A week ago or so I came across the idea of fabric postcards in Rebecca’s Pocket. Sharon at Inaminuteago provides a beautiful example and many useful links.
Years ago my brother and his best friend went through a phase of mailing each other unwrapped objects–the one that sticks in my mind was the leather glove that arrived intact and unabused by postal bureaucracy.
Although I doubt that I have the skill to produce anything as striking as these, I think I’ll give one of these a try–my sewing machine has been idle for a long time and oddly enough my stash of fabrics, threads, and doodads has continued to grow.
I’ve been slowing inching my way through Industry and Society in Nova Scotia: An Illustrated History. It’s the kind of read that reveals the embarassing extent of my ignorance about places I’ve lived in or near.
Today I’m boggling over the idea of industrialized Londonderry which we used to think of as rural and rough and beyond redemption when I was a teenager.
The first iron mines and smelters were opened there in the 1850s when the town was known as Acadia Mines and some of the iron made its way to Sheffield to be used in production of prize-winning steel cutlery. By the 1870s the town was renamed Londonderry and was using the new open-hearth technologies of Charles Siemens (yes that Siemens family). Londonderry was also the site of strike in 1877 in which one man was killed and troops were brought in from Halifax to break the strike. The steel plants continued to operate in Londonderry for the next thirty-years producing pig iron and steel.
One of the hidden pleasures of working from home fulltime is the smell. In tea breaks or back-loosening breaks, I can make bread or soup or baked beans. Each step takes only a few minutes and in the end there’s tasty, simple food, the house smells wonderful, and no supper-time rushing around.
Today it was baked beans cooked with maple syrup rather than molasses. These will feed us for a couple of days and the house closed fast in the below –30 cold will smell comfortable for nearly as long.
Soak 2 1/2 cups of navy beans in water overnight. Discard water and rinse. In a baking pan of some sort, mix the beans with 1/3 c maple syrup or molasses, 1/4 c sugar, 1 tablespoon mustard, salt and pepper and enough water to cover. Bake covered in a 250 to 300 degree oven for 4 or 5 hours, adding liquid as required, and uncovered for the last half hour or so.
We’ve been a non-car, non-driving household for more than twenty years and it’s always seemed to unnerve people when they find out. Occasionally I’ll get someone who thinks this is a reason to offer sympathy. That’s when I point out that not driving changes your relationship to time, to space, and to money.
It takes longer to get places and we carry most of what we need home, so we tend to grocery shop a couple times a week and tend not to buy a lot of canned goods. Errands are grouped together since it’s very annoying to have to double back by bus. And since big box stores are difficult to get to by bus and are in areas hostile to pedestrians (no sidewalks, few stop signs, oblivious drivers), we don’t tend to buy (or admire) very many large shiny objects. If we can’t carry it, we’re not likely to buy it.
Travelling by bus means that it’s hard to ignore the range of people who live in the city–bureaucrats, students, parents, the elderly, kids, the poor—and the things they lug around with them—walkers, grocery carts, baby buggies, knapsacks, bags of all sorts, stuffed animals—and the languages they speak—English, French, Italian, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Somali, Arabic.
Hard to be bored on a bus.
House bound. Minus 40. Poor old house creaks in the cold. Furnace soldiers on.
Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is the way of it, and it is remarkable
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead made its way from the public library to my house this past weekend and I’ve read it twice since then. It’s that kind of book: the first read for the pleasure of the discovering what happens next and the second read to start to understand how the book holds such power. Reading Gilead to find out what happens next is admittedly an odd pleasure since its world and happenings seem to be very small and constrained on the surface. Like her Housekeeping, though, the smallness and the surfaces are deceptive. While Housekeeping works through the difficult spaces between mothers and daughters, Gilead works through similar issues between fathers and sons, And while the surface of life in John Ames’ Gilead is calm, there is much anger, grief, and loneliness thus much meditation on the nature and necessity of forgiveness.
