A week on Sunday 21/52

Writing and creativity

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

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

And:

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

(Via) 

Enjoying

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

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

Greenhouses + flowers

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

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

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

A selection of flowers always looks pretty all together… 

In the kitchen

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

Walking the dog

The leaves are only timidly coming through on the trees…

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

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 20/52

Play

Years ago, I read Ray Bradbury’s book Zen in the Art of Writing and nothing else by him. The other day, by chance, I listened to a speech of his from 2001, and then contrasted it with one he gave in 1968. I tried listening to The Martian Chronicles, but relaxed a little better when I switched to Dandelion Wine. In a way, this latter book is like the drink - bottled up thoughts from faraway.

Bradbury in 2001 has strong opinions: “don’t live on your computers” he says. And “don’t let them flim flam you into buying all these devices.” In 1968, to a graduating class, he says: “We all know when we’re getting sick. Don’t you? I think we do. And when we ignore the signals over a period of years, we wind up with a sick individual, or a sick society.” It’s a speech in which he talks about loving what you do and protecting it from the twin temptations of money and academic pretension. There’s a glimpse of idealism. But it gives way to Bradbury’s emphasis on fun. He has a lot of fun writing, he says. “I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with” he writes in the introduction to Dandelion Wine. 

I think it’s his idea of “play” that is infectious… it sounds wholesome, his prescription for reading and writing… And sure, a writer shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. But play becomes a bit of an escape in its own way, when old ladies die full of dignity and grace for example. It’s riddles and fantasy as off ramps from whatever is irresolute in life. That’s what I feel, anyways, listening to Dandelion Wine.

Collage

If writing is work, hobbies are play, and even more fun than drawing (for me), is collage. I started earlier this year and have continued to pursue the practice over weekend evenings. I bought tools for greater precision in cutting, glueing, and placing images and I’ve been having fun catching magazines and flyers for a quick look-through before they go into the recycling bin. The other day I rescued an abandoned children’s book from the ground where it had settled over a few days, its pages blown about and spattered with a few rain drops. In it was a perfectly useful drawing of a seagull! Here’s a handful of tiny “artworks”:

Baking

This week I made Chewy Earl Grey Cookies. Here’s a picture:

Here’s the dog under the plate, wishing one would fall…

Dust

Thursday was an especially windy day… Driving, you could see a haze of dust. 

In the evening it was worse.

Walking the dog

These waves are deceiving… they don’t look like much but for the Red River they are impressive.

This is the forest of fallen-down trees. They’ve been fallen-down for a number of seasons already. They are the regular, mundane, part of our walks.

These are the trees still trying to push out their leaves. It’s been very slow this year.

To end, a picture of the green grass coming through amidst the gold… The sunlight is lovely.

Wishing you… a Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 19/52

Intro

There are weeks that feel bloggier… weeks that I take more pictures, eventful weeks, or weeks where my reading and listening had themes that converged. This wasn’t one of those weeks. I wrote, ran errands, failed a cookie recipe, and set up starter. My husband’s colleague’s chickens have begun laying eggs, and the shades of beige have been nice to see again!

The cold is holding on, but the evening skies glow like in summer… I like how the transmission towers and street lights reflect light from the setting sun…

Swimming - Part 3

(Part 1 here, part 2 here).

“Where your fear is, there is your task.” So says Carl Jung as perfect encouragement for continuing to throw myself into a pool. A bit of the excitement from early days has worn off now… Since last writing, I can swim with my arms and legs, but I still need a snorkel. I’m envious of the older women I see who swim purposefully and peacefully their laps, with fine nonchalance. I’m still afraid of drowning. It’s very much like Kaitlin Frehling describes… the hardest thing to do as an adult learner is to trust the water.   I’ve begun to think of my weekly pool visits as exposure therapy. The next challenge is rolling over in the water. (For example.) I think it’s very scary. 

Cooking

The easiest meal that makes everyone happy in this house is pasta with Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. It’s a nice break on the last day of the week, when you’re happy its the weekend and you’ve reached the end of your ambitious meal plan! What does this “ambitious” look like? Oh, not much really… We had Deb Perelman’s Crispy Lamb and Lentils on Sunday and it was a perfect meal!

