Attachments, etc.

I'm often held captive by the feeling that I cannot publish a blog post unless I've spent time gathering and synthesizing a quantity of information. Real life impedes such a habit however when you find yourself having ended one book and started three others. I am confronted with my own attachment to how I think something should be done. 

Being attached to something can be an obvious flaw. In Caro's biography of Robert Moses, it is a recurring, damning theme:

About building more roads and ignoring mass transportation, Caro writes:

But for New York, only one mind mattered, and that mind would not change.
As Moses' first postwar mileage had been opening, he had been as confident of the wisdom of his policies as he had been when he announced them in 1945. [...] Now, in 1954, with considerable new mileage open, the problems were worse than ever, but the confidence was diminished not a whit. All that was necessary, he said - and believed - was more of the same. (p 918)

Being attached to something can be a worthy endeavor, or a good intention, or a positive personally-held belief as in the case of John Green's signing tip-in sheets for his books and then being physically forced to give up this practice, which turns out to be its own kind of sacrifice:

Being forced to give up attachments can be, unknowingly, the necessary opening made for something new, or better. Reading Birds, Art, Life by Kyo Maclear, I found a quote along these lines from Amy Fusselman: "You would be surprised at how hard it is to be open to new and different good things. Being open to new things that are bad - disasters, say - is pretty easy... But new, good things are a challenge." (p 28)

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This week, two things grabbed my attention. First, having listened to John Green's video above, I borrowed the book he mentions in it: Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, edited by Robin Robertson. In it, there's a little essay by James Wood that recounts how in one of his books, he mistakes characters' names from a Jane Austen story and adds a further misspelling in the same paragraph. He explains: "As  far as I know, these were the only errors in my book; yet in one small paragraph, three howlers!" And...

Like most writers, and certainly most journalists, I work, and work most happily, from memory. Memory is organic. The notorious fact-checkers of the New Yorker are irritating not only because they often prove how fallible are our memories, but because they seem to mechanize what ought to be a natural, unmediated, fast-moving process. (p 144)

Being myself more on the side of fact-checkers (induced to paralysis should I be unable to check my facts...) I discovered the existence of an opposite personality trait. Wood continues:

But why do we all prefer to use our memories rather than look things up? The memory, after all, is an error-producing organ, as the police know only too well from millions of fallacious eyewitnesses. We do it not only because it is easier than trotting to the shelves, but to show off - not to others, who after all can't know we have used our memories unless we tell them so in print. We do it to show off to ourselves. But since using our memory is certainly bound to lead to error, the conclusion must be that showing off to ourselves is really - however unconsciously - commending ourselves for getting things wrong. Showing off to ourselves is getting things wrong to the secret satisfaction of our unconscious. And the further conclusion to be drawn from this is that we want to be caught at it. (p 145)

Second, these character descriptions in William Trevor's short story "The General's Day":

The General's breakfast was simple: an egg poached lightly, two slices of toast and a pot of tea. It took him ten minutes to prepare and ten to consume. As he finished he heard the footsteps of the woman who daily came to work for him. They were slow, dragging footsteps implying the bulk they gracelessly shifted. The latch of the door rose and fell and Mrs Hinch, string bags and hairnet, cigarette cocked from the corner of her mouth, stood grinning before him. 'Hullo,' this woman said, adding as she often did, 'my dear.' (p 30).

So much conveyed in so few lines!

I finished reading the Power Broker

I finished reading the Power Broker! Granted, I started during pandemic lockdown and listed it as a resolution in 2024…. By January 1st of this year, I had only 375 pages left to read. It’s a big book, not only heavy and over a thousand pages long… the pages themselves are large and packed with words. For university, I remember timing myself and finding that for one of Peter Gay’s books on the Enlightenment, I could read 50 pages in an hour. With the Power Broker I averaged 25.

I don’t live in New York and I don’t know if I’ll ever visit it, but The Power Broker is fascinating because it is a biography, because the subject in question is (I strongly suspect) a narcissist, and because the author, Robert Caro, is an amazing writer and researcher.

My favourite chapter (titled “And When the Last Law Was Down”) incorporates a description of one of Moses’ traits (vicious personal attacks), a description of a historic park (The Battery), his plan to build a bridge through it and the author’s description of a lesson of moral responsibility (letting ends justify means). 

