The Mystery of Matisse

Baltimore was recently ranked among the ten most dangerous cities in the United States—along with Detroit, Newark, Camden, Cleveland, and Memphis. It’s our good luck, then, that a magnificent collection of artworks by Henri Matisse owned by the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art is currently on exhibit here at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Everyone loves Matisse, I suspect, in the same way that everyone loves Monet, but for the sake of different effects. Matisse’s color schemes and decorative patterns are inordinately pleasing—so much so that they have influenced several generations of department store decorators. We’re more likely to be dumbfounded by the simplicity of his works than by their complexity. Anodyne rather than challenging, placid rather than angst-ridden, they subvert every value held dear by modernists, post-modernists, conceptual artists—and the critics who write about them. The same clichés may creep in here and there—pushing the boundaries, exploring new worlds. But Matisse, like Bach, filled a world rather than merely discovering one.

It seems that commentators often can find nothing better to do in describing Matisse’s work than cite the master himself, at those places in his letters and books where he speaks about harmony and line and sincerity. Such remarks could be applied to many artists in one way or another. And yet, they take on added meaning in the context of the specific lines and colors we're standing in the midst of.

"In speaking of a melon one uses both hands to express it by a gesture, and so both lines defining a form must determine it. Drawing is like an expressive gesture, but it has the advantage of permanency."

Reading these lines, we feel that Matisse is concerned about form and expression...but also that he likes melons.

And how about this one: "For me, the subject of a picture and its background have the same value, or, to put it more clearly, there is no principle feature, only the pattern is important. The picture is formed by the combination of surfaces, differently colored."

Paintings from every stage of Matisse's career are included in the show. This in itself makes it interesting. Looking at a given canvas, we're likely to be pleased. Then we ask ourselves: How can it be so simple? Then we begin to notice that the colors and patterns involved are actually a horrible mishmash. We notice that colors on different parts of a given canvas have been selected with less regard to what a window frame or an apple actually looks like than to how the color works within the ensemble. But then the opposite notion enters our head. The pages of that book there on the table are exactly the right color. That gauze curtain shielding the rainy day outside the window looks exactly like a gauze curtain letting in a little light.

An exhibit as large as the one on display here in Minneapolis gives us ample opportunity to compare and contrast. Some of the painting are overworked, and a few of the drawings epitomize “bad drawing,” with every line heavily over-sketched and every pattern laboriously complete.  

One entire wall of the exhibit is devoted to a series of photographs documenting the many iterations Matisse devised and rejected before at last completing the famous pink-and-blue “Large Reclining Nude”—an awkward, unsubtle painting that he might just as well have scuppered early on. 

But such evidence of laborious work over many months reminds us that even the drawings Matisse executed with unparalleled freshness and lyric grace were the result of years of training, practice, dissatisfaction, and repetition.  

And such work isn’t merely a matter of addressing a given subject arranged in front of him.

“I take from nature what I need,” Matisse once wrote, “an expression sufficiently eloquent to suggest my thoughts. I painstakingly combine all effects, balancing them in rendering and in color, and I don’t attain this condensation, to which everything contributes, even the size of the canvas, at the first shot. It is a long process of reflection and amalgamation."

I might also observe that Matisse took from nature what he liked--women, flowers, fabric.

The show currently at the Institute gives us ample opportunity to spend some time in the midst of canvases and drawing, lithographs and sculptures, that exude the beauty and feeling that Matisse found in life and succeeded in capturing time and again on paper and canvas. Nor is the beauty merely in the colors and forms involved. It runs much deeper than that. It extends to the sensibilities of the individual who developed such a profound rapport with these things, and to the wider world we all share with him. 

The last room of the show is devoted to the illustrations Matisse made for books--especially that well-known paper-cut creation, Jazz. The colors are bright, the forms are direct. My heart leapt as I looked around--and not just because I love books. Quite a bit of text has been translated and put on display, too. Matisse's musings on art, color, God, work. A fitting conclusion to a remarkable show. 

In the gift shop next door,  it struck me immediately how much grayer the posters on sale were than the originals we'd just been looking at.

Later, having lunch at Gandhi Mahal on Lake Street, I noticed that the plate of food I'd assembled from the buffet looked a lot like a Matisse painting. Well, maybe a little...

I spent the afternoon thumbing through an old copy of Matisse: Rhythm and Line by Jaqueline and Maurice Guillaud, a 650-page, full-color tome that weights five pounds. Ah, bliss! 

