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.
Five things
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:
A new pool
If you sit as comfortably as this dog, I’ll tell you a little pool story.
As one might do in all kinds of ways for all kinds of things, Christian has assured that the kids have always had a pool in the summer, as he remembers always having wanted growing up. One assures for one’s children the thing one feels having lacked growing up. It can be like a little mystery really… Why wasn’t there a pool on the great big Palud property in Aubigny? We asked Mme Palud if she was afraid it could be too dangerous for her kids… she didn’t really agree. Instead, she said:
“Personne d’autre en avait à Aubigny” (no one else had a pool in Aubigny).
I think this was reason enough. First, it kind of rhymes with that observation Mary Pipher makes about the generation of elders, so different from our own as to be almost “from another country”: “For example, Great-aunt Martha’s concern about what the neighbours think isn’t necessarily superficial, as we tend to view such concerns in our independence-loving 1990s. Rather it is about respect and connection, about having a proper place in a communal universe.” (I made a blog post with quotes from Pipher’s book here.)
It’s that “proper place in a communal universe” that makes me think that maybe my in-laws didn’t want to stand out by making such an audacious purchase. And then I wonder, would it have been audacious? Maybe… In the year my husband was born, Sears advertised a 10 foot pool with filter for 79.99$, or according to this inflation-rate calculator, 480$. When he would have been 10, Sears selling pools with liners. The price for a 12 foot pool then is 548$ in today’s money, again based on this inflation-rate calculator. And then, I’m not taking into consideration the differences between American and Canadian money, or catalogues…
How common were backyard swimming pools? I’m not really sure… Pool and Spa News has a nice little history here.
“How many of your friends had a pool?” I asked Christian in the midst of writing this.
“One,” he said.
In the end, he thinks it might have been a variety of reasons… inclination, money, time… All of that brief divergence to say: check out our new pool! It is Christian’s pet project this summer. Here’s a before and after…
During and after
We changed the patio in our backyard. May I temper the natural expectation for a stunning before and after? Here we only have room for small delights, not those home makeover dramas… And sometimes I think it’s better that way.
It all began because the garden space felt disorganized. The area between the house and the garage is almost triangular, and using rectangular patio blocks seemed to require a straight line somewhere. We chose to run the patio parallel to the garage. I played with the layout using rough measurements and miniature patio blocks cut from gray cardstock. When the snow melted and the rain stopped, Christian got to work.
.
We were kind of proud of the fact that this project was only going to cost us the gravel and the machine-rental to pack it. The patio blocks were already ours, scattered in little groups here and there around the yard; under the deck, behind the garage and part of the little patio glimpsed above.
Somehow I am always surprised when we execute these projects how much we change the feel of our space. This summer now has evenings when we sit under the stars and tend a fire in the fireplace, sometimes roasting marshmallows.
What we ate
I like writing about food, as it happens, and so to this end, here’s another unedited post on a variety of food-related things.
It’s asparagus season, I think, south of us at least, where it’s warmer and doesn’t feel like the spring has a windchill. To commemorate the appearance of these green stalks, I made Melissa Clark’s recipe for white beans on toast topped with asparagus. I went to a local bakery for fresh bread… a country-style loaf for the adults and something plainer for the kids. And that’s precisely the beauty of this meal: the adults can have their virtuous meal of beans made from scratch - soaked the night before and lovingly simmered - while the kids can top their bread with deli ham and sliced pickles, or slathered in peanut butter and dotted with bananas. Everyone finishes their meal happy with very little extra work on the cook’s part.
Our second asparagus-themed meal was a riff on (again) Melissa Clark’s Cacio e Pepe with Asparagus and Peas. I used a single cheese and had fresh linguine from the store. It was a satisfying meal mostly because the children can’t seem to get enough of pasta.
Now, I have something I have to correct… Our family has had the lazy habit, as one does with inherited recipes, of referring to a particular cabbage slaw as “Chinese Salad”. I even posted about it here. A week ago, Deb Perelman posted a Poolside Sesame Slaw that I am looking forward to trying… I mean, if it ever gets warm enough to consider going poolside. She made a note of the usual name for these kinds of salads and linked to two articles on the subject. Perry Santanachote’s “Stop Calling It Asian Salad” clearly expresses the problem and is concluded by seven actually-Asian salad recipes. As she writes, the article is “about words and how they matter”.
