La friperie

The other day I took my son to the children’s thrift store. In French, it’s called a “friperie” and somehow, that letter arrangement sounds more delightful to my ear than does “thrift store”. But this isn’t about linguistics, rather, it’s about how that unassuming place is so often a secret source of happiness. I shopped an hour and a half, arms raised, going through tight racks while my son played the store monkey, filling a cart with options. When my son swung by, I’d tell him to separate the shirts hanging on the cart handle into yesses and nos. First I select things I like, then my son selects what he prefers, then we try on the shirts, working as if crunched for time in the store’s only bathroom. It’s a sort of dance really; removing the clothes from their hangers, putting it on the boy, pause for mirror-appraisal, taking it off, readying the next item, and making a triage of the clothes tried on: yes, no, maybe. All while keeping up cheerful banter.

The effort, even when I put it off, is usually worth the savings… I left the store with 34 items and paid a little over 150$. Once Upon A Child, even if the name is long, does organize their clothes nicely by size, gender, type and colour. I suppose the thing that makes me happy is how the boys’ closet can contain, after one of these trips, such a colourful variety of styles and brands. In one place I’ve gathered a collection of pants, shorts, t-shirts, and dress shirts, some from labels that don’t even have stores here in Winnipeg. The other thing is that while I like everything we select, if an accident happens, I don’t feel precious about the item, the way I sometimes do when paying for new things. I don’t condone recklessness, but the pang of regret felt when the puppy made a hole in a 4$ shirt compared to a 12$ shirt doesn’t have the recourse to imagining that money-with-the-wings emoji.

This is just to say that I’m grateful for thrift stores. Not all the kids’ clothes are sourced there, and it would be an unsustainable model if there weren’t parents buying new clothes. Nonetheless, when I do go, I’m usually really happy for having done so.

Friday!

It’s Friday… kids hang from hammocks, laundry gets folded, adults eat quiche while the kids have cheese-stuffed tortellini.

The lawn is in poor shape, but the installation of fibre-optics underneath it has made it a lawnmower maze of flags and even the dandelions feel outdone by the spray-painted lines everywhere. The Badger truck spent a day around our place, humming noisily. The men gave stickers to the boys and we googled the website written on their truck door. We looked at pictures of badgers and compared them to the logo. The lawn will wait for quieter days.

I crave the ability to draw and since this seems like as futile as wanting to be a sea urchin, I’ve taken to googling the benefits of art. So far, the results have only been gentle persuasions and not gale-force arguments. Perhaps that is the nature of art… it is gentle and it transforms slowly.

Success

I like making meals that people like, but I consider it a triumph when I can disguise an ingredient a person doesn’t normally like, and they still end up enjoying the meal.

Christian doesn’t care for chickpeas and even hummus leaves him indifferent. But tonight, for the first time, I made falafel served with tomato-cucumber salad, lettuce, tahini sauce and pickles all in warmed store-bought pitas and it was a hit!

Once upon a fall night I hid a whole two cups of dates in a cake and served it to a guest who, like me, was never tempted to reach for a Grandma’s date square.

Freedom to explore

Writers of non-fiction, like journalists, will sometimes leave reality behind and dip into the “freedom” of fiction. I’ve heard them use that word: freedom. Lucky so-and-so’s I’d think… I only wish I could feel freedom in inventing a story. In fact, I’m very much like Mary Karr who wrote: “I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory.” (The Art of Memoir, p. 21)

Lately, I’ve been reading Amy Tan’s memoir, Where the Past Begins. She describes her talent for realistic drawing, and I’m annoyed… here again, a writer who is an artist besides? Harrumph! Put a marker in my hand and I freeze the same way one becomes immediately self-conscious before their picture is taken. But Tan explains why she chose writing over being an artist and it has to do with her childhood trauma:

It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix water-colour paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned - what does not happen when I draw - does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations - ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

Discovering and being able to explain why one writes is fascinating! I enjoy collecting these writerly “raison d’être”s because it shows how in one profession, there is such interesting variety. It also highlights how expanding a talent is linked to personal development. I think that ideas about freedom, in fiction or in art, suppose a kind of ease. I immediately associate art with freedom, but that is not really the case… art in one form or another is exploration and it is work just the same. The method used for the exploration is irrelevant.

