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Aubigny’s early pioneers from Quebec came from a host of Catholic parishes, including St. Geneviève, St. Jerome, St-Hyacinthe, St. Cuthbert, La Conception and St. Scholastique, to name a few.
In his book, Brève histoire des Canadiens-Français, Yves Frenette writes:
Comme l'écrit avec humour l'historien Guy Laperrière, "apparement, tous les saints du paradis se sont donné rendez-vous sur la carte du Québec."
The thought makes me smile.
This book dedication, from Claire M. Strom’s book Profiting from the Plains, encapsulates research and motherhood:
This book is dedicated to my daughter,
Phoebe Helga Margaret Strom
She was not yet born when I started my research and will be eleven by the time it is published. She has, therefore, through no fault or choice of her own, lived with James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway all her life. I thank her for that, and for the joy and grace she has brought to my life.
James J. Hill was a decent man, and he kept a diary. His biographer Martin Albro writes:
Like many another diarist, James J. Hill began the new year with the best of intentions, but quickly found that it was an onerous task to live a full, energetic, exciting life and note it all down in a book as well.
Here’s to exciting days!
A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:
I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.
And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:
When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.
But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.
We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.
And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:
[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.
[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.
I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.
And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:
It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.
I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.
While I'm writing my thesis, I like checking people's names, to see if they have interesting biographies.
Consider Adrien-Gabriel Morice. He wrote three volumes on church history in the West in which Aubigny's name is linked with vicomte Jacques d'Aubigny. But he was an insufferable man. He joined the Oblates but could not obey superiors. He was sent to a mission where there was one other priest, a Fr. Georges Blanchet. And this is what happened:
he made life so difficult for Blanchet, a gentle man much loved by the Carrier, that later that year the priest begged to be transferred before Morice’s perpetual disagreements drove him mad. That year Blanchet ceded supervision of the mission to Morice to avoid further conflict, but he would remain there, building churches and doing housework, until his retirement ten years later. A succession of priests, finding Morice impossible to work and live with, and refusing to become his servant, chose to leave.
What a character!
On another day, I checked this railroad contractor's name to discover that his daughter was more renowned than he was... Charlotte Whitehead Ross was the first female doctor in Montreal, having taken her medical education at Woman’s Medical College at Philadelphia in 1870, while also bearing children. She came to Manitoba in 1881 where she continued to practice medicine. Her biographer, Vera K. Fast, writes:
After assisting at a birth she would often scrub the cabin floor and do the washing, the cooking, and the baking to help the mother and family. Her daughters looked after the Ross home in her absence, although she always did the baking, which she enjoyed, as she did embroidery, knitting, and music, especially the piano.
She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn. I like how Fast writes:
Undeterred, Charlotte continued on her busy rounds by horse, sleigh, canoe, and train, not defiantly, for she was no social or political activist, but simply because there was a need.
Biographies are inspiring!
I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:
(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."
I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.
I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.
To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.
Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:
April Fool’s in French is Poisson d’avril, and poisson means fish, and so, my pranks have been food-themed. In the past there has been miracle berry experiments, liquid-turned-to-gel, and squid-ink pasta. This year was bug themed:
I put them in their lunches, as snacks. “There’s no way I’m eating ants!” said one, who gave it to her friends. The other thought the packaging was a spoof, did not read the ingredient list and had a friend, anyway, who’d eaten fried earthworms. He said they were good. And the third put it back in his lunch box and ignored it.
What is reading if one doesn’t keep an account of it? Ah, yes, the wonderful New Year’s resolution to grab those titles, to pin them down with a scribble of writing, to squeeze out some quotes and drop them here, to say, look! I’m reading!
First, well, I haven’t been reading, I've been listening… Audiobooks is all I have time for when writing an academic chef-d’oeuvre, so, I present to you, the things listened to…
Most recently: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. (Here I imagine a spray of confetti. I don’t know why.) Lovely book, lots of characters, tidy end, and this one quote in which, I feel, McBride might be saying “this is the moral of my story”, but who knows. I like it because it gestures toward History.
(From Chapter 18) The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway [...] as the group trumped forward, a rag-tag assortment of travellers moving 15 feet as if it were 15 thousand miles, slow travellers all, arrivals from different lands making the low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or Aroo [sp?], West-African tribesmen, herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them, Isaac, Nate and the rest, into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn't quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history, boiled down to a series of ten-second tv commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of Red, White and Blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troop, moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one days scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled.
