Reading List: Ulysses by James Joyce

How to begin: When I feel my enthusiasm flagging for a book, I Google "What's so great about [the book's title]" and often find someone's appreciation provides new encouragement to keep going. This Ted-Ed video by Sam Slote, on the subject of Ulysses, is excellent. 

A few quotes:

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. (p 533)

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? (p 789)

Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father? Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

With what success had he attempted direct instruction? She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.

Further thoughts: Ulysses is everywhere. I smiled when listening to Orwell's Roses in which Solnit quotes a letter he wrote to a girlfriend beginning with "Have you read Ulysses yet?" I don't read the books on this list in order to analyze them too closely. (There's How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton in PDF format for that!) I read them to see what I notice. I like how Francine Prose writes "to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another (...) will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art." And so, while there are many guides to help with reading Ulysses, (including a map drawn by Nabokov) I prefered just jumping in and letting the experience wash over me.

Friday Five

Last week I did not publish a post and have felt like a shell of a human ever since. That ends today with a quotes on beauty, a fact and advice learned from Kevin Kelly in a podcast, a recipe we tried and liked, cookies too, and what the scenery is like here. (Hint: it's gone from still-hibernating frigidity last week to "where are my t-shirts?" this week.) 

1. Rebecca Solnit's Thoughts on beauty 

Solnit published Orwell's Roses in October 2021. Of the many thought-provoking passages, there are these ones on beauty. (They lack page numbers because I listened to the audiobook and transcribed them later.)

The word beauty is one of those overly roomy words, frayed around the edges, ignored through overfamiliarity, often used to mean purely visual beauty. But the kinds of beauty that the Oxford English Dictionary enumerates include many that are not visual, including "that quality of a person or thing which is highly pleasing or satisfying to the mind; moral or intellectual excellence," an admirable person, an impressive or exceptionally good example of something.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, the scholar Elaine Scarry notes that among the complaints about beauty is that contemplation of it is passive - "looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard." It's a definition startling in its simplicity. What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it's where aesthetic and ethical standards meet. She contrasts that with "looking or hearing that is prelude to intervening in, changing, what one has seen or heard (as happens in the presence of injustice)." Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's doing something whose value and results are not so easily quantified or commodified, and you could even argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities, and oversimplifications. 

On how beauty and integrity go together:

Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see. A dancer's gesture may be beautiful because it is precisely executed move by a highly skilled artist-athlete, but even a gracefully executed kick of a child is ugly. The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up," Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dali. "If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down it it surrounds a concentration camp." Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty - or the hideousness - can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.

The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it's a quality found in many beautiful things. (...)

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.

2. Learning from Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly published, at the top of the month, a book full of advice. He's been a guest on a number of podcasts which is just the kind of promotion I'm most susceptible to. On Conversations with Tyler I learned that costumes are the fist things to vanish from traditional cultures because: 

the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. The traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom.

It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. It’s much cheaper to buy cloth. That’s one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money, is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. If you’re not taking the homemade cloth and making it into your native costume, and you’re buying a shirt — it’s just easier to put on a cotton T-shirt, which you can almost get for free. The costumes just disappear because they’re not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand.

In the Longform podcast episode, Kelly mentionned in passing his idea about "protopia" and his website offers an explanation: "(...) just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely." And, "Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize." 

(There’s an 8 minute video about it here.)

3. Celebrating asparagus!

There are three categories of pizza in our house. In order of preference, the first is the gourmet stone-fired kind you can get at fancy restaurants, authentic Italian markets or fancy food trucks. These yield simple pizzas with the extraordinary crust that has bubbles and spots of char. The second category are home-made, they have a simple dough and are cooked at regular oven temperatures and have the toppings your family likes. The third kind are quickly delivered from easy-to-remember phone numbers. 

Bearing all that in mind, our home-made pizzas are fine, not fancy, but still a treat, given I'm more willing to make waffle batter than pizza dough on a Friday night. This week, I finally made Smitten Kitchen's Shaved Asparagus Pizza. It's been on my mind a long time considering it's a recipe from her first cookbook published in 2012. 

I think I resisted making it because I figured the kids wouldn't like it. I'm not wrong, but this palate-limiting belief has loosened a little in the last while since I've learned how to split meals between the things the adults want to try and the things the kids are comfortable with. The usual dough recipe I use from Jane Rodmell’s Best Summer Weekends was enough for two pizzas, theirs had pepperoni and ours had asparagus. This will absolutely now be part of our spring menu rotation.

4. A basic cookie got good reviews in our house

This recipe for Jam Thumbprint Cookies comes from Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking (https://www.amazon.ca/Cheryl-Days-Treasury-Southern-Baking/dp/1579658415) actually garnered special notice from my little teenager.

5. Spot the birds!

Look, I'm sorry, but the landscape scenery here is dead boring. The river is high and everything is brown. But the birds are singing... If nature is not much to look at now, it has a lot to offer your ears.

I don't think I understood in Grade 12 why Silent Spring was the meaningful title it was. Even though I take pictures and look for beauty, walking the dog daily has brought me closer to what Solnit describes in Orwell's Roses:

“I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance. Indigenous people who were sometimes despised for not appreciating nature in the English rustic tradition often appreciated it as orderly patterns in time, not as static pictorial pleasure. That is, they might be more inclined to celebrate, for example, key moments in the temporal march of the sun through the year than an exceptionally pretty sunset.”

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Good Podcast episodes

My perennially favourite podcast, Longform, interviewed David Grann on the subject of his most recent book, The Wager this week. What I particularly liked about this episode is how the discussion often glanced on the subject of history, what people think of it, its presence "always there, undergirding us, always flowing," its malleability.

From guest Anna Keay on Conversations with Tyler, I learned about The Landmark Trust, where, for a reasonable price, you can stay in a castle. It sounds like the coolest thing ever.

Finally, awhile back, I listened to a re-broadcast interview with Margaret Atwood on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. She reads a poem from her new collection, titled "Dearly" and I liked this single line: "It's the smallest details that foil translators."

Best Recent Read

There is something a little magical about Graphic Novel where the immersion in another world feels as powerful as video. I was so enthralled that I read the final pages in bed with a headlamp - a trick Alison Bechdel illustrated in one of her books.

Green Almonds

I stopped at Alsham Market for brown lentils, and when at the cashier, asked the man what the giant bag of fuzzy green things were, from which he'd scooped a bag-sized portion for the lady ahead of me. "Green almonds." He sprinkled a handful in my bag and we tried them that night, with a bit of sea salt, as he'd recommended. It felt like a treat to participate in this seasonal delicacy, even though we're not sure we'd buy a bagful...

What's cooking

The brown lentils were for Stanley Tucci's "Lentil Spaghetti" a dish he describes in his memoir, complete with the recipe. His memoir is really good for that... he describes food and drinks so well that one feels encouraged to try anything. The unpalatable martini we'd heretofore regarded as a cocktail to avoid, became, thanks to Tucci's authoritarian mixing regime, the exact thing he promised: "Drink it. Become a new person." (We became people who could drink a martini.) Then we got scared by how much alcohol could be so easily consumed and conscribed gin to the mother-in-law, on her visits, to be mixed with ice and lots of ginger ale.

The view

There was a Colorado-low yesterday... it's a weather event that can bring lots of snow, or not that much, or it could be rain, or it could miss the city, or it could immobilize it. It's the low you can just never know.

