Biographies

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She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn.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!

Working on a Master's degree feels like learning to ride a horse

I thought that the experience of being a student would provide lots of writing inspiration, like an insider view as I explored realms of information. But it isn’t that… Being a master’s student is more about patient labour than anything else. I imagine that it’s like seeing a horse in the wild… “Wow!” you think. “What a beautiful horse!” It’s gem-stone eyes look like they beckon to you and you want to know this horse. You daydream about one day riding on its back.

Do you know how long it takes to domesticate a wild horse? I don’t. I do remember reading a book titled The Horse Whisperer when I was in high school. I thought it was fascinating. I thought I would like to train horses like this guy said he did. It seemed magical. I lived in a family that thought all kinds of things were possible.

Do you know how to train a horse? I don’t. Almost two years ago now, we bought a puppy and I cried tears of frustration over its training. It is a beagle, chosen for its medium size, its adorable face, its friendliness. A horse would be intimidating, the way zooming out from your house on Google earth is intimidating: my kingdom is a disappearing collection of pixels.

So I’m not sure why I chose this horse metaphor, except that in my imagination the information I’m handling feels about as big as a horse… not impossibly big, but still unwieldy. And then managing that information so that I can say something interesting about it, also feels like a kind of domestication. It requires organization and understanding. When I’ll have managed this, I think it will feel as if I’d mounted a horse and rode it to a destination.

In movies, characters just get on horses no problem. If there’s a problem, it might be saved for the blooper reel. Outside of movies, riders take training. Has there been a slow-tv channel dedicated to someone’s training? No. That’s because training is long and boring and has progression but also setbacks and good days when things go according to plan and days when other things interfere and the project is set aside. It is more interesting to pretend to sit in a train as it travels through tunnels and a frozen countryside than it is to be submitted to someone’s training. It is why time-lapse was invented. (No. But the invention of time-lapse is horse-related!)

To conclude, as students say when they’re finishing an essay, I’m working on my master’s degree, but writing updates on the subject is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s a rite of passage, a professor told me, and it’s true. It’s this academic training you submit yourself to, and it’s not meant to be very exciting.

Two history-related things

I was a teen when I watched Chariots of Fire. I loved the movie: the English countryside, the romantic scenes, the upright main character… and I wished I could run. I liked the story and I thought that the scene at the Olympics was just another scene. That scene when the trainer is in his room and sees the flags raised and knows his guy won the gold and so bites his knuckle and punches through his straw hat out of happiness… I had no idea that all this quiet celebration was because coaches were banned from the Olympics. I learned this today, listening to Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules (episode: The Unfair Coach). In the episode he interviews a historian who talks about the British class system in 1924, when coaches were frowned upon.

On Steven Levitt’s podcast, People I Mostly Admire, (episode 62), the historian Brad Gregory says: “A good historian is somebody who evokes and enables us to understand that even though somebody might have lived dozens, or hundreds or thousands of years ago, the three-dimensionality, the lived-reality of their human lives were every bit as real as the lives that we’re living now. When history is reduced to lists of names and dates and important battles and treaties and so forth, that’s when the blood is sucked out of it, so to speak, and I think that’s partly why people don’t like it.“

The point is: history is full of interesting stories; research makes them come alive.

Groundhog day

I thought I’d pop out my head, like the groundhog, so busy underground, so absent-seeming on the drifts of snow. There was a blizzard yesterday, and then, just like that it stopped and the sun came through and filled the sky with a gentle yellow.

I filled up a sketchbook. It’s not really anything I want to show, even though I caught this quote by David Hockney who said: “… of course, art is about sharing”. I’m sure he’s right, and I’ll feel that way eventually. For now, I hold on to a thought from Paul Heaston on the Sneaky Art podcast: “…you become so results oriented that you would rather see no result than a poor one, and that goes back to everybody no longer being creative. It’s like, because the idea of being a failure is much more horrifying than doing something at all, that you don’t even do it.” It’s about patience. Jared Muralt in an Instagram post wrote: “Drawing mountains is like mediation for me. I constantly got confronted with my own impatience. But to succeed I have to focus on what I do and only that.”

