Friday Five

Another week, another post! Here’s a little round up of things from the last week…

1 Notre-Dame

I really enjoyed clicking through (thanks Kottke!) to the NYT article about Notre-Dame Cathedral’s restoration; people coming together, preserving history, appreciating the particular resonance of D-major… A lovely story. 

2 Enjoying

Chef’s Table (Pasta); Freakonomics two-part podcast episode on the subject of large retail stores; the fact that a lip-shaped version of sleep tape is on a list of cool stocking stuffers (here).

3 Passing the time

My youngest son had an appointment to attend and I luckily decided to bring along my sketchbook. The wait was over a half hour, but the time flew by because we invented drawing challenges for each other as we sat side by side. I now have Christmas-themed drawings of a dog building a fort, penguins skating on an iceberg and the memory of making him chuckle when he gave me the prompt “a person whose having a hard time making his Christmas tree stand straight” and drew a man dragging a level and a crooked Christmas tree in a room with a crooked picture and a crooked vase. 

4 First Snow (Storm)

In her book Things to Look Forward To, Sophie Blackall lists “First Snow” as one of them, and writes:

Growing up in Australia, I didn't see falling snow until I moved to the United States. After twenty years, it's no longer a novelty, but I always look forward to the first snow. If you're outside, you can tell it's coming. The sky lowers itself like a goose on her eggs, and everything grows very quiet. Then a snowflake flutters down, and another, and soon they are swirling about like the aftermath of a pillow fight.

In the country, the landscape sparkles like a Victorian Christmas card. You can go outside in the first snow and tramp about, then come indoors, light a crackling fire, make a hot toddy, and revel in coziness. In the city, falling snow causes everyone to slow down for a minute. Everything is beautiful, and the children are happy. It's hard to argue with that. (p 26)

We had the “sky lowering itself like a goose on her eggs” and we had the snowflakes fluttering down, but then, as if unwilling to commit, the first snowfall was a scant bit of fluff. It wasn’t until Sunday, December 8th that the real snow came. That snowfall made everyone slow down, quiet down, and the world turn white. It’s that kind of snowfall that forces the machines to come out for winter duties, when snow clearing produces a parade of graters, loaders and dump trucks along the roads. I turn into William Cowper, the “chatty poet” that Adam Gopnik quotes in “Winter: Five Windows on the Season” and like him make a similar profession:


I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,
And dreaded as thou art!…
I crown thee king of intimate delights, 
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

5 Eating

We cooked an especially cozy meal last Sunday. It perfectly coincided with the season’s first snowstorm. This “Pork Shoulder Braised with Apples” via Cup of Jo was delicious. We substituted plain mashed potatoes for the polenta and boiled some peas for colour. 

Wishing you a lovely Friday!


Friday Five

It’s Friday! It’s Friday! That means I plan a menu for tomorrow’s shopping and tonight Christian and I might mix a drink from gifted bottles of Vermouth and Campari from his birthday and settle down to watch the latest episodes from the shows we’re currently watching: Shrinking, Bad Sisters, and The Empress. Meantime, let’s clear some of the flotsam from my head…

1 Deep thoughts

Consuming a variety of media from a variety of free sources sometimes has the happy effect of creating a cohesion of ideas. It’s like media consumption can be a stroll in the garden, and I come back with a posy and put it on display here.

First, there are these thoughts on care from StevenScrawls via Dense Discovery. He writes that care cannot be scaled and that this fact elicits “a sense of insufficiency” because “it is tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant.” I am familiar with this feeling. I meet it anytime I have to peel myself away from a project in order to volunteer time somewhere else. It’s humbling in a way, which leads to the second flower in this posy… Brian Doyle’s words on humility via The Marginalian. He writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. […]

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

I find these words consoling. The same way that StevenScrawls ends his post with the words: “But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do. There’s something oddly comforting about that.”

Care, love, kindness… There’s a third flower in this posy from podcasters’ discussion on the subject of Vasily Grossman’s book Life and Fate in which they quote a passage they find very moving. It is this:

The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is importent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human being has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

Care and love and even the more elementary kindness, come from humility, are acts of humility and if they do not scale, if recognizing that it is so brings some comfort, Grossman is convinced it triumphs.

2 Vignette

I’m at a table with older people eating a catered lunch of meat in a bun, plain salad on the side. They’re talking about a church that’s been repurposed as a hall and transported from one community to Miami. I’m a conversation participant. Transporting a church sounds impressive. A man formerly in construction sketches how it’s done. I ask, “It was cheaper to transport the building than build a new one?” Oh definitely they say. I ask how far the town was from Miami. Just a little over an hour to the East they say, one providing the highway, another the towns along it. Perhaps my face is more expressive than I mean it to be, but someone catches on that I only just understood that there’s a town named Miami in Manitoba and I’ve made everyone laugh.

3 Relationships etc.

I recently finished I’ll be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamara, the audiobook, which makes time spent baking cookies fly by. I particularly liked the autobiographical chapter in which she writes:

My mother was, and will always be the most complicated relationship of my life. Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother and I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

Later, reading the Paris Review interview with author Sally Rooney, there’s and idea of hers that seems related. What happens in real life that is sometimes so hard to describe, is something authors like herself explore in the creation of a story.

Everything you’re describing felt like the very questions I was working through in the book. Families get stuck in certain roles, but what becomes possible when one of those roles is suddenly absent—in this case, because of the death of a family member? There’s some guilt and discomfort in realizing that new family formations are possible because this beloved person is no longer there, and the space their absence leaves—maybe you don’t want to fill it?

I think it similarly fascinating the difference between the real-life criminal person you “meet” in I’ll Be Gone In the Dark, and the fictional Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. (Omg! I finally finished reading this book. See here.) Crime and Punishment is an artistic rendering, it’s an author imagining what went on inside a young man’s mind that made him commit a crime. In I’ll Be Gone In the Dark the criminal is only viewed from the exterior, never the interior. I like feeling the contrast.

4 Recipe recommendation

This week, I made cabbage rolls. I made them only once a decade ago and we didn’t care for the recipe and it took me until now to make a second attempt. I chose Ina Garten’s “Stuffed Cabbage” wanting to serve my grandmotherly guests something that felt old-timey. Even with only regular cabbage, this recipe was very tasty and abundant. I look forward to trying it with Savoy cabbage when it’s in markets in the fall.

5 Changes in the landscape

There’s a scene toward the end of “Perfect Days” in which an older man pointing to an empty space asks Hirayama “Remember what used to be here?” Hirayama looks around a little startled and the man smiles and turns away, saying “That’s what growing old means.” 

Around me, the city changes. I walk, year after year, this loop with its particular segments. The St. Mary’s interchange came up to one of those segments, and from May to November I had to modify the loop while constructions workers changed the road. What used to look like this:

now looks like this:

The row of giant poplar trees have been cut down.

