A week on Sundy 3/52

Intro

This week, quotes and links related to creativity… It’s where my mind is leaning at present, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But first, a documentary.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

About 12 minutes in to the above titled film available on Kanopy, Hockney says this:

I got a little sketchbook, a Japanese one, like a concertina and I would draw a certain kind of grass. I filled the book in about two hours with all these different kinds of grass. To most people, it looks like a jumble - because it is - but because you’ve done that, looked into the hedgerows, seen all the variety, then you draw it. When you’ve drawn it, when you then look again at the hedgerow, your seeing becomes clearer and you know you understand what’s going on more. And you realize there’s a fabulous lot to look at. If you want to replenish a visual thing, you’re gonna have to go back to nature, ‘cause there’s the infinite there, meaning you can’t think it up, I don’t think. 

I like how he shares a tip, a little practice he’s used himself that I can use too, and the subsequent appreciation for nature that comes from it. It makes me feel like drawing should have a place in education. Not a prescriptive kind of place, but a “freedom of exploration” kind of place. (I found this documentary from a book Sandi Hester recommended on her Youtube channel here. The library here doesn’t carry the book, but does have the documentary and I enjoyed it.)

A few more quotes on the subject

I like how Kristen Vardanega begins her first video of the year with a phrase to contradict the other well-known one… She says “I would like to ‘move slow and make things’.” Me too! In that vein, I appreciate the encouragement such as Orla Stevens offers it: 

You don’t need to know why you’re doing something. You don’t need to know where it’s going to take you. You just need to listen to your curiosity and let it take you where you’re meant to be going.

And her reflection that comes from pursuing that curiosity:

One of the main life lessons I think have been as a kind of byproduct of making and working in sketchbooks it’s not even really the art that’s the most important bit. It’s like the way that it lets you see the world more creatively and lets you appreciate the little things.

House upgrades and Mr. Enzo (the dog)

One day last week and two days this week, a little team of workers ascended ladders to replace the original eaves troughs on our house. Until then, we didn’t know it could be a winter project. It seems especially productive to transform a bit of our house when the yard is in hibernation, so that spring runoff will have a brand new highway.

As nice as that is, our dog was acting as if the fortress was under siege and I would have reached the end of our Tupperware of treats before he would agree to settle. Eventually, he seemed most comfortable in his cage, but at risk of teasing the poor boy, let’s just say his anxiety was still manifest:

As soon as the workers left and order was restored to his little universe, all he wanted was a peaceful stay in his new bean bag.

Hardly less rattled than our poor dog, I eventually dedicated a few hours to playing around with collage. Collage feels like almost childish fun to me, and in my imagination it has even fewer rules than drawing does… collage, in the end, doesn’t need to look like anything. You stop when you feel like it. You arrange at will. 

To trick myself into doing collage, I’ve given myself an appropriately small mission… Having been accidentally gifted the game “Cards Against Humanity”, I’ve been covering the inappropriate phrases with visuals I like better. “Cat pee in a water gun”? How about a floral sticker with a tiny animal-piloted plane flying overhead?

And who knew that India ink roughly brushed onto Kraft paper could make for such interesting textures! I call this series of tiny collages, my “cards for humanity”. 

After making ten, cortisol levels were indeed lowered just like Amie McNee says here.  

Reading online

I really liked the point made in this essay by Owen Kellogg who opens with the following

Phones do matter, but their role is often misunderstood. Instead of operating as a primary source of distress, heavy phone use appears to function as a compensatory behavior. When young people lack reliable sources of support or connection, they turn to tools that provide stimulation or regulation. Heavy screen use fills gaps left by unmet material and psychological needs.

This came via The Marginal Revolution who quoted a line from the conclusion: “The most reliable way to improve youth well-being is to meet individual needs through connection instead of control.” 

One of the things about December is that it’s a busy month, always and forever will be, meaning that I didn’t have the chance to sit down and peruse all the great year-end type posts that are so fun to read. It’s mid January, and I’m only now delving in… Thus did I come across… (thus did I? Alas, I am reading Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote and it is full of fancy language, so now I write in fancy language too… I’m about 170 pages in, since January 6th, and, yes, had to remind myself why I should be patient with all Quixote’s useless scrapes, and so read the first link served up to me… this by a Mr. Nick Senger back in 2018. Fine. Back to where I was going…) 

As I was saying… Kottke linked to this list of Best Video Essays, and I enjoyed listening through Josh’s “You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.)”. Anything about writing and A.I. is like catnip to me, and Josh’s comments about “beauty in recombinance” (at the 7:38 mark) makes me think of collage. His class syllabus has me nod with recognition, because yes, I find myself ”writing because you feel like you need to” (at 28:12). Literature that feels impenetrable? Another bit reminding me of the purpose of the self-imposed reading list!

Postcard

This week the temperature has fluctuated dramatically in Winnipeg, from melt to freeze, and one morning, the changing conditions during my walk lead to capturing some dramatic lighting. This dark slate sky and orange willow branches reminds me of summer evenings after a storm, when the sky is dark blue and the foreground is gold.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 2/53

Reading

I recently finished Mussolini and the Pope by David I. Kertzer and enjoyed the product of his historical research. I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to access the Vatican’s archives for this story. This inside look at Pius XI’s pontificate and Mussolini’s political career grounds the tangential things that have floated past in the last little while… The political unrest in My Brilliant Friend, for example. This online peek at an exhibition of fascist posters. Or Tom Philipps’ comment on Hitler’s organization versus Mussolini’s: “This anniversary card of Hitler’s year-old chancellorship was hot off the press and Hitler makes his first appearance on a stamp. The control exercised over all the semiotics of power, masterminded by Goebbels, already marked Hitler out as in a different league of dictatorship from Mussolini who only made one philatelic appearance in Italy […].” (From Postcard Century, p 172).

But back to Kertzer’s book for a quotation… This one encapsulating the crux of the scandal from those years:

Neither Pacelli nor the pope's two emissaries - the official nuncio and the unofficial Jesuit - had ever uttered a word to challenge the government's decision to treat Jews as a danger to healthy Italian society. For anyone eager for a sign of the Vatican view of the new campaign of persecution, including parish priests and bishops seeking guidance on how to respond to it, the message was clear. The state was finally heeding the warnings that had been appearing in the Vatican daily newspaper and that had been regularly repeated in the Vatican-supervised La Civiltà cattolica and in much of the Italian Catholic press, from weekly diocesan bulletins to major daily newspapers. The recent opening of the Vatican Secret Archives has brought to light a report that makes clear that, as far as the Vatican was concerned, the August 16 [1938] agreement Tacchi Venturi negotiated with Mussolini, promising not to criticize the racial laws in exchange for favorable treatment of Catholic Action, remained in effect. (P 345)

Ideas and the elderly

Reading Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past, I came across this passage on the subject of ideas:

These early twentieth-century historians [like Theodore Draper and Lewis Namier] knew that ideas existed, but they tended to dismiss them as propaganda, as manipulated rationalizations covering more deep-lying motives, which were usually economic. Ideas, they said, could not realistically be considered as motives for action, as causes of events.

Even if this realist or materialist position is true, however, ideas are still important for explaining human behaviour. Although ideas may not be motives for our actions, they are nevertheless the constant accompaniment of our actions. There is no human behaviour without ideas. Ideas give meaning to our actions, and there is almost nothing that we humans do that we do not attribute meaning to. We give meaning to even our simplest actions, a wink, for example, and these meanings - our ideas - are part and parcel of our actions. These meanings or ideas are the means by which we perceive, understand, judge, or manipulate our experiences and our lives. They make our behaviour not just comprehensible but possible. We have a human need to make our actions meaningful. 

Although we have to give meaning to nearly everything we do, we are not free at any moment to give whatever meaning we wish to our behaviour. The meanings we give to our behaviour are necessarily public ones, and they are defined and delimited by the conventions and language of the culture at that time. It is in this sense that the culture creates behaviour. It does so by forcing us to describe our behaviour in its terms. The definitions and meanings that we seek to give to our behaviour cannot be random or unconstrained, which is why the concept of “propaganda” as freely manipulated meanings is flawed. Our actions thus tend to be circumscribed by the ways we can make them meaningful, and they are meaningful only publicly, only with respect to an inherited system of conventions and values. [Emphasis mine.]

This feels especially pertinent when I think of my 88-year-old mother-in-law. As I am reading through the newspaper archives of her young adulthood in the late 1950’s, I am struck by the social conventions that shaped her and that feel so alien today. If she comments about the number of immigrants she has encountered on an errand, it helps to recall that in 1958, the appearance of a Black student teacher in the French school’s grade 7 class was a newsworthy headline. (See page 4 here.) 

Eating

The Big Book of Bread has encouraged me to try making simple loaves… Basic White, and a whole-wheat Everyday Bread. I’m learning about controlling the temperature of the ingredients so that the dough doesn’t overproof. I like the feeling of bread-making as an art.

Postcard

We had three days of frost on the trees, the third being the most impressive…

Happy Sunday! 

