Friday Five

1. A note

The kids are in school and the house is quiet. This week, after a summer of research and reading, I started writing the next chapters in this thesis on the history of Aubigny. I love research, but it’s always in service of writing, because writing is that wonderful creative part where all the information I’ve been squirrelling away now gets to be arranged and set to a page. When I can’t write, I come here to play with words and set thoughts afloat. But now I’m busy writing elsewhere, so writing here would become a chore, which makes me a bore. I think this blog post on Kottke helped me clarify these feelings.

2. Self care

I was reading a book by Pierre Berton titled The Promised Land, in which Clifford Sifton (the Minister for the Interior in charge of getting immigrants settled across the prairies) is described this way:

Sifton took office with the reputation of being an iron man. In the words of an admirer, ‘he never gets tired, works like a horse, never worries, eats three square meals a day and at night could go to sleep on a nail keg.’ During the Manitoba provincial campaign of 1896 he would climb off the train at Brandon at eleven at night, sit up until morning talking politics with friends, entertain at breakfast, and then take off in the winter’s cold by sleigh, speaking at Souris, say, in the afternoon, and Hartney at night before heading off to the railhead at Oak Lake to catch the train back home. (p. 19)

When he resigned in 1904, the author writes that his “nerves were badly shattered” and that

As soon as he had cleaned up the backlog of work in his office […], he left Ottawa […] for treatment in the mud and sulpho lithia water baths of the Indiana Springs Company at Mudlavia. (p 196)

(Pause… First off, Mudlavia! Fascinating! I had no idea… and then, of course, why wouldn’t there be spa treatments in 1904, just as there have been forever? Still, when Louis Litt’s devotion to mudding is shown in the tv series Suits, I thought it was exotic and new.)

Pierre Berton goes on to write about Sifton’s resignation, and I can’t help but feel like he’s poking fun at these mud baths:

It is difficult to picture the imperturbable Sifton […] emerging with nerves shaken so badly he was forced to immerse himself in mud for the best part of two months. (p 197)

Granted, Berton is writing in 1984, and he definitely wasn’t a millennial.

3. Eating

Our rhubarb plant produces rhubarb from spring till fall and before the first frost I make as many loafs of Rhubarb Nut Bread as I have time for. I am fond of a recipe I found years ago while working as a secretary by day and learning to bake by night. It’s from The Angel of the Sea Cookbook, which is still operating as a real bed and breakfast. (It looks so pretty!)

4. Audiobooks

When I’m reading, reading, reading for research, I notice that I don’t read much just for fun, and turn instead to audiobooks for a change. This summer I’ve enjoyed S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain, Susan Orlean's On Animals and The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman.

I heartily agree with this advice from a librarian quoted on Recommendo: "Ditch Audible and get a library card to listen to free audiobooks. Many libraries offer apps where you can download audiobooks straight to your phone."

5. Seen here

I love how the thistles, still drying from the dew, look wonderfully dishevelled.

Psst: Happy Friday!

This is the last in this series, but I’ll still pop in, with perhaps a different kind of post because I like this blog as a digital record of thoughts and experiences over time… Cheers!

Friday Five

It's Friday and the dreary weather here is pushing us along towards accepting that summer is coming to an end and school is about to begin. Somewhere I read advice about "writing what you would want to read" and since I love finding useful resources online, here are a few...

1. Newsletters

Understanding oneself is a funny thing because one can be nearing 40 and still learning that transitions are tough... I think that's why I appreciate McKinley Valentine's newsletter The Whippet, where, besides learning about stuff, I can come across an observation like "I sometimes think the biggest difference between super-successful people and the rest of us is how easily they transition" that makes me think long after I've left my e-mail. 

Austin Kleon's newsletter today linked to a quote by Lauren Groff who explains why I sometimes have trouble sitting down to write even this measly little post: “The ‘fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully training herself to let her work be messy and impermanent.’”

And Recommendo lead me to Mari Andrew's delightful list of "100 Things I Know".

2. Clothes

Between the statements "I need clothes" and "I want to develop my sense of style" lays a canyon of advice (trails), marketing (views) and contradiction (you could get lost). Having the authoritative voice of a friendly guide like Becky Malinsky means the venture might be (kinda?) feasible (i.e. I think I'll buy some Levi's this fall...).

Also, it made me chuckle to see this headline "Packing Light? Not for me, thanks" after having read Ann Mashburn's essay "Take It or Leave It"

3. Movies

Christian and I turned the summer's blockbusters into a date night scheduled every Tuesday over three weeks. We brought our own drinks and snacks and participated in the pop culture moment along with the rest of the audience and delivered our star-ratings to our kids next morning. Fun!

4. Eating

I made corn fritters this week, from a cookbook I've had for a few years now. It sometimes takes me awhile to get around to things, but this picture of a note scribbled on top of the recipe title stuck in my mind. I'm not sure if I could call it a haunting... Catherine Newman's scribbled "so f-ing good" never left my mind... When I went back in her blog archives to find it I realized this mental note had been hanging on since 2018. Good grief. (As an aside, I've often turned to the Ben and Birdy blog for gifts or entertainment ideas. The recommendations are perennial.) 

5. Seen around here 

This is our garden... it has yielded beans, cucumbers and zucchini, and lately, carrots! Funny squat carrots that we've mixed into lamb ragu and pulsed into Muhammara.

These are our dog’s nacho-smelling paws.

This is a neglected bouquet turned still life.

This is a fun children's book I found in the University of Manitoba's Icelandic collection.

Oh! And the drama last week of seeing a building on fire:

Friday Five - travel and time

1. Introduction

Last week we took a daytrip to Stonewall. The town and quarry are associated with Carol Shield's book, The Stone Diaries, the way Prince Edward Island and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables are associated. It's funny, you know... a few weeks ago, I followed a link to this essay titled "The Case Against Travel" in which Agnes Callard writes: "And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer." She's not wrong, except that I wish what she said about academic writing were not so generally true. But I digress... 

2. This idea of travel

I'm not writing about the trip to Stonewall, although, look, here's a nice picture...

While Callard made a case against travel, and I'm nodding along with her argument, Tyler Cowen wrote: "Travel makes you a better reader, especially for history, geography, (factual) economics, and political science." And instantly, I agree... this dish we are cooking on the subject of travel just got more exciting. You wouldn't call a short day trip outside of Winnipeg "travel" really... not much beyond a lunch was packed, no passport photos were taken, but when I go and re-read the notes I'd taken from The Stone Diaries all those years ago, there is a bit of that feeling of travel...  

3. Going through time

In The Stone Diaries, Shields writes this long bit that I can't bear to cut down any shorter than this...

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say "Twelve years passed" is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced - and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to  the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour-day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents' house and prepared for an early bed. 

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father's morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelor's Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parent's house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.

4. A lasagne of time

Shields uses the expression "obliteration of time" and it feels as though Stonewall were a place where one can really feel this. In the newly-restored interpretive center, where upstairs, events like the local Garden Club's 60th "Flower, Fruit and Vegetable" show was occuring as we, downstairs were admiring a pillar of of geological layers that the sign was telling us was to be understood like a lasagne. First, a layer of stone for building, and below that, limestone, burned and used for quicklime, or calcium oxide, sandwiched between other layers, in an earth history that spirals out like a pencil shaving in which our period, the human one, is just the first traces of pencil lead in all that compression of time.

And yet, this magnificent idea, that in spite of "obliteration" there is this undeniable fact of presence. Sheilds writes:

Her mama's no more than a little itty bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that's the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can't make it go away. Your mama's inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don't get yourself hurt.

