Exploring the South Shore

To most people in Minnesota and nearby states the phrase "North Shore" evokes images of crashing waves, towering cliffs, cascading falls, seemingly endless vistas, and easy hiking trails cutting through otherwise almost impenetrable pine forests rich in the smells of the north country. On the other hand, I suspect that for many, the phrase "South Shore" conjures little or nothing at all. Yet this region also has a lot to offer, including the Apostle Islands National Seashore, Bayfield, and the bucolic gem of Madeline Island, once the capital of the Ojibwe people, now home to Big Bay State Park, the village of La Pointe, and miles of gravel roads offering intermittent views of vintage cottages and the outer islands.

Discerning readers will immediately point out that none of the things I've mentioned here is actually on the South Shore; they all lie mostly around the corner of the Bayfield Peninsula, tucked within the protection of the outer islands and the expanse of Chequamegon Bay. But that's merely a quibble, especially when you consider that the South Shore runs for hundreds of miles, all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.

The stretch we visit, running from Superior to Ashland, has a character altogether different from its opposite number to the north. The beaches tend to be sandy, behind which the highway lopes through graceful hills weathered by streams and creeks so feeble that they've been given names like Lost Creek One, Lost Creek Two, and Lost Creek Three. The hardscrabble villages along the way—Port Wing, Herbster, Cornucopia—are miniscule, though they carry a lingering atmosphere of maritime life highlighted by the lighthouse and concrete pier in Port Wing and the Halverson Fishery in Cornucopia.

The coastline itself is punctuated by peninsulas extending out into the lake—Quarry Point, Roman Point, Bark Point, Squaw Point—and the bays that lie between them. But you don't find many DNR signs directing you to these features. More common are the signs identifying the sloughs that have formed in the backwaters where the creeks meander out to meet the big lake. It would take a connoisseur of landscapes to fully appreciate this biome—one equipped with a kayak and a field guide to ericaceous plants.

Most vacationers speed past these nondescript stretches of highway, eager to get to the shops, restaurants, and more picturesquely recreational marinas in Bayfield and Washburn. I suspect many skip the shoreline route along Highway 13 altogether—you don't actually see the lake all that often—and keep to the faster lanes of Highway 2 farther inland.

A few weeks ago Hilary and I booked a cottage right in the middle of Herbster. It turned out to be sandwiched between the fire station and the community center, which (we learned) is open twenty-four hours a day. But the setting was plenty woodsy for all that. Venerable spruce trees were growing in the front yard on either side of the sidewalk, much of the real estate nearby was undeveloped woodland, and we could see Lake Superior off in the distance out the kitchen window. 

During the two days we were there we saw only four people in Herbster: one construction worker on a scaffold refurbishing the windows of a church and a mother and her two children leaving the community center gym. Traffic on the highway at the bottom of the hill was negligible; the deer hunting opener was still a week away.

Our plan was simple: explore a few of the minor sights in the region, buy some fresh fish at Halvorson's Fishery for dinner, and read. We spent some time on our first evening acclimatizing ourselves to the suddenly snowy landscape at the beach in Herbster (see above) and the public landing at the end of Bark Point. The next morning we took a hike into Lost Creek Falls.

The trailhead lies just off County C, a few miles up the hill from Cornucopia. The air was cold and crisp, the landscape mildly hilly, and the snow-dusted forest a mix of spruce, maple, and mature red and white pine. My only concern, and a minor one at that, was that we didn't know how long the hike would be. The Trails.com website described it as 1.1 miles, but didn't mention whether this was one-way or round trip. The sign on the fridge at our cottage listed it clearly at 2.2 miles each way. And the spiffy government sign at the trailhead put it a 1.5 miles in each direction.

It was a lovely trail, and the falls, though hardly dramatic, made for a pleasant stop and turn-around point. Hilary broke open a dam of twigs that had created a backwater pool downstream from the falls, and we watched the water tumble through the newfound gap in a minor torrent for a few minutes.

Such are the quiet amusements of a morning spent in the deep woods.

The hike out, as usual, was much shorter than the hike in had been. (Correct distance? A little more than two miles round trip.) On the spur of the moment, we continued south along County C over the hump of the Bayfield Peninsula and down the other side, veering east through orchards, past a golf course, and into the town of Washburn. Our new plan was to get a cup of coffee at the Coho Café and spend some time in the Chequamegon Bay Bookstore.

I rarely browse in bookstores these days—I have more books than I'll ever get around to reading. But everything is different when you're traveling. You didn't bring all that many books with you, you're spending money right and left anyway, and you sometimes form an indelible connection between book and locale that becomes a meaningful part of the vacation. I still look back fondly on the hardcover edition of The Iliad (the Fitzgerald translation) that I bought in a used bookstore in Lanesboro that later burned down. Then there's that masterful piece of travel writing, Time and Tide in Acadia, which I spotted in a little shop in Stonington, Maine. And what about that coffee-table book of the photographer Nadar's portraits of his illustrious contemporaries Baudelaire, Sara Bernhardt, Balzac, and many others that I lugged home all the way from Avignon? I've never seen a copy like it. (Confession: I haven't looked at it much, either.)

