his book-length essay, Provence. Hil and I went to Castelnaudary years ago just to see how they made it.

One thing I can say about cassoulet is that it's always heavy, and oily, and tasty, and it gives you a stomach ache. I couldn't resist.

Norton went for the bouillabaisse, and Hilary ordered the cauliflower soufflé and the onion soup. I nursed a cocktail that seemed to be a combination of absinthe and grapefruit juice. It was good, but the cassoulet really called out for a robust red wine. I asked our personable waiter, Patrick, during one of his passes by our table, "I don't suppose you've got a rock-bottom glass of Chateaunuef du Pape on the wine list?" I was joking, and he knew it. He smiled and shook his head. "No. But I do have a cabernet franc that might be just the ticket."

As you may know, cabernet franc is most often a blending grape, dry and tending toward simplicity and harshness, but it turned out to be just the thing to cut through and complement the thick, oily, stew. Plouzeau Chinon.

It was a fine year at Nodin Press, with several stunning poetry collections and a top-flight memoir, but we didn't talk much about that. More  about a few upcoming projects, and how the tomato plants were coming along. 

It was a fabulous spring evening, there were lots of people out on the street and sitting on the terrace alongside the building. Big blue sky, and the passing years count for less than the passing minutes. 

   

What We Can Learn from Kant's Mistakes

Immanuel Kant was born on Earth Day, April 22, three-hundred years ago. The son of a saddle-maker, he eventually became one of Europe's most famous philosophers. A year-long string of conferences and celebrations have been scheduled in Germany to commemorate the event.
In the United States, not so much.

The director of the Einstein forum in Potsdam, German, Susan Neiman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the abiding importance of Kant's thought. It carries the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant."  Neiman is the author of a recent book called What We Can Learn from the Germans, so she ought to know what she's talking about.  But I could find very little in the article to convince me that Kant's ideas are worth examining in any great detail.

Her comments can be stated without much fuss: Kant "proved" that freedom, justice, and the world beyond our senses exist.  (Was there ever any doubt?)

"Kant [she writes] was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?"

A passage like this strikes me as borderline nonsense. Children begin to develop a notion of freedom the first time they're sent to their room for some foul deed, and they find that they've lost some of that freedom. The concept of justice follows soon after, as they begin to brood over the fact that their big sister "started it all" yet suffered no consequences. Acts of freedom and conscience are a commonplace in the lives of most adults.

In the eighteenth century the concepts of fellow-feeling and the "moral sense" developed in England, France, and elsewhere. Kant, to his discredit, rejected those concepts. He argued that a truly moral act could never be a pleasant one. If you helped an elderly man across the street and felt good about it, shame on you! In Kant's worldview, goodness was basically a synonym for duty. But who is to determine where our duty lies? And how can this devotion to duty be squared with the idea of personal freedom? And where does the genuinely moral element come in?  

But Kant is mostly known these days for his analyses of how the mind works.  Here, too, confusion reigns. Yet we can learn something from Kant's missteps. For example, the distinction he makes between analytic and synthetic judgments is worth looking into. In the former judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. In the later, the predicate adds something to the subject. The distinction here is sound, but the words Kant uses to describe it are not. An analytic judgment isn't really a judgment at all, but simply an analysis. When we analyze something, we take it apart, separating and identifying its constituent parts. When we judge something, we assert that the thing, considered as a whole, has some sort of value.

Philosophers tend to love analysis yet are wary of judgment. Why? Because judgment is always personal. There is no way to "prove" that the Mona Lisa is beautiful (I don't care for it much myself) or that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. But the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 follows  of necessity once we've agreed to work in the decimal system of numbering. It's already part of the scheme. It's an "analytic judgment." However, it's equally "true" that 2 + 2 + 11 ... if you happen to be calculating in base three.

Kant went on the posit two realms of judgment, one of them "prior to" experience, the other following upon experience. He was eager to locate a domain of truths that weren't merely reiterations of  the presuppositions involved, but had transcended, somehow, the rough and tumble of experience. He referred to such truths as acts of a priori synthetic judgments, and many Kant enthusiasts today consider this transcendental realm as Kant's great gifr to the world.  

I find it amusing that neither of the examples of such thought given in the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually possess the required attributes of the form:

Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband.