Werther at the Met

The planet is full of bad news—jumbo jets disappearing, sovereign states getting nibbled away at, vanishing aquifers, rumbling earthquakes. We turn from these cataclysmic happenings, about which we can do nothing, and observe that modern technology has made it possible for us to jump in the car at dinner-time, drive for fifteen minutes, and watch a “live” performance by some of the world’s greatest musicians, beamed via satellite from the world’s greatest opera house, of a French opera written in the late nineteenth century based on a slim German book written in the late eighteenth century.

This, too, is the world we live in. A world of continuity, amplification, refinement, as experience is transformed into art and the art is subsequently recast, rethought, modified to suit a new sensibility.

The plot of Werther could hardly be simpler—unlike Il Travatore or Simon Boccenegra, for example. Charlotte’s mother has died, and she, along with her kid sister Sophie, is responsible for raising their four or five younger siblings. Her mother had expressed the wish that Charlotte marry the dependable and agreeable Albert, and Charlotte acquiesces, more to honor her mother than out of any deep-rooted affection. In fact, Charlotte is so deeply invested in her family life, which also includes her father, that the claims of personal passion don’t figure very prominently in her emotional landscape.

Then Werther shows up. He falls for Charlotte immediately, of course. He’s a handsome dreamer, a poet, a scribbler, rather than a Don Juan or a cad. Albert is away, perhaps fulfilling some military obligation, and Werther and Charlotte even go to a ball together! Sparks fly. Charlotte almost forgets herself in the darkness of the garden after the ball. But when push comes to shove, she makes her position very clear to the overly attentive Werther: she’s engaged. And she has no problem demanding that her tormented suitor leave town immediately, and stay away until Christmas.

The opera is now half over. Ninety minutes have gone by. (One of the great things about opera is that everything happens so slowly!) I didn’t mention the two local boozers—always looking for the next party—or how charming Charlotte’s sister Sophie (Lissette Oropesa) is.

But the performances of tenor Johann Kauffman (as Werther) and soprano Sophie Koch (as Charlotte) stand out. They maintain, in their features, bearing, and gestures, a confused erotic tension that comes through loud and clear in big screen HD close-ups.

The singing is also very good.

And in the second act it gets better, as Charlotte begins to realize how much she misses Werther, and begins to wonder, rereading his letters, whether he’s contemplating suicide. She sings the celebrated aria "Werther! Qui m'aurait dit /Ces lettres!" and a cadaverous Werther, appearing at her door that same evening, cuts loose with the empassioned "Pourquoi me réveiller?"

Some critics have found fault with aspects of the staging, and I would have to agree that the pantomime of the mother’s death and burial at the start of the opera—not in the original libretto—was a little obvious and unnecessary. But the back projections used during the scene at the ball—also not in the original—struck me as dreamily effective, and the tiny room where the opera’s final scene is played out, weirdly lit in blue, evoked the loneliness bordering on madness that Werther was in the grip of.

A critic for the Financial Times described Massenet’s opera as “a precarious fusion of flashy prose and perfumed poetry,” but very little of either quality made it through the subtitles. What we were left with was a soaring romantic drama, sustained by rich orchestral color and two or three of the best voices on stage today.  

Treme All the Way

I’m not much of a TV-watcher, but I made a big pot of gumbo to eat while we watched the two concluding episodes of the HBO series Treme. The show is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it follows seven or eight story-lines that cut across lines of race and class with ease. Among the themes it explores are police corruption, restaurant management, the survival of traditional music in New Orleans, drug use, teen violence, and the incompetence of various level of government in dealing with the housing issues raised by the hurricane.

In the course of following these strands of narrative, we get to know a large ensemble of remarkable characters, so that by the time we reach episode 38, many of them have become far more than mere acquaintances. And the time devoted to the music and rituals of several subcultures within the city gives the series an almost anthropological caste.

And that’s good.          

If I were to attempt a two-paragraph synopsis of the plot, I would begin by observing that  LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander) has enlisted the aid of liberal-minded lawyer Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo) to find her brother, who went missing in the hurricane. Bernette’s husband Creighton (John Goodman), an English professor at Tulane, hosts a video blog on which he spares no explicative in excoriating the powers that be on their incompetency, though he’s troubled by the fact that he can’t finish his “flood” novel, begun decades ago but now suddenly relevant again. LaDonna’s ex-husband Antoine (Wendell Pierce) seems to be happy gigging around the city on his trombone, though his new wife Desiree (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc) wants him to quit tomcatting around and get a real job so they can qualify for a housing loan.

