Happy New Year

The solstice has passed and all the Christmas merrymaking. We have a few seconds more of daylight with each passing day. The twenty-first century is no longer new.

Best wishes to everyone as we move forward to a new year and a new decade.

I know it's cliched, but this version of Auld Lang Syne is my favourite. (It's all about the beat, man!)

Happy New Year!

Gambia and a Few Good Pounds

Gained a pound or two over the season? Worried about looking too heavy? Fear not! There truly is a solution that not only involves no effort whatsoever, but also actually allows for even more eating and the accumulation of even more pounds.

The solution is to move to Gambia.

In Gambia, "women do not battle the bulge, they celebrate it. A body is not something to be tamed and moulded."

Writer Catherine Pigott found this out during an extended trip to Gambia to teach English. She wrote about her experience in The Globe and Mail (March 20,1991). The Gambian women thought Pigott was far too thin and called her "Chicken-hips."

Pigott "marvelled at this accolade, for [she] had never been called thin in [her]life." She found it difficult to explain that in her North American culture, women with too hearty an appetite were thought unattractive and that they denied themselves food to achieve "perfect slenderness."

Dieting is unnatural in Gambia where there is "no place for thinness. It made people sad. It reminded them of things they wanted to forget, such as poverty, drought, and starvation." Pigott changed her weight and her attitude towards weight during her Gambian stay, coming to believe that their views of body size and female beauty were much more natural than those in the North American culture of denial and disapproval.

Despite wishing to retain her new attitude towards her body image and weight, when Pigott came home, she was bombarded with the familiar cultural messages. They "don't use words such as 'cheating,' 'naughty,' or 'guilty' when they talk about eating" in Gambia, but they do in Canada. "Family members kindly suggested that [she] might look and feel better if [she] slimmed down a little."

Pigott joined a gym, dieted, and felt her freedom about weight slip away. The fear of fat had returned, as had the "time to exert control over [her] body."

Pigott's article underscores North American attitudes towards female beauty and body image and towards an ideal of thinness. Yet there can be too much of a good thing. In Mauritania, fat women are so desirable that until only the last few years girls have been force-fed to make them more attractive to prospective husbands. Fortunately, the practice is very much on the decline, and attitudes towards it are changing.

As Pigott writes, it is not good to "romanticize...rock-hard lives" of Gambian women; the value placed on a heavier body may indeed be restrictive for some women in that culture (although not, I think, nearly to the degree it is in Mauritania!).

So there you have it. Worry no longer about those extra pounds! Move to Gambia! The only other sane solution is to change our attitudes about control, thinness, and female beauty. (Why do I think that planning and moving to Gambia might be easier?)

(The Catherine Pigott article originally in The Globe and Mail is anthologized in The Act of Writing: Canadian Essays for Composition. Ed. Ronald Conrad. 8th ed.Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 197-199. The quotes are from the anthology.)

Would That Be Real Chinese Food?

So, what is real Chinese food? That was the question around our dinner table last night, a question generated by yesterday's post about religious poetry written by an atheist (what is real religious poetry?).

Several factors exist for determining the authenticity of any cuisine. Recipes. Ingredients. Techniques. Utensils. Cooking methods. Cooks. Geography.

For purists, surely real Chinese food could only be had in China, with Chinese ingredients, prepared by Chinese cooks (are ethnic Chinese from Vietnam authentic Chinese cooks, or authentic Vietnamese cooks? or both? or neither?), using Chinese techniques and equipment.

Are all prepared dishes fake Chinese that fall short of that exact combination of factors ? At what point is a dish not Chinese? How many factors must be absent and to what degree?

Discussions about authenticity - authentic patriots, authentic believers, authentic men, authentic women, authentic religious poems, authentic cuisines - are all fraught with similar questions about absences, presences, variations, and combinations.

A discussion about the fake and the real should also include blogs and bloggers, especially on a blog! I was rightly reminded of this by my fellow blogger lifeshighway, who commented that in the blogging world fakery abounds: "fact and fiction are blurred to the point of the fantastical." Readers can become emotionally involved with a persona who is not the real writer. And I'm sure people are hurt as well.

