FINDING THE TIME TO READ & TO DREAM

Happy New Year to you all, belated, but no less heartfelt.

Once again I've left a long pause between posts. No excuses, really except for this feeling of impotence and paralysis that comes with extremely chilly weather. 

There’s something aggressive about extreme cold with wind, at least as we’ve experienced it here in Toronto off and on in the past ten days. It’s inhibiting, and a little scary. “Do I really have to go out?” “Is it safe to drive?” “Will my pipes freeze?” “Where is my long underwear?”: the questions and concerns range from the large and general to the detailed-small, but all of them seem to weigh on us. The result has been, for me, a feeling of being pinned and not independent. I don’t like it!

I say this even though I have been out each of the cold days. On January 2, for example, when the wind chill was 35 below, I walked about three kilometres (not far on a nice day) to a friend’s place for coffee. I was warm enough, in sensible boots, two pairs of socks, knitted gaiters to cover the gap between my boots and pants (over tights); merino wool T-shirt under long sleeved merino (both Christmas presents) plus a sweater on top of that; a neck scarf and big hat and wool armlets bridging the wrist gap to my heavy ski gloves; and a not quite knee-length fifties-era sheared beaver fur coat given to me long ago by the mother of an ex-boyfriend. Over all that I wound a long heavy silk shawl to cover my face and help warm the air I breathed a little. That’s a long list of clothing items, that take more time to put on than they do to be written down.

The encumbrances of winter, I sigh these days, as I pull on tights, or layer on another sweater.

But I am lucky and so are all the people who have health and warm clothes. As I hurried along to my friend’s place the streets were pretty empty. January 2 is not a big traffic day, and especially not in frigid weather. I even built up a bit of a sweat in all my garments. But the older man walking carefully across Harbord Street with a cane, wearing only thin gloves, to pick something up at the corner store, looked reduced by the cold and very vulnerable.

Others who have suffered - apart from the homeless, who are in a purgatory that the rest of us cannot imagine - are those who have to work outside in the cold: postal workers, garbage workers, and the people who work the ramp at the airport. And also the police, ambulance, and fire department people, as well as the hydro workers, who have all had to work overtime to rescue many from crises largely caused by the weather.

I am grateful to all who do that work. It takes a lot out of us all to live in the cold; it saps our energy and we want to retreat into hibernation…a natural animal response. At the same time we expect life to go on as usual and are upset when streetcars get jammed, or airplanes don’t fly, or mail isn’t delivered.

There’s a disconnect between what we are prepared to do ourselves and what we expect others to do for us. Hmm

On another subject entirely, I want to talk about reading and books. And that’s because the other day I gave a talk to a book club. I’d been invited by a friend last summer. The books were the first two of the trilogy of books by Patrick Leigh-Fermor about his walk from Holland to Istanbul in 1933-34, when he was 18 and 19. (They are A Time of Gifts; and From the Woods to the Water.)

I had read the books when they were first published (in 1977 and 1986) and had been engaged by the writing, and also aggravated by it. When I reread the books in preparation for the talk, I was for awhile even more aggravated. Some of the flourishes of words and images felt show-offy and unnecessary. They made me impatient.

But gradually I came to think about the writing differently. Yes it’s show-offy. But the cascading words and images are on the page to do the work that photos now do for us much of the time. And reading elaborate descriptions and complex ideas takes work. It’s work we’re no longer accustomed to doing. We are inundated with images, and tend to rush from one to the next, and to be impatient with stories that unfurl too slowly for our now-usual hurried pace.

And so I slowed down and started to try to approach the descriptions in the same way that I like to look at paintings in a gallery, slowly and carefully. Aha!

In the end, like many presenters in many contexts, I ended up talking about me myself and I, about my evolving reaction to the books. I hoped thereby to get people thinking about what we do when we read, and about how much we lose when we hurry along.

If you have stayed with me this far, in this blogpost, then you are a patient reader, and I thank you for it. I enjoy putting these words on the virtual page, working through the process of communicating my ideas and thoughts as clearly and cleanly as possible. But if there are no people out there who take pleasure in the effort of working their way through pages of reading, then books are under threat, and so is the richness of language.

I am confident, from the reaction of many who were at the talk, that a lot of us struggle to make the time to read well. We’re assailed and seduced by our computers and social media. We are enriched by them, yes. But this doesn’t come for free; it exacts a price. And that cost seems to be in a loss of free or dreaming or unmeasured time to get lost in a book.

Life seems to have speeded up rather than easing off as the decades have rolled by. As I walked along the icy chilled sidewalk this afternoon on my way back from Kensington Market (Sanagan’s Ideal Coffee, 4-Life: my basics along with Cheese Magic) I found myself wondering why there seem to be so few pauses in the day, the week, the year. I did have some deep-sleeping calm days over the holidays, but they were rare havens in a sea of rushings-around. And they were helped by my cutting off from social media and from the computer altogether for a few days.

And so now the new year is moving me along again. I am headed to New York tomorrow (if the planes are flying) for a James Beard Cookbook Committee meeting  (such great people on the committee, which oversees the judging of all the cookbooks published in any given year, by a huge number of judges scattered across North America). And then in ten days or so it’s time to prepare for this year’s immersethrough session in Chiang Mai, followed by a food-focussed tour in Burma.