Cookies

I used to come home from an office job, and consider the week productive only if I managed to bake a dessert. Dessert signified a form of self-care and indulgence and generosity too towards my husband. Now, I bake cookies for the kids and these Apple-Spice Cookies from The Pollan Family Table are a favourite. I like the almost ginger-bread-like spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves), the simple icing on top, but I especially like their cake-like texture.

Yard work

Since last Saturday we moved our vegetable garden from one side of the backyard to the other and filled the new fenced-off section of earth full of potato sprouts, tomato plants, peppers, herbs, beets, carrots, beans, zucchini and cucumber. Children and a puppy have made for the change in landscape design and this flexibility… this thing where Christian and I, lying in bed at night just before turning off the light, considering this season’s garden, the dry summers, the kid’s fun with the inflatable pool, the sandbox, the dog’s muddy paws when it rains… It’s a leisurely back and forth of thoughts and ideas. I enjoy this. I love how we can up and decide that play space wins over deck privacy and mediocre apples, and Christian, next weekend cuts down the apple tree. I like how we can see that the yard plan we started out with needs modification and both of us are game to do it.

Ahistorical

There is this thing, when you’re a historian, where you have to be careful not to project onto the past a feeling you have in the present. Recently, I read in a methodology textbook how a researcher can misunderstand circumstances in the past because the written records provide only fragmentary information. This is the case, when (in centuries past) for example, lots of mothers suffered over the high rates of infant mortality. These deaths might be recorded in a parish register, but few accounts can be found of the sadness they provoked. Historians are left to puzzle over what this means… Were mothers less emotional? Did they hide their grief? Was the society such that this kind of written record was thought unimportant? Etc.

As we are making our way through a pandemic, I think of the future historians who will have the advantage of perspective, but will, probably, not have been participants.

When I sit down to write, I don’t often concentrate on my feelings about the pandemic, the new government orders, the worries, hopes, deceptions or general ennuie. And then sometimes, that future historian pops into my head.

Take for example Nellie McClung. I thought it would be neat to know what she thought of the Winnipeg Strike of 1919, since she was around when it happened. Luckily enough, she left evidence of having grappled with the event… but there are other instances when you imagine that some event will have an impact on a person’s life and find nothing.

Today, the announcement was made that schools here in Manitoba are to remain closed until the end of the year. I do not count myself among the mothers who are overly concerned about their children’s getting Covid-19 or passing it on. The evidence of cases so far backs this up. The government’s decision to keep schools closed therefore feels unsubstantiated. And writing about feelings? That seems quite useless. It’s enough just to keep one’s head above water.

Masks

I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but have since become a promiscuous rifler of pages. Reading multiple books at once can lead to idea collages across genres. Take for example Amy Tan’s thoughts on photographs in Where the Past Begins:

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time.

Now compare that to a similar idea in a completely different context… In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam is explaining how the communist regime changed its citizens’ lives. Here she describes how people had appear uniformly fine:

It was essential to smile – if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit – if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. (…) But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh – this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.

Look how both authors use the word “mask” - Tan, a “happy mask” and Mandelstam, a “smiling mask”. It’s funny how, now, in the pandemic, the use of a mask in public has both robbed me of the ability to smile reassuringly to strangers but also provided me with the convenience of not having to make the effort if I don’t feel like it.

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.

One way or another

I was listening to Phuc Tran’s book Sigh, Gone, in audio version, and there’s a part in which he describes how his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, if I remember correctly. His parents, who are Catholic, up and decide to travel to the shrine of the newly-sainted John Henry Newman to beg his intercession. The mother is cured because the doctors find no trace of the cancer in her body in a subsequent appointment.

