Grand Hotel

About a month ago, I decided I really needed a break. I also wanted to get away and write. I sent off an e-mail to Sisters Kay and Annette Fernholz, Notre Dame Sisters who have a yurt on their Earthrise Farm in far Western Minnesota that can be used for retreats. I've been there once before, on a cold November weekend. It was quiet and warm and I was fairly productive. They weren't around that weekend, so it was a good solitary retreat for me. The one major drawback is that there are no bathroom or even outhouse facilities there, so you have to make trips to the nearby farmhouse to use the bathroom. That worked OK, since no one was in the farmhouse, but I got the impression after meeting them and having brunch with them on Sunday morning that if they were around, it might interrupt the solitude.

The yurt reservation fell through after they got a request for someone who wanted to stay a whole month. But things at work have been very difficult, and there have been weekend and evening obligations as well. My anxiety level has been high, and I knew if nothing else that I needed to "get away" for a break.

Of course, I'm now very in touch with the religious retreat options throughout the state. Every order has a guesthouse or retreat house of some sort. It would not be hard to reserve a room for a quiet, individual retreat. But due to my job, I just really wasn't relishing the idea of a religious retreat. I want to get away, after all. Thinking about what I would like, I realized that what I would like more than anything else would be to stay at a luxury hotel. Something old and classic, with a comfortable bed and deep tub. I went to Orbitz and looked around. After all, I've been an urban person most of my life, and I do miss cities, just being in them. And I feel like I know Minneapolis less well than any other place I've lived. (do I sound defensive? Yes, I feel a little embarrassed about this whole extravagent thing!)

So it is that I am spending two nights at the Grand Hotel, a 4-star hotel in Minneapolis. It has the added attraction of one of the city's best sushi restaurants and a world class fitness club (used by all sorts of people in the city, two floors, to which I have access).

I am trying not to put pressure on myself to write, but just to be-- to read, to relax, to continue my fitness program (18 days of Jillian Michaels workouts on the way to 30 days!) and the detox diet I've been on (adding miso soup and high quality raw fish to the regimen of broccoli, brown rice, oatmeal and a few fruits shouldn't throw my system off too badly). And now that I'm here, it clearly is a spa vacation more than a writing retreat. I'm trying to let myself have that, as I think it's exactly what I needed.

So after last night's workout, I soaked in the perfect tub, watched television and went to sleep early. This morning I got up, read the paper, went to breakfast (oatmeal, herb tea) at my favorite local joint, Moose and Sadie's, and took a walk over the Stone Arch Bridge that spans the Mississippi. Now I'm off for another workout, after which I will read some poetry and maybe write a little. The rules for myself are No Facebook and No E-mail (my boss always sends messages on Saturdays, and often others do, too). What I want to do is think creatively. What I want to do is feel good in my body, in space, and not have to clean, cook, garden or grocery shop. I think that will be very possible.

Autumn Light

It is clear that fall is all about light. All of September was very warm-- our summer finally-- but it was undeniably fall because of the light. Steve talks about humidity and dry air as his signs of seasonal change, but it is about light. For the first two weeks of October we've had cold and rain-- complete cloud cover, freezing ground, even those two days where snow fell and fell and fell. It felt like November; it felt like March. Without the sun we were unmoored from the season. Green leaves were falling from the trees. The pond had a skim of ice on it. Geese may have been flying overhead, but I didn't see or hear them because the house was closed up tight and I didn't go out much. The transition to the long months of going to the car, the office, the car, home.

But this morning, even with ice on the railing and the lawn chair on the balcony, the sun was shining and it was obvious that yes, this is fall. There is a coppery, metallic hue to everything, and layers upon layers. It is so far from death, this season, even as it portends death-- or maybe there is no death, and we have thought about the seasons all wrong.

Just this morning I finished Sister Mara Faulkner's book Going Blind about her father's blindness from a genetic disease that also afflicts her and many in her family. In it she quotes memoirs of other blind adults, including Stephen Kuusisto, whom I met when he was at a pretty low point in his blindness, at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. He wrote a memoir called The Planet of the Blind and both Sister Mara and Stephen imagine a world rich in compassion and empathy and simple, common-sense kindness, as well as one of rich imagination in a world of the blind. Her view is not of replacing the sense of sight with sharpened other senses, but of seeing the blind world in a new and positive way-- as rich in itself and life-giving. I wonder if we could-- or if I already do-- accomplish this with fall and winter.

