FIRST SNOW & SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CONFIDENCE & WORK

First snow-sticking-on=the=ground=and-slushy-roads day in downtown Toronto. The provident already have their boots out and the rest have wet looking feet. I am still looking for the snow shovel; it must be in the garage.

I love fresh snow in the city, for even with grey skies and the weight of that ugly word “slush”, the snowed surfaces brighten the day, giving us spare wintry lightness. I can love it because I’m not trying to drive in traffic made worse by the slush or to navigate the slippery sidewalks with a cane or walker or while pushing a child in a stroller.

Snow now is a reminder of time. Yikes! Every year December seems to collapse, lose days, until suddenly it’s the weekend before Christmas. Part of it is that we all raise our expectations at this time of year. We make more of an effort to see people and socialise, we may be doing those extra shopping errands for presents, or packing for a Christmas holiday departure. Whatever the extra “it” is, the month accelerates past.

In the last five or six years I’ve been away in November and the first half of December, so I’ve missed these early weeks and landed as the holidays were about to start. Now that work travels are taking me elsewhere my travel away pattern has shifted. I like that. The change helps me see with fresh eyes, and appreciate the details I might have ignored when I was last around at this time of year.

In this past five weeks since I got home from Iran I've been able to really dig into my Persian World project. I've come to realise, as I've been digesting my Iran and Georgia trips, doing recipe work, engaging with photos, stories, and historical research, that I love being home working and reflecting. And with short days and chilly weather, being indoors is feeling good, and productive. It’s a privilege to be able to settle in, to NOT have to think about airplanes and packing, etc. for awhile.

Is this age, I caught myself wondering yesterday, this pleasure I am taking in being home and working steadily?

Perhaps. But I think it’s also a change in working style. And that in turn comes from increased confidence. Rather than rushing from thing to thing, afraid I’ll be late or miss out on something, I am now more prepared to work steadily and to not worry about the possibility of not getting this or that done in a day. I guess I am being more methodical and generally more deliberate. Part of the explanation for the change is that after doing the Burma book sola, rather than with a partner, I know that I can trust myself to carry a big project through on my own. And I enjoy the whole process more, for I am in control of what is done or not done. It’s all up to me.

I used to think that carrying one large project, a thesis say (which was how I first imagined what a large project would be, when I was in my teens and early twenties), would be impossible for me, too sustained and onerous a burden. Then once I started making books in a partnership, I discovered that like almost every other task, the work of researching writing, etc. gets broken down into pieces and gradually as the pieces get worked on, the whole takes shape. Once the first book, Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas, was finished, and the manuscript sent in, starting on another book seemed like an obvious and wonderfully desirable thing.

But in those early years there were the kids to factor in, and the organising of travel and other work, and the complications of partnership. It all seems like a whirling blur as I look back.

In comparison, this process of deciding what work I will do on a particular day is very easy and uncomplicated. I can recipe test, or write up work already tested, or take on the writing of a story, or read some history, or edit photos… All of those possibilities are inviting. That’s the thing. And none of them scares me, though they do all require me to have energy and to take them on with creative imagination, rather than passively.

I think that’s the essential difference between a chore and work that you love. A chore is something that just needs to be done, and can be done with a dull mind and heavy or exhausted spirit, whereas work that I like and that I look forward to requires good energy and engagement. If I’m sleepy or otherwise exhausted I won’t get any good work done. And in such a state I’m better off doing some chore like cleaning or tidying my office or looking for that shovel.

I can imagine you wondering, 'and what about writing this blogpost?' For me writing, all writing, including these explorations of ideas on the virtual page, requires a fresh head and good energy. And of course I also need to have an idea in my head that I want to explore. I woke up this morning knowing that I wanted to write this. And now here it is, miraculously.

Once I’ve posted this, and done some other book-writing work, I’ll hit a low ebb, energy-wise. And then it will be time to get that sidewalk shovelled!

AFTER-TRAVEL REFLECTION & CREATION

A week ago today I was on a flight from Istanbul to Toronto, having flown out of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) two days earlier. In my checked bags I had a kilo of honey, some dried apricots, halvah, a selection of sweets from Yazd, sour pomegranate fruit leather (called robb in Iran), fresh pistachios, a second-hand Farsi-language cookbook, and a bundle of small kilims, as well as my well-worn clothing. My other luggage weighed next to nothing physically, but was a rich load: memories, emotions, early understandings, jam-packed notebooks, and digital photos.