As I understand it, from Phuc Tran’s point of view, there may or may not have been a miracle, and either way, the Catholic religion was a minor key bass line in his growing up - underpinning everything rather sombrely. What Phuc Tran offers the reader is a delightful example of how this possibly Divine Intervention was but an anecdote in this story. This thing that people pray for, that people can literally die or live on, has no greater repercussion in someone’s life than eating out on a Tuesday at McDonald’s. Just imagine the opposite… that this poor immigrant family, recently come to America, does pray to John Henry Newman and that the situation is not reversed and the mother dies anyway. The author would be no more Catholic than he is today with the miracle having happened.

It strikes me that when it comes to desires, it is the immediacy that counts. It also seems to me that when it comes to decisions, our human nature wants two things: to avoid suffering and to feel right. Basically, a request for Divine Intervention is a request that says: “please do something!” But say that a an indication is granted for a decision to be made. Or rather, say that clouds part, a voice is heard, and a command is handed down: “get the vaccine” or “don’t get the vaccine”. Assuming that the instruction is followed, our human nature would then be all puffed-up with the idea that our adherence to the instruction made us good. Instead, the instruction-less among us have to stay humble, have to search for calm and find peace and follow their own heart and then, even more importantly, have to give up their idea of what is good, in order to accept and understand the intentions and actions or inactions of others. I think this is the greater challenge. It’s not making the decision itself. Rather, it’s accepting that, free to choose, there is no immunity to suffering and no guarantee for the future, and that our choice might never find universal approval. Furthermore, in the future, the immediacy of this issue will have disappeared and we will struggle to remember what it was that we talked about so much.

School lunches

Schools went online here in Manitoba on the Wednesday after Mother’s Day. Unlike March of last year, the day’s routine is structured around the children’s classroom appointments rather than a schedule I improvised. (I write about it here.) This means the kids are more independent and I have time to make lunch the day-of, rather than doing it the night before. Here is what the kids have for lunch during the week:

Monday: Sandwhiches

Tuesday: Quesadillas

Wednesday: Pasta salad (here with tuna)

Thursday: Fruit smoothie, a muffin (here banana-chocolate, although other favourites include banana chocolate-chip, zucchini, and pumpkin) and nuts and bolts

Friday: Pizza (from frozen)

Visiting the U of M

Dear Diary,

Today I went to the University to pick up books from the library. It had been a long time since my last visit to the campus and the road driving in is still bumpy. The new apartment building called 30UC is complete, with inviting fresh pavement and benches near the entry. The Canada geese that were on campus last time I went have moved on. Instead, construction crews are busy rebuilding the stairs near the student centre.

In the gloomy interior of Elizabeth Dafoe, the book locker gleamed in other-worldly white. It was the first time I ever swiped my card as instructed, heard the click and witnessed the springing-open of a rectangular door where my books waited in a mauve glow of interior-lighting. Is there really an interior light? That’s how I remember it, a little startled by this futuristic interaction.

With my books under one arm, I loitered a little, looking through the glass to the darkened library. It felt a little ghostly, completely barren as it was, lines of yellow caution-tape running through.

Outside, it was sunny. Students walked here and there, purposefully, with backpacks on their shoulders. The campus is partially alive… it was a strange feeling.

inspiration

Beau Miles has published a book. Now would you look at that cover photograph? I sigh. I admit, I’m a fan of his Youtube videos, my favourite being Run the Line: Retracing 43 km of hidden railway because it touches on history. But often, after watching any one of his videos, I want to go out and shoot my own adventure. I get a feeling akin to jealousy…

While thinking of this post, I started wondering why I found Beau Miles particularly inspiring, and thought of other YouTube videos I’ve enjoyed, a bit dismayed to come up with Casey Neistat’s channel, which I followed for awhile when he was living in New York. I panicked a bit… Aren’t there any women’s channels I like? Yes! In fact, Bernadette Banner’s vlogs on the subject of Victorian and Edwardian dress offered a fascinating glimpse into corsets, for example. And Ariel Bissett introduced me to “book tube” a few years ago. Liziqi blends a kind of tireless productivity with almost graceful romance in her vlogs, in which furniture is built, fields are sown and harvested, harvested materials are transformed and every day ends with an extraordinary meal.