Wandering the aisles can be a pleasure in itself, but it's nice to have something in mind. I was hoping to spot an inexpensive copy of Theodor Adorno's collection Prisms. The copies for sale online start at $40. But would this rare item be stocked in sociology, philosophy, or belles lettres? This uncertainty pleasantly expanded my field of view. But I hadn't been in the philosophy section for more than thirty seconds when a different title caught my eye: The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. I had never heard of the author, but there were attractive woodcuts scattered here and there among the pages and a blurb on the back by none other than the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. The asking price of $12 seemed reasonable indeed for a pristine hardcover with Mylar protective covers and a retail price of 20 ₤.

We walked up to the check-out desk twenty minutes later with the Browne study, a small hardcover anthology of the poems of Theodore Roethke, a beginner's instructional manual for the accordion, and a copy of Hilary's upcoming book club book, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. (We might easily have stayed longer, but the sun was shining outside, and I had neglected to bring my reading glasses.)

The woman behind the counter pulled out a small pad equipped with carbon paper and wrote the titles and prices on the topmost sheet. Then she turned to her electric adding machine and rung up the total and the tax, which she noted on the slip.

"I'm almost tempted to pay with the emergency check I carry in my wallet just to maintain the anachronism," I said. This benign remark produced only a slight look of bewilderment, so I handed the woman a credit card.

The Coho Café was closed, but lunchtime was approaching, and we decided to head up the shore to Bayfield. Along the way Hilary made use of her phone to determine that Maggie's Cafe was closed (we later learned that it had been closed for two years) but she spotted a restaurant a few blocks down the hill called the Manypenny Bistro. It was not only a good choice, but also, we learned, the only restaurant currently open in Bayfield. Our waitress explained why herring was the only fish on the menu, and we picked up a number of incidental facts about people in town from a large, talkative man named "Tiny" who was sitting alone at the next table.

Quiet times in Bayfield

Tiny seemed to be retired, though he paid for his meal with a very large bill that the waitress had difficulty making change for. Everyone who came in seemed to know him. He told us he was born and raised in Happy Hollow, just east of Cornucopia, and we took note of the road sign later as we passed on our way back to Herbster.

Along the way we'd passed the Red Cliff Reservation and taken the loop road north to the Little Sand Bay Visitor's Center. From the beach and pier the views out across the bay to the islands were grand, but the buildings were closed and the only person we saw was a goose hunter returning to his car carrying a shotgun and wearing a bizarre, full-body suit made of short strips of cloth that resembled feathers--a ghillie suit--who told us, "I missed."

There's a fishery museum further down the shore, but it, too, was closed. I walked past the yellow tape and down to the shore; the buildings appeared to be deteriorating to the point of collapse.

The fishery in Cornucopia was also closed—no fish for dinner—and the general store was closed for the season. But the sun was still shining, and we had a fine time stopping to investigate the ingress of Lost Creek into Lake Superior from both banks. This entailed driving out to the end of Roman Point and stopping at an unsigned public landing.

Chalk it up to the brilliant afternoon sunlight: everything roundabout was stunning. The slough was bristling with vegetation, the rocks on shore looked like lumps of rusty gold, the sand lay spread in elegant swirls along the beach, and the clouds drifted by in soft, theatrical bands and tufts.

We spent the evening reading and listening to Bill Evans' CDs on the DVD-player at our cottage. I took a look at an anthology of critical essays about the Scottish philosopher David Hume that contained passages like this one:

Exegetically, we could say that Hume was following Schaftesbury's two most distinctive ethical tenets, namely, that the moral life stands on its own feet, and must do so if it is to retain its purity, and that judgments are akin rather to aesthetic taste than to rational insight.

Well put. But I soon wearied of such stuff and turned my attention to a collection of blog entries set in Door County by the opera-singer-turned-mystery-writer J. F. Riordan that included entries such as "In Praise of Small Towns," "The Intricacies of Casual Conversation," and "The Going Price for Squirrels." I especially liked her piece about eating an entire package of Chuckles in the local hardware store, evaluating them, flavor by flavor, from one end of the row to another. The cashier watched her and then said, "People always finish the whole pack before they leave the store."

Meanwhile, Hilary had spotted a collection of newspaper columns on the shelf by a local author named Howard Paap, chronicling life on the nearby Red Cliff Reservation, reviewing the early history of the Ojibwe people, and describing life in Bayfield both in and out of the tourist season. Perfect.

It clouded up during the night, and our morning walk through the woods east of Meyers Beach was a chilly one, further undermined by the wooden boardwalk that extends without a break for the first three-quarters of a mile. I'm sure it serves a purpose, perhaps both practical and ecological, but in mid-November I'd rather be walking on crunchy leaves than icy planks. All the same, the hike through the scrubby woods was nice, though neither the big lake nor the red cliffs for which the area is famous ever came into view.  

A half-hour in, the trail meets up with the stub end of Mawikwe Road, and at this point you can also see Lake Superior, just down the hill through the woods. Though the trail continues through the woods for miles, we scrambled down along a steep narrow path to the lake, and I was delighted to discover when we got to the beach that it was frozen solid. We could walk back to the car along the lakeshore without struggling against the shifting sand. 