I’ve been thinking about this process of travel, memory, and story. People have different ways of remembering. Mine tend to be visual: I have pictures in my mind after a trip. They’re not so much of actual events. Instead they are images generated by my thoughts about events or people or places. I would call them secondary images of events. At the same time I also have hundreds of photos, moments preserved, you could call them.

Because my memory works with past experiences, digesting and processing them in sometimes surprising ways, in the weeks right after a trip I like to keep that set of mental pictures uninfluenced by the “reality” of the photos I have taken. Once that digesting and processing is well underway, many memories have reshaped themselves as stories or vignettes that are informative or tell a small story in themselves.

When I then look at the photos I often notice the gaps between my (processed) “memories” and what I see in the details of the shots. The differences between them interest me. Sometimes they are due to the fact that I failed to notice certain elements of a scene, perhaps because I was caught up with other details, or with an emotional context that kept my focus elsewhere. Sometimes the differences are because I have subconsciously “forgotten” inconvenient, or ugly or uncomfortable details…

At the moment I am still early on in the digesting process. Stories and cross-connections, ideas about place and people, food and attitudes, are still taking shape, and will be for the next month or two. I’ll try to help that process along by doing recipe work. I find that as I draft recipes and shop and prep and cook, I often become more sure about the importance of particular details, or I get a flash of memory or insight.

This is why I am such a believer in developing and testing my recipes on my own to start with. It leaves me with a free head and imagination…so that unbidden thoughts can surface freely.

All of this probably sounds rather abstract and perhaps unreliable or fabulist to you. After all, am I not, in writing cookbooks, supposed to be transmitting information rather than invention?

Well, yes and no. I am not a journalist, digging out “the truth” in a factual literal sense. Yes I want to get the recipes right and to give them full honour and respect. But there are other truths that story-telling and imaginative reconstruction and reflection can elucidate. The aha! as I realise what anxiety or concern lay behind a comment someone made to me, may take me weeks to arrive at. But when I am able to understand the human, emotional, and social dimensions of a situation, then I think both the story-telling and the recipes gain strength and reliabilty of a deeper kind.

I hope that those of you who have had the stamina to read this far can make sense of what I am trying to say. I’ve been thinking about the connections between the “facts” on the ground, be they in Burma or Georgia or Iran, and the emotional reactions I feel or sense in a place. I admit that they are complicated.

It’s here, in the human complexities of place and perception, that I find the juiciest excitement and the largest potential for creative understanding. The trick is to not worry and to not force the pace. Sometimes at this stage right after a trip I begin to get impatient. I want to be further along in synthesizing my understanding. But things take the time they take.

And so, in the meantime, I plan to try making Tabrizi kofta, and sangak (bread baked on a bed of pebbles) and dizi, and more. I’m trusting that the same process of subconscious story-shaping that has happened before, most recently with the Burma book, will take over and allow me to create a rich and reliable set of stories and recipes in this new book of mine.

All I need is some tolerance and understanding from friends and family as I look or act a little dazed or distracted…

DETAILS, DETAILS: A MARKET AT CHINESE NEW YEAR

A couple of days ago on Facebook, I made an entry about a visit to the weekly Haw Market in Chiang Mai, and said that I planned to write a blogpost about it, a post that would be like the New Yorker articles that consist of endless lists of things.

Well here I am at last, thinking about the Haw market and all that there was to see there, and also thinking about lists, and descriptions, and what they achieve...

As we (I at least, and I think many others, from what I hear) get increasingly impatient with dense paragraphs of description and explanation, the power of the written word to convey a scene or a set of descriptive facts dwindles, is no longer a power. Am I wrong about this? Does it mean, if I am right, that the photograph or other graphic, holds sway and displaces the written word? I don't like to think so, for photos have become so un-mysterious, so sharpened and hyper-realistic, that they may contain "factual" content but they have lost the power, usually, to move us.

So perhaps in wondering about the power of a dense long paragraph of description to reach us, I am asking the wrong question. Perhaps it's never, or rarely, about the factual content, and far more often about the emotional content. Those long "Along the Avenues" pieces written about Christmas shopping possibilties etc were then not just about listing things available but about giving an overall sense of plenty or sense of wonder? Were they reassuring? They were certainly NOT replaceable by a photograph, so perhaps it was the hypnotic accumulation of detail that charmed.