So what is it about Beau Miles that I find so inspiring? I think there are two things: the first, is a sort of recklessness unfamiliar to me. I was raised with carefulness. That’s neither good nor bad, and I don’t mean Miles goes and risks his life for views. Rather, I think, I grew up feeling like things around me were fragile and that things had to be handled properly. This lent itself to ideas of perfectionism and scarcity. So, when Miles assembles things using found materials for example, the viewer gets to feel both the freedom of experimentation and a mastery of the tools that are handled. The results is therefore satisfying without being caught up in ideas of perfection. The older I get, the more I am intrigued by this idea of patina and lived-in spaces. (I mentioned that here.) Eventually, there comes a point, I think, when you’re not striving for an ideal image but rather, having acquired experience over the years, skill replaces self-consciousness. And this brings me to the second point. I think Beau Miles is an extraordinary storyteller. This is something you can glimpse in an interview he recently gave here, specifically, when he says: “As a storyteller, I know that you can come across a bit more loose and ad hoc and it’s just a bit more fun that way. But in my heart of hearts I kind of know what I’m doing.”

If you are unfamiliar with Beau Miles, I highly recommend his videos! See if you find them as inspiring!

Reading list: Cosmicomics by Italino Calvino

How to start: I really liked this article about Italino Calvino in The Guardian. For Cosmicomics, Chris Powell writes: “each story uses scientific statements as launch pads for imaginative tours de force, exploring the domestic, the romantic and the existential via astronomy, geology and evolutionary biology.” He also perfectly describes the feeling I had while reading Cosmicomics: “to begin a new Calvino story is like embarking on a voyage to unknown lands; there is a joy to the sense of expectation he inspires.”

Favourite quotes: (The Origin of the Birds) In the strip that follows, you see the wisest of us all, old U(h), who moves from the group of the others and says: “Don’t look at him! He’s a mistake!” and he holds out his hands as if he wanted to cover the eyes of those present. “Now I’ll erase him!” he says, or thinks, and to depict this desire of his we could have him draw a diagonal line across the frame. The bird flaps his wings, eludes the diagonal, and flies to safety in the opposite corner. U(h) is happy because, with that diagonal line between them, he can’t see the bird any more. The bird pecks at the line, breaks it, and flies at old U(h). Old U(h) to erase him, tries to draw a couple of crossed lines over him. At the point where the two lines meet, the bird alights and lays an egg. Old U(h) pulls the lines from under him, the egg falls, the bird darts off. There is one frame all stained with egg yolk.
I like telling things in cartoon form, but I would have to alternate the action frames with idea frames, and explain for example this stubbornness of U(h)’s in not wanting to admit the existence of the bird. So imagine one of those little frames all filled with writing, which are used to bring you up to date on what went before: After the failure of the Pterosauria, for millions and millions of years all trace of animals with wings had been lost. (“Except for Insects”, a footnote would clarify.)
(…)
There’s no use my telling you in detail the cunning I used to succeed in returning to the continent of the Birds. In the strips it would be told with one of those tricks that work well only in drawings. (The frame is empty. I arrive. I spread paste on the upper hand right-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail becomes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, allowing myself to be carried along. Thus I arrive at the Land of the Birds. If you don’t like this story you can think up another one: the important thing is to have me arrive there.)

