Last night I watched for the first time Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Forgive me, cinema highbrows, but I’ve long assumed that the film is a heavy-handed European existentialist yawn-fest. I just couldn’t bring myself to sit through it. Even Jill, my cinephile wife, hadn’t watched it and dreaded the prospect. Take a look at the official synopsis:

Exhausted and disillusioned, a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) makes the journey home after years of combat in the Crusades. But when the black-robed figure of death confronts him, the knight challenges him to a game of chess.

Are you kidding? Invite me to a funeral instead. Really, I thought it’d just be the Knight and Death playing chess on a gloomy beach. But, let me tell you, The Seventh Seal deserves a better synopsis because it’s very cool and much more than the chess game. It focuses on the knight’s return home — a reverse pilgrimage — in a land (presumably not Sweden) devastated by the bubonic plague.

The cast of characters seems lifted from a Shakespeare play or a Chaucer tale. There are high characters and low. There’s sex and celebration and cruelty and grotesquery. The lighting is stark and surprising, the shots sometimes bizarre (ugly close-ups, even one hand-held shot) and you can see why this film made such a splash in 1957, winning the Cannes special prize. There was nothing else like it at the time, especially not in the U.S.

Most surprising is the tension created by the knight’s intermittent, ongoing game with Death. No one can see Death as he plays against the knight (with one significant exception at the end). It looks like the knight is simply entertaining himself. Death is devilish and promises to kill the knight and all of the knight’s companions (the knight has picked up a crowd on his pilgrimage). But we don’t know when or how. The knight keeps winning the game.

The earthiness of the story and the Bruegelesque portrayal of the characters keeps things lively. The instances of depravity and desperation are striking and frank — a notable set piece is the arrival of flagellants, wailing and declaiming; another is a witch burning — and, again, like nothing American viewers could have seen in our domestic fare way back then.

As I watched it with growing pleasure and appreciation, I decided that The Seventh Seal would be an ideal pic for Halloween. So do consider it. It’s got everything you’d want from a Halloween tale — a certain gloomy charm, a scary villain, a doomed hero, a few grotesques, some horror, a pinch of humor, and an ending that won’t keep you up nights.

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I spent most of the day cleaning off my desk. This happens two or three times a year, usually after the pile-up of papers, books, CDs, note pads, magazines, bits of scribbled-on scrap, business cards, etc. has driven me mad because I can’t find anything I’m looking for and yet I can’t bring myself to throw anything away because phone numbers have to be written into my phone book or, worse, entered into my cell phone; articles (for teaching) have to be scanned; magazines have to be read (sort of); CDs have to be uploaded to my MP3 player, and so on. But who has time for all that? So the stuff piles up.

Then one day I find myself rooting through the desk-junk and cursing and vowing, once and for all, to put order in my life. Once, I lost a pile of student papers — for three weeks — because they were hidden under the pile-up on my desk. Cleaning my desk is like taking on an archeological dig. I never know what I’ll find. Today I found an Indian Head penny dated 1887 and I’m not sure where that came from. Also a circa-1960s token for the New Jersey turnpike. And a wooden house from an old monopoly game. And two miniature paitings I brought back from London last summer and forgot about (because my desk is the land of the forgotten). Oh, and three drum keys. And a tiny knob to one of my amplifiers. And a button from the band Pfisters. And a fifteen-year-old tube of cimificuga racemosa, a homeopathic medicine that was supposed to help relieve muscle pains, though I can’t recall what pain that might have been. Also a vintage geometric puzzle. This, in addition to the piles of papers and notes and cards I sorted.

As messy as my desk is, I don’t think my mess is exceptional. When a writer — in a 1918 edition of a journal called The Independent — complained of the “Clutter of Things,” he noted, “Here I am sitting at my cluttered desk, amid a vast profusion of Things, writing in praise of the absence of Things. On my desk alone, there are three inkstands, a pile or two of books, a few bundles of film, papers, paperweights . . . .”