In which case, you need to jump on a plane and come to spend time in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city the capital of the north. Burma lies not far away to the west and north, then there's Laos to the east. The ethno-cultural landscape is diverse and endlessly interesting to me, for there are not only northern Thais (Tai Koen) and central Thais, and Shan (Tai Yai) but there are also Kun Haw, Yunnanese, mostly Muslim, who came here and settled to do more trade; Pa-O; Burmese; people of South Asian descent; and more. Many of the non-Thai people get themselves to the Haw Market every week.

The Haw Market happens every Friday in a parking lot opposite the Mosque. It's alive with people from all the marginal, minority, and otherwise generally unacknowledged peoples who live in and around Chiang Mai. The faces of both sellers and buyers are very different from the crowd at Wararot Market or the large bustling wholesale market Muang Mai. Cheekbones are higher, skin often much darker, and many walk with the easy rolling gait of a hill person or farmer. Some speak Thai, others operate in Yunnanese or Mandarin or Burmese, or Shan.

And what they are selling is equally a blurring of the lines and a widening of the boundaries: celtuce, large and healthy, and spinach ditto; strawberries now in season; eggplants long or round, pale mauve or yellow; cherry tomatoes larger than small and all shades of red merging into pale green; piles of purple-red shallots and ginger and every kind of herb, from sawtooth herb and Vietnamese coriander to Thai basil and coriander and herbs I can’t name; masses of greens of all kinds, including pea tendrils and Chinese kale and other brassicas with white flowers and yellow flowers, as well as round pale cabbages and Napa cabbages, and more. There are red and pink and almost-mauve fat large radishes; squahes of yellow or orange with green speckling; long beans and sword beans; red rice and brown and black and white rices of varying qualities and prices.

The blue chickens by the Chinese woman stare across at the large plastic vats of pickles surrounded by a crowd. The seller, Chinese-speaking, is trying to get people to be orderly. But it's hard to hold back when you see deep barrels being emptied: the barrel of fermented tofu, four feet deep, was being scraped clean. The vats of pickles were also going fast.

Then there was the prepared food, being cooked right there. Women in headscarves fry beautiful little samosas and Shan tofu, others serve soup in wide white ceramic bowls or grill flattened black rice cakes, or fresh corn fritters. I bought a small bag of freshly hot black sticky-rice doughnuts, as a tip of the hat to Robyn Eckhardt and Dave Hagerman, whose favorites they are; I knew they were at the same time in a plane flying to Turkey, headed far from the delights of palm sugar syrup and rice doughnuts. I also had a generous bowl of mohinga, Burmese soup over fine fresh rice noodles, with bits of banana stem in the soup and crispy wide soy bean crackers to break up into it for crunch. Even full to bursting I couldn't resist a couple of pieces of semolina cake, a Burmese treat. I ate half one piece with my traditional Thai coffee and scarfed down the rest later in the day.

But then other temptations appeared as I kept wandering: small cubes of fried tofu; some nanpyar, Burmese style flatbreads... I resisted the air-dried strips of spiced beef, the Shan tofu, both fresh and deep-fried, the luxurious smooth Shan soup, usually my choice; as well as stacks of fresh fruit. I did buy a beautiful almost perfectly round avocado, hass -style. And to go with it I picked out a handful of small limes.

The crowd was dense and very focussed on the food. Chinese New Year meant there were more buyers and more sellers that usual. I saw several young Lisu men in New Year's finery: one had lime green draping swaying pants on; the other had shiny pale blue with silver speckles pants,very dashing and eye-catching.

Now two days later I've just eaten the avo, shared it with Fern, my friend and collaborator on immersethrough. We mashed it coarsely, added a dash of fish sauce, lots of squeezed lime juice, and some freshly pounded black pepper that my friend Allison gave me. She'd bought it in Cambodia, a place known for its peppercorns. The avo was perfect (Fern has taken the pit away to see if she can get it to germinate) and I'm feeling very well fed.

The firworks have started pop-pop-popping and bursting with a loud bang as the town revs up for Chinese New Year. We’re headed out of the year of the rabbit and into the year of the dragon, traditionally viewed as powerful and very auspicious. I’m just hoping for a year with fewer world-wide catastrophes, better outcomes in Syria and Egypt and neighbours, and continued progress in Burma’s process of opening up and democratizing. I guess I’m saying, let’s hope for some reasoned and reasonable peace in Burma and everywhere else, and for the strength to cope with grace when things don’t go our way.