(I.Mitosis) Now I know all of you will raise a flock of objections because being in love presupposes not only self-awareness but also awareness of the other, et cetera, et cetera, and all I can answer is thanks a lot I know that much myself but if you aren’t going to be patient there’s no use in my trying to explain, and above all you have to forget for a minute the way you fall in love nowadays, the way I do too now, if you’ll permit me confidences of this sort. I say confidences because I know if I told you about my falling in love at present you could accuse me of being indiscreet, whereas I can talk without any scruples about the time when I was a unicellular organism, that is I can talk about it objectively as the saying goes, because it’s all water under the bridge now, and it’s a feat on my part even to remember it, and yet what I do remember is still enough to disturb me from head to foot, so when I use the word “objectively” it’s a figure of speech, as it always is when you start out saying you’re objective and then what with one thing and another you end up being subjective, and so this business I want to tell you about is difficult for me precisely because it keeps slipping into the subjective, in my subjective state of those days, which though I recall it only partially still disturbs me from head to foot like my subjective of the present, and that’s why I’ve used expressions that have the disadvantage of creating confusion with what is different nowadays while they have the advantage of bringing to light what is common between the two times.
(…)
Let’s begin this way, then: there is a cell, and this cell is a unicellular organism, and this unicellular organism is me, and I know it, and I’m pleased about it. Nothing special so far. Now let’s try to represent this situation for ourselves in space and time. Time passes, and I, more and more pleased with being in it and with being me, am also more and more pleased that there is time, and that I am in time, or rather that time passes and I pass time and time passes me, or rather I am pleased to be contained in time, to be the content of time, or the container, in short, to mark by being me the passing of time. Now you must admit this begins to arouse a sense of expectation, a happy and hopeful waiting, a happy youthful impatience and also an anxiety, a youthful excited anxiety also basically painful, a painful unbearable tension and impatience. In addition you must keep in mind that existing also means being in space, and in fact I was dished out into space to my full width, with space all around, and even though I had no knowledge it obviously continued on on all sides. There’s no point in bothering now about what else this space contained, I was closed in myself and I minded my own business, and I didn’T even have a nose so I couldn’t stick my nose out, or an eye to take an interest in outside, in what was and what wasn’t; however, I had the sense of occupying space within space, of wallowing in it, of growing with my protoplasm in various directions, but as I said, I don’t want to insist on this quantitative and material aspect, I want to talk above all about the satisfaction and the burning desire to do something with space, to have time to extract enjoyment from space, to have space to make something in the passing of time.

Tangential: There are hundreds of articles with tips on how to appreciate literature, and not one, in my very quick search, that describes how reading can fall into two categories: the kind that whisks you along on in a story, and the kind that says, here, let me expand your senses. It’s like eating to satisfy hunger or eating to enjoy taste. Not that one excludes the other, but rather, that sometimes, when reading, you can feel that one takes priority over the other. Who knows… my theory is probably too simplistic. If you’d like some good advice, I’d recommend the second point on Iphigene’s “How to Appreciate/Read a Classic”, namely, “immerse yourself”.

vicarious

Sometimes, the most delicious feeling is the one in which, for a little while, you are taken away to another place and immersed in a different reality. I don’t care for fantastical worlds or romance novels… instead I like mundane day-to-day. Biographical documentaries are my favourite. Recently, I’ve soaked up the Netflix series “My Love”. But I also appreciate blog posts that gently pull you into a scene.

Here, the house is quiet because Christian and the kids have gone to walk the dog. The sun is here, with the ticking of the clock, after days of rain and clouds. Around my house, the scenes point to temporary absences.

Making decisions

I think the subject of decision making is neat… Neat in the sense that there are, for it, a variety of strategies that can be employed and a variety of pitfalls to be avoided.

To be avoided:
- Drift
- Decision fatigue
- Regret

I think most strategies can be boiled down to a form of mindfulness. Take, for example, Stephen Levitt’s advice on a recent episode of “People I Mostly Admire”. He divides decisions into two categories: the ones in which you lack information, and the ones where you have lots of information. For the first, he advises to be wary of self-interested experts and find, instead, a friend or family member who has faced a similar decision, has done research or knows more about it than you, and follow their choice. For the second he imagines the outcome of both choices and aims for the one in which he would feel the least regret. If he is still uncertain about the choice to make, his advice, based on research, is “to take whatever path is the biggest deviation from the status quo” because people who have done so, who have made the biggest change, “are on average happier than the people” who haven’t. (You can listen to the whole explanation at 23:36 into the episode.)

Levitt’s advice is neat: count on someone you trust, imagine a future self in one decision scenario or the other, or take the opportunity for the biggest change.

The latter part of his advice seems related to one of Mother Teresa’s tips for humility… She wrote that when faced with a choice, “choose what is hardest”. I often think about this during the day. Faced with little choices, it’s in my nature to pick what is easier, what is lazier or more comfortable. But building up a tolerance for what is harder, or more uncomfortable, is more rewarding in the long run.