A week on Sunday 1/53

Reading

If you’d like to be convinced of Henry Oliver’s “Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026” I’d suggest Sleepwalker in a Fog by Tatyana Tolstaya for the first two… “particular pleasure” and “the force of language”. I mean, sure, read any great literature you would like, but having just surfaced from this one, this slim volume of short stories, I feel a little like laughing along with the jollity of her descriptions, I feel like I’ve been awash in the brilliance and control of her use of words. Here are two quotations:

People assert themselves, sink their hooks in, refuse to go - it's only natural! Take the recording of a concert, for example. A hush falls over the hall, the piano thunders, the keys flash like lozenges gone berserk, lickety-split, hand over fist, wilder and wilder; the sweet tornado swirls, the heart can't stand it, it'll pop right out, it quivers on the last strand, and suddenly: ahem. Ahe he kherr hem. Khu khu khu. Someone coughed. A real solid, throaty cough. And that's that. The concert is branded from birth with a juicy, influenza stamp, multiplied on millions of black suns, dispersed in all possible directions. The heavenly bodies will burn out, the earth will become crusted in ice, and the planet will move along inscrutable stellar paths like a frozen lump for all time, but that smart aleck's cough won't be erased, it won't disappear, it will be forever inscribed on the diamond tablets of immortal music - after all, music is immortal, isn't it? - like a rusty nail hammered into eternity; the resourceful fellow asserted himself, scribbled his name in oil paint on the cupola, splashed sulfuric acid on the divine features. [From the title story, “Sleepwalker in a Fog”]

Having company in the country - it's not like having company in the city. There's a pleasant lack of obligation. In the city a guest  won't just drop in, he'll phone first to say, I'd like to come by and visit you. The hostess will glance quickly at the floor: is there a lot of dust? - she'll do a mental check: is the bed still unmade? - she'll give a nervous thought to the refrigerator shelves - all in all, it makes for tension. Stress. But in the country none of that matters: what to sit on, what to drink, or from what cups. And it's no disaster if you leave a guest alone for five minutes - in the city that's a cardinal sin, but not in the country. It's a different type of hospitality. The guest lounges in a wicker armchair, has a smoke or just sits quietly, gazing out the window at the view, at the sky, and there's a sunset playing through all its colors - it'll give off a red or lilac stripe, then a golden crust will flare on a cloud, or everything will be tinged with a frosty green or lemon - a star will sparkle... Better than television. [From a story titled “Heavenly Flame”]

Eating

Last Sunday, I made this Sheet Pan Chicken with Tomatoes and Chickpeas by Carla Lalli Music and it was well liked!

I was very happy to receive The Big Book of Bread (see here) as a gift on my birthday and chose, as a first recipe, Knackebrot to feature in a platter. It’s an intriguing bread, flat and seedy, but, as the recipe’s introduction says, it is flavourful and lightly sweet. 

The New Year’s Eve spread at a friend’s house looked like this:

Photo credit: Sébastien Forest

It reminds me that I should mention a fruit dip we really like… Contrary to most fruit dip recipes found online, this one doesn’t feature cream cheese. I suspect it’s consequently a bit lighter. I hadn’t kept the little cookbook it came in, called Rookie Cook, from the Company’s Coming series, and I regretted that decision just for this recipe. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has a copy you can borrow and because of that, I had the pleasure of being able to serve it to the kids and share in their enjoyment of it!

Cool Fruit Dip
From Jean Paré’s cookbook Rookie Cook (p. 23)

¾ cup marshmallow crème
½ cup sour cream
1 tablespoon brown sugar, packed
½ teaspoon vanilla
2 cups frozen whipped topping, thawed

Beat marshmallow crème, sour cream, brown sugar and vanilla together in medium bowl until blended and brown sugar is dissolved.

Fold in whipped topping. Makes 2½ cups.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 42)

Christmas

It’s a nice feeling to be on the other side of a holiday having enjoyed the anticipation, and participated in creating the mood. We hosted a small cookies and cocktail party, baking enough cookies and bars to share.

This year’s cocktail was Alton Brown’s Clarified Milk Punch, a recipe seen on TikTok that made me feel like I was pulling off a chemistry experiment in my kitchen. Even the kids were intrigued.

This year, our living room tree was a live one, bought all wrapped-up from Home Depot. I decorated it very simply in blues and golds. But our house features three additional trees… Marie-Hélène’s pencil tree, the boys’ room tree, and the downstairs mini tree.

Reading review

Looking over the 20-some titles of books read in 2025 reminds me of the books I enjoyed… The year began with Matar Hisham’s memoir The Return (mentioned here) and continued with William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days (no. 10). And so impactful for the conclusion it drew, was Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (no. 21).

But I didn’t just appreciate Pulitzer-Prize winning books… I also liked the books that taught me something, just by being stories set in a different time, in a different place. With my daughter, I read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and was delighted when an edition of Rob Stephenson’s “The Neighbourhoods” included a picture of the author’s house (here). In the same vein was Kamel Daoud’s novel Houris, containing accounts of the civil war in Algeria. This year I started listening to audiobook versions of French novels just to keep my ear trained to good language. The effects overflowed one day when my daughter said “Why are you speaking [so much] in French? It’s weird!”

Media

Like any typical pop culture consumers, the year’s streaming included Severence and White Lotus, The Night Agent, Adolescence, Friends and Neighbors, The Eternaut, The Wrong Paris and My Brilliant Friend (and the associated documentary). Also Kneecap, Slow Horses and Pluribus. We went to the theatre for Anora and One Battle After Another. But in the last month or so, we discovered that it’s especially relaxing on a Sunday night to just sit and read and stream a live fireplace instead. It took an extra effort, a little push in that direction to commit to doing it, but during the holidays, having finished the first season of Pluribus, we found ourselves reading several nights in a row.

Eating out

New lunch spots tried with friends this year included: Nicolino’s on Pembina, Bonnie Day on Westminster (so cute and cozy!), Dave & LaVerne’s on Lakewood (really nice customer service!), Next Door (I liked their mango jam!), Le Croissant (a deservedly busy spot!), Primo’s Deli (come hungry!), Buvette (Mmm, that Hashbrown Breakfast Sandwich…), Gather (sorry, the word “outstanding” comes to mind… it was unexpectedly my favourite of the year) and The Forge. At The Forge, I had a Polish Double Malt served as a Devonshire Cream Open Face - Blueberry Patch and it looked - pardon my poor photo skills - like this:

It was delicious.

Thanks 2025

To a year that has taught me: in the happiness of finishing a thesis, a deep appreciation for history; in the confusion of A.I., a love for the soul of craft; and in the ordinariness of life, the steadiness and reward of wholesome routines. Here’s to more of that, to still “refusing to lose your own sense of purpose”!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 41)

Reading

Contrast can serve to highlight appreciation for something and this was the case when I was reading Bonnie Tsui’s book On Muscle, and also reading a short story collection by Tatyana Tolstaya. In “Serafin” Tolstaya writes from the character’s point of view of disdain for humanity: “Fat is nauseating muck. The whole world of flesh - is fat. Fatty, sticky children, fatty old ladies, fatty redheaded Magda.” (p 48) But Tsui, focusing on muscle, delves into its various intricacies with an infectious appreciation. Here is a collection of quotes from the book that I liked:

Being a writer as well as a lifelong athlete, I can’t help but notice how language is telling. Muscle means so much more than the physical thing itself. We’re told we need different metaphorical muscles for everything: to study, to socialize, to compete, to be compassionate. And we’ve got to exercise those muscles - putting them to use, involving them in a regular practice - for them to work properly and dependably. (p 4)

The way you build muscle is by breaking yourself down. Muscle fibres sustain damage through strain and stress, then repair themselves by activating special stem cells that fuse to the finer to increase size and mass. You get stronger by surviving each series of little breakdowns, allowing for regeneration, rejuvenation, regrowth. (p 5)

In big ways and small, life is a movement-based relationship with everything around us. Muscles make my fingers fly across these keys, knit my brow in concentration, correct my seated posture, shift my gaze to the window, square my shoulders, tap out the rest of this sentence. So much has become virtual, and yet my body still very physically influences my thoughts even as it conveys them to you. Your own muscles allow your eyes to take this in, to blink thoughtfully and tuck your chin in hand and tilt your head in consideration. We haven’t said a word, but our bodies are talking to each other - even through the page (…). (p 12)

Exerting our influence on the world: That’s the modern-day definition of a flex. (p 13)

Maybe that’s what makes some people uneasy: muscle as potential. And sometimes we don’t know our own power, until, finally, we are given the opportunity to discover it. (p 27)

For all its nobility, the pursuit of mightiness remains grounded in the body and all of its appetites. But the strength community’s insatiable curiosity about the human body is something I find surprisingly moving. To know one’s own strength: I’ve come to understand the meaning of these words not as a binary statement, an “I do” or an “I don’t,” but as an ongoing process of discovery. Muscles matter - they allow us, in an observable way, to see what we can do. Though you may not initially know what you’re capable of, you have vast reservoirs of potential, waiting to be tapped. For just the right moment to be revealed. (p 44)

(…) there is a process in place for human donor dissection, and with that process comes a reverence that helps you to understand the privilege of getting to look. Head, hands, and feet are wrapped before dissection. And at the end of every academic year, a special memorial is held (…). (p 52)

Interoception is your body’s ability to sense itself from inside. (p 142)

All these quotes show a respect for the human body that the character in Serafin does not want to see and both writers make their point with the deft use of language. Words can be so strong…

Cards

Cards are divisive. The postal service has only to go on strike for a debate to flare up dramatically in the news. Cards are important. Cards don’t matter… Cards take time. My grandma could dash off a stack of 80. Or was it 100? But cards are like everything else: cookies and food and Christmas trees…  home-made or store-bought or real or fake. There are hundreds of permutations for celebrating Christmas and just as many ways of dispersing one’s energy for this demanding season. And so with all that in mind, juggling our own list of pros and cons, I made this year’s Christmas cards by hand and cut the envelopes from old wrapping paper. (This envelope tutorial was perfect!) At a time when AI is spinning reality to ever greater heights of improbability, a return to basics felt reassuring and solid. (I think this is what B. Dylan Hollis is getting at in his appreciation of vintage cards here on Instagram.) 

Baking

There’s a Nanaimo bar chilling in the fridge, but earlier this week, I tackled the start of this year’s baking with blondies and brownies…

Eating

Making things a little less demanding in the kitchen while I concentrate on cards and baking, are old favourites, like Jamie Oliver’s “Mini shell pasta with a creamy smoked-bacon and pea sauce.”

Postcards

This week, there were two days featuring a sundog in the sky, and Friday’s was so big, it reflected itself on the windows of the U of M’s Pembina Hall student residence.

Happy Sunday!

Family Year-End

Welcome to our family year end!

