Duluth Overnight

After hosting a large family gathering on Thanksgiving, we thought it might be a good idea to take a brief vacation, and what better place to visit than Duluth? I had downloaded an article from the Midwest Weekends website about hike opportunities in the hills above the city, after which you could return to your car via local transport. We were also equipped with a list of top restaurants and a few pages of the official Duluth events calendar that I'd edited down to size.

We were on the road by 7:45 Sunday morning. The freeway was deserted and the countryside was mute and hauntingly beautiful. The low sunlight spread across the fields and swamps; every branch stood out,  sharply etched in brilliant, muted colors, as if a calm perfection had settled across the landscape, dormant perhaps but not yet frozen: a soft blue sky with scattered puffy clouds, clumps of gray aspens, orange-tipped willows and darker red-osier dogwoods catching the sunlight in the ditches, and vast islands of red oak trees, as crisp and rusty brown as a newly poured bowl of Wheaties.

We took the 21st Street exit off the freeway in downtown Duluth, drove up the hill past UMD, and by 10:45 we were pulling on our balaclavas in the parking lot at Hartley Nature Center. We eventually found the thin strand of the Superior Hiking Trail amid the broader, flatter, and more prominent ski trails and headed up into the woods. The trail was hilly, rocky, snow-packed, and icy in some places, but it felt good to be moving through the woods, and once we reached to top of the ridge we could see the sunny glare of Lake Superior in the distance through the trees.

The plan had been to cross Arrowhead Road, continue along the trail though Bagley Nature Area, and pick up a bus back to the nature center on campus, but it had been slow going through the woods, buses only run once an hour, and we chose to return to the car on foot through the woods on Old Hartley Road instead. It was lunchtime.

We were intrigued by a little place on the list I'd created called Martha's Daughter, a café tucked into a narrow storefront on Superior Street with a very old "Coney Island" sign above it. It was warm inside. That was a good thing. On the other hand, the café was brightly lit and deserted, the music was bad, and the seating stretched bench-style along the wall across from a lunch-counter with stools—not my favorite arrangement. We were greeted by a bulky young man wearing a crocheted stocking cap, tilted to the side. We examined the menu briefly (Chicken and Waffle $17) and decided to move on.

Superior Street was like a wind tunnel, and by the time we got to Pizza Luće our standards had dropped considerably. But the place looked suburban and there was a 20-minute wait, so we ambled back toward the car with the idea in mind of revisiting O.M.C., a ten-minute drive away in Lincoln Park.

Then I noticed the Zeitgeist Cafe. It has always seems dark and deserted to me in passing, though it's often touted as a centerpiece of the downtown Duluth revival. We crossed the street to take a closer look and found there were people sitting at the bar!

Inside it was warm and lively. A folksinger was at work near the front window. Looking to find a place a little farther away from the music, I notice that a long flight of stairs leading up to a mezzanine above the bar.

"Are there tables upstairs?" I asked the greeter as she handed me a menu.

"Do you have trouble with stairs?" she said, giving me a look of friendly concern.

"I'm not that old," I said, as good-naturedly as I could. "After all, we've been out hiking for the last two hours."   

"In that case, let me show you to a table." And up we went to a table overlooking the front window and the entryway far below.

Hipsters and families with young kids were scattered at tables here and there. Strange and diverse works of art hung on the walls. From a distance the music sounded pleasant.

"That's an early Beatles song," Hilary said.

"I don't think he's got the melody quite right," I said. "What is that? 'Here, There, and Everywhere'?"

The food was top-notch. Hilary's salmon hash was tasty, and my omelet, with a creamy river of white wine sauce dribbling out from  a pale yellow envelope stuffed with prosciutto and spinach, was suffused with a distinctly fresh aroma of garlic. The potato latkes alongside the eggs—our waitress called them "rosti potatoes"—were light and mild.

"I read in the menu just now that this place is a non-profit," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Yes, it's a group effort to give back to the community, and not only as an art space. What comes to mind right now is the program we have to provide transport to elderly people who can't get out to buy groceries."

The only troubling aspect of the dining experience was the number of times our waitress had to go up and down the stairs to bring us coffee, jam, ketchup, and to refill the water glasses. During one of her visits, I said, "There's something in this jam besides strawberries, I can't quite pinpoint it...."

"I'll go ask the chef," she said, and was off before I could dissuade her. She reappeared a few minutes later.

"Cinnamon." 

"Ah, yes. Sorry to put you to all that trouble, up and down all those stairs."

"That's my job," she said cheerfully. "And besides, I used to be a ballerina."

*   *   *

On our way out we wandered around the lobby of the theater that adjoins the cafe. Someone had installed a Day of the Dead exhibit on a few banquet tables, with plastic skeletons, orange and red posters, and other unidentifiable things. I was enjoying the bright colors, but wasn't looking very closely.

The lobby of the Zeitgeist Theater

At our next stop, the nearby Nordic Center, we had an opportunity to examine a collection of objects cut from an entirely different piece of cultural cloth: gingerbread houses.