Friday Five

1. Art as a cure

It is the ugliest time of year in Winnipeg. Snowbanks are beige agglomerations of crusty ice covered in sandy gravel, receding, revealing mould-filmed flattened brown lawns. My mood suffered from the dismal view and the sun was bright but not quite warm enough to feel caressing. What helped was dropping in to Joel Meyerowitz's giant book of photography, titled Where I Find Myself. Being transported elsewhere thanks to someone else's artistic eye was just the cure I needed. I felt the energy of his pictures as he communicated it in the description of one of his series:

What freedom! Just being out in the world, shooting whatever spoke to me or suggested itself to my eye. Actually, learning to listen to what speaks to you, rather than prejudging or censoring, is what a trip like that offered. The world is far richer and more interesting than my imagination could conceive of, and by accepting this - which is at the heart of the medium - I learned not to second-guess myself and simply let the world play on my eyes. (page 261)

2. Enzo has a sore paw

I wonder if this week's mood is in part influenced by the fact that I can't take Enzo on long walks... he hurt his paw, and so we do a block. When it is time to turn around and go back home, he pauses and looks up at me, as if to say that he'd really rather keep walking and sniffing around. Marie-Hélène and I finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows published in 1961. It's about a boy and a pair of raccoon-hunting hounds and their adventures and misadventures. I was unfamiliar with the story and so, the accidental death of one of the characters who tripped and fell on an ax, and the gory after-effects of one of the hound's fight with a mountain lion - the dog's entrails catching on huckleberry branches on his walk home - came as a bit of a shock. I don't know why I was surprised... Aren't we always raising the alarm on violence these days? But somehow, the violence that filters through to my kids as Nintendo explosions, seems more comical and exaggerated than gory and realistic. I wonder if the quantity of violence is the same as it has been (or is it more?) but its remove is greater.

3. What we ate

Ali Slagel's Sesame Chicken Meatballs were a nice change of flavour. I really love how her cookbook provides such helpful hints. For example; while her recipe suggested broccoli, her note offered alternatives: “use another vegetable that’s good both raw and crisp-tender, like snap peas, scallions, broccolini, or sweet mini peppers.” And not only that, she also listed three other uses for the sesame sauce made for this meal. Her cookbook is delightfully titled I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To).

4. Masters of art series

I thought I would look down on a slim volume about an artist’s life and works, but perusing one on Marc Chagall from the Masters of Art Series felt like just the right dose of art and biography to foster interest and encourage a greater familiarity with what often feels like an intimidating subject.

5. A few pictures of dishes.

The kids thought it was strange that I took pictures of dishes in the sink, but I found them oddly pretty, their colour and the suds suggesting the comfort of warmth and cleanliness… It’s something to do while I wait for the view outside to improve.

Friday Five

1. What have I been reading?

I recently finished Caste by Isabel Wilkinson and especially liked the beginning sentences of its epilogue. She writes:

We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow, as more than the dust that we are. Even the longest-lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life, or life's potential, when our lives are so short to begin with.

It's a continuation of a thought from a previous post.  Wilkinson's thought parallel's Stella Levi's in Michael Frank's book about her life as a survivor of the Auschwitz titled One Hundred Saturdays. In it Michael narrates a question Stella was asked: "Many years later, a girl in Madrid asked Stella: 'After Auschwitz, do you believe in God?' and Stella answered, 'If you're asking me whether God was there, this is not a matter for God, but for man. It was not God, a god, who made this place, it was man." These two books have been an immersion in the ways in which we hurt each other and the ways we can help each other. 

2. Drawing a Parallel between art and writing

Sandi Hester recently published a Youtube video titled "Painting from Family Photos." At the 14 minute mark, she shows how she makes a series of sketches based on a particular photo. She describes how, once she had a rough sketch down, she wanted to play more with the narrative, so she opened a larger sketchbook, took out her paint and drew the scene again "noticing what's fun" and "trying to be loose." The crochet blanket with its triangle pattern progressively crept up the bed and took it over by the third iteration. Cookies appeared on the night table, clothing changed.  In a way, writing, even nonfiction, is not that different. Reworking the draft of a chapter, I can focus on what's fun, try to say things less stiffly, and dwell on a scene at greater length. It's the work that goes into any academic writing, where students have to "struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else" (How to Write a Paragraph quoting a report by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges). It takes work! Roger Ebert wrote that he would "haunt art supply stores, as if somehow one could purchase what one needed to be an artist" and I've often felt this way in bookstores, thinking maybe the right book would solve whatever inadequacy I felt at the moment. Which leads me to cookbooks...

3. What's Cooking?

Among the cookbooks I've borrowed from the library are Ottolenghi's two recent test kitchen ones and On the Himalayan Trail. What I appreciate most about them is how, by choosing to sample from their recipes, I get to think about food differently. Romy Gill who travelled to Kashmir writes, "Perhaps the most surprising difference between Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim cuisines, though, is the fact that Pandits will cook without onions or garlic: two of the staples of the majority of Indian regional cuisine" (p 12). By making "One-pan crispy spaghetti and chicken" and "Magical chicken and Parmesan soup with pappardelle" from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love, I appreciate how flavour is built using (lots of) tomato paste, and how stock is slightly thickened by blending a few ladlefuls of the stock and the vegetables together. 

Our family's palates and tastes and preferences are constantly shifting. Two years ago, I thought I might settle, once and for all, the question of a menu plan by setting one up for the whole year. The thing is, I'm not done learning, the kids haven't stopped growing and that restless desire for novelty awakens the moment you've closed the door on a routine you've coddled to sleep. The menu plan from two years ago no longer fits my children's new aversion for chicken, nor my new interest in less meat-dependent meals. C'est la vie! Now, although I do plan menus from week to week and have a wonderful repertoire of family favourites, my recipe binder contains lined loose leaf sheets of notes... the things we plan and what got done, alongside the new thing we tried and the comments that go with it. This week I made "Tuna and potato croquettes with egg remoulade" from Ottolenghi's Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things. It was a delicious introduction to remoulade, but only for the adults... the kids had cinnamon toast with peanut butter.

I think I wanted to add these thoughts to that menu planning post, triggered in part by Andrea Zittel's comments, captured in Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: Women at Work. Zittel said "Having a pattern helps ensure that you fit everything into a limited amount of time, but too much of a pattern and you get stuck" (p 121). Although this is in reference to her daily routine in her life as an artist, it could apply to any routine, any plan... I think it's funny how she is also recorded as having said "Cooking is one of the few dilemmas that I'll probably never fully solve" (p 122). She is wiser than I am, for I am always trying to solve it! I think I should think of it as a hobby in order to avoid finding it like the young Françoise Sagan, who said: "The material problems of day-to-day living bore me silly. As soon as someone asks me what we should have for dinner I become flustered and then sink into gloom" (p 266). I prefer the older Gustave Flaubert's thought: "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough" only, instead of "look" in this case, the verb "work" would be better.

4. A bit of history

Like the time I investigated the comptometer with my mother-in-law, a recent conversation in which we were discussing the local brewery Little Brown Jug, lead us to asking her if her relatives drank beer when she was little. Her answer revealed that St. Boniface had a local brewery we'd never learned about, called Kiewel's (see here). I like these occasional moments when past and present connect over a small concrete detail.