One of my points from yesterday's post applies here. Blogging, indeed anything interactive on the internet, has no tradition as yet. Some expectations carry over from other areas - news is news, fiction is fiction, fraud is fraud. But with interactive forms, our expectations about levels of authenticity have not had decades or longer to take shape and help shape these new genres.

The possibility for harm with the religious poem by an atheist seems negligible - a reader enjoys (or dislikes) a poem in a publication, and that's probably the end of it. Same thing with fiction and memoir. But  interaction between people directly (IM, email, texting) or indirectly (blogs) opens up more opportunities for engagement and thus many kinds of harm, from minor hurt feelings to life-changing situations. Perhaps we expect certitude, when, with time, the expectation will be to expect fantasy. We might do well to presume fantasy as a provisional stance.

We make the distinction between what is fake and what is authentic all the time and about extremely serious and extremely trivial issues. It's worth thinking about.

I'm reminded of an old TV ad for video cassette tape.   "Is it real or is it Memorex?"

Faux or No?

When I was a grad student, one of my colleagues wrote spiritual/religious poetry. She sold much of it to the official publications of various denominations and to small magazines and newsletters of individual churches all over the English-speaking world. For at least a couple of years, she made about $2000 - $3000 a year, a very nice addition to her meager student income!

My colleague was an atheist - staunch, loud, and pushy about it, too - but she could sure write poetry that was popular with devout religious people.

I always share this story with my writing classes as a point of discussion about distinguishing between the writer and the written, the truth and the creation. It generates much heated discussion. The question  is about what exactly writers are selling - their authentic experience and beliefs or words on a page -  and when and why it does and doesn't matter.

The answer depends on the genre and its traditions, which shape the expectations of reader and writer.

In news, we expect the truth, and writers, editors, and producers can be rightly fired for faking it. With news, including "soft" news, the facts are the focus. We often know little about the reporter, and sometimes have no byline at all.  Notwithstanding theoretical discussions about truth or about bias, news traditionally is factual.

At the other end of the spectrum is fiction. Novels and short stories may tell us a truth about human existence; but no one expects them to be the literal truth, nor do we expect the writer to have experienced everything in the work, and we do not expect knowledge about the author.

Other genres are less clear cut and can create problems because of lack of knowledge of the tradition or because of readers' expectations, and in some cases, manipulation by writer and/or publisher - memoir, creative non-fiction, even poetry, in the case of my colleague.

I wrote previously about the fiasco over James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces." My take on his book is that it is memoir and has a narrator who is different from the living, breathing author. That suggests a certain shifting ratio between fact and fiction, which is the tradition of memoir.

I also think that people were justly outraged because the living breathing author appeared on the Oprah show, claiming that he and his narrator were identical with identical experiences.

So, what about my fellow grad student's religious poetry? No one ever asked about her religious beliefs or about any religious affiliation. Everyone accepted the poetry she offered, the words on the page. Several bought her poetry more than once, saying that their readers had especially liked it. One publication asked her to submit more.

I think that people made assumptions about her and about her beliefs and would not have published her poetry if they had known that she was an atheist. But they also proved a point about certain genres and expectations for fact and for knowledge about the writer. The poems she submitted said what they said; they were true as written expression of certain religious sentiment. They were not true expressions of her belief, and she never offered them as such.

Faux, or no? What do you think?

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - December 21 - 26 /09

Northern Solstice - December 21/09

Christmas and the Food Police - December 22/09

Winter Wonderland - December 23/09

A Candlelit Silent Night - December 24/09

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 20 - 26 /09 - December 26/09

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four - December 20 - 26 /09

Christmas has come and not quite gone. Today is the day for turkey sandwiches with cranberries and stuffing, leftover lemon tarts, and a little Christmas Kahlua in the coffee.

The Langley Schools Music Project in 1976 - 77: There are three videos covering the story from the recording of students doing rock covers with their teacher (unconventional for the times), to the discovery of the album decades later, to the hit album, to the reunion of the students with their former teacher.