While there might be a tendency to look at decisions as a vast field of research, I’m tempted to look at decisions as a form of friction… Being mindful and observing the tensions that arise from the choices at hand is interesting!

About exertion

I keep returning to this bit of an interview with Greg McKeown on Gretchen Rubin’s blog, which is a good sign that I should take note of it here. He talks about how, in the case of a health scare with his daughter, he was confronted with a decision:

All we wanted in the world was for Eve to get better. That wasn’t just the most important thing. It was the only thing. What came into view for me was two paths for getting there. One made this challenging situation heavier. The other made this challenging situation lighter. And we had to choose which path to take. Maybe this choice seems obvious. But it wasn’t. As parents, our instinct was to attack the problem, with full force, from all directions: worrying about her 24/7, reaching out to every neurologist in the country, meeting with doctors one after the other, asking them a million questions, pulling all-nighters poring over medical journals and googling for a cure or even just a diagnosis, researching alternative medicine as a possible option. What the gravity of the situation called for, we assumed, was near-superhuman effort. But such an approach would have been unsustainable, while also producing disappointing results.

Mercifully, we took the second path. We realized that the best way to help our daughter, and our whole family, through this time was not by exerting more effort. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We needed to find ways to make every day a little easier. Why? Because we needed to be able to sustain this effort for an unknown length of time. It was not negotiable: we simply could not now or ever burn out. If your job is to keep the fires burning for an indefinite period of time, you can’t throw all the fuel on the flames at the beginning.

[His daughter, he notes, is almost completely better now.]

What did I learn from this experience? Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. You can make the choice to continue to work harder and harder, wearing yourself out in the process. Or, you can choose a more effortless path. One where you try and make each day a little easier.

Reading this, it might be easy to think that the decision to go “easier” is a selfish one. Isn’t there merit in sacrificing for someone? Doesn’t the Bible say, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”? I think there’s an interesting nuance here. Taking the first path could be falling into an illusion, or perhaps a misunderstanding of love. Because the appearance of total dedication, the self-imposed sacrifice is a distraction from what is even more important: a recognition (and acceptance) of vulnerability.

Keeping a blog

Writers are constantly prey to self-doubt, I mean, dare I even count myself as one of the group? It takes little for this to flare up… This American Life ran a segment about an entertainer who daily learned and memorized a ballad, recorded and posted it to Youtube, a habit that has lead to there being more than 1000 videos posted to his account. The story felt deflating.

Then, on cue, to revive my drooping spirits, to make a case against the futility of effort, I read Cory Doctorow’s post, “The Memex Method” shared on Tyler Cowan’s blog. Here are five things I especially appreciated:

1. “The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. (…) Writing for a notional audience - particularly an audience of strangers - demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. (…) Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

2. “Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research - it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or short story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet.” (This is mentioned by Austin Kleon too).

3. “(…) if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled. Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial - it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.”

4. “There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day.”

5. “As a blogger I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”

Baby rabbit

The dog has a daily walk no matter what. The other morning he discovered a baby rabbit in a tuft of grass. I was walking along as always when the clear morning air was pierced with a noise like a car alarm. I turned to find Enzo holding in his jaw a squirming ball of grey and white fur. I pulled on his leash, alarmed and suddenly panicked at the thought of having to deal with a mouse… he dropped his find, still squealing, when two rabbits appeared, ears perked, frozen in a « what’s next? ». I pulled more and Enzo regretted being unable to investigate more. The rabbit baby survived as far as I know - the squealing saved its life.

Three things

A picture taken last Sunday… a moody sky, dead trees, spring-tender grass.

Hidden Brain, the podcast, taught me, in passing, the phenomenon in psychology called “naïve realism”, explained as the host says it, like so: “I am bewildered that you would not see the world exactly the way that I see the world.” Since I feel like it reflects an impression I’ve often had, I consider myself still quite naïve.

In researching for an article, I learned about Texas’ Hill Country, and have been perusing The Texas Hill Country: A Photographic Adventure, thanks to a licensing agreement that the U of M library has that makes many books available online.