Enjoying

1. Last year I listened to this documentary on René Girard and felt a little depressed about his all-encompassing theory, and how widely it was accepted. It was a relief to read an essay this week by Joshua Landy, titled: “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist.” It concludes:  “All in all, then: the Girardian theory is not true; it does not make us better readers; and it’s not an exaggeration of anything important”

2. I liked Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast with Ada Palmer so much I reserved a copy of her book at the library. I brought it home but was too busy to get past the first few chapters before I was obliged to return it for other patrons who requested it. Still, the podcast was a really fun, enthusiasm-sparking listen!

3. This documentary by Samuel-Goldwyn titled The Booksellers was briefly available for free on Youtube and it was a fascinating look into the lives of book collectors… (Another channel has a copy here.) I especially liked the part where some booksellers reflected on the historical aspect of their work: 
   
   “A good bookseller is another kind of discoverer, historiographer, and thinker-of-history… […] They also provide a really important context. That’s why when you acquire things, you generally keep the descriptions they gave because sometimes you see a box - it doesn’t tell you that history that they understand and have done work to understand.” (at 47 minutes) 

Walking the Dog

Some snow…

Some phantom-like fallen tree

The impressive stump of a tree cut down earlier this winter.

And spring tentatively pushing through…

Happy Sunday! 

A week on Sunday 18/52

Intro

A little while ago, in an e-mail to my brother, I declared “The blog helps me to confront, weekly, two struggles: 1) clarifying my thoughts and 2) handling topics that expose opinions I feel vulnerable about.” For the longest time, I thought it was much safer not to have opinions about things and I think that can be felt in the stiffness of earlier writing. Taking a plunge - life is a river in this metaphor - distilling a cup at a time, paddling on; all that is a more vigorous way of living… And so, this week, more reading, more listening, and just a little more opinion.

Finished reading

I’m happy there are so many books on the subject of writing… I can go on in life continuing to find them and take in their little doses of inspiration. Lately I finished a classic; John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. Of the dozen pages bearing a sticky note, I’ll transcribe two quotes that are in fact pieces of advice. The first:

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. (p 82)

And the second:

Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. (p 180)

Podcastland

Part of being a fan of the Freakonomics podcast, with host Stephen Dubner, is admiring how he manages to find not just interesting topics (horses!) but also interesting people. Recently he interviewed Judy Faulkner, shining a light on how a company can be run differently than the maximizing profits model I feel trained to accept as normal. It felt like a refreshing point of view.  

The other, less-fun part of being a fan of a podcast and its host, is accepting that they, like you, are paddling a river and can influence you to like and accept something that later, you realize, wasn’t all that great. A case in point is a recent episode of If Books Could Kill. Titled “Grit”, I was reluctant to listen. Grit is Angela Duckworth’s word for a quality associated with success, and I’d been won over by her voice on Steven Levitt’s People I (Mostly) Admire. But here, Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri were going to apply their show’s tagline: “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds”. 

Is it embarrassing to have to revise a previously favourable opinion of something? I used to think so. I used to think that you had to be categorical about things, about people. It’s both harder and more liberating to accept that people are more like fellow travellers than sovereigns; that ideas can be more ephemera than doctrine. 

Collecting

Adding to a previous picture of a bar code I liked, this one, featured on a bag of Pop Corners:

A French audiobook

I liked listening to Veiller sur elle by Jean-Baptiste Andrea. This description of the protagonist’s feat of sculpting a saint, as if he was alive, made me laugh when I heard it:

Il examina le saint François dans mon atelier tandis que Francesco et moi, comme autrefois, attendions  son verdict. J’avais bien travaillé. […] J’avais sculpté François la main levé près de sa joue, un oiseau perché sur l’index. Jusque là, rien d’anormal. Mais l’on devinait par une audace insensé de ma part, que l’aile de l’oiseau avait dû frôler son cou dans la seconde d’avant, le chatouiller, car le saint souriait. On n’avait jamais vu un saint chatouilleux, encore moins souriant, en tout cas, pas en statuaire, où tout les saints arboraient en générale des mines de fonctionnaires divins, harcelés de demandes d’intercession.

In interviews around this book’s winning the Prix Goncourt, (such as here and here) Andrea talks about his love of writing and the priority he gives to a story’s structure. 

