Friday, October 25, 2013

Margotlog: Margaret Hasse's Poetic Exuberance

Margotlog: Margaret Hasse's Poetic Exuberance

     Sometimes in a schematic mood, I divide poets into Emilys and Tennysons--Emilys belong to the pare-it-down, nail-it-tight school of poetry. Tennysons to the broader sweeping, celebratory school. Their music is different. They look different on the page--Emily's tiny explosions, Tennyson's ranging and gathering, examining and weeping.

     The title of Minnesota poet Margaret Hasse's newest collection--Earth's Appetites (Nodin Press)--suggests the enjoyment and range of her verse. I like her best when she focuses closer, as in "Consideration for the Feet," when an inspection of feet above the bath water, "rosy as babies" becomes "They have been wild to waltz./ They march when I'm mad."  Or in a tea garden, after naming and sampling teas, she and a  friend remember "threshold events" and she gives a haunting rendition of a dying brother's request that bits of his ash be put in things he liked: "his banjo, top drawer of his desk, the garden." Such poignant specificity is hard to forget.

      Those of us around her age flinch as she does, climbing down the ladder to a swimming pool, worried people will notice "her thighs wrinkle like crepe." Or appreciate the methodical, tender way she folds away things her visiting son has left, ending with "I wander around the house, visit his empty room,/ nothing to fold except my hands." This is giving raw power to a time-honored religious phrase.

     Speaking of endings, a poem titled "Grave" goes entirely against the notion of death, as she describes love-making on the grave of her family. This poem ends wonderfully:                                                                                         A light joy talcs my body as if
                    I were abandoned as a child, then
                    fell into good hands. (27)                                                                                                                                                                                
     It's odd that her poems about childhood and youth resonate less with me than the more up-to-date renditions of experience. That is, all except the first poem in the book:Truant. I never left school in the middle of the day, as she describes doing, tooling around with a guy, but the joy of remembering "a meadowlark's liquid song" sets us up for a sassy, prophetic ending that sounds just the way a principal should:
                  "This will be part of 
                    your permanent record."
      That record reverberates through what we are now reading with so much pleasure, honoring Margaret Hasse's powers of description, insight, shaping, and surprise.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

     .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Monday, October 21, 2013

Margotlog:The Unbelievers - from Orchestras to Global Warming

Margotlog: The Unbelievers - from Orchestras to Global Warming

Every time I try to remember my breakup from my first husband, there are loud voices, the two of us standing in the kitchen shouting, then phone calls when he pled with me not to leave. At least we were communicating!

Lately the Minnesota Orchestra musicians and management have come under more scrutiny than perhaps ever before in their 14-month (?) lockout. Are their patrons becoming restive? Does it look like the organization may disintegrate before our very eyes? I think the chances are good. And I blame both sides.

It's a stretch but I imagine that the musicians, priding themselves on their excellence, can't, still can't believe that their former management could do such a dastardly thing to them. Their audiences have something of the same problem--witness the ploy in the only public meeting I've attended: "Answer the following question in your small-group discussions: "Do we want to have a worldclass orchestra?"

Hmmm! Is that really the question to ask at this juncture, when there's been virtually no negotiation face-to-face except through the mediation of George Mitchell? And even that has fallen flat. As someone said to me recently, "Of course, Mitchell will succeed. He negotiated with the two Irelands." Well, he's just met very  stubborn worldclass musicians.

Aren't they hurting financially? Some must be because they've left. But I'm guessing the bulk of the orchestra is still sitting somewhere with their arms folded across their worldclass bodies, a very aggrieved look on their faces.

As to the management--well I can't speculate, though I suspect the management NEVER expected their worldclass musicians to hold out so long. From what I've read in the paper, the offers from management do cut salaries, but as several friends have commented, these are still living wages we're talking about--hovering around $90-100,000 a year. Worldclass by my standards.

Now let's stop to contemplate recent news about global warming. A beautiful and extremely sad article in the Star Tribune Sunday about a search for living coral reefs. The swimmers found many bleached beyond redemption. Gone for good. Another article, also in the Sunday Star Tribune, about forests in N. Minnesota showing evidence of extremely rapid change, either through die-offs of boreal trees who can't tolerate increased warmth, or the appearance in northern range of more southern trees. Some extrapolate a loss of forests entirely along the northern tier of Minnesota within 50 years--only a rough-hewn form of prairie.