Some bodies are heavy? Well, a body would typically be described as something that has weight, so the remark is analytic. It doesn't meet the requirements.

All husbands are male? Here in the 21st century, we all know this to be factually untrue.

Kant himself considered mathematical processes as "synthetic," Heaven knows why.

 

The most glaring errors to be found in Kant's work are those that pertain to the differences between the world in which we live and our impressions of that world. It almost goes without saying that such impressions are always incomplete, provisional, and tinged with error. Kant make a great fuss about this fact, however, even going so far as to suggest that many elements of our experience derive not from the world we inhabit but from the architecture and tools supplied by our own brains.

The French intellectual and novelist Madame de Staël,  author of the first popular analysis of German culture to reach a wider Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote:

The leading imperative forms of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrated that everything we per­ceive is subject to these two forms. He concludes that they are in ourselves and not in external objects, and that in this sense it is our understanding that imposes laws upon external nature rather than receiving them from it.

From this and other silly notions arose the idea that we can never actually form clear and adequate impressions of the things around us. The only things we can know "for sure" are the impressions themselves, locked within our heads. Kant referred to these impressions as "phenomena," and in the course of time a field of study has developed—phenomenology—devoted to exploring the ins and outs of these purely mental bits of data.

The entire field is illusionary.

Just a few years ago, MIT published a monograph titled Phenomenology in which we:

Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead ... But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamen­tally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock... Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.

The author somehow fails to notice that "true" appearance differs here from "mere" appearance by further investigation, not of a phenomenological event inside our head, but of a real event out in a pond. We improve our understanding of the world by going out into it. 

The kernel of Kant's thought that needs to be explored and developed is the judgment, through which we assert the goodness, truth, or beauty of a thing. Or more strictly, of an event.

Value is of the essence of reality. We can defend our values, perhaps eloquently, but we can't "prove" them, because they apply to aspects of the world we share with others, rather than closed systems of our own devising. And others may react to the same things differently.

Kant describes his mission, near the start of his Critique of Pure Reason, as one of distinguishing a "pure" from an "empirical" cognition.  Underlying such an impulse is the desire for some sort of depth and transcendence, and these are things we can all aspire to. But such enlightenment cannot be gained through the pursuit of logical purity. Rather, the quest leads us through the muck of experience, guided by our conscience, taste, fellow feeling, curiosity, and judgment.

One of Kant's admirers wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that "it's easy to find Kant mystifying or off-putting unless you have the time, patience and sympathy to discover and properly reflect on his remarkably original work."

I have the time, patience, sympathy. I have reflected for years, on and off. Nothing good has come of it. I'm going birding.

Poetry Month Kaput

The French poet and thinker Paul Valery once described a poem as "a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." That may be true, but I've found that in order to appreciate a poem it's often necessary to be in a poetic state of mind already. Otherwise, the concatenation of words never springs to life, but remains in an annoying state of pretentiousness, irrelevancy, and disarray.

That's the way I often feel as my eyes drift across the first few lines of a poem I meet up with in the pages of the New Yorker, for example. Most often I've never heard of the poet in question, and in any case, I'm really not in the mood. I'd rather read a movie review or flip through the pages looking for the cartoons.

Yet there are times when I make a point of drawing a book of poems from the shelf. I may not be in a fully "poetic" state of mind, but I want to get there. And this raises the question of what this state of mind  entails. Valery differentiates it from the more common state in which we use words merely to exchange information. In the "poetic universe" (Valery's phrase) a sequence of words goes beyond utilitarian effect. They command our attention, our respect. They reveal to us, along with a measure of pain and personal idiosyncrasy, perhaps, a vision of balance and harmony. We admire their form. We'd be happy to read them or hear them again.

Yes, but is the world being described really like that? The mission of poetry—a term that, properly conceived, includes all the arts—is to remind us that it is. There's a time for following the news, exchanging information, and getting things done. And there's a time for seeking out that poetic state of mind that offers a deeper, loftier, and more intimate perspective.