I also like hot dogs.
Next, finished just last year, Transcendant Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. I wanted to pause here to praise the narrator, Bahni Turpin, and thank goodness for a quick Google search… I see she’s been praised a bunch, so we’re going to move on. Still, uh, I’m tempted to add that the narration here might have made this book more fun to listen to than to read… On with the quotes.
This, from Chapter 8, is a cool analogy of what research feels like.
Mrs Pasternak said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, "The truth is, we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millenia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science. But that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions."
Asking a ton of questions has never been a problem for me. I should be an interviewer. Actually, I think that conversation is different though… it’s not about asking a ton of questions, it’s more about what questions are asked. It can make a conversation boring or interesting, and maybe that’s the fun of it.
Onward!
This quote, from Chapter 40 makes me think of Brad S. Gregory’s book, The Unintended Reformation (I read it a year ago now, and made a summary here).
This is something I would never say in a lecture, or a presentation, or, God forbid, a paper, but at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses, become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith. And I have been educated around scientists and lay people alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.
But, back to non-controversial topics, the following quote is a touching reflection on the problem of drug-addiction and the people affected by it. It’s from Chapter 42.
And that's what so many people want to get at: the cause of the drug use, the reason people pick up substances in the first place. Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like "will" and "choice" and they end by saying, "don't you think there's more to it than the brain?" They're skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they're really saying is that they may have partied in highschool and college but look at them now, look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they've made. They want reassurances, they want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough, that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives. I understand this impulse. I too have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of my self. I don't want to be dismissed the way Nana was once dismissed. I know that it's easier to say "their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs," easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure that everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me. And when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It's just that I'm standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain, is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead, see him as he was, in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It's true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think; "what a pity, what a waste." But the waste was my own. The waste was what I missed out on, whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.
Recently, on our Jamaica trip, my mother-in-law looked over at me and asked what kind of book I was reading. (It was a holiday, and so contrary to the whole “I’m only listening to audiobooks” spiel above, I had a physical book in my hands.) When I told her it was fiction, she smiled and said she preferred non-fiction.
I do too!
Most of the time!
But the above quote? That’s why there’s fiction!
Do you know why else there’s fiction? For long heartbreaking passages, like the following one, from Small Island by Andrea Levy. I wanted something to read carelessly, at the beach or sheltering from the rain, or bored-to-smiles in an airplane, but mostly, I wanted something about Jamaica. Small Island is full of snappy sentences, funny and bright with imagery. Set in 1948, it describes character’s stories as they live through the war. The long passage is the following:
See me now - a small boy, dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom; the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher all look to me, waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now - a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England: the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester-to-Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster - her two chambers, the Commons and the Lords. If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian RAF volunteers - ask any of us colony troops where in Britain are ships built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whisky distilled? Ask. Then sit back and learn your lesson.
Now see this. An English soldier, a Tommy called Tommy Atkins. Skin as pale as soap, hair slicked with oil and shinier than his books. See him sitting in a pub sipping a glass of warming rum and rolling a cigarette from a tin. Ask him, "Tommy, tell me nah, where is Jamaica?"
And hear him reply, "Well, dunno. Africa, ain't it?"
See that woman in a green cotton frock standing by her kitchen table with two children looking up at her with lip-licking anticipation. Look how carefully she spoons the rationed sugar into the cups of chocolate drink. Ask her what she knows of Jamaica. "Jam- where? What did you say it was called again. Jam- what?"
And here is Lady Havealot, living in her big house with her ancestors' pictures crowding the walls. See her having a coffee morning with her friends. Ask her to tell you about the people of Jamaica. Does she see that small boy standing tall in a classroom where sunlight draws lines across the room, speaking of England - of canals, of Parliament and the greatest laws ever passed? Or might she, with some authority, from a friend she knew or a book she'd read, tell you of savages, jungles and swinging through trees?
It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country's defence when there was a threat. But, tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country. (p 117-9)
Blindfold me, spin me round and my hands will find a book. Hooray for books! Listening to this “Writers and Company” episode, you can hear in the first half the absence of books growing up for one writer, the disdain for the plentiful-ness of books everywhere for another…
But this is long enough and the subject of books is inexhaustible. So here, I’ll take a bow, gather my bookmarks and be off. May you enjoy your reading wherever you are.