A birthday

Enzo, our velvety drapes-for-ears beagle, turned 6 this week, so we gave him some gifts to unwrap.

Baking

Occasionally I’ll get a really specific dessert request, and this week, is was for something simple. Something that didn’t have any hidden “health” to it. No sneaking in some fancy flour, like buckwheat. No fruit and nut-filled batters. I complied and made vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting, thanks to a recipe for both from Smitten Kitchen Every Day. In the quest for interesting flavours and unusual ideas, I sometimes forget that basic can be perfect.

Walking the dog

This week, what caught my eye was texture… more golden grass, more sticks, more curly bark, and hey! Check out the chickadee that landed there!

Sun-drenched texture… from pine tree branches to pussy willows.

And in the forest, where last week we spotted a frog, this week, there was a box.

Do you know what was in the box?

Nothing!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 17/52

Intro

Of what is a week composed? Of daily walks, and small routines. Of BBC News in the morning and bringing my 88-year-old mother-in-law to her eye appointment in the afternoon. Of making a shopping list on Saturday and dessert on Sunday. Of packing lunches in the evening and the impromptu visit of a nephew travelling through Winnipeg on his way elsewhere. Amidst these routines and events, the mind flits elsewhere, a stream of consciousness fed by podcasts and books and little projects. Here’s what caught my attention this week…

Intentional effort

When I was young, I thought that “bothering” was to be avoided, as in “bothering” people, and by extension that the point of life was to get to greater ease. I don’t think that way anymore, and the following quote from William James nicely contradicts the idea of wanting to get to “ease”:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. (Via)

In a similar vein is are two interviews of Stewart Brand who is promoting his latest book titled Maintenance of Everything. There is the idea of care - caring for tools, of “honouring the process of taking care of things and yourself and others” and there is the contrast with a world that is increasingly automated. He says at one point: “we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it.” Stuck in line at a bank for half an hour, then with a teller for an hour and 15 minutes to resolve a small issue made me think “here we are, arguing with robots!”. The intentional effort manifested in the form of equanimity - a kind of caring for each other as we’re dealing with these robots.

Environment

Beau Miles recently concluded a series of videos on four different rivers in Australia, ending with the Murray River. I like how he grapples with being unable to end the story on a satisfying note, and how he includes his conflicting feelings in the video… His friend, Brian Wattchow, suggests “Unfortunately it’s going to have to be managed and rules are going to have to be imposed until we can get a whole new set of values and values for the river. It’s sad but I can’t see personal choice and individual responsibility saving the river at the moment.” His argument is consonant with Andri Snær Magnason’s observation on humility toward nature (quoted here).  

On the subject of rivers, but in Canada, is the CBC’s Ideas podcast episode “What the River Wants to Be”. 

Baking

This week I made Vaughn Vreeland’s Lemon Blueberry Cookies.

There remained, after this recipe, a lot of frozen blueberries left, and so I made a pie. The pie was unphotogenic, but delicious.

Walking the dog

This week, there was a bit of cold weather leftover… just enough to take pictures of the icicles formed on the branches from the preceding days’ higher water levels.

The sun came out, and so there was the view across the water…

I look down when I walk, eyeing the ground, surveilling Enzo who follows his nose everywhere. At one point I looked up and was so delighted to see pussy willows!

The last few mounds of snow that remain covered in grass look like wooly mammoths.

One day this week, we found a frog on our path! 

Enzo’s sniffing  caused it to raise its arms… “Leave me alone!” So we did…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 12/52

Three quotes on writing

There are things that I appreciate being reminded of… I recently opened a commonplace book I had on my desk, to the first page and read the following from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing:

Being a writer is an art of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.
No one else can authorize you.
No one.
This doesn’t happen overnight. 
It’s as gradual as the improvement in your writing.

I came across this quote by David Foster Wallace, on a page I photocopied from Zadie Smith’s book Changing my Mind (p 257). It feels especially pertinent with the advent of A.I.:

I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent… Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all… But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do - from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of The death of Ivan Ilych or the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow - is to “give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. […] Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven.

(The interview can be found here.)