First, Caro describes the park. He begins: “Sunlight, serenity, a sense of the sea - and something more. For walk into Battery Park at its Broadway entrance and staring at you, at the end of a long, broad grande allée, was an odd-looking building.” (650) He describes the building and he describes its history and I like all of it, but the park’s website does a great job of condensing everything with the help of visuals here: The Battery. Caro says, it was important, because: “In New York in which the old was ruthlessly demolished to make way for the new, the fort was pricelessly rich in ghosts of the city's great past.” (652)

I was listening to The 99% Invisible podcast series breakdown of The Power Broker, and the host in the 7th episode dealing with this chapter, Roman Mars, is a little critical of Caro’s invocation of historical ghosts. He says:

I do think that some of this reverie about, like, George Washington once walked here, and Lafayette had a brownstone nearby, is often used to stop cities working for people of the modern day. When you have so much reverence for history, […] nothing can move forward, and cities also need to function for the people who live today, and so it’s always a balance. […] When I read this, I can totally hear that in this case, it is the right argument for stopping the wrong project. But often, this is the wrong argument used to stop the right project.

It’s a comment among many that illustrates one of the reasons why I enjoyed this 99% Invisible podcast series… They balance Caro’s work, now published 50 years ago, against a modern-day perspective.

But back to quotes. 

Moses wants to build a bridge:

Sunshine, serenity, a sense of sea, a sense of history - build the bridge that Robert Moses wanted to build and they would be accessible to the streets of Lower Manhattan no longer. Build that bridge and the vista of New York Harbor would be destroyed, the majestic harbor sweep thrown into shadow, the sheer-rising skyscraper mass slashed in half and blocked, on of the wonders of the world turned into mere, rather unimportant backdrop for just another East River bridge not very different from the three others just behind it. (653)

A group of reformers, as Caro describes them, tried to stop him, by trying to convince him that a tunnel was better. Moses didn’t like tunnels, he preferred bridges and he met their efforts with derision. In this case, he insulted their members:

As for the vicious personal attacks, Moses had been making vicious personal attacks for years. The only difference was that this time the target was them - and they therefore saw how unfair the attacks were. Previously they had laughed indulgently at Moses' propensity for personal vituperation, regarding it as a harmless idiosyncrasy; perhaps, when one took into account all the crooked politicians, hack bureaucrats and selfish private individuals with whom Moses had to deal, even admirable. In that laughter and that indulgence was a feeling that Moses' methods, however distasteful, however antithetical to their principles, were justified by the difficulties he had to surmount to Get Things Done. (669)

Realizing at one point that they would not get through to him, no matter the arguments they used, some were shocked. But Caro writes, “They had no justification for such an emotion.” (669) Moses had not changed; it was they who were wrong for thinking he could or even should. And this is the moral lesson I love. To illustrate it, Caro refers to a movie my dad liked:

In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More warns young Roper about the consequences of letting ends justify means. When the young man says he would "cut down every law in England" to "get after the Devil," More replies: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?" The reformers could have benefited from More's warning. Robert Moses was of course not a Devil, but to give Moses power in the city, they had cut down the "laws" in which they believed. Now those laws no longer existed to protect the city from him. For the reformers and the city they loved, there was no place to hide. There was nothing the city, opposed to the bridge, could do to keep Moses from building it. (671)

I really enjoyed this book. I’ve enjoyed the discussion around it and the special 50th-anniversary interviews Caro has done for it. Tangentially, I’ve also been enjoying Rob Stephenson’s newsletter “The Neighborhoods” because it blends photography and history so nicely but it’s also studded with the present-day realities of Moses’ building projects.

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Other things: We really liked Suzanne Goin’s Lemon Tart (made with regular lemons), which can be seen here.

Since spending less time on social media, I feel like I can relate to this, and the article she links to here.

Orange

One thing leads to another…

I thought I’d go walking without bringing along a camera. Who cares? I thought… I’m not a photographer.

But I kind of missed it. 

Then I thought that really, a camera is only there to assist my writing. I’m not shooting for the sake of a picture. I’m shooting for the sake of a story. 

I like seeing things over time… But accruing the observations takes a lot of time. 

Right now? 

This week I photographed trees that have been marked for removal, likely  because of Dutch Elm Disease… 

Once on a walk, I came across a plume of black smoke to discover a city worker supervising the gasoline-fed fire on the riverbank of a pile of newly cut wood from an infected tree. 

