Friday Five

Let’s not be ponderous this week… let’s aim for short for once, eh? How about…

1 Working on…

I just found a haystack and decided there’s a needle in it that would be really satisfying to find… My mother-in-law worked at Eaton’s for about 7 years, and Eaton’s published their own newsletter, complete with photos and news about their staff. Wouldn’t it be funny if she were mentioned in one of those editions? I’m itching to get back to the Internet Archive…

2 recommending…

I’m having a lot of fun making a list of recommendations on various subjects in various media forms of things I’ve most enjoyed reading, listening to and watching over the years. Check it out here: https://www.jacintapalud.com/recommended

3 Baking

I didn’t make a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but the can of pumpkin purée has served for pumpkin cinnamon rolls, loaf and cookies and all three recipes have had high approval ratings in this household.

4 Viewing

Last Friday, a friend took me to Bruxelles, Manitoba for a tour of the region, just as she was treated to its discovery by a local family who welcomed her to Manitoba a few decades ago… It is a little magical to visit land and be gifted a closeness to someone’s attachment for it. And really… the view on that fall day was stunning…

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to another round of things I’m thinking about while supervising a pot of chickpeas on the stove…

1 The “In Writing” the podcast is back!

Hooray for Hattie Crisell who is back to interviewing writers! Her recently-aired interview with Naomi Klein had me taking screenshots of the automatically-generated transcript, and here is one of my favourite parts, for having experienced it myself in writing my thesis. Talking about research, and about writing so that the language is clear, Naomi Klein says:

This is also why I over research, is that I think you need to get a level of confidence to be able to simplify, to be able to popularize. I think you’re most likely to imitate when you’re not confident in your grasp of the material. You’ve got to mess around a bit. In order to play with form, you have to really marinate the material.

2 Eatons - sigh

I’m glad I finished reading Rod McQueen’s book about the family. For a slim volume, he managed to fit in five generations of the Eaton family, and a hundred years of the store’s history between two deep blue covers and an index. It surely wasn’t a small feat of research and guts… one of the blurbs for the book include a quote from a member of the Eaton family reasonably annoyed with the scrutiny.

A dispiriting read nonetheless.

3 Spooky Lakes

It’s Spooky Lakes Month on TikTok and if you don’t know what that means, I would like to take this moment to recommend Geo Rutherford’s channel geodesaurus on TikTok. Eating lunch during the month of October with fresh videos of “haunted hydrology” is way more fun. And she recently published a book!

4 Eating

Sometimes its nice to take a break from ambitious meals and all that striving to tackle new recipes, conquer techniques and explore new flavours. Sometimes its nice just to be able to trust an expert with a simple plan… some chicken thighs, some potatoes, some chickpeas from a can, a squeeze of lemon, a dash of oregano… thanks Smitten Kitchen… even the kids likes this “as simple as its title” meal.

5 The view

We got frost this week, and until the sun melted it away, my morning walk was crystalline.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1 Podcasts

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

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

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

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

2 Department stores

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

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

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

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

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

3 A lemon dessert

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

4 Robert Caro

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

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

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

5 The view here

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

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1.

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

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

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

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

Happy Friday!