And finally, a little quote from Brenda Ueland:

I have a kind of mystical notion. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too - you can tear them up afterward - for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively. So it is with people who have not been listened to in the right way - with affection and a kind of jolly excitement. Their creative fountain has been blocked. Only superficial talk comes out - what is prissy or gushing or merely nervous. No one has called out of them, by wonderful listening, what is true and alive.

Cooking

This week, we tried Priya Krishna’s “Kaddu” (Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash) and I made a loaf of bread to go along with the meal. Did you know that butternut squash produces a resin-like liquid that can coat your skin almost as permanently? I had no idea until I noticed my left-hand index looking shiny and feeling numb. I wonder if the recipe should not have come with a warning!

Enjoying

1. “Even a moment’s grown-up reflection reveals a very obvious, pretty dull truth to us: most people in the past were not less morally enlightened than us. They were the same — they just lived in a different world, with different structures of oppression.” From an article by Paul Sagar. 

2. Playing Pictionary. I found a first edition at a thrift store last fall and it’s become one of our go-to games when family is visiting. Age doesn’t matter, and we’re either laughing because competition reveals that one of our kids draws something that looks exactly like a carry-on, while yours looks like a lumpy toaster popped a lumpy slice of bread; or else we’re amazed with the other one’s execution of “Middle East”. Rather than using paper, we take a large piece of dry-erase board and set it down on the dining room table and use it from one game to the next.

3. The Thinking Game. I’m familiar with many of the events that form the chronology of this documentary, but seeing them presented as they are here was more satisfying than I expected.  

4. I liked watching how Brook Cormier took a travel experience and made it into a meaningful piece of art for her husband and their home.  

5. I appreciated how The Ezra Klein Show recently interviewed a person who could provide some context for the war in Iran in the person of Ali Vaez.

6. I’m in a season of decluttering, making my way through an accumulation of paper and the organization of an office space. Coincidentally, my mother-in-law is downsizing. Freeing up space and putting things in order is a thing I put off, even though I often enjoy doing it. Learning that Margareta Magnusson of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning died earlier this week made me smile to think that her practical ideas live on… “And people should start early. If your things are in order, then you don’t have to waste time looking for them.” (In my experience, nothing takes longer than paper-related clutter…)

7. I remember first coming across the recommendation for If You Want To Write so many years ago that when I think back to it, the internet by which it was recommended had a different flavour than it does today. Had I thought to google the author’s name to tether the questions she raised in my mind? Was the search unfruitful? Today, I googled Brenda Ueland and came across this article by Alice Kaplan in The American Scholar, (published September 1, 2007) and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Kaplan gives this criticism of Ueland’s writing: “Her biography of Clara (published posthumously under the title O Clouds, Unfold!), a sentimental series of sketches written in the first person, put together with whatever materials came to hand, shows Ueland’s strengths and her failings as a writer. She was headstrong, charming, disorganized, and enthusiastic, without much distance from her own feelings.”  

Postcards

The weather was cold, then windy. There was a snowstorm, then melt. What is enchanting is hearing the songbirds, feeling the glare of a bright sun, and seeing blue skies and impeccably white snow from a fresh snowfall. I can’t quite capture it, but here is a blue sky!

Also… the geese are back! (Since last week!)

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 9/52

History

This week I finished reading Gordon S. Wood’s collection of essays titled The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. Containing 21 reviews of books on the subject of American history, Wood makes observations about the way an author treats a historical subject, and it’s the observations that I appreciate. For example: 

Since we can never completely escape, even imaginatively, from our present, some degree of anachronism is inevitable in all history writing. But any good historian needs constantly to worry about the problem of injecting his or her contemporary consciousness back into the past. (p 39)

History is not a science; it is an art. History needs writers, or artists, who can communicate the past to readers […]. (p 63)

It's the differences, the discrepancies through time, however slight, however marginal, that intrigue and interest them, for cumulatively they tell us how that different, distant past world evolved into our own. (p 82)

It is the historian's responsibility to analyze and evaluate all these different views and narrations and then arrive at as full and as objective an explanation and narration of the events as possible. (p 106)

History writing is creative, and it surely requires imagination, but it is an imagination of a particular sort, sensitive to the differentness of the past and constrained and constricted by the documentary record. (p 107)

[…] historians seek to study past events not to make transhistorical generalizations about human behavior but to understand those events as they actually were, in all their peculiar contexts and circumstances. (p 271)

In my opinion, not everyone who writes about the past is a historian. (p 276)

It is a truism that history writing tends to reflect the times in which it is written. All history is "contemporary history," wrote the Italian historian Benedetto Croce, by which he meant that history is seen mainly through the eyes of the present and in relation to its problems. (p 293)

(I’ve previously quoted Gordon S. Wood from the same book, but on the subject of ideas here.)