5. Time as space enough

Beautiful as those quotes from The Stone Diaries are, one of my favourite quotes from Carol Shields is a passage in Startle and Illuminate.

...by 1996, likely much earlier, Carol had achieved an important insight. Time was precious but it was not fleeting. She had raised a large family. She had published dozens of books. She had travelled. She had read. She had sustained a long marriage and empowering, delight-filled friendships. She had talked and laughed and shared ideas with thousands of people as friend, mother, teacher, mentor. She had written letters, scrubbed floors, dried tears, wrapped and unwrapped presents, picked flowers, baked pies, argued, danced, slept, wept - experienced that full range of what life has to offer. Her conclusion? 

Tempus does not fugit.

Here's what she told the students that day:

"Time is not cruel. Given the good luck of a long healthy life, as most of us have, we have plenty. Plenty of time. We have time to try our new selves. Time to experiment. Time to dream and drift. Time even to waste. Fallow time. Shallow time.

"We'll have good years and bad years. And we can afford both. Every hour will not be filled with meaning and accomplishment as the world measures such things but there will be compensating hours so rich, so full, so humanly satisfying that we will become partners with time and not victims of it."

5.5 In conclusion - travel revisited

Our short trip occasioned this revisiting of an author's work, and a focus on Shields' contemplation of time, in fiction and nonfiction. It brings me back to the two first points above, on travel. Callard's essay inspired many responses, among which is Ross Douthat's opinion piece "The Case for Tourism". At one point, his argument echoes Cowen's "travel makes you a better reader". He writes:

The longtime reader of Jane Austen who wanders the grounds of a Georgian mansion, the history buff who touches the crumbling stones of Hadrian’s Wall, the parent who has read “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” a hundred times but now stands in Beatrix Potter’s rain-drenched garden — all of these travelers are enjoying an extension of their education, a deepening of their knowledge (...).

All that being said, Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to this week’s edition, which happens to bring you five interesting bits loosely related to weather! Let’s jump in!

1. Good advice

The sun is shining, there's an afternoon at the beach planned, Audiomachine's "The Big Smoke" is playing in my ears while far away, the news tells me, a chart-topping amount of forest hectares are burning. Transcending weather and anxieties there is good advice, and I especially appreciated The Marginalian's overview of Kevin Kelly's most recent book. Maria Popova does a great job of offering readers a website full of these gems of reflection.

2. Don't talk about the weather

Currently, I'm reading Pierre Berton's The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914, in which he describes Manitoba's premier, Clifford Sifton's efforts to "dispel the image of the West as a snow-covered desert". Berton writes:

One of Sifton's first moves was to try to ban the daily publication of Manitoba temperatures, but since that might prove even more alarming, he dropped the idea. Nevertheless, snow was never mentioned in the blizzard of pamphlets his department issued. (p 15)

Get it? Snow mentioned and blizzard of pamphlets? Berton made me laugh. He continues:

“Cold” was another taboo word. The accepted adjectives were “bracing” and “invigorating.” (...) “The kindest thing to say about it is that the literature was a little on the optimistic side,” one British immigrant recalled. “Canada was said to have a healthy climate guaranteed to be free of malaria. One has to admit that this was true. It was said that while the prairie summers were hot, the heat was delightfully invigorating and while it got cold in the winter the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall those glowing words as I pirched sheaves with the temperature at 95 in the shade, and as I ran behind the slight at 30 below to keep from freezing.” (p 16-17).

This week, working at the historical society, I would eat lunch in my car to warm up from their excellently air-conditioned rooms. But modern conveniences and jobs that don't require manual labour do not make weather any less of a topic of conversation.

3. In praise of summer produce

I would like to defy expectations here and avoid superlatives around seasonal tomatoes in order to highlight the luscious bunch of red swiss chard I picked up at the market for 2.70$. It was the main vegetable for Deb Perelman's "Swiss Chard Enchiladas" from Keepers. They were delicious, but more importantly, this is a recipe that makes it easy to consume a vegetable I would otherwise not buy.

4. The solution to environmental change

This quote from an article by Charles Eisenstein, highlighted in the wonderful newsletter Dense Discovery, feels true. 

No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love. 

5. A mini tour of our backyard

Welcome to our yard where we have collected perennials and shrubs and cedars and filled in their gaps with colourful annuals.

I don’t really plan which annuals I plant from year to year and so the flowerbed can offer serendipitous surprises from one season to the next…

A patch of violets that look especially whimsical hidden among the fronds of big lilies. Or the unexpected colour and texture combination here…

Rain and days of cooler temperatures make these petunias and begonias look especially luscious this year…

There aren’t just flowers in the yard though…

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1. Cognitive patience

I’m reading lots of academic books in order to write my own academic blah-blah-blah. A few weeks ago, I was struck by the friction I felt getting back “into” this mode of reading, absorbing and digesting this information in order to benefit from the exercise. I think that’s why, this comment on “cognitive patience” struck a chord as I was listening to this episode of the Ezra Klein Show in which Maryanne Wolf says:

Everything I have done, which was meant to be an apologia for reading, led me to a darker insight, which is that the very act of reading has become so degraded because of the bombardment of information, because of the affordances of the particular medium, and because we have become all, all of us cognitively impatient. We don’t want to spend the time.

2. I'm quite terrible at drawing trees

so I really appreciated this video that explains why trees are so hard! Steven Travers makes such good points! 

3. Beans, beans, beans

Our garden has produced an abundance of beans. That might be Mr. Gardener's fault (maybe don't plant so many darn beans? I tease!). They're not as versatile as zucchini, which can be baked into loaves and frozen for future zucchini-loaf cravings. Beans are their own standout ingredient. They need to be tenderly blanched and carefully dried before being frozen in order to be enjoyed mid-winter, and still, even then, they're not quite as magical as when they're freshly cooked... slathered in butter, sprinkled with salt... This week, I sliced them up, cooked them and added them to fried ground pork and served that over rice. No real recipe, but a kind of toned-down variation of this.

4.Hey! We had a birthday party!

Check out our home-made decorations!

5. The scenery here

Psst! Happy Friday!

Friday Five

A spider just drifted by and I let it be, floating on its piece of silk, because, I think, I should let bugs live. But when the ambient air in this big-windowed study room moves a stray hair against my cheek, I think "spider?" But no, it's now landed and is exploring the floor...

1. Having a routine just to take a break

Today, I give you no weighty thoughts, no facts or quotes, just this leftover feeling... Yesterday, I broke my self-imposed week-time routine to take the day and celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday. We packed a picnic and spent all afternoon at Assiniboine Park, visiting the Leaf, getting ice cream across the bridge at Sargent Sundae, and touring the English Garden and Leo Mol's sculpture garden. Besides the fact that the outing was itself really nice, that it pleased the generational span of our family and that everything went smoothly, it was also the momentary release of choosing to take the day off without setting any expectation on it that brought a "relaxing into the moment" kind of happiness I wasn't expecting. But I think that contrary to the impulse of wanting to chase that "relief from routine" feeling, it only reinforces (for me) the benefit of having a discipline to help me with this isolated - and isolating - kind of pursuit. I'm happier when I consciously dedicate time to both.

2. See?

This is the hat-wearing contingent of our little group headed over to get a treat. I'm really grateful to the city for maintaining such pretty gardens in the summer! 

3. Eating

The beginning of the week, and most of the month of July so far, has been unusually cold. After a decadent supper with relatives, we had Christian's brother and mother over for Fish Stew on Sunday. Fish stew doesn't sound appetizing, but I can always trust Nigella Lawson to win me over to something over the course of one lengthy recipe introduction or another... This one, she promised, would resolve my "fissues", and just being provoked to lol, I decided to take on almost two pounds of cod.  