I’ve enjoyed diving into two cookbooks: One has been online-only and the other I picked up at the library after learning that the author was Canadian. The Stained-Page News is a fun newsletter about cookbooks and its recent edition included lots of photographs of the unique page design from a cookbook titled “Leon’s: Ingredients and Recipes”. I relish good design and this cookbook was highlighted for its whimsy and smart layout. This can be glimpsed here.
The second cookbook is Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries. I paged through this tome, with chapters dedicated to geographic locations and could almost feel a nostalgic ache for travel and wholesomeness. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, except to say that thoughtful writing and cozy pictures of imperfect scenes and telling details can open a gate for the mind to go and wander about where it has never been. Kiros’ Instagram evokes a similar feeling and it makes me want to post anew. I thought “cloudberries” was an invented idea, like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”, but no! They are an actual fruit.
Earlier this week, a fellow tutor and I had a whole conversation about food. There’s this place in Scotland, she was saying, where she ate this fantastic dessert and had thought to snap a picture of the menu. Home again, the flavour lingered in her mind and so she retrieved the picture to recall the name and since adopted this simple-yet-impressive treat as a go-to dessert. I served it to our guests today, with a blackberry coulis and a mint leaf and it is indeed wonderful. It is called a Lemon Posset.
There! That’s a quick tour of the food-related things that have been on my mind! Cheers!
Reading list: The Broken Estate by James Wood
How to start: Benjamin Anastas has a perfectly succinct review of this collection of essays. He writes, “Pity the mortal novelist (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis) whose work is subjected to Wood’s fierce and loving gaze.” Anastas expresses better than I could, exactly what is wonderful about Broken Estate: “It is rare to be in the company of such bracing ideas about literature, and rarer still to see these ideas expressed with a style and complexity usually reserved for fiction.”
I’m sorry… I can’t just put a few little sentences here. My favourite quotes are whole passages:
When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own - this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate pauper of style - Hemingway, Pavese, late Beckett - have their smothered longings for riches, and make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it: Pavese translated Moby Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers: yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems. Language is pressed and consoled in that book with Shakespearian agility. No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words that Melville lived in; they were suburbanites by comparison. No other novelist of that age could swim in the poetry of “the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days.” And so, despite the usual biographical lamentations, despite our knowledge that Moby Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States; that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies; that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector - despite this, one says lucky Melville, not poor Melville. For in writing Moby Dick, Melville wrote the novel that is every writer’s dream of freedom. It is as if he painted a parch of sky for the imprisoned. (p. 42 The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville).
On sympathy:
And we know that the novel is the real home of this sympathy precisely because it routinely demands from us a sympathy that we could not possibly want to extend, in real life, to real people - to murderers, bore, pedophiles. The novel is able to test, and enrich, our power of sympathy in this way because it is both real and not real. Because, in Mann’s terms, it is absolutely serious and then not quite serious. It is true, and a game - a true game, but still not life. Which is why we can allow our ideas of things to remain unresolved in fiction as we rarely do in real life. (p. 124 Thomas Mann: The Master of the Not Quite).
An appreciation of D.H. Lawrence’s style:
Yet Lawrence has far greater stylistic powers than Hemingway and manages simltaneously to be both a power and a less mannered stylist. Here is Lawrence writing in 1916:
And then the tussocks and tussocks of primroses are filly out, there is full morning everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream sides, and around the olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of primrose.
And here is Hemingway, writing in 1929:
The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a small breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes.
Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both use one word three times (“green” for Hemingway, “primroses” for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is static. He is layering, using the coincidence of words to suggest a coincidence of colors, a pastoral monotony. But Lawrence’s words work against their own repetition, to enact a sense of change and movement. Lawrence is describing the breaking of down, the changing of light. This is a verbal discovery. At each moment of higher light, the landscape is changing but remaining the same. What is being revealed is merely the fuller essence of the same landscape, as the light builds - “a morning of primroses” culminates in “a clarity of primrose,” as morning is finally born, and Lawrence realizes that the sky above his head is the same color as the hepatica at his feet. The sentences move toward the light; we move into “a clarity.” The language stays the same but alters, as light changes but remains the same; Lawrence merely lets us see a word from an improved angle. Repetition is difference. Hemingway, one feels, knows in advance just what his repetitions will be; Lawrence discovers as he proceeds, that a word has changed its meaning as he has used it, and that he will need to use the same word because it now has a different meaning.
