A week on Sunday, no. 44

Welcome to another edition of things I found interesting this week. But first, Halloween! Our kids dressed up as a witch, a sorcerer and an old man and then dispersed near and far with friends to collect candy. Here they are, pictured with a friend dressed as a zombie. 

Our collection of carved pumpkins…

From Robert Caro

I watched Dwarkesh Patel’s interview with Robert Caro (here on Youtube). Caro’s generosity is admirable. And Dwarkesh is a considerate host. Present too is a chasm of years that can barely be bridged in an hour despite the supports of hours of research on the host’s part, English language in common, and good intention on the guest’s. Caro has answered interviewers’ questions many times, and interviewers have subjects of interest in common. Getting past those smooth-as-pebble answers is anyone’s challenge. A bit melancholy to see the interview end on the subject of loneliness?

To Knausgard

This BBC feature on Karl Ove Knausgard (here) was nice to watch. It reminded me of having enjoyed reading the first two volumes of My Struggle in 2018. Take this quotation for example…

When you visualized the future and conjured up a world in which urban life had spread everywhere and man had achieved his long-desired symbiosis with the machine, you never took account of the simplest elements, beer for example, so golden and flavoursome and robust, made from grain in the field and hops in the meadow, or bread, or beetroot with its sweet but dark earthy taste, all this which we had always eaten and drunk at tables made of wood, inside windows through which beams of sunlight fell. What did people do in those seventeenth-century palaces, with the liveried servants, high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs pulled down over skulls full of seventeenth-century thoughts, what else if not drink beer and wine, eat bread and meat and piss and shit? The same applied to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conceptions of humanity changed constantly, conceptions of the world and nature too, all manner of strange ideas and beliefs emerged and vanished, useful and useless objects were discovered, science penetrated ever deeper into the world’s mysteries, machines grew in number, speeds increased and ever greater areas of old lifestyles were abandoned, but no one dreamed of discarding beer or changing it. Malt, hops, water. Field, meadow, stream. And basically that was how it was with everything. We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies or needs had not changed since the first humans saw the light of day somewhere in Africa 40,000 years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. (p 521)

“Tiens!” As they say in French, to mean a kind of delight in discovery… In this paragraph, an appreciation of historical context (the “understanding” that biographers like Caro obsess over) and the deft display of commonalities (an aspect of the beauty of literature). 

On Conversations with Tyler (here) I like how, over time, the desperate need for solitude he once experienced (mentioned here), has given way to acceptance:

I think that’s the best advice I ever got — to accept everything that happens. So if you have many children, it’s a good thing. If you don’t have children, it’s a good thing. You have to embrace it because that’s your life. That’s where you are, and writing should be connected to that — or painting or whatever it is. 

Reading

This week I finished The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. It felt exactly as a blurb describes it: “Stunning and strange - like a dream you want to last forever.” A quote:

If today, when our gaze is no longer able to penetrate the pale reflected glow over the city and its environs, we think back to the eighteenth century, it hardly seems possible that even then, before the Industrial Age, a great number of people, at least in some places, spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which, perhaps because of its relatively primitive character, makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only be being harnessed to the machines we have invented. (p 282-3)

Cooking and baking

Our menu plan has cyclical favourites, year over year; like last year, we had “Five Spice Slow Cooker Pork with Noodles” and Deb Perelman’s “Vinegar Slaw with Cabbage and Dill” (here). We also tried Jeanine Donofrio’s “BBQ Tofu Bowls with Creamy Apple Ranch Slaw” here via The Dinner Plan. 

Last Sunday we had “Salmon and Tomatoes en papillote” from Dorie Greenspan. She has a recipe for 1 serving here. This, served with a simple fried rice, is a treat.

The sourdough “acquiring the skills” project continues, this week augmented by the acquisition of a Cambro. 

Finding this, and a bench scraper too, lead me to Winnipeg stores I hadn’t previously been in before… A Plus Restaurant Equipment and Supplies is downtown on McDermot and will be updating their website (here), making it possible to order items online.  

And d.a. Niels Gourmet Kitchenware (website) near the airport is fun to browse.  For cookies alone, there are all these cookie scoops and cookie cutters!

Enjoying

• Often, I don’t care about discoveries very much… but this one, of wheat (see here) (via) delighted my prairie sensibilities.

• On a recent episode of the 10% Happier podcast (Youtube link here), guest Katherine May said something I really liked: “I increasingly think that the work for those of us who are not on the front line at the moment, apart from giving all the support we can, is to almost store up those soft parts of life, to kind of maintain them and look after them and tend to them, so that they are ready for the people who need them. It’s almost like we’re maintaining a vision of the world as it should be against that hideous mainstream […] vision of bitterness, selfishness, snatching, anger. It’s the opposite of that. It’s like the work that we do is to take care of all of the stuff that’s beautiful […].”

• To follow Ken Sakata on TikTok is to discover the craftsmanship of clothing. Contrasting Sebald’s depiction of loom workers in the eighteenth century are these women, working for Kuska Fabric. Sakata’s description of the intricacy of silk weaving at this fabric mill is heartening (here).  

• Two outings this week lead me to lunch at the Oakwood Café with one friend, and The Forge with another. The Oakwood Café has recently changed ownership (see their introductory post on Instagram) and further signalling this shift is an overhaul of the restaurant’s decor… the vibe is curated vintage finds and I was charmed. Tables have their own sets of salt and pepper shakers. And look at this creamer!

• As for The Forge (website)… Writing more than once about the local neighbourhood coffee shop contravenes some vague rules that enforce novelty around here, but this bagel shop keeps evolving. It will soon be celebrating one year of business, and when it opened, it rewarded sweet-tooth expectations. On this week’s visit I chose the BLT on a Swiss and Ale bagel and the flavour combo was perfection. You might expect a business to open with their best foot forward, but this place keeps finding new ways to treat the tastebuds, and I’m happy for it!

How nerds throw a party

Finally, on the subject of entertaining, and because its fall, I really liked Malcolm Gladwell’s assessment of his father’s ability to gather students. He tells the following story:

My father, who was a nerd, but a very clever nerd, went to his graduate students. He said, “I’m going to have a party at my house called the leaf raking party.” And then the first year, like, five guys came, raked leaves, and then he had a dinner. And then they played party games of the sort that mathematics PhD students would like. 

The next year, 15 people came. The next year, 40 people came. The next year people who had got their PhDs drove like hundreds of miles to come. And by the end of the leaf raking party, by the end, before we moved out of the house, it was literally like a hundred people from […] like 25 nationalities. […] it was this kind of joyous event. And no one cared that they were raking our leaves. […] 

Your immediate sense of […] “oh, it’s a cynical act - he’s outsourcing labor to his grad students.” But if you knew my father, you knew that was the furthest thing from his mind. He understood […] ‘this is going to be way more fun if we do it together. A little outdoor physical labor is great. These are PhD students who are in their room all day.’ And then we’re going to have a fantastic dinner, and then we’re going to play the nerdiest, most complex party games […].

[…] The only reason he had that insight into how to create enduring connection with these people was that he was a nerd. And it was inconceivable for him just to have a party and invite people and have them mill around and talk. He wouldn’t have known what to do. He had to contrive this elaborate thing and that was the beauty of it.

He concludes:

The nerds, in compensating for their nerdiness, make the world a beautiful place. (Told here, on Revisionist History.)

Walking the dog

Our path along the river begins here, with an abandoned tree house, the kids who might have played there have long since grown…

It’s another week of pretty fall colours… more bronze and gold and green and a pretty handsome dog. 

If you time it right, he will look into the camera…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 43

Welcome to a new edition of the various things I found interesting this week. To set the scene, a picture from Friday, when it was so warm, a giant pile of leaves could be bagged in shorts and t-shirts.

Research

To answer the question “who owned the house at 216 La Verandrye” I’ve been going through copies of the Henderson Directory on the Internet Archive. There’s a rumour that this house, which once belonged to my husband’s grandmother, was owned by a religious community, but I haven’t found evidence for this yet. As I’ve been tracking ownership backwards through time, I’ve come across a change in the way houses were numbered on that street, and a short-lived attempt by the city of Winnipeg to change street names between 1891 and 1893. (A 2002 Winnipeg Free Press article by Christian Cassidy contains this plaintive quote by James Gray: “If Winnipeg originally had been laid out by surveyors instead of meandering cows, and if the pioneer urge to erect buildings in the most outlandish places had been squelched, Winnipeg would have little cause to worry about town planning today.”)

I’m ashamed about how slowly I work, how my research seems to rely on laborious methods. At the same time, these tiny discoveries seem more palpable than if I had read Cassidy’s article alone (here). Not all aspects are slow, but this week has been a pleasant plunge back into this kind of data gathering.

World news of an unexpected death

A Catholic priest, Fr. Patricio Sanchez Molinari, died in Ecuador last week and news of his death was relayed everywhere, no doubt because of the apparent irony of its circumstance. (An obit here.) If I give myself permission to imagine this priest, I think of someone sincere, muddling through pastoral life, maybe having visited a sick parishioner, maybe concerned about the effects of social media; either way, having eaten, going to the church, smiling at the people, putting on his robes. He feels inspired to talk about death, and so he does. And what is an accident some minutes later happens to be recorded so that not only is it shocking, but also, the sermon he felt inspired to give doesn’t just leave his mouth for the benefit or the possible ennui of his parishioners. Instead, it takes a leap and becomes a ricochet. What was he talking about? “One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we have spent on certain things does not hold as much meaning as the time we have spent with God. The quality time we dedicate to God, to our brothers and sisters, to our spouse, to our children, and to our family, that is time spent in the best possible way.” (Source) 

The news was about the inauspiciousness. But how often is it that a priest dies and the whole world can hear his last sermon? And furthermore, that their regular sermon can be true to their values and also a fitting testimony? We, as a society, insist on the bad; but it can make us blind to the good.

Baking (sourdough)

Perhaps this sourdough looks good, but learning to make this bread has been an initiation to a world of “crumb”.

Just as a stylist learns to judge an outfit, I am learning to judge bread texture and study flaws in surface appearance.

I’d rather get to the successful end of this process before posting the intermediate pictures, open as they could be to the gaze of more successful bakers than myself. Nonetheless… it shows the current preoccupation I have with sourdough. Nothing else I made this week has taken as much space in my head. For this I credit a book by Matthew James Duffy called Bread etc., published last year in Canada. 