The center occupies a modest storefront that used to be a print shop. A brick ramp runs up through the back of the long thin space, who could say why. It was dark in the room, though in the light coming in from the street I could dimly make out a group of women sitting around a table, chatting freely as they worked on some sort of craft project. Gingerbread houses of all kinds had been set out on white sheets along both walls, at a level low enough to be seen easily by eight-year-olds.

I especially liked the roofs, some of which were studded with spice drops. A few of them had rows of Dots running from eave to eave. I was reminded of a similar house my mom made when I was a kid, following instructions she'd gotten from Ladies Home Journal, no doubt. She constructed the roof out of Necco wafers, overlapping them like multicolored shingles. It's seemed a tragedy that, due to the adhesives involved, no one--not even me--would ever get to eat those wafers. 

The Nordic Center struck me as a poverty-stricken but good-natured place, run by volunteers yet dedicated to its mission, and perhaps even punching a little above its weight. We chatted with the two women who seemed to be in charge about how they'd gotten the little houses, who'd put them together, and whether they keep them from year to year. (No.)

One of the women had been to the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis recently and come home with two smocks by celebrated Swedish clothes designer Gudrun Sjödén. She was offering to sell one of them at half price because it didn't fit her very well. Hilary tried it on; it didn't fit her, either.

Then the woman said, gesturing toward the craft table,"Alison here had a show at the Swedish Institute recently." Really? Alison went into the back room and returned with her card. Turns out she's a professor at UMD, and has recently written a book about Norwegian author Cora Sandel. I looked at a few of her paintings on line. Very nice.

After a brief stop at the nearby Karpellus Museum—always free, always deserted—to take a look at some letters exchanged between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, we decided to head up the shore to enjoy the lake, the rocks, and the now-bright afternoon sun.

The offshore wind and the low light gave the lake a rugged five o'clock shadow, though it was only three. Near the end of Stony Point we stopped to take a picture of an old fishing shed. At one point along the way,  perhaps imagining what might have been going through Hilary's mind, I said, "Too bad the candy store in Knife River is closed for the season."

"Well, there's also a nice candy store in the Seitz Building on Canal Park," Hilary replied. True enough.

Back in town, we bought a few pieces of candy at Hepzibah's Sweet Shoppe, and then wandered into the kitchen supply shop next door, where Hilary took a liking to a locally printed Christmas card. Looking at the address on the back, I said, "This company is on South Lake Avenue. They might even be in this building."

Thirty seconds later, one flight up, we found the Kenspeckle Letterpress— "Curious Engravings / Eccentric Broadsheets." It would be hard to imagine, I think, a more attractive setting for such an operation or a more colorful and whimsical selection of woodblock prints, posters, note cards, and other printed objects for sale. A man in slightly outmoded dress (owner Rick Allen?) showed me the presses and told me a bit about them, but they were on the verge of closing up shop and we spent most of our time hurriedly thumbing through the cards and printed posters.

I came upon one small poster devoted to the word coddiwomple. "This looks very familiar," I said to the woman behind the counter.

"You probably saw it on the Grammarly website," she replied with just a hint of annoyance in her voice. "It got forty thousand hits. We didn't get anything."

Oh.

Hilary picked out two nice sets of cards, marked down to half price. I think we were catching the tail end of an extended Black Friday event. Merry Christmas!

By the time we'd checked into our hotel out on nearby Park Point, the sun was setting. It was approaching 5 p.m. The next event on our free-and-easy agenda, a "beer and hymns" singalong at Sir Benedict's Tavern, was scheduled to start in five minutes. But it was cozy there in the room, looking out through the last splash of evening light past the Coast Guard cutter moored nearby and on across the inner harbor to the distant grain elevators in Superior. 

We decided to hole up, order a pizza, do a little reading, and sort out a plan for the coming day.       

Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes

Jazz isn't for everyone, but I think just about everyone would enjoy the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, which was given a showing at the Trylon Theater the other day. 

It's about jazz, as seen through the careers of two Jewish emigres from Germany, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who decide to start a record company devoted to the genre simply because they like the music. During the 1950s and '60s the label they founded, Blue Note, was one of several that specialized in jazz—a slightly more popular genre then than it is today. I'm not a scholar of the era by any stretch of the imagination, but I bought quite a few LPs in the 60s issued by Blue Note, along with others put out by Riverside, Prestige, Verve, Columbia, and Impulse, without distinguishing overmuch between them. Sound engineer Rudy van Gelder appears on so many of them that I got to recognize the name, but Lion and Wolff never made an impression.

In the course of this film, director Sophie Huber introduces us to these two gentlemen, who liked the music without claiming to "understand" it, treated the musicians well, paid for rehearsal time as well as recording time, and in other ways stood slightly apart from the pack. Blue Note jacket covers, designed by Reid Miles making use of photos Wolff took during studio sessions, are instantly recognizable fifty years after the fact--several coffee table books have been devoted to them--and the musicians involved include some of the era's greats: Trane, Miles, McCoy, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock.

Lion was an early champion of Thelonious Monk, and he devoted six sessions to recording the pianist before arriving at material he considered worth releasing. Monk's jarring harmonies were never that popular with the public, but Lion didn't care.