I didn't read much poetry during national Poetry Month. I brought home a nice edition of Philip Larkin's poems from the deacquisition cart in the lobby of the public library, but I found it dismal; I wasn't in the mood. I read a few poems from a book by Jenny Xie called Eye Level that I enjoyed somewhat, though they were spare, and soon began to sound like well edited journal extracts. I attended a poetry reading at Magers & Quinn at which three of Minnesota's premier poets, Norita Dittberner-Jax, Sharon Chmielarz, and Freya Manfred, read from recent works. It was a fine evening, though I especially enjoyed chatting with one of Freya's sons and with Norita's two daughters before the reading.

Earlier in the month I pulled a copy of Horace's Satires off the shelf, and had a high old time reacquainting myself with that genial master, as if we'd just met at a coffee shop to shoot the bull. At one point a remark by Vivian Gornick came to mind: "In the presence of shared temperament conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow." Yes, a poem is, or sometimes can be, a conversation.

Wandering the back yard on cool, sunny April mornings as the plants leaf out  also has a strong poetic dimension, albeit evanescent. Better yet: wandering the yard with Hilary, planning what to move where, and admiring the new growth. 

Might it be that the poetic state of mind has less to do with literary stimulation than personal disposition? It's possible. But we can also groom ourselves for easier access to that universe of harmony and balance and fellow-feeling, simply by stepping outside, or reading a poem. And sticking with it for a while.

       

Film Fest 2

As the film fest draws to a close, a few works stand out. In fact, none of the films we saw lacked merit. But to the curious reader who says, "I don't have much time. Recommend just one," I would reply, "That's not how it works. But how about one of these?"

The Snow Leopard takes place in a Tibetan-speaking region of Qinghai province in northwest China, high desert country, where Jinpa's sheep pen has been raided by a snow leopard. Jinpa won't let the leopard go until he receives compensation for his nine dead sheep. The local DNR officers tell him that he's required by law to do so. A TV crew of high-spirited young men from the city has been dispatched to document the event, one of whom, by coincidence, went to school with Jinpa's younger brother, Nyina, who's since become a Buddhist monk. Before long the Chinese police have arrived to help sort things out, though they don't speak Tibetan. It's a first-class mess, full of shouting but also fun, and the tone is enhanced by dreamy mystical interludes suggesting how Nyina got so interested in leopard welfare. The CGI leopards, mother and cub, are also fascinating to watch.

Mountain Boy is based on a series of children's books, which is important to keep in mind as we follow the improbable adventures of Suhail, a young boy who's been cast out by his father and spends much of his time alone, up in the rugged mountains of the United Arab Emirates. The film details the boy's quest to find his mother, guided by nothing but a rare pearl that she gave him before vanishing from his life. The landscapes are lovely, the people he meets invariably helpful, and the atmosphere might have been drawn from the Arabian Nights.

Songs of the Earth focuses on the other end of the life cycle, as we take in a stunning Norwegian fjord from the point of view of an octogenarian who's lived in the valley his entire life.  He happens to be director Margareth Olin’s father, and there's an element of corn-ball in the presentation, as he and his wife sing Norwegian folk songs and reminisce briefly about the hardships of living and farming in such a remote location. The better part of the film is devoted to stunning drone and close-up photography of waterfalls, glaciers, small plants and berries, rocky cliffs, exotic raptors, and other such things. The subtle orchestral soundtrack adds to the mood of wonder. The film has been described as "a magnificent existential journey,” but that's overstating the case. It's a simple film, and in some places it  teeters toward monotony, but the overall effect is quietly glorious.

About Dry Grasses was perhaps the strongest film I saw at the fest. The director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is an old hand at developing mundane scenes filled with long and seemingly aimless conversations into films of excruciating but weighty import, for example, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Wild  Pear Tree. Here he follows a few months in the life of Samet, an art teacher from Isanbul who's spent the last four years at a school in rural Anatolia fulfilling his mandatory service. He considers himself above the pettiness and mediocrity of his colleagues and his situation, and he may be right. But he gets himself into trouble by becoming too friendly with one of his young female students, and the plot is  given added dimension when Nuray, a teacher from a neighboring village, enters the scene. She's been disabled by a terrorist bomb, and she challenges Samet's elitism, which strikes her as detached and narcissistic.  