And so we did.      

 

Beethoven: The Danish String Quartet Comes to Town

Two years after they'd originally been scheduled to play, the Danish String Quartet finally arrived in town last week to perform the complete Beethoven string quartet cycle. The six performances took place over the course of a week with a single break half-way through.

Many had bought tickets to the entire series when it was originally announced, including several of our friends. That seemed like an awful lot of Beethoven to me, notwithstanding the fact that the quartets are widely considered to be the pinnacle of his achievement. I love the late quartets, so much so that I rarely listen to them—don't want to wear them out. When I do listen, I tend to do so in a steady stream from one to the next, and I couldn't identify a specific opus or movement to save my soul, other than the Grosse Fuge, Opus 135.

We checked online a few days before the first performance, found that it had not yet sold out, and secured two seats. We arrived early, parked on Summit Avenue a half-block from the church, and listened with half an ear to an pleasantly old-fashioned lecturer walk us through the movements: "The third movement is a scherzo, but Beethoven didn't call it a scherzo because it doesn't follow ALL the rules, but it has the flavor of a scherzo, and you're going to love it."

Considering that there were three quartets totaling seventeen movements on the program, such remarks were mostly useless, but they passed the time until the performers arrived on stage, and I suppose a few bits and pieces sunk in.

The Danish String Quartet doesn't look much like a classical string quartet. If they had been wearing suspenders and Makinaws they could have passed for a lumber-camp crew. But their playing was superb: thoughtful, nuanced, rich, bright. I had forgotten how much fun it was to follow the cello or the viola line, just because the sound of the individual instruments was so rich and the separation was so good in comparison with studio recordings regurgitated through a Bluetooth speaker. I felt that the performers were thinking and feeling the music, bar by bar, as a unit, and bringing me along with them, capturing a greater range and depth of emotions than I'd heard at a chamber music concert in years. Especially rich was the third movement of the Opus 59, No. 1, "Adagio molto e mesto." Coming on the heels of the relatively light quartet Opus 18, #3, it filled the church with palpable sorrow.

Following the intermission, the musicians returned to play Quartet No. 14, which is a wandering cavalcade of moods and movements, more richly endowed with beauty than structure, perhaps the musical equivalent of Hölderlin's poetry, though much more robust.

After the show Hilary said, "I think that's one of the best concerts I've ever been to. Let see if we can get some more tickets." I was doubtful. Yes, the concert was great. But does the sequel ever measure up to that initial blast of surprising, shocking, artistry and emotion? The weekend concerts at the Ordway were sold out, but we were free three days later, and there were tickets, so why not?

Once again, the early arrival, the great parking spot, the frivolous but endearing before-concert lecture, and then the show. The Opus 18, No. 4, was meticulously observed, but it left me cold. I was afraid of this. But the late quartet, Opus 127, was a knock-out. I was reminded of a remark that our lecturer made to the effect that this quartet was so conventional that it hardly qualified as a "late" quartet. This might be true on technical grounds, but in terms of sprightly and brooding emotion it lies well within the fold of Beethoven's last, richest, and most introspective creative period.

Back home, we queued up the Alban Berg quartet doing one of the late quartets; it was "nice" but thin in comparison with the real thing. We had once more chance, and we took it. The final performance consisted of an early quartet, a "middle" quartet, and Beethoven's last, brief quartet, Opus 135. Once again, riches galore.

I don't remember them one by one, but it was a pleasure and more than that to hear them. After the performance we were chatting in the lobby with two friends who had heard the complete cycle. One said, "I wish the events had been more spaced out so you could savor them." The other said, "I like the intensity of becoming immersed, and consumed, by the performances."

Perhaps we had had the best of both worlds. The performances were spaced out because we had missed half of them. And they were intense because in each case we signed on at the last minute. We savored every one.

But that was not the end of the affair. After the last performance, and the next night, too, I gathered together every CD I could find around the house—Alban Berg Quartet, Guarneri Quartet, Quartet Italiano—and we listened again, in the dark, on the "good" stereo in the den. We even read bits of the text from the concert program, as well as some of the CD liner notes. For example:

"The Andante in A flat, one of Beethoven’s most sublime and contemplative slow movements, takes the form of a theme with six variations. Apart from the introductory bars, the theme falls into the two traditional eight-bar phrases, but this is as far as any resemblance to variation structure goes: there are no repeats, the length of the variations is by no means constant, and the resemblance between them and the theme is often highly tenuous. The third movement is permeated by the angular accents of its theme, which is stated by the cello and immediately inverted by the viola; its second section is twice interrupted by mysterious, recitative­like octaves on the viola and cello."

Someday, perhaps, I will correlate remarks like these to phrases in the music itself, but not any time soon. The people who write such things know what they're talking about, but it hardly matters to the listener, who is faced with one essential problem: Beethoven's lack of "flow." By the time he entered his "late" period, he couldn't hear a thing, but he could string together snippets and phrases of German folk melodies above complex and unorthodox harmonic progressions, augmented by contrapuntal fabric of the utmost sophistication, and the result was sublime, but in a mode utterly distinct from, say, Mozart's heavenly and seemingly effortless sublimity. Mozart's sublimity arises in uncanny directions from largely Italianate conventions. Beethoven's sublimity arises from Germanic frustration, stammering, disgust at the forms he is called upon to fill with sound appropriate to his feelings.