As a kid, I had so much stuff on my desk, it was easy to ignore my homework. I’d while away a hour or so every night playing with the trinkets I had arranged there to keep me company. I could do the same now. Says the author of Get Rid of That Clutter!: “Some people think that a cluttered desk looks like a productive desk … but when your desk looks like a train wreck, you are sending a message that you have lost control.”

When I pull my desk out to vacuum, I am appalled at the velvety accumulation of dust on the backside of things. It’s embarrassing to behold and it doubles my resolve to be a better steward of my desk. The crumbs that spill from my overturned computer keyboard could feed a pond of goldfish. I run Scotch tape between the keys and extract wads of cat hair. Try it some time, you’ll be amazed at what a single keyboard can hold. It seems to speak volumes for one’s life and the littered little landscape — our world in miniature? — that represents all that we hope to do but can never quite accomplish.

P.S. I’d love to see a photo of your desk. Send me one, if you can. Thanks.

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Jill and I went to the state fair with our friend Tim this week. Maryland’s state fair — at the Timonium fair grounds, in a Baltimore City suburb — is modest in comparison to the big bruisers in the Midwest. Like other east coast fairs, Maryland’s midway — with overpriced food stalls and dizzying rides — dominates and you’d think that’s all it’s about. But, remember, the fair was — and still is — all about the farmers’ harvest, an occasion to show off their good work.

When walking through the livestock barns and watching the earnest farmers proudly grooming their prize pigs, sheep, and cows, it’s easy to get nostalgic about farming. 80% of Americans now live in cities. But for 300-plus years — from the founding of the colonial settlements until 1950 — farming was the heart of America. If we include Native Americans, we could say thousands of years.

Our farming past persists in the structure of our school year — which lets kids loose for three months only because they used to have to work on the farm. The driving age in most states is low (permits at 16) because teenagers had to drive tractors on their farms. Thanksgiving is a farmer’s holiday. Many of our most iconic images, like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” are of the farm. And we still use expressions like “couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn,” even though most of us haven’t seen a barn except in passing, off the freeway.



Only 1/4 of America’s two million farms are now family operations. And every week, 330 farmers leave their land. Corporate farms dominate, thanks to government subsidies that privilege large operations over small. If you want to support family farms, start by frequenting your local farmers’ market. To learn more about family farms, visit Sustainable Table.

I was amazed to see 4Hers at our state fair. I didn’t imagine that kids still joined this old-fashioned organization, whose motto is I Pledge my Head to clearer thinking, my Heart to greater loyalty,my Hands to larger service, and my Health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

Our 4Hers were holding a fashion show to display the clothes they had made. This include a few boys too. As a hip teenager, I would have mocked kids in 4H as “hayseeds” and “hicks.” But now I stand in awe of their competence and self-sufficiency.

The youngsters who were taking care of the livestock were similarly inspiring. When I was a kid, I could hardly find time to feed my cat. These kids are taking care of one-ton cows and herds of sheep. You can see in the way they handle the livestock that they love and respect their animals. But you see too that these kids are rooted in ways that we city folk are not: they know that animals are food and raw material. They give these animals their best in the knowledge that these animals will give their all in return. That’s an honest approach to life.

The pre-teen cowgirls broke my heart. Talk about competence and true grit! As they galloped through their routines in the dirt ring, they appeared strong and confident and destined for good things. But I fear for them because their older counterparts on the midway –the teens who dress like ho’s and center their lives around pleasing men — forecast what awaits them. Mary Pipher got it right in “Revising Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls“: we live in a “girl-poisoning culture.” I’ll spare you my rant but it’s clear that, once girls reach a certain age, their options fall away. Good bye, cow girls.

Jill and I wanted to try the bumper cars but the line was a quarter mile long. As I watched the carnies work, I wondered what becomes of them when the fair season is over. Speaking of which: the best essay you’ll ever read about state fairs — and carnies — is the late David Foster Wallace’s Ticket to the Fair. Wallace got it right in every way and he’s hilarious.

Our state fair is neither large enough nor diverse enough to encourage repeated visits but this year’s did give me a nudge to consider visiting one of the legendary fairs — Iowa or Kansas or Nebraska. Places where the farmer is still a common sight and the broadside of a barn is something we can find easily. Click here for more photos

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