Friday Five

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

1. AI (again)

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

2. Reading

I really enjoyed Nora Krug's book titled Belonging. 

3. Supper

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

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

4. Information-gathering

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

5. The view

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

Cheers!

Friday Five

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

1. a painting

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

2. expansiveness

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

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

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

3. nabokov

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

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

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

4. Taste

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

5. The view

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


Reading list: Lolita

How to start: Jump in!

[Sept 2023 edit] Woah, woah, woah… I actually recommend the opposite of jumping in. I approach most literature this way, a kind of “read and figure it out later” attitude that in this case would be a disservice to the gravity of the subject matter of this book. Since reading, I’ve learned about a podcast series called “The Lolita Podcast” by Jamie Loftus and it is well worth listening to.

Fravourite quote: “I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow's hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been.” (p 265)

(This quote reminds me a Philip Roth quote I like and re-reading it, I appreciate the contrasting voices!)

Tangential: I didn’t know what to think of Lolita, even as I was reading it. These Yale Courses lectures (parts one, two and three) were very helpful! [Sept 2023 edit] Yeah… I didn’t know what to think and most readers, reading this for the first time, don’t know either. But listening to Jamie Loftus’s research into the book and society’s response, was eye-opening. I particularly appreciated episodes 1 and 2 and episode 10.

Friday Five

1. Chat GPT and Academia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Clocks from props

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

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

3. An app that we like

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

4. Luxury vs premium

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

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

5. Scenery here

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

Three things on a Sunday night

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

1. Eating

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

2. Pa on Father’s Day

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

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

3. The view this week was smoky

Just a bit, not too much...

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

Friday Five

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

1. Historical research detours

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

2. Historical research finds the drama

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

3. eating

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

4. Teacher gifts

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

5. Scenery here

After the dandelions come the clover...

Friday Five

1. Feeling inspired

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

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

2. A short essay on recipes and cooking

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

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

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

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

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

3. Rhubarb!

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

4. I'm in the yard

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

5. Scenery here

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

Friday Five

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

1. A soup delivery

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

2. Antidotes

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

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

3. Mental health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The scenery here

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


Friday Five

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

1. Drawing, again

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

David Humphries:

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

Kerry Lemon:

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

2. A thing I learned about rhubarb

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

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

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

3. Tiktok is still fun

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

4. Geraniums

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

5. The view here

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

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

Friday Five

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

1. Drawing for Illustration by Martin Salisbury

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

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

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

I so enjoyed reading this book!

2. Guilty pleasure

Indian Matchmaking (Netflix)

3. An audiobook that's fun to listen to

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

4. A treat

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

5. The scenery here

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

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

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


Psst: Take care!

Reading List: Ulysses by James Joyce

How to begin: When I feel my enthusiasm flagging for a book, I Google "What's so great about [the book's title]" and often find someone's appreciation provides new encouragement to keep going. This Ted-Ed video by Sam Slote, on the subject of Ulysses, is excellent. 

A few quotes:

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. (p 533)

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? (p 789)

Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father? Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

With what success had he attempted direct instruction? She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.

Further thoughts: Ulysses is everywhere. I smiled when listening to Orwell's Roses in which Solnit quotes a letter he wrote to a girlfriend beginning with "Have you read Ulysses yet?" I don't read the books on this list in order to analyze them too closely. (There's How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton in PDF format for that!) I read them to see what I notice. I like how Francine Prose writes "to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another (...) will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art." And so, while there are many guides to help with reading Ulysses, (including a map drawn by Nabokov) I prefered just jumping in and letting the experience wash over me.

Friday Five

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

1. Rebecca Solnit's Thoughts on beauty 

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

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

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

On how beauty and integrity go together:

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

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

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

2. Learning from Kevin Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

3. Celebrating asparagus!

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

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

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

4. A basic cookie got good reviews in our house

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

5. Spot the birds!

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

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

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

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Good Podcast episodes

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

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

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

Best Recent Read

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

Green Almonds

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

What's cooking

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

The view

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

Friday Five

1. Art as a cure

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

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

2. Enzo has a sore paw

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

3. What we ate

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

4. Masters of art series

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

5. A few pictures of dishes.

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

Friday Five

1. What have I been reading?

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

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

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

2. Drawing a Parallel between art and writing

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

3. What's Cooking?

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

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

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

4. A bit of history

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

5. What it looks like here

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

Friday Five

1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

Look at Enzo go!