When I mentioned adding this book to a Christmas wishlist, my daughter declared that I didn’t need another book about bread. But there’s a strong case to be made for this one… Duffy’s experience, which he unpretentiously details in the introduction, is wide and varied and his interest in bread has a charming nerdiness to it. Perhaps what is best about this book is its combination of excellent writing, Duffy’s teaching background, and the thoughtful organization. For every step of a basic recipe there is a minimum two-page explanation and accompanying pictures. Reading through the first chapters while my kids were at piano, I got excited about making sourdough. So while the beautiful Big Book of Bread launched this adventure, and Hailee Catalano’s sourdough starter recipe helped me overcome my fear of commitment, Matthew Duffy’s book is exactly the friendly teacher I need in order to learn how to improve. 

Enjoying

• The “What It’s Like To Be…” podcast is back with a second season, debuting this week with a contortionist. I hadn’t expected to learn so much about contortion, nor have someone in their late twenties have such appreciative points of view. About her mother she says: “she did the best she possibly could to give me all the tools to succeed and […] the road after that was […] in my hands, and it was a lot of work for me. But at the same time, without those tools, you have nothing.” And about how her profession shaped her perspective on the world: “for every tiny niche thing out there, there’s someone with a full breadth of knowledge, top to bottom, and it’s their whole world. It’s really fascinating, and it’s awesome to love in a world where there can be so many diverse interests.” (Here) 

• I’ve been finding motivation to get on the stationary bike for a bit of cardio if I can watch a few episodes of Design Notes on Netflix. In one episode, House and Garden featured shell artist Mel Campion’s house and studio. Her work is fun to look at (her website has a gallery here) and her house tour exhibited an ideal harmony between artist and environment.

A section on bugs…

• My sister celebrated a birthday last week and in the Venn diagram of our interests, hers, in bugs, is one that doesn’t overlap. Nonetheless, her love of bugs has made me consider them with more respect than I would normally. Should I learn more about isopods? Sure! Why not! While not technically an insect (they are a crustacean!) they fall in the general category of “bug” (“any insect or other small anthropod”) and look how many there are! This picture of an isopod’s shed skin fascinated me (see here). (Via) 

• In the same vein are amphipods, distinguishing themselves from isopods by the fact that they have two kinds of feet. And I only know about these things thanks to the wonderful Geo Rutherford, who every year in October does “spooky lake month” on TikTok (her webpage here). Lake Baikal makes repeat appearances and among its many peculiarities are the larger-than-normal amphipods. (An article from New Scientist here.)  

• And this week, the Sidedoor podcast featured an episode on beetles (here)! I already knew that the world contains a lot of beetles (“a quarter of all known animal life on Earth”) having read Candace Savage’s book Prairie (mentioned here and here) which featured a memorable, beetle-related, anecdote. She writes: “Asked what he had learned about the Creator from a lifetime spent studying His works, the Scottish biologist J. B. S. Haldane is said to have quipped, ‘He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.’” (p 231) (Wikipedia relays this quote as well, here.) The podcast was an interesting listen.

Walking the dog

This week, the maple trees are laying a carpet at our feet. 

And the line of willow trees look soft from a distance.

Do you think Enzo would make for a good construction worker for Halloween? He’ll stay on the job only so long as the supply of treats doesn’t run out, or an animal make an appearance.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no 42

Swimming (Part 4)

(Part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here)

It has been a year now since Christian and I have taken up the habit of going to the pool Friday night. We once had to miss a week and when I returned to the pool I noticed myself almost embracing the familiarity of the water. That feeling in itself was a reassuring sign of improvement. Although I can’t yet swim and have not graduated to the deep end, there have been milestones worth recording in this self-experiment.

As with the beginning of most projects, I had a lot of enthusiasm. This waned when I felt like my progress plateaued but gradually, the accumulation of practice and exposure lead to increasing comfort in the water. 

I fill an hour in the pool with drills… kicking in streamline position, pulling using a pull buoy, sideways kicking with fins - all while wearing a swimmer’s snorkel; and backstroke and floating and rhythmic breathing in between.

A significant snag in my progression was the fear of being unable to breathe. Fear of water is very common in adults and tackling breathing has been akin to undoing a knot. I started watching videos by Caribe Swim (here). I’ve noticed that when I’ve hit a wall in my progress, I need to find techniques that break things down into even smaller increments. Here’s a recent example. Step 4 of “The Shallow Water Mastery Course” (here) teaches a forward glide, with a head lift to catch a breath. I tried this repeatedly, over weeks. I’d pause to practice breathing exercises and relaxation techniques (here) and still, I could not lift my head to breathe. I realized that lifting my head and breathing was in fact two things. The pressure of having to catch my breath in this movement was preventing me from being able to execute the head lift. Decoupling breath from the movement made it possible, just last Friday - marking the 50th hour in the pool - to glide, holding my breath, then glide and raise my head out of the water, then glide and stop with my feet on the ground to catch my breath. The point was to prove to myself that I could lift my head without having to touch the bottom of the pool. And this felt like the happiest success, because by continuing to practice the movement, I am confident I’ll get to a point where catching a breath will come naturally. 

These small wins, and the growing ease of movement I feel in the water are encouraging signs that this experiment is working, even if very slowly. 

Telephone table / night stand

I found this telephone table on Facebook marketplace and instantly liked the design. I’ve given it a dual purpose in our bedroom as nightstand and as menu planning station… the filing cabinet fits neatly underneath and houses recipe printouts categorized mainly by ingredient. Nearby I have a shelf of cookbooks. Making a “station” for this weekly exercise, complete with its own chair, fills me with content!

Collage

In the spirit of experimentation and making art, this is another batch of little collages… They are for individuals, but also, they are fun, and I lose the sense of time cutting, arranging, and glueing things into place.

In the spirit of this exercise, Brendan Leonard has a video about making art here. What is unique about collage is that I don’t feel pressure to improve. With drawing, I do. With collage, it’s just experimentation. It’s a true hobby!

Cooking and Baking

I made these fruit and nut-filled “crowns” on Thanksgiving as a change from regular bread. They are of the “looks impressive” category of bread. 

Christian brought home such a large butternut squash that not only did I use it for Melissa Clark’s Butternut Squash Pizza, from her cookbook Dinner; I cut up the rest for soup (recipe here) and served a butternut-squash-themed meal. 

Another vegetarian meal we tried this week was Anna Jones’ “Proper Chilli”. I can’t remember how I had access to the recipe from her Substack (here) but The Guardian offers the recipe here. This recipe, like Bolognese, is markedly better on the second day. On the first day, the spices all clamour for attention, and the raucous competition made me second-guess their quantities. On the second day everything calms down a bit. You can enjoy a bowl as if you were a passenger on a train, cupping a bowl in your hands while taking in the scenery outside. 

Finally, I really liked Maggie Hoffman’s podcast episode with Mark Bittman (here). Towards the end, Maggie asks for cookbook recommendations, and Bittman offers a list and concludes “the important thing is that people cook. It’s not really how they cook or what they cook or how they learn how to cook. It’s that they cook.” Maggie asks why and Bittman answers: 

Cooking is just better. I mean, cooking for yourself, cooking for your loved ones, it’s just, it’s better than not. […] Not everybody can cook at home and not everybody has the time or the ingredients. Not everybody even has a kitchen. But for those of us who do and can, I think it’s sort of the first step toward good head and a good life is teaching yourself and your loved ones how to cook and cooking for your loved ones. If you can’t make the time for cooking, first you have to ask if that’s legitimate, I think, if you really don’t have the time for cooking. And if you really don’t have the time for cooking, that is a societal problem that we need to help you figure out how to address. 

At a different spot in the podcast, Bittman says “So much of what there is to cooking is experience.”

To end this… my kids… cleaning up after having made and portioned out a batch of soba noodles with sauce for school lunches…

Enjoying

• Out for lunch with a friend, we discovered one of the best wonton soup spots… it’s Aroma Bistro at 741 St. Mary’s Road, and this picture makes me want to go back for another bowl!

• Enzo being Enzo…

• Sometimes, we just want to watch a rom-com. Love at First Sight made us cry, but it was also a great love story!

• Running errands with the kids… here catching a snack at the many-mirrored KHAB Tapioca near Polo Park!

Walking the dog

Said dog pointing me in the direction he’d like to sniff…

Fall has been mild so far… It’s teasing us with all the pretty scenery…

The display of colour before everything turns white and blue and brown.

Fall teases and says, “wanna collect leaves?”

I say no! I can’t collect leaves! I have no time for a leaf collection! No space!

But fall says, look how sculptural!

And fall says, look! I made a version in pink!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday, no 41

Welcome to this weekly edition, where I’ll jump straight to things I’ve appreciated this last week… 

Enjoying

• A board game: The artwork on Transmissions was what drew my son’s attention to the box, and what lead us to buying the game as a birthday present. We finally pulled it out, watched the Youtube tutorials, and spent an evening immersed in play. The game’s design didn’t feel like anything we’d tried before - points are tallied once a resource runs out - and the objective isn’t the kind that has you mentally calculating your points and comparing yourself to your opponents as in Catan for example. I liked reading this interview with its designer, Adam West, here.  

• Make your art. This is the title of John Green’s YouTube video, and, just like the little essays in The Anthropocene Reviewed (the podcast he hosted from 2018 to 2020 - here) I appreciate the reminder. (here) 

• Uncertainty. In the same vein is this blog post from The Marginalian, which I found comforting to read… It is titled “The Creative Power of Uncertainty”. I like the phrase “a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”

• Home remedy: I caught a cold last week. I ate a cookie one afternoon and then my throat was sore. In the evening I made Julia Turshen’s “Cold Elixir” (a recipe here) and discovered its warming effect on my dulled sinuses. 

• Back spasm: Muscle-relaxing pills are great for getting to sleep when I get a back spasm, but what helps me recover are short daily yoga sessions like those offered by Adriene Mishler. (This one in particular is a frequent repeat.) It doesn’t only stretch my muscles, it reminds me how to move in a way that protects my back. 

• Gratitude for the small things: A perfect poem as an oblique nod to the Thanksgiving holiday here in Canada. It’s titled “Love Like Salt” by Lisel Mueller. 

Walking the dog

Leaves have turned and are falling. The last bit of colour on display until everything goes bare…

Scenery is a jumble of tall grass, untrimmed brush, and trees, but here I spotted a new bird house!

And on an overcast day, a calm river backdrop to highlight the silhouettes.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 40

History of concrete

What a funny quirky movie! Christian and I left the Dan Barber theatre downtown full of thoughts… In the shower the next day, I was still thinking about Jack Macco and how Wilson’s narration feels like it tempers eagerness. “Calm down” he seems to say, “let’s have a look here.” The between-projects feeling is real. The film’s editing that cuts from one idea to the next is my favourite thing: it’s the flash of curiosity alighting on a new tangent.