5. What it looks like here

Winnipeg was snowed-over anew thanks to a Colorado-low on Wednesday. Although I feel impatient for the carefree days of going out with only a light sweater on, there's a postcard-like charm to fresh snow.

Friday Five

1.

I started a new sketchbook this week. Keeping a sketchbook is a form of rebellion, a strengthening of the will that has to fight against distraction and urgency. I like this video titled "The sketchbook that healed me" by Danny Gregory.

2.

Reading Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: Women at Work is inspiring because it provides a glimpse into a diversity of lifestyles, personalities, and ways of dealing with challenges like time constraints, social relationships and family. I find it comforting to know that Josephine Baker and Coco Chanel didn't like taking vacations, and how Octavia Butler needed time alone.

3.

I feel like serving a side for a family meal is less about balancing vegetables and proteins and more about having something to nibble on besides the main meal. An impromptu Thursday night fried rice was enhanced by a bowl of Crown Corn Chips that taste like real buttered corn, picked up at the Asian grocery store ING Supermarket.

4.

I love homes that use moody paint colours. I remember being inspired by this house tour on Cup of Jo, and more recently, have stared at each picture in this tour on Emily Henderson's website. 

5.

Look at Enzo go!

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1. 

Audiobook reading: This week I thoroughly enjoyed Tina Brown's book The Palace Papers. It felt like the antidote to  Netflix's "Harry & Meghan" - a documentary as substantial as a plate of meringues. In the conclusion, Brown writes:

"It is ironic that after so much talk of duty perhaps the most powerful survival element of the monarchy has turned out to be marital love. Without the caring resolve of the queen mother, George VI would have been a stammering introvert who could never have lead the country in its hour of need. Without Philip's bracing loyalty, the Queen could have been a lonely conformist run by her courtiers. Without finally being allowed to marry Camilla, Charles would have suffered a slow death of the soul instead of his late flowering into an unapologetically happy man. And without Kate's serene empathy, William might have collapsed under the pain of his childhood and the weight of his future." [...] "The fascination of monarchy is that its themes repeat themselves because its protagonists are earthly. When George V rebranded the monarchy as the House of Windsor and turned it into the emblem, not just of the British family, but of a sacralized, exemplary version of the British family, there was one central flaw: their humanity. There will always be the rebels, the problem-children and the miscreants because the crown rests on a family as fallible as any other."

2.

Differences: There's a section of a thesis in which previous research on the subject you are writing about has to be acknowledged. While I was confident no one had written an academic paper on Aubigny itself, I've discovered lots of research on nearby communities. One short paper written in the sixties discussed family relations in a neighbouring community, the research being done mostly through interviews. I felt like dismissing it. What kind of person goes to the trouble of writing a paper based on asking random people about their relations? Preeminent anthropologists apparently... The joke's on me. What is interesting is the degree to which a field of study shapes how you think about things. I engage with documents. An anthropologist emphasizes fieldwork. This was something Levitt highlighted in a podcast episode with Brad Gregory in which he remarks on the difference between economists and historians:

LEVITT: (...) Why do you think economists and historians have such a hard time talking to one another?

GREGORY: My sense is, and you correct me if I’m wrong about what I say about economists and then vice versa. My impression is that economists grow exasperated by the tendency of historians to say about virtually any question: “that’s complicated” or “it depends on what you mean,” or “with respect to what part of the population?” In other words, even before an attempt to answer the question, they’re already complicating it and muddying the waters, so to speak. Historians — and again, this is a bit of a caricature, but you’ll recognize it, I think — they sometimes get impatient with the way in which economists seem to think that any and all forms of intentional human behavior can be modeled, quantified, and churned through some kind of a quantitative analysis in a way that is related in one sense or another to calculative or instrumental rationality. 

LEVITT: I think you put that really well. The words I would use, which are very close to what you use, is that economics values simplicity and universality.

3.

A delightful meal: Pork chops, salted, lightly fried, served with oven-roasted beets (tossed with olive oil salt and pepper), crinkle-cut sweet potato fries, seared button mushrooms and a simply dressed butter-leaf lettuce salad. (Chef's kiss)

4. 

Writing: I work on more than one project at a time and sometimes find the transition difficult. This week, forcing myself to do edits was tough. This post on The Marginalian was especially encouraging. Giving myself a deadline helped. And Carter Barnett’s advice: “The best way to write when you don't want to is just to write when you don’t want to.” (via)

5.

This week’s photo: The snow and cold is still sticking around here, see?

Friday Five

1.

On my mind:

So let's suppose there's no such thing as writer's block.
There's a loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patience
And hastening to write
And fearing your audience
And never really trying to understand how sentences work.
Above all, there's never learning to trust yourself
Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.

From Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Kinkenborg (p 72)

2.

In our ears: Christian and I listened to Et Bam by Mantissa on repeat this week, thanks to our daughter's recommendation.

3. 

In our front closet: Spring slushiness is just around a wintery-cold corner or two. Years ago, I took the advice from The Perfectly Imperfect Home and bought a terra-cotta pomegranate "infused with pomegranate oil" from Santa Maria Novella for our front closet. It continues to delicately perfume our entryway in spite of slushy boots and coats and mitts.

4.

Baking: Snowball-sized meringues.

5.

Saw: A fox, loping along the riverbank, orange fur against white snow.

Five Things

It’s Sunday by the time I’ve been able to publish this. But, hitting publish, even if later than usual still gives me a feeling of satisfaction and I prefer that over feeling defeated by the week’s busy-ness. These points spin in the orbit of my ongoing reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and my daily walks.

1.

Originality. A few students I tutored this week felt like they couldn't express any originality given the assignment they had in a history class. It looks that way, at first, reading these other people's work and then writing an analysis. It feels a little lame to say "but how you analyze, that's your own...".

I remember in Grade eight, we were instructed to write a story... I couldn't conjure an idea and desperately wrote something moralistic about a misfortune well lived, the ending being something where the characters are reunited, looking at a sunset. The smartest girl in the class invented one dramatizing an episode in the life of a Kleenex... it didn't want to be used on a human nose, and as chance would have it, got swallowed by the dog instead. I was in awe of this story and her ability to turn something simple into a saga.

Today, I see how scholarly articles can be original, how they reflect their author's voice, and I'm happy to be working on my own. It's lots of work, and sometimes I imagine that “just” inventing a story must be easier work than digging and sifting and arranging research. (The grass is always greener...) It's good to have writers like Virginia Woolf to remind me that no matter the endeavor, there's always work... In 1934 she writes, “I don’t think I’m fresh enough, though, to go on ‘making up’. That was the strain - the invention: and I suspect that the last 20 pages have slightly flagged.”

2.

Books. I went to the public library downtown to find its fourth floor closed for renovations. The library has changed so much since my pre-Covid visits that in a fit, I ordered the maximum amount of holds I could place in a day. Thursday I went to retrieve the ones that had arrived and found my name, not on the shelf, as usual, but on the ground, where two baskets overflowed with books. Sometimes I crave a whole book bath; an immersion in a bunch of genres, a dipping into a variety of voices, a soaking in pictures and vocabulary. I’m in good company though… Virginia Woolf writes: “What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!” (August 24, 1933)

3.

Kitchen experiments. I like finding recipes that can convert an ingredient someone doesn't care for into something they kinda like... (A classic example... Netti Cronish's Tofu Neatballs). It doesn't always work though... I don't care for onions beyond their flavour-enhancing capacities. I'd rather pass on onion soup, onion rings, and onion sandwiches. This week I wondered if Deb Perelman's Bialy Babka could magically transform this allium. It didn't. Some things can't be changed. It's a good lesson.