I will pop in again to add books read to the reading list, to share pictures of the dog and a handful of quotes. For most of January, the kids were home from school. I sat at my desk for only the most urgent work. I joked in our family newsletter that my studies had been pushed so far to the back-burner as to have fallen off the stove. But in the quiet of the house right now, I can see myself picking up the contents and bringing them back to a warm simmer. It is what groundhogs do below four feet of snow.

Hiatus-ing a hobby

Oh dear! Have you come looking for new content? I’m afraid I must disappoint you for a moment… I’m not sure how long. See, there’s this degree I want to get on with. It requires data organizing and then, once that’s done, it requires about 60 solid days of writing 500 words a day. Once the words are written, I have to add the proper references, for the bibliography, and I’m sure that will take a week… And then I have to go through the stack of pages I’ve written and edit them after they’ve rested awhile. Once that’s all done, I hope to get an official paper that says I’ve earned a Master’s.

I really like writing. I like thinking of things to say and pushing past reticence into thoughts that make some sense, that give me joy just to see “published”. It has been a gentle form of accountability, of proving to myself that this is fun more than it is scary.

I might pop in sometimes though, but mostly, I’m taking a moment to focus on academics and fill a sketchbook with silly things.

Cheers!

In the archives

Yesterday I went to the Saint-Boniface archives. Covid protocoles make for socially-distanced desks, and yesterday my desk for reviewing documents was just outside, under the arches of a preserved wall from the Empire Hotel.

Behind me was a wooden desk, also from the Empire Hotel.

Covid protocols keep me masked. Documents are all safe from my exhalations.

Some documents are huge!

This is a land title document with an impressively huge red wax seal, covered for its protection, still bearing pretty green ribbons. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is mentioned. It is dated 1888. Not all documents are so big and land titles eventually shrunk. But I like to imagine the office where this was written, the officious people who dipped their fountain pen in an inkwell, the giant seal and the man to whom the land was granted, walking out with this massive paper, to go farm a plot in relative isolation, going to bed at night in a rudimentary wood log house.

Foreign lands

I am deep into research, trying to wrangle information gathered from archives into a neat container that one calls a thesis. I’ve come to recognize this feeling from research projects past and my favourite metaphor is one of travel…

Craig Mod in his final picture of a pop-up newsletter called “Huh” captured the feeling in a few phrases: “what I remember most about this moment is how foreign and unknowable it all felt, an impenetrable newness, and for a second five lives (Derro just out of frame) converge and information is exchanged and, with a dollop of confidence, we take the very first steps of the long walk that starts it all.”

Burrowing into the past is much like travelling to another country… You have to find your bearings - the people and the places that were different, the organizations that existed then that don’t now, the customs that were common then but sound so unusual now.

Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.

Gathering clay

For the heck of it, I started listening to early episodes of one of my favourite podcasts, Longform. In episode 9, Jeanne Marie Laskas describes how getting material for a story is like gathering clay:

(I talk to my students like this…) I always feel like I’m like a potter, like a sculptor or something like that. And when you’re reporting you’re going out and you’re just like, gathering clay in a riverbed, like, you just got to get all different colours and all different textures and you don’t even know what you’re going to do with it. But you need the clay! You can’t make anything unless you get the clay. And then that’s a whole stage you’re going through, and then you’re bringing that back and you got these lumps. And it’s just like, you just went to a store and bought stuff, and you’re just like, “now I have all this now!” And then you get to play with the clay! 

The metaphor is pertinent now, as I tunnel through research in order to write a Master’s thesis. The small town’s registry I’m studying has an interesting connection to the larger French community, because over the years, when the Catholic Church was the dominant influence, the community newspaper would also record baptisms, mariages and deaths. Right now, I’m noting how many of the registry entries were also reported in the newspaper in order to see if patterns emerge. I’m gathering clay.