I’ve read some reviews online… The Gothamist (here) has lines about Wilson’s finding “meaning in the mundane” and how he is appreciated as a “comedic visual poet”. And this one (here) by Charlie Von Peterffy includes the line “concrete in reality and metaphor is mostly a myth of reassurance”. I like that. To pave is “to cover with a layer of something so as to form a pavement-like surface” and this documentary examines covers and plays with layers. 

How to critique

Sometimes I confuse feeling inspired with critique and I appreciate the distinction Dana Jeri Maeier makes (here): 

The most important thing I learned in art school does not fit in a nice click-bait-y list, however. The lesson arrived during a critique in a painting class. A fellow student was presenting her oil painting, a beautiful still life of an orange or maybe an orange peel. At one point in the crit, I mentioned how she could add a hand or something, some indication of a narrative or backstory.

I thought I was being clever, of course. But the professor shut it down immediately.

“She could do that,” he said. “But then it wouldn’t be her painting. It would be your painting.”

The ultimate lesson: judge art on its own terms, not yours. “This is what I would have done,” is not a critique. What’s the goal of the piece? Is it achieving it? Why or why not? That probably applies to a lot of life advice, too. If it were me, I’d do this generally does not take into account the fact that the other person isn’t you.

Ageing

This quote: “Ageing is the aggressive pursuit of comfort” (via an interview with Jim Murphy here) sounded like it was in conversation with Vivian Gornick’s discussion of literature. In The Situation and the Story, Gornick compares Jean Améry’s On Aging and Seymour Krim’s “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” and writes: “each man, as he entered middle age, seemed overcome by the realization that he had not done the work necessary to attain inner freedom […] the work [D. H.] Lawrence was referring to when he said, ‘Man is free only when he is doing what the deepest self likes, and knowing what the deepest self likes, ah! that takes some diving.’ Central to both Krim and Améry was that each one considered himself a failure because neither - by his own lights - had engaged with his own deepest self. Here was a pair of men widely separated by culture, geography, and focus - yet both haunted by the inability to have faced down their own youthful anxieties, to have made themselves dive.” (P 64)

It’s a theme that continues to gain in relevance!

Cooking + Baking

We had friends over last Friday and I made Sam Sifton’s Chicken Shawarma (a NYT recipe here) and like he says “It is perfect for an evening with family and friends.” We served it, as suggested, with home-made sauces: tahini, white, and hummus; and home-made pitas and (not our) garden-grown cucumbers, tomatoes, and quickly-fried Indian eggplants. It was a fully customizable meal, delicious in all forms! I had fun writing labels so that the buffet-style table was self-explanatory.

For company on Sunday, I made Amanda Rettke’s Chocolate Zucchini Cake from her cookbook Homestead Recipes published in 2022. The recipe, featured (here) on her website, is similar, except for the simple syrup step. Instead, I frosted the cake with store-bought Betty Crocker chocolate icing. 

Enjoying

• I like it when different reading and listening sources converge on a subject. First there was Manoush Zomorodi’s post (here) on the subject of publishing and marketing her latest book, Body Electric. One of the post’s subtitles is: “Podcasts aren’t the powerhouse converters they once were.” (Via) And then, I listened to Derek Thompson’s podcast episode with Chuck Klosterman, titled “Why Things Become Popular” (here) in which part of the discussion is an appraisal of non-fiction book sales and podcast appearances. 

• I mentioned illustrator and author Melissa Sweet in the previous post, and this week savoured her book Some Writer. I don’t think categorization should impede the enjoyment of a book, and it is all the more perfect that W. B. White who declared “I would rather wait a year than publish a bad children’s book, as I have too much respect for children” should be the subject of a biography that, in turn, treats its readers with just as much respect… One proof of this is the book’s 135-page length. Lots of good quotations, including this gentle poem (here).

• I like following Ryan Stefan (website here) on TikTok if only because it makes me able to talk about perfume with better vocabulary. His website has a great list of Canadian perfume brands.  

• I never thought of clenched vs unclenched as an attitude, until I read this article (here), and since then, I’ve  thought about it often. I know someone who laughs heartily, like the article describes, and the observation - “you can tell how much work someone has done on themselves by the depth of their laughter” - feels true. Via

Walking the dog

As soon as the wind picks up, it rains leaves. Otherwise, cool still mornings are alight with colour, and we’re enjoying every one of them!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 38

Welcome to a regular edition of the random things that comprise a week… outings with friends, errands, and other dailyness…

Cinnamoon - a new bakery downtown

A friend and I went to the newly opened Cinnamoon bakery on Albert street… the street with old Exchange District charm at one end, and graffitied dereliction at the other. People huddled on a stoop as the forecast fulfilled rain; others walked with brazen nonchalance, gaze up, hair down. The pale mauve colour inside matched storm cloud greys. The decor was ordered and still as leafy-green elms swung their branches around outside and the new awnings crisply fluttered. I wasn’t the ideal customer, looking for free wifi to pay for parking, and maybe wanting the trompe-l’oeil egg-on-toast to surpass what it was meant to fake was asking for too much. There were better, more ideal customers… young people who came in little lanyard-wearing troops, with smiles on their faces, excited to collectively buy pastries that shimmered with dewey cake-sweat under glass. Loose-leaf tea is listed for 7$. On the socials, everything at Cinnamoon is 10 out of 10. 

For fun

A friend suggested lunch at the Lily Stone Café in Rosenort. It’s a small town directly West of Aubigny that was a regular destination for farm-related errands for my father-in-law. Lily Stone Café is one of three businesses including The Rolly Stone restaurant and Lily Stone Gardens. A nice discovery! (Website here)

This is Enzo when his upper lip gets caught on his teeth. My daughter and I think it’s so cute!

Can you spot Christian prepping the garage fascia for paint? 

Baking

With the maintenance of sourdough starter, comes an accumulation of discard, and incorporating into rotation recipes that make delicious use of it has been a fun exercise. This week, besides crackers, I made these Sourdough Discard Cookies (recipe here) which feel like an indulgence given their use of cocoa and chips and the recent prices for chocolate. The cookies have a nice soft texture and brownie-like flavour.

Enjoying

• Just another argument supporting a love of reading:  “The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer” by T. R. Napper (Here, via) 

• Since Stitcher ceased to exist in 2023, I’d been using the default podcast app from Apple. With only one redeeming quality - the transcription - for its otherwise frustrating user-experience, I’ve been happy to find an alternative called Castro (website here https://castro.fm/ ). Using Castro has been like getting to a beach-side destination, throwing open the windows and realizing it is only a short walk till you can feel waves lapping at your feet. 

• I recently went to Toad Hall downtown for gifts and came across this book, titled The Right Word. Decorated with awards, I was nonetheless drawn in by the collage-style illustrations that told the (true!) story alongside the text. (A peek at the book here.) It was the kind of book I felt I would appreciate more than my young recipients, so after sitting and reading through, I left it behind in search of other fun things. Melissa Sweet, the illustrator, has a really nice website. I liked the Q&A page here.  

• Sometimes it’s nice to clap on a set of noise-cancelling headphones and get lost in a bit of music. Most recently, most dreamily, Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely. 

• I like it when The Daily takes a detour into art and culture, as it did for the Bayeux Tapestry. To complement it, I liked watching Deep Down History’s overview of the story on Youtube (here).

Walking the dog

This dying season has its spots of beauty… red berries, droplets collected on long stems of grass…

And wooly bears! Normally, I find them on the ground and avoid stepping on them, but this one was nicely posed on a weed…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 37

The week, in summary

There was a storm last Sunday and I like the picture I took of us, cozy inside, peering out as so much rain made a stream on our front lawn, a waterfall off the bark of our linden tree, and a mini geyser over the manhole cover in the street. 

We visited Princess Auto’s new location on Monday for fun. It was a grey day. It’s an unfamiliar store. We took note of their inventory and brought home a catalogue, tested their coffee and bought a few things…

Tuesday I ran school-related errands with the kids and did not take a single picture of anything. Instead there’s an account of our mall visit in receipts: eight stores in two hours. On Wednesday there were meetings with teachers, as is customary before the school year starts. It’s a common topic of conversation… the fact that there are parent-teacher meetings and that they occur before the start of school. My husband has repeated it often: meeting with students before classes is a good thing! It makes the first day of school less nerve-wracking! I saw this dead golden moth on the freshly-waxed hallway floor and thought it was pretty. 

Thursday was a first day for high school students, and Enzo missed our daughter. I’d try to catch him moping, but he’d feign alertness…. 

I sat beside him long enough, pretending to scroll, till he finally rested, just a bit.

Then it was Friday and everyone went to school. 

I walked the dog and came home to discover a power outage. So I left home and went to the library downtown to look at books. I spent time in the cookbook section (some covers are so pretty!)…

… before finding a window seat a getting some reading done. My view included preparations for the Winnipeg Biz’s Food Truck Wars (here). Then home!

Enjoying

1. Listening to the “How to Be a Better Human” podcast, I liked what guest Hrikishesh Hirway said about creative pursuits:
   “I talked myself out of doing the thing that I loved for many, many years, and I guess at a certain point, I just felt like that was one kind of unhappiness - not making stuff - and I preferred the unhappiness of making stuff. It was a matter of recognizing how much of myself was missing at a certain point. I felt like to be complete, I needed to be engaged with the part of myself that wrote songs, that made music, that was personal, and that I could really pour all of myself into.” (Here)

2. An informative website about the war in Ukraine is not enjoyment, but I found it very enlightening. Up until now the idea of drone warfare has been very abstract. (Here, via)

3. This video by Elle Cordova was a delight to watch (and re-watch)!

Cooking

Saturday morning, I plan the week’s menu. Yesterday, the dog wanted to bark at cars stopping for an open house. And there was a cookbook I brought home from Friday… so part of menu planning looked like this:

The cookbook is Milk Street Backroads Italy: Finding Italy’s Forgotten Recipes (published in 2025, see here). Flipping through the pages, I read this section titled “The pope’s pasta carbonara”:

We’re talking about pasta alla papalina, which roughly translates as pasta for the pope. Now almost 100 years old, it has become a classic - if little known - Roman pasta. As the story goes, during the early 1930s then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli asked Ceseretto Simmi, a restaurateur with several eateries near the Vatican, if he could prepare a lighter, more sophisticated version of the traditional Roman carbonara.

Carbonara - rich with guanciale and sharp pecorino Romano cheese - was considered a brash dish. “So my grandfather went to my grandmother and said, ‘Make carbonara, but use prosciutto instead of guanciale and Parmesan instead of pecorino,” said Simmi’s granddaughter, Elizabetta Simmi, who now has her own restaurant near the Vatican. And yes, pasta alla papalina is on the menu. “The cardinal suggested it and my grandfather created it, a softer carbonara.”