One critic has insightfully compared Samet to the "superfluous man" of nineteenth-century Russian novels. He writes: "Confusing his “civilised” city roots with moral and intellectual superiority over his village students and contemporaries, Samet at once seeks to find answers to his existential condition while barely containing his inner toxicity."

In Our Day, the latest "flash" cinema from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, offers more benign forms of hierarchical interaction. It consists of two mini-dramas that have little to do with each other. One focuses on an aging poet who's recently become fashionable with younger readers, the other on a retired actress giving a few words of advice to a novice who's decided to pursue acting as a career. Much of the later tale, however, is devoted to idle chatter about cats. In the former tale, the elder poet's responses to questions from a young film-maker and a fan take a back seat to games of "scissors, paper, rock" and the elder poet's desire to start drinking and smoking again, against doctor's orders. It may be true that the actress and the poet were once involved in a relationship—they both like to put hot pepper sauce in their ramen. If so, then the fact hardly seems significant. But Hong has learned, like Jerry Seinfeld, that a film "about nothing" can still hold our attention ... at least for a while.

The Gullspång Miracle is a bizarre documentary about two pious Norwegian sisters who buy an apartment in Gullspång, Sweden, from Olaug, a woman who looks exactly like a third sister who killed herself years ago. A bit of research reveals that Olaug is, indeed, a twin who was given up for adoption during WWII. There are tearful reunions with other family members back on the farm in Norway, but Olaug, who was raised in a cultured  Swedish family, doesn't really fit in, and the situation grows even more strained when she becomes convinced that her twin sister didn't kill herself, but was murdered. It's a mystery without a detective. Among other things.    

 

International Film Fest 2024: a few picks

The International film fest is back in town, and not a moment too soon. Thumbing through the booklet, I see new films by Hong Sang-soo, Ken Loach, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and many others. Yet for the most part, our choices are determined on time of day, when we've got free time, and whether the invariably vague two-sentence descriptions sound interesting. My favorites thus far are:

The Old Oak: A busload of refugees arrive from Syria in a depressed and dismal village not far from Durham, England. Some of the locals aren't happy about it. Others are eager to help the new arrivals. The plot revolves around a broken camera, a potential suicide, and cute little dog, and some broken water-pipes. It might sound sentimental, but veteran director Ken Loach broadens the field of view step by step to expose the unpleasant realities of village life after the coal mines have shut down and also the horrors that have brought these newcomers to England.

The Movie Teller: Set in a mining town in Chile's Atacama Desert, this sprawling and colorful film follows the lives of a spunky local family who face unusual challenges when the breadwinner, Medardo, gets injured on the job. Going to the movies on Sunday had always been a family treat, and as family resources dwindle, Medardo's young daughter, María Margarita, develops a talent for re-enacting the films, first to the family, and soon to the wider community, as a way to earn money.

The Home Game: Set in a small town on the west coast of Iceland, this glorified home movie chronicles the efforts of local citizens to bring a FA soccer game to their home field. Trouble is, they no longer have a soccer team. We watch as the son of the former coach cajoles anyone he can think of to sign on, enlists the help of experts to revive the condition of the pitch, and recruits a woman from a nearby village who's among the better players in the vicinity, though the Football Association doesn't allow females to play in the male division. After a year of effort training the squad for this Quixotic endeavor, with plenty of laughter along the way, the team remains in doubt whether their game will be home or away. It all depends on the draw.

Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. This documentary exposes the role of a single hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, in purchasing and dismantling newspaper chains throughout the United States, putting countless journalists out of work and leaving communities large and small without a source of accurate information about what's going on in high places. It focuses on the Denver Post, the Baltimore Sun, and various struggling Bay area publications, highlighting the work of a few dedicated journalists in bringing this form of "vulture capitalism" to light.  The interviews are uniformly crisp and full of information. The graphics are clever and illuminating, though the images of vultures become tiresome through repetition.

What's to be done? It's hard to say. Notions of "government funding" and "a new model" remain vague and largely speculative, while print news circulation continues to decline...

All About the Levkoviches: I suppose there is merit in seeing a film that's not firing on all cylinders. This odd tale focuses on a Hungarian boxing coach, Tamás, and his estranged son, Iván, who's moved to Israel and "gone totally Jew," as Tamas puts it. Iván returns to Hungary with his son to sit shiva when his mother dies, and during that painful and contentious week various elements in the back-story emerge. But the revelations are entirely predictable and Tamás is so relentlessly unpleasant that it isn't much fun to watch.