I hope this letter-like summary finds you well! If you received our family Christmas card, there’s the five of us smiling and healthy standing in a snowy scene beside the Red River, with the University of Manitoba campus in the background. It was Christian and Marie-Hélène’s idea, thought up on weekend morning dog walks with Cedric, William and Enzo. We’re so pleased with how it turned out! Thanks to a tripod and the iPhone technology that captures a photo like a mini movie, Enzo looks like a very cooperative beagle. Captured in time is Marie-Hélène in grade 11, Cedric in grade 7 and William in grade 6.

Winter

The year begins in winter… skating on the river and scenes indoors. It’s the hum of routine: suppers twice a week with Christian’s mom and games together. Sometimes there’s a dash of excitement with the visit of a family member on Christian’s side, or a new game added to the mix.

Spring

The months leading to summer were memorable for the earliest pool set-up so far (May 10) and for smoke in the air. When my sister Anna came to Winnipeg, she took a picture from her plane window, showing its distinct layer in the sky. Bubble tea now features as an occasional treat since we found a favorite local spot in 2024.

Summer

The warmest months in Winnipeg are also the most activity-filled ones for us. There are school-end parties of course, but also little celebrations like a 20th anniversary of an official “I do”, less formal meet-ups that are so much easier in biking weather, and the annual tradition of picking strawberries together.

Marking the season for its novelty was a trip to Alberta for our family’s week-long stay with my sister and Luke. I summarized the visit in another blog post, but here is this picture that looks as though we inserted ourselves into a computer background.

In our own province, summer brings weekend road trips to the beach and everyone gets a little bit tanned before school starts again.

Fall

As leaves are on the cusp of changing colour and school begins anew for Christian and the kids, my schooling ended with a thesis defence on a random Wednesday afternoon. Change rippled through the months as Christian’s mom’s age (this year she turned 88!) precipitated the choice to move her into supportive housing. As we awaited a spot to open up, we helped pack up her condo and sent the fine china to interested family members.

The pool stayed in our yard until October 4th when it was put away. This year, for the first time, Christian and I bought passes to the city’s indoor ones where we now have a habit of going on Friday nights.

It’s not yet winter as I write, but the city has a fresh blanket of snow. A tray of eggs, pounds of butter and bags of sugar and flour are all calling me to the kitchen… I hope that wherever you are you can share in something delicious and good people to eat it with! And with best wishes from our family to you, here’s a summer sunset view from Christian’s mom’s condo!

Cheers to 2026!

A Week on Sunday (no. 40)

Teaching myself to swim

Friday was the tenth time I put on a bathing suit, cap and goggles and slid myself into a city pool with the firm intention of getting over my fear of water. As an experiment, it has been going well. My goal is to be able to swim laps with Christian. Meantime, I stay in the shallow end, learning buoyancy, while he goes back and forth and tests ever higher diving boards. I think that an account is due, a little summary of the impressions I have of the experience so far, before I forget what learning to swim felt like.

An unexpected feeling. I’ve learned that there’s a distinction between feeling “enthusiasm” for something and feeling “invigorated” by something. An idea can create enthusiasm, but it can be temporary. Its definition associates it to speech: “she enthused” or “she spoke enthusiastically”. By contrast “invigorate” feels more stable and less superficial. It is “to impart vigour to; to fill with life and energy; to strengthen, animate”. I’ve had ideas for projects in the past, talked about them, felt enthusiastic, and fed myself on other peoples’ reaction. But it quickly wears out. Having a practice, like writing or drawing, has taught me persistence beyond the idea-phase because I can see that incremental improvement happens over time, despite feelings of impatience. 

One of the first instructor’s advice I followed was Kaitlin Frehling’s video. It begins by teaching buoyancy. I wasn’t able to follow her instructions until the third visit to a pool, but finally being able to gather myself into a ball while gently exhaling under water and feeling my back bob to the surface was a brand new sensation I was thrilled to repeat and repeat. My brain forgot to be okay with this feeling by the next visit, but picked it up again fairly quickly. Feeling this happen and observing the brain learn was very invigorating!

Learning technique. Swimming is so technical that breaking it down into steps is a little puzzle on its own. There is theory and application… but a big part of learning how to apply something is learning how to digest it in pieces that don’t lead to overwhelm. When I told my sister I was teaching myself to swim, she asked me why I didn’t just take lessons. The thing is, a big part of learning to swim is just getting over my own fear of the water… I understand technique quite well, and there’s a plethora of Youtube videos for every kind of technique. 

Videos that don’t break down technique are instructive in their own way. Take “Learn to Swim as an Adult” which compresses into three episodes Harry getting over fear of water in the first, learning front crawl in the second, and going at it in the deep end in the third; all within a month. The instructor is encouraging, and Harry is a good sport, but there looms over this production a feeling of “Ugh, why won’t this just come together?” expressed in Harry’s comment “it is frustrating…”. The technique is there, but really, what Harry needs, and what the Youtube channel doesn’t specialize in showing, is a whole bunch of time dedicated to getting comfortable with being in the water. I suspect that actual footage of an adult learning to swim is boring. More fun for the viewer is the exciting montage you tend to find in movies. More useful for the adult learner are the techniques that can be applied visit to visit. The two objectives are at odds in the above example, but there are other instructors who target their audience well by giving them very small steps to try on their own.

Pausing here to acknowledge fear. I want to take a minute to appreciate various sources of encouragement… Articles like Alexandra Hansen’s “Learning to swim as an adult is terrifying, embarrassing and wonderful” for The Guardian or videos like Dan Swim Coach’s “How to Overcome Fear of Water” and Sikana’s “Overcome a fear of water” treat this feeling seriously. They also emphasize the key to overcoming it by exposure. Exposing myself to water again and again and again is a small doable step and I’m happy after every time I take it.

Breaking down technique into small and smaller steps. I’ve mentioned Kaitlin Frehling above, and have used the PDF “Beginner Swim Resource” illustrating routines you can do to learn to swim, as a guide. But I do have a slower pace… For example: week 5 workouts introduce a swimmer’s snorkel. I’d never tried a snorkel before, and I had to confront the sensation of water in my nose. I’d been avoiding this by gently breathing out of my nose underwater and not just holding my breath. The first attempt - my 7th visit to the pool - I had to get past the panicky feeling. Between weeks 7 and 8 I watched Youtube tutorials (this one and this one) on snorkel use. Pool visits then included time gradually getting used to breathing with a snorkel for 2, then 4 then 6 lengths, with flippers and then without. But I don’t begrudge the extra time I’m taking, because there’s no one to impress but myself. 

Supporting local We visit our favourite city pool Friday evenings and it feels nice to be connected in this way to a service we now support. We’re starting to recognize regulars, becoming ones ourselves… And I found swimming gear I needed from a local business called Swimming Matters. All these things are motives for gratitude!

Reading

I think the book 1177 B.C. by Eric H. Cline was recommended by a podcast guest for its final chapter detailing the collapse of civilisations and the end of the Bronze Age, because of the “eerily prescient” (in Adam Gopnick’s words) conditions it highlights.

Personally, I liked the difference between then and now that the author highlights in this passage: 

I should hasten to add that, although it’s clear that climate change and such factors as pandemics have caused instability in the past, there is at least one major difference between then and now - concurrent knowledge of events unfolding. The ancient Hittites probably had no idea what was happening to them. They didn’t know how to stop a drought. Maybe they prayed to the gods; perhaps they made some sacrifices. But in the end, they were essentially powerless to do anything about it.

In contrast, we are now much more technologically advanced. We also have the advantage of hindsight. History has a lot to teach us, but only we are willing to listen and learn. If we see the same sort of things taking place now that happened in the past, including drought and famine, earthquakes and tsunamis, then I ask again, might it not be a good idea to look at the ancient world and learn from what happened to them? Even if the various problems at the end of the Late Bronze Age were “black swan” events, as Magnus Nordenman has suggested, the mere fact that we have so many similar problems at the present time should be cause for concern.

Enjoying

This definition of taste in a substack by Henry Oliver, written two years ago, is so clear, I’ll likely go back and reread it again.

Baking aspiration

There’s nothing like a baking project to inspire confidence in pulling off your own roundup of cookies at this time of year, and I’ve been enjoying Justine Doiron’s cookie advent-calendar she made over four (!) days. (On Instagram here.)

Postcard

This week: snow on the river!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 39)

Reading

This week I finished The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. It felt neat to approximately match the dates of his expedition with the time of year I’m in. A few quotes I transcribed:

And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread. (p 59)

This is closer to my own idea of freedom, the possibility and prospect of “free life,” traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes; free because without defences, free not in an adolescent way, with no restraints, but in the sense of the Tibetan Buddhist’s “crazy wisdom,” of Camus’s “leap into the absurd” that occurs within a life of limitations. The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty (to that self which is inseparable from others) to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible. (p 107)

I long to let go, drift free of things, to accumulate less, depend on less, to move more simply. Therefore I felt out of sorts after having bought that blanket - another thing, another burden to the spirit. (p 121)

This is the last Buddhist village we shall see, and even here, the faith is dying out; the prayer walls are ancient, and no one has added a new stone in many years. For this is the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when all the great faiths of mankind are on the wane. (p 300).

Googling Matthiessen out of curiosity to know a little more from his biography, there is this quote of his excerpted from The Paris Review, on Wikipedia:

Like anything that one makes well with one's own hands, writing good nonfiction prose can be profoundly satisfying. Yet after a day of arranging my research, my set of facts, I feel stale and drained, whereas I am energized by fiction. Deep in a novel, one scarcely knows what may surface next, let alone where it comes from. In abandoning oneself to the free creation of something never beheld on earth, one feels almost delirious with a strange joy.

I like how opposite this is to my own feeling about writing non-fiction; and he’s all the more admirable a writer for having applied himself to both genres and therefore being able to express the difference he feels in so doing. But I also like how he expresses the feeling… the “strange joy”!