On the other side of the tracks, Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) is working hard to escape his patrician roots and promote the musical traditions of the city as a D.J. and through a variety of independent projects. His erstwhile girlfriend Janette (Kim Dickens) is having an equally hard time keeping her restaurant afloat in a city that no longer seems attractive to tourists. Occasional influxes of cash from her parents can only take her so far. 

Out on the street, French-American violinist Annie (Lucia Micarelli) performs with her Dutch boyfriend  Sonny (Michiel Huisman), who’s in danger of becoming a crack-head. Meanwhile, Indian “chief” Albert  Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) has been among the first to move back into the damaged Treme neighborhood, where he works to fix up his house and continues sewing beaded garments for the next Mardi Gras parade. Albert’s son Delmond (Rob Brown) has made a name for himself as a modern jazz trumpeter, and he’s torn throughout the series by conflicting desires to further his career in New York and keep the family traditions alive in New Orleans.   

I know I’ve missed a few of the principle characters—the cop Terry Colson (David Morse), the sous chef  Jacques Jhoni (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), LaDonna’s current husband Larry (Lance Nichols), the Texan contractor David Hidalgo (Jon Seda). In any case, a lot is going to happen in thirty-eight hours of drama. But really there’s only about twenty-four hours of such stuff, because a good deal of Treme consists of music and parties and parades.

This may be one of those shows where it helps if you’ve actually been there. Fans of trad jazz, grind, Cajun music, blues, etc. are probably going to like it. Among the performers that appear in extended numbers are Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Kermit Ruffins, John Boutte, Steve Earl, Cassandra Wilson, Elvis Costello, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Peyton, Trombone Shorty, Shawn Colvin, Juvenile, Terence Blanchard, Fats Domino, and Lucinda Williams.

Treme takes us to many places tourists would never find, and would be reluctant to seek out in any case. There are elements of drama and danger, and a few people do get killed. But such events are the exception, not the rule.

The strength of Treme lies in the fact that it flows like life, not like melodrama. There are so many stories intertwined that we're often allowed to suspend our interest in the drama and enjoy the passing scene.

Wendell Piece, who plays the trombonist Antoine Batiste, the show’s central figure, may have captured it's appeal best when he remarks:

“…what's so different about Treme is that it's trying really hard to capture culture, and show the impact culture has on people's lives. Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. It's how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture. And we've lost that understanding in America. We don't understand the role of culture. The role of culture is that it's the form through which we as a society reflect on who we are, where we've been, where we hope to be. It's like the way thoughts are to the individual, but on a bigger scale. We only see the residual of it, the entertainment. "All right, perform, and entertain me." Entertainment is just a residual of culture. It is not the sole purpose of it. The sole purpose is that we kind of reflect on what the hell we're doing here, and how this thing of ours is going.”    

The Minnesota-California Connection

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned Minnesota winter—the kind we can be proud of, with vast heaps of snow, three-hour commutes, ice dams, leaky roofs, and neighborly conclaves in the dark around the snow-blowers. Temperatures remained below freezing, and often below zero, for weeks on end, and the skies were often brilliant both day and night as a result. Meanwhile, Packed ice created ruts on the freeways reminiscent of the patchwork of lakes and woods on Isle Royale.

In was so nice in these parts, in fact, that the snowy owls dropped down from the arctic in droves, though I never saw one. The closest I got was a snapshot taken by a client in Bloomington of one such bird perched on her front door railing.

The cross-country skiing was superb. We hit a few new trails in the course of the winter—the Minnesota landscape arboretum, the system at Itasca State Park (twice), Town and Country golf course, and Hiram ski trails south of Walker. And we visited long-standing favorites, too, such as William O’Brien State Park, Highland Park Reserve, and the Theo Wirth trails near our house in their myriad permutations. 

No one can accuse us of ignoring winter, or of hiding out. But in the end, we had a hankering to get away, and that’s what we did. (Nor were we alone. In early March, for the first time in history, all the parking ramps at the Mpls/St. Paul airport were full.)