Sometimes, I think, it's not about the recipe itself that I want to devote all my enthusiastic writing... sometimes it's better to just appreciate the "a-propos"-ness of food. The supper felt like a healthy pause in the midst of going-out extravagance and it felt warm against the chill. I appreciated it for that.

Yesterday, it was warm, and sunny, and after a day of walking around gardens and plants, we had salade nicoise, just to catch up on all the wax beans our garden has been producing. The day before, I'd said to Christian "maybe plant fewer beans next year?" A second and third serving of the salad and my mind thinks maybe I should hit "backspace" on the comment. Before assembling the salad, I made a riff on this Antipasti by Grossy Pelosi. (What? A salad before a salad? Ah! It's summer dear!)

4. A podcast I like

I'm new to listening to Hard Fork, and press play whether or not I understand the episode titles, only to feel like I'm always learning something new about AI and feeling a little smarter for it. There's a gap between appreciating new ideas and actually being able to explain them to someone else, but still, hosts that help pierce the nebulous nature of this technology are to be commended! (And hey! I learned about the Effort Heuristic!) 

5. Scenery

From the beautifully manicured Assiniboine gardens, to the lightly-maintained Henteleff, here are thistles and milkweed. The milkweed is treated with care in this park so that monarchs can lay their eggs on them. Swaths of grass will be weed-whacked, but special allowance is made for milkweed. 

And the thistles? They grow everywhere! I kind of like them though... Celtic nations associate positive qualities to the thistle and so I look at them with a benevolent eye. 

Psst! Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Look, I regret writing, last week, that I was "gathering details so as to add nuance to the generalization". Even as I wrote it, it felt cliché and flat and, in my mind, I had this image of throwing a pebble against a veneer surface. It seemed too rebellious though... Still, when I think of generalizations, I think of ideas that have hardened. The metaphor to suggest an opposite action hasn't come to mind. But let's move along...

1. AI (again)

I liked listening to Ezra Klein interview Demis Hassabis on the subject of AlphaFold. I appreciated the distinction between Chat GPT's "more human" aspect versus AlphaFold's scientific application. In the work I'm doing, I'm using a demographer’s tool, family reconstitution, to trace family genealogies through history. It feels very much like assembling a jigsaw puzzle (only that finding the pieces can be its own treasure hunt). Soon, no doubt, AI would render this unnecessary. Has it already? This recent video features an overview of how AI has been in use over a decade at Ancestry, but I wonder how its use in a consumer product compares to applications (of the AlphaFold kind) to databases like the University of Montreal's PRDH (https://www.prdh-igd.com), or the transcription of collections of letters... 

2. Reading

I really enjoyed Nora Krug's book titled Belonging. 

3. Supper

Some nights it's a relief to have a simple recipe in your arsenal. Biking home from the U of M campus, I delayed leaving because of a thunderstorm watch, and then biked home between rainshowers. We had fresh pasta in the fridge, canned San Marzano tomatoes and tinned tuna, which had me thinking of "Spaghetti con pomodoro e tonno". I modify it a bit by using Marcella Hazan's method of making tomato sauce (nixing fresh for canned, splitting a shallot and throwing it in along with a chunk of butter and letting that all simmer nicely while I catch up on the kids' exploits of the day). Add snipped fresh basil, if possible and flake the drained tuna as your pot of salted water comes to a boil. My idea of serving a meal is still toddler-influenced, meaning that adding other things to the main menu is like making an arts-and-crafts edible tablescape. Thinly sliced cucumbers cut on the bias and mixed with salt and a bit of sugar in a bowl, a pile of ringolos in another. The non-toddler-influenced version would be toasted baguette and a half glass of wine, no? 

We also had a seasonally-influenced meal this week, consisting of fresh peas and new potatoes. I love it when consulting a cookbook for the best way to treat fancy market produce (called as such for its just as fancy price) can yield a perfect answer. In this case it was a vegetarian version of Six Seasons' "English Peas with Prosciutto and New Potatoes" (the general idea here). Enjoying the result of McFadden's instructions brings a kind of relief... "phew" I sigh, "these peas really do taste good!"

4. Information-gathering

I find it hard to write anything serious without first drowning myself in information. Maybe submerging would be a better word? Drowning is the feeling I get when I think about how I'll never know enough. It happens when I set out to tackle a chapter and I've embarked on my canoe and I'm looking out over the water and thinking, "frick, this is a big lake." Engaging with the material though, sitting down, reading past the titles and deciding to corral bits into searchable notes, is jumping in and the first while is like drowning. I'm assailed by variations of thoughts like "What am I doing?" and "Where am I going?" but have to trust that eventually, things straighten out and I find my direction. It helps to ease the discomfort by giving it a title, and so, I present you with my current state, called "information-gathering". I'll feel a tiny bit better when, saturated with notes, I can start releasing coherent paragraphs into writing.

5. The view

It's the same as last week... fine weather, greenery, trees... I pack a lunch (chopped hard-boiled eggs, diced pickles, olive oil and salt in one container; an apple, cheese and crackers all separate in another) and eat outside. I miss taking daily pictures, but a real camera would be both heavy and awkward to carry around. I'll aim for taking some shots on the weekend and report back here next week! 

Cheers!

Friday Five

I am dispatching this from the Elizabeth Dafoe library, where I've decamped to work on writing the third chapter for this degree. I've left the comforts of home and given myself the discipline of routine in order to concentrate on productivity.

1. a painting

But! Shhh! Don't tell anyone... I got a little distracted, going through the stacks in that section where there are art books, by a bright yellow cover with the words "Jane Freilicher." Perusing her artwork, I found my favourite painting; it is titled "In Broad Daylight." I like it because I find in it the vast prairie-like horizon, bouquets of colourful flowers on a pop-of-orange table, and the scene all set against a serene and clean white interior. I feel happy just looking at it!

2. expansiveness

In the introduction to the book above, John Ashbury writes,

For almost half a century, Jane Freilicher has often painted the views from her studios in Greenwich Village and Water Mill, Long Island. The more she has focused on them, the greater the variations in individual pictures have been. In this she resembles Giacometti or Morandi, two artists whose fanatical determination to "get it right" resulted in what looked like a narrowness of range but was in fact an expansiveness that could have been arrived at in no other way. The same fields, bouquets, slants of light, views out over water or streets and buildings seem to recur, but it is the tremendous difference in them from picture to picture that entraps and enthralls the viewer.

I like how what could seem like a dismissable range, or a limited view, is instead appreciated for its depth and attention.

3. nabokov

From his essay "Good Readers and Good Writers" the following:

There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the suny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.

I feel like a similar thought could be applied to history. "Knowing about something" begins with generalizations, and then in research, one spends so much time gathering details so as to add nuance to the generalization. 

4. Taste

A friend gave us a bundle of garlic scapes, which I'm tempted to steam and add to an omelet. In the meantime, I cut the white pointy cap and discovered its tiny pale green seeds and crushed one between my teeth, releasing a bright garlicky taste. In a magical kingdom somewhere, these bright little bulbils are as common as dandelions and are liberally sprinkled into salads.

5. The view

It's bright and sunny here and if it's as lovely where you are, I recommend you stop reading and go feel alive, away from the screen! Cheers!