I've been convinced of global warming for almost ten years. And I've done things that a single-family can do--put in UV-protective glass and very tight windows, changed almost entirely to compact flourescent or LED lights, led a plan on the homefront to reduce energy use--everything from turning down the furnace AFTER we turn it up in the morning to simply doing without as many lights. Plus both my husband and I drive a Prius, not the only low-energy choice, but a good one.

Still I know it's not enough for one family. The entire neighborhood, city, county, nation needs to make changes in energy production--to wind and solar. In transportation energy use--to mass transit and cars that run far less thirsty for fuel. If we did these two things, and did them very very fast, say within three years, or four, we just might be able to keep from the tipping point, after which there is no return in anyone's lifetime. We are headed for sunstroke disaster.

Yet, bigger and bigger cars (really they're small fat trucks) idle daily in my neighborhood for no apparent reason, spewing CO2 from their tailpipes, Here are houses lit up like carnivals. Here are traffic jams that boggle the mind. Isn't being stuck in a jam every day of the week evidence enough that something is truly wrong with the way we've orchestrated our cities?

I've very very pessimistic that we can change our tunes, step up to the plate and actually play the game we are supposedly interested in playing - let's go all the way and saying, interesting in staying alive in relative comfort and handing over a decent world to our children and grandchildren.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Margotlog: Dickens' Divine Extremity

Margotlog: Dickens' Divine Extremity

For sheer outrageous characterization, Charles Dickens has no match. It helps that his England was rife with class divisions (probably still is). Whereas  US  novelists play around with outlaws, hoodwinking innocents with snake oil and motley, Dickens almost always draws a firm line between haves and have-nots, between the benign and the criminal, and then dares one or the other to step across and challenge the other. It's a fight within a tight arena, and the players remain vividly recognizable, until the mean crumble under their own weight.

Hard Times, one of the master's most extreme satires, gives us two extraordinarily bad (often ridiculous) men: Mr. Josiah Bounderby, and Mr. Grandgrind. Coke Town where these two preside is filthy with fumes and poverty. And though we soon meet one of the mill hands, a mild-mannered sort named Stephen Blackpool, most of the action centers around these two giant malefactors sounding off in various locations, including a circus.

Usually I wait at least six months before listening to a book on disk again because I have to forget the story  as well as the reader's voice. But for Hard Times, I'll probably have to wait twice that long. Not that I can quote much verbatim, but I can still hear the reader Patrick Tull announcing, "I am Josiah Bounderby of Coke Town," as if Bounderby were Moses reciting the Ten Commandments. Tull has a deep, incredibly variable voice, and to portray  Bounderby he puffs up with swaggering self-importance, which includes a ready reminder that "I, Josiah Bounderby have come from nothing," an orphan who fed on offal, raised by a snarling she-wolf of a grandmother.  

His sidekick, Mr. Grandgrind, is not much better, though he is capable of affection for his children, Dickens tells us. Strange how he shows it, drilling them with "facts" until he drills all sentiment, frivolity, imagination, sympathy, desire, enjoyment out of them, leaving his eldest daughter Louisa to sit for long hours in silent contemplation of the fire. He's ground down her surface with "facts," but she has kept an inner life burning. We suspect intelligence is her fuel.

His son Tom, Louisa's childhood playmate and her fondest friend, hasn't been ground down enough, it turns out, but I won't give the plot away, for it is a splendid plot, involving Mrs. Sparsit, a "lady of the highest gentility," who places herself under Bounderby's thumb. With her "Coriolanian eyebrows" and sharp nose, she has powers of discernment far beyond the pliant female she pretends to be. Eventually this discernment and indefatigable industry do Bounderby harm. By then, we're rubbing our hands with glee. We couldn't be more delighted to see class snobbery unseat self-made snobbery.  

But Dickens has a huge heart, and the suffering and desires of those mill hands, ground down by facts and greed and  snobbery, deprived of joy and hope, even food and drink rouse us to ire. We applaud the storm that drenches Mrs. Sparsit. We cheer Sissy, the daughter of a circus performer, brought up by Gradgrind's facts, who yet can detect the true nature of crime and goodness, and helps set things right in the end.

Hard Times is not fall-down funny, but it is full of wicked self-revelation, where we join league with the author to cheer his nasty fictions to self-immolation. We also weep at the pain they cause to the well-meaning and innocent, and are entirely happy to have Tom Gradgrind forced into the circus for disguise, his face blacked, with his job something to do with a horse. This, prefatory to his being shipped off to the colonies. I do wonder what horrors await him in Canada or in a Kansas prairie snowstorm.