We arrived in San Francisco at sunset, picked up our rental car, and drove over the mountains on a twisty road in the dark to Half Moon Bay, a half-hour away, where the green grass, 60-degree temperatures, and smell of eucalyptus reminded us almost immediately why we’d come.

The next morning, I looked out the motel window at a large Pride of Madeira shrub (echium candicans) loaded with conical blue flowers, and my heart sank into a puddle. This lovely creature is widely planted on the coast—it’s drought tolerant and doesn’t mind sea spray. Yes, it looks like a hot-house plant. And yes, we’d be spending the next week in one of the world’s mildest hothouses.    

I’d set up an itinerary to cover only three hours of the California coast—from Half Moon Bay to Salt Point State Park. We’d spend one night in San Francisco, visit the gardens and museums in Golden Gate Park, hike the cliff trail across the Presidio the next morning, then move north across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and on to the Sonoma Coast.

Much of the landscape follows a familiar pattern: long beaches below tall bluffs or cliffs, with breaks where the creeks wind down to meet the ocean. Further inland is a zone of sensuous hills covered with pastures and intermittent clumps of trees. As you rise further into the river valleys you reach the deep woods, thick with mosses and ferns, laurel and rhododendron, with redwoods and Douglas fir towering above, and California oak and alder filling in the middle story.

It had been raining for three days before we arrived, and the forest was wet. We hiked a mile or so up the Purisima Creek Redwoods Trail (starting from the Higgins Canyon Road, in case you’re interested). We observed banana slugs and a newt or two in the trail. Woodpeckers were chattering in the distance and winter wrens closer at hand. Mushrooms. Flowering shrubs we’d never seen before. This is what we’d come to do: luxuriate in the presence of growing things.

In Moss Harbor we made a stop at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve (lots of bushtits in the shrubbery, though the ocean “surge” had obliterated the tidepools).

By noon we were in Golden Gate Park, where we wandered the Tea Garden and the conservatory at some length, though we skirted the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the De Young Museum. I hope you'll forgive me for saying so, but it’s hard to cough up $52 to look at stale, stylized paintings of flowers after a morning wandering among genuine flowers glistening in the morning dew. But the pastrami sandwich Hilary had in the museum restaurant was seriously GOOD, and I was mesmerized by the huge David Hockney mulit-screen video montage hanging on the wall in the lobby.

The nine-story observation tower was also cool.

So this is how a trip goes. Up to Bodega Bay, back down to Point Reyes. Looking at things. Soaking it up. Meeting people on the headlands or deep in the woods. Whale-watchers, mushroom gatherers, house-painters on their day off.

We saw herds of Tule elk and fallow deer, a coyote, two bobcats, elephant seals, garter snakes, and a Pacific treefrog—the smallest amphibian on the Pacific coast.

The lupine were just barely coming into bloom. The blue-bottle likewise. The bishop pines were as statuesque as ever. The solitude on Kehoe Beach complete.

One day we hiked nine miles across Point Reyes from the trail center to Arch Rock and back, tacking on a few beach hikes later to wind up the day. On other days we may have hiked only three or four.

We saw seventy-five bird species, of which the most beautiful, I think, were the red-shouldered hawk, the cinnamon teal, the Western grebes, and the varied thrush ( a species I’d never seen before). We saw a hundred hummingbirds if we saw one. Allens or Rufus? Who can tell them apart?

There’s something cosmic about watching a huge flock of widgeons drift up Tomales Bay effortlessly with the tide in evening light. And something sublime about the quesadillas they make at Perry’s Deli in Inverness (with a quince/kale salad on the side).    

  

Literature or Academia, or Both?

Not long ago a friend of mine, who happens to be an English professor, directed me (and several hundred other Facebook friends) to an article in which another professor, Kevin Dettmar, offers a good-natured defense of literature as a profession against the seemingly vapid (but “deeply seductive”) vision provided by the film Dead Poets Society. Here’s the link.

 Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities

He hates that film, and we can tell by the vehemence of his criticism that this feeling goes far beyond what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

In fact, the film horrified Dettmar. He felt—and continues to feel, a quarter-century later—that the world it portrays has nothing to do with genuine literary study.

I don’t remember the film well enough to argue any differently. I saw it when it came out and seem to recall that it was slightly manipulative and preachy. (When is Robin Williams anything but?) I might mention here, before I forget, that a far better portrayal of the world of advanced literary study can be found in the Curtis Hanson masterpiece, Wonder Boys.