The novel has been very well received though Robinson is already weary of people harping on the time between her novels since these comments inevitably minimize her other writings and her teaching. John Ames’ letter-journal to his young son is family history with its begats and anecdotes and at the same time a working through of the meanings of that history in both its grand actions (Ames’ grandfather involvement with John Brown) and its small actions (Ames’ patient acceptance of a “distinctly Presbyterian” bean salad ). Part of what creates a sense of things happening is the slow unfolding of Ames’ account of his relationship with his godson Jack Broughton’s and his worries about Broughton’s relationship with Ames’ much younger wife Lila. In my first reading, I was reminded multiple times of Sinclair Ross’ As For Me and My House—a book that has similar setting, characters, and narrative technique. Though one reviewer claims that Ames as an utterly reliable narrator, for me re-reading reveals that Ames omits, elides, misperceives, and in his own re-reading of his journal, re-interprets and re-thinks his reactions.
There’s a temptation to conflate Ames and Robinson on the grounds of their shared religious faith and a parallel temptation to conflate Ames’ thinking about the metaphysical truths of his faith and his own truthfulness and self-perception. Once of the strengths of Gilead is that it resists simple truths. I admire Robinson’s ability to write such a nuanced, subtle novel that yokes the dailyness of its characters to tumultuous historical events without either denying or highlighting the causality of those connections. Ames’ does not trace the sorrows of Jack Boughton to the limitations and failures of abolition movement but the connections are there all the same and they should not become a part of the great forgetting.
We’ve had Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind on the bookshelf for several years and I’ve put off reading it because I’m not really a short story reader. (Having to teach them was always a challenge).
I admire Coady’s ability combine compassionate story-telling about small-town Cape Breton with sharp-eyed dissection of the consequences of alcoholism, family chaos, and narrow perspectives. In one story she’ll evoke the burden that the elderly can pose (Passing of a Great Man); in another they are exemplars of tolerance and prudence (Jesus Christ, Murdeena); in another they are at the mercy of a deluded, nurse-martyr (The Devil’s Bo-Peep). She has the ability to capture both the language of working-class Cape Breton and way the accent and vocabulary are manipulated by people who stay despite the place and by people from away who visit with twee ideas about the past and family connections. Family connections here are usually fraught.
Coady explores grim topics–drunkenness, teenage pregnancy, difficult parents, anger, loneliness. What I enjoy most though is that she has a hard time staying away from the comic as do most of her characters:
“Daddy figures you and me are going to run away together.”
“Actually, you can’t blame me, most men are afraid of that,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Me running off with their women. I’m a known snatch-sniffer.”
Bess couldn’t believe it, this at the poor old bastard’s wake. She had to run to the bathroom it was so funny, (Coady 120)
Reviews: here, here, here, here, here, and here. Useful interview here.
“When factories thunder in every city and town and skyscrapers touch the heavens, men will still be found in these provinces by the seas, eating their beans on Saturday night. ” (R. V. Sharp qtd in Forbes 37)
This is my favourite snippet from Ernest Forbes’ Maritime Rights. It comes from a 1919 celebration of the uniqueness and energy of Maritime culture and appeared in the Sydney Record in a brief flush of post-war optimism. The recession of the twenties and the loss of people an industry to Upper Canada and the Boston States led to a Depression well before the North American bust of 1929.
The history of the Maritimes of the twenties is not well known in Upper Canada (which oddly enough doesn’t see itself as a region) or in the West. In part I think because Upper Canadian and Western interests were privileged well above Maritime interests. My guess is that most Canadians don’t know about the massive union movements in the Maritimes, the General Strike, the use of troops against strikers, the starvation tactics, or the election in which the progressive labour and farmer candidates took 56% of the popular vote and roughly 30% of the seats in the NS Legislature.
Forbes is good on covering the political and financial ins and outs of the period and the Maritime secessionist movement. It’s filled in some blanks for me but has made me want more information and, well, more story. His account is driven by the facts and figures of tariffs, freight rates, and electioneering. I ended up wanting to know much more about the actual people involved in the campaign and movement. I want to know more about the Great Delegation’s time in Ottawa, more about the Duncan Royal Commission, and more about Fleming McCurdy one of the most articulate of the twentieth-century secessionist (Joseph Howe would be the most prominent nineteenth-century voices).
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