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.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Meg Fatharly Collage, Print and Surface Design (@printcessmeg)

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!

Tiny stories: hospital visits

If hospital stays can’t be avoided, and if you are the person visiting the patient, parking the car, walking over and getting directions to the room, it’s good to take in the view.

There’s the labyrinthine detours that construction can offer, in which unheard-of departments with stencilled windows might be found, and cavernous after-hour hallways too.

If you’re lucky, there is the leftover cotton-candy glow of a sunset just passed.

And maybe the walk between the car and the hospital offers a sentinel-like tree, whose sculptural effect can be admired in daylight and in twilight.

There are the rumpled sheets with stripes that can be caught too, in a picture of headphones taken for the right cord to be retrieved from home.

And sometimes, it’s the Sacred Heart that you might catch presiding a sunset before a crowd of marigolds, their yellow heads gazing upward.

And if your patient is on a higher floor, and you get the chance, do take a moment to catch the view. It can feel, for a second or two, that you’re gazing at unexpected art in a museum of suffering.

All the saints in heaven...

Aubigny’s early pioneers from Quebec came from a host of Catholic parishes, including St. Geneviève, St. Jerome, St-Hyacinthe, St. Cuthbert, La Conception and St. Scholastique, to name a few.

In his book, Brève histoire des Canadiens-Français, Yves Frenette writes:

Comme l'écrit avec humour l'historien Guy Laperrière, "apparement, tous les saints du paradis se sont donné rendez-vous sur la carte du Québec."

The thought makes me smile.

Dedication

This book dedication, from Claire M. Strom’s book Profiting from the Plains, encapsulates research and motherhood:

This book is dedicated to my daughter,
Phoebe Helga Margaret Strom
She was not yet born when I started my research and will be eleven by the time it is published. She has, therefore, through no fault or choice of her own, lived with James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway all her life. I thank her for that, and for the joy and grace she has brought to my life.

James J. Hill was a decent man, and he kept a diary. His biographer Martin Albro writes:

Like many another diarist, James J. Hill began the new year with the best of intentions, but quickly found that it was an onerous task to live a full, energetic, exciting life and note it all down in a book as well.

Here’s to exciting days!

A podcast episode I liked

A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.

But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.

We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.

[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.

I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.

Biographies

While I'm writing my thesis, I like checking people's names, to see if they have interesting biographies. 

Consider Adrien-Gabriel Morice. He wrote three volumes on church history in the West in which Aubigny's name is linked with vicomte Jacques d'Aubigny. But he was an insufferable man. He joined the Oblates but could not obey superiors. He was sent to a mission where there was one other priest, a Fr. Georges Blanchet. And this is what happened:

he made life so difficult for Blanchet, a gentle man much loved by the Carrier, that later that year the priest begged to be transferred before Morice’s perpetual disagreements drove him mad. That year Blanchet ceded supervision of the mission to Morice to avoid further conflict, but he would remain there, building churches and doing housework, until his retirement ten years later. A succession of priests, finding Morice impossible to work and live with, and refusing to become his servant, chose to leave.

What a character!

On another day, I checked this railroad contractor's name to discover that his daughter was more renowned than he was... Charlotte Whitehead Ross was the first female doctor in Montreal, having taken her medical education at Woman’s Medical College at Philadelphia in 1870, while also bearing children. She came to Manitoba in 1881 where she continued to practice medicine. Her biographer, Vera K. Fast, writes: 

After assisting at a birth she would often scrub the cabin floor and do the washing, the cooking, and the baking to help the mother and family. Her daughters looked after the Ross home in her absence, although she always did the baking, which she enjoyed, as she did embroidery, knitting, and music, especially the piano. 

She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn. I like how Fast writes:  

Undeterred, Charlotte continued on her busy rounds by horse, sleigh, canoe, and train, not defiantly, for she was no social or political activist, but simply because there was a need.

Biographies are inspiring!

Happy Friday!

Listening

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:

(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."