And other things

All that being said about history, I was busy away from the computer most hours this week… Having received my diploma by mail, the symbol is one among a few others marking a season of transition and I’ve been sorting through piles and clearing out neglected spaces. At one point, as I was about to empty the shredder, I was struck by the prettiness of what had accumulated inside.

A friend told me that there is such a thing as white beets, and that she plants them in her garden. I went to see for myself… Being unable to make that leap (beet colour feels fundamental to beets…), I instead chose Hakurei turnips, delighted that the Lacoste greenhouse carries them. Amy Thielen writes about them in her cookbook Company describing them: “as round as golf balls, these […] turnips […] are juicy, almost fruity-tasting.” I really look forward to trying them! 

Eating

Isn’t this fresh-year-round Swiss chard pretty? 

This time last year, I made the same Pancetta, White Bean and Swiss Chard Pot Pies.

The novelty this week was serving breaded broccoli, based on a recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. His is fried, not baked. Served alongside General Tso’s Tofu and a pile of lightly flavoured rice, it was a hearty vegetarian meal.

Considerably less effort was Friday night’s Tomato Sauce with Butter and rigatoni with a salty kale salad as a complement.

Baking

I recently made Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace Cookies which turned out like so:

I also made Sarah Fennel’s Cinnamon Roll Cookies (sans cream cheese) and they were so well appreciated, so soon disappeared, that I didn’t have a chance to take a picture as proof. The recipe can be found here.  

Enjoying

1. I like how Orla Stevens, a painter in Scotland, generously shares her reflections on her eponymous Youtube channel. In a recent video, one of her tips (at about the 19 minute mark) is “to not limit yourself. If you’re someone who also thrives off of variety, then allow different side quests to happen while you’re working on a series.” She, for example, likes to sew, and she made her own outfit for an exhibition of her series of paintings. “Giving myself permission to do that made me way more excited to come back to painting. So I think it can be a really good thing to have that variety in our lives.” I can apply this advice to research and writing (like her series of paintings) in contrast with the cooking, baking, and side hobbies (akin to her sewing), and make peace with the fact that indeed, I do like variety.

2. A quote! As I was clearing out stacks of old notes, I found this on a post-it: “The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone [i.e. past] days of virtue work their health into this.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is from the tenth paragraph in an essay of his titled “Self-Reliance.” I tired of reading the essay, but Claude gave me a good summary.

3. On a recent podcast episode of How To Be A Better Human, guest Courtney Martin said this thing I liked: “Because if we only show how bad that leadership is or how corrupt, and we don’t say, ‘look at this other leader who’s doing it this way,’ or ‘look at this other organization’ or ‘look at the state that has figured our this thing,’ then that’s actually holding power accountable because you show that it is possible.” I also really liked this essay of hers from her newsletter “The Examined Life,” titled “It takes a village to love an elder.”

4. I really like the style of Carol Nazatto’s collages… here and here. They feel so considered and imaginative.    

Postcard

Twice this week, Enzo and I spotted a coyote not far from us, but Enzo howls so much, it would be impossible to take a picture. Instead… a little colour contrast… Nature is endlessly inspiring!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 8/52

Painting

This week I primed and painted the wall-mounted shelves Christian made for me in 2024… made of pine, they perfumed the guest-room/office for a year as I let them dry, before applying the special primer this kind of wood takes. Tidying the space this way felt good.

Listening

Painting a piece of furniture takes hours. Some of them I let be silent, the rest I let fill with audio… Jad Abumrad’s podcast series “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” and a French audiobook titled La maison vide by Laurent Mauvignier.