4.

I was walking along the river bank this week and found this piece of broken porcelain. On closer observation, the flowers and seal were drawn on and not part of its original design. I'm intrigued! It made me think of The Artifact Artist.

5. 

Taking pictures on walks keeps the mind alert for little changes... one day this week the sun shone at just the right angle to gently light the mushrooms on this tree...

Happy Sunday!

Friday Five

On a week upended by those normal family things, like dental surgery for wisdom teeth, I take refuge in writing, like an artist in paint. Let's dive in and splash some colour around, eh?

1.

I pick up Virginia Woolf's diaries periodically and see what we have in common. I put a little post-it note on this passage where she wrote about some "learned" man and reflected: "I sometimes would like to be learned myself. (...) Still what use is it? I mean, if you have that mind why not make something beautiful? Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly forever." (July 13, 1932). I like both the solid and the beautiful and they are at constant war with each other... Ha! 

2.

On the subject of diaries, a blog recommended Diaries of Note. The entry for March 1st was from Shaun Bythell, a bookseller in Scotland and it plopped me into a different world. I like this. It's a pleasure I most appreciate in little, saturated doses.

3.

While shopping at IKEA the other week, I spontaneously grabbed a lamp because our living room has a penury of them. Once at home, I regretted my cheap impulse and in annoyance thought of searching lamps on Kijiji with no hope of finding anything interesting. Instead I found a lamp with a broken shade and a soapstone base with carvings of loons on it, and a sticker that authenticated it's being made in Canada. I picked it up the same night and now glory in the warm glow of a unique piece of art that I'm sure Emily Henderson herself would approve of (for example…).

4.

I made broth from scratch for tortilla soup and it was the one thing sustaining my daughter post-op. The best part of the soup, according to my son, is the melted cubes of Monteray Jack. Others say the fried corn tortillas... it's a crowd pleaser - thanks to Repertoire.

5.

This was my favourite photo of the week, demonstrating how emphatically sunny it's been here.

Cheers!

Friday Five

1.

An exercise Since watching this video, more than a year ago, I still do this exercise, pausing a moment in the hallway while talking to Christian or boiling water for tea, to sit on the floor and put my elbows against the wall. It's short, and my back feels massaged after doing it.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYA9TpRx/

2.

Comptometers My mother-in-law in her youth left school to take a job at Eaton's and help her mother by earning an income after her father's death at age 43. She would have worked at the department store in the early 50s, and she will often recall how she was trained to use a Comptometer to track inventory in large ledger books. A little while ago I finally googled the term and discovered that it is something like the grandfather of the calculator. From the youtube videos on the subject, it looks complicated to use. (This video presents the various models of comptometer from 1904 to 1950.) This snippet of information brings to the fore an object that represents how something was done not even a century ago, when people like my grandma would have thought the world was modern. It’s a detail, but it’s precisely the granularity of such a detail that thrills me and has become one of my favourite ways to criticize historical television series!

3.

Reading I really appreciate the Libby app... browsing biography this week I came across Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston and have been listening so much I drain the airpods of their battery life. 

4.

Recipe It is common to find pea soup on the menu at food venues at Festival du voyageur. This past Sunday I made our favourite version yet from Anita Stewart's Canada. CBC offers the recipe on their website. 

5.

Matter Wowed by this image of the Milky Way, it's hard not to consider how iota-like life can seem. It made me laugh when I noticed this sign along a walk, put there by some well-meaning person...

Matter has many meanings... it's 18th in the OED is "the substance, or the substances collectively, of which something consists; constituent material, esp. of a particular kind." And so, poetically, one could read the sign and recognize that unlike the importance it is meant to confer on the reader, it is a statement, that like anything, you too are a bit of dust in a galaxy of stars. Perhaps the only difference is love. I wouldn't put it so lightly had a friend not plugged in her stereo, unfolded the cd case of collected songs by Yves Duteil and made me listen to "Le bûcheron." (Here Yves Duteil sings it; here, someone else sings it more slowly and the lyrics are in the description.) Wayne Johnston ends his memoir with this final sentence: “I have come to believe that unlike my childhood illnesses, life is not idiopathic. It has a discoverable cause and whatever its duration, many purposes.” Yves Duteil ends his song with this refrain:

Je n'étais qu'un maillon dans cette chaîne immense
Et ma vie n'est qu'un point perdu sur l'horizon
Mais il fallait l'amour de toute une existence
Pour qu'un arbre qui meurt devienne une chanson.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Serving up the usual: reading, eating, looking!

1.

Virginia Woolf’s Diaries: I plug away at a thesis chapter, editing, adding 500 words like little historical dispatches while braving daily life of meals, appointments, sick days from school (and  gingerale refills), trips to Costco, lunch dates and Valentine dates. The blog is for fun and silliness, just as Virginia Woolf would have recommended it. She writes:

My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; and the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other. (From her diary entry October 27th, 1928).

2.

A memoir: For  my thesis, I've been re-reading Telesphore Robert's On va passer l'hiver. He writes stories from his childhood in the years following his father's untimely death from a car accident. He was only four at the time, but he recalls scenes from the vigil, his mother's determination to survive on the prairie with a family of eight children, and the scrapes he got into as a school boy. It offers a glimpse of life in the 1920s on a farm and casting aside the sometimes strident anti-clerical, anti-government opinions, it's an entertaining read, with scenes I relayed to the kids at supper time. As a reader, one gets the sense that Telesphore admires his mother... still, life back then was rough. When she married her husband, she spent two years living with his family, her mother-in-law insisting she learn how to live on the prairie. 

Cela a été utile, voire indispensable à ma mère, elle qui avait été élevée dans la ouate chez ses parents, grand-père et grand-mère Campeau, qui avaient un magasin général à St-Norbert, et qui avaient des sous au point de faire instruire leur aînée pour en faire une soeur enseignante et une pianiste. Mais dans ce temps-là, comme aujourd'hui, le rêve des parents ne se réalisait pas toujours.

C'est ainsi que maman, dont les mains ne connaissaient que le chapelet, le piano et les fleurs, s'est vue obligée de se durcir, et les mains et le coeur. Sans quoi, on se faisait des ampoules et des blessures qui nous obligeaient à nous arrêter, chose qu'on ne pouvait se permettre, la ferme commandant inlassablement. (p 113-4)

Nous étions tous foncièrement convaincus qu'elle aurait donné sa vie pour nous, n'importe quand. Ça, c'est l'amour absolu. Mais enfants, nous ne pouvions arriver à cette conclusion et, lorsqu'en quête d'une caresse, d'une manifestation affective quelconque, nous essuyions une rebuffade, nous ne pouvions savoir que c'était par peur de ramollir, par frousse de se laisser aller à la sentimentalité, de relâcher sa poigne sur le mancheron de la vie qu'elle s'était tracée: "Nous allons survivre." Et même, depuis peu, elle avait élargi ses horizons: "Nous allons vivre," c'est-à-dire, installer les garçons sur des fermes à eux, faire instruire les filles ou ceux qui le voudront. "Nous allons être riches," pas de dettes, et chacun sera en mesure de gagner sa vie. (p 93).

3.