Alongside those artists now considered the core of modern jazz, Lion and Wolff—the "animal brothers"—also recorded more avant garde musicians, including Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, but that fact doesn't change the narrative much, and Huber naturally prefers to explore the connections between the hard-bop and modal jazz of the golden age and Blue Note's reincarnation during the 1990s as a label willing to back efforts by musicians to bring jazz and hip-hop traditions together. 

Lou Donaldson, a soul jazz giant of the 50s and 60s, has some wry stories to tell about working with Wolff and Lion during Blue Notes early years, and young pianist Robert Glasper and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire join Hancock and Shorter in the studio with current Blue Note producer Don Was to chat while doing a few takes of Shorter's "Masqualero."

One gets the impression that some of the younger musicians don't entirely "get" jazz, and the associations they make between 60s jazz and the Civil Rights Movement are slightly misguided in the present context. On the other hand, artists about whom I know nothing, like Kendrick Scott and hip-hop producer Terrance Marti, are clearly getting things out of those classic sides, and I suppose I ought to direct more of my attention their way to see what they've found.

The film leaves several questions unanswered, and ought not to be scrutinized too closely. For example, if Blue Note was so great, why did most of the musicians move on to other labels? And how could it be that the label finally went under as a result of two mega-hits, Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" and Horace Silver's "Song for My Father"?

Such quibbles aside, the film remains a delight from beginning to end, not only because of the ebullient sound track, the stunning black and white graphics, and the articulate analysis, but also because the gentle souls of Lion and Wolff can be felt throughout. They were long gone by the time Nora Jones signed with Blue Note in 2002, but here, fifteen years later, she's still raving about the artistic freedom the label gives her.

*   *   *

Back home, we popped a frozen pizza into the oven, I uncorked a bottle of wine, and then started digging through stacks of CDs in search of Blue Note material. From the early days I came up with Thelonious Monk: Genius of Modern Music, volume 1, which was recorded in 1947. Wayne Shorter's Without a Net appeared in 2013. I rounded up 21 CDs in all, and was a little surprised to find that quite a few were from recent times: Don Pullen, Greg Osby, Bill Charlap, Sonny Fortune. Sticking to the old stuff featured in the film, I dropped Monk's early efforts into the player, then an album from 1960, Art Blakey's A Night in Tunisia. It's a spirited bunch of tracks, but thrashing and poundy, and it belies drummer Blakey's claim in the film that he never wanted to be a leader. 

Then on to Joe Henderson and Kenny Dorham. Page One. We were listening with fresh ears. We were groovin' high.   

Two Traditions

The winter blahs are threatening very early this year, and they must be kept at bay! Fires in the fireplace, hearty stews, long walks through the barren winter woods. And music. Getting out of the house after dark takes an extra effort, but it's almost invariably worth it.

Hilary and I drove over to St. Thomas University Saturday night to hear an organ and voice recital in honor of Francois Couperin's 350th birthday. We walked across the icy campus to the chapel, listening to the laughter of passing co-eds while admiring the pedestrian space illuminated by brilliant streetlights on crusty snow.

As for the concert itself, I would say it had too much organ and not enough voice. Speaking as a rank amateur, Couperin's style strikes me as lilting yet halting, like a courtly dance. It lacks the flow, majesty, and drama of Bach's keyboard work, and the tone tends to be light. In the course of introducing the program, Pipe Dreams impresario Michael Barone drew our attention to the various stops and voices that the young Couperin made use of—everything from the Aéoline and the Clairon to the Nazard and the Vox humana. Nevertheless, during the recital that followed I eventually got a little bored and began to examine the huge tapestries hanging on either side of the alter, wondering if they were mirror images, and if not, how the patterns, very similar to each other, had been generated.

I also began to wonder if these organ pieces might sound better on the piano. But that would have been a different concert altogether, and a huge disappointment to many in the audience, who were, no doubt, organ enthusiasts. The organists themselves never appeared; they were off somewhere behind the rood screen.

 After four or five such pieces, the singers of Consortium Carissimi emerged from the chancel and stood in a row in front of the audience, looking like they'd just been wakened from a long nap. And the singing was dreamlike—but in a good way. I especially enjoyed the second "set," sung by two tenors and a baritone, but by this time more than an hour had gone by, and we'd heard nine or ten organ pieces along with the fine spots of singing.

The old colors

Well satisfied, we took our leave at intermission and drove home through the night, admiring the silent river as we crossed the Lake Street Bridge and the various lights along West River Road, including the Guthrie spire and the flashing neon Grain Belt Brewery bottle cap, which seemed to be emitting a sequence of blues and whites rather than the greens and oranges I'm familiar with.

When we got home, Hilary said, "That was fun. What shall we do tomorrow night?" Digging out the weekend Variety section of the paper, she soon hit upon a concert scheduled to take place at the Cedar Cultural Center featuring a lyra player from Crete named Stelios Petrakis. Neither of us had heard of him but I hunted up a few YouTube videos. He sounded good. The important thing here is to make sure there will be a healthy measure of authentic music, rather than an electrified facsimile with the volume turned up and the rhythms watered down. There's no way to know for sure, but it looked promising.

