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...

Friday Five

Welcome to my little spot on the web, where, like a bird on a blade of bluestem I cheerily chirp in comfortable invisibility. Ha! This week brings more thoughts on writing, the foundational joy of these weekly dispatches, and… some fall colour! Cheers!

1 Writing

I like listening to writers talk about writing because I crave all their voices and experience in the silence of muddling along. For example, I nod along with Alexandra Shulman when she says “I’m somebody who never knows what I’m going to write ever until I start writing it. […] I write it down and then once I’ve written down wherever I get, then I go back and try and turn it into something that’s a bit more ordered.” It makes me think of Joan Didion’s expression: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” But do you see how Shulman’s statement is a little more raw, a little less literary? In the yellow glow of my black desk lamp, I more often feel like Shulman, a little humbled by my inability to draw up a plan and follow it. It’s in the glare of sunlight through a café window, joking with a friend over lunch that I can venture to be Joan Didion-like, just “writing to think…”

Or, for another example, I like how Jon Ronson said he needs “months to write”, that being a columnist wasn’t something he liked because his brain just didn’t work that way… “I’m very slow.” And while this might seem like an unflattering quote, such confessions are deeply reassuring for people whose creativity has a matching way of working itself out.

Slow percolation and spontaneity … I wonder if it’s related in a way to Carson Ellis’s own observation on the subject of narrative storytelling, when she tells Debbie Millman that she wishes she “felt more comfortable with it and better at it” but that she freezes when “faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. Like you’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations, the bar is very low, and I still feel kind of frozen by it.” I too get the same feeling.

Perhaps the fun of listening to this kind of “shop talk” is the excitement of a kind of pattern recognition, whereby I find in the professionals things I’ve begun to notice in myself and it’s a boost to my confidence. 

2 Breath

The ideas in this book have recently taken over our thoughts and modified some of our habits… I originally heard about the book on the podcast “People I Mostly Admire”. James Nestor’s writing voice is nice to read and he has a kind tone. Steve Levitt remarked on this in his podcast, saying “you came to book writing somewhat late” and then noting the success of his books. Nestor answers that for him, writing has been an outlet, “what I would do to feed my soul at nighttime and on weekends.” I find it inspiring that this kind of attitude toward writing imbues a reader’s experience of the book itself.

3 Eating

I made doughnuts from scratch for the friends and family festivities at our house Halloween night. It was a little chaotic… Christian had to serve supper on limited counter space while answering the door and being cheerful while the dog howled so I could concentrate entirely on managing dough and hot oil. But! They were a SUCCESS! I followed Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe in Start Here to the letter, and the outcome was plush and crisp and perfectly sweet. I learned about proofing dough - comparing the right amount of proofing to a handprint on memory foam was effective - and used coconut oil for frying as she recommended. Having our whole house smell like it was doused in coconut-scented sunscreen seems like an extra perk of the recipe. Wow.

Photo credit.

4 Research

I’m doing this little side-project for fun and it involves these directories that get bigger and bigger along with Winnipeg’s population growth. They’re called Henderson Directories and they list an individual’s name, their occupation, place of employment and address. They also list house owners by street. These tactile sources of data amaze me. They’re also a poor subject of conversation, of the “did you know” type. 

Research makes me think of Tyler Virgen’s post “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”. I really like this blog post. It begins small, leads to a little goose-chase and lots of sleuthing, contains self-doubt, has moments of humorous refocusing, plunges into dusty archives, contains newspaper clippings and delivers a satisfying ending. If I were a professor, I’d dedicate a class to this blog post, just for the illustration of research it provides.

5 The view

It’s so colourful this time of year…

I feel like milkweed makes a flamboyant show in the fall compared to the demure dusty-rose of its summertime flower clusters.

In case you were doubting the above statement…

The river recedes from the shore, going so low as to reveal new islands and the perfect profile of a duck.

Today, a row of willow looked like this, still leafy:

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Hello, hello! Welcome to another edition of things on my mind and before my eyes.

1 Thinking

Conversations with Tyler recently interviewed Alan Taylor (episode 217). I’m especially attentive with the guest is a historian, and there’s a part of the interview that focused specifically on “the (modern) practice of history”. In a response to Tyler’s question about coming out of a “good but not very, very top school” Alan discussed the academic field as he sees it today, saying:

The number of job openings for historians has shrunk dramatically. There are lots of complicated reasons for why that’s happened, but the general answer is that there’s a much smaller public investment in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts, and particularly in nonquantitative arts of the liberal arts.