In the kitchen: I'm charmed by recipes where food is delivered in a little package... egg rolls, piradzini, calzones, apple turnovers. Recently we tried Julia Turshen's Everything Bagel Handpies, and they were delicious! I bought Everything Bagel Spice at Black Market Provisions.

I also made Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies, and they too were unanimously well received. (A bit fussy imo...)

4.

Art: Follow artists on Instagram and it becomes a delight to scroll... I'm inspired by Julia Rothman, Sandi Hester, Magali Franov and Kristen Vardanega at Little Tiny Egg .

5.

Pictures: In winter, the Red River turns a deep blue that contrasts so beautifully against the white snow. Yesterday morning, the dip in temperature made for impressive evaporation fog along the river.

And should you need a hug, I hope you get one that is burr-less. Happy Friday!

Friday Five

No introduction… just the usual… a little nosegay of various things…

1.

Assembling family photo albums made me realize that I was missing the high-quality pictures my SLR takes. I started bringing my SLR on daily walks with the dog and notice that the routine feels newly enriched: now I think of framing shots; I notice how different the days are from each other... especially their light and how it draws my attention to different things. I post a round up of photos from the week on Instagram, picking a favourite from each day. 

2.

Trying to capture the sculptural branches of a bunch of dead trees in Henteleff Park, I noticed a plane flying through the shot. I immediately thought of Lost and felt a wave of nostalgia... It was the first tv show Christian and I binge-watched on weekends when our daughter was a brand-new baby, we were brand-new parents and the show helped us escape the tethered-to-our-house feeling. It was so long ago… we rented the dvds from BlockBuster.

3.

Last weekend we were sad to have reached the end of the second season of Acapulco. I don't think I've ever felt a tv show grow on me as surprisingly as this one did... I could barely watch the beginning of the first season's episodes, and would distract myself from the cringe I felt by working on a puzzle in front of the television. But over time I was won over by its characters and now agree with what Rebecca Nicholson writes: "the overall effect is gentle, sunny and laidback, and the show wears its easy charm well"

4.

I get a thrill when I can pull off a weeknight meal with family guests... Last night I made Melissa Clark's Sesame Chicken with Cashews and Dates  and it was perfect. Stars align, planes fly into shots, grapefruit is in season and you have the perfect occasion to make a loaf for dessert. I'd been wanting to make Smitten Kitchen's Grapefruit Olive Oil Pound Cake for years and finally did this week. It was delicious!

5.

I finished listening to The Sixth Extinction audiobook and loved every minute of being carried along on Elizabeth Kolbert's words. (I also especially like Anne Twomey’s voice as narrator.) I learned about paradigm-shifts and coral reefs:

(Chapter 5) The psychologists wrote up their findings in a paper titled "On the perception of incongruity: a paradigm." Among those who found this paper intriguing was Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, the 20th century's most influential historian of science, the experiment was indeed paradigmatic: it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework [...]. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible, [...]. At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensues, what the psychologists dubbed the "my God" reaction. This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, "The Structures of Scientific Revolutions" so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of enquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline, would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, Kuhn wrote, [...]. Crisis lead to insight and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries, or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, "paradigm-shifts" took place.

(Chap 5) "Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world," is how Kuhn put it.

(Chapter 7) Reefs are organic paradoxes: obdurate, ship-destroying ramparts constructed by tiny gelatinous creatures. They are part animal, part vegetable and part mineral, at once teeming with life and at the same time, mostly dead. Like sea-urchins and starfish and clams and oysters and barnacles, reef-building corals have mastered the alchemy of calcification. What sets them apart from other calcifiers is that instead of working solo, to produce a shell, say, or some calcitic plates, corals engage in vast communal building projects that stretch over generations. Each individual, known unflatteringly as a polyp, adds to its colony's collective exoskeleton. On a reef, billions of polyps belonging to as many as a hundred different species are all devoting themselves to the same basic task. Given enough time and the right conditions, the result is another paradox: a living structure. The great barrier reef extends continuously for more than fifteen hundred miles and in some places it is five hundred feet thick. By the scale of reefs, the pyramids at Giza are kiddie blocks. The way corals change the world, with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations, might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference: instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them. 

While writing this, I forgot I had put beans to boil and they are now cooling off outside, their burnt smoky-smell drifting off toward the neighbour’s. C’est la vie!

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

This week's roundup of ideas center around a theme: that of travel and exploration as a metaphor for my studies. It is inspired by the audiobook I just finished, titled Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, and the subsequent connections made across podcasts, websites and other books.

1.

It all begins with longing. When Kate Harris set out to bike along the Silk Road, she did so in response to an intense longing to explore. It is a theme that comes up more than once in her book. For example, she notes the irony in noticing posters in Asia with a scene that looks like it is set in Canada: 

Across the tent, tacked to its supportive beams, a glossy poster caught my eye. It featured juicy-looking burgers, golden french fries, bowls of cherries and oranges and ice cream and foamy milk shakes, all spread on a red and white picnic blanket in a lush forest next to a waterfall. I'd seen similar posters all across western China [...]. They fascinated me, not just for the torturously improbable feast they portrayed, food that was the stuff of fantasy, unavailable for thousands of miles, but for the odd familiarity of the scene. For all I could tell, the posters showcased woodsy, rural Ontario, where my own bedroom walls had been tacked with posters of mountains and deserts, of horizons picked clean by wind. We were longing right past each other. (Chap 2)

In Susan Cain's most recent book, Bittersweet, longing is an important aspect of bittersweetness. She writes:

Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

This idea - of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love - is the heart of this book."

2.

We are all plagued by the desire to be original. When I began my research, I hoped I was cutting a new path that would lead to new discoveries. Instead, the more research I've done, the more historians I've found who have laid tracks parallel to my own. I think this means two things: the first is that it is human nature to want to stake out one's individual merit, and to have hubristic ideas about it. It is better to discover oneself as part of a community. Secondly, venturing out with a project in mind is a good and necessary part of one's personal development. Again, Harris writes about this in her book, with the example of Alexandra David-Neel: 

Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within. She didn't even have the luxury of a blank literary or geographic slate when it came to Tibet. Dozens of Europeans had already been there, from diplomats to missionaries to soldiers. They'd drawn maps, written reports, even owned real estate in Lhasa. That none of this deterred the Frenchwoman was deeply consoling to me, a hint that exploration was possible despite precedent, that even artificial borders were by definition frontiers, and therefore worth breaching as a matter of principle. (Chap 1)

And in her book’s conclusion, Harris writes:

But exploration more than anything is like falling in love, the experience feels singular, unprecedented and revolutionary despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the silk road or walk on the moon for you.

3.

Distractions and procrastination. I'm writing through the results of the research, working through another chapter, and sometimes, as much as I like writing, I am seized by the desire to escape it. I start thinking that the story of the small town would better be communicated in a graphic novel, or an interactive website. Or what if what the world really needs right now is a comprehensive map featuring every travel writer's journey in the books they wrote? That way, I reason, if you wanted to travel vicariously without any of the discomfort, you could pick a place and see the books written about it!

Such digressions of thought are like desert mirages, and they're a normal part of writing. They do sometimes lead to interesting rabbit holes though... I discovered the website Wikimapia, for example, and Richard Kreitner's article titled “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips” on Atlas Obscura. (He also wrote a book with selected works of fiction and their settings around the world.)

4.