The video is part two of the story.





TED: Ideas Worth Spreading is

a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

The list of talks on the site is long and includes thinkers from all areas of human endeavour. This is a wonderful resource for everyone.


crew L Street Art and Graffiti has excellent photographs of street art and comments on each photo. The blog owner is from Portugal, so I'm guessing the photos are as well. Interesting, the range of art in these photos. (The image is from the blog.)

Finally, Around the World and Back - Moly x 25 is based on an interesting idea - six artists from the US and Australia each have a Moleskine folding sketch book which they send by snailmail to each other in a planned rotation. Each sketches in the others' books, and the blog shows the results. I can't find much information about the project on the blog, such as what they are planning to do with the sketch books at the end of the rotation, but the idea is very cool.

A Candlelit Silent Night

I grew up in the Lutheran Church. When I was very young, it was the Danish Lutheran Church, although my parents weren't Danish (the people there were very nice, and they had the best coffee!). Over the years, the church attracted Lutherans from many northern European countries, and I had the great good fortune to make friends with Danes, Estonians, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and others.

On Christmas Eve, we had our candlelight celebration, and the last song of the service was always Silent Night. With the main lights out and each person holding a small lit candle, all would sing the carol in their own language. 

I always loved to hear all those voices and lyrics around me. It was an emotional time for many, as they remembered, I'm sure, past Christmases with their families in their homelands. There was always a tear or two.

Silent Night in German (it's original language)




In Estonian




In Danish




In English, and in keeping with those childhood Christmas Eves in the Lutheran church, this choir is from Peace Lutheran (from where, I don't know).



I would love to find a video of Silent Night sung in all of these languages all at once, but I'm sure none exists. But whenever I have attended a candlelight service in years since, they usually end with Silent Night, and then I hear them all in my heart.

Winter Wonderland

It will be a white Christmas,

With sun sparkling on the snow,

Hoar frost and berries in their ice blankets

And later donning their snow hats.

Snow on tree and wall

Fire in the afternoon sky from the setting sun.

Christmas and the Food Police

Christmas brings out the food police. They are in the grocery store line-up, planning the company Christmas lunch, issuing orders, er, I mean giving advice, wherever and whenever they can.

The food police don't want anyone to have any fun at all enjoying all those wonderful goodies that abound at Christmas. Shortbread - ugh, no, too much butter! Gravy - OMG, saturated fat! Cheesies - you actually eat all those chemicals, not to mention FOOD COLOURING! Mashed potatoes - stop, please, high glycemic index! Chocolates - sugar and caffeine; you'll kill yourself!

Now, I am not against eating good healthful food. That's exactly what I do most of the time, organic too and not overly processed. I must also confess that I actually like tofu. 

I once had Christmas alone, on purpose, and  planned and enjoyed a vegetarian dinner. (I know, I know; it was a kind of self-dare that I could happily celebrate without company and without traditional food. It worked, although I especially enjoyed the champagne!)

But the food police don't want anyone to indulge in too much of anything, ever. They want to force their choices on to others at company lunches and breakfasts - fruit, fibre, salad only. They purse their lips and say things like, "We aren't bacon-eating people here at ABC company." (This is true; someone actually said this at a meeting to plan the menu for a gathering.)

Food police also find it difficult in grocery store line-ups, tsk-tsking at the choices their fellow shoppers have made. Often, this is done in mock friendly and courteous tones: "My, my, all that fat; it's not good for you, you know."

There is much variation in the lists of superfoods for good health; there are even one or two that work very well for feasting. Turkey and sweet potatoes/yams (marshmallows not included). But Christmas, for me, isn't about black beans and blueberries, oats and soy.


My list of Christmas superfoods includes Cheesies, as much chocolate as possible, especially Toblerone and truffles, dark fruitcake with lots of brandy, two helpings of Christmas dinner, including spoonfuls of gravy, and leftover turkey in a bun with cranberries and stuffing on Boxing Day. Did I mention chocolate?