And so, in a fit of late-night enthusiasm, we took the plunge. I bought two tickets online—and this is an important step. If you don't buy the tickets, it becomes easy to talk yourself out of going the next day when it's dark and cold outside and you've already had a glass of wine.

Stepping into the lobby of the Cedar Cultural Center can take ten years off your life. It's not that you suddenly feel young in the midst of a bunch of old fogies, but that the crowd is casual, diverse, sharp, and buzzing with enthusiasm. We grabbed a couple of chairs on the center aisle, nine rows back, leaving an empty row in front of us for no particular reason. It was soon filled by a tall man who seemed to know everyone in the room. Petrakis himself dedicated a song to him. He was having a fine old time, speaking Greek with various friends seated nearby, though he resisted the impulse to hum along with the tunes—with only a few exceptions.

Petrakis was playing a small stringed instrument called a lyra, no more than two feet long, that he cradled in his lap and bowed like a cello, accompanied only by a toubeleki-like drum and a Cretan lute. The lyra isn't loud, but, like its distant cousin the cello, it's capable of producing slow, haunting tones and also frenzied patterns. Petrakis covered the range, and he also sang several numbers. He opened the show with a few pleasant numbers accompanied by piano, during which the music teetered on the edge of a Yanni-like schmaltz. Once the band came onstage the vibe improved, and on several numbers the drummer got up from his seat and did some dancing.

During his soft-spoken patter Petrakis conveyed his deep love of the musical traditions he was extending, and also his appreciation for the crowd's enthusiastic response. "In Chicago, a chilly audience," he said in his shaky English. "Cedar Rapids, warmer. Here, most warm of all!"

On one number he played a goatskin bagpipe, and inquired as to the proper way to pronounce "shepherd." He tried it several times, but the second syllable wasn't coming out well. "That's very hard to pronounce," he said with a laugh.

Including an opening set by a local band called Uskudar Eclectic, we were treated to two and a half hours of music and conversation, absorbing the warmth and sincerity of the eastern Mediterranean just fifteen minutes from home. The walk back to the parking ramp was bitter—but somehow it didn't feel that bad.  

November Reflections

Wan gray skies and a room full of books.

Opening Joseph Epstein's A Literary Education to the title essay,  I almost immediately came across a quotation by Duff Cooper, Britain's one-time ambassador to France, now largely forgotten:

"Had I devoted as much time to my school work as I did to promiscuous reading I might have obtained some scholastic distinction. But I had a stupid idea that hard work at given tasks was degrading."

For myself, I was never afraid of a little hard work, but in college I found it hard to bear down on any specific subject long enough to produce anything worthwhile. Decades later, I haven't changed: roving interests, little accomplishment. Yet I still take pleasure in reading academic works like the ones that we were required to read in college; of course, now I can take my time, read them at my leisure, and drop them at will.

That might explain why I was attracted to a recent acquisition, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200. It's short and the gray days of November are well suited to medieval study. Also, the title seemed absurd to me and I wanted to see where the author was going to take it. Could anyone possibly believe that prior to 1050, Europeans had no awareness of themselves or their neighbors as individuals but conformed unthinkingly to rigid social norms, like ants? 

It seems Morris does. In his introduction he dismisses the many individualistic elements in Greek culture by citing a single remark of Aristotle that man is a political animal. It would have been more convincing to cite the fertility cults of the Hellenic world, which we know little about because their rituals and beliefs were secret. My thoughts took another step backward, to the most popular book of ancient times, The Iliad. It begins with the word "wrath." Achilles is upset because he didn't get the young woman he preferred as a battle prize, and he sulks off to his tent for the first half of the book, indifferent to the outcome of the dire conflict his "people" are in the midst of. He's a striking individual, but not much of a team player.      

And what about Heraclitus's one-liner: "One man is a good as a hundred, if he's the best," or Sappho's deeply personal and erotic love poetry? Or Archilochus, the self-sufficient mercenary soldier, leaning on the only thing he really values: his trusty lance?

No, the Greeks were a profoundly individualistic bunch. They valued their community—their polis—but even here it was one against the other, and the ultimate aim of life was to cut a good figure, stand out from the masses, and be remembered. That was the closest thing anyone could think of to immortality.

Morris is on slightly firmer ground when he suggests that during the dark ages, individualism of this type was replaced by a more socially-minded ethos, yet this view doesn't square with what we know of the people who lived at that time—the Celts. In Celtic society great emphasis was placed on the position one was given at the feasting table following a successful hunt, raid, or battle. If you weren't happy with the spot you'd been given, you might be inclined to challenge one of your comrades who was seated closer to the lord to single combat. To the death. Cheerfully.

No, the dark ages weren't short of individualism. What they largely lacked was literacy—and paper. The bards of the era recited the exploits of heroes, and the lord and his retainers listened, probably imagining that they were no less valorous themselves.

The bond between lord and vassal was often strong, as was the despondency of those who had lost that connection. Here is an early (950?) and famous expression of lonely exile.