On the subject of writing. Travel writing, as a genre, isn't easy to pull off, as Tyler Cowen writes in a blog post titled "Why is most travel writing so bad?" Rory Stewart, on a podcast episode of Always Take Notes, is also critical of some aspects of the genre. 

[...] it absurdly inflected with a strange form of decadent asceticism, it too often relies on essentially mocking foreigners [it's] very very unaware of the actual political context of people's lives, it's anthropologically primitive, it has no real interest in the actual structures of society

Then again, every genre has its weak spots and examples of poor execution. Criticism is instructive (preferably when one isn't the subject of it!).

5.

Finally, a balance between history and the present, between thinking and doing. Thanks to Tyler Cowen's recent podcast episode I learned about Paul Salopek's years-long project of walking across the continents. The premise is fascinating, and Salopek uses his talents to highlight "slowing down and finding humanity." In one of his recent dispatches, he writes about human migration. And there was this line: "History—as scribbled by smug homebodies—often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers." I wonder if he's highlighting a tension between people who stay at home and people like himself who choose to venture out to see life "on the ground." I don't think one should exclude the other... Rory Stewart (back to that episode on Always Take Notes) marries both aspects.... the walking and the history: 

[...] you access communities that you can's access except on foot, and you're walking at the same pace as everybody else. [...] Walking therefore exposes me to the landscape but [also] to the human components and history of the landscape. Things make sense for me as a historian by walking: the distance that Alexander the Great had to walk, or the Genghis Khan's army had to walk makes sense to me [...]. 

It's been a thought-provoking week! Pictures taken this week while walking the dog are on Instagram.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to another end-of-week round up, with a quote, appreciation for food, a book I finished, a competition with Chat GPT, and more pictures from my dog-walks. It’s Saturday, but I refuse to rename the post granting myself a pass for the busy day yesterday…

1.

I love the prairies. In the course of reading for my paper I came across Kenneth Michael Sylvester’s description in The Limits of Rural Capitalism: "My strongest memories are of the scale of the countryside, of fading towns with weathered false-front buildings and of cities that appeared without reason, out of nowhere, like distant harbours in a vast agricultural ocean." (p 3) Sometimes I wish academic writing encouraged more lyricism.

2.

In praise of the traditional meal. I've tended for the past four months or so, to build menus that rely less heavily on meat as a main, or to space them out a bit... Fried rice, wonton soup, creamy pasta with peas and bacon... those sorts of meals. But earlier this week, I breaded pieces of chicken (flour, egg, panko crumbs), shallow fried them, and made a side of perogies (boiled then lightly pan fried), lingonberry sauce (from IKEA!) and boiled edamame and remembered how comforting it is sometimes to come back to a traditional meal. Dress it up a bit, and you have Jamie Oliver's "Super Schnitzel" from his book Jamie's Comfort Food, with breaded veal cutlets and a special "sprinkle" (made of finely chopped shallot, pickle and parsley), potato salad and apple salad. 

3. 

A good book. Thanks to the podcast “People I Mostly Admire,” I learned about the work of historian Brad Gregory. (I wrote about a quote I liked from that podcast episode here). Last week, I finished reading his book The Unintended Reformation. I liked it so much, I wrote a summary of it here. Gregory’s approach with a book on “how the distant past remains influential in the present” [p 14] is unusual, as he points out in the introduction, and perhaps this is another reason why I appreciated the book so much.  

4. 

A competition with AI. I asked Chat GPT to take over this edition of Friday Five with the query “Write me 5 short paragraphs, each with an interesting idea on random subjects.” This was the result:

One interesting idea is the concept of "forest bathing," which is a practice that originated in Japan and involves spending time in nature to improve physical and mental well-being. Studies have shown that spending time in nature can lower stress hormones, improve mood, and boost the immune system.

Another interesting idea is the concept of "pre-suasion," which is the art of preparing people to be more receptive to a message before the message is even delivered. This can be done through a variety of techniques, such as using certain words or images to prime the audience's subconscious.

An interesting idea in the field of psychology is "change blindness," which is the phenomenon where people fail to notice significant changes in their visual environment. This can have important implications for fields such as advertising, as people may not even notice changes in a product or brand.

An interesting idea in the field of economics is "behavioral economics," which is the study of how psychology and cognitive biases influence economic decision-making. This field has shown that people do not always make rational decisions when it comes to money, and that understanding these biases can help to improve economic policy.

An interesting idea in the field of technology is the concept of "smart cities," which use technology to improve the efficiency and livability of urban areas. This can include things like smart traffic lights, air quality sensors, and public transportation systems that are connected to the internet. By using technology to improve the functioning of cities, it is believed that smart cities can help to reduce pollution, improve quality of life, and increase economic productivity.

Isn’t it comforting to know this blog hasn’t been taken over by robots? That bit about change blindness is intriguing though… I’ve often tended to feel the opposite. More like Homily in The Borrowers, which my daughter and I are reading right now. In the story, a boy is bringing the family pieces of furniture from a doll’s house and Homily, the mother, is excited about all this new décor:

…Homily was tireless; bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, after a long day’s pushing and pulling, she still would leave nothing until morning. “Let’s just try it,” she would beg, lifting up one end of a large doll’s sideboard, so that Pod [her husband] would have to lift the other; “it won’t take a minute!” But as Pod well knew, in actual fact it would be several hours before, disheveled and aching, they finally dropped into bed. Even then Homily would sometimes hop out “to have one last look.” (p 131).

I so recognize this excitement! Re-organizing a corner, changing a paint colour, or styling things a different way have the opposite effect of change blindness, instead sparking my attention every time I walk by. Cup of Jo once called this a fakeover.

5.

Pictures. Care for some Winnipeg scenery? Last week was warm and cloudy, but this week brought dipping temperatures and fresh snow. It’s a game of “would you rather…” Option 1: warm weather, no sun; option 2 cold weather, bright sun! What do you pick?

Look how the sun makes a difference:

And check out the “Loch Ness tree” in winter… (I’ve taken a picture of it in other seasons here.)

Earlier this week I spotted deer. Enzo, not having picked up their scent, didn’t notice them!

Happy weekend!

Summary and quotes from Brad S. Gregory's book The Unintended Reformation

Summarizing Gregory’s research is like writing a Haiku for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet… the oversimplification makes the source sound discreditable. For a historian of Gregory’s caliber, this is very much not the case. The exercise here is my own form of aide-mémoire for the points this book makes. The words in parenthesis are the titles of each of the book’s six chapters.

Summary

            Luther, an Augustinian monk, alarmed like so many of his contemporaries at the state of the church, the way its pontiff and cardinals and bishops and priests had deviated from Christ’s example in the Gospel, of love and humility and poverty, concluded that the Catholic church had a flaw in its foundation. Instead of spreading, as it did, with reference to a central figure in Rome and a legacy of tradition from the Church Fathers, the faith, he decided, should come, simply, from the Bible. The Bible, he thought, would not lead people astray, because for him, reading the Bible was clear. Luther, printed his thoughts in German and they spread throughout the population of practicing faithful, also concerned about their church. Were it not for Luther’s passionate fervor or the protection of a Prince, the world would not be what it is today.

            If we are inclined to think that the Reformation was a movement that sprung from the Catholic Church, with its own structure and cohesion, this was not the case. Luther in his own lifetime was dismayed that so many interpretations of the Bible, differing from his own, could muddy and complicate what he thought was evident.