It was months of work…

The road was torn up, drainage infrastructure was buried, new roads were made.

It’s all modern and sophisticated now…

It’s dark now as I type. Still, happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to another edition in which I celebrate getting to the end of The Odyssey with my daughter, a moment of grace, one of my favourite things this time of year, a podcast episode I liked and a small tragedy.

1 The OdYssey

My daughter and I finished reading The Odyssey together, four pages at a time, some four nights a week. It was fun and silly reading and if she was in a hard day’s end sour mood, I’d add sound effects, or give characters ponderous voices and she’d swat at me and I’d hurry on with the reading before we’d head out to walk the dog around the block. 

Perhaps what I like most about the book was the translator’s passion for the project. Emily Wilson loved The Odyssey from when she was eight years old. In her Translator’s Note at the beginning she writes:

It is traditional in statements like this Translator’s Note to bewail one’s own inadequacy when trying to be faithful to the original. Like many contemporary translation theorists, I believe that we need to rethink the terms in which we talk about translation. My translation is, like all translations, an entirely different text from the original poem. Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which a reader can see the original. […] I have taken very seriously the task of understanding the language of the original text as deeply as I can, and working through what Homer may have meant in archaic and classical Greece. I have also taken seriously the task of creating a new and coherent English text, which conveys something of that understanding but operates within an entirely different cultural context.

A few lines, and we glimpse a world of “translation theorists” and realize that translation involves a degree of subjectivity in interpretation. Then,  Wilson contends not only with bridging language but also time. In an age when translation can seem mechanical, when it is tempting to feel like the job is on the brink of being handed over to A.I., Wilson shows how this work, in her case, is to some degree, an art. I As such, I appreciate how her translator’s note is a little view into a different field of work and research.

2 Grace

When searching to see if I’d already written about The Odyssey on my blog, I found instead a reference to it from a podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Marilynne Robinson.

Her comment at the end, about grace, describing it as she does as the ability “to look beyond the offense” is something I recently felt when I forgot to bring my son to a birthday activity that had been scheduled on a Saturday morning. I felt horrible and apologized to the mother. We don’t know each other but her answer was so kind and understanding, like a person who instead of saying “that’s fine”, takes a moment to write that they as a parent can understand how days are busy and schedules confusing and in spite of that, they still look forward to seeing your son. It was a touching gesture I hope to replicate when someone is late for one of my kids!

3 Gift guides!

This is such a fun time of year when, in anticipation for Christmas, websites everywhere, and TikTokers too, start publishing lists of gift ideas. I realize I really like browsing these curated lists! (A few that are fun: The Kid Should See This, Wirecutter of course, Emily Henderson, and soon, Cup of Jo!)

4 Podcast episode

I really enjoyed a recent episode of the Sporkful: How Judith Jones Changed Cookbooks Forever.

5 The end of the wonky tree

It’s strange to feel sad when you arrive moments after a tree has been cut down…

There are many trees on my walk that I don’t notice, because they are tall or bushy, or further back from the path. But some are sentinels I look toward each day, cleaning the air I breath, standing firm through the seasons. This tree was a wonky tree. It had an endearing shape and over the years, I’d take its picture, just to commemorate its existence.

I think maybe I intuited its coming end, because twice in the past few months I photographed it.

It wasn’t really easy to photograph because it was hard to isolate it in the frame, even though it stands out as you walk by, the path literally curving to accommodate it. It was also striking because its trunk had survived a deep gash.

I still tried, even going back years in my photos, to capture the delight it gave me to see its funny shape.

When the sun would land on it…

When snow would skirt its base…

Dear little wonky tree… thanks for all the years you stayed and arrayed my path, growing despite some strange accident that changed your shape, producing leaves and staying strong as we walked by.

Friday Five

This week…

1 The air is cooler…

Look at these frost-fringed white poplar leaves!

2 I made cookies

They are called Browned Butter Banana Bread Oatmeal Cookies and are as substantial as their title. (From Well Made By Kiley, via Tess Madalyn on Tik Tok) There are now 2 bananas fewer in my freezer.

3 Card Games

Our friends invited us over to play card games. It was so cozy! I learned James Bond


and Trash

And the kids sang Karaoke.

4 Fog and other scenery

One day there was fog, and it was like nature’s aperture, forcing you to only focus on what was closer… I liked how the building from the University campus across the river loomed like a ghost.

The next day, bright sunshine! Blue skies!

5 Quote

Recently on Hattie Crisell’s podcast In Writing, the episode ended with this quote, a perfect summary in my opinion, of the gamut of emotion one can feel from day to day, just writing… It’s from Hari Kunzru.

I get great pleasure from writing, but not always or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline, trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak out. Beginning is daunting, being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus. Ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation, as you fleetingly believe that you’ve nailed that particular sentence, and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of cliches that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you’re in the zone, spinning words like plates, there’s a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to my little spot on the web, where, like a bird on a blade of bluestem I cheerily chirp in comfortable invisibility. Ha! This week brings more thoughts on writing, the foundational joy of these weekly dispatches, and… some fall colour! Cheers!

1 Writing

I like listening to writers talk about writing because I crave all their voices and experience in the silence of muddling along. For example, I nod along with Alexandra Shulman when she says “I’m somebody who never knows what I’m going to write ever until I start writing it. […] I write it down and then once I’ve written down wherever I get, then I go back and try and turn it into something that’s a bit more ordered.” It makes me think of Joan Didion’s expression: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” But do you see how Shulman’s statement is a little more raw, a little less literary? In the yellow glow of my black desk lamp, I more often feel like Shulman, a little humbled by my inability to draw up a plan and follow it. It’s in the glare of sunlight through a café window, joking with a friend over lunch that I can venture to be Joan Didion-like, just “writing to think…”

Or, for another example, I like how Jon Ronson said he needs “months to write”, that being a columnist wasn’t something he liked because his brain just didn’t work that way… “I’m very slow.” And while this might seem like an unflattering quote, such confessions are deeply reassuring for people whose creativity has a matching way of working itself out.

Slow percolation and spontaneity … I wonder if it’s related in a way to Carson Ellis’s own observation on the subject of narrative storytelling, when she tells Debbie Millman that she wishes she “felt more comfortable with it and better at it” but that she freezes when “faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. Like you’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations, the bar is very low, and I still feel kind of frozen by it.” I too get the same feeling.

Perhaps the fun of listening to this kind of “shop talk” is the excitement of a kind of pattern recognition, whereby I find in the professionals things I’ve begun to notice in myself and it’s a boost to my confidence. 

2 Breath

The ideas in this book have recently taken over our thoughts and modified some of our habits… I originally heard about the book on the podcast “People I Mostly Admire”. James Nestor’s writing voice is nice to read and he has a kind tone. Steve Levitt remarked on this in his podcast, saying “you came to book writing somewhat late” and then noting the success of his books. Nestor answers that for him, writing has been an outlet, “what I would do to feed my soul at nighttime and on weekends.” I find it inspiring that this kind of attitude toward writing imbues a reader’s experience of the book itself.