I guess you can't win them all.  

Wiseman in France - Menus-Plaisirs

In comparison with recent projects focusing on the New York City library system, the Paris Opera, and Boston city government, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest field of inquiry—a family of restaurateurs in a small town in southwest France—might seem small. Yet he has little difficulty sustaining our interest through four unhurried hours of Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros. During this time we join Michel Troisgros as he analyzes a menu with his two sons, listen in as the wait staff discuss their daily assignments, table by table, and watch the ensemble at work as guests arrive. We spend a good deal of time in the kitchen as dishes being prepared.

Interspersed here and there are visits to several nearby farms where Michel and his sons get their meat and vegetables. We tour a cheese warehouse along with the wait-staff, where the owner explains the various storage and rubbing techniques required to age a particular cheese successfully, and stop in at a local vineyard where the restaurant gets much of its wine. The pace is leisurely, the countryside quietly sublime.

In one scene Michel discusses the wine list with his sommelier, who has only been able to secure one bottle of Richbourg—at 5,000 euros. (They already have a patron in mind.) Even the lesser Burgundies don't come cheap.

Wiseman has never been one to explain things or introduce people, and it takes a while to sort out the principal players. The issue is compounded by the fact that one of Michel's son runs his own restaurant a half-hour away. Such an approach can be confusing in the short run, but it forces us to pay close attention to what's going on, minute by minute. Over time a sense of richness, natural bounty, civility, taste, and family feeling develops, and it's a pleasure to experience.

One attribute that's absent from the film is pretension. Everyone seems to be on the same page—producers, suppliers, chefs, line cooks, servers, guests. No one is trying to impress, or gouge, anyone else. Conversation at the tables is casual yet "informed." Dress is informal but crisp. A large percentage of the guests are elderly, as we might expect, considering that the standard eight-course tasting menu with wine parings runs to $600 per head. But we meet plenty of younger folk, too. And the nearest we come to a conflict is in a scene during which Michel samples a dish newly created by his son and finds it to be too hot. "Too much sriracha," he keeps saying. "I'm enjoying it. But too much sriracha."       

The restaurant has been a family-run affair for several generations, and has retained a three-star Michelin rating since 1968. You could make a reservation there yourself, if you happen to be planning a trip to Lyon. But for now, why not just watch the movie.

You can see the whole thing here.

Spring Morning in the Garden

On a cool sunny morning I wander the backyard, stricken with an inexpressible glee as I listen to the chattering birds—is that the first chipping sparrow I hear?—and wonder at the leaves just now springing into view.

There are the raspberries, hanging on along the side of the garage, though they produce fewer berries every year, and we've been replacing them with other things: a volunteer pagoda dogwood and a miniature woodlot where I split wood and sometimes convert the pieces into kindling.

 Out back I come upon the reddish leaves of a very fine chokecherry tree. 

Right next to it is a honeysuckle. They call it an "invasive" and I wish it would invade further.

And right at my feet I notice the buckeye tree that we've been nurturing for a few years, at least to the extent of putting one of those peony supports around it so it doesn't get stepped on.

 I had big plans for the morning, as usual, and now I put them in motion. I take some cuttings from the yellow-twig dogwood in the front yard, and after digging a hole and filling it with soil and mulch, I plant them along the edge of the woods. I doubt if the plant will take, but it's worth a try. Nothing else seems to do well out there.

My final task is to cut back the sage bush that gets bigger every year. As I dump the old but still fragrant branches into the yard waste container alongside the still fragrant Christmas tree I chopped up and tossed in yesterday, a heady and complex smell emerges, and it reminds me of a remark I came across recently by the Japanese poet Sōshitsu, who died in 1527:

In enjoying blossoms, appreciating scents, and loving wine, I am no different from anyone else. Past to present, these three have been favored by stalwarts and sages, and who, from the oldest village elder to the tenderest youth, does not feel the same?

Year after year, we invite the neighbors to come help themselves to a few springs if they need some fresh sage.

You're also welcome to come take a few. But not quite yet.