Now that could be depressing to hear, but instead, I feel a little thrill… History’s place in education, at all levels is something I want to learn more about. I suspect that somehow, there’s been a change in society and the way history is viewed and I find that intriguing.

A link from the newsletter Dense Discovery (no. 299) lead me to read this substack article by Freya India, in which she writes:

My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness. Could just be me but when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more.

Don’t history and rootedness rhyme? If not literally, figuratively?

2 Eating

Our garden has started producing string beans just this week, and so the menu plan reflects their abundance with Salade niçoise, and this other recipe from Market Math, which, (shh!) is just barely a recipe, in fact, I could tell it to you here… It’s browned ground pork (about 230g) with a big pile of thinly sliced beans (about 340g) and a clove or two of garlic microplaned and a tablespoon or so of soy sauce sauteed until the beans are tender. Served on rice. Mmm.

3 Reading

I heard about this graphic memoir on Longform (RIP!) and reserved a copy at the library. The kids say it has a scary cover, but it has turned out to be a enjoyable read. I also liked listening to Tessa Hulls talk about how she made the book on the Youtube channel Sequetial Artists Workshop here.

4 Listening

I learned a lot from Andrew Leland’s book The Country of the Blind, which I listened to as an audiobook. (Kevin Brown has a great review here). I particularly like how he writes about choosing to walk around with a gentle half smile, an idea he learned from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I remember after pandemic restrictions eased and you could walk around maskless, I felt annoyed about having to think of arranging my face when it was easier to scowl, the way one could behind a mask. Remembering to half-smile is far more pleasant, even if effortful.

5 the view here

There is nothing like the serenity of a calmly flowing river to jolt you from a mind pulsing with computer-screen glare.

Happy Friday!

The view

Spring stalled mid-melt, dithering in delay, making us regular-walkers strap crampons to our boots. These pictures are of the path I take, one March 13th, the other just yesterday.

And here’s the dog wishing he could get at the geese.

Friday Five

Welcome to another end-of-week round up, with a quote, appreciation for food, a book I finished, a competition with Chat GPT, and more pictures from my dog-walks. It’s Saturday, but I refuse to rename the post granting myself a pass for the busy day yesterday…

1.

I love the prairies. In the course of reading for my paper I came across Kenneth Michael Sylvester’s description in The Limits of Rural Capitalism: "My strongest memories are of the scale of the countryside, of fading towns with weathered false-front buildings and of cities that appeared without reason, out of nowhere, like distant harbours in a vast agricultural ocean." (p 3) Sometimes I wish academic writing encouraged more lyricism.

2.

In praise of the traditional meal. I've tended for the past four months or so, to build menus that rely less heavily on meat as a main, or to space them out a bit... Fried rice, wonton soup, creamy pasta with peas and bacon... those sorts of meals. But earlier this week, I breaded pieces of chicken (flour, egg, panko crumbs), shallow fried them, and made a side of perogies (boiled then lightly pan fried), lingonberry sauce (from IKEA!) and boiled edamame and remembered how comforting it is sometimes to come back to a traditional meal. Dress it up a bit, and you have Jamie Oliver's "Super Schnitzel" from his book Jamie's Comfort Food, with breaded veal cutlets and a special "sprinkle" (made of finely chopped shallot, pickle and parsley), potato salad and apple salad. 

3. 

A good book. Thanks to the podcast “People I Mostly Admire,” I learned about the work of historian Brad Gregory. (I wrote about a quote I liked from that podcast episode here). Last week, I finished reading his book The Unintended Reformation. I liked it so much, I wrote a summary of it here. Gregory’s approach with a book on “how the distant past remains influential in the present” [p 14] is unusual, as he points out in the introduction, and perhaps this is another reason why I appreciated the book so much.  

4. 

A competition with AI. I asked Chat GPT to take over this edition of Friday Five with the query “Write me 5 short paragraphs, each with an interesting idea on random subjects.” This was the result:

One interesting idea is the concept of "forest bathing," which is a practice that originated in Japan and involves spending time in nature to improve physical and mental well-being. Studies have shown that spending time in nature can lower stress hormones, improve mood, and boost the immune system.