There is a coppery fullness, a rich, warm texture, an inner life of fall, to be followed by the quiet depth of winter, that is life itself.

Backroom Deals

I have to open with a SPOILER ALERT. I want to discuss in this entry a documentary and a play I saw last weekend, both of which took up pretty much the same issue in more or less the same way. The bad guys are developers and the good guys are folks using property -- in the form of a community garden and a historic property-- that may be taken away due to a backroom deal. And I just can't figure out a way to do it without giving away the ending. The Garden, a documentary about a community garden in South Central Los Angeles, is worth watching whether you know the ending or not, but a lot of what keeps you watching is wondering whether the group of Latinos who have been gardening the 14-acre site for 12 years are going to get to keep it. So if you don't want to know, don't read this review. Radio Golf by August Wilson, which we saw last Sunday at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, is about whether or not an African American developer with a good heart and hopes for his community will in the end do the right thing by a homeowner on the lots he has to develop. I'm also going to say here what he does in the end. If you just want to read my review of the play with the ending revealed, click here.

OK. I literally saw the documentary on Friday night and attended the play on Sunday afternoon, which intensified my connection with this basic story. In the case of The Garden, the story of the land went this way. The city of Los Angeles claimed the 14-acre plot through eminent domain to build a trash incinerator on after the 1992 riots. They paid $5 million for it to the owner, g A local activist led a successful campaign to stop the incinerator, and a local woman worked with the city to turn the plot into a community garden. A community of Latinos reclaimed the land from concrete and farmed plots for 12 years, turning the acreage into an oasis of green and of food, including papaya trees. It was an amazing place. They didn't sell the food, but consumed it within their community of families.

Then one day they arrived to find a sign saying the land had been purchased and the garden would be removed in three months. This time it is the community that mobilizes, eventually getting assistance from some social justice lawyers. The lawyers probe how the land was sold, and it turns out it was sold to the original owner, a developer, for the same price the city bought it for 12 years before-- with no public posting, no chance for the gardeners to bid on it, etc. Involved in the deal was his promise to turn part of the lot into a community soccer field (a project of the local councilwoman and the aforementioned activist).

Before you know it, Darryl Hannah and Danny Glover are involved, and a councilman who is interested in saving the garden has become mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. Through pressure, the developer says he will sell the property to the gardeners if they can raise his asking price: $16 million. There's a high-profile concert fundraiser and more celebrity visits. In the end, they raise an impressive half million. Then the Annanberg Foundation steps in and agrees to provide all the rest-- and together they make the offer of $16 million.

And that's when the astonishing thing happens. The developer turns it down. He sends bulldozers instead and in a horrifying scene, with riot police surrounding the plot and dragging off gardeners, they flatten the garden. The voice over is of the developer saying he wouldn't sell it to that group for any amount of money. They seemed to feel they were entitled to it, and didn't recognize the rights of the owner. He didn't like them and didn't like the way they were acting. Who did they think they were? He owned the property and could do with it what he wanted. And he wanted to build warehouses there. As of 2008, two years later, not a thing had happened on the lot. The gardeners were able to buy 80 acres in Bakersfield, where they garden (I have no idea how they get there and back) and market their produce at farmer's markets, including the one in Los Angeles. They also got a plot of land under some high voltage wires, and some concluding footage shows them working to get the concrete slabs out of it and bring in dirt so they can start over.

Radio Golf, the last play in his decalogue portraying African American life in each decade of the 20th century, was really delightful. What I liked about it was that the main character, Harmond Wilks, has a very clear conflict. He is the son of a rather ruthless real estate agent, and is running for mayor of Pittsburgh while running a "redevelopment" company. His goal is to gentrify the Hill District, and he has bought a property and already signed on Starbucks, Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble for the ground floor retail of an apartment and medical complex. The problem arises when a wise but somewhat derelict man wanders in claiming to own a home on the property. The home is slated for demolition. In defending his title to the land, Harmond realizes that it is "one of the properties" he was able to buy before it went to public auction, so was not listed in the paper. He didn't follow the rules.