It worked because both the cheese and meat were lighter, more nuanced options, which toned down the intensity of the carbonara. (P 162-3)

This little story provides a neat, almost folkloric, distinction between the kinds of carbonara we’ve eaten… the gentler, parmesan-bacon kind I tend to make (with Kenji Lopez-Alt’s blessing, here on Youtube) versus the authentic, almost fiery, guanciale-pecorino we got to try. 

If there is a meal that universally unites the family, it is definitely pasta-based. Last Sunday I made Joshua McFadden’s “Lamb Ragu with Carrots and Green Garlic” (but with regular garlic… recipe here) and Christian, not finding ground lamb at the usual places he shops, stopped in at Alsham Food Market (Instagram) where the butcher ground it on demand. The quality of this one ingredient made this an outstanding ragù…

Walking the dog

This week, I was back to dog-walking duty since the school year began. The kids showed me the mushrooms they found on walks with Christian…

Catching those amber beads took a minute or two… time enough for a brief nap…

They found a monarch butterfly chrysalis too.

By myself, I try to capture the seasonal change…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 36

A generous spirit

Somehow, this apartment tour, titled “An Artist’s Collected Home Brimming with New York Character” appeared on my Youtube homepage, and it proved to be the perfect viewing antidote to a restless Monday morning. I watched a handful more videos from the Homeworthy channel, but Thomas McKean’s felt heartwarming. I’ve tried to put my finger on why it was… His collaboration with poet Ruth Pitter? His family history? His sense of humour? The fact that he made a piece of art from the cards and envelopes he received and called it a “grateful collage”? Or is it his storytelling? I’m not sure, but perhaps its the quality of generosity that stands out. He says, for example that what “makes a New Yorker, [is] somebody who’s ideally here to share the space, appreciate the history, and maybe contribute to it.”  

It reminds me of having really liked an episode from the six-part documentary series on Netflix titled “My Love: Six Stories of True Love.” Among others, it featured Kinuko and Haruhei in Japan. Kinuko, who cared for Haruhei “ever since they met at the facility where he was treated for leprosy” - eventually marrying and having three children together - talks to the producer at one point, full of admiration for her husband: “In that type of difficult environment, he was a really unique individual. […] He had a very kind face. No matter what people said, he never got angry, even when the staff verbally abused him. He really talks up a storm, but he has the warmest heart.” […] “…ordinarily, a person with a severe illness like his could easily become disheartened and bitter, but he strived to do his best. He’s an impressive man. I believe that.” It’s an attitude and a relationship that has stayed in my mind ever since having watched it in 2021 (mentioned here).  

Enjoying

• There are still some warm afternoons for enjoying a book lounging on a chair in the backyard. Partly because I wanted to enjoy the weather, and partly because I liked the book so much, I finished The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead quickly, considering I started July 11th, and that it is over 500 pages. It has been my favourite from the reading list so far. I dedicated a blog post (here) to the book in appreciation.

• Listening to the short podcast series “The Gaza Chef” (here, via) I felt momentarily disoriented… Which region again? Which war? These tragedies pile up. But the journalism dedicated to the individuals and the nuances is so worthwhile.

• The kids are about to go back to school. I drive them to the store, then take sneaky pictures while they pick out school supplies. We even helped a mannequin who had lost his pants…

Eating

One rainy afternoon this week, I made Julia Turschen’s version of “Rascal House Stuffed Cabbage” with a Taiwanese cabbage so large, I had to steam it in sections. It’s our favourite version of cabbage roll, but the recipe isn’t available online. It’s from her 2021 cookbook titled Simply Julia (her website). Cabbage roll photos are not very aesthetic…

It’s a bit of a project (the kitchen looks more like an artist’s studio space…) but I’ve often found Nigella Lawson’s observations to be true. Years ago, while listening to the short-lived “Simple Pleasures” podcast (six episodes aired in 2018, link here) hosted by Yotam Ottolenghi, Lawson, who was a guest once, said: “People as a general rule confuse two things. They confuse time-consuming with difficult. It’s whether you’ve got the time and whether you feel like doing something like that.” (4:00) And: “The daily cooking: often I just feel, ugh, you know, exhausted, I can’t do that. But the minute I start cooking, I feel better.” (16:15) And: “The shopping can be harder than the cooking. Because unless you get your shopping organized, you can’t actually cook and cooking is relatively straightforward and simple, once you do it.” (17:47)  

This time of year, when produce is abundant, I get a little disconcerted because it’s almost better to make a meal plan after visiting the market, rather than before.

Walking

This thistle has seed heads like tassels

This branch, severed from the trunk, is drying out with the prettiest shades of yellow.

Happy Sunday!

Reading list: The Man Who Loved Children

This novel has the reputation of being under-appreciated. In its defence, Jonathan Franzen writes: “it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you.” 

In my case, yes, this novel was really for me.

Franzen continues: “I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it.” And indeed, I bless Francine Prose who put it on her list. 

Randall Jarrell’s introduction (which should only be read, like most introductions, afterwards) alludes to Aristotle, who, according to Jarrell “speaks of the pleasure of recognition” which Jarrell applies to the novel, arguing that the reader can get the pleasure of recognizing their own childhood family life. I think that if this were true, Stead’s novel would not be under-appreciated. More realistically, there is a quote online from Hazel Rowley’s biography of the author, which describes the experience of reading Stead as a “chaotic sense of flux that makes reading Stead somehow unlike reading fiction, that makes reading her seem like plunging into the mess of life itself.’ This quality of unpolished rawness is something Stead’s readers either find immensely seductive or immensely irritating.” (Via)  

What Randall Jarrell cannot label, writing as he is in 1965, Jonathan Franzen can, in an article published in the summer of 2010 (here, archived). Of Christina Stead’s character, Samuel Pollit, husband and father, Franzen writes:

“To a wild degree, Sam makes his children accessories of and to his narcissism. There isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature, and, in good narcissistic fashion, while Sam imagines himself a prophet of “world peace, world love, world understanding,” he remains happily blind to the squalor and misery of his circumstances.”  

What makes it an “ecstatic pleasure” (in Jarrell’s words) to read, is the fact that Christina Stead had the genius to make narcissism palpable. In Franzen’s words: “When Louie tells her father that she’s never told anybody what her home life is like, the reason she gives is that “no one would believe me!” But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see […]”

It is brilliant. And if ever anyone would want to know what it is to be the child of a narcissist, I would point them to this masterpiece.

A week on Sunday (no. 35)

What does summer look like here? It looks like a new coat of paint on our house, and a coat of stain on the fence…

It’s the dog sitting in regal elegance on one of the folding chairs left strewn about between family gatherings…

It’s a round of go-karts and bumper boats on a bright sunny day.

Fun signs…

Leisurely cart returns and noticing the sparrows that have elected to preen their feathers there…

It’s tomatoes ripening on thick green stems.

A day at the beach…

Reading List: Searches and Seizures by Stanley Elkin

Elkin’s writing is described, on the wikipedia page (here) dedicated to his biography, this way:

Characters and especially prose style take full precedence over plot. His language is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter.

And indeed, it seems fitting that the son of a costume-jewelry salesman should bedeck his stories in lavish frivolity. I would have the impression, at the end of a story, of having spent time not getting anywhere. So why does Francine Prose like this author? For good sentences. She writes: 

It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. These are works you can turn to whenever you feel that your own style is getting a little slack or lazy or vague. (Reading Like a Writer, p 47.)

It’s appropriate that a passage I liked captures the end-of summer feeling creeping up on us right now…

[The pool was] thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers - some of them actually on vacation - who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.

Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations. (“The Condominium,” p 282.)

By contrast…

I read this book in less than a week.

Luke Burgis (here) on Conversations with Tyler said “we might be entering an age where we can actually learn more about what it means to be human than less, and that might lead to a renaissance in the humanities, for instance. I think AI is performing a kind of via negativa on the human person, maybe even the human soul, and helping us discover who we are. And to me, that’s very exciting.” I also think it’s exciting! And in that vein is Alexandre Dianine-Havard, reaffirming the existence of the soul, the values and virtues that make life fulfilling.

Cooking

I gathered all our favourite recipes celebrating corn (here) and then tried a new recipe by Pierce Abernathy (Instagram) called “Corn Compound Butter”. It’s very popular right now. It’s been mentioned on three different Substack newsletters (one, two, three)! 

A still life… the counter as I was preparing Corn Chowder this week.

Enjoying

This sentence by Elle Kamihira (here): “And mostly my mother stepped in to close the gap between his imagination and the inevitable work it took to achieve anything.” Via Curious About Everything

I like thoughtful tributes made to Dolly Parton, subsequent her death. This I relate to: “…if I write about things that bother me then they don’t bother me anymore.” Via Hanif Abdurraqib (on Instagram).

And how about this encouragement to write by hand? (here)

And to conclude…

A view of the Red River at golden hour…

Happy Sunday!

Reading list - adding in the books I forgot to

In the interest of proving to myself that I have completed over half Francine Prose’s list of “Books to be Read Immediately”, I’m adding here the ones I forgot to earlier… To justify this patchwork blog post, there is Carl Jung, the answer to my query for “quote about completists” with the following: “Life calls not for perfection but for completeness.”

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Reading this book during the pandemic felt like a bit of vicarious travel… It was nice! Three quotes:

All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.
Up-stairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning's work. At eleven o'clock I went over to the Quai d'Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d'Orsay with Woolsey and Krum. (p 36)

“No, I don't believe it. And I'm fond of him, too. And I'd like to have children. I always thought we'd have children.”
She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don't want to think I'll never have them. I always thought I'd have them and then like them.” (p 47)

I had coffee out on the terrasse with the team manager of one of the big bicycle manufacturers. He said it had been a very pleasant race, and would have been worth watching if Bottechia had not abandoned it at Pamplona. The dust had been bad, but in Spain the roads were better than in France. Bicycle road-racing was the only sport in the world, he said. Had I ever followed the Tour de France? Only in the papers. The Tour de France was the greatest sporting event in the world. Following and organizing the road races had made him know France. Few people know France. All spring and all summer and all fall he spent on the road with bicycle road-racers. Look at the number of motor-cars now that followed the riders from town to town in a road race. It was a rich country and more sportif every year. It would be the most sportif country in the world. It was bicycle road-racing did it. That and football. He knew France. La France Sportive. He knew road-racing. We had a cognac. After all, though, it wasn't bad to get back to Paris. There is only one Paname. In all the world, that is. Paris is the town the most sportif in the world. Did I know the Chope de Negre? Did I not. I would see him there some time. I certainly would. We would drink another fine together. We certainly would. Would I be up for the depart? I would certainly try to. Would I like him to call me? It was very interesting. I would leave a call at the desk. He would not mind calling me. I could not let him take the trouble. I would leave a call at the desk. We said good-bye until the next morning.
In the morning when I awoke the bicycle-riders and their following cars had been on the road for three hours. (p 236-7)

The Trial by Franz Kafka

I read The Trial in 2015 and appreciated Kafka’s talent more in retrospect than when I was reading his books. The story is frustrating, but, that was the point. A few sentences I liked:

Through the open window he had another glimpse of the old woman, who with truly senile inquisitiveness had moved along to the window exactly opposite, in order to go on seeing all that could be seen. (p 3).