Watching

My brother recommended this documentary, and I did a double-take when I noticed it was seven hours long. But those seven hours pass agreeably well, and Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s narration is extremely thoughtful. The video begins:

The way people talk about history is usually with a line; a line of argument drawn across time and data, a line of progression from monarch to monarch - or administration to administration -, a line of connection, to tie the importance of something that seems minor to a major world event. One of the least common lines to draw when talking about history is a physical one, drawn across the landscape itself, taking whatever crosses its path into account.

Thus does Caldwell-Gervais take the viewer along the Lincoln Highway, melding history and observation from the dash of 1978 Ford Thunderbird. 

I like his thoughts on nostalgia (about 3:31:00), the forgotten omnipresence of mud in the past (about 4:03:00), how he talks about abandoned buildings while passing by the Packard plant in Detroit (about 4:27:00), and his explanation of the difference between earnestness and artistry as he walks through a wax figure museum (around 5:07:00). 

The lights are up!

I used to have firm opinions about how things should look. It was a pastime in my childhood to mentally criticize decor and imagine how I would do a thing in my hypothetical future house. But time smooths these hard edges, and I realize that my perfectionist ideas are hollow compared to the happy family spirit of group-effort decorations. Last week I could look out the kitchen window at the tree-trunks getting outfitted and feel happy knowing the effort was made with a sense of agency and belonging. The kids are proud of our house!

Eating

It was Christian’s birthday last week and he requested a family favourite: Ricardo’s “Penne with Italian Sausage”… I’ve made this recipe so often that I’d assumed I’d already mentioned it here, but a quick search gave no such result. To rectify that, the official mention now!

Over time we’ve made some modifications that have improved the recipe by making it easier. First, I rarely use freshly peeled tomatoes. We like eating this when tomatoes from the garden are a memory under three feet of snow, just as much as mid summer, when tomatoes are still green, so in either case, we use a can of San Marzano, bought in packs of six from Costco and roughly chopped before being added to the pan.

Also, in lieu of hot sausages, we use mild, and I don’t bother to slice them for cooking… Instead I remove the casing and add them to the pan after the onion and garlic have softened, and break them up as they brown. And if I could add a third comment… there’s no hurry to “serve immediately”. It’s ok if this sauce simmers a bit as you get around to dressing a salad, or slicing a baguette, or you know… waiting for the pasta to cook. 

Postcard

The skies were heavy with potential snow this week, and so the landscape looks especially dreary. One thing though is the bleached grass… it rustles nicely in the wind…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 38)

Reading

Another book done from the reading list! This one a tiny book of short stories, titled Escapes, by Joy Williams. Reading her, the sensation of the short unexpected sentences in my brain is like eating popping candy... The writing seems to fizz.

From a story titled "Rot": "The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children." (p. 17)

"Health" so acutely described a tanning salon that I was jolted into the memory of having gone to one with Christian, some weeks prior to our wedding so we'd look attractively tanned for the pictures... "Aurora leads her to one of the rooms at the rear of the building. The room has a mirror, a sink, a small stool, a white rotating fan and the bed, a long bronze coffinlike apparatus with a lid. Pammy is always startled when she sees the bed with its frosted ultraviolet tubes, its black vinyl headrest." (p 115)

Perhaps my favourite passage is a character's thought about overheard conversation: "Pammy coughs. She doesn't want to hear other people's voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word were as good as another." (p. 119).

A fun read!

A poem

This is a beautiful poem: "Miss You. Would like to take a walk with you". It is by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Here on the Poetry Foundation website.

Part of me wants to leave the poem like a gift on a doorstep with the secret anticipation of the recipient enjoying it. Another part of me wants to confess that until reading it, a poem had never made me cry. I didn't believe, till now, that poems could contain this power. It's like a little gift that arrived, that proved Patti Smith's description of a poem to be true: "… it can distill everything like a teardrop. If you’re thirsty and you get that drop of water, it suddenly becomes like a liter of water. Then you’re satisfied." (Quote taken from Patti Smith's interview here.)

AI and history

I've held the misguided belief that AI couldn't do much for the archival work inherent to the field of history, but a recent interview on Hard Fork with Professor Mark Humphries is proving that AI might become very helpful. Humphries has a substack on the subject here.

Eating

Sometimes a meal is less about the recipe and more about the pairing. This week, we tried Deb Perelman's Skillet Macaroni and Cheese - liberally messing around with the quantities of pasta vs sauce because we're not a creamy-sauce-loving family - and paired it with an almost virtuous broccoli salad by Jamie Oliver.  (See here.)

For dessert, I made these Pink Party Cookies, per my daughter's request... "Could you make a sandwich cookie, but with icing in between?" It was subsequently so fun to come upon Carla Lalli Music's recipe.  The thing with her cookbook picture, is that I suspect the saturation is heightened. If you "bake until there's a barely perceptible tint of light golden around edge, 8 minutes. Do not overbake." it yeilds a pale cookie. Mine looked anemic by comparison. But still delicious!

Postcards

This week... a look upwards, to the pretty leaf outlines of a willow tree.

The lovely golds and browns and reds…

And the dog…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 37)

Intro

No quotes about history, no deep thoughts on some random subject… This week, I’ve been working through edits on my thesis. Since beginning my thesis, a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style has been published (number 18!). It’s this dictionary-sized guide that provides the reassuringly nitpicky details like how many authors’ names justify using “et al” and whether punctuation marks go inside or outside quotation marks. 

But instead of all that, I bring you a picture of a potato from our garden, dug out and cleaned just this week.

Or this satisfying comparison of the space pictures in photo albums take, versus the space they occupy in photo boxes. Ta-da! 

A few more pictures, and some recipes (because no matter how important a list of references is, the family must eat! and me too!) and we’ll call it a week, alright?

Texture

Yesterday we happened to park in front of this pole, and for the sake of contrast, I’ve included the sleek aluminum pole we also parked in front of, somewhere else…

I was going to wax on about colour and texture, when I realized that the first picture with the wood grain reminded me of a book I used to pore over when I was young, titled The Prairie Alphabet (here on Youtube). It is illustrated by Yvette Moore, in the style of hyperrealism. Listening to it being read on Youtube and looking through the pictures, I feel reminded of something comfortingly familiar. It’s a lovely book… I like how, the introduction concludes: “Some people say there’s not much to see on the prairies but we say we have more time to see it.” 

In the kitchen

About once a year, I make this “Chinese Five-Spice Slow-Cooked Pork Shoulder” from the Food Network cookbook Making it Easy. It’s served with egg noodles, and we’ve also added Deb Perelman’s cabbage slaw to the plate for a little contrast and crunch. As advertised, it’s easy. It’s also very tasty and very tender.

I don’t always succeed in my little kitchen. For example, I seem to have bad luck with the simplest of cookies… These ginger cookies are more like a ginger puddle and that was after refrigeration. The previous batch was in fact a ginger lake that extended to all four sides of my baking sheet. And it’s not the first time ginger cookies have turned into ginger puddles in my kitchen! Advice seems to be: beat the butter and sugar for a longer amount of time… like 5 to 7 minutes. I say I just need to find that magical recipe that delivers something like the ginger pillow of my imagination. (See imagination on left, reality on right…)

Meantime, there’s these Vegan Amaretti Cookies that turn out perfectly…

Oh! And I should mention that I made a “Banana Cake with Tahini Fudge” this week and served it to my husband’s mom and sister and they loved it! “The best banana cake I’ve ever had…” someone might have said. See, I don’t invent these flavours… I just go looking for recipes.  

I was listening to the podcast “The Dinner Plan” and the guest Maddy DeVita explained at one point the difference between being a person who cooks for friends and a person who is hired as a private chef as basically a transition “from using recipes and really leaning on recipes to looking at something […] maybe a photo I’ve seen on social media or a recipe that I think sounds interesting and really being able to combine those things and take elements and pieces. And I think going to culinary school and working as a private chef and the sheer amount of reps you get in of just being in the kitchen, allowed me to really grow […].” 

I really like it when a person is able to clarify a distinction I suspect, but hadn’t confirmed up to that point. I’m a person who leans on recipes!

Postcards

This week there was a day when the Red River was like glass and all around was reflected the reds and browns of the ending fall.

Berries, pretty, in stages of decay…

And these trees that frame themselves so nicely on my walk…

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 36)

I love history

When I was 20, I didn’t know that I loved history. When I was 30, I had minored in history. Now, past 40, I’m developing opinions about history. Sometimes I wonder whether I should gather all these history-related ideas together into one blog post, but I think not. I’m thinking as I go… isn’t it better to be invited on a hike and admire the view as you go along than to have a friend present you with with an album of their souvenirs? Blogging is like inviting you along…

I like it when I find myself nodding along with what a podcast guest is saying. This week it was to Paul Kingsnorth on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss (here). To establish your values, he argues, you need  “people, place, prayer, and the past”. About the past, you can ask yourself: “What’s your sense of the past, your sense of history? How can you live that? How can you honour your ancestors, pass things on to your children?” I think about this often and enjoy the challenge it presents.

What kind of challenge does thinking about history present? The first one is relevance. When I say relevance, it makes me think of people who say that history is boring and I so I think about the things that make history boring (like cliché) and the things that make it interesting (story) and I glow incandescent when I hear academics broach these themes exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed stumbling upon this interview between Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin on Youtube (here).  

Cercle Molière

Last weekend we attended a play at the French theatre, the subject of which was Pauline Boutal’s life. (I read her biography earlier this year and I’m so happy I did - I doubly enjoyed the play!)

Going to plays in French was my husband’s idea, and this one was the first of this season… I don’t know why or how I managed to have such low expectations of theatre, but my gosh, I found myself discreetly crying actual tears. The actors disappear after we applaud at the end, and in the emotion of the moment, applause felt too little, too small an act… they deserved hugs! A round of drinks on the house! Cheers to their talent, more cheers for health and a long life!

