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!

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!

A podcast episode I liked

A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.

But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.

We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.

[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.

I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.