After the Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounded like a bad idea to me.

"Up near Cotton?" I hazarded a guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is Steve."

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

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

Hilary said, "Yeah."

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

_____________________________

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

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

A few lines later Chandler adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bright sun looks spectacular on the newly fallen snow.

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

 
Living

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

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

 Turn Every Page

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

Good Night Oppy

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

 Aftersun

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

II. Matinee Fare

The Fablemans

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

See How They Run

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

Knives Out: Glass Onion

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

 

 

A Few Films for Valentine's Day

Red

A young fashion model (Irene Jacob) and a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trinagnant) cross paths more than once in this study of love, fate, and coincidence. The most successful of Kieslowski’s Red/White/Blue trilogy, it’s a satisfying mix of troubled solitude, murky romance, abject bitterness, and unabashed sentimentality (the puppies), all of which has been brought to the screen with considerable élan. (1994)

Queen of Hearts

A young Italian couple uproot themselves from their village to escape family pressures and set up a coffee shop in London. The story is told from their young son’s point of view, and there are one or two supernatural elements in it, but by in large it’s a comedy of Italian family life, full of arrivals and departures, squabbles and reconciliations, personal crises and dramatic reversals of fortune. "Beware the eight of swords." (1989)

A Room with a View

This film, largely set in turn-of-the-century Florence and sporting a stunning cast, is so pleasant and so unabashedly “romantic” that a second viewing may be required to establish how good it really is. (1986)  

Robin and Marion

Richard Lester was in a groove when he made this revisionist version of the Robin Hood tale. Sean Connery plays the hero, Audrey Hepburn is Maid Marion, and they’re both getting old. Robin is just back from the Crusades, and the screenplay abounds in witty remarks to match his sore back and waning energy. Throw in Nicole Williamson, Robert Shaw, and Richard Harris and you’ve got high drama, too. (1976)

Un Coeur en Hiver

In this unusual film, Claude Sautet, a past master of the subtleties of the human heart (Vincent, François, Paul and the Others) explores the inter-relations of a pair of violin-makers and the concert performer (Emmanuelle Béart) who’s in need of their services. The soundtrack of Ravel chamber music compounds the atmosphere of attenuated romanticism and the presence of students, mentors, and agents gives the film a multi-generational resonance. (1993, France)

Casablanca

Everyone knows about Casablanca, but it’s surprising how many people have never actually seen it from start to finish. The core of nostalgic romance is dwarfed by a wide array of character actors and sketchy sub-plots concerning Germans and refugees from Vichy France who pass through North Africa en route to safer places. It’s difficult to tell who’s a crook and who’s not, and there are very few genuine heroes around, yet every scene strikes an uncanny balance between sincerity and cliché—perhaps because no one on the set, including director Michael Curtiz, knew quite what was going on. (1942)

Beseiged

Bernardo Bertolucci, better known for large scale films such as The Conformist and The Last Emperor, here crafts an intimate and sometimes sentimental tale with a time bomb ticking inside it. An eccentric composer (Michael Thewlis) plays a game of cat-and-mouse with his live-in housekeeper (Thandy Newton), whose husband, unbeknownst to him, is rotting in an African jail. Much of the film consists of day-to-day events at his Roman palazzo, including a hilarious piano recital,  though the canvas broadens considerably when he agrees to help his housekeeper secure her husband’s freedom. (1998)

El Amor Brujo

Director Carlos Saura here adapts the ballet of the same name by Manuel de Falla to an idiom closer to genuine flamenco, drawing on the artistry of a large cast of dancers including Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos. It’s a tale of family commitments, star-crossed lovers, knife fights, infidelity, prison terms, racy talk around the community well on wash day, and ghosts.

Certified Copy

A French antique dealer (Juliette Binoche) attends a talk by a British author on the subject of authenticity in the art world. He points out that most originals are renderings of something else—a landscape, a face—while a reproduction can be considered an “original” in its own right. When the author arrives the next morning at the woman’s shop to sign a book, authenticity becomes the theme for further conversation. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t like her shop much, and they decide to go for a drive while he signs the books. During the drive the conversation gets more personal as Shimell learns more about Binoche’s sister and her stammering husband. Binoche looks on them as an ideal couple, simple people who have found contentment with one another and their lot in life.