3 Eating

I made doughnuts from scratch for the friends and family festivities at our house Halloween night. It was a little chaotic… Christian had to serve supper on limited counter space while answering the door and being cheerful while the dog howled so I could concentrate entirely on managing dough and hot oil. But! They were a SUCCESS! I followed Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe in Start Here to the letter, and the outcome was plush and crisp and perfectly sweet. I learned about proofing dough - comparing the right amount of proofing to a handprint on memory foam was effective - and used coconut oil for frying as she recommended. Having our whole house smell like it was doused in coconut-scented sunscreen seems like an extra perk of the recipe. Wow.

4 Research

I’m doing this little side-project for fun and it involves these directories that get bigger and bigger along with Winnipeg’s population growth. They’re called Henderson Directories and they list an individual’s name, their occupation, place of employment and address. They also list house owners by street. These tactile sources of data amaze me. They’re also a poor subject of conversation, of the “did you know” type. 

Research makes me think of Tyler Virgen’s post “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”. I really like this blog post. It begins small, leads to a little goose-chase and lots of sleuthing, contains self-doubt, has moments of humorous refocusing, plunges into dusty archives, contains newspaper clippings and delivers a satisfying ending. If I were a professor, I’d dedicate a class to this blog post, just for the illustration of research it provides.

5 The view

It’s so colourful this time of year…

I feel like milkweed makes a flamboyant show in the fall compared to the demure dusty-rose of its summertime flower clusters.

In case you were doubting the above statement…

The river recedes from the shore, going so low as to reveal new islands and the perfect profile of a duck.

Today, a row of willow looked like this, still leafy:

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Let’s not be ponderous this week… let’s aim for short for once, eh? How about…

1 Working on…

I just found a haystack and decided there’s a needle in it that would be really satisfying to find… My mother-in-law worked at Eaton’s for about 7 years, and Eaton’s published their own newsletter, complete with photos and news about their staff. Wouldn’t it be funny if she were mentioned in one of those editions? I’m itching to get back to the Internet Archive…

2 recommending…

I’m having a lot of fun making a list of recommendations on various subjects in various media forms of things I’ve most enjoyed reading, listening to and watching over the years. Check it out here: https://www.jacintapalud.com/recommended

3 Baking

I didn’t make a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but the can of pumpkin purée has served for pumpkin cinnamon rolls, loaf and cookies and all three recipes have had high approval ratings in this household.

4 Viewing

Last Friday, a friend took me to Bruxelles, Manitoba for a tour of the region, just as she was treated to its discovery by a local family who welcomed her to Manitoba a few decades ago… It is a little magical to visit land and be gifted a closeness to someone’s attachment for it. And really… the view on that fall day was stunning…

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

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!

Friday Five (A mini essay edition)

Vicariously

I got completely caught up in Hurricane Milton for some reason. I blame TikTok. Hurricane Helene shared the same name as my daughter’s, my friend blamed a windy day on it but it was only after it had passed that I learned of it. Milton was on my “For You” page before it even hit land and an influencer pointing to the dropping levels of a river backing-up endeared me to her by dint of compelling explanations and windswept hair. I followed her, refreshed the feed for hourly updates, went to bed with a prayer for Floridians (what a lovely name for residents… anyone from Saskatchewan would be jealous), and woke up wondering how they fared. 

I walked the dog in the morning and the air in Winnipeg was completely still. Not calm-before-the-storm still. Just regular still. It was odd to feel the contrast be so stark, perhaps because my mind was a little drunk on vicariously living through someone else’s storm. 

It is thrilling to live in a time when we can peak through a window onto people’s lives and be transported to a different reality. It’s a great distraction to spend some time poking around another person’s story. Recently I’ve been interested in the camping adventures of Fiona Macbain for example. Or when a link lead me to Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter, I got caught up in reading about a lumbar puncture that lead to a big life change. I’m grateful in a way to be able to continue to discover people whose writing inspires me, just as, so many years ago, I felt inspired by those “dawn of blogging” bloggers… Petite Anglaise, Dooce, Mighty Girl… so many.

In the penultimate episode of “Nobody Wants This” when the Jewish mother is talking, about to tell a story, Noah, her son, turns to his girlfriend Joanne and says “There’s always a moral.” 

I feel like I’m always looking for a moral. Like my writing has a dreadful subconscious gravitational pull toward moral, and I’m constantly fighting against it. Thwack, thwack, thwack. No moral. This makes for incredibly short paragraphs, like a person being curt, because were you to prod them more, words would tumble out everywhere in a cascade. What a mess. This section could end, would normally end there, at “so many…” because I like avoiding the longer thoughts underpinning the blithe observation. 

Still, there should be a point. I think it’s there, in the allusion to windows, the image that is so compelling it is also a brand, the inference being both possibility and voyeurism. I catch myself feeling a little guilty for this sudden preoccupation for someone unrelated to me, and for using the thing that enables it.

I recently read Martin Luther King’s Nobel Lecture delivered in December 1964. It’s such a beautiful speech. I didn’t know it was so beautiful. My heart swelling aside, there’s a paragraph which begins:

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say “We must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.

And King refers to the story of the Argonauts in which Ulysses gets Orpheus to sing because, King explains, Orpheus’ melodies were sweeter than the Sirens’ and thus they saved themselves more intelligently from the Sirens’ lure. He applies this analogy to war and peace: 

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war.

If the analogy can be made between such far ends of a spectrum as positive influence, Orpheus and peace on the one hand and Sirens, war and negative paths on the other, a far humbler application can be made here. It is that all kinds of valid fears and true horror stories can indeed be managed with fences of rules and warning tut-tuts, of giving in to feelings of shame and vaguely resolving to be better. But deep down I believe it is both more challenging and more rewarding to nourish the “positive affirmation” of values. 

I’m endlessly buoyed by people who do so and who are generous enough to write about it. Or who make videos. (I have only to think of the organist Anna Lapwood on TikTok to be infected by her smile and exuberance!)  

There was a moment there when my preferred influencer had no hurricane updates on her feed. Had her windows shattered? Was that other person’s concerns about high-rises and hurricanes right? Was the wifi out from night to morning? No… none of that. My dear influencer had been sleeping. And good on her! 

If I’m to conclude this mini-essay, it’s with that almost comical juxtaposition… a body that needs sleep, a mind that’s tirelessly curious. Governing both is a soul, a heart, a thing that can elevate the physical sleeping and eating and moving to resting and nourishing and caring. To contrast the Sirens’ call of mere distraction with an admiration and gratitude for the creativity that allows me to share in someone else’s life, and the value in that. I do not delude myself by thinking this will solve big problems, you need King for that. But I think that just as much as anybody else, I need to be reminded that joy is a flame whose benefits radiate outward.