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1. 

Audiobook reading: This week I thoroughly enjoyed Tina Brown's book The Palace Papers. It felt like the antidote to  Netflix's "Harry & Meghan" - a documentary as substantial as a plate of meringues. In the conclusion, Brown writes:

"It is ironic that after so much talk of duty perhaps the most powerful survival element of the monarchy has turned out to be marital love. Without the caring resolve of the queen mother, George VI would have been a stammering introvert who could never have lead the country in its hour of need. Without Philip's bracing loyalty, the Queen could have been a lonely conformist run by her courtiers. Without finally being allowed to marry Camilla, Charles would have suffered a slow death of the soul instead of his late flowering into an unapologetically happy man. And without Kate's serene empathy, William might have collapsed under the pain of his childhood and the weight of his future." [...] "The fascination of monarchy is that its themes repeat themselves because its protagonists are earthly. When George V rebranded the monarchy as the House of Windsor and turned it into the emblem, not just of the British family, but of a sacralized, exemplary version of the British family, there was one central flaw: their humanity. There will always be the rebels, the problem-children and the miscreants because the crown rests on a family as fallible as any other."

2.

Differences: There's a section of a thesis in which previous research on the subject you are writing about has to be acknowledged. While I was confident no one had written an academic paper on Aubigny itself, I've discovered lots of research on nearby communities. One short paper written in the sixties discussed family relations in a neighbouring community, the research being done mostly through interviews. I felt like dismissing it. What kind of person goes to the trouble of writing a paper based on asking random people about their relations? Preeminent anthropologists apparently... The joke's on me. What is interesting is the degree to which a field of study shapes how you think about things. I engage with documents. An anthropologist emphasizes fieldwork. This was something Levitt highlighted in a podcast episode with Brad Gregory in which he remarks on the difference between economists and historians:

LEVITT: (...) Why do you think economists and historians have such a hard time talking to one another?

GREGORY: My sense is, and you correct me if I’m wrong about what I say about economists and then vice versa. My impression is that economists grow exasperated by the tendency of historians to say about virtually any question: “that’s complicated” or “it depends on what you mean,” or “with respect to what part of the population?” In other words, even before an attempt to answer the question, they’re already complicating it and muddying the waters, so to speak. Historians — and again, this is a bit of a caricature, but you’ll recognize it, I think — they sometimes get impatient with the way in which economists seem to think that any and all forms of intentional human behavior can be modeled, quantified, and churned through some kind of a quantitative analysis in a way that is related in one sense or another to calculative or instrumental rationality. 

LEVITT: I think you put that really well. The words I would use, which are very close to what you use, is that economics values simplicity and universality.

3.

A delightful meal: Pork chops, salted, lightly fried, served with oven-roasted beets (tossed with olive oil salt and pepper), crinkle-cut sweet potato fries, seared button mushrooms and a simply dressed butter-leaf lettuce salad. (Chef's kiss)

4. 

Writing: I work on more than one project at a time and sometimes find the transition difficult. This week, forcing myself to do edits was tough. This post on The Marginalian was especially encouraging. Giving myself a deadline helped. And Carter Barnett’s advice: “The best way to write when you don't want to is just to write when you don’t want to.” (via)

5.

This week’s photo: The snow and cold is still sticking around here, see?

Friday Five

1.

On my mind:

So let's suppose there's no such thing as writer's block.
There's a loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patience
And hastening to write
And fearing your audience
And never really trying to understand how sentences work.
Above all, there's never learning to trust yourself
Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.

From Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Kinkenborg (p 72)

2.

In our ears: Christian and I listened to Et Bam by Mantissa on repeat this week, thanks to our daughter's recommendation.

3. 

In our front closet: Spring slushiness is just around a wintery-cold corner or two. Years ago, I took the advice from The Perfectly Imperfect Home and bought a terra-cotta pomegranate "infused with pomegranate oil" from Santa Maria Novella for our front closet. It continues to delicately perfume our entryway in spite of slushy boots and coats and mitts.

4.

Baking: Snowball-sized meringues.

5.

Saw: A fox, loping along the riverbank, orange fur against white snow.