“There’s nothing simple about being simple,” is Shimell’s caustic reply.

That’s the film: Old World ambiance and cultured talk, sullied by the frustrations of being a single mother in a world where men can deliver lines such as, “Ultimately people must live their lives for themselves.” It contains one or two mystifying wrinkles that I’ll leave it to viewers to discover for themselves. (2011)

I Am Love

This lavish Italian production that has been compared to the best works of Lucino Visconti. The comparison is only superficially apt. Visconti’s works are carefully designed and visually rich—even such black-and-white productions as Obsessione and La Terra Trema—but they also tend to be stagy. In I Am Love, we’re given a “fly-on-the-wall” point of perspective on the comings and goings of a wealthy multi-generational Italian family. The lifestyle is opulent and conservative. The family members are well-mannered, considerate, sincere. In an early scene the old man announces he’s retiring from the family’s clothing corporation and names his successor. The choice comes as a surprise to everyone.

The scenes flow one into the next, we’re not sure which threads are the important ones. That’s what makes the film so interesting. It’s as if the director, Luca Guadagnino, wants us to see not only the most dramatic turns of events but also the paintings on the wall, the tile on the floor, the glaze on the shrimp, and the insects buzzing amid the clover. (2009)

Three Good Films

I can't recall when three such exhilarating, well-crafted, and radically different  films appeared in the Oscar line-up as we have this year with Tar, Banshees of Inniserin, and Everything, Everywhere All at Once. I was reluctant to see two of three, but I'm glad I saw them. These brief remarks, which give little or nothing away, aren't reviews. 

They're merely encouragements.

Banshees succeeds by sticking to the logic of its unusual plot, though even more so, perhaps, on the strength of the major characters—our somewhat simple but often kind-hearted "hero," his erstwhile best friend, his sister, and the character I'm going to describe as the village idiot, a boy whose brilliant strangeness is essential to the success of the work. We feel we're in the presence of a Frank O'Conner short story that has not yet been written. It's a sad and humorous tale, set on a desolate island off the Irish coast. And you don't need to know anything more about it before you go.

Tar would be a successful film if it were merely a documentary look behind the scenes of an orchestra conductor's life, which it almost is—the ambition, the tensions among conflicting egos, the demands of the medium and of the wealthy donors who keep the art form afloat, interviews with the New Yorker, tony lunches with legendary musicians, now retired, discussions about the significance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony.  

But when we add to those elements the added interest of the conductor's private life, parsed out here and there to various minions and hangers-on and to the conductor's wife, who happens to be the orchestra concertmaster, things gets more complicated. 

Cate Blanchett deserves the attention she's been getting for her complex and riveting performance, but the look of the film, the framing of scenes, the sparkling light—in short, everything about it is brilliant and aesthetically satisfying. It has the resonance and depth of a good long novel. And there isn't a dull moment in it.

I know what you're going to say. "I hear that Tar isn't a very nice person." Well, perhaps not. Then again, neither was Citizen Kane ... Or Don Giovanni ... Or Travis Bickle.

Everything, Everywhere All at Once, on the other hand, is a glorious mess—zany, irreverent, violent, tender-hearted, and utterly joyous and implausible. It's a sci-fi Kung Fu film about tax evasion, the ins and outs of the multi-verse, and how difficult it can be to keep a failing business afloat while trying the raise a teenage daughter. Not all the scenes work, and there are one or two dull patches, but the good-natured tone of the film hardly wavers, even when the entire universe is about to be destroyed by a giant bagel. 

You could watch in on Showtime with a 30-day free trial. Why not? 

Wild Gray Weekend

It's a grayish part of the year, more suitable for afternoons in front of the fire than touch football, or even skiing. But it really does pay to get out and about on occasion. 