Friday Five

It’s been a good week, starting as it did with Monday off, during which Christian and I ran an errand… then days of routine and now its Friday, the kids were home from school, friend visits were lined up and this post gets barely published in time! But I love gathering a few things here, as if I’m styling a little vignette just for the pleasure of looking at it.

1 Coziness

The errand we ran, was for a lamp. “I need a lamp!” I texted Christian, like a dramatic soprano who wants honey-lemon tea. “A lamp, lamp, lamp!” So he brought me to Home Depot, and we found a lamp, and it is perfect. I feel so cozy now.

2 Satisfaction

There are some mysteries in life, like the end of Lost or the meaning behind The Leftovers, that linger like dust bunnies. But then, I was listening to Dead Eyes and an interview with Damon Lindelof mentioned both shows and unravelled my thoughts on the subject. It was very satisfying. The podcast is a fun listen!

3 Nuit Blanche

Christian and I walked 5 km taking in the art at Nuit Blanche on Saturday. Streets were full of people, cars immobilized and buildings overrun. We took a “break” by stopping in at Across the Board for snacks, drinks and two rounds of Battleship. (While we were waiting for the performance below, we ducked into the Antique Mall at Johnston Terminal before it closed and I spied a jacket that was the same as one I had when I was young!)

4 Mr Lytle: An Essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan

I read this essay, from the book of Mr Sullivan’s gathered essays, titled Pulphead. But it’s online too. I liked these two paragraphs, because I have my own Mr. Lytle, except that she’s short, wears her hair as a sphere of white cotton-candy and raised my husband to standards of cleanliness one rarely sees in real life.

The manner in which I related to him was essentially anthropological. Taking offense, for instance, to his more or less daily outbursts of racism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, class snobbery, and what I can only describe as medieval nostalgia, seemed as absurd as debating these things with a caveman. Shut up and ask him what the cave art means. The self-service and even cynicism of that reasoning are not hard to dissect at a distance of years, but I can’t pretend to regret it, or that I wish I had walked away.

There was something else, something less contemptible, a voice in my head that warned it would be unfair to lecture a man with faculties so diminished. I could never be sure what he was saying, as in stating, and what he was simply no longer able to keep from slipping out of his id and through his mouth. I used to walk by his wedding picture, which hung next to the cupboard - the high forehead, the square jaw, the jug ears - and think as I passed it, “If you wanted to contend with him, you’d have to contend with that man.” Otherwise it was cheating.

5 The view

I’ll leave the natural scenery behind for another shot from our night out.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1 Podcasts

There are podcast episodes that stand out because someone makes a point that stays in my mind long after the subject has changed. The Decibel, for example, interviewed Justine Hunter on the subject of lost fishing gear from a once busy Canadian industry that is now hurting wildlife and the efforts deployed to retrieve it. A worthy story that rings a tiny bell of optimism, but mostly what I retained is how Hunter framed the effort… On the podcast she says

To me, this is also a reminder that the abundance of our oceans has been depleted and cleaning up some of these messes, to me, is just like a little penance that’s due.

It’s as though she’s reminding us, having herself experienced how big and how amazing the ocean is, how some of its beautiful animals are suffering, that the inconvenience it’s now costing us to retrieve gear from a time when we benefitted so much from the ocean’s bounty, is a way of recognizing nature’s majesty and asking its forgiveness for our too hurried, too greedy attitude. I find it a heartening attitude. (Episode here.)

Second, is Canadaland… Jesse Brown is in favour of safe injection sites. The issue is in the news, Brown talks about how politicians spin the problem in their snappy-sensational-making soundbites and then takes the listener on a little journey to another perspective, thanks to a thoughtful interview with Derek Finkle. I really enjoyed this episode because it felt like I really learned a lot in a short time. Nice work! (Episode here.)

2 Department stores

This week I finished reading Bruce Allen Kopytek’s book titled Eaton’s: The Trans-Canada Store.

It’s the latest read in a fun little side-project into colouring-in my mother-in-law’s life story, which included seven-years’ employment at the Eaton’s store in Winnipeg in the 1950s. The book ends inevitably with the store’s demise and Kopytek writes:

Some employees offered their experiences over the last few turbulent years in hindsight. They admitted that the store became terribly shabby […]. More than one claimed that Eaton’s abandonment of its core customer was critical to its failure. The youth group that the store sought was not only fickle, but it also didn’t have tremendous amounts of disposable income, and what’s more, it never really identified with Eaton’s like its former customers did. (pp 386-7)

Its hard not to see in this a kind of pre-mortem for The Bay at the St. Vital Mall where my mother-in-law every week has us park the car, where we pass through broken doors and where she browses styles she dismisses (cut-out shoulders, shiny puffer jackets, neon shirts) as bizarre.

How many more years will this one limp along pretending that marketing can substitute for care, when I’m pretty sure there are a lot of older women that would be pleased with a crisp white polyester-blend button-down, with short sleeves for summer. And an extensive petites section. 

3 A lemon dessert

This week, I made Amy Thielen’s Lemon Nemesis for a lemon-loving birthday-celebrating lady and it was a hit even among the less-lemon-loving guests. It was also my first time using a blow torch - go me! If the dessert sounds intriguing (here’s Thielen’s description: “This giant lemony ice cream cake—from its salted butter-cracker bottom to the racy lemon custard middle to the swirled toasted meringue on top—corrals all three of my personal temptations into a single dessert. It is my nemesis. My lemon nemesis.”) the recipe is wonderfully available online. (See it here.)

4 Robert Caro

On the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker, the Daily aired an interview from the Book Review podcast with Robert Caro, its author. At one point, he discusses the writing, and Caro says,

I believe that if you want people to read a piece of non-fiction, and if you want it to endure, the level of the writing, the prose, the rhythm, the word, the choice of words, getting the right word, is just as important in non-fiction books as it is in fiction books.

Were I an audience in attendance at the recording of this interview, I would have stood up and cheered, would it not have caused an interruption - I want to hear everything Caro says about writing… I also am really really enthusiastic about his point of view on the subject.

5 The view here

Fall is turning leaves into potato chips on my morning walk. Its ombré colour treatment on this baby tree is also pretty nice.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

There are weeks in a year when something happens somewhere in time, that sends a bowling ball through your calendar, roaring a path through the quotidian and bending all the invisible structure of ephemeral habits to the energy of its passage. That is to say, things can happen in a week that tear at the gossamer web of quiet moments in which to percolate ideas. Creativity this week is focused on food, the pictures taken while preparing meals, moments in between meals, meals as necessity and care.