The first line of Mauvignier’s epilogue caught my ear: “C’est par l’invention que l’histoire peut parfois survivre à l’oubli.” (Sometimes it is through invention that a story can survive through time.) And thus, by inventing a story, Mauvignier remedies the pieces of a tragic story that were handed down to him in real life. He says as much in the second interview here (“j’ai l’impression qu’écrire c’est peut-être pour réparer une angoisse de l’enfance; une peur lié à cet enfance…”). And so, as much as I appreciate listening to French fiction for the sound of it in my ears, I’m all the more interested in the real-life connections, the way fiction and facts cross-pollinate in this story.

Date night

We postponed our Valentines supper out and went to Gather at the Assiniboine Park’s horticultural garden this week instead. Isn’t it pretty reflecting sunset rays?

On the actual Valentine’s day, we went skating with the kids and treated them to boba at (our favourite) KHAB Tapioca…  

The special was a Ferrero Rocher drink that, when ordered, came with the question, “any nut allergies?”

Eating

Cooking from Hailee Catalano’s cookbook By Heart continues to surprise and delight… (Her website is really nice too!) On Sunday last week, a “Pasta alla Norcina with Roasted Squash” so delicately flavoured, so wonderfully balanced - one could decide that Beef Stroganoff had been permanently dethroned. Then, on Wednesday “Spinach and Artichoke Ziti” described as a pasta rendition of the beloved appetizer. The fact that the dip is not beloved in our house is a trifle when you’ve decided to whole-heartedly trust a good cookbook author, and this trust was rewarded! Not a single artichoke-spinach sauce-covered noodle was lost, cast aside, distractedly left for the dishwasher or digestive failure of our dog (shallots and a whole head of garlic, roasted and blended, would surely finish a beagle). 

Dog coat

An Etsy purchase for Enzo arrived this week… a perfect-fitting coat made of 73% wool for when the temperatures really dip in Winnipeg…

Here’s what he looks like on our walks, most of the time, sans coat.

Postcard

It’s cold again as I write, but still, just the way the light is, in the mornings, on our walks, shows the approach of spring even if it can’t be felt in the temperature.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 7/52

Day in the life 

I’m currently reading Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Amazon) by Esyllt W. Jones as I conduct a bit of family research and have little to say on the subject right now. (Reading, reading, reading… I’m just a little squirrel gathering facts.) 

I was going to leave it at that, but as I was looking up a recipe for the following section, I was scrolling through my history and found that Thursday was particularly illustrative of a day spent in research… I spent the day going through the online archives of Henderson Directories. (It’s so convenient, even though I did appreciate feeling the heft of these books at the library when I went in November of 2024!)

Isn’t it glamorous? All this clicking through year after year of directories, to find names and to see where they’re living? 

Here, in 1933, we see two families, the Faucher and the Tytgat, living in St. Boniface: Arthur on Aubert Street and Alice with her father Camille on Dawson Road, a few years before they marry. 

I am unable to write a story out of thin air, but as I gather these elements one by one, a story starts to take shape in my mind…

Eating

It took exactly one TikTok video to convince me to make this Spicy Carrot Rigatoni. (Canadian content creators - yay!) (Also the library identified Hailee Catalano’s cookbook as Canadian?)

But back to the recipe… so clever! Carrots went sneakily undercover camouflaged as sauce and crossed into defended “no vegetables allowed” territory unnoticed. It was a strategic win for this kitchen chef.

From a main to a side… can we discuss polenta? Until this week, I’d been fine with using plain old, abundantly available cornmeal. Cornmeal is tiny, not powdery, of a texture similar to iodized salt. It reminds me of cream of wheat. Polenta made from cornmeal is similar in texture to cream of wheat. Once most of the water has been absorbed, bubbles form, puff and release as it cooks. I could not understand recipes that called for long cooking times… Enter Carla Lalli Music’s recipe “Baked Polenta with Floppy Broccoli” which, in the list of ingredients in the cookbook, specifies “polenta, not quick-cooking”. What is “not quick-cooking polenta”? Cornmeal didn’t seem right anymore! Indeed, if you like bearing down on details, using cornmeal that is smooth and small for polenta is fine, but cornmeal that has more of the character and shape of ground corn (or maize) kernels, that is a bit more roughly ground, is more flavourful. And thank goodness for stores that carry brands like Bob’s Red Mill for just such a product. One night we baked it in the oven, as in Lalli Music’s recipe, another night we cooked it in the slow cooker as per package instructions. The latter was better: longer to cook, but more evenly cooked and easier to clean. All this for Jenny Rosenstrach’s Cider Braised Meatballs.  