Lawrence is more refined than Hemingway, more of a true stylist, with a better ear; but he is also more natural than Hemingway. (p. 134 D.H. Lawrence’s Occultism)
And here:
Lawrence is sitting on a ledge. It is late afternoon, and suddenly, beneath him walk two monks, apparently in conversation. Lawrence cannot hear them, and he can barely see them. Instead, they must be divined:
And then, just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks, their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode from under their skirts.
It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended that I felt them talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, lapsing stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown monks with hidden hands sliding under the bony vines and beside the cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone… I could hear no sound of their voices.
All of Lawrence’s qualities as a writer seem to me to be gathered here. There is the brilliance of Lawrence’s repetitions, so that the language becomes an abstract swoon, a religious nudging. There is the humble, funny, practical mention of the cabbages, beside which the monks walk. And then a verbal exchange occurs: Lawrence describes the vines as naked and bony, and then both the vines and the monks as “brown.” He uncovers the monks, denudes them. He takes their cassocks off: For if the vines are like the monks, the monks become like the vines. The monks become “naked, bony” and brown.
More important, the writer is feeling the presence of the monks, prayerfully. He cannot hear them, he can hardly see them, but he can feel them. They are “hidden,” yet Lawrence uncovers them. And he uncovers them religiously - by looking for the light they give off: “sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode.” Underneath their cassocks, they glow. So Lawrence attends to the monks with his “dark soul.” And what lights the path of this dark soul? The monks, who glow with light. Lawrence refers to the “hidden converse” of the monks as they exchange words, but this passage is really the “hidden converse,” for it enacts a secret exchange. On the one hand, Lawrence uncovers the monks by removing their trivial clothes, by stripping them to a state of nature (they are vines), and by illuminating them with light (they give off light, but Lawrence can see them only by the light they give off); on the other hand, and in an opposite direction, it is the monks who uncover Lawrence, who shine a light onto his “dark soul.” Lawrence is dependent on the monks even as he conjures them into being on the page. This is a religious and literary humility with which Lawrence is hardly ever credited. Jesus said that he was the vine, and that we are the branches; in a sense, Lawrence, hovering out of sight, dependent on the monks and growing out of them, is a dark branch to their bright vine. All of this is to be found in Lawrence’s style, which so many “knowing” critics and readers so cheaply disdain as hysteria. I doubt that a more vitally religious passage of prose has been written by an English novelist in this century. (p. 142 D.H. Lawrence’s Occultism)
Tangential: James Wood is married to Claire Messud (whose book Kant’s Little Prussian Head I quoted from here and here). I liked this interview with Wood on the blog Aesthetics for Birds.
Sunday Sundries
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.
Miscellany
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.
Quotes
I like writing advice and the latest book I’ve read on the subject is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. My favourite quote is this one:
You may need to write for yourself for awhile,
And listen only to the language.
That’s okay.
The first person who need to be persuaded of your authority
Is you. [p. 132]
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.
Reading list: The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
How to start: Rebecca West is an acclaimed British author with an impressively long Wikipedia entry. The Birds Fall Down is a “spy thriller based on the deeds of the historical double agent Yevno Azef”.
Favourite quotes: “That taught me a lesson I’ve always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them they become soft.” (p. 23)
“His voice was strong now that he had re-established the importance of his grief.” (p. 78)
“‘When there is a great tragedy, all other things should go well,’ he sighed. ‘It’s not fair, having to look after all sorts of secondary matters as well.’” (p. 95)
“It’s often been remarked that every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. A Polish professor has found an explanation in the presence in the subsoil of the city of certain earths heavily charged with electricity. It is wonderful how science is solving all mysteries. It seemed to me that the proportion of men and women quite evidently in love was higher than would have been the case in Berlin or Zurich or St. Petersburg, but also that they were exhibiting their state more candidly than they would have done in these other capitals. They walked arm in arm, their eyes shining, and they chattered and laughed.” (p. 172)
“The glasses had come from Prague, from another honeymoon, and they had survived a hundred years, only because they were always washed in a basin lined with several layers of flannel.” (p. 175)
“Most of the crowd had dispersed, but a few people still watched him as they might have watched a cab-horse fallen in the street, with maudlin smiles of pity confused with gratification at their own pity and a cold expectation of further calamity.” (p. 213)
“…for it’s sound medical practice to put the patient’s mind to rest before we start on correcting his body.” (p. 236)
“…but their real occupation was the talk, which by jerked hands, shrugged shoulders, hands flung out palm upwards, wove the French fairytale about other people having shown an extraordinary lack of common sense. In the middle of the paved causeway children in blue overalls played gentle games. If a wrangle turned rough, parents started forward in their chairs and shot out jets of scolding, but the mellowness set in again at once. As the street darkened the sky grew brighter.” (p. 247)
“They raised their glasses to each other in gaiety which was false yet true; it was a container for their kindness to her.” (p. 268)
“She recognized what he was doing; piling up grievances to kill his sense that he was in the wrong. She often did it herself, but had hoped that she would grow out of it.” (p. 361)
“But she assumed it to be a point of honour with Chubinov not to take grace poured out generously.” (p. 422)
Tangential: Googling the title of this book leads to alarming reports and investigations of birds falling from the sky. But it comes from the line of a poem the author uses as an epigraph. But neither the poem nor the poet exist… West used a pseudonym and invented the poem herself. We know this thanks to Victoria Glendinning’s biography of West, excerpted here.