Friday Five

1. Chat GPT and Academia

If you are unfamiliar with Chat GPT, the podcast This American Life had an entertaining episode segment on the subject.  Apart from its novelty, I'm especially interested in the impact these LLMs are having in academic life, both from the students' and teachers’ perspectives. A recent episode on The Daily focused on this, and a professor named Andrew Reeves, upon discovering his students were using Chat GPT in their assignments mused,

I think it’s a betrayal of the purpose of a university class. We’re on this journey together, is my feeling about a class. (...) And so I suspect one reason it hit so hard for me is that a great many students never saw themselves on a voyage of discovery along with me. They saw themselves en route to a credential. And to some extent, the upset is my realizing that not everyone is going to see this as a magnificent voyage of discovery.

I wonder if this comment, laden with disappointment, isn't a realization, enabled by this technology, of how, for many students, education is an obligation rather than a pursuit.

On Conversations with Tyler, Reid Hoffman offers examples of how a teacher could encourage their students to use Chat GPT:

...say I was wanting to teach a class on Jane Austen and her influence on English painting. What I could do as a teacher — go to ChatGPT, other AI bots, construct 10 essays with my own prompts, hand them out to the students and say, “These are D pluses. Go use the tools and make it better” as a way of doing it.

That’s the way that you could still have homework. They’re using ChatGPT, and it causes them to be much better at thinking about what makes a great essay, as opposed to just the mechanics of all the writing. What could I innovate on the structure? Could I have a bold or new contrarian point and argue it in an interesting way? That kind of provocation is a way that we get, again, human applications.

I think it is easy to fear the arrival of new technology and easier still to suspect only negative interference, so I appreciate hearing how it can be harnessed in new and creative ways.

2. Clocks from props

If I remember correctly, my grandpa was a mechanic in the second World War. At its end, he saw these unused helicopter propellers and had four cut and made into clocks, one for each of his children. I inherited one from an uncle - my own unusual "grandfather clock". 

Recently, when visiting an antique store, I saw this one, which looks like a different spin on the same idea.

3. An app that we like

Christian does the shopping in our house and Any List makes it easy for me to write the list, and him to cross off the items. We've been taking its simplicity for granted for years!

4. Luxury vs premium

Until listening to an episode from Acquired, (thanks to a tip gleaned from Kottke media diet post) I could not have told you the difference between luxury and premium consumer goods. But at around the 1:46 minute mark, hosts Ben and David make this distinction [transcription lightly edited] : 

There are premium goods, which means, you pay more and you get more utility, like objective value... (This nuance is so illuminating once you understand [it]. You start seeing it everywhere once you think about things this way.) Premium is pay for value, luxury is literally paying because something offers no more value. And other people will know that, so they know that 1) you have the wealth to spend on things even though they are no more utilitarian to you and 2) that you have taste, and you have chosen this item as the item that you want to throw your wealth at because it says something about you, not what you need it to do productively. [From Coco Chanel]: "Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends."

5. Scenery here

I like how Henteleff Park volunteers make nice signs around the park:

Three things on a Sunday night

Winnipeg, which has had above-average temperatures for the past few weeks, has had the blanked yanked off Wednesday when I set out to walk the dog and donned two sweaters instead of sunscreen. Sitting at a desk in cool weather doesn't feel like a deprivation compared to those days when you could be comfortable reading outside in the shade.

1. Eating

We had visitors last Sunday and served BBQ pork tenderloin with potato salad. I was determined to try “Ottolenghi's Beyond Potato Salad” and our guest took one bite and said that it tasted like summer. It was delicious! I have just the tiniest quibble on the amount of tarragon recommended... The recipe asks for 30g, which, I feel might be fine if you have a tarragon bush or two in the backyard. But here, we find fresh herbs at the supermarket packaged neatly in rectangular plastic containers. At about 9g of tarragon I got impatient. The salad was still perfectly tasty.

2. Pa on Father’s Day

Warm weather brings with it surreptitiously placed painted rocks (#WinnipegRocks), in grass, on stumps, under benches... The kids collect them like art enthusiasts... but not this one. This one, titled Irish cottage, brought home by my husband, I kept for myself because it made me think of my dad.

College-aged, he took a trip to Europe with a friend, meeting up with acquaintances, hitting tourist spots, staying in hostels sometimes and keeping a tiny spiral-bound notebook with short sentences of the days' highlights and impressions. He spent a few weeks in Ireland and then went to France. He wrote "France is very flat – red soil and many trees." (It made me smile, reading A Writer's Diary, that Virginia Woolf too called it a "flat country" in 1928.) My dad took a few pictures on the trip, a pittance by today's standards, but three of them feature this cottage with its white exterior walls and flowering bushes...

3. The view this week was smoky

Just a bit, not too much...

Psst... There won't be any blog post next Friday... I'm away from my desk, but wishing you well! Back on top by the 30th. Cheers!

Friday Five

Welcome to another edition of this, er, blog. Why blog? Because its fun! And because I don't think you need another newsletter subscription. (I have so many that I don't pay for and lament the fact that they are not in a feed, that putting them in a feed would require its own feedly subscription and I'm Séraphin Poudrier as far as all that is concerned.) (Do you know what kind of monthly bill I’d have to pay for all the newsletters I like following? Uh…) On with the list!

1. Historical research detours

Sometimes history is taught from an arbitrary point... In Manitoba we might learn for example that Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière and Marie-Anne Gaboury were the first white couple to arrive on the plains of St. Boniface.  They are, after all, Louis Riel's grandparents. So while we make do with this image of a man and woman arriving on this frontier in their uncomfortable clothes, on their uncomfortable cart, greeted with warmth by the busily harangued bishop, worry-worn but happy to see this nice white couple, it's exciting to to push that frame and pan out a little... This week I read a local history of the parish of St. Justin, from where they came, the priest that ministered there for 45 years (Denis Gérin) who was related to Quebec's first sociologist (Léon Gérin) and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie who wrote "Un canadien errant" - a ditty my father-in-law would sing to the grandkids. 

2. Historical research finds the drama

One of the families who immigrated to Manitoba from Quebec, came from the town of St. Scholastique. To get an idea of where such a place is, research lead me to discover that the town was forced to give way to the Mirabel airport in 1969. In this case, history leads the willing person into a noisy and vibrant drama, the way, in winter, you could be driving along a lamp-lit road and only be greeted by people the moment you open the door to a raucous party. I find it just as exciting!

3. eating

A plate of sticky chicken, rice and pickled vegetables hit the spot with this week's warmer temperatures. I made Ali Slagel's version, but Lynn Crawford and Lora Kirk's "General Gemma's Chicken" in Hearth and Home is good, so is Julia Turshen's "Sticky Chicken" in Simply Julia, but she also has a recipe for tofu with rice and pickled vegetables that could rival the chicken options listed so far. Mmm... quick pickled vegetables feel so effortlessly summer. I also tried out Smitten Kitchen's Blondie Chipwiches. The cakey-cookie layer is easy-peasy, but assembly is a little tricky.

4. Teacher gifts

End of June marks the end of the school year and I have teacher gifts on my mind. Need some local ideas?

• Black Market Provisions sells 12$ jars of La Lichée caramel with fleur de sel, coffee, and chocolate flavours.

• Reusable bags are a must, and why not pick a pretty one from Kelly Lewis's extensive collection here.

• A mug, but make it special! My aspirational gift-giving self would support potters like Pepo Cermics, and Meg Does Pottery. Isn’t this gold splatter wine mug pretty?  (And I love this planter, priced like the piece of art it is.)

• Summer is a celebration of fresh vegetables and fresh fruit and supporting local producers is a gift in both directions. How about a gift card to St. Leon Gardens? 

• If you really want to spoil someone, a gift card to Thermea.

• Then again, a pretty card with kind thoughts inside and a gift card to the teacher’s favourite coffee stop is never a bad idea!