Look at that, two sleeps till Christmas, festivities, joy and well-wishes and parties and family and whoop, the year is done and this is turning into a Christmas carol. Here are five holiday-themed things.
1. Ordered and received calendars: the kids have theirs on the fridge, I have my 2023 agenda.
2. Finished a puzzle, started another (the dog ate 7 pieces).
3. Baked some cookies; gifted caramels and little bags of nuts and bolts.
4. My sister and I will try mulled wine.
5. Enzo can strike a holiday pose. (Thanks for the pic Anna!)
There is a rule for blogging success that says a writer should stick to one subject. Forget it, I say. Here, I'm a rebel, writing about all sorts of things.
Making supper isn't about one recipe... it's about putting together a meal with enough component parts to tempt these kids' appetites. This week, I made Julia Turshen's Sticky Chicken, stir fried leftover vegetables (green pepper, zucchini, mushrooms) and presented this with a pile of freshly-made crepes. Folding this all together I took a bite and surprised myself with how good it was. Ruth Reichl can wax poetic about how "cooking is the adventure of combining ingredients" - a level of kitchen ability I'm not yet at, but I do get a hint of the feeling when putting together a meal at night. "You're a traveler, [she writes] following your own path, seeking adventure. (...) If it doesn't work out - well, there's always another meal." (My Kitchen Year, p 169)
I'm listening to Say Nothing via the Libby app and I'm having a hard time not hearing my own thoughts with an Irish accent. Pair this reading with the Longform podcast's interview with the author, Patrick Radden Keefe and you have hours of great listening.
Noticing happenstance colour-palettes is a new fun thing I like to do à la fashionista. In my non-glamorous life, colour-palettes are found on walks and in piles of books. And then, what about this crochet pattern with its 'dark green tea' and 'teal' and 'raspberry' and 'gold'? I am in awe of this artist's rendering of Christmas lights at night.
Today, the kids' busdriver picked them up dressed in a Santa costume, complete with beard. Primed by HONY, I now suspect a whole mysterious backstory.
Design Matters interviewed Min Jin Lee, a writer and the author of Pachinko. I really like interviews with writers and thought it was so touching how she talked about her husband: "My husband has carried me for decades while I wasn’t earning, while I was on the quest to be a writer. And he was willing to put up with the financial, the fact that I wasn’t earning." Because "I chose this thing called writing." And she talked about how vulnerable being an unpublished writer made her feel: "And I would tell them I’m working on a book. And they would say, “Well, can I buy your book? Is it sold anywhere?” And there was no answer to this. And at that point I didn’t have a contract. I didn’t have an agent. I had just really no idea how to even go about this. But I just knew that I had these books and I was going to write them. And with each additional year of delay, the more humiliated I became and I became more private. But I really work actually much harder." Fantastic interview.
I like a snappy list of random things, don't you?
1. It's almost Christmas, and my favourite places to shop in Winnipeg are Black Market Provisions and Toad Hall Toys. These stars look so pretty and tonight, it would be fun to go to a Student Show and Sale. The Events Calendar here feels so festive! Christian and I adopted the idea of keeping a Google Doc of gift ideas for each other from this episode of Hidden Brain.
2. What will you do with your history degree? (I don't know!) However, reading the Canadian Historical Association's report was oddly comforting. Also, people studying history are fewer and fewer in number apparently...
3. I've started baking, because cookies are delightful and my sister is visiting which is all the more impetus for making things cozy here! (Maybe I’ll try a new recipe?)
4. Last week I spent the days intensively working on a surprise for the family. I'm the kind of person that almost bursts at the thought of having to keep a surprise and avoiding doing so requires an attitude of cool indifference - as if I had to decide to draw a curtain over all the scenes my imagination puts together. And I have lots of imagination! Not enough to write a novel, unfortunately, but enough to amuse myself with silliness. Years ago I took my SLR and photographed made-up scenes using my then-toddlers' toys. I thought that things that made me laugh would be too ridiculous to share and stopped.