Contrast
If you read more than one book at a time, and you change from one to the other, you can feel a little shock. Take this passage from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit:
Out of the blue, May sent me a long passage by Virginia Woolf she’d copied in round black letters on thick unlined paper. It was about a mother and wife alone at the end of the day: “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” [p. 15]
And then take this one from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates:
Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
“Synchronize watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jewelled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time.
“I’m afraid I’m booked solid through the end of the month,” says the executive, voluptuously nestling the phone at his cheek as he thumbs the leaves of his appointment calendar, and his mouth and eyes at that moment betray a sense of deep security. The crisp, plentiful, day-sized pages before him prove that nothing unforeseen, no calamity of chance or fate can overtake him between now and the end of the month. Ruin and pestilence have been held at bay, and death itself will have to wait; he is booked solid. [p. 213]
Solnit gave me a feeling of comfort. It is unhurried and quiet. Yates is loud by comparison. His examples are authorities who establish control. A schedule is tight and disciplined.
I might not have appreciated the feeling of difference if I hadn’t been reading more than one book at a time. This is a little thrill when you are a person like me who finds their thrills more often in books than in stadiums.
Another little thrill is finding a person who explains something just as you have felt it. Cup of Jo linked to an interview with book critic Molly Young.
As a New York Times book critic, Molly Young often reads three to six books at a time. Under that workload, she says, she likes to spend two hours with one book, then change to another. For her, the practice is sort of like moving from a hot steam to a cold bath. “It resets your circulation,” she said. “I like to shock myself between vastly different books.”
Just like Cup of Jo, I like how Young describes how she felt able to become a book critic:
There was a moment, probably in my early 30s, when I realized that I had read enough books that I had not a sense of mastery but a pile of knowledge that I could be a worthy conduit to books. Something clicked. I felt like a humpback whale swimming through the ocean with my mouth full and I was capable enough to filter the nourishing bits of plankton from the rest. I was finally able to discern what I felt was good from what I felt was less good, and could make an argument. And that couldn’t happen until I read as many books as I had read.
This is how much
A friend, on a trip to Belgium, sent me a picture of greenery. My brother-in-law on a visit to Toronto sent us a snapshot of an icing-sugar-dusting of snow. The other evening a supper-delivery person asked our kid who was standing atop a pile of snow, what he was building. “A mountain!” our son answered.
I came home from a walk Sunday and could hear the kids’ voices from the street. We have so much snow, the garage roof is our kids’ playground.
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is “of, relating to, or concerning interpretation or theories of interpretation” (OED). It is what James Wood uses to describe Jane Austen’s heroines - hermeneutical. They were people “who understood other people, who attended to their secret meanings, who read people properly…”
James Wood argues that the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher influenced Austen’s work. Schleiermacher “stressed repeatedly that hermeneutics could be applied to ordinary conversation as well as to the Scriptures” and gave a speech wherein he “referred to the art of reading ‘significant conversations’”. He asked his audience: “Who could move in the company of exceptionally gifted persons without endeavouring to hear ‘between’ their words, just as we read between the lines of original and tightly written books? Who does not try in a meaningful conversation, which may in certain respects be an important act, to lift out its main points, to try to grasp its internal coherence, to pursue all its subtle intimations further?” James Wood writes: “This is what the Austen heroine does.”