The Danish String Quartet's utterly fresh renditions have revived my interest and reminded me that the early-middle-late schema is merely a mnemonic device. This afternoon I burned a couple of CDs of the "middle" quartets, which I hardly know at all. It might be just the thing for our gray November ramble north through Wisconsin to the South Shore.

Snow buntings, anyone? 

The Golden Autumn of 2021

Everyone remembers the Halloween blizzard of 1991, and we can all think back to where we were when that tornado ripped through town in—you remember, the year your cat died—but a year or two from now, will anyone remember the golden autumn of 2021? Probably not.

After the long summer drought, the accepted wisdom was that the autumn leaves would be sub-par at best. The negativity was so widespread that some even cited the lack of vaccine compliance as a factor contributing to a likely drab fall season. (Not really. I just made that up.)

Yet here we are, in the third or fourth week of bright blue skies and stunning leaves of every hue.

As the mornings grow darker, Hilary and I often step out into the front yard to check on Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, and the Gemini Twins. As we take our morning walk around the block, I am stupified and delighted, again and again, to find that Sirius, the dog star, which was shining brightly above our spruce tree a few minutes ago, is now occupying a position above Jay-Jay's house at the end of the next block! It hardly seems possible.

One dark morning recently I put a plan into action that I'd been contemplating for weeks: after turning off the porch light, I took my binoculars outside and lay down on the front sidewalk. Scanning the sky in the vicinity of Cancer, below Castor and Pollux and to the east of Procyon,  I finally spotted the Beehive Cluster, which I hadn't seen in years. Yes, it's faint, but it's still there, and sort of where I thought it would be.

See the owl?

On another morning we were greeted, when we stepped outside into the dark, by the complex, multi-note hoot of a great-horned owl. The typical call has five hoots, but this owl had added a few grace notes to her call. Then we heard the male respond, shorter, less delicate, on a lower pitch. It appeared that Chad, our neighbor across the street, was shining a searchlight up into the trees.

But the greater glories of the seasons arrive during daylight hours: the multicolored leaves, the rich blue sky, the intermittent clouds, and the ambiance generated by sunlight irradiating the cool crisp air from a lower angle. Just driving down the parkway can make the heart sing. Two young oaks no more than twenty feet tall have been putting on a show down by the archery range for weeks, moving from a coppery yellow-orange to something resembling rusty candy-apple red.

crispy leaves

Meanwhile, the dry weather has made it a perfect year for raking. The fallen leaves are crisp and light. You can do a few loads, carry them on a tarp back to the compost pile, call it a day, and return the next morning to do a few more. Quite a few leaves linger on the tress, so there's no special pressure about getting them all raked up the first time around.

On Sunday morning I got up at five, turned on the computer, only to find that the time had changed: it was actually (or conventionally?) four in the morning. The male owl was hooting across the street, but getting no reply.

Later I climbed up onto the roof while Hilary held our shaky aluminum ladder to spend some time removing the leaves from the gutters. The view is nice from up there, but the positioning required, above yet leaning out over the gutters, is awkward, and I ended up with a crick in my back. That didn't stop me from pruning the branches of the mulberry and the pagoda dogwood that had grown in over the roof during the summer.

Hilary had agreed to stay outside until I was done, so she could hold the ladder while I stepped gingerly around the edge and started down, (most mountaineering accidents take place on the descent) but she was out by the curb chatting with our neighbor Sarah. These conversations are interesting and important; Sarah and her husband are much better connected with neighborhood happenings than we are, and we enjoy hearing about their camping excursions, too. So I sat on the crest of the garage for a while, idly admiring the rooftop views, too far away to hear or appreciate the conversation. Eventually I could not resist banging the top of the ladder against the gutter once or twice--oh so discreetly.

On mornings like these, everything happens in a precious envelope. Unlike the seemingly endless days of summer, and of winter, we know that this autumn interlude is not going the last long. Just yesterday we drove down to the warehouse district to have what may be our last al fresco lunch of the year, following the route I took for twenty years five days a week to and from work. A new food court called Graze has opened in a space that formerly served as the parking lot for the Bookmen. This neighborhood has changed in many ways, but the view toward downtown from the rooftop terrace of Graze still contains a few venerable warehouse landmarks, and the food was good.

Last night we went down to Magers and Quinn, in Uptown, where I was scheduled to read from my new book, Cabin in the City. I always enjoy standing in front of dear friends, former clients and workmates who have become friends, and total strangers, shuffling papers while trying to keep things lively. During my ad lib introductory spiel, I said a few words about how glorious the autumn had been, and someone in the back row shouted, "Why don't you write about that?"

And I said, "Maybe I will."     

Surprised by the Falls — Owamni

 

It was a crisp morning, with heavenly blue sky and sharp sunlight igniting the yellow leaves, and it cried out to be experienced. I could see that from every room of the house. When Hilary returned from an early morning walk along West River Road with a friend, she was eager to get back out in it, and take me along.