THE WANDERER

This lonely traveler longs for grace,

For the mercy of God; grief hangs on

His heart and follows the frost-cold foam

He cuts in the sea, sailing endlessly,

Aimlessly, in exile. Fate has opened

A single port: memory. He sees

His kinsmen slaughtered again, and cries:

“I’ve drunk too many lonely dawns,

 Gray with mourning. Once there were men

To whom my heart could hurry, hot

With open longing. They’re long since dead.

My heart has closed on itself, quietly

Learning that silence is noble and sorrow

Nothing that speech can cure. Sadness

Has never driven sadness off;

Fate blows hardest on a bleeding heart.

So those who thirst for glory smother

Secret weakness and longing, neither

Weep nor sigh nor listen to the sickness

In their souls ...

In short, the dialectic between individual and group is active in every age and era, including our own. We tend to take an interest in those who stand out, rather than merely "acting out." They inspire us, kindle our souls, and give us something to revere and emulate. An important wrinkle is added to this process by the fact that some notable individuals rise above the crowd and inspire others by virtue of their selflessness, social awareness, and compassion rather than their genius or swagger.

Morris would no doubt agree to much of this. The book is more nuanced than the title, which recalled to my mind—and that was perhaps Morris's intention—part II of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which carries the title "The Development of the Individual." Morris simply wants to slide the bar back a few centuries, following the lead of Walter Ullmann (The Individual in Medieval Society, 1966), Charles Haskins (The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927), and other scholars of bygone eras whom he mentions in his introduction.

And I was willing to go along with him, in hope of refreshing my memory and learning a few new things about that obscure era along the way. Here are a few of his observations that I found especially interesting:

"It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the Church's history, years in which death was often close and threatening to most men, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted."

"The interesting feature of the development [of personal confession] is that it was an attempt to introduce the idea of self-examination throughout society; at this point, at least, the pursuit of an interior religion did not remain the property of a small "elite," but entered every castle and every hovel in western Europe."

"The revolution of thought in the thirteenth century created, at least in principle, the possibility of a natural and secular outlook, by distinguishing between the realms of nature and super-nature, of nature and grace, of reason and revelation."

All three of these remarks offer insights that would occur only to those who, like Morris, have spent a lifetime examining the relevant material. The first, that the suffering Christ is largely absent from the iconography of the first millennia of Christian history, is, indeed, remarkable. But it seems to underscore the fact (is it a fact?) that Christians of the dark ages had little grasp of the nuances of Christianity, and perhaps more often considered it a talisman for military victory than an avenue to personal salvation.

The second statement, about the rise of personal confession, highlights a theme that Morris seems to be overlooking throughout the book. What he is actually prodding his way toward isn't "the discovery of the individual" or even the discovery of "individuality," but the growing interiority of art, personal expression, and conscience during the period under review.

In the early going it was largely a group interiority, I think, fueled by plainsong and Latin phrases that few of the faithful could understand. And having written these lines, I leap from my dilapidated and uncomfortable office chair and put of CD of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Pérotin onto the stereo. This music dates from the very end of the period Morris is exploring, but it's the earliest I have at hand.

Viredunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri

It suits this bright November morning.

Hilary and I came upon a striking example of this group interiority when we were in Ireland a few months ago. We drove out from Dingle across empty fields to see the Gallarus Oratory, alleged to be a 7th century structure, though it was probably built five hundred years later. We took it to be a place of worship, but here once again, archaeologists suggest it's more likely to be a refuge built for pilgrims and other passing strangers. There isn't much room or light inside.

Morris's the third statement refers to St. Thomas's complex analysis and differentiation of the natural (Aristotelean) and supernatural (Christian) realms. He claims that Aquinas thereby "created the possibility of a natural and secular outlook."  Yet very few individuals read St. Thomas Aquinas during the middle ages or at any time since, and people have always known that nature is all around them. The interesting question in this or in any age is: in which direction, if any, do individuals move beyond that secular view? Toward magic, witchcraft, and science? Toward spiritual devotion and service to a higher end? Toward superstition and ancestor worship?

In later chapters Morris reviews the literary heritage of the era. It quickly becomes obvious that he doesn't think much of the troubadours, who often celebrated their love for seemingly unattainable females. In an interesting aside, he analyses the marriage contracts of the day, finding them typically shaky and often revoked or annulled as property changed hands and political alliances were made and broken. In such a context, the celebration of fin amor and the proffering of elaborate praise for a "high-born" woman considered in her own right, might be taken as a breakthrough in the "discovery of the individual" with profound gender implications. Yet Morris refers to the works of the troubadours as "brittle"—twice in a single paragraph! And he suggests in the introduction that they have been given far more attention than they deserve. Hmmm. I wonder if he prefers the French fabliaux, those bawdy, primitive tales of cruelty, cuckoldry, chicanery, and obscenity.  

Morris finds the expressions of friendship between monks more interesting than the amorous expostulations of the troubadours, though he has the perspicacity to observe that the sentiments expressed in espousals of friendship were often lifted from De Amicitas, Cicero's treatise on friendship. He also notes that such friendships were often merely epistolary. The men who cultivated them rarely met one another face to face.

Reaching the conclusion to this short work, I cringed to find Morris clinging to the inadequate phrase with which he began, "the discovery of the individual." He writes:
"The discovery of the individual was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200."