Airplane rides, long ones, become a kind of pause-place, a time to read and daydream. I never mind a long flight. It feels like an oasis between lives. And how amazingly lucky I feel, to be able to have these transitions, these moments to pause and reflect, and to get lost in books.

A CHANGE OF SEASONS AS WE CROSS-CONNECT ONLINE AND OFF

It has been a full more-than-week since I last wrote here, not just because of the Toronto film festival (TIFF), though the five films I saw did take chunks out of my week, but more centrally because I am now working my way through the edits on my Burma book Rivers of Flavor. I should be spending my days and nighst at it. But of course there are only so many hours of high quality concentration time available in the day. The mind and body are very limited I find, when it comes to this stuff.

Anyway, as the person doing the line editing and generally overseeing this process said to me in a note: remember to take breaks and breathe and enjoy the spaces in between (or something like that). This evening the "break" was a meeting up north of the city of the Women's Culinary Network. There was a panel on social media and new media and I was one of three speakers. Those of you who know what a luddite I am will be surprised, I'm sure. I know nothing about using the internet for self-promotion, or about marketing generally. The two speakers who went after me talked about all that.

I wanted to remind all of us there that Twitter and Facebook and all the other connecting tools are a wonderful way of getting access to new ideas and fresh information about creative people, unheard of projects, etc as well as to hard news. I rely on a number of curatorial people, like @brainpicker on Twitter for example, who find and put up links to interesting sites or articles or videos. I am constantly astonished by what she has links to. I reminded the meeting that lots of links are not related to food, but are still important, and they can enlighten us and be relevant in unexpected ways. One such link I came across just today; it's about our sense of smell . Pretty interesting, and a surprise because it's not the way we've assumed smell works in humans. [NOTE: I put the link in, but somehow this time blogspot doesn't recognise it. If you want to have a look cut and paste the link in. The URL is www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128301.800-the-unsung-sense-how-smell-rules-your-life.html?full=true" - more tech incompetence here, sorry!]

And then at the other end of the spectrum is longreads.com, which gives access to in-depth articles of various kinds, real reading! Those of us who dash from item to item can soon lose the capacity to hang in for a long concentrated exposition of ideas. Longreads helps keep us tuned-up, as well as furnishing us with new ideas and concepts.

All this I mentioned, along with a list of my favorite tools and sites and Tweeters. Hope it was useful.

I also reminded myself as I was preparing for the panel, that I enjoy taking a day away from all this follwing and connecting stuff. Often it's the day I write here... A day off enables me to imagine and think about things in a longer-arc more reflective and introspective way. That's valuable, as valuable as any particular insight or piece of information that I might come upon as I explore new links online.

Sorry to go on and on about this; it's all so self-referential and suffocating after awhile, this talk of social media. I'm reminded of how often that chat sounds like people are rehearsing for life. And that's a waste, for this is it, now. We're not rehearsing for a bigger and better stage down the road once we understand things better. The whole of life is happening as we talk about it.

I think sometimes that we've been infected (or maybe just I have been infected) by the implicit and explicit message in primary school, that we'll grow and learn and improve and eventually be more able, more capable, more responsible. But in fact that message gives us less-than-useful reflexes. All of life is life. The preparation and the living out of it are all one. That's true even of our two-year-old selves. It's not a rehearsal.

And so whether it's the mundane details of social media and self-promotion, or the deeply important emotional connections we have to our nearest and dearest, it's all happening in the now, and we get the privilege of taking it on, being responsible for it, enjoying it, appreciating each breath and each moment.

Once more I'm back at this idea of balance, reasonableness, or perhaps we could call it sustainability. It's up to us to balance our screen time with our other work. And that means not being needy and greedy about tweeting and FB'ing.

Last night I had dinner at a friend's place. Her cousin was visiting from Vancouver, and that was a treat, for i met them both when I was an undergraduate at Queen's. And then a third of that band of women I knew in first year so long ago came by. I had seen her only a few times since undergrad, and the last time was nearly 25 years ago. Unbelievable! we said to each other. And yet with all those years gone by, we were each recognisable to the others, each essentially the same person, even though marked by age and scars of various kinds. How lovely, the privilege of knowing people over time, and of reconnecting with them unexpectedly at a later stage of life.

It was pouring rain last night, but I was wearing my father's wool dinner jacket, which kept me warm and dry as i walked to the subway. The chill in the air, despite today's sunshine, gave me the urge to make a skillet cake, as did the damson plums that a friend had found for me. This afternoon I made two medium-sized skillet cakes, one topped with the plums and the other with chopped apple on top. It is a sign of cold weather, this cake-baking. Another was the bread I made last week. There was some leftover white rice that was on its second day, so just starting to ferment. I added lukewarm water, covered it loosely, and left it to ferment for a couple of days. Then that water plus rice became the base for a bread dough. It included whole wheat pastry flour as well as all-purpose. NO oil. It made wonderful bread, after an overnight rise, even though there was no yeast, just the leavening of wild yeasts and the fermented rice.

We all agreed it was a treat to once again have home-made bread on hand. Now here's the question: how to make bread fairly regularly, without it becoming a chore or a burden? If I figure out the answer, I'll let you know!