Dettmar claims he’s a fan of passion in the classroom. But he finds the lessons Robin Williams teaches in the film to be full of sloppy reasoning. And although Williams advocates “thinking for yourself,” he never lets his students do that.

How odd, then, that Dettmar speaks approvingly of two lines Harvard poetry professor Helen Vendler uses in the classroom.

“What we have loved, / Others will love….and we will teach them how.”

“That’s how I teach, or hope to teach,” Dettmar says. Well, Mussolini might have espoused the same formula. We will force you to love what we love.

In fact, a close reading of Dettmar’s article exposes quite a few instances of sloppy analysis. For example, he opposes “feeling” a poem, which we derive from the sound of words, with actually reading it, which allows us to analyze it carefully. This is a false opposition; the feeling we derive from a poem is just as likely to derive from its imagery and patterns of organization as from its mere “sound.” The feeling comes from the reading.

Then again, he accuses Mr. Keating, the hero of Dead Poet’s Society, of offering a jejune interpretation of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” In the film Keating remarks: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’”

Dettmar is here to tell us that Frost said no such thing. It’s a character in the poem who makes the remark. And according to Dettmar, this character lays so many qualifications on his choice that we would be justified in believing he never stepped off the well-beaten path at all. Dettmar concludes that Keating’s “use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong. The result, according to Dettmar, is that Keating arrives at a moral point "entirely different from that of Frost’s poem.”

I have no trouble believing that instructor Keating has missed some of the underlying irony and ambiguity of Frost’s message. But if his moral point is completely wrong, I was eager to learn what the moral of “The Road Less Taken” actually is. But Dettmar doesn’t produce any such judgment. And in fact, his own analysis of the lines in question is more seriously flawed than Keating’s.  

He notes that the road as Frost describes it was “grassy and wanted wear,” but observes that the narrator presents a series of qualifications that “contradict” the description—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same…both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.”

Here Dettmar is way off base. The qualifications don’t contradict the initial assertion. Not at all. They merely suggest that the difference was slight. At the end of the poem (I just now went down to the basement to fetch my Modern Library edition of Frost’s poems) the narrator is still asserting “Two roads diverged in the yellow wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by…” 

Once all the qualifications have been offered, the narrator returns to his original description. Obviously, the distinction still holds.

Dettmar compounds his error by committing the most grievous sin an academic can make: he puts words into the poet’s mouth arbitrarily. He presumes that the narrator equates “the road less taken” with “the exceptional road.” But where in the poem does that word appear? It doesn’t. This interpolation is entirely unjustified.

The steady back-current of the little soliloquy of which the poem consists is that the two roads are hardly different. This fact draws our attention to the poem’s most important line—the last one:  “And that has made all the difference.”

Difference how? What has been the difference? We don’t know. Probably not a good one, in so far as the narrator offers this judgment “with a sigh.” But the judgment is hardly more than a speculative musing, to be delivered “somewhere ages and ages hence.” I wouldn't call the poem light-hearted, but neither is it in any way seriously distraught.

The moral of the poem, crudely put, is this: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Instructor Keating’s interpretation is not entirley accurate--less subtle, more inspirational than Frost intended. Dittmar’s is deflationary, nihilistic, and sloppily reasoned. The poem has none of the “hollowness” Dittmar imputes to it. I give his reading a C -.

In the spirit of literary camaraderie I ought to mention that although I received degrees in anthropology and history as an undergraduate, I also took plenty of English courses—almost enough to bag a triple-major. (I even took a course from a professor who claimed Frost as a personal friend. He kept referring to him as "Robert" with an affectionate Bostonian twang.) I loved literature then and still do today. But studying literature proved difficult—just as teaching it is—because the values it transmits are so basic and so important that very few academics find it possible to refer to them without embarrassment. Honor? Justice? Love? Zany merriment? “I didn’t get a PhD just to talk about that.”

And as far as I can tell, things got much worse when the New Critics were replaced by literary sociologists who considered literature merely a source of data regarding various symptoms of societal injustice. 

Dittmar approves of the rise of Continental literary theory in the 1980s, but he doesn’t tell us why. Perhaps he approves because their poses are analytic and “professional,” rather than sentimental and axiological.

To his credit, Dittmar ends by admitting that Dead Poet’s Society has considerable charm. But he’s wrong to suggest that the “sentimental humanities” portrayed in that film present a challenge to genuine academic methodology and rigor, or somehow undercut its dignity.