1 Bluestem Red

I love how pretty Big Bluestem is in the fall, with its occasional vibrant red blades… Yesterday, I walked the dog early in the morning, before the sun rose, and his nose detected a fox I could not see in the dark, until it ran across the street and its coat shone red in the streetlight. The fox is an elegant animal, its white-socked paws seem to dance across the ground in balletic bounds across the road. It scampered away and Enzo and I made it to the end of the block after so much excited howling. We turned the corner to the left at a quiet suburban crossroad and faced the wind. When I looked back, I could see the fox sitting at the right side of the crossroad, its pointed ears perfectly silhouetted in the dark, watching us as we walked away, the dog oblivious, the scent gone for him. 

2 Beet red

Our garden is yielding beets, and so, this week, I made borsht. I also made refrigerator pickles for another meal. I stopped though, to take this picture, just to marvel at the beauty in the contrasted colours.

3 Seeing red

These are almond crescents, the ones saved from being snapped up by the dog, in the half-minute I left the kitchen and left the cookies too close to the edge. I served them for dessert along with a magical chocolate mousse made with only water and chocolate - but fancied-up with a bit of orange juice, a swirl of whipping cream and a sprinkling of sugary orange zest.

4 Roses are red

Or rather, these lilies are, kindly gifted, happening to match these giant tomatoes, ripening for Deb Perelman’s Tomato and Corn Cobbler.

5 A rosé, not a red

Wine is lovely and this is a rosé, with a bit leftover, pulled from the fridge and so full of condensation, just to say, if you like wine that could trick you into thinking it’s juice, this is just the kind for you!



Happy Friday!  

Friday Five

Dear Visitor,

How have you been? The week here was a strange one.

First There was Monday…

…a holiday that we took advantage of as a family, with friends, to go on a hike to Spruce Woods Park. Enzo and I headed the pack… he likes to be in front. We’re the first to catch the view:

Second, there was Tuesday

Plans were set aside to come to the help of a friend in pain from an accidental fall. It was a warm day but I served our family and guests Corn Chowder from an old Food Network cookbook. The recipe feels like an indulgence, for by its simplicity (corn, garlic, scallion whites, salt, a bit of sugar and water) it elevates the taste of corn and magically intensifies it.

Third, Wednesday

Wednesday, we met teachers and brought school supplies to school. I don’t know that it matters what I think of some product or other, but, so far, I’ve been impressed with the durability of L.L. Bean backpacks, the service for outfitting the kids with shoes at Canadian Footwear, and the quiet and calm of the back to school aisle at Superstore in the second week of August.

Fourth, Thursday

I love the experience of hearing or reading another person put into words a thing you haven’t been able to describe yourself. This recently happened on the Ezra Klein podcast, in his interview with Jia Tolentino. It focused a lot on screens and parenting, following Tolentino’s recent article “How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention”. But this part, in which the host is describing his own attention:

… what always feels limited to me is my attention. And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it. […] And what allows me to access the transcendence of my children, of the world is, honestly, how rested and how awake and aware I am. […] So in that way, I think escape is undertheorized. That escape, it can be good or bad. I think we have trouble with this question of, are we distracting ourselves, or are we recovering? Are we getting a kind of necessary contemplation, so that we can come back and experience a world and process what we’ve experienced and seen, or are we running from it? Are we trying not to feel from it? Are we trying to be anywhere but here?

I like how objectively the need to recharge attention is treated.

Fifth, well, it’s Friday

The kids are all at school, the air is cooler and the fridge is full of summertime memories.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to a pot pourri of subjects, this week featuring flowers, flurries and fluids… I mean, really, the only commonality is this stretch of an alliteration… there are flowers… the flurries are featured in a book recommendation about an expedition to the South Pole and fluids… well, that would be wine. My motto is, if you’re bored, I’ll change the subject.

1 Flowers

I do not like these flowers. I mean, sure, maybe from overhead, in contrast to the fence and the stones, they have a lovely dark-green veined leaf and a sculptural trumpet-like flower, in stunning scarlet no less… but every time I look at them, I regret my spontaneous spring purchase. I prefer pinks, whites, and purples, and colour aside, I recognize my taste is subjective.

Take geraniums for example. I remember geraniums lining a windowsill in one of my elementary school classrooms, submissively potted and straining to the light, their dead leaves that crinkled like paper bags being plucked by some teacher, filling the ennuie of a quiet classroom at work, before there were computer screens for that. 

In my first year as lady-of-the-flowerbeds in our house, I disdained geraniums and planted any other flower I could. I also disdained petunias. But then, over lunch a few years later, with a certified landscape-architect friend who was my age, we admitted to each other, that on this subject, our tastes in floral beauty had run up against practicality. Dang it if geraniums and petunias weren’t such hardy plants, giving up their colourful blooms all summer-long.

Still… a geranium had yet to cross the threshold into my home’s interior… until last year. (I even documented it). There was the blog post on Gardenista, but then there was this book about interior design, Sense of Place, featuring homes of celebrated interior designers like Penny Morrison, Carlos Sanchez-Garcia and Helen Parker. And all their sumptuously decorated homes feature… well… as the book’s authors, Caitlin Flemming and Julie Goebel call them… pelargoniums. Do you know what pelargoniums are? They’re basically less hardy geraniums. The fact that these homes feature these plants and that they get their own special attention in the captions, well… I guess I could update my taste.

But there are other flowers that have a similar effect… hollyhocks for example. Or marigolds. But see them blooming somewhere else, under someone else’s artistic eye and suddenly your own partialities feel silly and arbitrary.

2 The Worst Journey in the World

It’s not often that you can make a wholehearted, unequivocal recommendation. A tv series we watched could have a caveat, like, “if you like such and such”. And then, so many of our habits are culturally influenced. You watch or read something because that’s what other people are watching, reading, talking about. But this book is a particular gem. It’s written by a person who fell in love with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s story and wrote about how she did in an inspiring downloadable PDF titled  to mirror his: “The Best Journey in the World”. 

The first volume of Airriess’s graphic novel series was 10 years in the making. It features her skill as an animator and as a writer. Her enthusiasm for research and accuracy is something I too share and these qualities alone are enough to recommend the book. But Airriess imbues the story with something more, which she describes in an interview: “What makes me burn to share this story is the example that these people set, of how to behave when everything goes against you, and being there to support each other and not leaving your friends to die alone. […] We could do with more of that in the world, and I want to show that people can be that.”  

See her work here: https://worstjourney.com/

3 Wine

Amy Thielen’s author bio clearly indicates she is a writer and a teacher and so my enthusiasm for her, every time I open Company feels a little late to the party. Still, I cannot help but admire how her cookbook teaches me so much in such an informal way.

