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

1 Podcasts

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

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

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

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

2 Department stores

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

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

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

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

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

3 A lemon dessert

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

4 Robert Caro

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

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

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

5 The view here

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

Happy Friday!

Scratching sound

It was fall in Winnipeg, full of the delicious anticipation of the first snow and the rich smells of summer’s decay and there was a scratching sound in our wall. I’d heard it for the first time one morning during meditation. It was downstairs in the little room beneath the stairs. Our house is split and so our basement sits higher up and has large windows. All the exterior walls have a ledge two-thirds of the wall’s height because of the way the foundation was made. The scratching was in one of those spaces between the cement and the interior wall.    

When I mentioned that I heard a scratching sound to Christian, he dismissed it. So I tried to ignore what I thought I heard, even though, when I’d duck my head into that space which was cooler than the other spaces in our house, where we kept our potatoes and onions, suitcases and children’s toys, I’d keep an eye out for a mouse, or maybe a squirrel. But there was never any evidence of mice, or bugs. And then I would still hear the scratching sometimes.

One night, almost a week later, Christian heard the scratching. I had paused the television in the middle of the commentary following Justin Trudeau’s win. When I came back, the under-stairs light was on, and Christian was standing leaning toward the wall. 
    “You hear it?” I said.
    “Yes!” he answered.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “What are you gonna do?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he paused, “how did it get there, I wonder.” 
    It would seem that only a thin piece of drywall was separating us from this scratching source and neither of us felt like taking it down, tearing right through to see.
    So he turned off the light and I continued to watch the political commentary. 
    Before bed that night, I asked what he planned to do.
    “I don’t know.” He said.

I’ve grown asepticized to close encounters with wild life. We didn’t have any family pets besides the beta fish. Once, when I was washing my hair I came across a protuberance on my scalp and squeezed it off and as I found its round bead shape carried off in a stream of water I saw its six little legs confirm an innocent suspicion before it disappeared down the drain. The panicked surge of disgust mimicked anger and I punched the flimsy shower stall wall because it was the only thing I could think of doing. It wasn’t dissimilar to the time that I found myself weeding a space in the front yard, still an elementary school student when I unwittingly ended a small caterpillar’s life in a firm pinch. I sprang up from my crouched position and shook my arms until I was calm enough to think of washing my fingers. More recently, when fishing out tools and pails from an under-deck area in the backyard, I came across a drowned, bloated mouse. The scene was like the one in Anne of Green Gables when a slimy mouse is discovered at the bottom of a custard pot. I confess I was far less adroit at getting rid of the mouse than young Anne, even though my daughter was watching and I couldn’t give in to yelling, or shaking, or punching walls.
In the increasingly intermittent scratching sounds in the wall, I could imagine a small animal in distress, slowly dying, drying up, clawing around hopelessly surrounded by pink insulation. Maybe it fell through a crack in our foundation but we couldn’t check because that area was a corner under our front patio. Undoing a bunch of two by fours to get a good view felt like a lot of effort for a scratching sound. 

But what if it was some poor animal? It was that kind of thing that mixes pity and fear together so that the tug of war between the two leads to nothing. You stand there and do nothing because making a hole in the wall inside feels too close and inspecting a foundation outside feels too laborious.  
    “How long have you heard it?” Christian asked me.
    “A week?” I answer.
    He says his parents would sometimes hear scratching in the walls in their house and his dad would go up into the attic and drop poison into the walls and then the scratching would stop. I’m discomfited by the way having a dead rodent stuck in the wall is just fine, as if all walls everywhere would have the dried up, mummified remains of some un wary creatures. 

That was the conclusion, that our wall certainly had something dead in it. I was re-reading my work and read the first sentence to Christian who laughed at the memory. He said:
    “It’s gone away, eh, whatever it was.”
    I said that that wasn’t the conclusion I’d drawn. I said I thought the whatever-it-was was dead. 
    “No!” he said “If it was dead, it would have smelled!”
    I said I had no time to re-work the conclusion.