NBD

In the ninth episode of the “Darts and Letters” podcast, the host, Gordon Katic, interviews a person who writes papers for students across a variety of academic disciplines, for a variety of programs. The anonymous guest reflects on his ability to meet his clients’ expectations by professing “a natural curiosity for subjects” and an aptitude for “pattern recognition” that can appreciate and imitate a discipline’s “jargon”.

I’m against academic dishonesty, and I’m far too interested in writing my own paper and far too poor to pay someone else to do the work. That being said, this interviewee is a surprising source of motivation… Procrastinating, like a regular student, he says, he manages to turn in lengthy assignments in a short time. It has cheered me to think of this “Bill Faulkner” reading a Master’s degree thesis or two in Canadian history, and sitting down and producing a 120-page document in a week like it was no big deal.

Humility

Somewhat hilariously, I’ve been listening to a CBC podcast based on an American podcast’s recommendation, as if things, before they should reach my ears, must be American-approved. Have you ever noticed that? Those little moments that force you to rethink things? I’ve heard so much about Adam Grant’s latest book Think Again and I think fussily, like a person who has too many jotted-down titles of books they should read, whether it is really necessary to read this author’s take on something I suspect I already know?

The other day for example, I was in Wal-Mart and I passed two women who were considering a mass-produced painting of a Parisian street with the vague outline of the Eiffel Tower in the background. “I don’t know what it is, but I love this painting” the one was saying to the other. I inwardly scoffed. How can you fall in love with a fake-as-heck piece of reproduction art? What about supporting local artists, eh? But the next aisle over I chastised myself for the unkindness and remembered what my mother-in-law has often repeated: “tastes cannot be argued” (Les goûts ne se discutent pas!). Then, while looking for a lucite organizer tray, I came across stark white canvases with flower outlines in gold and imagined how nicely the frame would look against our slate-blue wall and protectively tucked this rectangle piece of decor under my arm all the way to the self-checkout.

I’m pretty sure that to be interested in history is to engage in a flexible state of mind. I grew up not caring about Canada’s problem with its Indigenous Peoples, but a few courses in to a history degree will force any student to re-think. I’m listening to CBC’s Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, thanks to a recommendation from the Longford podcast. It’s well-produced. It’s also devastating. It reminds me of reading Halfbreed by Maria Campbell.

I notice in these moments how the book, or podcast, or documentary, or university course, provides a vantage-point with which to view the tiny space I occupy. It is humbling. It is also a source of pride. Like a person who has travelled to a new country and now brags of their visit there, I have gained some partial understanding of a minorities’ situation. I feel this as a kind of paradox. Learning more about Indigenous People is a good thing, it is one of the goals of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It’s also uncomfortable and I think the discomfort prompts the mind to race toward anything that might alleviate the discomfort. I’ve found myself thinking: “I should enlighten people with what I’ve learned!” But I’ve also found myself (I blush to write this), wishing I could express my admiration for the survivors whose stories I’ve heard, at great remove from them.

I think what is needed though, is humility. Humility is a fickle quality because once it is declared, it ceases to exist, much like when one observes happiness, it too can fly away. But it is worth pursuing in tangible ways… Humility, like Mother Teresa once said, can be found in being quiet about oneself, in keeping busy with your own things, in not wanting to organize other people’s lives. It can be found in not getting mad about minor things or pointing out other people’s flaws. I think that if humility is appreciated and cultivated, it doesn’t become too hard to re-think big things.