I really liked Jane Austen when I was young. I must have picked up on all this “inwardness” because I thought it applied to everyone. I suppose that was why I was frustrated when my not-yet-husband saw me as beautiful but opaque. The visual impairment had to be made up for with words. It’s strange how Austen’s heroine’s are to be admired for their inward life and yet only a writer of talent is able to expose their quality. It makes them inimitable…
“I have a wonderful inward life!”
”Oh yeah? So…?”
James Wood says it is what made Jane Austen happy: “I suspect that Jane Austen, so private, so enigmatic and contradictory, went through life as if she were the possessor of a clandestine happiness. Like her heroines, she saw things more clearly than other people and therefore pitied their cloudiness.”
(All quotes from The Broken Estate; Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood, pp 32-41.)
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.
Quotes on planning
I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. What he writes about planning reminds me of Ellen Hendrikson’s comments about the various forms social anxiety can take (in this post over here). What Oliver Burkeman writes about planning is a larger observation:
[…] we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time - our culture’s ideal is that you should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. [page 31]
Further on in the book he writes:
But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaning full life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it could ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
It’s easy to argue that this isn’t a new idea. The New Testament’s letter from St James reads:
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. [Chap 4: 13-16]
When I tutor students, I send them links to a resource that can help with a recurring problem they have with their writing. I try to encourage them to look at the link by making it specific. I take it for granted that they might not have the inclination to read through much information, but I also hope that the nudge might lead them to finding it useful. You never know if maybe, the way the information is presented just makes sense, if you haven’t just helped them have their own lightbulb moment.
And so, people talking about planning… Look at this lovely variety and the different aspects they highlight! A quote from C.S. Lewis that Oliver Burkeman included in his December 9th newsletter, The Imperfectionist, blesses even interruptions:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own', or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life – the life God is sending one day by day.
Ah... Winnipeg!
What a city you are! You transform dog-walking into an extreme sport. Your dog-owning inhabitants fall through ice-crusted snow, cut drifts with snow-pant scissor legs, and must carve their own paths when overnight winds have shuffled the landscape. Cheers, Winnipeg. Your winter so far has been epic.
January recipes
There are a variety of ways I could introduce the topic of “food we ate in January” here. There were Christmas leftovers, like lingonberry sauce from IKEA that pairs so well with breaded chicken cutlets, my mouth waters thinking about it. The kids like breaded meat… panko crumbs or bread-crumbs, simply flavoured with salt and pepper, maybe parmesan too. Thus, chicken cutlets and schnitzel made with pork are reliably liked.
But there was also comfort food (chicken noodle soup and salmon en papillote), the meals you can transport to someone else’s house, to warm and serve and bring a feeling of home.
But also, there floats about the month of January that siren song of New Year’s Resolutions. Some people favour vague ideas (more of this, less of that). Others argue specificity is the key to success. I waver between the two… This year, I’ll draw every day-ish. This year, we’ll expand our vegetarian repertoire. Both come from a feeling of dissatisfaction: I want to draw better, I’m tired of a routine formula for a meal.
Thus, I made tofu wonton soup, from Hetty McKinnon’s cookbook To Asia, With Love. I mixed the wonton-filling with a mortar-and-pestle and Christian said it was his favourite tofu-based recipe to date. Even the kids ate all their wontons. While tofu-filling tends to make for a crumbly texture, chicken suddenly seemed rubbery in comparison, with a back-to-back serving of both wonton-filling variations. I learned a new way to fold wontons, thanks to Youtube. Hetty writes that her mom keeps pre-assembled wontons in the freezer and adds them to a meal as she sees fit, which sounds delightful.
I also made cabbage-mushroom hand-pies from Six Seasons, which was a meal with a chicken and apple-filled version for the kids. Chicken and apple is fine and all, the kids opined, but really, the effort would be better spent on a dessert version. And so, last weekend for a family visit, I made apple turnovers from a simple recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook Around my French Table. It exceeded our expectations… Six or seven McKintosh apples cooked slowly with a bit of water, a bit of sugar, a pat or two of butter, a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, cooled and spooned onto puff pastry cut in a circle and “painted” with an egg-wash, as Dorie puts it… Mwah! Chef’s kiss! And in spite of the fact that assembly takes time, the supermarkets are determined to help home cooks because they offer puff pastry that is pre-rolled! Pre-rolled! All I had to do was defrost the package, unfold the sheets and cut the circles! Amazing!
So there… those were the new things we tried in January.
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!