In fact, Morris is tracking the development of interiority, reflection, exuberant love and shared private space. Farther on in his concluding chapter Morris describes this cultural development, more astutely, as "a concern with self- discovery; an interest in the relations between people, and in the role of the individual within society; an assessment of people by their inner intentions rather than by their external acts."  

Well put.

Morris might have advanced his case more forcefully by offering a few points of contrast. Once I'd finished the book, I was moved to take another look at the Icelandic sagas, which are focused almost entirely on individuals, but unfold within a world that has little interiority. Here is a typical passage, less gruesome than some:

"Sel cast off his burden and lunged with a bear-hunter's knife at Halfdan, who parried with his sword and sliced the knife handle in two, cutting off all the fingers of one of Sel's hands as well. Sel picked up a rock and flung it at Halfdan, but he dodged out of its path and, getting close enough to Sel, managed to take a grip on the tooth jutting from his snout. Sel started away so violently that the tooth came out, and Halfdan gave him such a blow on the nose with it that it broke both the nose and the whole row of front teeth. The giant looked like nothing on earth—apart from himself, that is."

I then pulled an anthology of medieval philosophical works from the shelf and was lucky enough to hit upon exactly what I was looking for—Peter Abélard's analysis of whether an act or the intention to commit that act constitutes the sin. It's pretty dry stuff, I didn't get far, and soon enough it all began to sound casuistic.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that the author had entirely overlooked Marie de France, whose fables fall squarely within the period he's describing. More elevated than the fabliaux and more richly symbolic than many of the troubadour lyrics, Marie's narratives occupy a zone of expression well worth examining.  

But it would hardly be fair to praise someone for the brevity of his work and then criticize him for the things he's left out.

Gray Friday with Gutters ... and Books

For a long time I resisted the temptation to go out and remove the leaves from the gutters. But "temptation" isn't the right word here. That word connotes something pleasurable that we ought to avoid. What would be the right word, then, to describe such a thought? Resist the self-imposed injunction? No. (Help me out here!)

It was true, the gutters were full of leaves. It was true, it had started to drizzle, with the prospect of more seriously wet and dreary weather ahead. It was true, when the gutters get clogged, the rainwater dribbles down the front of the windows in both the bedroom and the den, ending up who knows where?

On the other hand, there were still quite a few leaves on the trees. A week or two from now I'll have to do the same thing all over again. But my life has been based, almost from the beginning, on efficiency and flow. Don't get so worked up. Don't push so hard. Things are never going to be perfect.

What finally got me up out of my chair was the realization that it would be impossible for me to enjoy any part of the luscious gray afternoon that was developing if that stupid thought kept nagging me: I ought to go out and clean the gutters.

So I did the sensible thing. I got the aluminum ladder out of the garage, found the flimsy cotton gloves which I use for no other purpose than cleaning out the gutters—I call them my Red Ryder gloves, with reference to a TV show from the early 1950s—and stepped out onto the back deck. 

My plan was a simple one. I would clean out the leaves from those crucial areas that might lead to backups and overflows above the downspouts on the deck, the bedroom, and the driveway, leaving the bulk of the work for another, drier, time when I could climb up onto the roof and slide along the abrasive shale-gray shingles on my rear end, clearing out all the gutters from above.

There wasn't much of a problem with the gutters above the deck, but when I lifted the first clump of wet leaves from the downspout outside the bedroom window, I heard the pleasant sound of water streaming down the pipe, and it went on for quite a while. Ahhh.

On my way back into the house after stowing the ladder, I noticed our little rosemary plant, standing alone in the plot that had nourished Hilary's tomato plants all summer—still green, still offering its oily, pungent leaves, and perhaps doing better now that the tomato stalks have been cleared away, though I doubt it. Tonight might be a good night for spaghetti sauce?

But now, have completed my self-imposed yard work, I was free to make a fire and luxuriate, which was a good thing, because quite a few new books have made their way into the house recently. I'm not referring to the ones I got at the Fall Forum book convention a few weeks ago, but to those I received from a friend of mine in Madison who has recently moved to a newer and smaller house, leaving quite a few volumes stranded on the shelves in the old house, which has not yet been put on the market.

Timothy allowed me to take two books from his newer, trimmer—but still awfully large—library: The Scottish Enlightenment by Alexander Brodie and a selection of essays carrying the title Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.  Back at the old house, now in considerable disarray, I picked up The Haiku Seasons by Higginson, In Defense of Reason by Yvor Winters, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics, a paperback edition of Pascal's Pensées that has "northwoods cabin reading" written all over it, and The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200, a Harper Torchbook by Colin Morris, the very appearance of which reminds me of my undergraduate years at the U.

I'm sure Morris's theory has been discredited many times over by several generations of gender- and race-based scholars, but I'm also sure there are threads of truth in it, and it will make for a relaxing and pleasurable read.

And as for the "ancilla," (a word that I just now looked up: "an aid to achieving or mastering something difficult") I open the book at random and hit upon Melissus of Samos, a disciple of Parmenides, where I almost immediately spot an error. He writes: "If [being] were infinite, it would be One; for if it were two, these could not be spatially infinite, but each would have boundaries in relation to the other."

