Welcome to another round of things I’m thinking about while supervising a pot of chickpeas on the stove…
1 The “In Writing” the podcast is back!
Hooray for Hattie Crisell who is back to interviewing writers! Her recently-aired interview with Naomi Klein had me taking screenshots of the automatically-generated transcript, and here is one of my favourite parts, for having experienced it myself in writing my thesis. Talking about research, and about writing so that the language is clear, Naomi Klein says:
This is also why I over research, is that I think you need to get a level of confidence to be able to simplify, to be able to popularize. I think you’re most likely to imitate when you’re not confident in your grasp of the material. You’ve got to mess around a bit. In order to play with form, you have to really marinate the material.
2 Eatons - sigh
I’m glad I finished reading Rod McQueen’s book about the family. For a slim volume, he managed to fit in five generations of the Eaton family, and a hundred years of the store’s history between two deep blue covers and an index. It surely wasn’t a small feat of research and guts… one of the blurbs for the book include a quote from a member of the Eaton family reasonably annoyed with the scrutiny.
A dispiriting read nonetheless.
3 Spooky Lakes
It’s Spooky Lakes Month on TikTok and if you don’t know what that means, I would like to take this moment to recommend Geo Rutherford’s channel geodesaurus on TikTok. Eating lunch during the month of October with fresh videos of “haunted hydrology” is way more fun. And she recently published a book!
4 Eating
Sometimes its nice to take a break from ambitious meals and all that striving to tackle new recipes, conquer techniques and explore new flavours. Sometimes its nice just to be able to trust an expert with a simple plan… some chicken thighs, some potatoes, some chickpeas from a can, a squeeze of lemon, a dash of oregano… thanks Smitten Kitchen… even the kids likes this “as simple as its title” meal.
5 The view
We got frost this week, and until the sun melted it away, my morning walk was crystalline.
Happy Friday!