"Well, why don't we go downtown," I said. "There's an article in today's paper raving about the architectural features of the newly opened riverside park down there."

Good plan. We parked in a pay lot across the river from Boom Island and began our stroll under the brilliant trees along the pedestrian path past a very active children's playground, past the Federal Reserve building, and under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to Water Works Park, which architectural journalist Linda Mack was calling "the most intriguing new building in the Twin Cities."

We weren't seeing it at its best. It was half-wrapped in mid-morning shadows, the charcoal firepits hadn't been lit, the chairs were tilted up against the tables, and almost no one was using it. I found it hard to remember what used to be there, because the area had been under construction for many months. But all of that being granted, this short slice of riverfront looked handsome. No doubt next spring it will look even more appealing.

A spanking-new two-story building stands at the east end of the park.(see top photo) The facade is partly rough-hewn limestone of the type used to build the flour mills than once dominated the riverfront neighborhood. The rest is faced with attractive fresh-cut stone, perhaps of the same kind, if not the same vintage. This is the home of Owamni, the Native American restaurant that has been in the news off and on for years, though the restaurant itself opened only a few weeks ago. (I picked up a copy of chef Sean Sherman's cookbook at a book convention several years ago, and I've actually tried to make a few things.)

It was dark inside, but the heavy glass door opened when I pulled on the handle, and we went in. To the left I could see a hall containing several comfortable-looking chairs; to the right a man was sitting behind a desk, minding his own business. We continued straight up a long flight of stairs, eager to see as much as we could before they kicked us out.

Upstairs a young woman was standing behind a podium, talking to someone on the telephone. "No. We take a few walk-ins, but reservations are booked until the middle of December. Once the reviews appeared in New York and Los Angeles ...."

When she hung up I inched closer and said, "Can you find a place to squeeze us in?"

"Two? I can seat you at the bar."

"That would be great."

 We hadn't planned to eat lunch at Owamni. We'd never discussed it. But we followed her into the restaurant without a word or a glance.

When we'd seated ourselves the bartender said, "You know the basic idea here, right? No dairy, no wheat, no care sugar." He handed us a couple of menus.

Sitting at the bar has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you can't see the river. But we've seen the Mississippi hundreds of times. No big deal. On the other hand, you can see things being done in both the bar and the kitchen, so much so that you almost feel involved. You can chat with the staff from time to time; they're right in front of you. On the other hand, you see food under the heat lamps that you wish you'd ordered, but didn't, and your server is often standing three feet in front of you, mixing a drink for someone else. A drink you wish you'd ordered.

The food was very good. The drinks only fair.

We've made two of the drinks on the menu ourselves at home or on the trail more than once using ingredients we'd gathered in the field. Sumac tea tends to be bitter, like Lick-um-Aid without the sugar, and Labrador tea tends toward a nauseating vegetative flavor. In a word, terrible. We were curious to see how Owomni's versions, which came iced rather than hot, compared. The flavors were the same, but much milder, and refreshing at first sip. By the third sip, however, and especially with the food, I felt we might just as well have stuck with tap water and devoted the funds to other food items.

Waksiti (left) and Garden Sisters (right)

The dishes we ordered were all good in different ways. The fresh tostatas that accompanied the smoked Red Cliff lake trout, blueberry/maple syrup reduction (wojape) and tepary bean spread were wonderfully light and crispy. The Garden Sisters, which consisted of black bean puree, pickled squash, and purslane on a chubby corn disk, had a complex blend of flavors and a surprisingly spicy kick. And the native grain bowl (waksica) with bison offered a complex but balanced palette of  flavors drawn from the beans, nixtamal, wild rice, quinoa, pesto, wojape, and grilled vegetables. (I ought to mention that our servers described these things to us one by one as they were being served, but I had to look them up on the menu later and google a few Ojibwe and Spanish terms to complete this paragraph.)

Looking around, I didn't see a salt or pepper shaker anywhere in sight. The bison could have used a pinch. But I suppose it was hard to come by in precolonial times.

Smoked trout with crispy tostadas and wojape

Lots of other things on the menu sounded interesting. I wouldn't mind going back, though we might not be so lucky as to get in next time.

 A young woman with long blond hair was sitting alone next to Hilary. She was trying quite a few of the dishes. I wondered if she might be a reviewer, but she wasn't writing anything down. Hilary struck up a conversation, asked her which dishes she'd liked best. Turns out she was from Los Angeles, but not a food critic. She had enjoyed most of the things she'd ordered, but found the squash too spicy, and had hardly taken more than a bite. (I was tempted to ask her to pass it over to me, but I didn't want to reinforce the widespread bi-coastal stereotype of Minnesota Gauche.)

She expressed disappointment that the walleye only appeared on the dinner menu. "We don't have walleye in Los Angeles," she said. I was on the verge of remarking, in order to add to the stereotype, that walleye was delicate, but didn't really have a distinctive taste.