Five Things

It’s Sunday by the time I’ve been able to publish this. But, hitting publish, even if later than usual still gives me a feeling of satisfaction and I prefer that over feeling defeated by the week’s busy-ness. These points spin in the orbit of my ongoing reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and my daily walks.

1.

Originality. A few students I tutored this week felt like they couldn't express any originality given the assignment they had in a history class. It looks that way, at first, reading these other people's work and then writing an analysis. It feels a little lame to say "but how you analyze, that's your own...".

I remember in Grade eight, we were instructed to write a story... I couldn't conjure an idea and desperately wrote something moralistic about a misfortune well lived, the ending being something where the characters are reunited, looking at a sunset. The smartest girl in the class invented one dramatizing an episode in the life of a Kleenex... it didn't want to be used on a human nose, and as chance would have it, got swallowed by the dog instead. I was in awe of this story and her ability to turn something simple into a saga.

Today, I see how scholarly articles can be original, how they reflect their author's voice, and I'm happy to be working on my own. It's lots of work, and sometimes I imagine that “just” inventing a story must be easier work than digging and sifting and arranging research. (The grass is always greener...) It's good to have writers like Virginia Woolf to remind me that no matter the endeavor, there's always work... In 1934 she writes, “I don’t think I’m fresh enough, though, to go on ‘making up’. That was the strain - the invention: and I suspect that the last 20 pages have slightly flagged.”

2.

Books. I went to the public library downtown to find its fourth floor closed for renovations. The library has changed so much since my pre-Covid visits that in a fit, I ordered the maximum amount of holds I could place in a day. Thursday I went to retrieve the ones that had arrived and found my name, not on the shelf, as usual, but on the ground, where two baskets overflowed with books. Sometimes I crave a whole book bath; an immersion in a bunch of genres, a dipping into a variety of voices, a soaking in pictures and vocabulary. I’m in good company though… Virginia Woolf writes: “What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!” (August 24, 1933)

3.

Kitchen experiments. I like finding recipes that can convert an ingredient someone doesn't care for into something they kinda like... (A classic example... Netti Cronish's Tofu Neatballs). It doesn't always work though... I don't care for onions beyond their flavour-enhancing capacities. I'd rather pass on onion soup, onion rings, and onion sandwiches. This week I wondered if Deb Perelman's Bialy Babka could magically transform this allium. It didn't. Some things can't be changed. It's a good lesson.

4.

I was walking along the river bank this week and found this piece of broken porcelain. On closer observation, the flowers and seal were drawn on and not part of its original design. I'm intrigued! It made me think of The Artifact Artist.

5. 

Taking pictures on walks keeps the mind alert for little changes... one day this week the sun shone at just the right angle to gently light the mushrooms on this tree...

Happy Sunday!

Friday Five

On a week upended by those normal family things, like dental surgery for wisdom teeth, I take refuge in writing, like an artist in paint. Let's dive in and splash some colour around, eh?

1.

I pick up Virginia Woolf's diaries periodically and see what we have in common. I put a little post-it note on this passage where she wrote about some "learned" man and reflected: "I sometimes would like to be learned myself. (...) Still what use is it? I mean, if you have that mind why not make something beautiful? Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly forever." (July 13, 1932). I like both the solid and the beautiful and they are at constant war with each other... Ha! 

2.

On the subject of diaries, a blog recommended Diaries of Note. The entry for March 1st was from Shaun Bythell, a bookseller in Scotland and it plopped me into a different world. I like this. It's a pleasure I most appreciate in little, saturated doses.

3.

While shopping at IKEA the other week, I spontaneously grabbed a lamp because our living room has a penury of them. Once at home, I regretted my cheap impulse and in annoyance thought of searching lamps on Kijiji with no hope of finding anything interesting. Instead I found a lamp with a broken shade and a soapstone base with carvings of loons on it, and a sticker that authenticated it's being made in Canada. I picked it up the same night and now glory in the warm glow of a unique piece of art that I'm sure Emily Henderson herself would approve of (for example…).

4.

I made broth from scratch for tortilla soup and it was the one thing sustaining my daughter post-op. The best part of the soup, according to my son, is the melted cubes of Monteray Jack. Others say the fried corn tortillas... it's a crowd pleaser - thanks to Repertoire.

5.

This was my favourite photo of the week, demonstrating how emphatically sunny it's been here.

Cheers!