On a recent Sunday morning Hilary and I drove down to the Art Shanty Village, which has been set up in the hills behind the bandshell this year rather than out on the lake, due to concerns about slush and other unpleasant ice conditions.

We've been going to this event almost since its inception in 2004 on Medicine Lake, later White Bear Lake, and in recent years on Lake Harriet. The current village isn't one of the better ones. Because the installations are scattered here and there, often out of sight of one another; there is little community hubbub, and the few shanties that have been erected seem simpler, less outlandish, more pointedly designed for kids. Meanwhile, the vastness of the ice, where the entire village was visible and strange creatures would pass by on bicycles and sleds, doesn't come into play much.

Which is not the say the village isn't worth a visit. We got there early, before the scene had really warmed up, but it gave us more time to chat with the women and men who created the installations, and that's often the best part of the event. The woman at the "house of treasures" insisted that Hilary take her favorite piece of mini-art. The artist in question had retired and moved to the North Shore, but found it too isolated and ended up in Sturgeon Bay, where she now makes collages out of antique pieces of paper.

"But I don't have a treasure to exchange," Hilary said.

"Don't worry about that. We have hundreds of tiny treasures in these chests," the woman said.

At the bottom of the hill a minister was in attendance at a Chapel of Love. You bring the marriage license and he will marry you. Traffic had been slow but he was looking forward to doing a brisk Sunday business.

Thirty yards away stood a strange shack with plastic sheathing decorated with wreathes made of weeds and sundry other things. A large number of shoes were hanging from pieces of string nearby, and each of them was stuffed with a potato-like object painted gold. Why? I have no idea. The theme was re-use, though it was hard to tell.

I chatted with the proprietor about the joys of pallet wood, of which there was an unlimited supply on the loading dock where I worked for twenty-odd years, and even began to rave about a wine cabinet I built from such material forty years ago. It now stands in the basement behind the furnace, filled with old manuscripts, maps, travel fliers, and MACARONI back issues. (Just let me know if you want some.)

At one shanty children were given the opportunity to design quilts using frozen blocks of colored ice. (Sound like fun?) At another stylish sculptural installation at the top of the hill you could generate eerie sounds while watching colored strips of cloth rustle in the wind.

Mid-afternoon would have been a better time to visit. A klezmer band was scheduled to perform and also an opera troupe. But we enjoyed our unhurried stroll through the grounds and also our walk back to the car through the neighborhood.

Our afternoon stop was at the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear a program presented by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra called "Distillations." The university campus was a good venue for the program, which seemed a little like Modern Music History 1-001. It was devoted to a range of musical styles and moods, though the pieces were all written within a narrow span of years. The most recent of the bunch, Richard Strauss's "String Sextet from Capriccio," was also the most conventional. A lovely interweaving of string voices—nothing more, nothing less—it showcased the sound of violins, well played at close range. (We were in the seventh row.)

Concertmaster Steven Copes, who both designed and introduced the program, described the next piece, Arnold Schoenberg's "Chamber Symphony No. 1," as "forty-five minutes of music compressed into twenty minutes of time." The question he didn't answer was, "What's the rush?" I succeeded in enjoying the piece for a third of its length by closing my eyes and imagining it was the soundtrack to a long chase scene in a German Expressionist film, perhaps starring Peter Lorre. It also brought to mind George Antheil's obscure opera Transatlantic. But Schoenberg didn't do the work required to fashion his brief and frenetic symphony into a more expansive and coherent or even superficially satisfying piece. It was obvious he wasn't listening to or imagining the sound, but merely devising logical schemes for rearranging the notes and shuttling material from one instrument to another. Scholars enjoy analyzing such things. Sometimes musicians too. Most music-lovers don't enjoy listening to them.

The best flashes of the piece reminded me of Igor Stravinsky's Octet, which is also harmonically challenging but far better paced and shaped.  