Our bartender/waiter, who was also hers, assured her near the end of her meal that all of the wild rice served at the restaurant was Minnesota-harvested. She had no idea that most of the wild rice on the market comes from California and Manitoba. I tried to explain that most wide rice is now paddy-cultivated and machine-harvested, though the natural Minnesota type grows in shallow lakes and stream margins and is harvested by canoe with wooden poles.

Do they taste different? I have no idea.

As we left the restaurant, I heard the couple to our right mention that they were from New York. But anyone can come to Owarmi. And you don't even have to come inside. The outdoor seating is accessible from the street. After all, it's a public park.

First Fire of the Season

Wednesday night. First fire of the season blazing in the fireplace. Chunks of dead branches from our maple out front that I cut up during the summer. Wonderful smell.

Thus, one thing leads to another. The branch falls. I saw it up, and months later we burn it. Then, smoke.

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous lines deals obliquely with this phenomenon. Something about "exploring," followed by a remark to the effect that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started from, and know it for the first time." Not a direct quote, obviously.

I could look it up—I see the collected poems on an upper shelf, almost out of reach—but the exact wording isn't important. I received that book as a gift from a friend back in college days. On the end paper he wrote, "Merry Christmas, and I'll be seeing you when we're both famous." An atypical remark, considering how modest and self-effacing he tended to be. He and his wife headed east to grad school, and I haven't heard from him since. 

I have never liked that line by Eliot. Pseudo-profundity, or at best sheer speculation. After all, when he wrote it, Eliot hadn't reached the end of his searching, so how would he know? And in any case, it doesn't seem likely we'll end up right back where we began, unless it's in oblivion, a place we won't be able to recognize at all.

I prefer my own pseudo-profundity: "One thing leads to another." But let's not confuse this notion with an altogether different one: "One thing leads to the next." That phrase implies that the steps are preordained or somehow causal or unavoidable, which isn't the case. Considered in retrospect, they often seem entirely fortuitous.

Such notions often cross my mind when I spot a book on the shelf—one that's been there for quite a long time—and chide myself for having bought it. "I'll never read that book. I should get rid of it," I say to myself. But I almost invariably leave it be, though once in a great while I will actually pull it down and take an extended look. Occasionally, in some small way, it changes my life. How close I came to missing this path entirely!

A few weeks ago a collection of essays by Theodore Adorno caught my eye for perhaps the twentieth time. The title, Critical Models, stands out in thick yellow lower-case italics on the spine. I have rued the day when I bought that book many times, because it reminds me of an entire realm of thought, loosely referred to as the Frankfort School, that I've never investigated. But on this occasion, I said to myself, for no reason that I can think of, "I'm finally going to read some Adorno."

I read a few pages dealing with interactions between the city and the country, and I found them interesting. I even went so far as to copy out a few passages.

"Urbanity is a part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either."

"The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions are meanwhile irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself."

"I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes."

I suppose these remarks sound sort of cranky and high-handed, but it's worth noting that Adorno escaped Nazi persecution as an adult and returned to his home after the war to find that the German's hadn't really changed that much. Though he has plenty of scathing things to say about modern culture, his heart seems to be in the right place, to judge from this somewhat longer passage about spirituality and teaching:

"Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling's age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has under­taken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement."

I find this association between "spirit" and "momentum" very attractive.

Some of Adorno's reflections on authoritarian personalities have obvious relevance to the American political scene today, but one or two sentences will suffice:

"Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents. [e.g. fascism, communism] Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives."

At one point a blurb on the back cover caught my eye in which Susan Sontag praises another of Adorno's collections, Notes to Literature, and especially that volume's introductory essay, "The Essay as Form." I requested the book and it arrived at my local branch a few days later, after having sat on a shelf in the semidarkness of the downtown stacks for years, in all probability.

Good stuff, though rather dense. For example:

"The essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure.  It is not unlogical; it obeys logical criteria insofar as the totality of its propositions must fit together coherently ... but it neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria."

A better gloss, perhaps, appears a few pages earlier:

"[The essay's] efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him....[It] reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say."

This particular essay is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, I think. Adorno clearly feels the need to defend his chosen form against the strictures and the ridicule of the positivist scholarly community that had come to dominate German culture well before the 1960s.  At one point he writes, "In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship [Wissenshaft] comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism. Positivism's irresponsibly sloppy language fancies that it documents responsibility in its object, and reflection on intellectual matters becomes the privilege of the mindless."

Reading such humorously scathing passages, I almost feel like I'm rereading a Thomas Bernhard novel.

Yes, one thing leads to another. And another. And sometimes three or four things. I really ought to order a used copy of Adorno's Notes the Literature. (Really? To sit there on the shelf beside Critical Models till the end of time?) But perhaps I ought to take a look at Susan Sontag's collection Against Interpretation. And why not her Notebooks, which offer fresh snippets of thought devoid of the hidden formal excellences that Adorno attributes to the essay form? For that matter, there are unread Thomas Bernhard novels scattered here and there on the shelves—Frost, Gathering Evidence. It's a beautiful situation: a plenitude of options, sullied only by an agonizing sense of insufficient time in which to do the exploring adequately.