Baking

Do you have a favourite chocolate-chip cookie recipe? Until this week, our family didn’t. I therefore planned a cookie test. I had four recipes, but had to cut one because, having been written entirely by weight, I was left with too big a puzzle when the kitchen scale I’d been using for the past 20 years disappeared its digital numerals forever. Oh well! I made do with cups and tablespoons, and the family voted and agreed that by a very slim margin, Sarah Fennel’s “Best Chocolate Chip Cookies in the World” was the winner. Hooray! We now have a dedicated chocolate chip cookie recipe!

Enjoying

1. Podcast interviews with local historian Murray Peterson and city archivist Sarah Ramsden on Our City, Our Podcast. Conducted in 2024, I stumbled upon the former’s name when finding that my mother-in-law’s grandfather’s first residence in Manitoba is today a Heritage Building. From seeing a person’s name online, to having their voice in your ears and hearing their thrill for a subject you too are thrilled about is the gift a podcast can offer. 

2. This three-part story of a meet cute by Amber Estenson, known as That Midwestern Mom on TikTok, pleased my little romantic heart. Not to mention that she fell in love with a teacher!

Postcards

Another week featuring fog and frost! One morning the conditions were just right for even Enzo to have frosty hairs! So cute!!

The frost was different from day to day…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 4/52

Intro

It’s cold here right now… colour is found in gifted bouquets…

and sunsets observed from indoors…

This week, an overview of a hobby-project, quotes I liked from podcasts I heard lately, and what I’ve baked and cooked in the kitchen.

Genealogy as a puzzle

I’m not that interested in my own genealogy, so much as I am in other peoples. Delving into ancestry reveals first, that it exists… that a person is descended from a long line of individuals within families; and second, little else. The satisfaction comes from filling in a table, which, in the scientific language of academic research, is called “family reconstitution”. It’s a method of filling-in information about a family in an organized way. It has at the top the couple’s name, their parents’ names, their marriage date, and births and deaths; and then it lists their children with all the dates of their birth and death and marriage and who they married.

This past little while, I’ve been gathering information from registries online, to fill in a table for my mother-in-law’s great-grandparents. It is possible to do so because her great-grandparents lived in Quebec, where Catholic parishes kept excellent records. It is also possible because the “Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec” has made these registries available online. (See St. Zéphirin-de-Courval, for example. A map of parishes in the province of Quebec can be found here.)  

Filling in the table for her great-grandfather’s family looks like this:

A table allows me to summarize facts like this: Abraham Faucher and Rose Delima Geoffroy married in 1870 and in their 23 years of marriage, they had 14 children, among whom were a set of short-lived triplet boys. Three of their four surviving sons came to Manitoba: Didier, Arsène and Wilfrid. Didier brought his family. Arsène, recently-widowed, brought his children. Wilfrid was a bachelor. The recently-widowed Arsène met with ill-fate. His arrival in St. Boniface coincided with the outbreak of the Spanish Flu, and he, along with 60,000 other Canadians, became one of its victims. His son, Arthur - Rose-Marie’s father - was 4 years old when his mother (Arthur’s wife) died. He was 6 when, two years later, almost to the day, he lost his dad. 

Listening

I find narcissism interesting and appreciated this observation in passing by Diarmaid Macculloch on Conversations with Tyler:

[Thomas] Cranmer survived, remember. He survived by loyalty to King Henry VIII, and I think he genuinely loved Henry VIII, and so served him with a good conscience.

Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. […] The thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. Henry VIII was talented at making good people, such as Cranmer and, I would say, Thomas Cromwell, do bad things. 

I have a theory that persons with a narcissistic disorder build up an image of themselves that they constantly maintain and demand to be maintained. So, indirectly, I feel like Kevin Townley’s comment (here) on the subject of personal brand is indirectly related to narcissism. He says “[…] the attempt to codify and maintain a branded identity is an act of violence. It requires a kind of aggressiveness that is detrimental to you, and I would venture to say others as well.” 