Unless a person has a specific issue, like diabetes, high cholesterol, or morbid obesity, overdoing it isn't likely to hurt. Pleasure, even once in awhile to excess, is a good thing.

A sound Bah, Humbug! to all food police everywhere. God bless us, everyone, with as much Christmas food indulgence as we wish.






Did I mention chocolate?

(turkey sandwich photo)
(roast turkey photo)
(yams and marshmallows photo)
(truffles photo)
(fruitcake photo)

Northern Solstice

Circumpolar winters are hard on people, body-and-soul hard. Even at the southern edge of the Arctic region, we go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, with at best only eight hours between sunrise and sunset.

I always recognize a certain something in the art and literature of Nordic countries, a relationship to snow, dark, and cold that is absent from the winter scenes of more southerly climes - and a take on life that contains both joy and a certain resolute bleakness.

The work of Edvard Munch captures the northern mood. Living north of 60 hardens Norwegians to the rigours of winter, the biting cold and the seemingly endless dark.

There are two Munch paintings called Starry Night, one from 1923-24 and and one from 1893. There is a wild variety in the colouration of images pulled from internet sources, but the two below epitomize for me two of the moods of winter found in Munch.

The later painting (1923) captures the brilliant, almost buoyant effects of a winter night in the snow. One feels exhilarated, can imagine being outdoors, and being captivated by the glorious colours. The lights of town and home in the distance are the security that makes staying outside energetic and fun. I can hear the ring of the steel blades of skates in this painting. It all sparkles.

The older painting (1893) portrays the weighed down, it's-still-winter mood one often has at the solstice and on into January, even February. The stars may be out, but the dark is heavy and foreboding.

Throughout the winter, the white changes from the stark white of a new snowfall, through the "brown sugar" stage, to the brown and dirty break-up stage - perhaps winter at its most depressing: like Munch's painting Winter Landscape from 1918.

Usually by the time mud appears in the snow, spring is near. People here begin to shovel the snow from their lawns onto the street to speed things up. As spring comes closer, sprinklers appear in the snow on lawns all over the city. I've seen this nowhere else, but understand the rush to spring.

The light of spring and the breezes of the new, fresh season are a joy, really, and relief that we survived yet another winter.

                                

Munch's painting Spring (1889) says it all. By the time we reach the shortest day of the year, it can't come too soon.

                                                                                                                        

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - December 13 - 19/09

This is post number 100!!!

Posts from the last week before Christmas. Enjoy!

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 13 - 19/09 - December 19/09
The Jinxed Blog Post - December 18/09
Life as Writing Practice - December 17/09
Lunch at the MRA Department Store - December 16/09
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Grandmother - December 15/09
Good Thinking About Art - December 14/09

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 13 - 19/09

Serious Eats is an excellent food site. I posted about it in September and began receiving two of their weekly newsletters, which I always enjoy. The site has reader-contributed content, recipes, Q & A about food and techniques, a place where readers can contribute their food photos, columns, and much more. All this month in Serious Chocolate, Lindt chocolatier Ann Czaja answers questions.

Feministe "is one of the oldest feminist blogs online designed by and run by women from the ground up." I only discovered this blog a couple of weeks ago (probably the last remaining feminist to do so!) and always find the posts interesting and important.  The posts are largely about current events, responses to articles in the media, and commentary about ongoing problems women face. They don't pull punches. I like that.

On Familiar Things: Rediscover Classical Paintings is a wonderful, detailed, chatty blog by a  former professor of fine art (Amsterdam) and a professor of art history (Utrecht). Each post offers (usually) a classical painting and an informative, but informal discussion of it, sometimes with personal things woven in as well. This is a great place to learn about some famous and not-so-famous paintings with two learned but down-to earth art lovers.

Animal picture in the Telegraph UK  - One of the very few animal pictures I could not resist sharing. What can I say; every once in awhile "cute" gets me, and this one really is cute.