I don't know of any other author who enjoys criminals so hugely and who paints their false denominations with such fervor. The fervor of a convert who himself suffered in working poverty until he gave himself over to practice the literary faith.  

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Margotlog: Grass-fed Beef and Ladies Plates in Amsterdam and Bologna

Margotlog: Grass-fed Beef and Ladies Plates in Amsterdam and Bologna

Three thousand miles up, I'm sometimes at a loss for things to do. Recently, flying home from Italy via Amsterdam, I started reading the KLM packaging. Not only did the flight magazine tell me that Amsterdam's Concertgewau orchestra hall is one of the finest in the world, along with Boston's Symphony Hall, but that the beef served on board KLM planes comes from a cow first bred in the Middle Ages, the blaarkop. Not only do these feed on nothing but grass, herbs, and wildflowers, but some actually are stationed near Schiphol airport.

As we came down for a landing, I spied plots of corn and other crops, but no cows. Using every inch of land makes sense in a country mostly claimed from the sea. I also applaud the raising of beef cattle on essentially wild grasses and flowers. Yes it take longer than the horrible methods of feed lot concentration and fattening on corn in the US, but feeding cattle grass and making them more around to get it, is far better for the environment--no lagoons of sludge from cow feces and urine (in some cases so huge that they dwarf what some major cities) but also no fast-fattening on corn which bulks up cows but riddles their meat with fat. Seems to me I remember the highly enjoyable documentary "King Corn" mentioning that corn-fed beef is around 98% fat, versus 15% for grass fed. Why anyone with any sense would buy corn-fed beef is beyond me, but then I don't much like beef anymore, and our family has the bucks to purchase grass-fed.

As a whole I'd say that the Europeans in Holland and Italy eat better food than do we in the US. And the KLM airplane paper cups tell us (in very fine print along the side) that they are made from 100% renewable resources, and the inside is coated with Inego innovation, made from plants not oil. Hurrah, say I, blinking to readjust my eye sight. Then my heart sank. Four months ago we purchased new bathroom carpeting (it's a bath plus dressing room)  made from corn. There I was strutting my environmental green, while the cats (heaven help us) were sniffing themselves into new places to pee! Slowly the lovely new carpeting began to smell suspiciously of a piss pot. Soon I was rendered frantic as I tried all sorts of products shy of sending the offending cat (we have three but were pretty sure the culprit was Tilly, the oldest and most aggrieved) to the rendering plant. After weeks of denial, hope, disgust, more hope and finally resignation, we visited the carpet/linoleum dealer yesterday and selected an oil-based linoleum replacement. There's no telling how Tilly will react, but even if she continues to pee on the floor, not in the litter box, there will be hard, impermeable oil-based linoleum under her. Fingers crossed. As the lovely dame in the carpet store said, "They're family." Yup, she's got that right. Pretty hard to put down a critter who's survived tornadoes, flu, children leaving home, spousal disagreements, aging joints, dashed hopes, and loves you so intensely she walks over your sleeping body for comfort.

As I say, the Italians (and probably the Hollanders) eat better than we do in the US. Food for us is often something to be downed fast and furious. In Europe, it's something to savor well into the evening. My favorite meal in Italy was the first night in Florence when my friend the artist Patricia Glee Smith (check out her website) and I went across  narrow Borgo Pinto from our convent hotel to Accadi, a family-run small restaurant. That night huge mushrooms (porcini? morels?) were on the menu. I had pasta with them and Pat had rice. The smooth sauce, just piquant enough for the delicious earthy taste of the mushrooms, was divine. The pasta cooked to perfection, just enough, and the portion not too large or too small. As we ate, we were grinning ear to ear.

Then visiting in Bologna, I encountered a series of plates on the wall of our hostess. Turns out the plates are made by a Bolognese artist Angela Lorenz, or to use her professional name, "L'Aura," the Wind. The images on each plate are of women in antique Renaissance head gear, puffed sleeves and swooping necklines, i.e. "Babes" from 450 years ago. Of course I don't need to mention that women have been in charge of food preparation for millennia. These dames, slyly and in concert, suggest something different. Here, in order of the plates, reading left to right, is their message:

She is round.
She is idealized.
She hangs on the wall.
She is not to be used.
She is not disposable.
She is a dish.

By the end, I was laughing out loud, highly entertained at the simplicity and sly resistance of these plates.