Sensing that we'd need a break after such a dense extravaganza, Cope followed it with a four-minute solo flute piece by Edgard Varèse called "Density 21.5" performed by SPCO veteran Alicia McQuerrey. Hilary read in the notes that this is a famous piece, its brevity notwithstanding. I'm not sure why. It reminded me of a typical Japanese shakuhachi solo, better suited to a pine forest or a Zen monastery than a concert stage. I "liked" it, but it didn't add up to much.

Yet all of these efforts were worthwhile, if only to prepare us for the final piece, Maurice Ravel's String Quartet, which is a sui generis masterpiece, hauntingly beautiful in a slippery and sophisticated way. I first heard it in college, decades ago, and as I listened I was reminded of the Nonesuch LP I owned back then, with a hot-air balloon on the cover. In the SPCO performance everything sounded a little different—which is what you want at a live performance. The cello was unusually prominent and I noticed for the first time how many of the sounds being made were unmusical flashes and squiggles amid the otherwise free-flowing lines.

The young Ravel dedicated the piece to Gabriel Faure, who deemed it a failure. When Ravel's slightly older contemporary Debussy heard it, he said, "Don't change a note."

We spotted violinist Maureen Nelson just ahead of us as we walked through light snow to our car after the performance. "Nice concert!" we shouted, almost in unison. (What else  are you going to say?)

 "Thanks," she said, as she hurried off.

Maybe it was the flute solo, but we were primed for the remarkable Happy Hour at the nearby Thai-sushi restaurant Soberfish. We're talking egg rolls, spring rolls, tempura, gyoza, and a sushi sampler, along with several glasses of wine, for just over $40. The cozy dining room looked to be half full of students from nearby Augsburg University, though an Asian family of five was eating a big meal that included oysters lined up in a row in little white spoons.

We drove home through light snow along West River Road feeling we'd had a good day.  

In Praise of Firewood

I had been putting off the task of buying firewood for far too long, due to COVID, the holidays, and simple inertia. We'd been burning up odds and ends from the yard and a few bundles we'd purchased from the DNR but never used. And we'd been having fewer fires, too. But the pile was dwindling.

There was a time when I considered buying firewood a sort of quest, or a game, where city folk buy things from country folk, trying to be friendly while not getting swindled. There was a time, in fact, when woodcutters would go from door to door selling their nicely split but perhaps slightly green product. If you bought some, they'd make a note of it and come back again a year later.

The men who cut, split, age, and haul the stuff around are a breed apart, only one step higher, perhaps, on the ladder of atavistic trades than the men who apply hot asphalt to warehouse roofs in the summertime. Yet I feel that I’ve got a lot in common with them. I love the woods, I love the trees, I’ve cut and split plenty of wood myself, in my time, and feel an almost Hamsun-esque attachment to individual trees, living and dead.

The chain saw and the power-splitter have no doubt changed the industry somewhat, but the men who come around to drop off the stuff don’t seem to change much at all. They typically don't care to chat about trees—unlike the arborists at Rainbow Tree Service—and there isn't really much to say. Oak, maple, birch. Brainerd, Little Falls, Deer River. How long was it aged? Is there any point in asking, now that a ton of it is sitting in your garage?

I had some wood delivered this morning, quick and easy, from Five Star Tree Service. Friends had recommended it. I spoke to "Greg" yesterday, and he quoted a price somewhat lower than Ron's, a suburban firm with a cadre of woodcutters and a paid customer service rep with an agreeable voice.

And the wood looks good. By this stage in life my attention has shifted from healing the urban/rural divide to fully appreciating the wood itself sitting in a beautiful stack inside my garage. It's a sacred moment, a moment of subtle rejoicing and heart-felt awe, and it will be repeated again and again each time I bring a few more pieces of wood into the house

.

Vacation - Minnesota-style

 

We left town at 9:30 and arrived here at our rental cabin just beyond Castle Danger at 5 p.m. in near darkness.