            (Excluding God) Today, we have science, or more specifically, the natural sciences. Natural sciences allow us to look at the world and measure and understand it and make giant strides in technology. Weber saw this and declared that since there is nothing we can’t know, there is no need for God, “this implies the disenchantment of the world.” [p 26] Disenchantment! So now, there is science and there is faith and the two are separate. How they became separate was a trick of language… a long time ago, God was in everything, and then, as the natural sciences measured and quantified things, and labeled cells and named galaxies, God was outside the arena of things passed under microscopes and observed through telescopes, and so, God became something that was nowhere.

            (Relativizing Doctrines) For all the wonder and beauty of natural sciences, they cannot answer questions about life purpose. All the disagreements about what the Bible meant, lead to philosophers turning to reason for consensus. But then reason couldn’t provide a single satisfactory answer, and philosophers only ever continued to ask questions. Eventually this lead to everyone disagreeing with each other and having their own ideas and not arriving at a solution of any kind.

            (Controlling the Churches) The way society is organized, with the separation of church and state can be traced in history. When Luther needed a monarch’s protection or risked being put to death, so too did all adopters of various Protestant faiths. Religion became associated with power. Over time, the differences between what people believed to be true became an internal creed that had to be confessed, rather than a guide for a way of being. Depending on the monarch’s convictions, populations were subjected to terrible persecution and so it was better over time to allow for a whole variety of individual convictions without imposing any one thing on everyone. But just as government depended on its citizens to live the virtues of their religion, suddenly religion was being eroded in importance and no longer had a prominent part in nurturing good practices. Society and religion became secularized.

            (Subjectivizing Morality) A sense of what is right and wrong is now based on personal feeling with one’s happiness as a guide. Morality became separate from politics from the time of the Renaissance popes who, in shrugging their duty, unwittingly set an example for Machiavelli’s advice to leaders. Centuries later, the American “pursuit of happiness” is counted as a true right, and yet rights are no more self-evident than are souls. Therefore, citizens are left with being proscribed tolerance.

            (Manufacturing the Goods Life) Getting to where we are now as a culture that endlessly consumes, goes far back to the people’s idea of how to treat God’s creation, the greediness of the Catholic church’s clergy and the idea that material prosperity was a sign of God’s favour. Wars over religion were expensive and onerous and by taking the Dutch Republic’s example of favouring a common interest in economic prosperity over a common interest in religion, life seemed better. Suddenly it became a good thing to want good things for one’s family and everyone could agree that being comfortable was a source of happiness, even if many wars have been waged over the fight for material goods. An increasingly undeniable consequence of capitalism and consumerism has been the destruction of the environment and the consequences of the disruption caused to the natural world.

            (Secularizing Knowledge) Finally, effects of the Reformation can also be found in universities where specialization, while good, is also conducted in isolation without an idea of “knowledge as a whole,” [p 301] or how things are connected and related to each other. Theology was put aside as were other forms of knowledge that had been accepted prior to the Reformation. Universities favoured secular humanism and just the right amount of skepticism, to “relativize […] religious views” [p 359] and still allow for toleration.

           In the end, while Luther set out to fix the problems in the Catholic church, he could not adjust the foundation in a way that made sense to everyone. Instead, his effort had the unintended consequence of causing a breach where a whole diversity of claims about truth rushed forth and spread and splintered.

A few quotes

From Chapter 2 “Relativizing Doctrines”

A rejection of the church's authority and many of its teachings is precisely what happened in the Reformation. All Protestant reformers came to believe that the established church was no longer the church established by Jesus. So they spurned many truth claims of the faith as embodied in the Roman church. Their repudiation was not based primarily on the church's rampant abuses, the sinfulness of many of its members, or entrenched obstacles to reform. All of these had been obvious to conscientious clerical reformers and other open-eyed Christians for well over a century. The Reformation's upshot was rather that Roman Catholicism, even at its best, was a perverted form even if all its members had been self-consciously following all the Roman church's teachings and had been enacting all its permitted practices. Institutional abuses and immorality were seen as symptomatic signs of a flawed foundation, namely false and dangerous doctrines - that is, mistaken truth claims. The established church itself was teaching errors and lies as if they were truth. This was the problem that had to be fixed. And because the church had pressed into every nook and cranny of politics, social life, economic activity, and culture - in myriad ways, according to Protestant reformers, distorting them all - it looked like the apocalypse was nigh. [p 86]

From Chapter 3 “Controlling the Churches”:

With supreme irony and as a result of understandable pragmatic decisions, it repudiated Jesus's uncompromising, anti-subjectivist, anti-individualist commands precisely because disagreement about them had proven so costly in the Reformation era and in the enduring confessional antagonisms it left in its wake. Doubly ironically, however, by pointing the way to the emancipation of politics from any and all religious institutions, the American founders unwittingly laid the groundwork for the potential erosion of the church-nurtured, virtuous behaviors of the nation's citizens, and so for the eventual endangerment of the nation's own public, political well-being that depended on citizens who exhibited certain behaviors rather than others. Controlling the churches by disestablishing them freed not only political institutions from churches but also established the institutional framework for the eventual liberation of society from religion. It left public culture, political life, economic activity, and social relationships dependent on the individual behaviors that informed them, whatever those behaviors happened to be. [p 172]

From Chapter 4 “Subjectivizing Morality”:

As MacIntyre notes, the widespread default in Western societies at large is emotivism, an ethics of subjective, feelings-based, personal preference, which only exacerbates the unresolved and irresolvable disagreements. The de facto guideline for the living of human life in the Western world today seems simply to be "whatever makes you happy" - "so long as you're not hurting anyone else" - in which the criteria for happiness, too, are self-determined, self-reported, and therefore immune to critique, and in which the meaning of "hurting anyone else" is assumed to be self-evident, unproblematic, or both. Because there is no shared framework within which such disagreements might rationally be debated and perhaps overcome, and yet life goes on, moral disagreements are translated socially into political contestation within an emotivist culture - one that is closely related to if not largely identical with the individualistic "therapeutic culture" diagnosed by Philip Rieff. Protests, the exertion of power, and manipulation, whether overt or disguised, displace rational moral discourse, as has become ever more apparent, for example, in American public life and the media in recent decades. Everything becomes "political" because once morality has been subjectivized no arguments can succeed, since there is no shared set of assumptions from which they can proceed. [p 182]

From the conclusion:

Yet the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself, which is now well under way in different respects. In order to see this, we have not only consider simply and narrowly the problems that modern liberalism solved, but also what its institutional arrangements have facilitated in combination with other historical developments. A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people's actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities - including self-discipline, self-denial, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one's community, commitment to one's spouse and children - derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lives in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity's failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics and so forth. [pp 375-6]

The quotes above are excerpted with fair use in mind… I might be wrong though, and I’m happy to comply should copyright be infringed here.

Links

This is a video on Youtube in which Gregory introduces his book to a university audience at Notre Dame.

This is a podcast episode in which Gregory discusses academia and history more generally.

Friday Five

Drawing up a list of things is a steady exercise in taming my feelings; one week, five things is hardly enough, I think, for all that's going on. The next week, five things is far too much, for I have suddenly dried up, the scene is boring, how shall I ever manage to entertain a guest? Writing, as a gift, is not about feelings, and inuring oneself against the vagaries of the trade is best done, I'd argue, by practise as if it were a form of exposure therapy.

1.

Boring scenery is just what this week has had to offer here in Winnipeg. The skies have been piled high with clouds, the snow is old. The weather has been mild such that the river is still not frozen.