Reading 

I finished Art Work by Sally Mann. It contains lots of quotes. Lots of lovely-long sentences. Advice given as if she suspected her reader might roll their eyes, but also as if she knew she had the authority to give it (that is, sometimes the tone felt self-deprecating, sometimes haughtily impatient). I liked her stories… the terrible renter fiasco, the incredible trip to Qatar. Dear Mrs. Mann: more stories please? 

The thing is, I really enjoyed reading Hold Still (mentioned here in 2018). The image of a person’s death being like a library burned to the ground has often come to mind, and it’s from the end of that book. She writes:

I have long been afflicted with the metaphysical question of death: What does remain? What becomes of us, of our being? 

Remember that song by Laurie Anderson in which she says something about how when her father died it was as though a library burned to the ground? Where does the self actually go? All the accumulation of memory - the mist rising from the river and the birth of children and the flying tails of the Arabians in the field - and all the arcane formulas, the passwords, the police recipes, the Latin names of trees, the location of the safe deposit key, the complex skills to repair and build and grow and harvest - when someone dies, where does it all go?

Proust has his answer, and it’s the one I take most comfort in - it ultimately resides in the loving and in the making and in the leaving of every present day. It’s in my family, our farm, and in the pictures I’ve made and loved making. It’s in this book. “What thou loves well remains.” […]

Love! The world needs Love!

In the kitchen

This week, I made Zaynab Issa’s “Ultimate tuna melt” from her cookbook Third Culture Cooking and the kids told me not to lose the recipe. Very high praise!  

For dessert: Apple Pudding Cake. Delicious!

Enjoying

Freakonomics podcast is doing another series and I’ve been delightedly pulled-in. All Stephen Dubner’s research into horses has reminded me of when I was young… I read Black Beauty and wanted a horse. I was a child in the middle of Saskatoon with no concept of what horse-ownership entailed. My dad discouraged the idea. He said horses could have a temperament. I figured he’d not read Black Beauty. 

My mom also liked horses, but from a distance. Her brother had worked with horses. We watched National Velvet together… I knew about the Triple Crown and Secretariat and nothing about The Adams Family. In teenager-hood, I read Monty Roberts’ book The Man Who Listens to Horses (which, in my flawed memory, was titled “The Horse Whisperer” but Google refutes me). Mom and I were fans of people who could perform feats in animal behaviour. Then I grew up and horses left my mind. These podcasts are a nice (current!) revisit to that world!

Writing

Really liked this substack post by Gen Zero titled “Everyone is a strategist and No One is a Writer” (via) especially this concluding bit:

As we focus on how marketing is done, substantive questions of the world itself get sidelined.

Implicit in this focus on marketing is a focus on everyone but oneself.

I’ve noticed oak galls in the past and even mentioned them here but never gave them any further thought. But woah! Wasps are involved! What a lovely substack post! (Via) 

Christmas approacheth

I admire a person who can make craft projects feel almost un-craft-like. I’m not sure how to explain it except that Naomi Vizcaino - with her references to the past and the originality of her ideas - makes her project ideas feel especially artistic. (TikTok)

Postcards

Here is my dog, not barking at another dog.

Here is milkweed with floss so soft I think of a grandmother’s hair.

Here is a view of the fallen tree across the river.

Here, through a tangle of trees, I spy some that seem almost decorated in the sunlight… red berries, leaves that shimmer…

And behold! Captured here is the first snow!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 35)

Perfectionism

So I was listening to this podcast (The Good Ship Illustration) because it featured an interview with an artist I follow on Youtube, Sandi Hester. In the course of the interview, Hester put her finger on why I enjoy watching her Youtube videos so much… She says:

You just get to be a fly on the wall over the years that I’ve been a professional artist, just working through [negative self-talk] and working on muscles to think rightly about my creative process. It’s not as draining anymore. I don’t feel like every single piece I create has to be a masterpiece.

I think negative self-talk and perfectionism are two sides to a coin, but each one reminds me of people who’ve discussed these two aspects on two different podcasts. The first is Stephen Dubner on Design Matters back in September (I mentioned it here) when he was reflecting on having worked with Angela Duckworth: 

The very basic thing that I came away with is that […] I know the brain is a muscle. I know that. But I never treat it like a muscle. I treat it more like a trampoline, that things will bounce off it and send you into some other direction, right? Someone will say something or do something. You will have an involuntary emotional response. And all of a sudden, you say or do something that is far from the thing that you really wish you had said or done. 

But in fact, your mind or brain is a muscle and you can control it. And I can say, you know what? I recognize what’s happening right now. I just hit a bad shot. I just gave a bad talk. I just embarrassed myself. I was just unkind to someone. And you can say, okay, that’s done. What am I going to do now? I’m going to process that for a minute, see why I did it, try to figure out how to not do that very thing again. And then I’m going to direct my mind, my brain, back to what I want to be working on. […] 

And I think that being a little bit more intentional with your brain as a muscle is a huge, easy win for just about all of us, whether it’s a cognitive thing we’re doing, physical thing, whatever. But you know, the fact that it took me 50-some years to learn that, tells me, at least for me, it’s pretty hard. 

The second is an interview on the Longform podcast from 2018 with another artist, Liana Finck. In it, she describes having evolved her drawing style, from slow and careful, to fast. The podcast host, Evan Ratliff, asks why. She answers:

[…] I decided that I didn’t want to redo things a million times anymore. It’s just, it’s a sin, I think. And so I started drawing very fast. So what people think of as my style is me drawing really fast, and it’s a way to combat the perfectionism. 

Ratliff asks why she calls it a sin. Finck says that a preoccupation with perfectionism is like circular thinking…

It’s this very, very minor thing that’s not even like a real bad thing that’s just getting in the way of you being a person. And it’s kind of a way of incapacitating yourself so that you don’t contribute to the world at all. And I think it’s a way certain people are kept down. And if you indulge in it, you’re collaborating with the people who want to keep you down or the forces that want to keep you down.

I find these thoughts so instructive.

Drawing

I find drawing from memory a challenge. It can lead me to think I have a terrible memory, and to give up (still at the stage of what Martin Salisbury calls “the inevitably demoralizing early results” in Drawing for Illustration). But Andrew Tan’s recent Youtube captures an encouraging tip.

Holiday card tip

I 100% agree with Caroline Chambers advice, having adopted the practice of asking a friend to take our picture for many of our Christmas cards in the past.  

Lamp posts (or one thing leads to another)

I liked this video spotted a few weeks ago shared online… Then Dense Discovery  shared a link to Thomas Moes’ project “52 Weeks of Obsessions” which lead to “Why did we stop building places we want to live in?” which summarizes an article by Nathan J. Robinson. 

I think that’s why I’m especially happy to notice that the improvements being made on the University of Manitoba campus are looking pretty. Look at these lamp-posts! 

Eating

This week I made “Roasted Salmon with Lentils” from Dorie Greenspan’s Around my French Table, satisfying a craving for the “hominess” of this meal, which is simple and tasty. The recipe can be found here.

Postcards 

Winnipeg has been getting lots of rain this fall… I’m happy for the trees. This autumnal humidity brings no mosquitoes with it, only saturated scenes and maybe more mushrooms.

And although I should restrain myself and stick to just one postcard, I can’t help but include these willow trees… Their slender silvery leaves almost make them look soft from a distance. But their trunks? Their strangely wavy branches? It looks like they caught cotton candy clouds in their net.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 34)

Death by execution

I finished reading A Place of Greater Safety this week and transcribed a dozen passages. The book is very long, and having to edit my own thesis makes me reflect on how much of a labour it must have been for Mantel to edit some 800 pages. Nonetheless, there are two lengthier quotes I really liked on the subject of the guillotine. Mantel neatly describes the first execution in 1762 for which the guillotine is used:

April 25, 1762 - Scientific and Democratic Execution of Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, highway robber.

There are bigger crowds than for any ordinary execution, and an air of anticipation. The executioners, of course, have been practising with dummies; they look quite buoyant, and they are nodding to each other, putting each other on their honour not to make a blunder. Yet there’s nothing to fear, the machine does everything. It is mounted on a scaffold, a big frame with a heavy blade. The criminal ascends with his guards. He is not to suffer, because in France the age of barbarism is over, superseded by a machine, approved by a committee.

Moving quickly, the executioners surround the man, bind him to a plank, and slide it forward; swoop of the blade, a soft thud, and a sudden carpet of blood. The crowd sighs, its members look at each other in disbelief. It is all over so soon, there is no spectacle. They cannot see that the man can be dead. One of Sanson’s assistants looks up at him, and the master executioner nods. The young man lifts the leather bag into which the head has fallen, and picks out the dripping contents. He holds the head up to the crowd, turning slowly to each quarter to show the empty, expressionless face. Good enough. They are placated. A few women pick up their children so that they can see better. The dead man’s trunk is cut free and rolled into a big wicker basket to be taken away; the severed head is placed between the feet.

All in all, including holding up the head (which will not always be necessary), it has taken just five minutes. The master executioner estimates that the time could be cut almost by half, if time were ever important. He and his assistants and apprentices are divided over the new device. It is convenient, true, and humane; you cannot believe that the man feels any pain. But it looks so easy; people will be thinking that there is no skill in it, that anyone can be an executioner. The profession feels itself undermined. Only the previous year, the Assembly had debated the question of capital punishment, and the popular deputy Robespierre had actually pleaded for it to be abolished. They said he still felt strongly about the question, was hopeful of success. But that deep-thinking man, M. Sanson, feels that M. Robespierre is out of step with public opinion, on this point. (p 416-7)

Then, 300 pages later, we, the reader, are in 1793 and Mantel enters the head of the executioner and delivers his point of view. It's not neat anymore.

His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. The kind of money he can offer doesn’t attract people to the work. He has to pay for his own cord for binding the clients, and for the big wicker baskets to take the corpses away afterwards. A first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there were problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes. People down there don’t realize, but he sometimes gets splashed right up to his knees.