Take wine for example. Now, there’s a show like “Drops of God” (Fun series!) that makes you feel like you haven’t been using your nose properly, never mind your taste buds, and you go about sipping a proffered glass feeling like a mole invited to a picnic. But Thielen can talk you down from your ledge with a little section subtitled: “When it comes to drinks, I’m pretty hands-off.” And here’s something I didn’t know… [Talking about wine at the liquor store in the affordable aisle]: “Many of these wines are chaptalized, or pumped up with added sugar at the last minute. Winemakers do this to bring out the grape’s berry-juice-box flavours, which they call fruitiness, but it raises the alcohol content to a head-spinning level. For me, a wine with 14- or 15-percent alcohol had better be well made and highly structured, or it can burn a little going down the throat and tends to dominate the food.” (p 17-8). She offers recommendations, an entertaining secret and then its off to a little introduction on menus… “Locating the exact coordinates of your own hunger is surprisingly difficult. Those of us who tend to think first and feel later will have to push our brains aside for a second and ask the body what it craves. Something fruity? Dark and meaty? Light and loose? Comforting and starchy? Spicy?” Etcetera. I wonder if writing so kindly has won Thielen a whole population of parasocial friends.

4 The dog

Enzo can be an exasperating beagle, with an “aroooo” so loud, the whole neighbourhood is alerted to the cat under the car. But darn if he isn’t a little schnookums in this picture… especially since he’s flattened all my pillows to make himself a bed.

5 The view

The sunlight slant is hastening faster and faster in the evening. Glancing back as I walked away from this viewpoint over the river, it alighted so nicely on the globe of fuzz of a flower gone to seed. It’s tiny amidst all the foliage, just one element among the rest.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to five things this week featuring things online and offline I’ve been enjoying…

1 Shot and Forgot

This is such a fun TikTok channel, animated by an enthusiastic host, Dan Rodo, who, by using the visual media of pictures, compressing hours of historical sleuthing into a fast-paced trail of crumbs, one-clue to the next, puts the excitement of research on display. Kudos to him!

2 About writing

Perhaps it is true for most writers, that seeing someone else braving the usual impediments to writing inspires their own writing... A post on Marginal Revolution lead to Jake Seliger's blog and then to Bess Stillman's substack which is the kind of thing that can happen now in this online world. (I remember once visiting a local cemetery where a woman's gravestone had a Youtube link. It was an oddly satisfying way of scratching the itch of a "who was this person?" question, even if only superficially.) I particularly appreciated Bess Stillman's three-part series on writing, the first of which is here.

3 Halfways (Bubble tea places list)

Before summer had even started and the kids had come out of a place with a disappointing experience of bubble tea, my daughter declared that we had to have an "authentic" bubble tea experience. I embraced this project idea, made a list of 20 bubble-tea-offering businesses in Winnipeg, put them on a map, and made a booklet for evaluations. We are halfway through, and even though the summer is winding down, we'll likely continue these random visits. I feel as though the focus on a single experience is both unexpectedly fun and surprisingly educational. Our stops are included among other summer activities and memorialized on the fridge, we've learned a lot about bubble tea, tracked down addresses in the city in areas we wouldn't normally visit, and discussed drink quality and tea place ambiances we wouldn't otherwise, were it not for this mini-project.

A list of places we've tried so far: On Tap Frozen Dessert Bar, Xing Fu Tang, Panda Crepe, The Alley, Icey Snow, Khab Tapioca, Boba Paw, Chatime, Happy Lemon, Dynasty Café.

Christian and I have been to KHAB Tapioca on Pembina three more times, just by ourselves and even invited visiting family members to try out bubble tea there. A close second, ambiance and taste-wise, is the nearby Panda Crepe. The kids were unanimous in liking the drinks from Dynasty Café which offers a small menu of basics. And Xing Fu Tang had a cool fortune-telling cabinet that entertained us as we waited for our orders.

4 Double Fine PsychodYssEy

My siblings turned me on to this Youtube series which Tom Faber describes in the Financial Times this way:

You might expect a documentary of this length to be exhausting or indulgent, particularly when it’s about something so technical, but it is a riveting watch. [...] Here are the mechanics of human creativity, the brutal realities of the gaming industry and the passion and heart of the people who choose to do it anyway.

Recently, watching episodes 12 and 13, I especially liked Tim Schafer's thoughts on how creativity is about momentum (around the 4 minute mark on episode 13). It's not that it's especially insightful but that you get to see what it looks like to put an idea like "creativity is an endless process you should do everyday of your life" into an exercise called "Amnesia Fortnight".

5 Summer’s progress here

There’s this particular tangle of thistles that I like to photograph against the sun after supper and they’ve been a steady marker of the season’s progress… (taken July 26th, August 2nd, August 16th)

The plants going to seed, and those seedheads emptying and turning brown are the visual aid helping me along this ever-forward thrust of time. Summer’s early exuberance gives way now to days gathered like last-minute berries plucked and put into over-full baskets as we leave the field behind, taking a store of fine memories.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Hello, hello! Welcome to another edition of things on my mind and before my eyes.

1 Thinking

Conversations with Tyler recently interviewed Alan Taylor (episode 217). I’m especially attentive with the guest is a historian, and there’s a part of the interview that focused specifically on “the (modern) practice of history”. In a response to Tyler’s question about coming out of a “good but not very, very top school” Alan discussed the academic field as he sees it today, saying:

The number of job openings for historians has shrunk dramatically. There are lots of complicated reasons for why that’s happened, but the general answer is that there’s a much smaller public investment in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts, and particularly in nonquantitative arts of the liberal arts.

Now that could be depressing to hear, but instead, I feel a little thrill… History’s place in education, at all levels is something I want to learn more about. I suspect that somehow, there’s been a change in society and the way history is viewed and I find that intriguing.

A link from the newsletter Dense Discovery (no. 299) lead me to read this substack article by Freya India, in which she writes:

My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness. Could just be me but when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more.

Don’t history and rootedness rhyme? If not literally, figuratively?

2 Eating

Our garden has started producing string beans just this week, and so the menu plan reflects their abundance with Salade niçoise, and this other recipe from Market Math, which, (shh!) is just barely a recipe, in fact, I could tell it to you here… It’s browned ground pork (about 230g) with a big pile of thinly sliced beans (about 340g) and a clove or two of garlic microplaned and a tablespoon or so of soy sauce sauteed until the beans are tender. Served on rice. Mmm.

3 Reading

I heard about this graphic memoir on Longform (RIP!) and reserved a copy at the library. The kids say it has a scary cover, but it has turned out to be a enjoyable read. I also liked listening to Tessa Hulls talk about how she made the book on the Youtube channel Sequetial Artists Workshop here.

4 Listening

I learned a lot from Andrew Leland’s book The Country of the Blind, which I listened to as an audiobook. (Kevin Brown has a great review here). I particularly like how he writes about choosing to walk around with a gentle half smile, an idea he learned from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I remember after pandemic restrictions eased and you could walk around maskless, I felt annoyed about having to think of arranging my face when it was easier to scowl, the way one could behind a mask. Remembering to half-smile is far more pleasant, even if effortful.

5 the view here

There is nothing like the serenity of a calmly flowing river to jolt you from a mind pulsing with computer-screen glare.

Happy Friday!