5. I've often been paralyzed by the thought of perfection. Drawing has been somewhat therapeutic in this regard. I've been forcing myself to draw a person (whole or just the face) everyday for the past few months after stumbling over myself in the last year and a half. It's more than just accepting that results take practice... it's getting over the enthusiasm of a new idea and accepting that desire for a result must be subdued. Meekly, it becomes a habit and a habit in its purest form should be executed with a kind of simple attention that is light and not grasping or weighed down with expectation. And reaching that mode of working takes its own time and suffers onslaughts of impatience, but that's fine... that's just how it is.
I'm writing the long paper that will, with some prodding and goodwill, become that thing you call a thesis that might earn me a certificate that says I've mastered the discipline it takes to be a member of this little field of Canadian Studies. Isn't that a better sentence than saying "I'm currently on chapter one of my Master's degree thesis"? I don't like the personal pronoun "my". It feels too possessive. All this quibbling aside, I do like writing and reading and looking things up, and sometimes, the looking-things-up yields funny asides... Take this injunction from 1900 when bicycles in St-Boniface were so new they were called "velocipedes"...
The Archbishop, writing one of his circular letters, notes that while bicycle-riding is not prohibited, its use should be restricted to those who have gained permission. I shared this with my husband, my kids, a friend... just to marvel at how foreign these rules feel 122 years later and everyone has a different reaction. The kids thought it was funny, like I had. Christian wondered why and this prompted me to look up how priests dressed in 1900. I suspect their long dress-like cassocks must have been encumbering. And my friend mocked the rules-y-ness of the institution. But there were rules for everything! There were rules for welcoming the bishop in a parish, for belonging to secret societies and for fundraising events. There were rules for getting married and fees prescribed for the customs you had to follow, and tariffs paid for dispensations for marrying a cousin funded the archdiocese's expenses for priests.
Reading these circulars makes me feel like I should worry that my clothes are too comfortable.
All that above made me want to draw a priest on a bicycle in 1900, or find a picture of one, and drawing is still for now, a spare 10-minute hobby. I laughed when reading (via Ngaio Parr's newsletter Some Things) Vanessa Varghese describe learning how to draw as "what a bowl of humble pie that's been" in part because, yes, that's how I feel, but also, the description sounds awkward to me, just as the attempt to draw is awkward. Did she mean it that way, I keep wondering...
Shepherd's pie, well executed, might be a sloppy rectangle of meat topped with mashed potatoes. Sure, you could eat it in a bowl, where it has no shape at all. Same with triangular shapes of fruit or berry or pumpkin desserts with a crust... So often you set out to draw something on a page and it barely resembles what you want it to be. (But maybe I'm just used to serving pie on a plate.)
I'm happy to listen to other people talk and usually I can avoid the awkwardness of having to talk by just asking questions. As a bonus, most people like it when you are interested in them, but, thanks to these guests on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I've learned that asking questions can be a subtle way of controlling the conversation... (From Episode 494: How to Speak Clearly, Calmly and Without Alienating People.)
(Dan Clurman) Sometimes people think that asking questions is the same exact thing as reflecting, and there is a difference, and I think that's important to understand, is that questions are very useful and can be certainly a helpful part of conversations. We distinguish reflecting from questions in that questions often contain what the person who's asking the questions think would be valuable for the other person to talk about. So in a certain sense, questions in their own way direct the other person who's speaking down a particular path that the listener thinks would be useful to talk about, which might be the case, or might not be the case.
(Mudita Nisker) Yes, they're both ways of getting information, of soliciting more information, reflective listening often has a gentler feel than questioning. Questioning can sometimes seem like interrogation and people might not like that and it might have the opposite effect on them, they might close up rather than open up.
Winter's coming... We've had glorious fall weather so far, but who can deny the delight of those magical snowfalls? (From The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, p 60)
The world was completely transformed: snow had been falling furiously for more than three hours, and still was. Drifts were piled high along the sidewalk, the air was dense with flakes, and Rush felt happy: this was the best snowstorm of the winter. He pushed his way past the people who were waiting for cars and taxis, turned up his collar and went out into the blizzard. In no time at all his feet were soaking wet and he loved it. He took a long time going home and made a great many detours. In the side streets the air rang with a noise of scraping as men cleared the sidewalks. All other sounds were furred with quiet by the snow; the hoots of boats came muffled from the river, cars passed noiselessly, and people walked without a sound in the feathery dusk.