It’s heavy work. If you get someone who’s tried to do away with himself beforehand, he can be in a mess, maybe collapsed through poison or loss of blood, and you can strain your back trying to drag him into position under the blade. Recently Citizen Fouquier insisted they guillotine a corpse, which everybody thought was a lot of unnecessary work. Again, take someone who’s crippled or deformed; they can’t be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can’t see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he’d have fewer problems, but it’s surprising how few of them fall into all those categories. The citizens who live nearby complain that he doesn’t put down enough sawdust to soak up the blood, and the smell becomes offensive. The machine itself is quiet, efficient, reliable; but of course he has to pay the man who sharpens the knife.

He’s trying to make the operation as efficient as he can, get the speed up. Fouquier shouldn’t complain. Take the Brissotins; twenty-one, plus the corpse, in thirty-six minutes flat. He couldn’t spare a skilled man to time it, but he’d got a friendly spectator to stand by with his watch: just in case he heard any complaints.

In the old days the executioner was esteemed; he was looked up to. There was a special lady to prevent people calling him rude names. He had a regular audience who came to see skilled work, and they appreciated any little troubles he took. People came to executions because they wanted to; but some of these old women, knitting for the war effort, you can see they’ve been paid to sit there, and they can’t wait to get away and drink up the proceeds; and the National Guardsmen, who have to attend, are sickened off after a few days of it.

Once the executioner had a special Mass said for the soul of the condemned; but you couldn’t do that now. They’re numbers on a list now. You feel that before this death had distinction; for your clients it was a special, individual end. For them you had risen early and prayed and dressed in scarlet, composed a marmoreal face and cut a flower for your coat. But now they come in carts like calves, mouths sagging like calves’ and their eyes dull, stunned into passivity by the speed with which they’ve been herded from their judgement to their deaths; it is not an art any longer, it is more like working in a slaughterhouse. (p 724-5)

The idea of capital punishment, and the use of a guillotine, can feel distant, but the latest season of Revisionist History and the discussion of capital punishment by lethal injection seems to be showing that the idea of having "improved" it is illusory. 

Mr Enzo

Our dog sits tall and dignified, and places his paws so neatly between his front legs. See our collection of decorative gourds on the table? But wait... is that a freely roaming cat outside? Is that terrier wearing A RAINCOAT? Forget the pose! Forget the neatly placed paws! It's time to howl with indignation!

He is the dog who thinks we buy pillows from IKEA just for him.

Overheard

On People I Mostly Admire, guest Frances Arnold describes when she became interested in chemistry:

I think I got a D in Chemistry when I was at Princeton, and I wasn't at all interested in it, so I didn't spend any time with it. But then when I was a graduate student and I loved enzymes, Chemistry suddenly became fascinating. So it was the context. We don't give young people enough context for them to become fascinated about getting into the nitty gritty.

Feeling vs Acting

On a rebroadcast episode of Freakonomics, titled “Can We Break Our Addiction to Contempt”, guest Arthur Brooks describes what he means by love:

What I'm talking about is the love that we manage, that we make metacognitive. So love is a verb. It is to will the good of the other as other. What is love not? It's not a feeling. And this is incredibly important to remember because in our modern culture, we tend to [...] over valorize feelings, which tends to throw us like bits of jetsum on the surf. And we're getting thrown around a lot, but it makes our lives have less quality, quite frankly, and it makes us bitter and angry and it makes us suffer a lot more than we need to.

Sometimes, to break loose of a bout of procrastination, I google for help. This Harvard Business Review article had the reminder I needed... I shouldn’t take myself seriously when I don't “feel” like doing something... I should just do it. Just like Kate Bingaman-Burt writes, “You don't need to feel creative to be creative”. (Here)

Food

Two weeks ago, we celebrated Thanksgiving (on Sunday October 12th!) and 10 minutes before our guests arrived with their well-wishes and bottle of wine, the power went out in our neighbourhood. We were surprisingly well-prepared (stuffing made the night before, pie chilling in the fridge since the morning, scalloped potatoes assembled, chickens buttered and stuffed with onions) so that all we did was transport everything to Christian's mom's condo and cook it there. And good thing... the power was out from 3:50 to 6:20.

Here we are each with our own set of headphones, listening to our own thing, as blithely unaware cooks prepping the components of a meal ahead of time. (Christian is assembling a lasagna for the next day.)

For dessert, we had A Pumpkin Chiffon Pie from Canal House Cooks Everyday, made with a regular pie crust (rather than the ginger snap one suggested). Our family and guests prefer it to the traditional pie that calls for cream cheese in the filling, because this version, made with gelatin and egg whites, feels much lighter. (Recipe here, thanks to The Splendid Table.) 

In the spirit of Halloween

The pop-up store by the same name contains not even a glimmer of the delight I feel watching this short video (Instagram) of Jessica Lowe’s creation of an armadillo costume for her 7-year-old.

Postcards

It's such a pretty time of year at Henteleff Park...

Condo-building progresses with The Banks at 1918 St. Mary's Road and 1920 SMR apartments right beside. 

Frost has fringed these flowers so prettily!

The milkweed looks lovely in its decay.

Happy Sunday!

P.S. A little thought for my brother-in-law who's hunkered-down in Port Antonio as the island faces hurricane Melissa. (We visited in 2024.)

A week on Sunday (no. 33)

Grace

Recently, listening to the latest season of Revisionist History (The Alabama Murders) Malcolm Gladwell describes a particular group of Protestants (Church of Christ) as being especially strict. One of the words he uses, in making his point, is “grace”. He uses it in contrast to shame, or rather, he says that when you feel a lot of shame, it can sometimes be because there is a lack of grace:

When you’re in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche.

In the absence of any sort of constructive grace, and I don’t mean by that, some flabby sense of, oh, everything’s-ok-grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, […] it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness. […]

What [Lee C. Camp] was saying, and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was that their church, particularly their church in that era, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace.

[…] Because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression.

But grace is greater than just “relief from transgression”. It reminded me of the end of an episode of This is Actually Happening… A doctor named Tony Dajer talked about a patient he helped on the day of the Twin Tower attack. The patient had been transferred to another hospital and Dajer decided to visit him, to “have a face, to know of somebody that we had taken care of that I could get to know a little more.” The patient had been rendered paraplegic, and Dajer feared that the patient’s wife would be distraught… Instead,

the wife shows up, and it was probably the most unexpected moment of grace in my whole life. She was just, “look, you saved him. Whatever time I had with him, without you, he wouldn’t even be here” and just left us speechless. She was radiant with gratitude and love and “oh, my God, what you guys must have gone through on 9-11,” and “thank you for saving my husband.”

The husband died a few months later, but the doctor and that woman kept in touch. Dajer says:

she visits every now and then, and it’s a touchstone that keeps me connected and forgiven and understanding of what happened. […] What she showed me was that even in the depths of her grief, that somehow her love for him spilled over to us was almost a miracle. That sense of her taking care of us when it’s supposed to be completely the other way around was what was so powerful.

I have never seen another human being so represent what grace means. It’s a human standard that because she can do it, means it can be done, and it is possible to be that way.

The definition of grace in the OED starts with its theological origin. It is “benevolence […], bestowed freely and without regard to merit”. And benevolence is the “disposition to do good, […] to promote the happiness of others”. Grace can also be the expression of gratitude (Thanksgiving is “action de grâce” in French, a literal “giving grace”!). Considering all this, grace feels like an especially potent word and something to aspire to. Grace heals… not just the person who receives it, but the person who chooses to bestow it.

Whereas that doctor found that it stopped him in his tracks, an experience which he gifts listeners of the podcast with the words to translate the intensity of the feeling, I think we aren’t granted such profundity every day… Most days, I suspect, grace flows, if it is unobstructed, like a little stream. I think it can look as mundane as a man taking care of his father with Alzheimer’s, a strength hidden in the willingness of his care for his family despite the merit of his freedom having been unfairly judged. That’s what came to mind listening to In the Dark’s season 2 update, here.

(Grace, previously mentioned.)  

Keeping a diary

I liked what Peter Elbow writes about keeping a diary in his book Writing Without Teachers:

One of the functions of a diary is to create the interaction between you and symbols on paper. If you have strong feelings and then write them down freely, it gives you on the one hand some distance and control, but on the other hand it often makes you feel those feelings more. For you can often allow yourself to feel something more if you are not so helpless and lost in the middle of it. So the writing helps you feel the feeling and then go on to feel the next feelings. Not be stuck. (p. 56)

(I also like how the colour of my sticky notes perfectly matches the pages in this book!)

Food (the subject)

Sometimes, things connect in a delightful way… First, there’s the mild curiosity over the old recipes you can come across while browsing newspaper archives. You kind of wonder, half in passing, if that dish, whose black and white picture is rendered in ink blots, would actually taste good today. 

This recipe, featured in July 1956, is a frozen dessert. It has a crust made of pulverized sugary cereal and butter. The filling is milk, cream, almond extract and instant pudding whipped together for a minute and then set to freeze for 4 hours. It is called a Frozen Royal Pie. Who knows? Maybe it’s delicious! (This is also the newspaper edition that features Christian’s grandpa’s death on page 4.)

Then second, by chance, a podcast asks the same question, going further into the past, and answering with a bit more academic rigour. (At one point in the podcast, the guest, Marieke Hendricksen, muses about one of their experiments, “it also brought home to me that because people ate so many fermented foods, they must have had a higher histamine tolerance than we had.”)

But wait! There’s a third link! There’s this story of Rosie Grant (This is Taste podcast) who collected recipes carved into gravestones and lovingly gathered them into a cookbook titled To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. She’s been documenting her discoveries (Instagram: Ghostly Archive) and when asked about any changes of perspective she had since beginning the project, she answered:

Oh my gosh, so much appreciation for our home cooks. […] On the flip side [of professional chefs] there are people who are just like everyday cooks who really love food. 