Friday Five

I’m back! Welcome to a weekly roundup of things seen, read, tasted - the resumption of something I had fun doing last year, but set aside to focus on writing a final draft of my Master's thesis. The last Friday Five was September 8. 

1. Summer birthday party

Someone turned 11 this year and suggested Minecraft as a theme. Decorations were a nod to the game's use of voxels. The boxes labelled as TNT for favours were a hit!

2. Eating

I don't often eat fish, but pickerel at Pineridge Hollow this week was a treat! If there's an occasion to go out for lunch and I have no idea where to eat, I can rely on Lily and Josh's instagram account wpgeats for recommendations.  They even have categories of bookmarked posts, making their account even easier to consult.

3. Reading

I thoroughly enjoyed going through Martin Salisbury's latest book Illustrators' Sketchbooks. Looking at how other people work and think in art and illustration is inspiring. I'm constantly wishing I were better at it and exposing myself to a collection of artists fuels the aspiration. 

I've begun compiling a little list of media consumed over the year, as a kind of accountability of choice and exposition of taste I guess. I'm participating this way in a thing other people do that I really like. (See Kottke for example.) 

4. Something good

When Christian fell from a ladder in May, daily life felt constricted to the things an injury undoes in a partnership... there were more chores on my plate, and that is normal, and we're lucky recovery has been a series of gradual improvements. Nonetheless, when this came across my social media, I found it incredibly comforting.

5. The view here

We've had lots of rain this year compared to last year, but lately our skies are hazy because of smoke drifting over from provinces west of us. Vegetation is lush and the background is pastel orange.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1. A note

The kids are in school and the house is quiet. This week, after a summer of research and reading, I started writing the next chapters in this thesis on the history of Aubigny. I love research, but it’s always in service of writing, because writing is that wonderful creative part where all the information I’ve been squirrelling away now gets to be arranged and set to a page. When I can’t write, I come here to play with words and set thoughts afloat. But now I’m busy writing elsewhere, so writing here would become a chore, which makes me a bore. I think this blog post on Kottke helped me clarify these feelings.

2. Self care

I was reading a book by Pierre Berton titled The Promised Land, in which Clifford Sifton (the Minister for the Interior in charge of getting immigrants settled across the prairies) is described this way:

Sifton took office with the reputation of being an iron man. In the words of an admirer, ‘he never gets tired, works like a horse, never worries, eats three square meals a day and at night could go to sleep on a nail keg.’ During the Manitoba provincial campaign of 1896 he would climb off the train at Brandon at eleven at night, sit up until morning talking politics with friends, entertain at breakfast, and then take off in the winter’s cold by sleigh, speaking at Souris, say, in the afternoon, and Hartney at night before heading off to the railhead at Oak Lake to catch the train back home. (p. 19)

When he resigned in 1904, the author writes that his “nerves were badly shattered” and that

As soon as he had cleaned up the backlog of work in his office […], he left Ottawa […] for treatment in the mud and sulpho lithia water baths of the Indiana Springs Company at Mudlavia. (p 196)

(Pause… First off, Mudlavia! Fascinating! I had no idea… and then, of course, why wouldn’t there be spa treatments in 1904, just as there have been forever? Still, when Louis Litt’s devotion to mudding is shown in the tv series Suits, I thought it was exotic and new.)

Pierre Berton goes on to write about Sifton’s resignation, and I can’t help but feel like he’s poking fun at these mud baths:

It is difficult to picture the imperturbable Sifton […] emerging with nerves shaken so badly he was forced to immerse himself in mud for the best part of two months. (p 197)

Granted, Berton is writing in 1984, and he definitely wasn’t a millennial.

3. Eating

Our rhubarb plant produces rhubarb from spring till fall and before the first frost I make as many loafs of Rhubarb Nut Bread as I have time for. I am fond of a recipe I found years ago while working as a secretary by day and learning to bake by night. It’s from The Angel of the Sea Cookbook, which is still operating as a real bed and breakfast. (It looks so pretty!)

4. Audiobooks

When I’m reading, reading, reading for research, I notice that I don’t read much just for fun, and turn instead to audiobooks for a change. This summer I’ve enjoyed S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain, Susan Orlean's On Animals and The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman.

I heartily agree with this advice from a librarian quoted on Recommendo: "Ditch Audible and get a library card to listen to free audiobooks. Many libraries offer apps where you can download audiobooks straight to your phone."

5. Seen here

I love how the thistles, still drying from the dew, look wonderfully dishevelled.

Psst: Happy Friday!

This is the last in this series, but I’ll still pop in, with perhaps a different kind of post because I like this blog as a digital record of thoughts and experiences over time… Cheers!

Friday Five

It's Friday and the dreary weather here is pushing us along towards accepting that summer is coming to an end and school is about to begin. Somewhere I read advice about "writing what you would want to read" and since I love finding useful resources online, here are a few...

1. Newsletters

Understanding oneself is a funny thing because one can be nearing 40 and still learning that transitions are tough... I think that's why I appreciate McKinley Valentine's newsletter The Whippet, where, besides learning about stuff, I can come across an observation like "I sometimes think the biggest difference between super-successful people and the rest of us is how easily they transition" that makes me think long after I've left my e-mail. 

Austin Kleon's newsletter today linked to a quote by Lauren Groff who explains why I sometimes have trouble sitting down to write even this measly little post: “The ‘fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully training herself to let her work be messy and impermanent.’”

And Recommendo lead me to Mari Andrew's delightful list of "100 Things I Know".

2. Clothes

Between the statements "I need clothes" and "I want to develop my sense of style" lays a canyon of advice (trails), marketing (views) and contradiction (you could get lost). Having the authoritative voice of a friendly guide like Becky Malinsky means the venture might be (kinda?) feasible (i.e. I think I'll buy some Levi's this fall...).

Also, it made me chuckle to see this headline "Packing Light? Not for me, thanks" after having read Ann Mashburn's essay "Take It or Leave It"

3. Movies

Christian and I turned the summer's blockbusters into a date night scheduled every Tuesday over three weeks. We brought our own drinks and snacks and participated in the pop culture moment along with the rest of the audience and delivered our star-ratings to our kids next morning. Fun!

4. Eating

I made corn fritters this week, from a cookbook I've had for a few years now. It sometimes takes me awhile to get around to things, but this picture of a note scribbled on top of the recipe title stuck in my mind. I'm not sure if I could call it a haunting... Catherine Newman's scribbled "so f-ing good" never left my mind... When I went back in her blog archives to find it I realized this mental note had been hanging on since 2018. Good grief. (As an aside, I've often turned to the Ben and Birdy blog for gifts or entertainment ideas. The recommendations are perennial.) 

5. Seen around here 

This is our garden... it has yielded beans, cucumbers and zucchini, and lately, carrots! Funny squat carrots that we've mixed into lamb ragu and pulsed into Muhammara.

These are our dog’s nacho-smelling paws.