That's not good time—the trip would normally take 4 hours—but on the way up we veered north through Cloquet and ate a pleasant lunch at Wilbert's Cafe in Cotton. On the TV in the bar next door the Packers were just then crushing the Vikings, but we opted for a more pleasant diversion, heading west on back roads and across the tracks toward the Brigadoon of Meadowlands and the nearby Shangri La of  Sax-Zim Bog. This region is famous for its rare owls who dip down from Canada to hunt for voles and mice amid the fields and black-spruce bogs. 

On any given winter day you might see a car parked on the side of the road with a license plate from Texas or Florida. Birders, of course.

A great gray owl can hear a mouse under four feet of snow a hundred yards away. That's amazing, but I know it's true: I read it on the place mat in Wilbert's Cafe while I was waiting for my BLT.

We stopped briefly at the visitors' center, which has been expanded and now boasts a small exhibit room with sub-floor heating of which the staff is very proud. After consulting the whiteboard listing recent sightings, we headed down a path through the snow—the Gray Jay Trail—and a quarter-mile later we came to an elevated platform supporting a bench facing a stunted and leafless tamarack tree. Someone had put a swab of peanut butter at the tip of the naked trunk, and several chickadees were darting back and forth to it from the protection of a piney thicket a few feet away.

One of them was a boreal chickadee. 

Visitors often see them here, but we never had. That was a thrill. Other sightings during the hike included pine and evening grosbeaks and quite a few ravens.

The gas fire is flickering. The wind is coming up on the lake. There's a big stack of books sitting here on the table beside me, defining the limits of my literary explorations. It's hard to say what mood you're going to be it once you leave the city behind.

Glancing at the stack, I see: 

George Steiner: On Difficulty, which has an essay with the intriguing title "Dante Now: the Gossip of Eternity."

Mark Kurplansky: Cod

Jules Superville: Selected Writings

Dark Blue Winter Overcoat: recent short stories by Scandinavian authors

How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells, Lewis Wolport (a bit of science never hurts)

The Autobiography of Benedetto Croce

The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I

The Lost Origins of the Essay: an anthology containing some unorthodox selections

At the last minute before we left, it struck me that my stack was a bit heavy on the "intellectual" side, and I removed a yellowing Beacon paperback of essays honoring Ernst Cassirer (ca 1934) and,replaced it with a slim volume containing two novellas by Natalia Ginzburg under the title Family.

That was the first book I opened tonight.

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After breakfast and a morning walk out to the highway, we drove back to Two Harbors to buy some groceries. We also paid a visit to the harbor and took a walk along the rock shelf just beyond the breakwater looking for snow buntings. A large ore boat was just leaving the port when we arrived. 

When we got back to the parking lot, a middle-aged woman without a hat was looking frantically out to sea. The man who was with her had climbed down closer to the breakwater.

"Did you lose something?" I asked.

"A ship was supposed to be docked here, or just departing," she said.

"We saw one leave fifteen minute ago. You can still see it if you walk out along the shore. It's pretty small now. What's so special about it?"

"It's the Arthur Anderson. It was with the Edmund Fitzgerald the night it went down. It made it to shore."

Hilary showed the woman a photo she'd taken on her phone.

"I don't think that's it," the woman said. Okay, whatever.

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Lunch of pea soup and melted cheese on toast. Then nap time. Hilary had the idea of playing some CDs we'd brought to listen to in the car on the miniature DVD player that's tucked into an alcove in the chimney wall of the cabin. We've been coming up here for years but had never thought of that. We're listening to Til Fellner's version of the Well-tempered Clavier on piano—a meditative rendition, heavy on the sustain pedal, that suits the mood of the hour.

______________

Darkness arrives; we're done with dinner: leftovers from last night. I just now finished reading the second of Ginzberg's novellas, Borghesia.  When I was done with the first one, I read the first thirty pages a second time over. The names are odd and hard to keep track of—Ninetta, Dodò, Carmine, Ivana, Angelica, Amos Ilia, Ciaccia Oppi—and the story doesn't unfold with any kind of focus . Ginzberg has a crisp, gossipy, and "omniscient" narrative style devoid of interiority, mystery, or suspense. It just skims along. Both novellas chronicle the messed-up lives of people who can't seem to stay connected to one another, though the focus is less on the personal drama of the couples involved than the secondary and residual connections that keep everyone's life afloat emotionally despite all the antipathy and confusion. Paying bills, making meals, going to the movies, looking for work, heightened from time to time by a break-up, break-down, or suicide.