The numbers nailed to these trunks suggest these trees are inventoried on a list somewhere… a unique distinction among their tree peers of being singled out because they’re sick.

They stand out against blue skies, the white ground and the brown in between. No monarch butterfly wings, no dazzle of fall leaves. Orange is hidden away under jackets unless you’re hunting, in imported seasonal citrus protected indoors; some navel oranges set aside, if you want to bake, for a nice loaf.  

Parties

I like parties in stories.

During a class on English Literature, we read Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” (available online too) and our teacher, Mr Rivers relived the delight of the author’s depiction of Laura directing workers to install a marquee while holding a piece of bread and butter in her hand. The party was an extravagant affair. It had mounds of roses and canna lilies and 15 kinds of sandwiches. Cream puffs were sampled before guests arrived: “(…) Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.”

There are other parties in other stories… Mrs Dalloway offers that wonderful feeling of excitement for a party in June, the energizing thrust of the prospect of a fresh morning with errands to run: “What a lark! What a plunge!” But food is barely mentioned. In Search of Lost Time features a party, and again the food is secondary, the author perhaps having spent so much energy describing a madeleine dipped in tea that he preferred to focus on the socializing at Mme de Guermantes’.

But why talk about parties when their season is over? When they are over? (You hear it on the '“This is Taste” podcast interview with Yottam Ottolenghi about 28 minutes in).

For two reasons… Parties have two components - people and food - and I’ve discovered that the priority can diverge in real life as in stories. Advice can be like Auren Hoffman’s who has a paragraph header that reads “the least important thing is the food”. Similarly, more gently, from David Lebovitz’s newsletter “In France, we eat to be with our friends first, the food is secondary.”

Secondly, I read Hisham Matar’s book The Return, and enjoyed it so much, I wanted to note one scene among many others that stand out in my memory. It’s tangential to the book’s main subject, but listen to this description of the kind of dinner parties Matar’s mother would host in Cairo…

First there was the menu, which shifted several times before agreement was reached. And then the machinery would start. Every resource would be employed – servants, children and a handful of committed friends – until each desired ingredient was located and delivered. My mother managed this complicated operation with the authority of an artist in the service of a higher cause. She spent hours on the telephone, handing out precise instructions to the butcher, the farmer who brought us our milk, yogurt and cheese, and the florist. She made several trips to the fruit-seller. She would drive into the Nile Delta, down narrow dirt roads, to a small village near Shibin El Kom in the Monufia Governorate, to select, as she used to say, “with my own eye,” each pigeon. I would be sent to get nutmeg from one spice shop west of the city, then gum Arabic from another in the east. There was only one vegetable-seller in the whole of Cairo from whom to buy garlic at this time of the year. Several samples of pomegranate would be tasted before she placed the order. And because, she maintained, Egyptians have no appreciation for olive oil, she would order gallons from her brother’s farm in the Green Mountains or, if the Libyan-Egyptian border was closed, from Tuscany or Liguria. Ziad and I would then have to accompany the driver to the airport to explain to the customs officials why our household consumed so much olive oil, pay the necessary bribes and return home to Mother’s happy face. Orange blossom water was delivered from her hometown, Derna, or, if that wasn’t possible, from Tunisia. On the day of the party, a dash of it would be put onto the pomegranate fruit salad and into the jugs of cold water. The marble tiles would be mopped with it too. (p 54)

[…] [On the day…] The kitchen, which was off the main entrance, would have my mother at its center, helped by the cook and a couple of maids. The radio would be on very loud, playing the songs of Farid al-Atrash or Najat al-Sahhira or Oum Kalthum or Mohammad Abdel Wahab. (p. 56)

Ours was a political home, filled with dissidents and the predictable and often tiresome conversations of dissidents. These high dinners were my mother’s retaliation against that reality. Her obsessiveness with where and when to get each ingredient, combined with her extraordinary talent as a cook, produced astonishing results that literally silenced these men of action. (p. 57) 

Hisham Matar’s book had the same effect on me: I felt silenced. All I could think, after having read it, was how beautiful literature could flood me with gratitude.

Enjoying: Christian and I are three episodes from the end of the miniseries “Say Nothing”. I love how the inside of the A in Say Nothing is shaped like a tear – so subtle! Also, our Apple remote takes it personally when we say “Say Nothing” using the Siri button. It answers “ok then” on the screen.