Harmond redevelops his redevelopment plan to fit into the larger complex, and defends the importance of the house-- and of fairness in not taking advantage of his backroom deal. But his wife and business partner are in touch with the major businesses, whose contracts are contingent on the original plan. Nobody wants a "raggedy old house" in the middle of a new development. In the end, Harmond holds his ground and his partner gets rid of him-- a sort of hostile takeover-- and moves forward with the bulldozing. There is some good theatrical symbolism, as first one of the advocates for the house, and then Harmond, paint their faces with red house paint as if they are Indians. All I could think of was, "THE INDIANS ALWAYS LOSE!" I've been reading about the Mandan Indians of North Dakota as well, in Sister Mara Faulkner's memoir Going Blind, and it's the same story-- cash for complete loss of land and livelihood, and no real choice. The writing seems to be on the wall for me when they choose to be Indians. The odds are on the cowboys.

The odds are on the developers, the ones with the power, even if they got it through backroom deals. I was kind of shocked in both cases that the corruption won out, though in both cases it did not need to. And in both cases it came down to individual greed and ego, and a lack of commitment to the common good.

October Snow Makes One Think About the Future

Woke to snow

Green leaves blown

From ash trees

October Snow

Dry coneflower stalks bending in wind,

one squash left in the garden bed.

Last night I was reading a blog by someone I knew in college. In the last year she's left the place she lived her whole adult life and moved to San Francisco, where she bikes the hills (we're talking 300 miles in 3 days in one instance, competitive biking), wakes up with coffee and a view of the ocean, has a new lover, spends her mornings writing and her afternoons doing project work and is clearly quite happy. She's living the life she imagined, and her blog is full of great, brief entries encouraging transformation. If you can be clear about what you want, the line of thinking goes, you can make it happen.

One of her techniques is to write out "An Ideal Day." From morning to night, what would an ideal day consist of? After reading hers, I had trouble thinking of my own. Eventually I started imagining two. One is wintery and involves snowshoeing on the farm and writing and a good meal. Another involves giving a reading in a city, waking up in a nice hotel, meeting with friends in that city, giving a reading at a sweet-smelling bookstore, a good meal, the hotel room with a view of the city.

I was surprised that the day would include fulfillment of writing ambitions, though maybe I shouldn't have been. I am not doing the kinds of things that would make that dream come true, like serious and disciplined writing or more serious submissions to magazines. I did send an idea for a non-fiction book past my agent last week, and she was actually kind of excited about its possibilities, but it is a book that is a project, not really the book I want to represent me as a writer in the world. It is a book I probably could write, but not my passion.

Still, what does it take to get that ideal day/ideal days? I had those days very regularly when I had a year off in 2005 and was at the Ecumenical Institute finishing the memoir and a book of poems. It was not sustainable, but maybe it could be in a few years, when Steve's daughter is out of college and his businesses are established enough to provide some breathing room for me in terms of work.

I am actually quite clear about the way I'd like to be living my days. I do realize that I'm losing faith in myself slowly but surely in terms of writing, but I know what it takes for me-- time and attention. And I know that I am still "reading the signs" all around me, as avidly as ever. I also realize the courage it would take at this particular moment in my life to make a change and live my days that way. Lucky for me, making a change, especially in service of my writing life, has always felt more like necessity than a choice.

Gourmet No More

Back in May, in one of my periodic rants about the lack of "wake up and smell the coffee" change in response to the deepest recession since the Depression, I did a little commentary on Gourmet and bon apetit magazines. Click here if you want to refresh your memory. My feeling is that the recession has been masked and even packaged in a rather meaningless way, with a "budget/value" issue telling you how to make macaroni and cheese (with five kinds of cheese of course) and across the way an ad for culinary adventures in exotic locations. Basically, when golf courses close, I'll start thinking that we might not remain a superpower for long. The poor always get poorer, but the rich, well, when are they going to start to suffer? (I do hear a government program is being put in place to retrain all those folks displaced by layoffs in the financial industry.) I still feel that way, especially with the media united in saying the recession is over (more or less, at least not going to get worse, and on its way back to normal) even as the jobless rate is about to top 10%, and worse in some states. A jobless recovery is not really a recovery, is it? Were we only worried about Wall Street and nothing else? OK, but let me get to my point.

Then, in yesterday's newspaper, I gasped to read that Gourmet is closing its doors after the November issue. Has the advertising market for $10,000 ovens and Subzero fridges and exotic travel really dried up so completely that there will be no more Gourmet magazine? I quickly adjusted my thinking to seeing the move as more about the slow death of published media-- as newspapers and magazines struggle to keep afloat in a changing technological universe. Most people can get recipes online. (However, again Gourmet seemed so well-placed to capitalize on even this transition, with a popular and really well-designed and run web site.)