Yet it strikes me that this agony of overwhelming possibilities grows weaker as we age. We don't give up in despair or resign ourselves to a third-rate understanding of things, but we come to recognize that our microcosmic worlds echo or exemplify the larger ones lying beyond our grasp, and the things and people we know best offer far more enrichment than a scattered and superficial familiarity with everything.

This may be what Eliot means when he says that at the end of our exploring we finally "know" a place for the first time. You can see, I think, how clumsy the wording is. There isn't much finality to the process. We gradually get to know and love things better, sink into them, feel more at home, limiting our field of view while honing our senses. Once eager to hike the Compostela Trail, we now stroll down to the creek at the bottom of the hill and relish every step.  

Which is not to say we won't be doing the Compostela Trail one of these days!   

Alec Soth in Park Rapids

The Nemeth Art Center is located on the second floor of an old government building—maybe a courthouse?—with dim lighting, blue-green plaster walls, and oak woodwork all around. A quilt hangs from one wall in the lobby above a scale model of the building itself, with an old (but fancy) dress hanging from a manikin nearby. It was as if we were entering an enormous historical museum cum B&B.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which houses the art galleries. The words “Alec Soth, Paris / Minnesota” had been painted in an elegant font on the glass transom above the double doors into the large open gallery space, though which we could see a few very large photographs and also two or three long tables around which little kids were crowded, engaged in some sort of craft project.

A quick glance at a few of the photos reinforced the opinion I had already formed of Soth’s work. The quotidian subject matter and the superb handling of light and color drew me in; but as I looked, I felt my interest fading into a kind of cold admiration and a puzzling disappointment.

I know very little about photography as an art-form, and I’m halfway toward agreeing with the viewer whom you sometimes overhear at a show mumbling, “My daughter takes better pictures than this.” But every famous photographer has his or her signature tone. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s warmth and humanity, Garry Windogrand’s exuberant and chaotic street-formlessness, Diane Arbus’s weirdness, and so on. Alec Soth doesn’t probe his subjects; he forces than into our faces with a flat, visual uniformity that’s almost uncanny, and is usually less about them—the subjects—than it is about the distress of taking a photograph without succumbing to the “picturesque.” Comparing his work with the images in a volume like Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light, one of my favorites, may be taken as an example of a photographer whose work can be formally and tonally astute, rich in atmosphere, and unafraid to include images of people having fun together.

On the far wall an array of smaller images had been arranged in a square. I was going to take a picture of it—I didn’t see a sign saying you couldn’t—but then I saw a young woman standing nearby with a camera, and I said, “Are you taking pictures?”

“I’m Tessa Beck, the museum director,” she said. “I was doing some video of this textile workshop.” And she came over to talk. She had a friendly smile, and wore a bright blue and white checkered blouse that almost matched her eyes. 

“Are you familiar with Soth’s work?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I like it. We saw a show at the Weinstein in Minneapolis a few years ago ... and then there’s the Mississippi series.”

“Well, this show predates those,” she jumped right in. “Alec went to Paris to shoot a fashion show, mostly back stage. Then it occurred to him to come back here to photograph the style of people in this area. Everyone has a style of dress, don’t you think?” I looked at the bright blue squares on her blouse, which were actually shaped like small, bent, stove-pipe hats. Then she started talking about something called “W.” I’d never heard of it. A fashion magazine? She spoke rapidly, interjecting “like” and other place-holder phrases liberally here and there, like young people often do, and for a while I lost the thread. She was enthusiastic and obviously very bright.

“Are you from around here?” I asked, changing the subject slightly.

“I’m from the Fargo area, but my family has a cabin on Bad Medicine.”

“Fargo’s getting to be pretty hip,” I said. “Especially along Broadway.”

“Yeah, and they have that new hotel.”

“The Donaldson?” Hilary and I explored the lobby ten years ago.

“No. Now they’ve got the Jasper,” Tessa updated me. Then, hardly stopping for breath, she pointed at the array of photos on the wall and said, “These pictures were in a box.”

She used a photographic term for them that I’d never heard before, describing them as part of the process but not intended for exhibit, the rejects from an oversized contact sheet. “Alec said, ‘If you want to frame them, you can use them.’ Most of them have never been seen before.”

Tessa was excited about that.

“Do you get to keep them?” I asked, naively.

She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Dream on.”

Hilary said, “Where are the photos from Paris?”

“We decided to omit them from the show, so we could add more of the images from this part of the world.”

“Hmm. Interesting.”

Tessa let us go, having enriched our visit immeasurably,  and returned to her textile workshop. We wandered the floor for fifteen minutes. Many of the images were of teenagers at a dance. Formal poses. Lots of seemingly blank faces and empty space all around. But was there more?

The most memorable image, I think, was of an adolescent girl wearing a pink coat and a crocheted stocking cap: colorful, wistful, enigmatic, slightly wary, bordering on the sentimental but not quite tumbling in. Perhaps the photo nearby of the adolescent male looking out through a gray window showed us the same world, but from the opposite point of view.

It would have been interesting to see the photos from Paris, too. But perhaps the division between haute couture and backwoods “whatever” would have been too obvious. Yet wasn’t that what Soth himself was driving at? Maybe. Maybe not.