Another interesting idea is the concept of "pre-suasion," which is the art of preparing people to be more receptive to a message before the message is even delivered. This can be done through a variety of techniques, such as using certain words or images to prime the audience's subconscious.

An interesting idea in the field of psychology is "change blindness," which is the phenomenon where people fail to notice significant changes in their visual environment. This can have important implications for fields such as advertising, as people may not even notice changes in a product or brand.

An interesting idea in the field of economics is "behavioral economics," which is the study of how psychology and cognitive biases influence economic decision-making. This field has shown that people do not always make rational decisions when it comes to money, and that understanding these biases can help to improve economic policy.

An interesting idea in the field of technology is the concept of "smart cities," which use technology to improve the efficiency and livability of urban areas. This can include things like smart traffic lights, air quality sensors, and public transportation systems that are connected to the internet. By using technology to improve the functioning of cities, it is believed that smart cities can help to reduce pollution, improve quality of life, and increase economic productivity.

Isn’t it comforting to know this blog hasn’t been taken over by robots? That bit about change blindness is intriguing though… I’ve often tended to feel the opposite. More like Homily in The Borrowers, which my daughter and I are reading right now. In the story, a boy is bringing the family pieces of furniture from a doll’s house and Homily, the mother, is excited about all this new décor:

…Homily was tireless; bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, after a long day’s pushing and pulling, she still would leave nothing until morning. “Let’s just try it,” she would beg, lifting up one end of a large doll’s sideboard, so that Pod [her husband] would have to lift the other; “it won’t take a minute!” But as Pod well knew, in actual fact it would be several hours before, disheveled and aching, they finally dropped into bed. Even then Homily would sometimes hop out “to have one last look.” (p 131).

I so recognize this excitement! Re-organizing a corner, changing a paint colour, or styling things a different way have the opposite effect of change blindness, instead sparking my attention every time I walk by. Cup of Jo once called this a fakeover.

5.

Pictures. Care for some Winnipeg scenery? Last week was warm and cloudy, but this week brought dipping temperatures and fresh snow. It’s a game of “would you rather…” Option 1: warm weather, no sun; option 2 cold weather, bright sun! What do you pick?

Look how the sun makes a difference:

And check out the “Loch Ness tree” in winter… (I’ve taken a picture of it in other seasons here.)

Earlier this week I spotted deer. Enzo, not having picked up their scent, didn’t notice them!

Happy weekend!

Friday Five

1

Podcast I loved this week's episode of This American Life... These are short paragraphs-long stories, Ira Glass says… and yet how powerful the humble paragraph! As a tutor, I often encourage students to look at paragraph-construction tips, because, in academic writing, they can follow a pattern: make a point, have examples to develop the point, conclude the thought and lead to the next point. On This American Life, guest Etgar Keret shared pieces of his mother's character and turned paragraphs about her into art.

2

Music Tom Allen's CBC programme "About Time" featured "Oqiton" by Jeremy Dutcher. The song is based on a wax cylinder recording of a Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) song, in a language that had (then) long been outlawed. It's beautiful and haunting.

3

Deodorant Megababe has a slew of products and I'm two weeks into daily application of "The Smoothie Deo" post "Space Bar Underarm Soap" lathering, rinsing, drying. I smell good, even at the end of a busy day wearing heat-tech turtlenecks. Natural products make one feel extra lady-like when they work because they exude environmentalist virtue perhaps... Wearing something that smells like a chocolate filling (coconut, lime and bilberry) feels lighter than applying men's extra-strength antiperspirant, even though, to be clear, aluminium is fine and detoxing one's armpits is a dubious exercise. 

4

Food I made Refrigerator Bran Muffins, the idea of this recipe being that the batter can be safely kept in the refrigerator for weeks so that, for weeks, you can treat yourself to freshly-made muffins with little prep. For my mother-in-law, I baked them all at once. The recipe made 44 muffins, and I learned you don't need to fill the empty wells of a muffin tin with water.

5

Winnipeg Scenery This week's weather brought nice temperatures and cloudy-grey mornings. Enzo and I tramp through the well-tramped Henteleff trail along the river. Wildlife makes itself scarce, but everywhere, there are traces of its presence... An abandoned nest in the bleached strands of grass;

Enzo's fox-like conviction that field mice are running tunnels under the snow;

a coyote, small as a dot that crosses the river behind us

and snowmen that freeze, mid-exercise as we pass by…

Happy Friday!