Gourmet was unusual. It wasn't just about the food porn-- it had great writing! It was in Gourmet that I encountered David Foster Wallace's amazing and hilarious essay, "Consider the Lobster," later the title of his collection of essays. The columns by the Sterns were always wonderful, and there were great essays about families in Spain and Italy and France and Sonoma with photos of sun-kissed outdoor eating or giant tables with half-filled carafes of wine. OK. It was more lifestyle porn.

bon apetit, which Conde Nast will continue to publish, has good recipes, but it is so, well, Hollywood. The back page always features some celebrity talking about their favorite cuisine (Italian, Spanish, French), where they like to travel (Italy, Spain, France) and what they cook at home. Soooo uninteresting. And there are no photos of food being served up in an actual ice palace on ice plates and bowl and cups in, where else, Iceland. I can see how that kind of photo shoot required a higher-than-average budget.

I have two small notebooks that I've filled with recipes from Gourmet over the nearly ten years I've been a subscriber, and other recipes stuck into the appropriate section of other cookbooks. Reading the magazine taught me easy and elegant ways to cook green beans and scallops and shrimp and potatoes and gave me the recipe for the mango salad that is the first sign of summer and red-and-yellow tomato soup. Much of what I know about combining herbs and various food, much of what I am as a cook, I owe to Gourmet. I have learned when you just have to use shallot or a sweet onion, and when a regular white or yellow will do. I am not afraid of curry powder, and have a much better understanding of the virtues of sage and tarragon. Reading this magazine over this many years, patterns emerge, and before you know it you actually have ideas of your own-- you know how to cook. I am not afraid of cranberries and know how to make an amazing turkey and stuffing.

So I'll read the November issue from cover to cover, and cut out more carefully the recipes from the remaining issues on my breakfront before sending them off to be recycled. And I guess I'll have to settle for that pedestrian alternative, bon apetit. But it just won't be the same... I'll miss you, Ruth Reichl, and your mane of hair and smiling, urban, aristocratic face that promised me that with ordinary things like chicken and potatoes, the good life was to be shared by all.

Hiatus

I developed a headcold -- as did many people who attended the wedding -- and have been a laid a little low. In addition to making me tired and stuffy for a week, I'm finding that even into the second week I'm having trouble thinking. It's also been gloomy and raining and cold for almost a week straight, and this sudden onset of November weather at the beginning of October has made me feel like hibernating. So although I've been aware of the blog out here wanting some new entry, I just have literally had nothing much to say.

If Mad Men becomes a soap opera and persists on taking up most prominently the issue of sex and the way men of that era wield their power in this arena (even extending to a very ambiguous handling of whether the neighbor's au pair was seduced or coerced by Pete Campbell), they will probably lose me.

Saint John's University won the homecoming game against Bethel in the final seconds with the longest field goal in the school's history; it was made all the more dramatic because the same kicker missed a routine extra point two minutes before the end of the game.

Brett Favre continues to lead the Vikings toward glory.

The garden is pulled up and there is one container of tomatoes left, some peppers and carrots, a half dozen butternut squash, and everything else is in the freezer or canned. Steve plowed up a big area next to the boxes to extend the planting space-- it made me tired to see it, truth be told.

I hope we get a few more warm, dry stretches, because May is a long way away!

Mad Men-- On Power

People watching Sunday's episode of Mad Men on AMC, season 3, episode 7, called "Seven Twenty-Three" might have thought that they had now officially gone over to watching a soap opera. Flirting with handsome men and school teachers, rendezvous, and Peggy waking up with a man in a hotel room...were we really just headed into another show that quickly devolves into everyone sleeping with everyone?

That's not what I saw, however. Steve and I usually try to identify a theme for the episode as it unfolds, and lately we've been grasping, and not really hitting on anything very concrete. But I think Sunday's episode was a brilliant illustration of how power works, and namely, of the theory that one gains power by withholding and loses it or gives it away by divulging information.

All the major characters in the episode had a certain amount of power banked. They could use this power for money or sex or advancement of some other aim. The game, as it was, revolved around a principle Don Draper sums up early on, when Conrad Hilton wants Don signed to a contract before he'll work with the firm. "He wants what he can't/doesn't have." Getting what you want is power, no? The business relationship is also firmly identified with sex: Conrad Hilton tells Don he has "a wandering eye" and wants his needs satisfied-- meaning he's willing to ditch his current agency for Don.