This is a neglected bouquet turned still life.

This is a fun children's book I found in the University of Manitoba's Icelandic collection.

Oh! And the drama last week of seeing a building on fire:

Friday Five - travel and time

1. Introduction

Last week we took a daytrip to Stonewall. The town and quarry are associated with Carol Shield's book, The Stone Diaries, the way Prince Edward Island and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables are associated. It's funny, you know... a few weeks ago, I followed a link to this essay titled "The Case Against Travel" in which Agnes Callard writes: "And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer." She's not wrong, except that I wish what she said about academic writing were not so generally true. But I digress... 

2. This idea of travel

I'm not writing about the trip to Stonewall, although, look, here's a nice picture...

While Callard made a case against travel, and I'm nodding along with her argument, Tyler Cowen wrote: "Travel makes you a better reader, especially for history, geography, (factual) economics, and political science." And instantly, I agree... this dish we are cooking on the subject of travel just got more exciting. You wouldn't call a short day trip outside of Winnipeg "travel" really... not much beyond a lunch was packed, no passport photos were taken, but when I go and re-read the notes I'd taken from The Stone Diaries all those years ago, there is a bit of that feeling of travel...  

3. Going through time

In The Stone Diaries, Shields writes this long bit that I can't bear to cut down any shorter than this...

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say "Twelve years passed" is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced - and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to  the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour-day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents' house and prepared for an early bed. 

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father's morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelor's Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parent's house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.

4. A lasagne of time

Shields uses the expression "obliteration of time" and it feels as though Stonewall were a place where one can really feel this. In the newly-restored interpretive center, where upstairs, events like the local Garden Club's 60th "Flower, Fruit and Vegetable" show was occuring as we, downstairs were admiring a pillar of of geological layers that the sign was telling us was to be understood like a lasagne. First, a layer of stone for building, and below that, limestone, burned and used for quicklime, or calcium oxide, sandwiched between other layers, in an earth history that spirals out like a pencil shaving in which our period, the human one, is just the first traces of pencil lead in all that compression of time.

And yet, this magnificent idea, that in spite of "obliteration" there is this undeniable fact of presence. Sheilds writes:

Her mama's no more than a little itty bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that's the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can't make it go away. Your mama's inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don't get yourself hurt.

5. Time as space enough

Beautiful as those quotes from The Stone Diaries are, one of my favourite quotes from Carol Shields is a passage in Startle and Illuminate.

...by 1996, likely much earlier, Carol had achieved an important insight. Time was precious but it was not fleeting. She had raised a large family. She had published dozens of books. She had travelled. She had read. She had sustained a long marriage and empowering, delight-filled friendships. She had talked and laughed and shared ideas with thousands of people as friend, mother, teacher, mentor. She had written letters, scrubbed floors, dried tears, wrapped and unwrapped presents, picked flowers, baked pies, argued, danced, slept, wept - experienced that full range of what life has to offer. Her conclusion? 

Tempus does not fugit.

Here's what she told the students that day:

"Time is not cruel. Given the good luck of a long healthy life, as most of us have, we have plenty. Plenty of time. We have time to try our new selves. Time to experiment. Time to dream and drift. Time even to waste. Fallow time. Shallow time.

"We'll have good years and bad years. And we can afford both. Every hour will not be filled with meaning and accomplishment as the world measures such things but there will be compensating hours so rich, so full, so humanly satisfying that we will become partners with time and not victims of it."

5.5 In conclusion - travel revisited

Our short trip occasioned this revisiting of an author's work, and a focus on Shields' contemplation of time, in fiction and nonfiction. It brings me back to the two first points above, on travel. Callard's essay inspired many responses, among which is Ross Douthat's opinion piece "The Case for Tourism". At one point, his argument echoes Cowen's "travel makes you a better reader". He writes:

The longtime reader of Jane Austen who wanders the grounds of a Georgian mansion, the history buff who touches the crumbling stones of Hadrian’s Wall, the parent who has read “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” a hundred times but now stands in Beatrix Potter’s rain-drenched garden — all of these travelers are enjoying an extension of their education, a deepening of their knowledge (...).

All that being said, Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to this week’s edition, which happens to bring you five interesting bits loosely related to weather! Let’s jump in!

1. Good advice

The sun is shining, there's an afternoon at the beach planned, Audiomachine's "The Big Smoke" is playing in my ears while far away, the news tells me, a chart-topping amount of forest hectares are burning. Transcending weather and anxieties there is good advice, and I especially appreciated The Marginalian's overview of Kevin Kelly's most recent book. Maria Popova does a great job of offering readers a website full of these gems of reflection.

2. Don't talk about the weather

Currently, I'm reading Pierre Berton's The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914, in which he describes Manitoba's premier, Clifford Sifton's efforts to "dispel the image of the West as a snow-covered desert". Berton writes:

One of Sifton's first moves was to try to ban the daily publication of Manitoba temperatures, but since that might prove even more alarming, he dropped the idea. Nevertheless, snow was never mentioned in the blizzard of pamphlets his department issued. (p 15)

Get it? Snow mentioned and blizzard of pamphlets? Berton made me laugh. He continues:

“Cold” was another taboo word. The accepted adjectives were “bracing” and “invigorating.” (...) “The kindest thing to say about it is that the literature was a little on the optimistic side,” one British immigrant recalled. “Canada was said to have a healthy climate guaranteed to be free of malaria. One has to admit that this was true. It was said that while the prairie summers were hot, the heat was delightfully invigorating and while it got cold in the winter the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall those glowing words as I pirched sheaves with the temperature at 95 in the shade, and as I ran behind the slight at 30 below to keep from freezing.” (p 16-17).

This week, working at the historical society, I would eat lunch in my car to warm up from their excellently air-conditioned rooms. But modern conveniences and jobs that don't require manual labour do not make weather any less of a topic of conversation.

3. In praise of summer produce

I would like to defy expectations here and avoid superlatives around seasonal tomatoes in order to highlight the luscious bunch of red swiss chard I picked up at the market for 2.70$. It was the main vegetable for Deb Perelman's "Swiss Chard Enchiladas" from Keepers. They were delicious, but more importantly, this is a recipe that makes it easy to consume a vegetable I would otherwise not buy.

4. The solution to environmental change

This quote from an article by Charles Eisenstein, highlighted in the wonderful newsletter Dense Discovery, feels true. 

No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love. 

5. A mini tour of our backyard

Welcome to our yard where we have collected perennials and shrubs and cedars and filled in their gaps with colourful annuals.

I don’t really plan which annuals I plant from year to year and so the flowerbed can offer serendipitous surprises from one season to the next…

A patch of violets that look especially whimsical hidden among the fronds of big lilies. Or the unexpected colour and texture combination here…

Rain and days of cooler temperatures make these petunias and begonias look especially luscious this year…

There aren’t just flowers in the yard though…

Happy Friday!