Poking around online when we got home, I discovered that “W” refers to a book disguised as a fashion magazine that Soth put together for Magnum Photos. I located it in the library catalog and requested a copy; it arrived a few days later. Running along the top of the front cover, in thick black capital letters, are the words “Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth,” but on the center of the cover, in larger letters, it says “Paris Minnesota.” A library cataloger’s nightmare, but a postmodernist’s dream, I guess. It’s a complex, multi-layered work, loaded not only with formal and casual photos but also with articles that a fashion magazine might run. Are they for real? I’m not sure I could tell the difference, and I didn’t take the time to check. But the curators in Park Rapids were wise, I think, to limit their focus to images taken nearby.

I'm reluctant to look too deeply into W or other secondary materials. Often that ancillary verbiage, which tells you what you're looking at, or how you should be looking at it, is doing the work the art itself is supposed to do, while obscuring its intrinsic value intuitively considered. 

But I'm warming to Soth's work, almost in spite of myself.  

 

Remembering Pamela Espeland

Incomprehensible that Pamela Espeland is no longer with us. 

My encounters with her were few and far between, though over the years I got to know her fairly well. I met her at a book awards ceremony at the Minnesota Humanities Center in St. Paul, where we were seated at the same table. It may have been 2006, she was still with Free Spirit Publishing at the time. That summer we found ourselves attending the same Writers' Union meetings in Linden Hills. On one occasion, the subject under discussion was arts reviewing. Hilary and I had recently been to the Dakota to hear a set in which tenor saxophonist David Murray and two accomplices succeeded in jamming for an hour while avoiding a single musical reference to one another, and I expressed frustration that you could read an entire jazz review without finding out what kind of jazz was going to be performed.

"Well, David Murrray is still a great tenor saxophonist," came a voice from the other side of the room. It was Pamela.

As art-lovers and friends have invariably mentioned in tributes following her sudden death, Pamela and her husband, John Whiting, went to many concerts, readings, gallery openings, and plays in the course of a week. Sometimes three in a single evening. A few years ago we ran into her at Plymouth Congregational Church, where poet Louis Jenkins was reading from his last collection, Where Your House Is Now. The next night, there they were again, at the grand opening of a South Indian fabric studio loft in Northeast Minneapolis.

"How do you know Anita?..." "What drew you to this event?" And so on.

Loaded with accumulated expertise, both local and international, she graciously highlighted the best upcoming events in her weekly MinnPost Artscape column. 

During the pandemic, of course, there wasn't as much going on, no one got out so much, either. Hilary and I watched a variety of performances on-line— jazz, classical, theatrical. On one occasion we tuned in to a live show at Crooners given by jazz singer Kurt Elling that was also available for streaming, and were impressed by the emotional intensity of the performance. Was Elling always this wired up, expressive? Or were we witnessing a rare explosion of energy following the lockdown?

I knew Pamela was a big Elling fan, so I sent her a note. A few days later I got a reply that will give you some idea of her knowledge, enthusiasm, and eagerness to help others enjoy the things she enjoyed. The last few lines are almost unbearably poignant.    

Hi John,

Good to hear from you.

I thought Friday’s show was one of the best I’ve seen from Kurt, and I’ve probably seen him 20-30 times (because he never does the same show twice). That he started with a 20-minute improvised scat-a-thon was astonishing. He let us know he was going to do his show, his way.

We happened to be sitting in front of the sound board, where his manager was hanging out. More than once, I heard his manager sound surprised by what Kurt was up to on stage.

Kurt has been a road warrior for years, performing 300+ shows every year. I’m sure the pandemic and being stuck at home were hard on him. Midway through the pandemic, he and his family moved back to Chicago from New York. Early in the pandemic, he started a “Cocktails with Kurt” weekly livestream that kept him in touch with his audience (and made them aware of his politics, many for the first time). He followed that with a virtual tour - six weeks of concerts in a row - that you could subscribe to and get a T-shirt.

When he returned to Chicago, he immediately started streaming live performances from the Green Mill and also from his porch. Because he has spent a lifetime building relationships with audiences all over the world, people all over the world tuned into his livestreams. For at least one concert, unless I misheard this, he had 130,000 viewers. Thousands were watching Saturday’s livestream. If you were watching on CrowdCast, its counter told only a small part of the story.

His last two studio albums, “The Questions” (2018) and “Secrets Are the Best Stories” (2020), were both swallowed by the pandemic. Even though “Secrets” won a Grammy, I’m not sure how well it did. His next album comes out this fall - funk and dance music with Charlie Hunter.

All of the above is a circuitous route to answering your question. Yes, emotion and inventiveness are typical of his shows. He sings what he wants. He writes his own lyrics to instrumental tracks. He’s an expressive guy who loves what he does and thrives on the connection he makes with his audience. And his voice! I’ve never heard him sing such low notes and jump so many octaves, finally ending with falsetto.

And I’m sure he could not wait to get back on the road. This is true for a lot of the great ones. Fred Hersch has also hit the ground running.

I’m glad you heard him, and glad you felt him. I’ve been to several events over the past few weeks (a surprising number, all things considered) and this was the first one that grabbed me.

All best, and good for us! We’re still here.

P.