Not true. For it's easy to imagine two spaces meeting up at an interface—imagine an infinite brick wall—while extending endlessly off in every other direction.

To add to the biblio-influx, I wandered over to the Golden Valley Library book sale this morning. But let me be clear: before doing so I did more than an hour of paid work making proof corrections and emailed another friend (and sometime client) regarding the issue of book cover colors. (But not for this particular book.)

At the book sale I limited myself to five hardcover volumes at a dollar apiece: A Literary Education and other Essays by Joseph Epstein; The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce; The Complete Operas of Verdi by Charles Osborne; You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie; and Red Earth, White Earth by our own Will Weaver.

The day is frittering away. (Otherwise put, I am frittering the day away.)There's a big pot of borscht in the fridge. Also sour cream and fresh dill. The rain is holding off for now.

It's time to make a fire.

La Rondine - the Swallow

It's odd to think that although La Rondine lies on the bottom shelf of the Puccini oeuvre, I've seen it three times in the last ten years. The Met did an HD simulcast production in 2008 with Alagna and Gheorghiu, touting an alternative ending that Puccini tried out in Palermo in 1920 and then dropped; the Skylark Opera Company did it here locally in 2015 on a pleasantly small stage; and the Minnesota Opera is doing it now.

In fact, Puccini modified the opera's ending several times, and modern composers have added a few variations of their own, which can be taken as an indication of how problematic the plot structure was to begin with.

Only one of the opera's arias, the melancholy "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" ("Who could guess Doretta's beautiful dream?") appears with any frequency on anthology recordings, yet the far more cheerful duet at the end of act 2 between Magda, our heroine, and country boy Ruggero, "Bevo al tuo frescosorriso," (I drink to your lovely smile) is widely considered the emotional high-point of the work.

The plot calls to mind several more robust and popular operas, but it contains subtleties that are worth pointing out. Magda ran away to Paris early and is now a "kept" woman. Her benefactor, Rambaldo, is kindly, perhaps, but a little dull, and that military uniform with bright red pants doesn't suit him at all. 

At a social gathering hosted by the couple, the charming but cynical poet Prunier, evidently a regular visitor, observes that in Paris nowadays everyone is talking about "love," a concept that he finds slightly risible. Magda, instinctively defending the love impulse, pines for an excitement she no longer feels, though Puccini succeeds in conveying the impression that she isn't just a thrill-seeker but is suffering some sort of existential crisis. 

Near the end of the act, Prunier confesses his love to Magda's maid Lisette—though he has difficulty explaining to the audience how he has come to stoop so far beneath his social station. Meanwhile, Magda steals off to town in an effort to revive, if only for one evening, her moribund emotional life.

Earlier in the act, a young man named Ruggero had arrived. The son of one of Rambaldo's old friends, he's visiting Paris for the first time, and the assembled guests giddily discuss which nightclub would provide him with the best introduction to the City of Lights. They settle on Bullier's. Magda is off-stage during this scene—she doesn't meets Ruggero—and as it turns out, she shows up at Bullier's, too. In an attempt to escape the unwanted attentions of several male admirers, she sits down at the table of an innocent-looking stranger. Needless to say, the young man is Ruggero. They chat. He's naive but charming and sincere. Magda begins to feel the warmth of emotion again. She's falling in love.

The plot is thickened by the arrival of Prunier and Lisette at Bulliers—they supply much of the incidental entertainment throughout the opera—but the central point remains the same, and near the end of the act, when Rambaldo arrives at Bulliers to bring Magda home, she gives him the heavy ho. As act three begins, she and Ruggero have run away to a villa on the Riviera to further cultivate their blossoming relationship.

Lacking both the salon setting of the opening act and the boisterous barroom flavor of the second, act three seems a little dull from the moment the curtain rises. Ruggero is head over heels in love—his first and only love—while Magda is stricken with anxiety by the fact that she has told her lover nothing about her checkered past. 

Ruggero is financing the getaway, so Magda is still a "kept" woman; it's just that her protector doesn't know it yet. When Ruggero informs her that he's written to ask his mother's blessing to marry Magda, her world begins to crumble once again. Her doom is seals when Ruggero shows her his mother's response and asks her to read it aloud.

Magda (and the audience) is chilled to hear Ruggero's mother highlight all the virtues that Magda lacks—purity, chasteness, etc.—and underscore the importance of motherhood as the sine qua non without which the attraction couples feel for one another remains empty and without purpose. Magna realizes that she could never enter Ruggero's world, within which she had hoped to find a more meaningful life. But she's not in the mood to shatter his illusions by telling him why. 

Unlike several of Puccini's other heroines, who die of consumption in the arms of their lover (Mimi) or kill themselves nobly (Butterfly) or in desperation (Tosca), Magda, the "swallow," is doomed to return to a lackluster life with Rambaldo, drinking champagne and listening to jaded, cynical talk about "love" while pining about things that might have been.

In one alternate version Rambaldo arrives at the villa, in another Ruggero finds out about Magda's past and creates a "scene." Puccini even toyed with the idea of having Magda commit suicide, but that seemed too dire a way to end an opera so heavily peppered with barroom music and frothy declarations of love.