Closing notes for 2024

I still have last year's planner open on my desk, and atop it, this year's. It seems only fitting to look over 2024 and make concluding remarks before shelving the planner. Did you know that Leuchtturm means lighthouse? When I look at it, this time last year, we were in Jamaica. It was pretty neat. We came home, and it was like what my daughter said, when we unlocked our door last week after a New Year's Eve party with friends, "it always feels weird". Winter felt weird. Dryness too.

When I look back over the collected weekly newsletters I sent out to our family members and friends, they seem a little mundane. I report, too frequently, the visits we make to the dentist, the orthodontist... But throughout, there are highlights. I discovered this recipe for Vegan Amaretti Cookies and now my sister benefits from it too. And so long as the recipe involves aquafaba (the water from canned chickpeas, or chickpeas cooked at home) I might also note that William, age 10, ate a chickpea for the first time in his life, thanks to Smitten Kitchen's Lemon Chicken with Potatoes and Chickpeas. And so long as we're on the subject of culinary wins, Sohla El-Waylly's detailed instructions for home-made doughnuts were an effort that paid off extraordinarily well. None of us have ever eaten such good doughnuts.

2024 will forever be associated with what could have been a terrible accident. Christian, cutting a tree branch, fell from 17 feet and had only scratches and a minor pelvic fracture to heal. Still, when I think back to this event, it forms a divot shape in the calendar year, the way the linear lines of a grid curve around the mass of an object in the theory of relativity. May 11th had the sound of yells, neighbours running over, the decision to call an ambulance and hours at the hospital while the kids stayed with friends. Subsequently it had all the tasks a healing man in crutches couldn't do: the bed-making, the shopping, the dog-walking. It had the heart-touching kindness of friends.

Eventually, gradually, he healed of course, marking the signs of betterment one by one; shopping, walking the dog in July, cliff-jumping in August, running in November.

The city decided to cut the tree down and came on a drizzly day in October in the form of a team of people: the chainsaw man, the tractor driver, the canopy cutter, the twig raker, the chainsaw-man's driver, the tractor-hauler truck driver, the loader driver, and a few backup crew.

 This year had a bubble tea quest, resolving, ten or twelve bubble-tea places in, with the favourite being KHAB Tapioca, our newest go-to for a treat.

I've noticed that when something unusual happens to disrupt my routine, I take an excessive amount of pictures... My uncle's hospitalization provoked a mini photo-essay. When he took a trip to Quebec, I filled Christian's absence with so many things to distract myself and the kids: Sushi for the first time, a dinner party with friends, an evening dog walk to record river-height, a garden-center shopping trip and more photos of everything.

 We've had visitors, and Mme Palud turned 87 in September. We threw her a little party at home, decorating the table with low bouquets of carnations.

She's a big part of our life... On Thursday afternoons I take her and a friend to the mall usually. On Sundays, she's our supper guest. I find malls mostly depressing, but I try to record her moving through them. It's made me curious about the history of retail which is its own little side-project.

So there, those are a few notes from a year as a family. It's hard to write more without betraying the kids' privacy, even though it feels like we move through life like a little pod. I hope to keep writing in the new year, to keep learning and growing. "Semper floreat" as the motto reads for the U of M's Faculty of Arts. I hope to keep hailing the cyclical milestones, the seasonal things we do, like planting flowers or setting up the pool (“the other half of my life” as Cedric declared in July) with tender gratitude, and to embrace the little adventures our quests for novelty bring.

Enjoying: A post on Sasha Chapin’s substack about enjoyment, specifically the qualities that can lead to its increasing like, “Let the intensity in” and his comment “curiosity instantly inverts resistance”. Or how his tips “Getting lost in a detail” and “Build a context” harmonize with qualities I feel are part of my academic studies in history. In his tip “Find one flaw” he writes: “I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points. […] If conducted covertly, this particular mental habit allows you to love people more deeply and realistically, by noticing how the annoying thing about them and the great thing are fundamentally intertwined.”

Also: Hetty Lui McKinnon’s comments on the podcast The Dinner Plan, in which she says: “[…] cooking dinner is not hard. It’s the thinking of what you’re going to make.” And: “[…] cooking dinner, I think is the most, one of the most empowering daily acts that we can do as humans. If you were in a position of privilege where you can actually cook dinner for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for your community, it’s such a privilege and I don’t see why it should be demonized in the way that it actually often is […].”