I like taking pictures the same way I like drawing... I'm not a photographer nor am I an artist, but I like the way these mediums can interact with words and expand thoughts on creativity. Listening to photographers and artists on Youtube can be so enlightening in this sense. Take, for example, Thomas Heaton, who kindly invites the viewer into his thoughts as he goes about finding an image that captures a feeling... either in Scotland or on a "bank holiday". 

2.

I borrowed John Green's latest book from the library, titled The Anthropocene Reviewed, not thinking it too would have his signature scrawled on the inside. It was a strange thrill to feel that his thoughtfulness had reached me all the way here, in a lowly library loan. (See here).

3.

I'm happy to report that today, on the job, I netted a few clichés, pinning them down and signaling them to the student, just like we were instructed to do. Avoid clichés! Avoid clichés! Teju Cole wrote in Known and Strange Things: "Flaubert hated cliché, a hatred that expressed itself not only in the pristine prose of Madame Bovary but also in his letters and in his notes on the thoughtless platitudes of the day. (...) We could learn from his impatience: there are many standard formulations in our language, which stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time - due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy - as though they were fresh insight." (p 74)

4.

This week, I made the kids Snickerdoodles and they baked, spreading flatter than pancakes. I must find a different recipe, even though the kids find this one an acceptable form of after-school snack.

5.

I made a quiche on Thursday. It had been so long, it tasted especially delicious!

And I'm off, reading, doing chapter edits, wishing you a happy Friday!

Friday Five

1

Podcast I loved this week's episode of This American Life... These are short paragraphs-long stories, Ira Glass says… and yet how powerful the humble paragraph! As a tutor, I often encourage students to look at paragraph-construction tips, because, in academic writing, they can follow a pattern: make a point, have examples to develop the point, conclude the thought and lead to the next point. On This American Life, guest Etgar Keret shared pieces of his mother's character and turned paragraphs about her into art.

2

Music Tom Allen's CBC programme "About Time" featured "Oqiton" by Jeremy Dutcher. The song is based on a wax cylinder recording of a Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) song, in a language that had (then) long been outlawed. It's beautiful and haunting.

3

Deodorant Megababe has a slew of products and I'm two weeks into daily application of "The Smoothie Deo" post "Space Bar Underarm Soap" lathering, rinsing, drying. I smell good, even at the end of a busy day wearing heat-tech turtlenecks. Natural products make one feel extra lady-like when they work because they exude environmentalist virtue perhaps... Wearing something that smells like a chocolate filling (coconut, lime and bilberry) feels lighter than applying men's extra-strength antiperspirant, even though, to be clear, aluminium is fine and detoxing one's armpits is a dubious exercise. 

4

Food I made Refrigerator Bran Muffins, the idea of this recipe being that the batter can be safely kept in the refrigerator for weeks so that, for weeks, you can treat yourself to freshly-made muffins with little prep. For my mother-in-law, I baked them all at once. The recipe made 44 muffins, and I learned you don't need to fill the empty wells of a muffin tin with water.

5

Winnipeg Scenery This week's weather brought nice temperatures and cloudy-grey mornings. Enzo and I tramp through the well-tramped Henteleff trail along the river. Wildlife makes itself scarce, but everywhere, there are traces of its presence... An abandoned nest in the bleached strands of grass;

Enzo's fox-like conviction that field mice are running tunnels under the snow;

a coyote, small as a dot that crosses the river behind us

and snowmen that freeze, mid-exercise as we pass by…

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

It's week 1 of the new year, and just as good as day 1 for making resolutions or starting their practice. To hail the new calendar, so crisp and clean, here are five things: ideas, recipes tried, watching a log cabin being built, and the delight of small bouquets...

1

Details: Colouring-in a story with detail feels like a skill that requires precision and balance: too many details and the story is tedious, too few and the anecdote is lifeless. Erik Larson, author of many nonfictions books, of which Devil in the White City is my favourite, explains what it takes to dig them out on an episode for the Longform podcast: "I do have a high tolerance for being alone and sitting in an archive hour after hour (...). To me it is never boring, because once I'm on the case, (you know it really is kind of like a detective story, like I'm in one), once I'm on the case, you just never know what you're going to find. But you know you've got to find a certain category of information, something that will make my imagination come alive, something that screams to me "this is good." And the only way to find that is to put in the hours. But I'm very content to do that. If I spend, in the case of Devil in the White City, if I spend an entire day in an archive, and all I discover is that the doctor who was in charge of this innovative ambulance service at the fair, is that his name was Gentles, G-E-N-T-L-E-S, Dr. Gentles, you know this innovative ambulance service with rubber wheels so that it wouldn't shake people,  that kind of thing, if I find little details, something like that."

2

Having received Deb Perelman's latest cookbook Keepers for Christmas, was excited to try new recipes and have cooked the cover-photo-ed "Green Angel Hair with Garlic Butter" the "Turkey Meatloaf for Skeptics," the "Snow Peas with Pecorino and Walnuts," the "Apple Butterscotch Crisp" and the "White Russian Slush Punch." Deb has such a kind and encouraging writing voice, it feels like a privilege to have her friendly guidance in the kitchen. Were I to quibble with her, it would be over the Apple Butterscotch Crisp, simply because we have a pretty strong opinion about the one that comes from Christian's mom. It's simpler: the apples are not parcooked in a skillet, but rather in the oven in the same dish the crisp is served in and, more importantly, it contains no oats. This isn't to say that the version in Keepers is not delicious... it is! As I was eating it, the topping reminded me of granola, only more decadent. The apple crisp Christian requests has a topping like the big crumb coffee cake, which, humbler for its lack of nuts, feels a bit less cluttered. Tonight I'll be making "Chocolate Chip Buckwheat Pancakes" and an omelet for supper, and I'm looking forward to August's tomatoes and corn to try "Tomato and Corn Cobbler."

3

I submitted a chapter for my thesis before Christmas and recently received feedback. Among the comments was something to the effect of "the writing is too brusque, you need more transitions" and echoes feedback I've received for articles submitted to a small publication. It makes me smile because I think it reflects a characteristic, which, like most characteristics, one can suspect but not know... I'm always worried about boring an audience and in fact, should I fall into a limelight, do try to hurry away. Must work on transitions.

4

I accidentally drank black tea too close to bedtime and could not fall asleep. I ended up watching the construction of a log cabin in Sweden and was charmed by the puppy that eventually appears, the exhibition of traditional building techniques, the non-narration and the friendly family feast at the end.  

5

I think any store bouquet is exponentially prettier when divided into little bouquets nestled in unexpected spots around the house... The bathroom, so guests have something cute to look at; the kitchen window, to delight while washing dishes; or here, the night-table...

And voilà! This Friday's post done! Should we meet again next week? I'll try to be on time, like morning rather than afternoon...

Friday Five

Look at that, two sleeps till Christmas, festivities, joy and well-wishes and parties and family and whoop, the year is done and this is turning into a Christmas carol. Here are five holiday-themed things.

1. Ordered and received calendars: the kids have theirs on the fridge, I have my 2023 agenda.

2. Finished a puzzle, started another (the dog ate 7 pieces).

3. Baked some cookies; gifted caramels and little bags of nuts and bolts.

4. My sister and I will try mulled wine.

5. Enzo can strike a holiday pose. (Thanks for the pic Anna!)