[…] less loud indeed than he had threatened, but with such explosive force that it hung in the air a moment before gradually spreading through the room. (p 30)

Many seemed convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time to think it over, suggested some joined who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or enquired of their neighbours, or escorted K. To a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information than they could. […] He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so practical. (p 40)

Selected Stories by Alice Munro.

Since this author’s death, her reputation and legacy have been revisited. I read the collection in July of 2013, because in a journal I’d kept, I write “This afternoon I read Alice Munro. Francine [Prose] points out the simple, spare language.” In fact, Prose writes, “Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box. Everything about her style is meant to attract no notice, to make you not pay attention. But if you read her work closely, every word challenges you to think of a more direct, less fussy or tarted-up way to say what she is saying.” (p 23 in Reading Like a Writer) 

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

This is a series of sketches of life as a soldier during the Vietnam War. I liked his description of the small town where he grew up: 

The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie - the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water.

It was a graceful, good-sized lake. [….] Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town’s first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth, a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. (p 157)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor; Wise Blood, Collected Stories

I liked “A Good Man is Hard to Find”… it’s such a perfectly contained story that it’s hard to extract a quote. But here is one:

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

Apart from that story, I find O’Connor hard to read. This is one assignment I didn’t complete. By contrast, I find her letters fascinating…

Freedomland by Richard Price

This is one of the few novels from the list adjacent to the mystery genre. The quotes I recorded are all ones that made me smile:

Danny stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and marched over to Bobby McDonald, who stood on the paved side of the tape, hands in pockets, squinting up at the trees as if attempting to count the number of pairs of sneakers thrown up there bolo-style and left to dangle like rubberized fruit. (p 93)

But McCoy’s… The air conditioning gave off Legionnaires’ disease, and although there was some kind of grudging, nominal menu, the geriatric cook had TB and it took twenty minutes for him to dismount from his bar stool, the resulting hamburger on white bread, with a side of potato chips, finally showing up something like six drinks after it had been ordered. (p 245)

“What do you self-help people with?”
“Happiness.” He gave her a shrug. “Aspects of happiness.” Then as if reading her mind, he added, “I’m happier than I look.” (p 253)

Swan’s Way by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust was magical. His long sentences that stretched like spider silk, weaving an ethereal architecture of thought that held me in awe. I read it in the original French, and here are a few favourite quotes: 

Elle me faisait luis dire le sujet des poèmes que j’avais l’intention de composer. Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être un écrivain, il était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naître. (p 170)

Les intérêts de notre vie sont si multiples qu’il n’est pas rare que dans une même circonstance les jalons d’un bonheur qui n’existe pas encore soient posés à côté de l’aggravation d’un chagrin dont nous souffrons. (p 375)

Et encore, même à ce point de vue de simple quantité, dans notre vie les jours ne sont pas égaux. Pour parcourir les jours, les natures un peu nerveuses, comme était la mienne, disposent, comme les voitures automobiles, de “vitesses” différentes. Il y a des jours montueux et malaisés qu’on met un temps infini à gravir et des jours en pente qui se laissent descendre à fond de train en chantant. (p 383)

Proust can be intimidating to begin, but I was encouraged by Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life. In it Botton uses Proust to reflect on suffering, language, and friendship, but a passage that is pertinent to this reading list project is the following:

Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he [Proust] argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves. (p 178)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

This is a short read. From it, a few short quotes…

Franny’s ministering to a pet goldfish:

She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans. (p 133)

The description of an outfit, (the reefer is a peacoat, the tam a hat similar to a beret):

She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. (p 150-1)

The nose-blowing that makes me wince:

Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. (p 151)

The Elements of Style by by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr.

I read The Elements of Style as a university student. I had trouble being concise when writing essays and this book transformed my writing in the middle of a course on literature. The professor noticed, and I kept a copy of the essay I’d handed in (“Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers”) and professor Doug Reimer’s response to a note I’d added, fretting over my writing. He wrote: “White’s Elements cannot be bettered, never, today, or next millennium. Your new ‘simplicity’ of style is exactly the right approach for you to take.”

The book had made such an impact, that it was always the first thing I recommended, when asked, as a writing tutor, some years later. Here, from the introduction, a little taste of William Strunk’s advice:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky 

“He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,” she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure, manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault for which she stood guilty before him. (p 189)

Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. (p 241)

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is. (p 302)

Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

I read this book but took note of only four sentences, two because they were funny:

The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened teeth when she smiled. (p 97)

and

You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in. (p 133).

The two others denote the novel’s mood…

The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. “The Irish are like that,” my mother had explained. (p 107)

and

I stood with the nun in the hall of St. Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes Fluid. (p 138)

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

I recently re-read this short essay, reviving my appreciation for Woolf’s talent. Nevermind this quote I like… you can read it here and see if you find something you like too. 

But to return to the invalid. “I am in bed with influenza,” he says, and actually complains that he gets no sympathy. “I am in bed with influenza”—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry out, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

In a blog post in 2022, I wrote about appreciating the contrast of writers’ styles when reading more than one book at a time. I illustrated it then with a quote from Yates here. In addition are the following that I also liked.

A landscape I have seen:

At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays - always, it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white, the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shrivelled snow. (p 5)

A calm feeling:

The rain had stopped but it was still a wet, gray day and good to be indoors. The radio was dimly playing Mozart and a gentle, sherry-scented repose settled over the kitchen. This was the way he had often wished his marriage could always be - unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance - and as they sat there quietly talking, waiting for the sight of the Givingses’ station wagon to appear through the dripping trees, he shivered pleasurably once or twice as a man who has been out since before dawn will shiver at the feel of the first faint warmth of sun on his neck. He felt himself at peace; and by theme the car did come, he was ready for it. (p 182)

The incongruity of death:

Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn’t possibly be dying. People didn’t die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor, like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn’t be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum. And he certainly wouldn’t be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn’t have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance (“Fun! Refreshments!”) and they wouldn’t have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. (p 317)

As I re-read these quotes, I’m reminded of the pleasure of discovering these sentences and the authors who penned them. Prose writes: “They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.”

Happy reading!

What to cook - the corn edition

I really look forward to fresh corn every year. Boiled, slathered in butter and salt, it is perfect as-is; but when you’ve reached your fill of being a human corn-eating-typewriter (a tv trope explained here) or don’t want to present yourself as such in front of company, there are recipes that make the most of this seasonal treat.

1. Corn Chowder from Food Network Kitchens Cookbook (published in 2003). I’ve mentioned this recipe before (here), writing: “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.” It is the most “uncluttered” of corn recipes. It could also be argued that “chowder” is a misnomer, since this soup uses no milk or cream nor require a roux. The thickness comes entirely from the corn itself of which two-thirds is blended. The recipe on page 51 features an herb salad as topping, but we don’t bother.
   
   8 ears fresh corn, preferably white, shucked
   6 tablespoons unsalted butter
   8 scallions, white parts chopped
   6 cloves garlic
   1 tablespoon kosher salt
   2 teaspoons sugar
   freshly ground black pepper
   3 sprigs fresh parsley
   3 sprigs fresh thyme
   1 bay leaf
   6 cups water

   Shear the corn kernels from the cobs with a knife. Put about 2/3 of the kernels in a large bowl. Set aside the remaining kernels for adding to the soup before serving. Working over the large bowl, run a knife along the cobs to press out the milky liquid. Snap or cut 3 of the cobs in half; discard the remaining cobs.

   Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium-low heat. Add the scallion whites, garlic, salt, sugar, and pepper to taste. Cook, covered, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft and fragrant, about 12 minutes. Add the larger amount of corn kernels, with their milk, and cook, covered, stirring occasionally, until the corn is tender, about 10 minutes. Tie the parsley, thyme, and bay leaf together with kitchen twine and add to the soup along with the reserved cobs and water. Bring mixture to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer, uncovered, until slightly thickened, about 30 minutes. Remove the herb bundle and cobs and discard.

   Puree the soup in batches in a blender (or in the pot with an immersion blender) until creamy. Return the puree to the pot, add the reserved corn kernels, and simmer over medium heat, uncovered, until the whole corn kernels are just tender, about 5 minutes. Taste and adjust the salt and pepper. Divide the chowder among soup bowls.
   
   In our house, we typically serve the soup with grilled cheese sandwiches.

2. Bacon Corn Hash from Deb Perelman’s website Smitten Kitchen (published in 2012 - link here). This is simple and delicious and a complete meal in itself, egg optional. 

3. Tomato and Corn Pie from Deb Perelman’s website Smitten Kitchen (published in 2009 - link here). This recipe isn’t simple because it involves peeling and seeding tomatoes and making a pie crust. However, in its defence, the pie crust is forgiving and peeling and seeding tomatoes can be done according to taste (I don’t mind the extra step in favour of a less ‘wet’ pie, and no skins, but Deb’s 2026 update dispenses with this step). In her cookbook Smitten Kitchen Keepers, published in 2022, Deb created a recipe based off of this, writing “a few years ago, I ditched [Tomato and Corn Pie] and turned it into a biscuit-topped cobbler” (page 149). Although the cobbler is easier, I still prefer the pie and find that its assembly, as a project, yields a worthwhile result.
   In our household, it’s the adults that like this meal and its one of the few I make year-over-year where my husband and I shrug our shoulders and say “too bad” to our non-participant kids. (It can be a bummer to make a meal that requires extra effort, only to have “meh” as a unanimous kid vote. This is one recipe for which I’m undeterred.) To make this more substantial when serving it to visitors, I’ve paired the pie with a tomato-less Cobb Salad, using Deb Perelman’s recipe here.  

4. Corn and Lentil Salad from Jane Rodmell’s cookbook Best Summer Weekends (published in 2004). This is a fairly easy salad to make, requiring only for lentils to be cooked. Depending on how you think of it, the one hour rest in the fridge is an annoyance that requires a bit of forethought, or a bonus for advance meal-prep. (More than a few hours in advance? “Add the fresh herbs right before serving” writes Rodmell.) Grilling the corn adds “a light, smoky taste” but I’ve enjoyed the salad just as much without grilling the corn. Most often I’ve used brown lentils for the salad, but French lentils are good too!
   