(chocolate photo credit)

The Jinxed Blog Post

Years and years ago, I worked for a bank. Most of the customers were decent people; they took errors in stride and showed us respect as we tried to sort things out.

But every branch office had its few problem customers for whom nothing would ever be good enough. For these folks, there was nothing that a bank employee could do that would satisfy their need to complain, often loudly and in inappropriate ways.

I found over the years that whenever I had to deal with those particular customers, I would make some foolish error - whether they were in the branch or not. Extra special care seemed to guarantee an error - the greater the care, the worse the error.

Such people, and the errors that go with them, are my metaphor for trying too hard and for all the things I encounter in life that will just get worse and worse, the harder I try.

Yesterday's blog post about Natalie Goldberg's book was one of those things. Started weeks ago, the post was jinxed from the beginning. Every sentence I began wouldn't work. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't spit it out. The images of the book were too big, too small, too not where I knew I had put them.

Finally, the words did come, and as I was almost finished, I hit the "Publish" button by mistake. N-o-o-o! I had wanted the previous post to be the first one visible for longer (and I don't know how to fix something like that). What to do?

I copied the text, deleted the post, then pasted into a new post, which did not seem to work and then seemed to disappear altogether. Oh well, I could always do it over.

When I did begin to do the post over, lo and behold, there was the "lost" one, and with text intact, albeit oddly spaced. I fixed the spacing, re-inserted the images and video, and found and deleted the repetition of it all much further down the page. Ahh, success at last! Publish and be done with it.

Not long after that, the post received its first comment. Yay! But, alas! In responding to the comment, I found not one, but two more iterations of the paste "hanging" off the end of the post with much space between lines. They are now deleted, but I daren't say that all is well.

I dearly want to believe that I am done with that post (well, except for more comments!), but am uncertain because it is jinxed. Maybe, I just won't look, and it will eventually fall off the page into oblivion. At least I don't feel any guilt about wishing such a fate on a blog post.

Life as Writing Practice

Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is one of the best-selling writing books of all time - over 1 million copies sold in fifteen languages since the first edition of 1986.

It is a book about process, about writing itself and about the self writing. Unlike many other books of advice on writing, Goldberg's classic does not focus on rules for writing correctly. If anything, she breaks more rules than she offers.

Creativity and granting oneself permission to write are two of Goldberg's concerns. The exercises she suggests promote writing - writing as writing, writing as life, writing as Zen practice.

The point of a practice writing session is to write, now, in the moment, pen to paper, without censoring. One of the first exercises that Goldberg discusses having her classes do is to write without lifting the pen from the paper for a set time - 5, 10, 20 minutes.

For these sessions there are rules for the process to help writers "burn through to first thoughts:" no stopping, no editing, no worrying about spelling and such, no holding back, no reasoning, no fear.

In other sections of the book, Goldberg reminds writers that they and their words are not one, that practicing writing (as for a sport) is good, that whatever is in the moment is a good topic to write about, and that sentences should have action and energy.

This is one of my favourite books on writing. I turn to it again and again for inspiration and good solid help. Goldberg's wonderful book was re-released in 2005 by Shambhala. It's time for a whole new generation of writers to experience the Zen of the book and to use life as writing practice.



The video interview with Goldberg highlights her ideas about writing and creativity.

Lunch at the MRA Department Store

As a child of three or four, I was taken uptown regularly by my mother to meet my grandmother for shopping and lunch at Manchester Robertson Allison Department Store - or MRA as everyone called it.

The two buildings in the 1930s photo (below) belong to MRA, but are only two of several that connected down the hill (pictured) and behind. Because of being situated on a hill and comprising several buildings, each with several floors, the interior of the store had a unique arrangement of departments, to say the least - around corners, up or down a few stairs,  into nooks and crannies, and down little passageways.

I remember the tea room being on an upper floor, although my mother says I am wrong. Maybe the importance of the occasions raised the status of the venue in my memory. I remember tablecloths and waitresses in starched uniforms and proper cups, saucers, and teapots. (Always put the milk into the teacup first; then pour the tea, my grandmother insisted.)