5. Scenery here

After the dandelions come the clover...

Friday Five

1. Feeling inspired

Writing a many-paged thesis is, for me, the first longest writing assignment I've ever had, and from the start, I've taken it on with gusto. I like writing! I told everyone and myself, and I do. I haven't been lying... but it is long and sometimes, I'd like to hasten it along, to reach that finish line. I think that's why listening to podcasts like Longform are especially helpful... they remind me how caring about the research and writing can have a worthwhile payoff. 

The latest episode featured an interview with Lisa Belkin. She answered questions about her latest book, Genealogy of a Murder which was nine years in the making. She explains how she researched how the lives of three people intersected on one day. I look forward to reading the book. But it's the idea and her research to pull it off that I especially like. To a much smaller degree, I hope to pull off something kind of similar... in my case, it's how the lives of a collection of families intersected in a small town's creation that interests me, and I hope, can be written in a way that interests others too. 

2. A short essay on recipes and cooking

On Conversations with Tyler, Seth Godin had this to say about cooking:

Lacking all humility, I am a really good cook. The reason is, I don’t follow recipes. I dance with them by understanding what the person who made the recipe had in mind. Having created recipes myself — there’re some on my blog — when someone’s making a recipe, they don’t test — unless they’re Kenji — the difference between half a teaspoon and three-quarters of a teaspoon of something. They’re not sitting there doing 4,000 variations. They just make the thing, and then they write down the way they made it, but the way they made it is not the only way to make it.

There is a project here. I cook every night because I like the short-term nature of the project. You can visualize the outcome, and if you understand the components, you can make it. It will be slightly different every time, but it will be delicious because you understand. When I find people who don’t like to cook or who say they are bad cooks, it’s simply because they’re trying to follow a recipe, and that feels like being an indentured servant.

I do not dance with recipes, ingredients, cooks or guests, but hearing an opinion about recipes so different from one's own is interesting... Maybe I can dance with opinions the way Seth dances with recipes. Dance... that's a funny word choice... I'm trying to imagine… Dancing in my mind is the romantic ballroom kind, the Maria in a shrub-walled terrace kind... take the lead, I'll follow... in fact, I like a good strong recipe telling me what to do, moving me around my linoleum-floored kitchen, flushed from the heat of the oven. Seth is older than me, but perhaps the dance he imagines is the modern kind? The tag-you're-it, improvisation-on-the-dance-floor-and-people-clapping-along-to-the-beat, kind? 

Recipes are my teachers. I am thrilled when I can compare how an ingredient, or a meal, is treated according to cooks with greater experience and better intuition. Take arborio rice. I first made risotto based on a recipe by Ricardo Larrivé. (I once tried to make it without following his recipe and ended up with flavourless goo.) With leftover risotto, you can make the somewhat laborious arancini - but I rarely do.  Perusing Rosie Daykin's Let Me Feed You led to the discovery of "Risotto Cakes" which were delicious - both an interesting twist to serving risotto and easy to do. But also, there is Ina Garten and Deb Perelman who have risotto recipes that provide a different way of cooking arborio - an oven method that promises less hassle - and, in Perelman's case, new flavours in the form of a more breakfast-y take. Just this week, I made falafel, twice. The first time based on the usual chickpea filling, the second time, using Melissa Clark's farro-lentil filling and spices, just to see which one we liked better, to feel how the ingredients came together differently. Unlike Seth Godin, I need recipe writers with me in the kitchen! I am so grateful to the kind and thoughtful ones who never make me feel like an indentured servant.

3. Rhubarb!

Something about warm weather and the end of the school year makes for delightful impromptu gatherings, ones in which the only invitation is a text like "I made rhubarb cake, wanna come over for a piece?" 

4. I'm in the yard

That's my plan for the day... print off what I need to read to help me write the next chapter and bring it outside, to read in the shade. I might pull a few weeds while I'm at it...

5. Scenery here

I know dandelions are a weed and I fully support my husband chasing them off our lawn, one inhospitable spray of Killex at a time. However, their run of city parks make them an inevitable photo subject...

Friday Five

The weather here is glorious, sunny, breezy, and warm. Unusually warm... a forecast full of warmth, suns splashed all across the next five days and a heat warning. So while this weather has me feeling unproductive (my senses tell me it's summer), the prodigality of the rays feels like a false thing... a stranger with candy. Soon, the warmth will be scorching, the forests will dry out and blue skies will turn orange with smoke, no? This back-of-mind climate-change anxiety is real. Still, it's Friday, and writing a small dispatch to remember the week is a cheering exercise. Let's reverse the order of things a little, shall we? We'll start with yesterday's activity, which was:

1. A soup delivery

Soup and hot temperatures seem contradictory, but not for my mother-in-law who's sequestered herself in her air-conditioned condo for the duration of her cold. I insisted on making her Ottolenghi's Magical Chicken Soup. It's a good recipe! And the advantage of a soup delivery during summer temperatures is that, if you have to run an errand, the soup will stay warm in the car!

2. Antidotes

Being kind to a mildly sick person isn't hard and one could even feel especially virtuous. It's harder to feel good in different circumstances, say, when the solution isn't soup, but patience. Listening to the 10 Percent Happier podcast recently, I was intrigued by the Buddhist idea of a list of strategies for "Abandoning unwholesome states" of which "finding the antidote" is one Joseph Goldstein took time to illustrate with examples, like empathetic or sympathetic joy when feeling envious, or:

...again, some of these things are so simple! (...) If we're really feeling greed, the antidote is renunciation, and it doesn't have to be some super big renunciation, just, you know, moments of, there's a desire to do something that maybe is not that important or necessary, or whatever, and just for the practice of it, say “no, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to let it go.” (...) Just a simple example: I may be doing a walking meditation and the thought comes, “ah, a cup of tea would be nice.” And then, “no, no.” And then the thought may come again and again and again and again. But those times when I can say “I don't need it, I don't need to do it...” It's not that there's anything wrong with having a cup of tea. It's just a very simple thing, but it's a chance to practice the move of renunciation, you know when we have some desire, even a very small one like that and we have a wise “no, I don't need this.” For myself I feel that, first I feel that it is a great victory over my mind, but also, more important than that it's energizing, you know because it's like the conservation of energy, instead of our energy going out to the fulfillment of all our desires, saying “no, I don't need to do that,” it feels so strengthening. So again, this is just a way of applying an antidote.

3. Mental health

I appreciated the two episodes the Ezra Klein Show dedicated to teen mental health... In his part 2 interview with Lisa Damour, she talks about mental distress and how, in her field (psychology), there's a (pretty clear) way of assessing mental health:

We’re looking for two things — do the feelings fit the situation, even if they are negative, unwanted, unpleasant? And then, second, and perhaps more important, are they managed effectively? Are they managed in a way that brings relief and does no harm, or are they managed in a way that does bring relief but is going to come at a cost?

Then, perhaps more interestingly, Klein asks Damour if our way of reacting to "negative emotional experiences" isn't creating "a kind of aversion to things that people, at another point, might have just understood to be part of life." To which Damour answers (in part):

I think that’s a worry. I think that if we, consciously or not, operate with this idea that you’re supposed to feel good, and then if you come up against something that doesn’t feel good, you should be very wary of it. I think it can have unintended consequences. 

And one of the arguments that threads through my book is actually about the value of psychological distress. And this is something that seems strange to say at this moment in time, that there’s value in psychological distress because we are so set against it as a culture, but I can tell you from the side of psychology and certainly the side of development, this has not really been something that is controversial or that we’ve questioned.