   1 cup green or brown lentils
   leaves from 1 celery stalk
   1 bay leaf
   3-4 ears corn, grilled and kernels removed (approx. 2 cups)
   ½ medium red onion, finely chopped
   ½ red pepper, seeded and finely diced
   ½ green pepper, seeded and finely diced
   ¼ cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
   ¼ cup fresh coriander, finely chopped
   ½ cup Lemon Cumin Vinaigrette

   Toss lentils into a large quantity of salted water with celery leaves and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, lower heat to moderate, and cook, uncovered, until just tender. Cooking time varies depending on the variety and quality of the lentils; start testing after 15 minutes. Drain lentils; discard celery leaves and bay leaf.

   Combine warm lentils with remaining ingredients. Cover and refrigerate for an hour or so for flavours to blend. Allow the salad to return to cool room temperature before serving.

   Lemon Cumin Vinaigrette 

   1 clove garlic, minced
   1 teaspoon ground cumin
   2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
   2 tablespoons balsamic or red wine vinegar
   6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
   ¼ teaspoon salt
   ground black pepper 

   Mash garlic with salt. Combine with cumin, lemon juice, and vinegar. 

   Whisk in oil. Taste and adjust seasoning. Makes ½ cup.
   
   In our household, we’ve most often served this salad as a side for grilled chicken. Jane Rodmell recommends mixing “chunks of spicy grilled sausage into the salad to make a one-dish meal” accompanied with fresh country bread, but we have yet to try that!

5. Corn and Spicy Sausage Orecchiette from Ali Slagle’s cookbook I Dream of Dinner (published in 2022). Unlike the Tomato and Corn Pie, this recipe is unanimously loved in our household. We use mild instead of spicy sausage, and the orecchiette pasta shape has become increasingly available in regular supermarkets in Winnipeg over the years. Recently when we served this meal to visiting family members, they thought Slagel’s use of spent cobs to flavour the pasta water was ingenious. It’s an example for why Slagel’s cookbook is well worth leafing-through.

6. Sautéed Corn Four Ways from Joshua McFadden’s cookbook Six Seasons (published in 2017). This is corn as a side. Made in its most basic way, corn kernels and green onions are sautéed in butter with salt and pepper for 3 or 4 minutes and served right away. This is the way to most elegantly feed corn to guests where you, as host, do all the work, and no one discusses typewriter eating. McFadden offers spicy and cheesy variations too. 

Other ideas

The above six recipes are our favourite. They are the ones I’ve copied and printed into a binder of reliable meals. But here’s a list of other notable recipes worth mentioning…

1. Savory Corn Pancakes with Pickled Chiles an adaptation of Joshua McFadden’s Corn Fritters with Pickled Chiles by Catherine Newman on her blog Ben and Birdy (here). I tried McFadden’s corn fritters in 2023 and never remade the recipe, unlike Catherine Newman who liked the recipe and found a way of avoiding deep-frying. I prefer making pancakes with zucchini instead of corn and haven’t adopted fritters of any kind because of the deep frying. Although I’ve made an exception for Sohla El-Wayllly’s doughnuts from Start Here (tried for the first time and mentioned here).  

2. Corn Stew with Chicken and Sausage by Jenny Rosentrach. This recipe is featured on her blog, Dinner A Love Story (link here) and is also in her cookbook Dinner: the Playbook (the recipe is also on Food52 website here). I’ve made this a few times and it’s a good recipe, if a little meat-heavy. Sometimes it comes down to preference.

3. Corn and sausage are a pairing that recurs in recipes, as is corn and scallops (see Molly Baz’s Cook This Book - here - which features a recipe titled “Seared Scallops with Curry Butter, Sweet Corn and Sungolds”) Scallops aren’t easily available here and since they’re an unfamiliar ingredient, I’m hesitant to try - but that doesn’t mean you need to be!

I hope these lists might be useful in inspiring some meals, if, like me, you too like corn and want to take advantage of its summer abundance. Happy cooking!

A week on Sunday 33/52

Welcome to a new edition of “A Week on Sunday”. Pleased to be home and back into the routine of things, here’s a little roundup of things I’ve noticed online and in real life. 

“Grey gold”

A fan of Australian, Beau Miles, I’ve been keeping up with the updates on his latest project to restore an abandoned cottage. It’s an unappealing adventure, but Miles is generous in sharing the ups and downs of his undertaking, and that’s what makes it interesting. In a recent video “stumpers” are hired to redo the foundation, and we get to meet a man named Danny who is not only in high demand for this kind of job, but who took the time to do a little research into the cottage’s history. The fact that Miles calls his new concrete stumps “grey gold” make me think of my dad who liked working with concrete and was foreman at a cement plant before he died.  

Clogs

Authors of the cookbook Kismet, Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, recommended Calzuro clogs for long days in the kitchen, and I took their advice when invited to help cook for a week for a girls camp in Quebec. The old sugar shack kitchen had two fridges on a slightly raised concrete platform. Inevitably, one day I rammed my foot on one of the corners, but hardly suffered any pain. The “co-polymer rubber compound” the clogs are made of provided not only good support but excellent protection. It was a worthwhile recommendation! (Mine are tomato-red, pictured here with the visiting kitchen mascot… a tiny dog named Pistache!)

Dinnerware

My son had a birthday party event on the western end of Portage Avenue and I took the opportunity to visit a Value Village I hadn’t yet been to. There were such pretty sets of dinnerware! How darling would it be to outfit a cottage with one or both of these?

Eating

We had company this week in the spirit of summer holiday gatherings with friends and family… We served mojitos and Hailee Catalano’s Maple Cheddar Snack Mix. 

Ina Garten’s Slow Roasted Spiced Pork is a reliable main when feeding a crowd and choosing the oven over the barbecue.

Besides salad and fresh beans from the garden, we also served Sohla El-Waylly’s Bravas Potato Salad which was a hit!  

Summer views

A few pictures from evening walks in Henteleff…

Happy Sunday!

Summer Roadtrip East

We left beautiful Winnipeg to visit family in Quebec and Ontario and here’s a little overview in pictures from my phone. The difference between the going out and the coming back is the cheery optimism… We are bright-eyed and excited for the change in scenery. I packed meals ahead of time and we avoided fast food stops for three lunches and one of two suppers on the road. Coming back, we are anxious to get home, interest in an audiobook has replaced interest in the scenery, and all meals (except for breakfast at the hotel) are fast food.

We stayed overnight at Super8s along the way… Thunder Bay was smokey, but we had ice cream at Merla Mae and admired the views at Marina Park.

“The Persian” is a local treat we recognized for its pink icing.

In North Bay, the hotel looked like a castle.

Rest stops in Quebec were large and new, and full of tourism guides. I collected a small pile for collage.

Our cabin had such a relaxing view… the boys would take their screens outside and in the afternoon, after a swim, we’d line up the swim shorts to dry in the sun.

We did some tourism… like visiting Sept-Chutes in St. Georges with family, and sampling ice cream at a spot with an amazing view.

There was Chutes Montmorency and Saint Anne-de-Beaupré.

We also visited Moulin La Lorraine, walked through the park and stayed to witness the live demonstration of the flour mill in action.

One day we visited a “chocolaterie” on l’Ile d’Orléans and did a brief tour of Vieux Quebec.

Calm sunsets, exciting boat rides, regular meals, cute dogs… 

The two weeks flew by. On our way home, we made a detour to Niagara Falls where we visited an uncle, and got close to the beautiful landmark.

Then it was long days, a fairly comfy night in Sault St. Marie, and the relief of pulling into our own driveway in the wee hours of Thursday morning. 

I’m happy to be back and to wish you, as usual, Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 28/52

Welcome to this week’s blog post edition, in which is featured a little road trip to Lockport, a few quotes and some scenery.

Local tourism

This week we were a group of three friends that took to the road for a late breakfast, early lunch, at The Heritage Tea Room. Newly renovated, its wood interior shines, the paint is a fresh deep green, and the wallpaper a cheerful blue and white floral that contrasts with the paintings that hang from a railing. It’s a charming place to go if you like that “stepping back in time” feeling, plus modern amenities. We ate lunch on the patio, shaded from the sun, with a view of the river just beyond.

River Road is one of the most scenic of scenic routes and while travelling it is a treat in itself, we also stopped at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church where we slipped in as final funeral attendees left, to admire the stained glass windows. I would have been curious to hear the sound that comes from these tiny set of pipes…

Across from the church is a cheerful rectory, with artefacts and interactive displays. Mostly I admired the dainty size of the stitches in these granny squares… I like how this shot captures four patterned materials too… the blanket, the chair upholstery, the stool underneath and the carpet. It feels instantly cozy.

Visiting small museums feels a bit like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet. At a buffet, you can sample so much and leave feeling so stuffed. At a museum, there can be so much reading, that the information gathering can leave you feeling oppressed. I would argue that unless you visit a museum by yourself, determined to feel immersed in its subject, going with family or friends exempts you of any reading duties. Flit about like a butterfly, see where your attention goes, read that little plaque if your curiosity invites you to, and move on to the next thing! From this visit, I couldn’t tell you anything about the historical figures profiled, but I learned about how broken dishes could be repaired with staples (See here for example.) and left feeling awed by the contrast it represented to today’s culture of dispose and replace.  

Making art and Making a living by Mason Currey

Again, I am mentioning this book, perhaps risking “gushing” doing so… but I finished it this week, almost reluctantly, since I so enjoyed the way it was written. Currey’s final chapter has a passage that crystallizes the impetus behind his book’s project; in opposition to “a kind of stingy, withholding, resentful energy that seems to be trending in society” he looks to the lives of artists.

[…] what I love about the artists in this book is their embrace of the opposite values: of possibility, of giving yourself permission, of staying true to your instincts and indulging them even when they lead someplace totally impractical - especially then - and asking necessity to wait while you figure things out, even if you never quite figure things out.

I am so grateful to him for making this book. 

Podcast quote

I liked listening to Bryan Stevenson as a guest on the Ezra Klein podcast. This reflection on linking the past with the present is touching:

What I realized is that there was power in the hopes of those who had come before me. I felt lifted up by generations of people who had struggled. And that’s what we’re trying to do with this history. We want to be very direct about the harms and the horrors of slavery. But we also want people to understand the resilience, the power, the strength, the courage, the character of people to love in the midst of agony. I then gives you something to celebrate in a new way.

The dog is well

The dog, on the children’s summer holiday, gets accessorized with apple-peel bandanas, which he can eat if he’s patient enough for a picture…

Evening walks

Although a weed, the Western Salsify becomes such a cute little puffball among all the Hairy Vetch…

The milkweed is in full bloom right now.