Eating

I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.

I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.

To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.

Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:

Writing

Because I'm in the middle of a lengthy draft, I'm extremely attentive to what people say about writing. For example, on the Ezra Klein podcast, the host and guest were discussing the use of A.I. in writing, Ezra explaining:

But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.

Maybe, taken out of context, this quote doesn't mean much, but I like how it exposes the kind of things I struggle with.

The guest (Ethan Mollick) in his answer said:

And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think.

It was a fascinating episode on A.I.

It reminds me of this part in Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” wherein she explains how she taught herself to tackle her thesis writing by committing herself to work on it for 15 minutes a day.

The first rule was that the fifteen-minute period had to be spent solely in working. My feeling of accomplishment depended on having a chunk of time that I did not fritter away in any way. I also had to learn that losing myself in my work was not dangerous. Most important, I noticed that I tended to stop working the minute I hit a difficult problem. Working in fifteen-minute chunks meant that occasionally I hit such a difficult problem in the middle of the required fifteen minutes and had to learn how to deal with it. Sometimes it simply required a little more thinking; sometimes it meant I would have to read something or talk to someone; sometimes it meant a lot more thinking. What I learned, though, was that I could deal with problems and didn't have to give up whenever I encountered them.

To me, it’s not the 15 minutes that matters so much (although I do find it very helpful to think about). It’s that encountering a “problem” and learning how to fix it, is just as valid a use of time as writing 250 words unimpeded. It has helped me dispel the idea that I was failing my productivity goals if I hadn’t set an impressive word count at the end of the day. Writing is dealing with problems. Dealing with problems is the hard work of thinking.

The view

Spring stalled mid-melt, dithering in delay, making us regular-walkers strap crampons to our boots. These pictures are of the path I take, one March 13th, the other just yesterday.

And here’s the dog wishing he could get at the geese.

Like buying a house

Since hearing this podcast episode several weeks ago, Derek Thompson’s comparison has stuck in my mind as an encapsulation of how I feel writing this thesis. Here’s the quote, lightly edited:

One thing I learned writing my first book [...] is that writing changes so much as the length of the work changes; that in a way, blogging is pure writing and by the time you get to a book, writing a book is actually not entirely writing, it's almost more organizing, than it is writing. One way that I thought of it is like if you're writing an article, it's almost like shopping for one shirt. I'm just looking for one data set about Americans hanging out less. And once I find that data set, I've found my shirt, I can write the article. Writing a column sometimes, like a 3000 word column, is more like buying furniture for a room. It's a lot of buying stuff and when you buy it, you have to lay it out and once you've laid it out, you're like ok, now the room is together. Writing a book is like buying a new house and outfitting it with furniture. I mean, yes, it is about buying stuff, but the biggest job for a new house is figuring out where all the damn stuff goes. And that's the major challenge with a book, so that's how I think about it at a conceptual level.

April Fools'

April Fool’s in French is Poisson d’avril, and poisson means fish, and so, my pranks have been food-themed. In the past there has been miracle berry experiments, liquid-turned-to-gel, and squid-ink pasta. This year was bug themed:

I put them in their lunches, as snacks. “There’s no way I’m eating ants!” said one, who gave it to her friends. The other thought the packaging was a spoof, did not read the ingredient list and had a friend, anyway, who’d eaten fried earthworms. He said they were good. And the third put it back in his lunch box and ignored it.

Review

In January I liked:

1. Keeping a bullet journal anew

2. Tracking our family meals

3. Buying two cookbooks at a local bookstore (Start Here, Company; at McNally)

4. Trying their recipes

5. Watching a tidy thriller (The K_.ller)

6. Being disabused of the tidiness of violence (Miles Johnson on Longform)

7. Walt Hickey’s enjoyment of having a variety of writing avenues (PIMA)

8. Sandi Hester’s encouragement for creativity (Youtube)

9. The research and story-making itch of a podcast like The Big Dig

10. Skating on a pond in the moonlight.