And what I mean by that is emotions — there’s a lot of value in the negative ones across a lot of different domains, like one is they’re informational. If you notice that you’ve got a particularly uncomfortable feeling every time you’re in somebody’s presence, there’s value in figuring out what that’s about. It helps us make decisions. It helps us guide our thinking. They’re also growth-giving. (...)

Damour goes on to explain the kinds of emotional maturation she's observed in her practice and I think its thought-provoking.

4. A quote from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries:

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. (p 293)

5. The scenery here

I like it when my current read has a description that matches real life. This line from Lolita came back to me on this week’s walks; “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.” (p 73)

Friday Five

Welcome to this week’s edition of things I’ve enjoyed and thought about… And while I hone my conversational writing to match Nigella Lawson’s, this rambling and the links from which it is inspired is all free!

1. Drawing, again

Drawing for Illustration by Martin Salisbury, mentioned last week, had these two inspiring quotes from illustrators, on the subject of drawing:

David Humphries:

"When I was a student, I remember visiting an exhibition of drawings at the Royal College of Art by Sir Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. I was really annoyed  that all of the scientists could draw better than me. After the exhibition, when I was sitting under a tree in Hyde Park, an iPhone dropped out of the sky and hit me on the head. At that moment it occurred to me that very few modern illustrators have the technical ability to make drawings of that quality, and it is the advent of photography that has allowed drawing to disappear from the science curriculum (and the majority of art schools). But the real loss is that the act (and discipline) of describing things visually helps us understand their function and appreciate their beauty; merely pressing a button on a camera or a phone just isn't the same."

Kerry Lemon:

"I'm evangelistic about drawing. Always on a mission to get people to draw. The tragedy of art education is the quick determination of who is 'good' at drawing and who is not. An obsession with product, rather than the process of creation. Finding joy in the process, the sound and texture of dragging pen, brush or pencil across a page will mean you will continue to do it and, as in all things, the more you actually draw, the more you WILL automatically improve - your finished drawings will become better and better. There are no shortcuts. No expensive pens or expert tuition will get you there. Just draw. Draw constantly. Draw everything, all the time. Drawing is all about looking and a regular drawing practice will alter your view of the world. You will begin to see things that you previously ignored. Sitting on the train, you will be acutely aware of the pattern of the seat, the light on the metal railing, the profile of the commuter opposite, the weave of their scarf. Drawing is magic, and I am bewitched by it.

2. A thing I learned about rhubarb

It's nice sitting down with a cookbook written by Nigella Lawson. She's a very chatty cook and were you to compare recipes to all the thoughts she pens along with them, I wonder if the latter wouldn't outweigh the former. But I like listening to her.... she writes so well, it does indeed feel like listening, I swear I can even hear her British accent. Her recipe books have photos, and I always find them very colourful, almost over-saturated. She has a chapter on rhubarb, accompanied by bright pink rhubarb photo-subjects... in a trifle, all soft in a tray, fresh from being roasted. Until I read the chapter though, I didn't know that there are two kinds of rhubarb... In Cook, Eat, Repeat, she writes:

For much of the world, the coming of rhubarb heralds the arrival of spring; for those in England, it appears brightly in the bleak midwinter, absurdly, improbably pink, the color of hope, filled with all the light that is missing from our skies. My heart lifts every time it comes into season towards the end of December. How could it not? Yorkshire forced rhubarb, which is started off outside, but then transplanted inside, cultivated in the dark and harvested by candlelight, is one of our greatest culinary treasures: hot pink from the cold earth, its stalks are more tender, their texture more delicate, and the taste purer and more vibrant than the hefty red rhubarb that comes later, out in the open, and which, as the year moves on, and the stalks grow thicker and greener, all too often cooks into a fibrous khaki mush (p 127).

Mystery solved! I will no longer worry where all the pretty pink colour goes... it was never really there to begin with!

3. Tiktok is still fun

Sometimes I abandon a social media platform for awhile... I scrolled through Tiktok recently and it made me feel happy that Hank Green's office has been redecorated since I last visited the platform. And a ceramicist got accepted into a market after being turned down again and again. Feeling "heartwarmed" on social media should be celebrated!

4. Geraniums

Inspired by this post, I bought geraniums for inside the house. They remind me of the ones that lined the window sill behind our elementary school teacher's desk. For years, I disdained them, but my taste has changed, and now they make me think of coziness and comfort. 

5. The view here

It's been very warm this week. Leaves are sprouting, delicate and shiny like butterfly wings before they dry. I planted flowers in the garden a week earlier than in years past. Everywhere, the first dandelions of the season...

Psst! Happy Friday! This was sent just before the day ended, and doesn’t include a link to a recipe. But if you’d like a recommendation, we tried this soup on Wednesday, when it was chilly and rainy, and paired it with Buttermilk Biscuits and felt satisfied.

Friday Five

Welcome to another edition of “Friday Five” where I pause regular work to play around with words and try to be useful by sharing a few things I’ve enjoyed this week. Have a seat! This edition brings you an art book, a Netflix series, an audiobook, a cake and the tiniest of flowers. Happy Friday!

1. Drawing for Illustration by Martin Salisbury

This book is brilliant. I wish I hadn't read it so that I could enjoy reading it for the first time again. Books on drawing that I've read so far, fall into categories, like how-to or glimpses into artist's work and perhaps that's why this book felt so unique and fresh... it was neither of those things, even if basics are laid out in the first part, and quotes from illustrator/artists are interspersed throughout the book. 

Because having only recently ventured into this hobby, everything can feel overwhelming, having the steady voice of an experienced person feels like just the right kind of guidance. Although I knew that yes, everyone can draw, getting better at it is about learning to see. Seeing is a skill that develops with time and practice and Salisbury is direct about it. "While experimenting with a range of media is ultimately important, when trying to get to grips with the basics of drawing, it is advisable to focus on the process of learning to see rather than giving in to the distractions of the respective effects that can be created by the myriad drawing implements available."(p. 52) Seeing people's work online has positives and negatives: "On the one hand, there is now unprecedented instant access to an enormous array of influence from wide-ranging visual cultures and traditions. On the other hand, it is easier than ever to slip into imitative mannerisms by (consciously or unconsciously) for example, drawing foliage that owes more to the decorative patterns of a particularly admired picture-book maker than personal experience of the real world." (p 105) Teaching yourself to draw from memory is an exciting and challenging next step. 

I love how the book is written; everything is divided into categories, each heading gets a succinct text often containing description, historical context, advice and examples. Not just current illustrators are profiled, but ones from the past too; their qualities are highlighted as are the mediums in which they worked.

I so enjoyed reading this book!

2. Guilty pleasure

Indian Matchmaking (Netflix)

3. An audiobook that's fun to listen to

Unlike some podcasts, audiobooks have little in the way of special effects. (One narrator was described in the review as having a "nasal voice"!) Coming across a book read by the author is always a plus, but coming across an author who genuinely seems to enjoy narrating what they wrote is especially delightful. I didn't know this could exist to the degree it does until listening to Lucy Worsley narrate her book titled Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman. It feels as though she read the entire thing smiling! She even seems to chuckle at parts! In the audiobook, she narrates "The early acidic Miss Marple is actually the Miss Marple I prefer. But perhaps that's because I'm a nasty old cat myself." I can't even imagine that is true.

4. A treat

If I were to bake myself a treat for Mother's Day, it would be this cake. 

5. The scenery here

The trees this week have all sent forth their seeds. Because I arm myself with a camera, I've been paying closer attention to the display this year and have enjoyed the variety and detail... 

Just look at these seeds! Black and white and pink and green! They look like they’ve put on a dress to go Flamenco dancing!