They use food to show love. They use it to celebrate someone’s birthday or to celebrate a holiday and bring people together. And there’s a real, like a labor side and gift side to it as well. […] 

Every day I just feel like I have so much appreciation for even my own family members who use food to not only nourish me, but give me some of my best childhood memories to connect me with others. 

I like food best when I’m with a loved one or friend and we’re having dinner or we’re cooking. It’s just given me a lot more of a sense of how it connects us together.”

Eating 

Would you like to see this Nutella croissant from Le Croissant, where I was invited for lunch earlier this week? I was one bite in to my half before my (kind, less voracious) lunch partner suggested a picture of our meal. It was too late for the muffuletta sandwich… But the table decorations were cute!

This week, I made Tikka Masala from The Huckle and Goose Cookbook, a recipe filed away for occasions when I’d need to use up garden tomatoes that were all together ripening, ripening, ripening.  

The boys tried one of their uncles’ favourite desserts… a slice of Wafer Pie from Salisbury House (Instagram). It might not win top spot in their heart, but they didn’t detest it either.

And, in the spirit of the season, I picked up this cookie mix from the Bruxelles General Store last week, made it and served the cookies with a cinnamon glaze to the kids gathered at our house for a playdate. 

PostcardS

Fall is advertised for its colour, but pictures from walks this week advertise its texture instead… the silver pearls of a heavy dew, the ragged cutout shape of maple leaves on the ground, and the fuzzy softness of a plant going to seed…

Happy Sunday! Happy Thanksgiving!

A week on Sunday (no. 32)

Quote

Listening to an interview with Arundhati Roy lead me to reading her short essay titled “The End of Imagination”. Published in 1998, she wrote it in response to India's testing of nuclear weapons. 

I liked these two paragraphs in particular:

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way. (...)

The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four billion, six hundred million year old. 

It could end in an afternoon.

Picturesque

I remember a university class in English literature that featured poetry by Wordsworth and Byron and the idea of their seeking "the picturesque". On Tuesday, we went on a similar quest and visited Bruxelles, a town with a church resembling Aubigny's, and a small grocery store. We found the rock indicating the town's original location, climbed the hill where the town began and commented on the view.

(This was following the footsteps a friend and I traced together last year.) We visited Cardinal too, where the little church is maintained, just like it was when we visited 21 years ago as a couple.

And then we struggled a little to find St. Lupicin, eventually did, and then went up and down the scenic, sunken, winding Snow Valley Road. Along it we discovered Leary's Brickworks, obeyed the sign and looked it up later. It's a long defunct brickmaking business that nonetheless has some attractive ruins. (The chimney seen from the road could be mistaken for a piece of modern art.)   

Happiness

It's easier to be annoyed and grim and dissatisfied and worried and blue and verklempt than it is to be happy and hopeful. I think that's why I so appreciated this bit from the Blackbird Spyplane newsletter that quotes an article (from May of 2020) on P.G. Wodehouse, whose author, Rivka Galchen, writes: “Wodehouse had a rarer trait, too: a capacity for remaining interested and curious, even in a setting of deprivation. His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was.”

Blackbird Spyplane authors Jonah and Erin agree with Galchen. In thinking about happiness they write:

[…] there are different forms of happiness, aren’t there?

In the same way that extravagance isn’t inherently immoral, neither is happiness inherently moral. And it feels reasonable to suggest that, in order for happiness to count as moral — which is to say, for happiness to count as truly nourishing — it must have a pro-social component. It’s got to be based in an awareness, rather than an avoidance, of how much we owe to others.

Their reflection makes me think about another example Galchen offers of Wodehouse in her article... In the diary he kept while interned in a German-run camp in 1940, he writes “Met cook and congratulated him on today’s soup. [...] He was grateful, because his professional pride had been wounded by grumblers saying there wasn’t enough. He said he could have made it more by adding water, which would have spoiled it.” 

It's that tiny act of gratitude, the example of going above what I could imagine my own natural inclination to grumble, or be quiet, how that lead to a moment of... what? Beauty? Kinship? Surprise? However it might be defined, it contains a bit of delight that would otherwise have been absent... would have been denied the chance to exist. 

TV watching

We started watching Friday Night Lights in May of this year, and could reliably count on feeling relaxed with this series "that centered itself completely on decency" as Glen Weldon says here. Having finished (appropriately) on Friday, we started The Eternaut and some minutes into this sci-fi that begins with mysterious atmospheric conditions, a storm broke over Winnipeg with thunder and lightning, making it feel particularly eerie.

Baking

I'm always willing to try a new recipe if it leads to more effectively tackling garden produce, and Deb Perelman recently published a chocolate version of her Ultimate Zucchini Bread. I baked it on Wednesday and served it on Thursday and took a poll on Friday and the family agrees... it did not beat the UZB! But hey... it's not like they're complaining about the leftovers... 

Postcard

It's the time of year when the trees de-leaf and reveal... the river beyond.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 31)

I don’t have much to list this week, except the the simple things gathered on the daily morning walks… Like milkweed seeds, once dried after a rain, that show such silky softness:

Or, a landscape transformed by fog…

Suddenly, in the moistened air, strands of spider webs are revealed everywhere…

Now it’s the wild field that is aflame, and the river behind it has disappeared:

The sun’s rays become a gentle softness…

The next day, walking the same path, you can gaze up, startled by the contrast of yellow and blue, and find the sky cleaved in two, and seagulls so high that in the camera viewfinder you can mistake the glints of sunlight on their wings for leaves being blown off the trees…

These are the little things that, being so anodyne, are what soothe the soul.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 30)

Intro

The past week was a busy one, and on weeks like that, it's less about enumerating the things that leant it weight, than about gathering the moments of light that peeped through.

Listening

My podcast feed has been full of inspiring interviews...

First, there was Stephen Dubner on Debbie Millman's “Design Matters” podcast who said:

Some things are abundant that are bad. But then there's one thing that I think is rare, is too rare, that's a good thing, and that thing is courage. I just think people need to understand that they need to give themselves permission to be courageous about everything, about who they are, about what they make, about what they think." [...] "I think courage is the precursor to confidence.

He also talked about using the brain as a muscle and choosing not to ruminate. 

Second, I've been enjoying seeing Samin Nosrat's return to the public eye with the publication of a second recipe book. Even more, I've appreciated how kindly she's shared pertinent bits of her biography with hosts. Recently, there was an episode on Milk Street Radio for example. 

The third interview encapsulates the gratitude I have for podcasts. Life can be so busy as to prevent me from reading for fun, but podcasts such as the ones mentioned are a gift... just like Terry Gross says on Sam Fragoso’s podcast “Talk Easy”, when she thinks back to radio shows she enjoyed:

I also realized when you're doing something that isn't really engaging your mind, how wonderful it is to have something to listen to, that your eyes aren't required for, but you can feed yourself on it. It keeps you emotionally and mentally fed. 

Floral

Fall bouquets can be vibrantly filled with orange and red... or they can take on more muted tones, like this one, with ornamental kale and cabbage.

Eating Out

There are many good lunch spots in Winnipeg, and most of the fun is in getting around to experience for yourself a random TikTok recommendation. This week friends and I went to Next Door at 116 Sherbrook for the first time. It was a 10/10 for atmosphere, kind staff and delicious mango jam!

At the opposite end of “lunch out with friends in an artsy part of town” is an old establishment uniquely favoured by my mother-in-law... It’s Red Top on St. Mary’s Road, where she is such a loyal customer that they will fry up a plate of eggs and sausage for her at 6:45 in the evening. It was a surprisingly cozy feeling to be sitting in a booth while darkness descended and the skies continued to rain down on us. (The sausage btw was my favourite ever served in a restaurant so far...)

Postcard

Isn't fall pretty here?

Hope you are well. Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 29)

Intro

Life's little upheavals that take me away from the finely-honed desk routine, that - granted permission in the name of flexibility - impinge on otherwise "ruthlessly managed" spare time, leave me sometimes in a restless craving for creativity. In fact, I think that's an understatement. 

When I can't sit and write, the air suddenly feels thinner. 

The strange thing is that at a remove from this practice, I get a little delusional... I start having doubts, like, "Surely, this writing is frivolous!" But then I start feeling ill and joyless and I have to rush myself back into this practice. The very thing you're reading is my cure against narcissism; it is an inherently humble way of sharing what I’m doing and thinking about.

Daytrip

Upheavals in my life aren't bad... summers in Manitoba are amazing and to be taken full advantage of. We joined friends for a little excursion to Steep Rock

where we ate lunch

borrowed a paddleboard

and watched the sun set.

And various other things...

Our godson made the local French-community newspaper La Liberté and I sent him pictures of us reading the article, as well as this little spoof:

Normally Christian plants a cherry tomato plant beside the garage door, but this year, the tomato size turned out to be unexpectedly small. They're a candy-tomato variety that are eaten like tomato-flavoured blueberries.

Leave them out on the counter to dry, and your son might rearrange them like so:

Enjoyed

This Canadaland episode on the Hudson's Bay history, apparently now for sale, had Taylor Noakes on as a guest, and at one point, commenting on Canada's history, he said: “I personally think that [...] a lot of Canadians, unfortunately, are really not comfortable with the complexity of Canada's history. I mean, this idea has practically been hammered into our own heads for decades that our history is not interesting.” 

That “not interesting” bit is kindling to the fire of any historical research I do!

In the latest episode of What It's Like to Be... Dan Heath interviews a speechwriter. I liked the whole episode, but I especially liked how the guest, Stephen Krupin, in answer to what “aspect [he] consistently savors” says:

I love in the writing process when you feel a puzzle piece clicking into place. Either a narrative device that through trial and error you discover and it holds the whole speech together, or a detail in the research or from history that vividly tells a story or an anecdote that serves as a perfect metaphor or maybe a counterintuitive twist that surprises the audience. When you find those and you think “this is something I can build everything else around”, or, “I can nail an ending, or nail the end of a section”, that feels really good.