I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes a single word will plunk itself down amid the furniture in my brain, and just like any new thing, it’ll grab my attention and I’ll notice it each time I walk by. For the last little while, it’s been the word “community”. Did it start with Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart? Maybe… See, she talks about belonging:
Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He [John Cacioppo] explains, "To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favour their outcome." Of course we're a social species. That's why connection matters. It's why shame is so painful and debilitating. It's why we're wired for belonging. (p. 179)
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History just finished a season with a series of episodes on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the final episode (The Mennonite National Anthem) makes a poignant point about a person’s sense of community and how it can be disrupted by the denial of a basic need:
[About Lester Glick:] "He is just one of the kindest most gracious people but as he writes about his experience, he writes about getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread, you know, he's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough." Back when Lester Glick was working at the state mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak. He loved to work with patients and help them. But now in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, anti-social. He started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs. "And so there is this separation that starts to take place, this breakdown in relations that is not at all in keeping with the real Lester Glick, but was the new malnourished Lester Glick who was separated from all the people around him." He understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit; it is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level. "Yeah. It's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood, that church community, the family community that shaped who he was in the most basic ways."
Having read that, does it seem like an obvious conclusion? Maybe. But the thing with a word that stands out, is that you start to notice it in different contexts. Oh look, you say (to yourself), there it is over there! It looks different in that place!
This is from the podcast Invisibilia, on an episode called Power Tools, where the guest, Peter Belmi, discusses a class he attended where the professor taught Machiavellian-type tactics for gaining power in the work place and how it conflicted with his upbringing:
"In a working-class environment, where there's lots of threats, lots of uncertainty, everybody has to coordinate because doing so helps us survive as a group. And so people learn in those contexts that what it means to be a good person is to be sensitive to the needs of other people, to see yourself as connected to others." This tracks with social science that shows that by contrast, people from wealthier backgrounds are taught to value focusing on themselves. "We don't need others as much in order to survive, and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you're unique compared to others.”
How nice, you might think, how charming… But wait! Here is the idea of community again, but this time, in the concrete functioning of society! It’s Roman Mars, (episode 508 here) explaining to former President Bill Clinton why not being able to pop the hood and fix your own car isn’t such a bad thing…
There's also a beauty in other people doing it better and you just kind of trusting in that. That is how we build a society. So the world […] has to be an ecosystem of things we know and control and there's individual agency and liberty and things like this and then you have to like, fall into the warm embrace of a designed world that people have thought of and their expertise is present and maybe you don't understand it and hopefully we're engaged enough in the civic society that you trust those things. And I think that that's super inspiring, like I love the things we create together, collectively.
And then, there’s this last quote, which isn’t exactly about community, really, but it’s this touching idea about the small human action it takes to foster this usually-grandiose ideal. It’s an action so small it can be overlooked and dismissed… it doesn’t win prizes, it’s not the kind of generosity journalists look to profile. And yet, its small size betrays the effort it took, and takes, and will take, to build and maintain this kind of goodness. It comes at the end of a piece by the Guardian, read on their podcast The Audio Long Read, titled “‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?”.
I have to accept my parents for who they are (...) my mom has been gone for awhile now, but I still speak to my dad. He's 90, has other wives and other children, so I need to take away my prejudices about that, forgive and just deal with him as he is. He's an old man, so I'm going to do what I can for him and I'm not going to have any malice about it because that means I haven't truly let go.
Isn’t that amazing? I can’t help but feel in awe of that person’s example. Mason Currey in his latest newsletter included a quote from Virgina Woolf which seems to capture the sentiment I feel reading this.
I’m thinking here of a favorite Virginia Woolf line, in which she praised the Irish novelist George Moore for “eking out a delicate gift laboriously.”
Friday morning I took a friend for a medical procedure outside the city. It was dark and cold when I woke up at 5:00 and showered, and put on the clothes I laid out the night before. It was dark 20 minutes later when I locked my house and travelling to hers, lined up the truck with the early birds at traffic lights.
In darkness we drove to Steinbach’s hospital where I dropped her off. It was the still-cold morning after the season’s first hard frost. Cold fall mornings remind me of France, where I stayed a month the first time I left home. Dark mornings remind me of my dad who sometimes brought me along on trips when he was a trucker. (I remember one time when the headlights of his immense cab shone into the car opposite as he turned left at an intersection. The wide turn needed for the long trailer my dad was pulling startled the man whose eyes grew wide and he reflexively pushed back in his driver’s seat.)