Happy new year everyone….

AND A POST-SCRIPT: My Burma cookbook is now in design, so exciting, and we now have a title, for sure and final, which pleases me enormously. It's called PINCH OF TURMERIC, SQUEEZE OF LIME: Recipes and Travel tales from Burma
I can't wait to see the galleys, which are due to arrive in a week or so. Whew!

FREED FROM DEADLINE: FRESH THOUGHTS ON WRITING AND IMAGES...

Surfacing from a deep sleep this morning I slowly came into the remembrance that there's a freeing-up of life that's happened. And why? Because yesterday I carried the manuscript of RIVERS OF FLAVOR, the Burma book I've been working on for two years, to the fedEx office and sent it off to New York City and Ann Bramson's desk at Artisan. I feel lightened, for sure. But I also had a slight shakiness yesterday, almost a psychological equivalent of the shaking-legs-after-a-big-effort feeling. That has now gone. And the feeling of "should" and "ought to" which is necessary for getting things done, but can be oppressive, we can all agree, has lifted for now.

It's Saturday morning. I'm in bicycling shorts and heading out to Brickworks Market on my bicycle. The day will unfold as it unfolds. And I will try not to think "I should" about anything!

On the other hand lurking in the shadows is a list of "should"s, starting with the need to take hold of my office and indeed the whole house. I'm talking about cleaning and tidying up and organising. These fits come upon us at turning points, don't you think? And there are more things to do for the book. There is some recipe retesting, but that's easy and unpressured.

Bigger things still: I have the Glossary to do. It might seem like a dictionary-writing kind of chore, but I enjoy it. It's a chance to pull threads of information together and to give the book a solid factual anchor. I also have a back section to write which I am calling Burma Over Time. It's a bit of a chronology/history that incorporates references to the writings of others: historians, memoirists, travel writers, from earlier times and from the present. I want the book to have a political and historical context, but I don't want the brilliant food culture of Burma to be burdened by the politics. That's why it's going at the back.

And the last and most fun part I have left to do is the photographs. Photos are so important to me. Why aren't there any in this blog? I can hear you wondering. Well I think they're wonderful, and give us windows into other places and people and dreams and ideas. But sometimes mixing photos and text, interrupting text with photos is what I mean, does both a disservice.

I do love photos with captions. You can get lost in the image, or read the captions, or both, but there's a balance, and they are meant to work together in a complementary way. It's rare for the same thing to work with text.

Photos are attention grabbers. The steady processing-ideas kind of attention that is needed to engage with writing is shoved aside by the immediacy of apprehension that we have when our eyes alight on a photograph. We see and feel it, and then perhaps we also start to conceptualise about it and engage with deeper more continuous reflective thought, but the first hit, if I can call it that, lies outside the steadiness of reflective thought, for sure, and pushes it aside.

I hadn't thought I'd be writing about this photogrpahy-writing connection and disconnection today. It's just arisen as I contemplate the process of organising my Burma images in a digital data base, and then pulling those that I want to submit for the book.

You might wonder about why then I think photos will work in the Burma book. Well there, as with Hot Sour Salty Sweet and the other four-colour books I've done, the text is in pieces, so text and photos work with each other, like an assemblage of colours and patterns in a quilt.

But in a longer piece of writing I do believe that photos are a disruption. The exception I think proves the rule. That exception is Sebald's work. In his books there are small un-pushy black and white images occasionally. Because they are not road-hog photos, not attention-grabbers, but instead quiet, they don't shout out in the text, and instead are there to be discovered. They're also integral to the text, a complement to what he is writing about; instead of taking us away, they take us more deeply into the thoughts and reflections he is pulling us into. He was a genius...

It would be interesting to write a book and include photos, spectacular attention-getting photos, but instead of interleaving them, to have the writing run continuously for the first half, the photos for the second. Or it could be the other way around. The order will have an impact, but it doesn't really matter I think. The important thing is that the two ways of seeing and engaging not interrupt each other. Once you've read the book, you engage with the images, or the other way around. AFter you've done both, they can reverberate with each other. hmm

Have you come across any books that have been designed this way?

The sky is overcast, the birds are singing, and it's time to have a long drink and then head out on my bicycle. After all, it's the first day of the rest of my life!