But I also liked his descriptions of art and creativity: “Art is a liberation from being a self. You can do anything.” And:

The writer Robert Olin Butler talks about how creativity is hard. It’s really hard to do. And quite often, we avoid doing it because to delve down into the unconscious realm where the creative impulse seems to simmer is literally hell for a lot of people. For most people, it’s hellish. Even if you’re trying to write a joke, it’s torture.

So the idea is like, if you’re looking at a masterpiece, then you are engaging with a work made by somebody who is doing this all the time. […] you are looking at something that went through this kind of rigorous practice, it’s a practice of not knowing, of transforming negativity into something colourful, something with shape, something with tone, somebody who is able to handle the heat, the white hot heat of the creative process, and bend it […] into some other medium.

Approving

Any new article that makes the case for blogging is one I’ll read! This one from Joan Westenberg.  

Eating

The foray into bread-making continues! This week, a lovely brown “Oat and Molasses” loaf.

Winter is a wonderful time for ragu-type recipes… A slow-simmering meat sauce served over pasta felt like the perfect way to welcome Christian home after his class’s 3-day camping trip. Molly Baz’s recipe in Cook This Book, titled “Paccheri with Pork and Lentil Ragù” (see an iteration on Instagram) uses anchovies for depth of flavour and red lentils for creaminess.  I think I preferred it over other group-pork-based ragù recipes that simmer with milk and vegetables. It’s proof, I would argue, that recipe collecting is a good thing, because you get to discover variations on a theme!

Postcard

On cold days, when temperatures don’t invite much more than a glance at the landscape as you trudge through the snow, it’s the golden colour of the grass that draws my eye.

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 (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. 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. 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. 9)

Thoughts

News feels like a constant rain, a subject as pervasive as weather. Keeping up on news is a way of keeping conversational. But not here... Here, I never feel like talking about the news. I feel like, if I talked about news, I'd be a big phony, like the phonies Holden Caulfield calls out all throughout Catcher in the Rye. And Catcher in the Rye is what Marie-Hélène and I are reading right now... Then, this week, Tyler Cowen wrote why he didn't feel like writing about "various topics" on Marginal Revolution, and I suddenly felt the same way... words to a feeling, someone else expressed better than you. At number 1: "1. I feel that writing about the topic will make me stupider." And stupid is a good word... it means "Emotionally, morally, or spiritually dull, numb, or indifferent; lacking in natural feeling, moral sense, or spiritual awareness." 

Fandom

I follow any link that leads to more Robert Caro, and Kottke served up one to another recent interview, by Chris Heath, with more writing tips! Like routines: "When not beset by distractions, Caro keeps to the same work process he has had for decades. He rises early, puts on a jacket and tie, and walks to his nearby office, picking up a croissant and coffee on the way." And admiration for Ernest Hemingway, from whom he learned, “Every day, you write first before you do anything else. That was a rule. And I followed that.” And a quote from the eulogy he wrote when Hemingway died:

The Ernest Hemingway who was a legend in his own lifetime was the bearded, barrel-chested central figure in a boisterous tapestry of gin and bananas and giant marlins. But the Ernest Hemingway who created the work that will be remembered in centuries to come was the man who, for 40 years, dragged himself out of bed at 5 a.m. to begin long mornings of loneliness before unyielding pads of yellow paper.

Drawing

I never really understood Lynda Barry's excitement over drawing with young children until this week when a friend's 5-year-old showed me his sketchbook, and critiqued mine. He added missing wings to a bird I'd doodled, and took inspiration from a grid I'd drawn. I got to admire his spontaneity, his wonderful unself-consciousness. We inspired each other, we doodled subjects we could think of on the spot. Now I get it, when she said in her typewriter interview with Austin Kleon: "This summer I spent 3 days a week drawing with [4 year olds]. [...] They changed me in a deep way in 3 months. A feeling of aliveness and realness is what they gave me all the time."

Cooking

Ali Slagle's Mighty Meatballs! Served on top a soft heap of mashed potatoes, with a few bright peas on the side for colour and slices of baguette. Comfort food to the max!

Postcards

This week begins the long slow spring melt, when warm days turned back snow to slush, then cold days return and make the slush into ice. The colour palette is limited... but the Red River looks blue at this time of year, and that is when it is prettiest.

Also... a view of the trees planted last year in Henteleff, awaiting the warmth to grow a little more...