It's worth noting, I think, that the most insightful books about literature are usually written for the general public, not the academic community. I’m thinking, for example, of Michael Dirda’s Readings, Tim Parks’s Hell and Back, Javier Marias’s Written Lives, Frank O’Connor’s The Mirror in the Roadway. 

And how about Borges’s This Craft of Verse, Kenneth Rexroth’s brilliant series Classics Revisited, Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do, Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions of San Francisco Bay, Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, Sven Birkerts’ An Artificial Wilderness, Roger Shattuck’s Candor and Perversion, to name a few? These are books about literature that are also works of literature themselves. Few of them come out of universities--though several were originally lectures delivered at universities. None, I suspect, were written primarily with academic readers in mind.

And in the end, Dead Poet’s Society is about high school kids, after all. Would Keating have served his students better by suggesting that all roads are the same, and it doesn't matter which one you take? I don't think so. The film's “feel-good” approach to the humanities, which Dittmar feels threatened by, continues on into adult life in the form of impassioned works that are no less well-reasoned for being direct, personal, honest, and full of feeling. In such works the peccadillos of academic dispute have been left far behind. No one is attempting to win tenure, score a generous grant, or  defend their professionalism here. What’s at stake is to expose the beauty and misery and liveliness and mystery of living—to expose it, defend it, capture it, celebrate it.

Neighbors

It was a beautiful snowfall, though it doubled Hilary’s drive time coming home from Prior Lake. I had a fire going when she got home, and we were soon enjoying left-over spicy pork stew (orange peel, eight cloves of garlic, leeks, thyme) over new potatoes. Soon she was deep into a Ruth Rendell mystery. I had a stack of New York Review of Books to work through.

I’d retired to the computer room when I heard Hilary exclaim: “John!” in that tone of voice often hinting that a deer is standing just outside the window, nibbling on the arbor vitae. Or an owl has alighted on the streetlight pole.

“What?” I replied.

“I think Stephan is blowing our driveway. You should go out and thank him.”

“Well, I’ll go get some more wood from the garage, and thank him along the way.”

But Stephan (our neighbor across the street and two houses down), wasn’t blowing our driveway. Brendan (our neighbor across the street) and Jamal (our neighbor to the north), were having a snow-blower convention out there. It’s a wonder they didn’t knock each other over with their fountains of new-fallen snow. It sounded like a airport runway.

By the time I got outside, they were turning off their machines.

“Thanks, gents,” I said. “I appreciate it. Big time.”

“Well, you’re the one who helped me get this machine going,” Jamal said. “I’d sunk $200 into this thing and all it needed was some fuel stabilizer.”

“Well, all the same, you guys are swell.” I opened the garage door and lifted out my own little Toro pup. 

“You’ve got those big two-stage throwers,” I said. “This little darling just throws the snow a few feet straight ahead.”

Brendan told us how he’d purchased his own humongous blower, we rehashed the weather. I brought out my ice dam stories—I guess the only thing missing was a pint flask of whisky going around in the dark. I think we all enjoyed the camaraderie. 

This morning I was up at 5:30. The coffee was brewing, and I had it in mind to scan a few choice pages from The Platonic Renaissance in England by Ernst Cassirer. I retrieved this book from the off-site stacks of the downtown Minneapolis Library a few weeks ago, and  once I return it I’ll probably never see it again.

Then I heard the noise again. A snow-blower. Our driveway? Yes. Someone was clearing off the ridge created by the plow sometime deep in the night. Was that Jamal or Brendan? Whoever it was, a few minutes later he was down cleaning up the entry to Stephan’s driveway.

I think that may have been Stephan himself.    

    

Valentine Weekend - Little Falls and Beyond

The good news is that The Seven States of Minnesota is now in its third printing. A generation of outdoor enthusiasts, vacationing families, and armchair travelers has enjoyed the book since it first appeared in 2007. 

In this thoroughly revised and updated version, I’ve removed outdated material (the bakery in Faribault, the bookshops in Stillwater, etc. etc.) and introduced new facts and references about every corner of the state, including notes about a printing press museum in Montevideo, Touch the Sky Prairie just north of Luverne, the Scandinavian folk festival in Nisswa, and unusual restaurants in Wadena and Park Rapids. Minnesota’s newest state park on Lake Vermilion receives notice, along with long-established but out-of-the-way parks such as Bear Head Lake and Scenic State Park.