And this “Ipomoea” is called “pretty white trumpet flower” in my head.

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday 27/52

Welcome! This week, a little photo-essay of the things that keep us smiling and keep us busy as we transition into summer holidays, plus a few quotes from articles from around the web.

Winnipeg has been getting a lot of rain. The skies above it are often filled with painting-worthy clouds and dramatic light. On the way to the pool one evening, I just managed to catch a tiny rainbow.

My mother-in-law moved from a main-floor room with a basement window to a second-floor room with a regular window. I can now wave to her from the parking lot! At the MCC Thrift Store on Chalmers the other week, we found a comptometer like the one she used when she worked at Eaton’s in the 50’s. (Previous mention in 2023.) 

The peonies are blooming and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of a home-made bouquet of them on a desk at Artists Emporium.  

Long daylight hours mean that Christian and I can go on exploratory bike rides in the evening, getting a feel for neighbourhoods that is different from taking a car. When we last explored Warde Avenue’s funny breaks and continuation, the Bonavista neighbourhood was still being built. The difference in atmosphere from our comparatively middle-age neighbourhood is perhaps in part because Bonavista is a master-planned community. (And it feels similar to ones visited in Airdrie, AB!)

Here I present my second sourdough ever… It was better than the first and the family has been spoiling me with encouragement. Keeping natural leaven alive produces discard and I’m now on the third batch of Discard Crackers. Turmeric and black pepper happens to be a very healthy combo and a fairly addictive snack.

For our daughter’s birthday we went to Blufish downtown, where the soy sauce was served in such cute ceramic vases, we mistook the presentation for missing a flower rather than hiding a condiment. 

My Mom sent us a packet of Magic Fire and we experienced our first backyard campfire with colourful flames. One packet lasts a surprisingly long time.

Quotes

On the subject of beauty: In a Youtube video about typography and book design, designer Klaus Krogh says: “I think beauty and faith is interlocked. The beauty of the language for prayers, the beauty within, we’re trying to make it show on the outside, and that’s our deepest inspiration.” (Around the 5 minute mark.) 

On the subject of courage: “Courage is an ancient predisposition that has played a protective role on the stress.” Hearing about “the courage response” to stress on a podcast, I was immediately intrigued, and found a scientific paper on the subject. Incidentally, it is common in French to wish a person “bon courage”, whereas in English, we commonly wish people “good luck”. What’s nice about the French expression is that you are recognizing a behavioural approach that implies agency. 

On the subject of negativity: A study linked and excerpted on Marginal Revolution shows how negativity gradually increases over time because negative responses stand out, more than positive responses. “[…] analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity.” This feels true in real life, where the greater effort must be devoted to focusing on what is constructively positive rather than destructively negative.

On the pitfalls of rationalization: In an article titled “You don’t have to swallow frogs” Andrea Pitzer writes, “But the truth for nearly everyone is simpler. You don’t have to turn your back on the big issues, but you also don’t have to import the entire national crisis into your personal one. You just have to think for yourself. Know what tradition you’re aligned with, whether it’s a philosophical one, a religious one, or one that rises out of a particular past oppression—or all of the above. There might even be a group or a school of thought you’re reacting against. If you haven’t thought about these things before, read less daily news and try to find an approach that reflects what matters to you. Having answers to that will do a lot to give you direction.” 

On the subject of human dignity in design: I really liked this article by Sara Hendren titled “Pattern Recognition”. She discusses dignity in relation to design (and includes this definition of what dignity is by Helmut Thielicke: “Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force […]”) and includes examples of design that incorporates human dignity, from babies to the elderly. Sequestered dementia patients are a fact of the society I live in, but reading about places where that isn’t the case is heartening.

Eating

My friend invited me for an al-fresco lunch in her backyard and made the Jennifer Aniston Salad. It was delicious! 

For a snack table in our garage for our daughter’s outdoor birthday party, I had fun cutting “handles” for the watermelon, an idea I saw here!  

Walking the dog

Here’s a picture to bookend the spring season of walking the dog, now that summer holidays have begun and Christian has taken over the doggy duties!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday 25/52

Welcome to a little roundup of things I’ve been reading and doing and listening to… plus a few pictures of the scenery here.

Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey

It’s hard to describe what an enjoyable read this book has been, only a few chapters in. I really admire Currey’s writing… as a reader, I feel like the examples he offers are deeply researched while also being succinct. The examples he chooses offer contrasts that feel fresh and interesting. Overall, the goal, as he states it in the introduction:

I hope that these stories help readers […] at least see their own dilemmas reflected back at them, and draw strength from reading about how those who came before them kept up the effort and came through

is one I feel he meets. (His website here.)

Collage

I continue to make little collage cards, pressed on by a mission to make a hundred this year. It’s really intriguing though… I thought I could be frivolous about it, but it turns out to be far more absorbing than I expected. At first I thought I could trick myself into a carelessness. But I soon noticed that collage, despite how easy it is to do, imposes its own rules. I like how Jake Kennedy says:

Because it’s so quick and accessible, collage to me is also a great leveler. Anyone can do it - or their own version of it - and by the same token, even the best collage artists can make absolute stinkers.

And how Leslie Siegle says:

I aim to be a blank slate, not to force things, and to let that gift of connection overtake me. Some days you have it, some days it’s just experiments. Those little failures are necessary, though; they plant a seed you can go back to later.  

Were it not for the fun of making something pretty from bits of paper collected from everywhere, I wouldn’t know what “not forcing things” meant. Take a failed collage for example… I was trying to tell a fairytale-like story, but the elements refused to cohere (see left side). I changed tack and made something much better for the purpose of a birthday card (see right side).

Running this little artistic experiment aligns with what Brad Neely says in his typewriter interview with Austin Kleon (May 2026):

Your mind can’t hide if you’re doing art, so know yourself as much as possible, but here’s the twist, you get to know yourself by making art. Learn by doing. Experience. First-hand experience by making art, second hand by reading and watching and listening and staying open until death.  

Previous collages here.  

Enjoying

1. The BBC and 99% Invisible podcast have teamed up to present a series titled “A History of the United States in 100 Objects” and it’s been fun listening in!  

2. Articles of Interest recently did an episode on clothing sizes. I’m still thinking how demanding a job it is to be a fit model… something I had no idea existed!

3. This episode of Family Lore titled “Father Figure” was one I didn’t want to pause!  

4. Lunch at Shirley’s (135 Osborne St.) featured this assortment of pickled vegetables and grapes. They have shelves lined with a whole assortment of preserved food and this was a nice taste! Pickling for the win!

Cooking

When we don’t know what to cook, Hetty Lui McKinnon’s “Tomato Macaroni Soup and Scrambled Egg” from her cookbook To Asia, With Love, is one of the recipes we turn to for ease and comfort.  

On Friday, we topped waffles with an improvised rhubarb compote… about 10 long stalks of rhubarb, 2/3 cups of sugar, simmered 10 to 20 minutes with just a splash of water, then cooled outside and served. For fancier compote, add vanilla!

Walking the dog

Cooler weather and occasional rain showers made for impressive clouds this week… 

I like this distinctive flower…

And Enzo can barely sit long enough for a photo… 

He much prefers sniffing around…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 24/52

Welcome to a new edition of a weekly post, rounding up thoughts, quotes and links to things I enjoyed reading. This week, I finished reading Don Quixote (translated by Tobias Smollett, 2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition) - horray! And online reading lead to a little collection of quotes I liked.

Storm

Winnipeg and parts of Manitoba were hit with storms Tuesday evening. In our area and in St. Boniface, there was a lot of rain and wind. This tree in front of the St. Boniface Cathedral was one of the most impressive casualties:

Don Quixote

Finally, I finished this brick. It’s a classic, and I’m happy to have read it, but there are some classics you enjoy more than others. I don’t like delusional characters and I don’t agree that some morality is to be found in Don Quixote’s way of seeing the world. Trying to sympathise with these arguments makes me impatient. That being said, the friendship between Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, demonstrated in their dialogue, has a touching quality to it. Take, for example, how the squire names the knight:

(…) the knight asked what had induced Sancho, now, rather than at any other time, to stile him the knight of the rueful countenance. “Truly, answered Sancho, I have been looking at you some time, by the light of that torch the unfortunate traveller held in his hand; and in good faith, your worship cuts the most dismal figure I have almost ever seen; and it must certainly be occasioned either by the fatigue you have undergone in this battle, or by the want of your teeth.” “That is not the case, replied his master; but the sage who is defined to writ the history of my exploits, hath thought proper that I should assume some appellation, by the example of former knights, one of whom too the title dog the Flaming Sword; another, of the Unicorn; a third, of the Ladies; a fourth, of the Phoenix; a fifth, of the Griffin; a sixth, called himself the Knight of death: and by these epithets and symbols, they were known all over the face of the earth; and therefore, I say, that the fore-mentioned sage hath now put it into thy thoughts, and directed thy tongue to call me the knight of the rueful countenance; an appellation that henceforward I adopt: and that it may suit me the better, I am resolved to have a most woeful figure painted upon my shield, with the first opportunity.” “There is no occasion, said Sancho, to throw away time and money on such a device; your worship has no more to do, but uncover your own face; and I’ll warrant, those who behold it, will call it a rueful one, without your having recourse to pictures and shields to explain your meaning; and you may well believe I tell you nothing but the truth, when I maintain, tho’ it be but in jest, that hunger and the want of teeth, makes your worship look so ill-favoredly, that we may very well save the expense of a rueful picture.”

Don Quixote could not help laughing at the pleasantry of Sancho, tho’ he actually determined to assume that name, and have his shield and target painted according to his fancy. (p 181)

My favourite passage is Sancho’s appraisal of sleep:

(…) while I sleep, I am troubled neither with fear nor hope, nor toil nor glory; and praise be to him who invented sleep, which is the mantle that shrouds all human thoughts, the food that dispels hunger, the drink that quenches thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cool breeze that moderates heat; in a word, the general coin that purchases every commodity; the weight and balance that makes the shepherd even with his sovereign, and the simple with the sage: there is only one bad circumstance, as I have heard, in sleep; it resembles death; inasmuch ,as between a dead coarse and a sleeping man there is no apparent difference.” (p 1051)

Enjoying

1. On a recent episode of the podcast “What it’s like to be… with Dan Heath”, Esther Berkowitz, a clinical ethicist, described an aspect concerning the respect of autonomy this way:
   
   “there's this concept that I really love called the "dignity of risk", which is the idea that we support people's dignity in allowing them to make decisions that sometimes are high risk or very inadvisable. But that's a part of human dignity to be allowed to take risks and potentially not have good outcomes.”
   