From a rainy day to a sunny day, this tree with its tiny buds went from quiet and modest to bright and buzzing, attracting to its tiny yellow flowers a swarm of happy bees.

Psst: Take care!

Friday Five

Last week I did not publish a post and have felt like a shell of a human ever since. That ends today with a quotes on beauty, a fact and advice learned from Kevin Kelly in a podcast, a recipe we tried and liked, cookies too, and what the scenery is like here. (Hint: it's gone from still-hibernating frigidity last week to "where are my t-shirts?" this week.) 

1. Rebecca Solnit's Thoughts on beauty 

Solnit published Orwell's Roses in October 2021. Of the many thought-provoking passages, there are these ones on beauty. (They lack page numbers because I listened to the audiobook and transcribed them later.)

The word beauty is one of those overly roomy words, frayed around the edges, ignored through overfamiliarity, often used to mean purely visual beauty. But the kinds of beauty that the Oxford English Dictionary enumerates include many that are not visual, including "that quality of a person or thing which is highly pleasing or satisfying to the mind; moral or intellectual excellence," an admirable person, an impressive or exceptionally good example of something.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, the scholar Elaine Scarry notes that among the complaints about beauty is that contemplation of it is passive - "looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard." It's a definition startling in its simplicity. What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it's where aesthetic and ethical standards meet. She contrasts that with "looking or hearing that is prelude to intervening in, changing, what one has seen or heard (as happens in the presence of injustice)." Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's doing something whose value and results are not so easily quantified or commodified, and you could even argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities, and oversimplifications. 

On how beauty and integrity go together:

Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see. A dancer's gesture may be beautiful because it is precisely executed move by a highly skilled artist-athlete, but even a gracefully executed kick of a child is ugly. The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up," Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dali. "If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down it it surrounds a concentration camp." Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty - or the hideousness - can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.

The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it's a quality found in many beautiful things. (...)

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.

2. Learning from Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly published, at the top of the month, a book full of advice. He's been a guest on a number of podcasts which is just the kind of promotion I'm most susceptible to. On Conversations with Tyler I learned that costumes are the fist things to vanish from traditional cultures because: 

the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. The traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom.

It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. It’s much cheaper to buy cloth. That’s one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money, is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. If you’re not taking the homemade cloth and making it into your native costume, and you’re buying a shirt — it’s just easier to put on a cotton T-shirt, which you can almost get for free. The costumes just disappear because they’re not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand.

In the Longform podcast episode, Kelly mentionned in passing his idea about "protopia" and his website offers an explanation: "(...) just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely." And, "Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize." 

(There’s an 8 minute video about it here.)

3. Celebrating asparagus!

There are three categories of pizza in our house. In order of preference, the first is the gourmet stone-fired kind you can get at fancy restaurants, authentic Italian markets or fancy food trucks. These yield simple pizzas with the extraordinary crust that has bubbles and spots of char. The second category are home-made, they have a simple dough and are cooked at regular oven temperatures and have the toppings your family likes. The third kind are quickly delivered from easy-to-remember phone numbers. 

Bearing all that in mind, our home-made pizzas are fine, not fancy, but still a treat, given I'm more willing to make waffle batter than pizza dough on a Friday night. This week, I finally made Smitten Kitchen's Shaved Asparagus Pizza. It's been on my mind a long time considering it's a recipe from her first cookbook published in 2012. 

I think I resisted making it because I figured the kids wouldn't like it. I'm not wrong, but this palate-limiting belief has loosened a little in the last while since I've learned how to split meals between the things the adults want to try and the things the kids are comfortable with. The usual dough recipe I use from Jane Rodmell’s Best Summer Weekends was enough for two pizzas, theirs had pepperoni and ours had asparagus. This will absolutely now be part of our spring menu rotation.

4. A basic cookie got good reviews in our house

This recipe for Jam Thumbprint Cookies comes from Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking (https://www.amazon.ca/Cheryl-Days-Treasury-Southern-Baking/dp/1579658415) actually garnered special notice from my little teenager.

5. Spot the birds!

Look, I'm sorry, but the landscape scenery here is dead boring. The river is high and everything is brown. But the birds are singing... If nature is not much to look at now, it has a lot to offer your ears.

I don't think I understood in Grade 12 why Silent Spring was the meaningful title it was. Even though I take pictures and look for beauty, walking the dog daily has brought me closer to what Solnit describes in Orwell's Roses:

“I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance. Indigenous people who were sometimes despised for not appreciating nature in the English rustic tradition often appreciated it as orderly patterns in time, not as static pictorial pleasure. That is, they might be more inclined to celebrate, for example, key moments in the temporal march of the sun through the year than an exceptionally pretty sunset.”

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Good Podcast episodes

My perennially favourite podcast, Longform, interviewed David Grann on the subject of his most recent book, The Wager this week. What I particularly liked about this episode is how the discussion often glanced on the subject of history, what people think of it, its presence "always there, undergirding us, always flowing," its malleability.

From guest Anna Keay on Conversations with Tyler, I learned about The Landmark Trust, where, for a reasonable price, you can stay in a castle. It sounds like the coolest thing ever.

Finally, awhile back, I listened to a re-broadcast interview with Margaret Atwood on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. She reads a poem from her new collection, titled "Dearly" and I liked this single line: "It's the smallest details that foil translators."

Best Recent Read

There is something a little magical about Graphic Novel where the immersion in another world feels as powerful as video. I was so enthralled that I read the final pages in bed with a headlamp - a trick Alison Bechdel illustrated in one of her books.

Green Almonds

I stopped at Alsham Market for brown lentils, and when at the cashier, asked the man what the giant bag of fuzzy green things were, from which he'd scooped a bag-sized portion for the lady ahead of me. "Green almonds." He sprinkled a handful in my bag and we tried them that night, with a bit of sea salt, as he'd recommended. It felt like a treat to participate in this seasonal delicacy, even though we're not sure we'd buy a bagful...

What's cooking

The brown lentils were for Stanley Tucci's "Lentil Spaghetti" a dish he describes in his memoir, complete with the recipe. His memoir is really good for that... he describes food and drinks so well that one feels encouraged to try anything. The unpalatable martini we'd heretofore regarded as a cocktail to avoid, became, thanks to Tucci's authoritarian mixing regime, the exact thing he promised: "Drink it. Become a new person." (We became people who could drink a martini.) Then we got scared by how much alcohol could be so easily consumed and conscribed gin to the mother-in-law, on her visits, to be mixed with ice and lots of ginger ale.

The view

There was a Colorado-low yesterday... it's a weather event that can bring lots of snow, or not that much, or it could be rain, or it could miss the city, or it could immobilize it. It's the low you can just never know.

Friday Five

1. Art as a cure

It is the ugliest time of year in Winnipeg. Snowbanks are beige agglomerations of crusty ice covered in sandy gravel, receding, revealing mould-filmed flattened brown lawns. My mood suffered from the dismal view and the sun was bright but not quite warm enough to feel caressing. What helped was dropping in to Joel Meyerowitz's giant book of photography, titled Where I Find Myself. Being transported elsewhere thanks to someone else's artistic eye was just the cure I needed. I felt the energy of his pictures as he communicated it in the description of one of his series:

What freedom! Just being out in the world, shooting whatever spoke to me or suggested itself to my eye. Actually, learning to listen to what speaks to you, rather than prejudging or censoring, is what a trip like that offered. The world is far richer and more interesting than my imagination could conceive of, and by accepting this - which is at the heart of the medium - I learned not to second-guess myself and simply let the world play on my eyes. (page 261)

2. Enzo has a sore paw

I wonder if this week's mood is in part influenced by the fact that I can't take Enzo on long walks... he hurt his paw, and so we do a block. When it is time to turn around and go back home, he pauses and looks up at me, as if to say that he'd really rather keep walking and sniffing around. Marie-Hélène and I finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows published in 1961. It's about a boy and a pair of raccoon-hunting hounds and their adventures and misadventures. I was unfamiliar with the story and so, the accidental death of one of the characters who tripped and fell on an ax, and the gory after-effects of one of the hound's fight with a mountain lion - the dog's entrails catching on huckleberry branches on his walk home - came as a bit of a shock. I don't know why I was surprised... Aren't we always raising the alarm on violence these days? But somehow, the violence that filters through to my kids as Nintendo explosions, seems more comical and exaggerated than gory and realistic. I wonder if the quantity of violence is the same as it has been (or is it more?) but its remove is greater.