Eating

For the longest time, my lunch has revolved around two eggs.

But recently, to follow in my fibre-preaching husband's footsteps, to not let this bag of Red River Cereal linger in the pantry and expire, I switched the main component, and now lunch looks more like this.

It feels healthful.

While I feel the same as Adam Roberts does about people's dietary restrictions... that they can be viewed “as fun, creative challenges,” I like to think that the attitude can be expanded to encompass my own family's food preferences. A recent win in favour of this point is Christian's comment that the only recipe in his whole life in which he actually likes black beans, is Deb Perelman's Swiss Chard Enchiladas. (You can have a peek on Amazon). (And yes, I've mentionned them before!)

Postcards

At the end of summer, plants look a little discheveled. The green has faded, and weeds, having claimed a space in the sun, stand about as tree leaves gather along the path they border.

The berries are abundant and colourful this year.

And some mornings this week have been so calm that the river was transformed to glass.

Trees are turning yellow, and geese are arriving…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 28)

Lowly (Earthworm-Inspired thoughts)

Memories are a funny thing… a link from Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter Curious About Everything to an article about earthworms vividly reminded me of having seen a (Canadian? National?) Geographic Issue with night-time earthworm-catchers on the cover. I’m sure of it! So sure of it that I feel old, and that the link in Ettenberg’s newsletter is like déjà vu, and has me tut-tutting young journalists for covering the same ground. The fact that I am given to that impulse, however light-hearted, makes me regret losing the enthusiasm I could summon when I felt like the world was full of possibility for any story idea that could pop into my head. All this to say that, here I sit in my comfortable mid-life teetering between that kind of can-do energy that lit straw-thoughts on fire, and a growing appreciation for something like lived experience… the glowing embers of steady heat. 

I don’t particularly care about earthworms. Why would that supposed (Canadian? National?) Geographic cover from when I was young struck such an impression on my imagination? “The worm hunters of Ontario’s” author Inori Roy does mention the spices and their having been imported from Europe… something I hadn’t known before until I read Candace Savage’s book Prairie (previously mentionned). On the prairie, ants are the dirt-moving stars: “So, despite everything we've heard to the contrary, the presence of earthworms in the soil is not always a mark of good health. Across much of the Great Plains, it is a prime indicator of disturbance. In arid regions, the work of digesting organic matter is assigned by nature not to tender worms but to the invincible legions of drought-hardy microorganisms. (...) Given their impact on prairie soil, it could almost be said that ants are the earthworms of the Great Plains Grasslands.” (p 93)

(This local artist made really cute worms a few years ago… See here.)

Attempting to find that cover in the archives, I came across this recent article titled “The silent migration beneath our feet” and felt, after having read it, a little bit of that old enthusiasm flicker. It ignites when the world feels big and unknown again.

Reading

I’m almost 200 pages into A Place of Greater Safety and rarely share books mid-read. However I couldn’t restrain myself from making a few observations. First, I find Hilary Mantel’s writing so funny. Take her depiction of Robespierre, who, from what I remember, became some kind of fanatic in the French Revolution, but here, is introduced to the reader as a young man with a careful diet and a demanding dog: 

…he eats some fruit, takes a cup of coffee and a little red wine well diluted. How can they do it, tumble out of court roaring and backslapping, after a morning shouting each other down? Then back to their houses to drink and tine, to address themselves to slabs of red meat? He has never learned the trick.

After his meal he takes a walk, whether it is fine or not, because dog Brount does not care about the weather and makes trouble with his loping about if he is kept indoors. He lets Brount tow him through the streets, the woods, the fields; they come home looking not nearly so respectable as when they went out. Sister Charlotte says, “Don’t bring that muddy dog in here.” (p 99-100)

The examples are too numerous really… Heading out on a little family road trip to the beach and chuckling over this paragraph obliges me to read it out loud:

The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads. (p 11)

Incidentally, this book set against a view of Lake Winnipeg, is very pretty.

It’s very entertaining, but I catch myself wondering, a little suspiciously, if I want to trust this author? What an amazing talent, to tell me this story, as if she’s beside me, confiding all these details to me with a sly smile, delighting in my disbelief.

I broke away from the book to try and find her in “real-life”. I listened to a lecture. I thought I might catch a nap, but was instead fully awakened to subjects I love: writing, and the differences between historians and novelists who write historical fiction. She talks as I imagine she writes: smilingly. 

Eating

We pulled up some potatoes from the garden, mashed them and served them alongside Julia Turshen’s Rascal House Cabbage Rolls from Simply Julia, and these have been declared the best version of cabbage roll so far. Hooray for good recipes and Jardins St. Léon that sells Savoy cabbage! For dessert we served Panna Cotta with Rhubarb Compote (à la Catherine Newman), following the original, smaller amount recipe from Splendid Table.  It was a nice meal!

Decisions, decisions

I liked Elspeth Kirkman’s tips on making decisions on TikTok and have often used them myself. I’m not sure if I’m more decisive, but at least I don’t dither so long.

Postcard

A week ago we spent time at Albert Beach. As we were leaving, the sky looked like this:

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 27)

Reading

Last month I picked up Peter Taylor’s A Summons To Memphis to read in spare moments during our road trip West. Taylor’s writing floats the reader along a lazy river of attenuated events, such that the book was done before the visit was over. It begins genially enough but soon, as Francine Prose writes: “discord [in the family] will turn out to have less to do with property and real estate than with resentment, revenge, power, the inability to love, and the impulse to control and destroy one another’s lives.” (p 102) (Maybe that’s why I felt a little let down at the end? I get duped by seemingly-optimistic tones at the beginning of things.)

A passage I liked from the book reads:

During the days and weeks that followed Holly and I talked of almost nothing by our two families and of the problems of looking after old people - of looking after aged parents in particular. Holly was meanwhile receiving letters about her father’s discontent with the ‘retirement home’ that he had been moved to. Any my sisters begin writing me about the new onset of Father’s neuropathy and his senile diabetes. In both cases - mine and Holly’s - we were urged to come home, if only to help cheer the patients. We neither of us considered going, but we went on talking about our fathers. If one could not bear to be with them, if only because of temperament, then how was one to offer protection and care? We were like a couple that finds itself bringing up children when there is no natural liking for children in either parent. (p 156)

Another book from the reading list done!

Emotional intelligence

Previous to watching this short video, I’m not sure I could have explained what co-dependency meant. Having watched it now more than once, and recognizing that it is a tendency I often had in the past, I’m relieved to see that age and maturity have, first, given me the awareness to notice it, and second, the security to move away from it.

In her latest newsletter, Mckinley Valentine writes about a distinction between use of the words “trauma” and “conditioning” that I really liked. It can be found under the heading “Unsolicited Advice” and I would be doing it a disservice to copy and paste only a part of the (already fairly short) section.

Relatable

Sometimes you hear someone else say something you yourself have felt but never expressed. It’s like that person got in your head and delivered your opinion for you. This week, it happened while reading Leandra Medine Cohen’s substack The Cereal Aisle. She writes:

I think the greatest insight from this vantage is that I max out at like, ten days of not doing anything. 5-6 days is the sweet spot for a recharge. Day 10 is when the direction of the slope changes — like the peak turns towards valley. You know what though? While in the past I’ve convinced myself that this difficulty bathing in the blankness has meant that I am addicted to productivity like it is a Very Bad Thing — the function of my free mind’s possession by a culture gone terribly awry, I am more convinced now that it more likely reinforces the idea that purpose gives us meaning. Getting up everyday and having something to do is a blessing in and of itself. Loving what you do is practically euphoria.

There’s a freedom in recognizing this, even more in actually articulating it because now I know: every time that lazy voice comes out to be like, “But I don’t wanna!,” there is another voice to challenge it from right around the corner being like, “Lol, yes you do.”

And indeed, making supper for the family after a four-day hiatus, getting to sit at my desk and resume mundane projects make me happy!

Celebrating a birthday

We celebrated our newly 11-year old’s birthday this week with a first-time visit to Winnipeg’s Vertical Adventures.

We all stepped into a harness and after a brief demonstration, attempted climbs according to difficulty. It was a relaxed, novel way to spend an hour or so together.

Being on the opposite end of the city was a little like being a tourist and we stopped at Buffet Square for supper and visited Young’s Market in search of an ice-cream treat I’d seen described on TikTok.

(They were out! But it was ok… everyone was still full from the buffet!)

Eating

This week we tried the latest from Deb Perelman’s website, a Grilled Chicken Salad with Cilantro-Lime Dressing, and wow! A real weeknight treat: easy to make, unexpectedly delicious, and, if you lay it out “composed” style (i.e. each ingredient piled separately), the kids can choose what they like. In fact, Christian suggested we make it a second time for his family on Sunday.  

Guest Adam Roberts on the podcast “The Dinner Plan” has three rules for hosting: 1. Never let them see you sweat. 2. Pace it out so that it’s not rushed. 3. Don’t skimp on dessert. While I’m still working on rules 1 and 2, I must say the third has never once been a problem for me. I love dessert. Sometimes it’s the first thing I think about. My son requested brownies, and so I went all in with a classic; Ina Garten’s Outrageous Brownies. And they were perfect!

Postcards

I’ve been taking walks in the evening, and am loathe to bring my phone along on hot days when I’d prefer to make my way as lightly as possible. I think it’s one of the aspects of summer that is so enjoyable… you can up and go with pants and a t-shirt and little else. Scenic pictures are therefore lacking. Should we do the dog instead, in a funny stair-case posture? 

Or our friends’ cat, that is a breed called Ragdoll? (So soft!)

Or my favourite penguin, since spotting it at the Calgary zoo? (It’s called macaroni penguin!)

(Thanks to MH and Anna for sharing Enzo and penguin pictures!)

Wishing you a lovely week ahead!