   It struck me that the New York Times article, “Tenderly Tracking My Husband” by Caroline Bailey (via Kottke) offers an example of this concept in action (Archive link).

2. On the one hand, an article titled “My Students Can’t Read” by Tyler Jagt is alarming, but I like the point he makes on the subject of analysis:
   
   “When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not ‘free students up for higher-order work.’ It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.”
   
   On the other hand, “The Power of Patience” by Jennifer L. Roberts sounds ennobling.
   
   “I want to focus […] on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention. I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available ‘in nature,’ as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.”
   
   (This practice of attention reminds me of Hisham Matar’s book The Return, in which his staring at artwork is a practice he describes.)

3. This quote by Charles Leifer: “What sustains me through difficulties is not a single thing. On motorcycles, it's just me, the bike, and the environment. Selling the home, it was the harder thing: to turn away from selfish scheming towards faith that right principles, when put into action, would produce a good outcome. AI cannot address either, because the sense of technical mastery is itself the reward for the hours spent in practice. And similarly, it cannot supplant faith, because faith rests upon hope, and these grow only by taking a risk. I had to experience a lot of pain, mistakes, loss to understand the value of the kind of love Dickens writes into Betsey's spirit.” (via Robin Sloan)

4. Robin Sloan’s popup newsletter (here) lead me to L.M. Sacasas’ substack, called “The Convivial Society” where one post lead to another. I like many of the points he makes. For example, from one post titled “Do you Still Look at the Stars” he writes:
   
   “We are habituated into a mode of life that doesn’t reward, and actively inhibits, our capacity to see what is there before us. Our gaze is monopolized by our devices, and the demands of efficiency and productivity steal from us the leisure that, as Josef Pieper wrote, is ‘a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality.’”
   
   In “AI as Christian Heresy” he writes:
   
   “AI is apocalyptic in exactly one narrow sense: It is not causing but rather disclosing the end of a world. (…) the manner in which AI is developed, deployed, and marketed reveals the degree to which our modern institutions are failing and expiring.”
   
   And:
   
   “Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.”
   
   And in a post titled “Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It” he writes:
   
   “Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from ‘getting things done’ to living.”

5. This week marks a first attempt at sourdough, following a recipe from Hailee Catalano’s book By Heart… The result exceeded my (very low) expectations: the flavour was surprisingly mild and the whole loaf was eaten in the course of 3 days. I’ve taken note of the flaws, and find that The King Arthur Baking Company Big Book of Bread offers a reassuring amount of suggestions for improving sourdough outcomes. What is attractive about Catalano’s method of making starter, compared to King Arthur’s (heh!) is that hers requires only a single feeding every 24 hours, compared to King Arthur’s two. Catalano’s also uses less flour total; 50 grams instead of 75. Learning to make bread from natural leaven is a hobby in itself.

6. A pretty colour combo from a gifted knitted dish cloth!

Cooking

We enjoyed Hailee Catalano’s “Spinach and Artichoke Ziti” so much that we made it again for a dinner guest. Catalano’s recipes don’t feel like they’re incorporating unusual ingredients for the sake of unusual-ness. Instead, as you’re cooking and eating from her cookbook By Heart, it feels like you’re entrusting yourself to capable hands and good flavours will ensue.

Walking the dog

This week featured warm temperatures, après-storm views, and a bit of rain. The milkweed looks like this:

Everything is very green

Bees are at work

And Enzo can barely stay still.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 23/52

Welcome to another edition of a weekly roundup of things I’m thinking about, enjoying and doing around my house, in bright, sunny, quite-hot-right-now, city of Winnipeg.

Drawing how-to book advice

I recently finished Drawing Outdoors by Henry C. Pitz published in MCMLXV. (How fancy! A year in Roman numerals… I remember seeing this in movie credits, like a frustrating code. Apparently, this is intentional. It is “associated with prestige and enduring value”.)Whatever the publisher’s intention for putting 1965 into Roman numerals, I really like Pitz’s book. It ends with this section, titled “Benefitting from Discouragement”, with advice that sounds like it shouldn’t be limited to learning to draw:

All this is part of the artist’s life and although the core of his life is always the work at drawing board or easel, the peripheral activities support and feed his experience. Once committed to a serious program of picture-making, you need to work out certain strategies to sustain enthusiasm, to strengthen resolve, and to circumvent discouragement. Each artist is faced with the facts of his own temperament and must adjust his tactics accordingly.

A last suggestions may be helpful: discouragement is usually intermittent but inescapable. Discouragement loses some of its terror when you realize it is often an encouraging sign; it indicates dissatisfaction with and rebellion against your present level. It is a growing pain. It can be a message that you are beginning to reach out for something better. Discouragement can be an important interlude in your practice and growth. (P 141)

Enjoying

1. The Uppercase Magazine newsletter recently featured an artist whose craft is so unique, I spent some time just admiring her pieces… Her name is Susanna Bauer and she combines lace crochet and natural leaves. The intricacy and end product are stunning.

2. One link lead to another, and I ended up watching this documentary on the opening of the very first Disneyland in 1955. Workplace safety wasn’t in practice then, and I actually thought I might see a man get squashed by scraper. What is curiously heartwarming is seeing the variety in age of the male workers, the humour, and the artistry. 

3. A recent episode titled “The Photograph” from the This is Love podcast made me tear up! A really beautiful story!

4. I really liked this wine label and wanted to save the illustration for using in collages. This tutorial on removing wine labels was a perfect how-to!  

5. Finally… my starter is taking off! This stage took far longer to get to than the method I followed suggested. But that’s fine. I’m happy I didn’t give up! I followed Hailee Catalano’s method in her cookbook titled By Heart. This week, I’ll attempt a first loaf. Expectations for the success of this first loaf are reasonably low… But I’m interested in adding to my small bread-making experience and using natural leaven has felt like a good next step.

Cooking

I really like Ottolenghi’s “Beyond Potato Salad” (pictured here). It is mixed with greek yogurt and a bit of mayonnaise. It is topped with toasted cardamom seeds, sesame seeds and nigella seeds and a nice tarragon-and-pickle mixture. Unfortunately, no one else in my little family likes it as much as I do.  

What we all like is Jane Rodmell’s version of Jambalaya from Best Summer Weekends. I think prep and cooking takes about two hours, especially if you take the time to brown ingredients as directed, and it yields a generous six portions. 

Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup smoked ham, diced
½ cup spicy smoked sausage, diced
2 cups boneless chicken breast, diced
2 large onions, finely chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon filé (optional)
2 cups long-grain converted rice
1 cup tomatoes (fresh or canned, San Marzano), chopped
3 cups chicken stock

Heat oil in a large heavy pot, add ham and sausage, and brown lightly. Lift out and set aside.

Add chicken pieces and brown, then remove and set aside.

Add half the onions, celery, and pepper to the pot, cooking until soft and well browned. Toss in the rest of the vegetables and the garlic, and cook over moderate heat until softened.

Return meats to pot with all the seasonings and cook for 5 minutes. Add rice and stir for a few minutes, then add tomatoes and stock. Bring mixture to a boil, lower heat, cover pot, and leave to cook gently for 20-25 minutes more until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender yet still has texture. Toss gently, remove from heat, cover, and leave to rest for 5 minutes. Serve hot.

Tips: It you want to prepare part of the jambalaya ahead, cook the meats and vegetables as described above and add the tomatoes and stock, but do not add the rice. Refrigerate or freeze. When you are ready to serve, bring the mixture to a boil, add rice, and cook for 20-25 minutes as described above.

Jambalaya often includes seafood, such as shrimp and/or fresh oysters; add them during the last 5 minutes of cooking. Add some hot sauce if you like things spicier.

Walking the Dog

Here’s Enzo, paw daintily lifted, as if the dandelion fluff were a little too much to endure…

Indeed, there are dainty flowers everywhere, and I grab a shot of my favourites here and there…

Then there are the dandelions after a storm. I think they look pretty like this too…

And here’s milkweed. It has pretty long oval-shaped leaves that stretch upwards at the tip, but spread out in pairs as the plant grows.

Here’s another mushroom to add to the collection (here, here).

A mallard on the river…

And Enzo again, looking like a dignified dog.

Wishing you a great week ahead!

A week on Sunday 21/52

Writing and creativity

I liked Michael Nielsen’s essay “Developing creative identity” so much, I read it twice. The section titled “What feeds the writing?” felt like the clear articulation of something I only vaguely understood before. Two quotes I want to remember:

I feel foolish for not forcefully articulating this to myself much earlier. But it takes time to become legible to oneself when outside well-defined communities.

And:

And while I say "drill down on fundamental questions" often there is no well-formed starting question, merely a hunch there is something worth exploring. So you must endure creative fog and confusion and ignorance, to find questions worth drilling down on, all without knowing whether you will eventually find insights worth the effort!

(Via) 

Enjoying

1. Another interview with an enthusiastic writer, this time on Conversations with Tyler, who hosted Bob Spitz.  

2. I liked this little tour of a datacenter by Dwarkesh Patel. It goes well with Search Engine’s episode “The many lives of Taiwan” and Interesting Times episode “The U.S. and China Are Not In An A.I. Race”. 

Greenhouses + flowers

I like visiting all the greenhouses along what used to be a single strip of road on St. Mary’s south of the Perimeter. It has been bisected with the construction of the new overpass, and what time you are saving by not having to wait at a light to cross the Perimeter, you should use to visit all of them. Ron Paul has a rustic charm I like, and their petunias seem to perform ultra-well in my flower bed.

Lacoste was the busiest greenhouse when I went this week, but the slow spring has really staggered the customers’ arrival. There were no lineups to have to queue in. There is St. Mary’s Nursery, and then, getting back on St. Mary’s, there is Red River Valley Garden Centre. I’m always impressed with the colour of their flowers… though they are a smaller greenhouse, everything is so neatly laid out. I spied a bee taking a nap.

Sage Gardens at the southern-most end offers a hundred varieties of tomato! 

A selection of flowers always looks pretty all together… 

In the kitchen

I feel a little uninspired this time of year when the weather warms, and kitchen habits demand a shift… Nonetheless, I planned to try this recipe - Kismet’s Springtime Chicken Skewers - baking the chicken rather than barbecuing it, and I’m glad I made it. It was a real treat for the tastebuds! I served it alongside plain buttered shell pasta and we had Sarah Fennel’s Salted Caramel Pots de Crème for dessert. Both were a real hit!

Walking the dog

The leaves are only timidly coming through on the trees…

On our way back home, Enzo noticed a cat on the neighbour’s fence and was completely incensed.

Happy Sunday!