3. What we ate

Ali Slagel's Sesame Chicken Meatballs were a nice change of flavour. I really love how her cookbook provides such helpful hints. For example; while her recipe suggested broccoli, her note offered alternatives: “use another vegetable that’s good both raw and crisp-tender, like snap peas, scallions, broccolini, or sweet mini peppers.” And not only that, she also listed three other uses for the sesame sauce made for this meal. Her cookbook is delightfully titled I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To).

4. Masters of art series

I thought I would look down on a slim volume about an artist’s life and works, but perusing one on Marc Chagall from the Masters of Art Series felt like just the right dose of art and biography to foster interest and encourage a greater familiarity with what often feels like an intimidating subject.

5. A few pictures of dishes.

The kids thought it was strange that I took pictures of dishes in the sink, but I found them oddly pretty, their colour and the suds suggesting the comfort of warmth and cleanliness… It’s something to do while I wait for the view outside to improve.

Friday Five

1. What have I been reading?

I recently finished Caste by Isabel Wilkinson and especially liked the beginning sentences of its epilogue. She writes:

We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow, as more than the dust that we are. Even the longest-lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life, or life's potential, when our lives are so short to begin with.

It's a continuation of a thought from a previous post.  Wilkinson's thought parallel's Stella Levi's in Michael Frank's book about her life as a survivor of the Auschwitz titled One Hundred Saturdays. In it Michael narrates a question Stella was asked: "Many years later, a girl in Madrid asked Stella: 'After Auschwitz, do you believe in God?' and Stella answered, 'If you're asking me whether God was there, this is not a matter for God, but for man. It was not God, a god, who made this place, it was man." These two books have been an immersion in the ways in which we hurt each other and the ways we can help each other. 

2. Drawing a Parallel between art and writing

Sandi Hester recently published a Youtube video titled "Painting from Family Photos." At the 14 minute mark, she shows how she makes a series of sketches based on a particular photo. She describes how, once she had a rough sketch down, she wanted to play more with the narrative, so she opened a larger sketchbook, took out her paint and drew the scene again "noticing what's fun" and "trying to be loose." The crochet blanket with its triangle pattern progressively crept up the bed and took it over by the third iteration. Cookies appeared on the night table, clothing changed.  In a way, writing, even nonfiction, is not that different. Reworking the draft of a chapter, I can focus on what's fun, try to say things less stiffly, and dwell on a scene at greater length. It's the work that goes into any academic writing, where students have to "struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else" (How to Write a Paragraph quoting a report by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges). It takes work! Roger Ebert wrote that he would "haunt art supply stores, as if somehow one could purchase what one needed to be an artist" and I've often felt this way in bookstores, thinking maybe the right book would solve whatever inadequacy I felt at the moment. Which leads me to cookbooks...

3. What's Cooking?

Among the cookbooks I've borrowed from the library are Ottolenghi's two recent test kitchen ones and On the Himalayan Trail. What I appreciate most about them is how, by choosing to sample from their recipes, I get to think about food differently. Romy Gill who travelled to Kashmir writes, "Perhaps the most surprising difference between Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim cuisines, though, is the fact that Pandits will cook without onions or garlic: two of the staples of the majority of Indian regional cuisine" (p 12). By making "One-pan crispy spaghetti and chicken" and "Magical chicken and Parmesan soup with pappardelle" from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love, I appreciate how flavour is built using (lots of) tomato paste, and how stock is slightly thickened by blending a few ladlefuls of the stock and the vegetables together. 

Our family's palates and tastes and preferences are constantly shifting. Two years ago, I thought I might settle, once and for all, the question of a menu plan by setting one up for the whole year. The thing is, I'm not done learning, the kids haven't stopped growing and that restless desire for novelty awakens the moment you've closed the door on a routine you've coddled to sleep. The menu plan from two years ago no longer fits my children's new aversion for chicken, nor my new interest in less meat-dependent meals. C'est la vie! Now, although I do plan menus from week to week and have a wonderful repertoire of family favourites, my recipe binder contains lined loose leaf sheets of notes... the things we plan and what got done, alongside the new thing we tried and the comments that go with it. This week I made "Tuna and potato croquettes with egg remoulade" from Ottolenghi's Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things. It was a delicious introduction to remoulade, but only for the adults... the kids had cinnamon toast with peanut butter.

I think I wanted to add these thoughts to that menu planning post, triggered in part by Andrea Zittel's comments, captured in Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: Women at Work. Zittel said "Having a pattern helps ensure that you fit everything into a limited amount of time, but too much of a pattern and you get stuck" (p 121). Although this is in reference to her daily routine in her life as an artist, it could apply to any routine, any plan... I think it's funny how she is also recorded as having said "Cooking is one of the few dilemmas that I'll probably never fully solve" (p 122). She is wiser than I am, for I am always trying to solve it! I think I should think of it as a hobby in order to avoid finding it like the young Françoise Sagan, who said: "The material problems of day-to-day living bore me silly. As soon as someone asks me what we should have for dinner I become flustered and then sink into gloom" (p 266). I prefer the older Gustave Flaubert's thought: "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough" only, instead of "look" in this case, the verb "work" would be better.

4. A bit of history

Like the time I investigated the comptometer with my mother-in-law, a recent conversation in which we were discussing the local brewery Little Brown Jug, lead us to asking her if her relatives drank beer when she was little. Her answer revealed that St. Boniface had a local brewery we'd never learned about, called Kiewel's (see here). I like these occasional moments when past and present connect over a small concrete detail.

5. What it looks like here

Winnipeg was snowed-over anew thanks to a Colorado-low on Wednesday. Although I feel impatient for the carefree days of going out with only a light sweater on, there's a postcard-like charm to fresh snow.

Friday Five

1.

I started a new sketchbook this week. Keeping a sketchbook is a form of rebellion, a strengthening of the will that has to fight against distraction and urgency. I like this video titled "The sketchbook that healed me" by Danny Gregory.

2.

Reading Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: Women at Work is inspiring because it provides a glimpse into a diversity of lifestyles, personalities, and ways of dealing with challenges like time constraints, social relationships and family. I find it comforting to know that Josephine Baker and Coco Chanel didn't like taking vacations, and how Octavia Butler needed time alone.

3.

I feel like serving a side for a family meal is less about balancing vegetables and proteins and more about having something to nibble on besides the main meal. An impromptu Thursday night fried rice was enhanced by a bowl of Crown Corn Chips that taste like real buttered corn, picked up at the Asian grocery store ING Supermarket.

4.

I love homes that use moody paint colours. I remember being inspired by this house tour on Cup of Jo, and more recently, have stared at each picture in this tour on Emily Henderson's website. 

5.

Look at Enzo go!

Happy Friday!