Friday Five

1 Podcasts

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

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

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

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

2 Department stores

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

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

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

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

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

3 A lemon dessert

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

4 Robert Caro

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

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

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

5 The view here

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

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

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

1 Flowers

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

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

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

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

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

2 The Worst Journey in the World

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

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

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

3 Wine

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

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

4 The dog

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

5 The view

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

Happy Friday!

Happy Friday!

Listening

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

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

Eating

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

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

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

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