I notice I'm getting older, a cliché statement that nonetheless belies the comfort of growing self-knowledge. In my twenties, this kind of small event was all exclamation-pointed single words: possibilities! exploration! In my thirties, it's full sentences with commas and periods: "Let's see what I could reasonably do in Steinbach between 7 and 10 on a Friday." In my twenties, expectations could be wildly unrealistic and took the form of over-scheduling or imagining I could easily wake-up with different preferences than the ones I usually had. In my late thirties, I'm a person who doesn't mind assembling a day of good habits in a different order. My twenties would have thought "Good habits? Why! Steinbach is a whole new place! Let’s eat a cinnamon bun for breakfast?" Now, avidity seems tiresome.
Therefore, I took my good habits to Steinbach. I walked 45 minutes, just like I would have done at home (minus the dog). I found a local spot and ordered toast and coffee and ate the toast with peanut butter, just like I would have done at home.
And you know what? The delight of this was so off-the-charts as to have prompted me to try to explain it here. I walked, like I like to walk at home and the surprise of the change of scenery, this one little variable, had twice the effect on my happiness as having aimed for something more extraordinary. And that toast and coffee? Its simplicity afforded me double the satisfaction for having checked off a healthy breakfast than the passing satisfaction of having picked something deliciously sweeter. It buoyed the morning's peregrinations, like a calm reassurance.
The frost-tinged grass sparkled with a million diamond rainbows under the freshly rising sun. The small forest on either side of the paved pathway was one tableau after another of fall still-lifes.
Breakfast provided a change of scene and a window on a different view, brown wood chairs that have backs that curve around into armrests, kitchen noises and chatter you can eavesdrop on. An older local man complimented my parallel park that he'd observed from the window. I browsed the small grocery store and bakery and picked cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and canned tomatoes for that night's soup.
All of this could have been a series of pictures, titled, “my morning in Steinbach”, but I don't know how I could have fit on my phone that funny fifteen minutes when I parked in the sun behind the local thrift store and bided the time to its opening by reading the first 21 pages of the French novel my friend loaned me, wherein the protagonist is left her Grandmother's mysterious dresser containing ten painted drawers, all stuffed with locked-up lifetime souvenirs. Nothing can quite prime you for hoping for a lucky find at a second-hand store, but when I looked up from my book, a line had formed and was continuing to form of locals; a man with no hair but a long gray beard and his wife in a motorized wheel-chair, and two women with their toddler, and an old lady with a cloth bag, all having woken up that morning, and put on their pants and holding a similar hope.
But the only thing I trusted my phone to capture, (for the diamonds on the grass or the fall tableaux in the crisp air would have killed its frail battery-life) was the name and look of a pastry I'd never heard of before.
Happiness is ordinary.
One should never draft a post without saving it as a draft on Squarespace. I write from fresh heartbreak - may you benefit from the advice and the consequent concision.
Descriptions of trust are touching. Here's one from Camila, a character in the novel Daisy and the Six: "If I've given the impression that trust is easy—with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about—if I've made it seem like it's easy to do... then I've misspoken. It's the hardest thing I've ever have to do. (...) But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That's why I chose to do it. Over and over and over. Even when it bit me in the ass. And I will keep choosing it until the day I die." Another from Gretchen Rubin's Little Happier podcast here.
I was tickled to hear Malcolm Gladwell disparage the marathon on No Such Thing As A Fish (episode 438). Consider me determined to never add it to my bucket list.
I don't disparage exercise... Christian and I have started taking neighbourhood bike rides on weekend evenings and had our mental maps of the city completely blown up. Once we startled twin fawns running across the road to suckle their mama standing on the other side. Five raccoon heads noted our arrival at Elizabeth Dafoe Library and immediately disappeared behind the low concrete bed wall one twilight evening. Grant Peterson's Just Ride is a "hey, relax" kind of book on the subject of bike riding.
I made snowball-sized meringues this week, that were more like mini pavlovas, the difference being that meringue should be dry all the way through and pavlovas can have a pillowy soft center. I've learned lots trying to make meringues for the first time for this other recipe: Nigella's Meringue Gelato Cake with Chocolate Sauce. I've had to learn lots because meringues don't seem very common here in the middle of Canada.