Ladies lunching out in the 50's dressed for the occasion - hats, gloves, dresses or skirts, never, never pants. The same rules applied to children, and I remember starched dresses with big bows in the back, white gloves, white socks and black or white patent leather shoes. For the adults, handbags were de rigeur, and occasionally a fur stole. My grandmother had one that actually had the head of the animal attached - to this day, I don't know why anyone thought that was a good thing! I was always a little afraid of that animal around her shoulders; what if it weren't really dead? what if it thought she wasn't looking and bit me when I walked behind her?

My mother and grandmother always dressed very stylishly as well, especially with hats and costume jewellery. The hats weren't necessarily large, but they did have impact. I remember particularly the hats with veils.They made their faces look as if they had black measles, very intriguing for a kid. Even more intriguing were the veils with the odd sequin instead of a dot. Wow, sequined measles!

Lunch was always the same for me: a chicken salad sandwich and a glass of gingerale. I have no idea what my mother and grandmother had, except for the tea. My grandmother used to read tea leaves, but I don't recall her doing so in MRA's at lunch - ladies probably didn't do that sort of thing in public.

Ladies did, however, smoke in public, at least I think more women than just my grandmother did. Her cigarette was always part of her outfit somehow and definitely connected to having tea. My she was stylish, most dramatically so. She would inhale, tilt her head back, and blow a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling. - later I found out that they did this in the movies, and it wasn't really her "move," so to speak. I would always break the straw from my gingerale to the same length as a cigarette and pretend to smoke because that's what grown-up stylish ladies did. I felt very important with that straw cigarette, with my gingerale, in the tea room.

I loved those lunches. My grandmother has been gone now for many years, as has that department store. But my mom and I share the memories of those lunches out at MRA.


                                                   -------------------
This has been a great week for memory and for synchronicity as well - lunches, department stores, and, grandmothers. Santa, too.

A recent post in ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly brought me right back to those lunches at the MRA. Yesterday, I found a story about the 13 indigenous grandmothers. Today, searching for a picture of the MRA, I found a story dated December 13/09 about department store Santas, and guess what? The Manchester Robertson Allison Department Store was the first department store in Canada to have a Santa.

My visit with that MRA Santa might just be my only claim to fame:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Grandmother

As Christmas approaches, it is good to remember that many traditions have paths to salvation and healing. Some have come together in the form of a council called the International Council of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.

The grandmothers' council began  in 2004 and continues to raise awareness and hope : 

Through the years, they've become teachers and icons who are galvanizing and uniting a rapidly emerging global movement. They are awakening people to the urgent need for change if we are to survive on this planet. But they are not using fear as a weapon. They are offering us hope. What many people see as a threat, they see as an opportunity. They show us that by going back to the ancient and time-proven earth-based traditions and practices of our Indigenous people, we will be able to break away from our destructive habits and make the changes necessary for our survival. (Read more here.)

Alison Rose Levy in The Huffington Post, Dec 12/09- "A Meeting of the Hearts: the Dalai Lama and the Thirteen Grandmothers," - writes :     "They have circled the globe, meeting with the Dalai Lama, leading healing ceremonies and prayer circles in India, Nepal, the Amazon, Alaska, Mexico, and Nicaragua."

Levy goes on to quote one of the grandmothers:

"Together, the grandmothers have almost nine hundred years of experience," said Flordemayo a Mayan healer from Nicaragua, "We are thirteen voices strong to remind humanity that we must unite to move into this new millennium. We're in the process of birthing a new way of being, a new way for all of us to be gentle with each other. We should connect our hearts and become one."

All of the grandmothers believe that greed is the root cause of all our ills, causing humans pain and the earth and its creature dire consequences. The grandmothers have joined voices and knowledge to help all people heal both themselves and Mother Earth.