I bring readers up to date on recent changes in Red Wing’s pottery industry, the art galleries in Fergus Falls, the autumn swan convocations on the Mississippi near Brownsville, mining controversies in Babbitt, Alexandria’s new pedestrian-friendly downtown, the challenging mountain bike trails north of Crosby, and the ever-changing discovery center in Chisholm.

And to top things off, the new edition has full-page sidebars devoted to Lake Superior’s South Shore (not in Minnesota, I know) and The New York Mills Regional Cultural Center.

But wouldn’t you know it: no sooner is the book out than I come upon more wonderful stuff that perhaps should have gotten in.

Hilary and I were headed north to Itasca (again) this past weekend, and we decided to duck into Little Falls along the way. At the visitor’s center we were given heaps of information about the city by director Khristina VonBerge. But what impressed us especially were the two buildings sitting on a small bluff closer to the Mississippi. These were the homes of Charles Weyerhauser and Richard Musser. 

I give them a full paragraph in the book, but visiting the site again, I’m wishing I'd emphasized that although northern Minnesota abounds with mock lumber camps, there is no better place than Little Falls to conjure the atmosphere and lifestyle of the barons who ran the industry. (Except perhaps Taylors Falls?)

During our chat with Kristina we also learned that the train station in Little Falls was designed by Cass Gilbert, and that Crowler’s gas station, on the north side of town—open since 1938— may be the oldest in the state that’s still selling gas.

Is that important? I don’t know. Anyway, we’ll catch it in the next edition. (But first, I’ll have to find out if it’s true.)

We stopped at Morey’s in Motley to pick up some smoked fish, and I asked the clerk if Morey’s operated the huge Trident factory next door.

“We have nothing to do with that,” she replied. “All they make there is mock crab legs. They work three shifts, around the clock. And they’re expanding.”

“Well,” I replied. “The Lund Boat Works in New York Mills is building a new addition…and I believe the Tuffy Pet Food plant in Perham is expanding, too.”

“It’s nice to see some prosperity returning to the region,” she said, as she scooped up some herring in horseradish sauce and plopped it into a plastic pint container.

At that point we were just a loaf of bread shy of a fine Valentine dinner in the bosom of Itasca State Park. 

As we were passing through Menahga I seemed to recall hearing about a co-op in town. I’d met an organic potato farmer in Wadena who told me about it. Turn right at the Orton’s station, then another right one block to the east. 

We’d passed the Orton station but turned right, and having made the turn we immediately spotted a little bakery on the corner. We went inside and bought a loaf of Finnish flatbread, very flat, with a little hole in the center, and I asked, “Is there a co-op around here?”

“Co-op? No.” The woman shook her head. Then she said: “Oh. You’re thinking of the organic grocery—half a block down, other side of the street.”

So we wandered over to A Clean Plate, which looks very much like a co-op inside. Organic sweet potatoes in a bushel basket on the floor. Ginger salad dressing with a cute name on the label for $6 a bottle.

When the proprietress emerged from the back room, I said, “I asked at the bakery if there was a co-op in town and they had no idea.”

“We’re not a co-op,” she said. “We don’t want members. We want to keep control for ourselves.”

So we talked a bit about distribution. “We get a lot of the same things the Wedge gets,” she told me. “But around here, it seems everything has to go to Moorhead, and then we buy it and get it back.”

OK. “So, is that a Finnish bakery across the street?” I asked.

“Not really,” she replied. “They sell a few Finnish items.”

I felt I was in the land of Jean-Paul Sartre, where things are what they are not, in the mode of being them. And then I remembered the large statue of St. Urho alongside the highway on the edge of town—the Finnish “patron saint” whom people in Finland have never heard of, created by a department store clerk in Virginia, Minnesota, in 1956. St Urho drove the grasshoppers from Finland. Or so the story goes.

A Clean Plate is housed in a wooden building dating back to 1891 (presuming the plate at the apex of the roofline is real). It does have an attractive façade.

Someday I’d like to try the potatoes. But we were headed for a little two-room suite in a log cabin at Itasca--where twenty miles of ski trail start right outside your door--and we were already well-provisioned with Valentine lobster tails and fresh asparagus…and a loaf of fresh St. Urho Finnish flatbread.