So how did the characters fare?

Betty has power over the city employee, Henry Francis, sexual power that she wants to use to get him to advocate on behalf of saving the reservoir. Henry Francis wants what he can't have-- Betty, and he has a lot of power. Betty maintains her bank by giving him a little but not enough-- no walk to the car, no kiss. He also gains power by withholding, canceling the walk up to the reservoir, leaving open the possibility of a second meeting.

Betty seems to have no power over Don. She confronts him about not signing the contract, and he simply walks out, not to appear again until, when? Sunday night? It seems he doesn't come home until Monday night, after he's signed the contract, though he throws this at her almost as an accusation ("are you happy now?") even though she had seemingly nothing to do with his decision-making.

Peggy has negotiating power with Duck over a new position at his firm. He is "wooing" her with a scarf. She is loyal until Don scolds her for no apparent reason (pure sexism) when she approaches him about the Hilton deal (men can be this aggressive in business, but not women). She goes to Duck's hotel room, ostensibly to return the scarf, but then submits to his sexual advances, thus losing ALL her power and really any chance of legitimately taking the job at Duck's firm. Oh, Peggy. Oh, oh, Peggy. I love her-- she doesn't understand power. But also, Peggy wants to be wanted: "What is it that you want from me?" she asks, and he responds with a lewd proposition.

In the relationship between Don and the teacher, Miss Farrell, she also has a fair amount of power. It seems to me she made an advance toward him when she made the phone call home-- and when she told of losing a parent when she was young, she compromised her own power, which lies in part in mystery. She proves consistent here, when during small talk that she initiates, she accuses Don of coming on to her. She may be being honest, but she also is diffusing all sexual energy. He has given her nothing, and he retains all power. He has not shared with her or been "intimate" with her, although she has with him, if only in conversation. She cuts off the actual possibility of an affair, which is a good thing, as she is a teacher, but is again not good in terms of power brokering. And because Don is unscrupulous to the core of his being, and holds all the power, there is still a chance he'll eventually "get what he wants." If he decides to want it.

Finally, the most interesting exchange/brokering in this episode is over Don and the contract. Sterling and Cooper want him to sign. They insist that he sign. Eventually, when other tactics (reason, approaching Betty) don't work, Cooper goes to his office and asks: "Would you say I know something about you, Don?" "I would," says Don. "Then sign," says Cooper. What he knows is that Don has stolen his name and identity from a man who died in Korea. He has the information. He has the power. Don still negotiates, even as he's signing, in this case not to have to work with Roger Sterling. (For telling Betty? Or a final salvo in their never-ending male competition?) As he's signing, Cooper asks, "After all, when it comes down to it, who's really signing this contract anyway?" That question in its way acknowledges that Don still has manipulated the situation-- doesn't play by the rules. But maybe is also assuaging his hurt ego, saying that he still has a trump card/power if he chooses to use it. It's actually quite brilliant the way Cooper achieves this with a series of questions.

Of course, this is also complicated by the car trip to Niagara Falls, the reason I think he actually signs. Don at the point of picking up the hitchhikers really thinks he's invincible. He thinks he has ALL the power. And yet he is duped by these liars, these "innocent" kids. He's also, of course, undone by the vision of his father, the story at all costs he wants to keep secret-- seemingly the real threat to his power.

The deck is stacked in this show, as in the society it portrays. The men have the power, and the women have few tools for getting some of it for themselves. Everyone in this episode "wants what they don't have." If you don't have power, you seem to have two options: preserving mystery and living in the sexually charged atmosphere of withholding intimacy, or clubbing the guy who has what you want over the head.

I, unfortunately, have been Peggy, and I have been Miss. Farrell, too. And once, in a car after what had been a series of romantic dates and flirtations, I told a man something about myself and he said to me, "Why did you do that?" "What?" I asked. "Why did you just give up your power?" I had no idea what he meant. But he, rogue that he was, drove away from my house and into the nearby city where he slept with another woman, telling me later that I had imagined any romantic overtures on his part. I tried to figure out what he meant about giving away my power, and in some ways I did. It was a painful lesson. It didn't make me start being mysterious, or stop me from blurting out what I wanted and calling a romance a romance-- or divulging things about myself probably best left unsaid. But I did tend to my power as best I could, and watched how such things work in the lives-- and tales-- of others.