The grandmothers are:

(The two flags are just a sampling of those connected to the grandmothers.)
                                                                                                                                           ( Lakota flag)

Aama Bombo, Tamang, Nepal

Agnes Baker Pilgrim, Tekelma Siletz, Oregon USA

Beatrice Long Visitor Holy Dance, Oglala Lakota, SD

Bernadette Rebienot, Omyene Gabon, Africa
Clara Shinobu Iura, Mapia Amazonia, Brazil                                        
Flordemayo, Mayan, Nicaragua
Julieta Casimiro, Mazatec, Mexico                                                                            (flag of Nepal)
Maria Alice Campos Friere, Mapia Amazonia, Brazil

Margaret Behan, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Montana
Mona Polacca, Hopi/Havasupai?Tewa Arizona
Rita Pitka Blumenstein, Yupik, Alaska
Rita Long Visitor Holy Dance. Oglala Lakota, SD
Tsering Golma Gyaltong, Tibetan, Canada

Pictures and bios of the grandmothers are here.

For the Next 7 Generations is a movie about the grandmothers by filmmaker Carole Hart. She felt compelled to make the film because she was healed of terminal brain cancer by elders in an indigenous healing ceremony. The film's website has a wealth of information about the grandmothers,  their coming together in 2004, and the making of the film.

 

For The Next 7 Generations Trailer from Laughing Willow on Vimeo.

We need the grandmothers, their vision, and their action, now more than ever.

Good Thinking About Art

Critics write about music, books, theatre, and art, and they write using ideas and words particular to those fields and to ongoing developments in those fields. A review written using eigtheenth-century terms and concepts about a contemporary play would sound odd to us. But when writing about art can highlight one of two contemporary, but quite different, approaches, issues about art and writing can become confused with each other.

Eric Gibson, in his article in The Wall Street Journal - "The Lost Art of Writing About Art" (April 2008) discusses what he and others saw as the abysmal writing for the Whitney Museum's biennial exhibition of contemporary art (2008). He laments the change in critical writing about art since the 1950s and quotes other artists and critics who see it as "impenetrable" and insulting.

Gibson cites Richard Lacayo who writes in a blog for Time magazine and wants to ban five words from the critical lexicon because they are meaningless - "interrogate," "problematize," "references" (used as a verb), "transgreessive," and "inverts."

These five words exemplify the move away from earlier times when critics dealt with "art and aesthetics," to the present, when they "simply riff..." on philosophy. Art and aesthetics have been overtaken by discussions based on Marxism and feminism. (The Horror! The Horror!) Duchamp's Readymades inaugurated the shift.

The problem with impenetrable writing about art is not the real issue here. Bad writing is bad writing wherever we find it and is not acceptable. Good writing about art can and should include words that reflect how critics approach art. Gibson himself says that from Duchamp on, art required a different kind of writing.

Gibson's article should be titled "The Lost Art of Writing About Lost Values in Art." The issue here is nostalgia for a time when art was believed to be purely aesthetic and "real" critics knew how to write about it from the correct perspective. Gibson seems really to want a ban on a contemporary way of thinking about art, a way of thinking that needs its special words.

Feminism and Marxism both "problematize" the purely aesthetic approach to art, a change which, as Gibson points out, began with Duchamp and his contemporaries.

Whether one prefers the purely aesthetic approach to art or is an afficionado of conceptual art, appreciation increases with well-written criticicism. Well-written criticism requires the words and ideas appropriate to each approach.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - for the week of December 7 - 12/09

Purple Prose Rides Again - Monday, December 7/09
Hardwiting 101 for Women - Tuesday, December 8/09
Fun with Dictionaries - Wednesday, December 9/09
Hardwiring 101 for Shoppers - Thursday, December 10/09
A Meat-Eater's Love for Vegetarian Restaurants and Cookbooks - Friday, December11/09
The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 7 - 12/09

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 7 - 12/09

My four favourites from this past week, in no particular order.

The Chemist's Kitchen is unique, at least of all the many food blogs I have seen. Readers can ask questions about the chemical properties and handling of food. Ingredients are explained - like the effects of too much essence of bergamot oil in Earl Grey tea or just how many rum balls one would actually have to eat to become impaired (6.6 lbs!). Interesting, informative, humourous with really nice photos.