Local news

There is much discussion about the death of local news. I checked Google just to make sure I wasn’t making that up based on American headlines, but no, it’s true. There’s an article about it in The Walrus. (Seeing The Walrus website makes me feel bad for not consulting it more often. Looks like a cool place…)

Anyways. Local News. Do you know what there used to be in local news? Right now I’m going through the archives of French papers La Liberté and Le Patriote from 1913 to now. A small town called Aubigny is the subject of my master’s thesis and so combing through archives provides me with a feeling of the life that went on there. In the 60’s a church group called Catholic Women’s League formed a press committee and submitted short articles about what was going on in the town. There were hockey match results, and birth and death announcements. When a couple got married, the author would sometimes plunge into details about what the bride wore: “gorgeous in her ivory brocade dress which ended with a graceful train. Her short veil was fastened with a delicate diadem. She held a bouquet of white orchids.” Bridesmaids were also named and described: “they wore identical dresses in gold brocade. A golden rose adorned their hair.” Even the couple’s mothers’ attire was described: “the two mothers (…) chose brown ensembles with brown accessories and their corsages were orchids.”

Trips were also noted: people visiting family, going away on holiday, attending a retreat. Accidents were recorded, minor ones eliciting prayers or sympathy, major ones eliciting their own separate headlines to mark the tragedy. Church meetings were summarized and gatherings were described. The latter included card games, holiday concerts, children’s groups, wedding anniversaries, and teas.

But there were articles prior to the 60’s, and the Catholic Women’s League press committee, with town news. They were often more sporadic and the subject matter varied from year to year. A farmer, it was noted in 1915, had a bumper crop of wheat. Conversely, the parish priest submitted a question about why his harvest was so low. Student grades were listed! I could, if I wanted, find out what my mother-in-law received in French as a young girl.

As a historian-in-the-making, I enjoy all this detail. However, I have trouble imagining that I would enjoy being the subject of these articles. On the other hand, you could argue that social media accounts provide heaps of information in comparison. Maybe it’s the ownership of the information? While others commented on what went on in the village, providing this comfortable sense of community, I am loathe to have anyone report on my goings on, even though I am fine with describing them myself. I think the feeling could be expounded because it reflects some generational gap; perhaps a divergence between a feeling of community and a growing sense of individualism.

The ways in which I'm lucky

I walked the dog this morning, came home, boiled water and made tea. I took off the damp cloth from the bundt pan containing 20 frozen dinner rolls and poured melted butter over them and then covered them in grated Cheddar, and returned the cloth to the pan. I ate an apple and cheese Ritz bits in alternating mouthfuls, feeding the apple peels to the puppy. I tethered the puppy to his sunny spot in the living room, went downstairs and transferred the load of darks to the dryer and started a second load of darks. And now I sit here at my desk, having read two Oliver Burkeman articles relating to creativity, and looking forward to continuing Titan while imputing names into a spreadsheet.

Vicarious passenger

I miss libraries. Perhaps that says a lot about the sort of person I am… the kind who finds that of all the COVID restrictions, not being able to browse books is the first complaint that comes to mind. Fortunately, the university has made many texts available online, and this morning I have an article to read.

If I make myself too comfortable for this task, I tend to doze off, so I read sitting at my desk. My desk faces a wall and to remedy the non-view and the perfect-ennui sound of a ticking clock, I pick a train video from Youtube and pretend I’m a passenger, somewhere in Europe. Today I’m in Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5t2RZj1ZkQ A few weeks ago, I was in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/user/lorirocks777

Data entry

Since January I’ve been sitting at my desk and devoting hours to transcription and data entry. Eventually the data will pile up nicely and provide statistics. Then I’ll gather the statistics like wildflowers and put them into a graph like a bouquet.

Because the task is detailed and long, I listen to audiobooks on Libby. My favourite books are biographies. I agree with Rumaan Alam who commented on the Slate Working podcast, “I find them a very satisfying form when done well. (…) Biography can be stodgy in the wrong hands, but with a good writer, it’s not unlike eavesdropping - what could be more fun?”

I have enjoyed Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and am 13 hours into Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. I had no idea that there were oil refineries for crude oil before there was was a use for gasoline.