Ciaccia Oppi had questioned Ninetta and now knew that she was having an affair with Giose Quirino and suffering badly, because she had always thought adultery was a sad, degrading thing. But although she was suffering, she was perhaps proud and stunned to be experiencing such a sad, degrading adven­ture. Her old radiant smile had gone, and in its place was a humble, tremulous, pained little smile. Carmine had met Giose Quirino at Ciaccia Oppi’s house a few months before. He thought him the most ghastly imbecile. He was a tall, thin man with a face that was all furrows, wrinkles and bags, a grizzled forelock and pale eyes. His lean figure was always clothed in soft, elegant white sweaters. The first time she had seen him, Ninetta had said he looked like a monkey. There was that rag monkey of Dodò’s, which was completely pulled to pieces now, its head was all floppy, but he always wanted to take it to bed with him ....

There are no real highs or lows. Every tidbit gets the same emphasis.  

I read a few of Ginzberg's novels thirty years ago—The City and the House, Valentino, Sagittarius—and it feels good to renew the acquaintance.

________________

At three we walked down to the end of the road past the owner's fine new house and three or four of the older cottages, where we've stayed at various times by ourselves or with friends thirty or forty years ago. We continued east though a copse of pines along the ski trail into open fields and more spotty woods, a nice trail that we would have been skiing if my back weren't a bit out of whack due to some recent heavy shoveling back in town. It's been cloudy and "close" all day, with temperatures in the 20s.

_______________

Bright stars this morning at 6:30 against an inky black sky. Impressive. Exciting even. An hour later, a pale blue sky to the west with wispy white swirls of cloud, nineteen degrees. Refreshing. An ore boat is passing fairly close to shore. How close? It's hard to say. It looks to be about an inch long. In any case, it's clearly "hugging" the North Shore, heading for Silver Bay or Thunder Bay rather than Marquette or Sault Ste. Marie.

___________________

Oatmeal. And now the sun is breaking above the clouds.

________________

Back from our morning excursion to nearby Gooseberry Falls State Park. We walked across the expanse of the rock-shelf picnic area. Gray clouds had arrived in earnest and the day was suddenly much darker. A pileated woodpecker erupted out of the woods, squawking. A raven croaked from the far side of the hill. We admired an unusually handsome jack pine well situated in a snowy clearing, surrounded by tall yellow grasses. At another place Hilary noticed three first-year spruce trees protruding a foot above the snow. They had turned a bright greenish yellow.

"They aren't going to make it," I said. But a second later I added, "Then again, you never know."

Before we'd reached Pipit Point—a name I made up just now because a few years ago we saw a flock of pipits there—we turned back on the bike trail, now a ski trail, that passed along the edge of the deserted campground.

We spent a little time at the Visitors' Center examining the plastic lynx and the stuffed bobcat. Back outside, we noticed a flock of purple finches, most of them heavily streaked but colorless, flitting back and forth between a feeder and the branches of a nearby grove of birch trees. 

A park employee wearing a luminescent green vest and sunglasses passed us on his way to empty the trash cans, and we talked with him for quite a while about the wildlife he sees in the course of his work here at the park and at other locales in the vicinity. We were standing there for so long that after he left we returned to the car immediately. No need to venture out on another hike.

The waves are now sizable, with white-caps everywhere. A dark gray, leaden, almost sinister seascape as night comes on. Snowy rain in the forecast for this evening. Well, we're not going anywhere.