(The image is of the bergamot orange plant.)

Got Medieval is about all things medieval - marginalia, saints, books of hours and culinary history. The treatment is lighthearted but detailed and informative. In his post about forgetting St. Cecilia in the November saints roundup, the blogger began with a riff on Simon and Garfunkel's song Cecilia: "Oh St. Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to forgive me for leaving you out of my November saints roundup." Very nice touch in this blog.

Figleaf's Real Adult Sex is NOT a porn site. It is a thoughtful, very frank, and searching discussion about sex and gender by a thoughtful, frank, interesting, respectful man. I love this site because it is written by a man and deals fairly with gender issues, is informative, not shy, and often funny. It is fairly explicit, though, so be forewarned.

The Wisdom of Whores is also NOT a porn site; rather it is the blog of Elizabeth Pisani, epidemiologist, author, and journalist. Pisani writes about HIV and its prevention in the blog (among other things) and has published a book The Wisdom of Whores. The information in Pisani's blog is eye-opening, informative, often sad, but necessary. I wrote about Pisani in an earlier post - A Wise Woman.

A Meat-Eater's Love for Vegetarian Restaurants and Cookbooks

I am not a vegetarian, although I have flirted with it many times over the years, as I have also with veganism. The lifestyle is not for me, but I do love good and varied food, and I do love to cook. So I treasure and use my special (and many) vegetarian cookbooks. Some of my fondest restaurant memories also are of eating at vegetarian establishments. I am a sort of closet vegetarian who likes tofu, miso, and grain burgers as much as I like meat.

The Moosewood Collective of Ithaca, New York has been in operation for over thirty years. I have never been to the restaurant, but am a loyal fan of their cookbooks. My most used and probably favourite cookbook of any I own is the Moosewood Restaurant  Low Fat Favorites ( it is torn and falling apart, always a testament to a good cookbook), but I have and use many of the others: Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home; Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant; Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special; and Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates.

One of my favourite restaurants is The Naam in Vancouver, BC. Like the Moosewood, it has been serving wonderful vegetarian food for many, many years - more than forty. The restaurant on Fourth Ave was, when it opened, in the heart of Vancouver's "Hippie" area and drew in crowds of people searching for something different - and The Naam provided. Although the menu and food at The Naam has evolved over the years, the meals are still wonderful and filling, and most things are made right there. Everything is good, but breakfasts are to die for.

Grainy breads, pancakes, made-on-the-premises granola, and choices which include tofu and tempeh, lots of fruit, and wonderful omelettes - all are wonderful.

Probably my most memorable vegetarian dining experience was in Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. Unlike The Naam and Moosewood, both folksy and down to earth, Greens was begun and remains a high-end restaurant. It is in the Fort Mason complex, right on the water, and serves exquiste food. I still remember the delicate squash, green bean, and tomato stew and the wonderful cornbread I had there in 1995!

Greens, opened in 1979, was a project of the San Francisco Zen Center and probably was the first "gourmet" Buddhist restaurant in North America.  One of the Zen Center residences for students was the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, which published its own cookbooks by Edward Espe Brown.

I have owned Tassajara Cooking  and The Tassajara Bread Book twice in my life. Initially, I bought the books in the late seventies or early eighties, loved them, and used them frequently. For some strange reason, I gave them away in a purge of (mostly) cookbooks in the early nineties. It wasn't long before I missed them both. I was lucky enough to find both, used, in good condition, and in the early seventies editions (not the editions pictured here).

The Tassajara cookbooks, especially the Cooking one is delightful, but not for the faint of heart. The instructions are more musings about food and the Zen of preparation than they are recipes. Brown sometimes lists the ingredients on hand and suggests several different ways they might work together for a meal.

I will continue to cook and serve vegetarian meals from my favourite cookbooks and will eat at The Naam as often as possible. One day, it would be great fun to go to the Moosewood restaurant. Most of all, though, I would love to go back to Greens and San Francisco - you see, I left my heart...!