The tack chosen by the Minnesota Opera seems just right to me. Though it isn't very operatic, it makes Magda a tragic heroine by keeping our attention focused on her self-sacrifice and almost Kierkegaardian anguish in the face of a situation from which she can see no good way out.

Do opera plots matter? I think they do. Last spring Hilary and I saw Massenet's Thais, the plot of which is simply dreadful—too wretched to describe even briefly. There was no avenue upon which to enter that drama emotionally, and it ruined the show.

But it can be a mistake to think about the plot too much. In the case of La Rondine, the fact that Ruggero knows absolutely nothing about Magna calls into question the depth of their love, as does the fact that she would rather call it quits than take a chance on Ruggero's ability to understand and accept her past follies. Rather than pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, perhaps it would be better to settle back and luxuriate in the music, the staging, and the lively and affectionate bantering that goes on between Prunier and Lisette--just as if they were already a long-married couple.  

The Music Season

There has been a movement afoot for quite a while to de-classicize classical music. Orchestras and chamber groups are naturally concerned that their audience is aging; concert-goers find it difficult to attend evening events, have already heard Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" quite a few times, and will soon enough be dead. Meanwhile, younger enthusiasts aren't keen on spending a bundle at such events while also saving up for those $200 tickets to Hamilton and Guns N' Roses.

In response, organizations like the Schubert Club and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra have worked hard to make their programming more diverse, their ticket prices more reasonable, and their venues more casual and widely scattered. In recent weeks Hilary and I have attended concerts at Ted Mann Concert Hall, Saint Paul Academy, and Aria, a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis, at an average ticket price of $10. We're not in the targeted age group, but we're benefitting just the same.    

As far as creative programming, it seems to be bearing fruit. The most memorable piece I heard at the first SPCO concert we attended was a lush, early-twentieth-century piece by Franz Schreker, a composer I'd never heard of. The hit of the next concert was Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano by Max Bruch, about whom I knew nothing except the name. 

In contrast, though the musicians obviously relish getting the dynamics in Haydn's symphonies just right, these works contain little genuine musical interest. Their chief merit is that there are so many of them, it isn't hard to find a new one to add to a program. The SPCO's recent performance of Haydn's 102nd was a snooze. It didn't help that it had been preceded by Mozart's brilliant Linz symphony.

The most rewarding of the concerts we heard recently was given by violinist Nicola Benedetti at Aria, a gutted brick warehouse in the North Loop that served for many years as the home base of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The last time I visited the place was in 1993 to see the Jeune Lune's performance of Carlo Gozzi's The Green Bird. 

The Schubert Club had brought in Nicola, a dazzling young Scottish/Italian violinist, as part of their casual "Mix" program. There was a trivia context before the performance, free pretzels, and a cash bar in the back. The program was described as an exploration of Johannes Brahms's personal life through his three violin sonatas. Or maybe it was the other way around: a study of Brahms's violin sonatas through the lens of his personal life. The approach sounded interesting to me, and I was curious to hear a concert in that cavernous venue.

Not surprisingly, the musical performance was top-flight. But I was prepared for neither the deep, almost giddy, enthusiasm nor the level of detail which Nicola brought to her analysis of the various details of Brahms's personal life and his complex and conflicted relations with Clara and Robert Schumann. She went on for quite a while from the podium, with the help of an iPad, ingenuously apologizing more than once for the length of her peroration. It brought me back to my college years, when that classic tome, Harold Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers, was a frequent reference resource, and the love lives of Wagner and Liszt seemed as relevant to musical study as their compositions.

I was a big fan of Brahms in those days, though in time I began to find him slightly overbearing and even strangely turgid in comparison with his younger French contemporary Gabriel Faure, for example. In recent years I've gotten interested in his work again, but I was entirely unfamiliar with these complex, emotional pieces.

They differ quite a bit in temperament. Nicola and her long-time accompanist Alexei Grynyuk performed all three with intensity and élan. The performance was more than satisfying ...  though I must confess that not once during the musical sections of the evening did my wandering thoughts take me in the direction of the specifics of Brahms's personal life.

That's not to say that Nicola's forays into biography were beside the point. Her talk gave us a chance to get to know her better—not only her unaffected zest for every aspect of the music, but also her character. And the stories Nicola told us about how she came to a love of classical music—her parents preferred ABBA and the Bee Gees—were an added delight. "My parents don't like me to tell that story, but it's true," she told us. "When I heard one of the Brahms sonatas at age 12, it changed my life."

Sure, Nicola is talented, vivacious, and articulate. But she's also personable. During her recital at Aria, the diva in her lost out time and again to Brahms, and the girl next door.

***

Postscript. I'm sure you're wondering, and the answer is no. I didn't win the trivia contest. How could I, when David Grothe was in the audience? The first time I went over to his house (for an editorial klatch with his wife, Margaret, as I recall), I noticed that the wall in the living room alongside the front door was filled, floor to ceiling, with CDs—entirely classical, as far as I could see.

"You have quite a collection," I said.

"Well—um—yes," Dave replied, a little sheepishly. "It's alphabetical. These are the As and Bs...."