Part of the challenge of writing, is simply sitting down and committing to an idea. I’m always tempted to wait awhile, see if the idea ripens, if more connections can be made, or if I could express something more eloquently with a little more time devoted to research. But in this bulletin, I’m forcing myself to cast those inclinations aside, for the quick satisfaction of hitting “publish”.
This summer, I feel like I’ve been listening to more audiobooks than I have been reading physical pages. Three I enjoyed recently are Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser; The Dutch House by Ann Patchet (read by Tom Hanks); and Taste by Stanley Tucci.
I mentioned (here) having enjoyed The Library Book by Susan Orlean and consequently, I’m excited to hear what is next on the podcast mini-series Book Exploder. I enjoyed Hrishikesh Hirway’s first interview so much, the episode felt too short. Hrishikesh has a newsletter called Some Cookies, which when you sign up for it, invites you “to accept Some Cookies”. I was confused until I got the joke.
This week I made Weird and Wonderful Banana Cake and had my little family guess the mystery ingredient. It was like a game of 20 questions.
Some trend on TikTok encourages professionals to give advice based on things they’ve seen in their profession. Sometimes it’s terrible and other times it’s frightening. This, I thought, could not apply to my current job as a tutor… It’s not like grammar rules are life-threatening.
However, university life being what it is, I’m always a little bit sad for students who are submitting a paper in a course they’re taking in a field they’re pursuing because they feel like they have to. In an ideal world, students would be following an academic path based on their own interests, and universities would be better at catering to this. This recent interview on Fresh Air backs up this idea; the author of After the Ivory Tower Falls, Will Bunch, recommends a gap year “it gives our young people more time to find themselves and figure out what they want to do. So many people at 18 and their families are making bad choices…”
I agree! I recently came across personality tests we were administered in high school to help our 17-year-old selves decide our future career. I applied myself to the task begrudgingly (I feel like I remember mom not giving much weight to these things, and thus disdaining them myself). (She might have been right though… I don’t know if applying myself more would have saved me from my own self-ignorance.) Test results then showed I’d be good in sales, (I couldn’t sell candy to children) and that I wouldn’t do well in studies or research (see number 5).
How’s that Master’s coming along? Aha! So glad you asked! I love talking about research and assume no one wants to hear about it. Right now, I’m combing through the genealogies of Aubigny’s Métis and French founding families. It is like assembling a giant puzzle. Take this one example here: Joseph and Clothilde. Joseph was from Quebec and came to Aubigny with his dad and mom and siblings. He and some of his brothers stayed in Aubigny for generations. When he was old enough, he fell in love with Clothilde. (I mean, I assume the love part, because I’m romantic.) Clothilde’s family had established themselves south of the border, in a French parish in Leroy, North Dakota. She had a sister who married into an Aubigny family in 1907 (maybe that’s how they met?), and a cousin in the community as well. Gathering these connections has lead me to learn more about the French communities in the United-States and the fluidity of the border back then. I also get to imagine what “community” meant a century ago.
Happy Friday, dear reader. May you find yourself as comfortable as this dog:
75 days ago I linked to two snow clearing articles and still, there’s weather on my mind. MEC discontinued a pant I liked… a perfect cotton-linen blend, drawstring closure, straight leg and I haven’t found the perfect replacement. Linen is either too frumpy or the pant legs are 3/4 length which defeats the bug bite/sun protection purpose. Then again, the weather has been quite cool… jeans might be a better choice. This article is about a different discontinued pant but it’s an entertaining read!
TikTok got me interested in making dal. This week, we'll be trying Melissa Clark’s Sweet Potato Dhal with Coconut. Recomendo recently linked to this “king of dal” recipe, which suggests using beluga lentils and making your own garam masala. I consider that an aspirational dal I’ll eventually get to. For now, I’ll be happy just to get to where Melissa Clark was in 2017. She wrote “As you can probably tell from the three dhal recipes in this chapter, I’ve fallen in love with making dhals” (Dinner; Changing the Game, p. 235).
Our most recent vegetarian supper success were Soy and Lentil Burritos from Anita Stewart’s Canada cookbook. Christian didn’t miss the ground turkey. This website calls them “Chipotle Lentil”. Given we are pale prairie folk, you can imagine nary a fiery spice entered our version.