_______________

In late afternoon I finished Cod, Mark Kurlansky's book about the North Atlantic fishing industry. I think I may be the last person in the world to read it. It's a nice mix of nautical lore, international politics, environmentalism, national character (you know, "fish & chips"), reflections about the allure of the life at sea, and recipes from Scandinavia, Portugal, Newfoundland, and other places. Why do tourists, including me, love to wander through yuppified fishing villages? Part of the allure, I'm sure, comes from the expansiveness (and smell) of the open seas, compounded by the ruggedness and aesthetic "look" of boats, piers, nets, and lobster pots, compounded by the evident intelligibility of what's going on all around. You can see the watercraft, the rigging, the men, and sometimes even the fish, which you can buy and cook up for dinner or order off the menu at waterfront cafe. 

Last spring, in a little restaurant in Pacific Grove, California, I ordered a fish I'd ever heard of. Nothing special, but tasty, prepared with some sort of Caribbean flair. When I asked the waitress about it she said, "We get it from New Zealand."

Lake Superior doesn't support much commercial fishing, though you can get fresh lake trout and herring here and there. Our dinner was a seafood chowder consisting of canned potato soup, milk, sautéed onions, flour, marjoram, cayenne, thyme, and a big bag of assorted frozen seafood bits from Trader Joe's—scallops, squid, and who knows what all? 

Excellent. With Joe Lovano's Joyous Encounter on the CD player.

________________________

The gas fire is flickering. The wind continues to rise. But wave-watching is hardly a meditative experience, especially when the waves are big. You find yourself evaluating the waves, trying to guess which ones will break magnificently and which ones are going to fizzle out, which will get subsumed in other waves approaching from one side or the other or by the backwash of the previous foaming crest. It's an endless exercise, irresistible but also tedious. The roar of the surf is ever present, rising and falling, and there is never a "last wave."

__________________

This anthology of essays I've brought along has turned out to be a shrewd pick, with as much variety as anyone could want, but it's also unorthodox, and that starts with the title, The Lost Origins of the Essay. The entries are arranged chronologically from 1500 B.C to 1974, and Plutarch, Montaigne, Swift, and Virginia Woolf are among the familiar contributors. We're not dealing here with origins, or with essayists who have been "lost." But quite a few of editor D'Agata's choices are peculiar, and some are perverse. Last night I skimmed an essay by Michel Butor about Egypt, translated by Lydia Davis. I also read some catty passages from that classic of Japanese literature, The Pillow Book, circa 996. Both pieces were highly idiosyncratic, and I guess that's the point. I might even be tempted to call them trivial. But lyric poetry often follows such paths to good effect. Why not prose?

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If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot it from my memory. -- Montaigne, "On a Few Lines of Virgil."

But I don't see this as a problem. Sure, we ski less, but we read more. And I'm reading books I first read forty years ago—Ginzberg, Montaigne—but relishing them more. The heavy seas outside the window seemed ominous in the pre-dawn dark, but they now strike me as dramatic, tedious, and irritating.

I am on my way to a point where I will leap for joy as at a novel favor when nothing pains me.

This I can relate to, as I adjust the hot-pad on my back and reach for the bottle of ibuprofen.

Our masters ... seeking the causes of the extraordinary flights of our soul, have attributed some to divine ecstacy, to love, to warlike fierceness, to poetry, to wine, but has not assigned a proper share to health—an ebullient, vigorous, full, lazy health, such as in the past my green years and security supplied me with now and then.

_____________________

Back from another excursion to Gooseberry. We hiked up the west side of the river through the shadows of snow-covered spruce and balsam. Not a soul in sight. The river is frozen over though the roiling water has broken through in a few places. The cedars lining the bank are almost black in the low light. On the way back to the parking lot we passed a man who said, "Go to Grand Marais. It's beautiful up there. Bright and sunny."

____________________

It was maybe 1:30 when we headed back in to Two Harbors. Hilary's mom isn't feeling well and she wanted to check her emails for news. I was looking forward to taking a look at the better-than-average de-acquisition shelves at the public library. We returned to the cabin with a spy novel by Alan Furst, a book of poems by Amit Majmudan (never heard of him), a DVD of Julie and Julia, and a classic full-color book of outdoor photography by Galen Rowell.

Darkness grows out on the lake, though the waves are as fierce as ever. The Rowell book turns out to be a personal and well-written photographer's credo, along with plenty of climbing stories and practical tips about shooting film. I haven't thought about Kodochrome for a long time. 

We're listening to a CD of Bach cantatas, and the joyous shouting seems appropriate to the evening. I opened a bottle of Savigny-Les-Beane (2017)  which reminded me a remark by Montaigne that I came across yesterday:

We should take the whip to a young man who spends his time discriminating between the tastes of wines and sauces

.This red wine is light, but well-structured, and it TASTES like a Burgundy. It will go well with the Spicy Mexican Squash Stew we'll be cooking up soon. I ought to know the shipper; in Burgundy that's important. But I don't. Looking at the label, I see it's Villament. My friend Tim, who knows far more about wine than I do, would say, "Unreliable, but worth taking a chance on occasionally."

And now a lovely soprano aria emerges from the chorus, very familiar, I ought to know what it is, but once again I don't. Could it be "Man singet mit Freuden von sieg"? Or "Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich"? All I know, based on the liner notes accompanying the CD, is that Arlene Auget is the soprano and the music is wonderful.

____________________

Now the smell of cinnamon fills the air. The stew is simmering. We've been chopping things.

____________________

Morning. The lake is calmer, no white-caps, and the swells break in handsome forms rather than crashing with wild abandon. On our pre-breakfast walk we ran into Jamie, the third-generation owner of the resort, out walking her golden retriever, Penny. We also passed an old sign I'd never noticed before. "Ole's Acres: Established 1898." I doubt if the highway came anywhere near here back in those days.

_______________________

Only two cars in the parking lot at Gooseberry. We hiked up across the highway bridge and circled right on the Gitchi Gummi Trail through the woods, enjoying the views across the valley. We spotted two deer on the trail ahead of us who plunged effortlessly down a steep, snow-covered hillside toward the river. We heard a few bizarre notes from a nearby raven that Hilary compared aptly to someone striking a few random notes on a broken marimba. Although the trail was well-traveled it was also hilly and vaguely treacherous in a few places. I don't think a physical therapist could have devised a better exercise regime for my aching back.

____________________

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself.

                                         - Montaigne

__________________

Finally a bit of skiing here on the property. Brilliant sun on the new snow and a few animal tracks—a vole, maybe, and the oval tread of a coyote who was following the groomed trail.

_____________________

The afternoon has been splendid, it looks like a summer day, and for at least an hour the sun was shining across and through the immaculate white of the breaking waves, so that they looked like clumps of warm white coral glowing from within. Now the sun is lower, the waves are in shadow, and they've taken on an aquamarine or pale turquoise sheen.

I opened a book of Jules Superville's work just now and hit upon a poem, "Homage to Life," that seemed oddly familiar, as if I'd quoted it in a book somewhere long ago. Here are a few lines:

It is beautiful to have chosen

a living home

and stayed awhile ...

And to have all these words

moving around in the head

to chose the least beautiful of them

And make a little feast ...

 The sky is clear tonight for once, though the moon is insanely bright. Mars cannot be outdone among the stars. Orion is fair, and the Pleiades look good through binoculars. We'll go out again later, the moon will be brighter. People have arrived. Cabins are lit up on either side of us, and all the way down the road.

__________________________

I was up at 5:30 this morning, made the coffee, sat near the window waiting for signs of sunrise. Two hours later, the sun is one finger above the wisps of cloud on the horizon. We followed the progress of light, noting every shifting phase of illumination in the clouds, the sky, the gentle waves, the atmosphere. Stepping out into the morning, we walk along the road past a string of Hyundis, Rav4s, Subarus, and one black Tesla. The weekend people have arrived.

It's cold—maybe ten degrees. The sky is streaked in bands of soft pink.

It's time to pack up.