I’m pretty sure it was Oliver Burkeman who said hobbies should be something you do that you’re slightly embarrassed about, but I can’t find a quote. (His Four-Thousand Weeks is quotable at length, but that is the subject of another blog post). A hobby defined as such is exactly how I think of drawing… and yet, I can’t tell you how delightful it is to be “trying to find (your) way to the back of the sketchbook” as Ian Fennelly said on the Sneaky Art podcast. Listening to artists talk about their work with Nishant Jain, the host, is like opening a window onto a new world. Discovering artists and drawing, just to see if you can make the lines look, each time incrementally more, like the thing you are looking at.
That’s where it’s at: food and a hobby. Should we tie this up with a reference to weather again? Here’s a picture I took last week in which I spotted a piece of rainbow. I didn’t know they did that… that they abandoned their arc form and could deliver a lopsided slice.
I don’t have a coherent thought about anything right now, the days when life forces me from my desk are what they are and so here is just everything… strewn about. I’m a boat dragging a net and picking up jetsam and hauling it up and having a look at it all… (As seen here.)
I’m listening to The Library Book by Susan Orlean and am totally captivated by the story. It has everything I like: books, history, interesting characters, masterful writing. The author’s mother would weekly bring her daughter to the library, like mine.
Previously, I was listening to My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. I appreciated her appraisal of the letters Eliot wrote in her youth. Rather than roll her eyes at their earnestness, Mead strikes an understanding tone, offering compassion for that youthful age where I often feel embarrassment. She writes:
Lacking in charm they may be, but they were not written to charm, and certainly they were not written to charm professors of English Literature at Yale. They were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation and her desire to discover what she was thinking by putting it on the page, which is to say, they are letters written by a young woman who is trying to work out who she is and where she’s going. (…) And if my teenage correspondence was much less learned than George Elliot’s, the letters I wrote were no less painfully self-exposing, filled with the enthusiasm and obliviousness and un-earned world-weariness of youth.
Rebecca Mead was recently interviewed on “Working” for her most recent book, Home/Land.
The weekend before this one was particularly productive. I buzzed about checking off tasks, decluttering, and getting ahead on things I often put off. Then Monday came and I felt drained of energy. Austin Kleon happened to put his finger on it in a Q and A in on Ask Polly.
That said, there’s some weird point at which if I make too much in one day, I don’t feel good at all. I sort of feel despondent. I think it has to do with doing so much and knowing there’s so much more to be done? My wife Meghan loves to garden, but if she spends too much time gardening, there’s some threshold at which she becomes depressed. I think there’s an ideal amount of work to be done every day — enough that you feel like you’ve done something, but not so much that you feel wrung out and existentially fried. I imagine setting a timer and stopping when time is up no matter what would help.
Life is strange. But let us pause in our befuddlement over the human condition for a study in contrast. Here I present:
Should I be chiming in here to criticize media? Probably not… Jesse Brown does a fine job of it and still I want to brew him a cup of tea and tell him to calm down. Yet here I am ready to provoke a poor time-crunched journalist with 20 questions. (Snowfall in Winnipeg varies how much from winter to winter? How does the city manage the range? Accidents? Number of complaints? Etc.) Were it left to historians, newspapers would never publish on time. I like reading news from the archives where it has acquired a funk, like cheese.
This miscellany began with a link to The Ocean Cleanup TikTok and will end with Joy Williams. The Subtle Manoeuvres newsletter prompted me to look up Joy Williams’ book The Florida Keys and skim the introduction. I liked how it ended:
“Keys” comes from the Spanish word cayos, for “little islands.” The Keys are little, and they cannot sustain any more “dream houses” or “dream resorts.” The sustaining dream is in the natural world - the world that each of us should respect, enjoy, and protect so that it may be enjoyed again - the world to which one can return and be refreshed.
Time passes. There are more of the many, and they want too much. The bill is coming. It’s not like the bill from a wonderful restaurant, Louie’s, for example. It’s not the bill for the lovely fresh snapper, the lovely wines, the lovely brownie with bourbon ice cream and caramel sauce at the lovely table beside the lovely sea. It’s the bill for all our environmental mistakes of the past. The big bill.
But I really must be off. Sporadic entries for the next while. Work bears down.